Latest news with #MuppetShow
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Off the Grid: Sally breaks down USA TODAY's daily crossword puzzle, It's the Muppet Show!
There are spoilers ahead. You might want to solve today's puzzle before reading further! It's the Muppet Show! Constructor: Justin Werfel Editor: Anna Gundlach ALAN (16A: "Galaxy Quest" actor Rickman) Galaxy Quest is a 1999 movie that parodies and pays homage to sci-fi movies and TV series and their fandoms. In the movie, fans of a fictional cult TV series, Galaxy Quest, become involved in an interstellar conflict with aliens who think the series is a documentary. ALAN Rickman portrays Alexander Dane, the ship's science officer on the fictional series, who is a member of an alien species known for superhuman intelligence, and whose catchphrase is "By Grabthar's Hammer, by the Suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!" Although I know ALAN Rickman, and so was able to figure out the answer here, I was not familiar with this movie. In learning about Galaxy Quest, I discovered that scenes of the alien planet were filmed at Goblin Valley State Park in Utah. My husband and I have been to that park. It's an amazing place, and with its red rock hoodoos (rock formations) it does look a bit alien. GONZO JOURNALISM (35A: Hunter S. Thompson's reporting style) GONZO JOURNALISM is a non-objective style of reporting that centers personal experience and emotion rather than the detached style of traditional JOURNALISM. Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) was a journalist and author. For his 1967 book, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, he spent a year living with the Hells Angels motorcycle club in order to write a first-hand account of the experience. In 1970, Hunter S. Thompson wrote an article for Scanlan's Monthly titled "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." An editor of The Boston Globe commented on the Kentucky Derby article, saying it was "pure GONZO JOURNALISM." This was the first use of the term GONZO JOURNALISM. TAMPA (8A: Florida city near St. Petersburg) TAMPA is located on the west side of Florida, with coastline on TAMPA Bay and Old TAMPA Bay. The city of St. Petersburg, Florida is also located on TAMPA Bay – it's across the bay from TAMPA. The port of TAMPA BAY is the largest in the state of Florida. APE (13A: Donkey Kong or King Kong) Donkey Kong is the titular gorilla of the Donkey Kong video game franchise. King Kong is a gorilla-like monster who has appeared in movies, comics, video games, and TV series since 1933. An APE is a tailless primate, and the classification includes gorillas. HULU (14A: "Shogun" streaming service) Shōgun is a HULU TV series that premiered in 2024. The show is based on James Clavell's 1975 novel of the same name. A 1980 miniseries of the same name by Paramount Television was also based on the novel. HULU's Shōgun series features a mostly Japanese cast and much of the dialogue is in Japanese. Shōgun won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series. It is the first Japanese-language series to win that award. WALDORF ASTORIA (19A: Luxury resort brand of Hilton Worldwide) According to their website, WALDORF ASTORIA has resorts in a number of locations worldwide, including Doha, Qatar; Beverly Hills, California; Osaka, Japan; and Beijing, China. RTS (24A: Some football linemen (Abbr.)) In football, RTS are right tackles. I'm pretty sure I learned that information from a crossword puzzle at some point. LEG (27A: One of a quadruped's four) In this photo, my cat, Willow is showing all four of her LEGs, helpfully demonstrating that she's a quadruped. DUSTS (40A: Does a housecleaning task) My husband and I do a fairly good job of working together to keep our house clean. We make a pretty good team, because we are generally bothered by different types of messes, so we each take responsibility for cleaning those that bother us. However, neither my husband nor I DUSTS on a regular basis; apparently DUST doesn't bother either of us as much as it should. THE (43A: Most common word in English) Just for fun, I counted up the number of times the word THE appears in this article. THE answer is 101 times. ALEC (55A: Actor and comedian Mapa) The comedy special, ALEC Mapa, Baby Daddy, premiered on Showtime in 2015, and is based on ALEC Mapa's one-man show of the same name. The show tells the story of ALEC Mapa's experience of becoming a father through the process of foster adoption. INCA (56A: Creator of a 40,000 km-long South American road system) In the late 1400s and early 1500s, the INCA Empire incorporated a large part of western South America, including portions of the modern-day countries of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. The INCA built an extensive and advanced road system that had two main north-south roads. One of the main roads ran along the west coast of South America, while the other main road was further inland and in the mountains. Both roads had numerous branches. SUET (58A: Beef fat in some bird feeders) This clue feels timely for me, as the birds in our neighborhood have been particularly hungry recently. For the last week I have been putting a new SUET block in the bird feeders on a daily basis. DALAI (1D: ___ Lama) The Dalai LAMA is a spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism. The current and 14th Dalai LAMA is Tenzin Gyatso. ELSA (6D: "Frozen" princess) In the 2013 Disney animate movie, Frozen, the princess ELSA is voiced by Idina Menzel. Wait, has it really been 12 years since we first heard "Let it Go," ELSA's iconic song? TAHOE (8D: Lake on the California/Nevada border) Lake TAHOE is located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the California/Nevada border, and is the second-deepest lake in the U.S., after Oregon's Crater Lake. MAUI (10D: Second-largest Hawaiian island) and LEIS (27D: Hawaiian necklaces) As the clue informs us, MAUI is the second-largest Hawaiian island; the largest is Hawai'i. If you visit any of the Hawaiian islands, you're likely to receive LEIS. PITA (11D: Bread served with hummus) and ATE (12D: Had some hummus) It's fun to see hummus linking these two consecutive clues together. PITA is making back-to-back puzzle appearances, as we saw it yesterday clued as [Pocketed bread for souvlaki]. MONA (33D: "___ Lisa") Leonardo da Vinci's painting MONA Lisa is on display at the Louvre in Paris, France. BLUE SKIES (34D: Jazz standard that describes sunny weather) The jazz standard "BLUE SKIES" was written by Irving Berlin in 1926. The song was written (as a last-minute addition) for the Rodgers and Hart musical Betsy. Although the musical wasn't much of a success, the song became a hit. It has been sung by numerous artists over the years, including Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye for the 1954 movie White Christmas. "BLUE SKIES, smilin' at me / Nothin' but BLUE SKIES do I see..." RIVER (44D: Tigris or Euphrates) The Tigris RIVER and the Euphrates RIVER both begin in the Armenian highlands of Turkey and then flow, in a somewhat parallel fashion, down through valleys and gorges in a south-easterly fashion before joining and discharging into the Persian Gulf. The Tigris-Euphrates RIVER system lies in the Fertile Crescent region where Mesopotamian civilization flourished. HENRY (47D: Shakespeare wrote seven plays about kings with this name) The seven plays William Shakespeare wrote about kings named HENRY are (rather unimaginatively) titled HENRY IV, Part 1, HENRY IV, Part 2, HENRY V, HENRY VI, Part 1, HENRY VI, Part 2, HENRY VI, Part 3, and HENRY VIII. ORCAS (48D: Whales commonly seen in Haida art) The Haida are indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. They are one of 231 federally recognized tribes in Alaska. ORCAS are prominent and significant symbols in Haida art and stories. CLUE (53D: You're reading one right now) Self-referential CLUEs always bring a smile to my face. AOL (54D: "You've got mail" ISP) Who else is old enough that they can still hear AOL's "You've got mail" message in their head? I sometimes wish I had saved all of the CDs AOL sent me in the mail, as they surely would have been useful for making some marvelous, creative artwork. (Actually, I'm extremely glad I did not save all of those CDs...) WALDORF ASTORIA (19A: Luxury resort brand of Hilton Worldwide) GONZO JOURNALISM (35A: Hunter S. Thompson's reporting style) ANIMAL CRACKERS (50A: Zoo-or circus-themed snacks) IT'S THE MUPPET SHOW: The first words of the theme answers are names of characters on THE MUPPET SHOW: WALDORF, GONZO, and ANIMAL. Cue The Muppet Show theme song, "It's time to play the music / It's time to light the lights / It's time to meet the Muppets on the Muppet Show tonight..." As a tremendous fan of The Muppet Show, I thoroughly enjoyed this theme. The Muppets we're meeting in today's puzzle are: WALDORF - one of the two elderly men (along with Statler) who sit in the balcony of the show and heckle people, GONZO - a Muppet of ambiguous species who is known for his passion for performing stunts, and ANIMAL - the wild and frenetic drummer of the Muppet band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. Congratulations to Justin Werfel on a USA Today debut! Thank you, Justin, for this delightful puzzle. USA TODAY's Daily Crossword Puzzles Sudoku & Crossword Puzzle Answers This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Crossword Blog & Answers for June 2, 2025 by Sally Hoelscher
The Age
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Tasmanian royalty' rules the Jordan Gogos runway
Rather than pander to celebrities, or have to pay them, designers at Australian Fashion Week in Sydney are enlisting high-profile friends to promote their shows. Celebrity cookbook writer Nigella Lawson looked on at Lee Mathews, while television personality Melissa Leong walked in Gary Bigeni's show. Radio host Carrie Bickmore sat front row at Aje and former Victoria's Secret model Jessica Hart walked the runway for Bianca Spender. The enfant terrible of fashion week Jordan Gogos aimed higher, summoning the couple often referred to as the closest thing to royalty in Tasmania, excluding Queen Mary of Denmark. David Walsh the founder and owner of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, dressed in Gogos's label Iordanes Spyridon Gogos to watch his wife Kirsha Kaechele model on the runway from the front row. 'It just made total sense for me because Kirsha is so theatrical, and she's got so many ideas,' says Gogos, a fan of Kaechele's creative defence of the male-free status of the controversial Ladies Lounge at Mona. At the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal last March, Kaechele was inspired by Robert Palmer's 1980s music video Simply Irresistible to perform silent choreography alongside a group of performers in navy suits, red lipstick and pearls. For Gogos, Kaechele shimmied down the Carriageworks runway in a multicoloured coat dress with neon-trimmed knee-high spats, stopping in front of Walsh for more elaborate dance moves. 'I feel that everything she throws herself into from the deep end is authentic,' Gogos says. 'Also they've been collecting a bit of my stuff.' Gogos manipulates fibres into one-off creations for the Sotheby's crowd rather than the Shein set. Even his runway shows are art, with stiff patchwork pieces and rough quilting, giving the impression of a Muppet Show reboot with classical motifs ran by an alternative art collective. 'I was on the treadmill earlier wondering how I got into this vortex and feeling the excitement of being a part of this,' says Gogos, who made his fashion week debut in 2020. 'I remember seeing the fashion week schedule in 2019, the year before my first show, and thinking that there was a space for this. There was a space for what I do.'
Sydney Morning Herald
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Tasmanian royalty' rules the Jordan Gogos runway
Rather than pander to celebrities, or have to pay them, designers at Australian Fashion Week in Sydney are enlisting high-profile friends to promote their shows. Celebrity cookbook writer Nigella Lawson looked on at Lee Mathews, while television personality Melissa Leong walked in Gary Bigeni's show. Radio host Carrie Bickmore sat front row at Aje and former Victoria's Secret model Jessica Hart walked the runway for Bianca Spender. The enfant terrible of fashion week Jordan Gogos aimed higher, summoning the couple often referred to as the closest thing to royalty in Tasmania, excluding Queen Mary of Denmark. David Walsh the founder and owner of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, dressed in Gogos's label Iordanes Spyridon Gogos to watch his wife Kirsha Kaechele model on the runway from the front row. 'It just made total sense for me because Kirsha is so theatrical, and she's got so many ideas,' says Gogos, a fan of Kaechele's creative defence of the male-free status of the controversial Ladies Lounge at Mona. At the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal last March, Kaechele was inspired by Robert Palmer's 1980s music video Simply Irresistible to perform silent choreography alongside a group of performers in navy suits, red lipstick and pearls. For Gogos, Kaechele shimmied down the Carriageworks runway in a multicoloured coat dress with neon-trimmed knee-high spats, stopping in front of Walsh for more elaborate dance moves. 'I feel that everything she throws herself into from the deep end is authentic,' Gogos says. 'Also they've been collecting a bit of my stuff.' Gogos manipulates fibres into one-off creations for the Sotheby's crowd rather than the Shein set. Even his runway shows are art, with stiff patchwork pieces and rough quilting, giving the impression of a Muppet Show reboot with classical motifs ran by an alternative art collective. 'I was on the treadmill earlier wondering how I got into this vortex and feeling the excitement of being a part of this,' says Gogos, who made his fashion week debut in 2020. 'I remember seeing the fashion week schedule in 2019, the year before my first show, and thinking that there was a space for this. There was a space for what I do.'
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Touching the soul is all that matters!' The outrageous genius of Barrie Kosky and his Wagner phantasmagoria
From the Muppet Show to Kafka, Yiddish theatre to Vivaldi, pop music to Wagner – Barrie Kosky's enthusiasms ricochet at a speed that leaves you dizzy as well as, in their rampant variety, a touch envious. This 58-year-old Australian theatre and opera director sees all art, all life, as one. His love of clowns, cabaret and musicals is as intense as his passion for theatre and grand opera. 'Whether it touches the soul is all that matters,' he says, his loquacious personality expanding into a small side office at the Royal Opera House in London before a rehearsal. His new staging of Die Walküre, the second opera in Wagner's Ring cycle, openson 1 May . Kosky was born in Melbourne but has been based in Berlin for the past 20 years, where he was artistic director of the Komische Oper and still has an association there. He is funny, clever, outrageous but above all serious. His productions may shock, though that is never his intention. Dressing his Carmen up in a gorilla suit for a production that now has cult status in Frankfurt and Copenhagen – but did not catch light with audiences in London – was part of a studied aesthetic: the heroine living her brief life through a set of extreme roles. In his Das Rheingold, the first part of the Ring which opened in 2023, he caused upset in some quarters by having Erda – mother Earth – represented by a naked 82-year-old woman. 'How can Earth, dreaming and witnessing this story, not be in her own bare skin?' he says. 'There is nothing more beautiful than watching older people on stage. It almost reduces me to tears, thinking about what their bodies have experienced, their histories. If people don't like it, that's their problem. After 35 years of working in opera, I am experienced enough to understand that if you put something out there for artistic reasons, there will be negative reactions. People have paid for tickets. They can have any reaction they want. It's never about saying, 'Hey, this will really annoy the Royal Opera audience.'' Describing himself as a cocktail of Russian, Polish, Hungarian and English (his mother was born in Harrow) as well as Australian, Kosky has explored his origins in his work, from youthful endeavours in Australia to a career spanning the world's major opera houses (his widely acclaimed production of Handel's Saul returns to Glyndebourne this summer). From 1991, for six years, he had his own company Gilgul, which investigated Jewish identity and migration through physical theatre. He has just had a huge success with Philip Glass's Akhnaten in Berlin. As he signs off on Die Walküre, he will start work with Cecilia Bartoli, the star Italian mezzo-soprano, on a new piece based on Vivaldi and Ovid for Salzburg, and next he will prepare a German-Yiddish version of Kafka's The Trial for the Berliner Ensemble. His capacious tastes are given full rein in a short memoir published in 2008, called On Ecstasy. In a few heady pages, he describes his childhood yearning for his Polish grandmother's chicken soup, his Hungarian grandmother's love of opera, his gay awakening in the school changing rooms, 'a forbidden zone touched with rapture', and his experience of being dumbstruck by Mahler and emotionally drugged by the 'phantasmagoria' of Wagner. The question is how he continues to be so drawn to that composer, whose writings and works are rife with anti-semitic tropes. This is Kosky's second tilt at the Ring cycle. The first, completed in 2011, was in Hanover. He has also worked at Wagner's festival theatre of Bayreuth in Bavaria, where he directed Die Meistersinger, featuring a giant puppet and a backdrop of the Nuremberg trials. But for a UK audience, his attitude is different. 'I do believe people can appreciate Wagner above all for the music,' he says. 'I have no problem with that. However, as a Jew and as a director, I don't have that luxury. I'm dealing with the text, and how to interpret that text. In Germany, the cultural baggage of Wagner is en-or-mous. Any German audience knows about the association of his music with Hitler. The operas always reverberate with that history. One of the reasons I accepted this Covent Garden Ring is because it enables me, with a non-German audience, to concentrate on other things: on the redemptive power of love and the brilliance of the narrative. Do I believe Wagner anticipated the Third Reich? No, I do not. Do I believe there are elements in Wagner's life and work that are deeply problematic and contradictory and unpleasant? Yes, I absolutely do.' A disturbing aspect of Die Walküre is the incest between the twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, which results in the birth of the cycle's hero, Siegfried. As Kosky points out, in some ancient societies – the Incas, the Egyptians – incest was not taboo. 'But Wagner is not interested in good or evil, or in the norms of Christian morality. He was driven to explore mythic, primal impulses. In these sibling-lovers, he creates two of the most sympathetic characters in any of his works.' But at the same time you cannot escape the idea of pure blood, of race, of eugenics. For Wagner, the greatest of all dramas was Aeschylus's Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia trilogy in which the brother-sister relationship is key. Greek drama shapes Wagner even more than Nordic myth. The orchestra acts as the chorus, commenting with leitmotifs, the musical themes used by Wagner to suggest particular characters. As a trained pianist, Kosky is among those few directors able to steep themselves fully in the score. His joy at working alongside Antonio Pappano, former music director of the Royal Opera who is returning to conduct the successive operas in the Ring, is touching. 'His assistant remarked: 'Tony is a conductor who occasionally directs and Barrie is a director who occasionally conducts in the rehearsal,' because I throw myself around all the time and jig my shoulders to the music. Tony's sense of humour is almost as wicked as mine. We giggle helplessly even though there are definitely no jokes in Walküre. He is a genius musician. I adore everything about this man. He breathes with the stage. You feel it physically. Everyone knows where this inhalation and exhalation is, so all are breathing as one. It's the rarest gift. It's what Tony does better than anyone I've ever worked with.' With rehearsals about to start, Kosky gives a rush of observations about the state and profile of opera: no, he cannot judge, as yet, whether the rise of the political 'alt-right' in Germany has made any impact. Yes, opera ticket prices, despite efforts by opera houses, are still too high, but outside first nights you get different audiences, who save up and are addicted to an art form that combines everything: singing, dance, sculpture, literature, painting. Prices are still less than people pay for a Lady Gaga gig or a top sporting event, 'and this Die Walküre sold out within a fortnight'. Berlin, he notes, even after a reduction, still has arts funding of nearly €1bn, for a city of fewer than 4m people, 'which is unthinkable to someone like you from England or me from Australia'. He reveres the tradition of opera in the UK, saying: 'Britain has produced some of the greatest singers, conductors, directors in the world. But there's an Anglo-Saxon tendency to feel guilty about enjoying opera. In Germany and central Europe, it's part of the DNA.' He remains evangelical about the value of the arts in nourishing the soul. 'I don't expect politicians to get that.' But in Berlin, he adds, a huge number – 45% – of visitors come to experience culture of one kind or other. 'Think what that means in terms of hotels, restaurants, transport. We need to line up our arguments better about the economic value of the arts'. For Kosky the return to the Royal Opera has an element of private odyssey. His Hungarian-English grandfather had a fruit and vegetable stall in Covent Garden. 'I find it very moving to walk through that site every day and think, 'This is where Jo Fischer sold fruit and veg.' That part of the family was involved in Yiddish theatre in the East End. One uncle was a clown, the other a composer. I still have his manuscripts in my apartment in Berlin.' In Kosky's view, that other family – the god Wotan, his Valkyrie daughters and other complicated offspring – is a visceral microcosm of us all. 'You need know nothing about Nordic myth or Wagner's antisemitism or Hitler's abuse of the music,' he says, 'because you are sitting there, on the edge of your seat, wanting to know what happens next.' He is still talking at top speed as he hurries off to the rehearsal room. Die Walküre is at the Royal Opera House, London, 1-17 May, and is live in cinemas on 14 May.
Metro
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Metro
Why do we keep quiet about the noise around us?
In MetroTalk: One reader says noisy protests and amplified buskers are music to no one's ears. (Picture: REUTERS/Peter Nicholls) Do you agree with our readers? Have your say on these MetroTalk topics and more in the comments. Turn it down a notch An activist known as Stop Brexit Man has been cleared of flouting a ban on playing music outside parliament (Metro, Apr 15). To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Up Next Previous Page Next Page Steve Bray used to play the Muppet Show music and Darth Vader's theme through a loudspeaker as Rishi Sunak arrived for Prime Minister's Questions. A good start in reducing noise as a public nuisance would be to not permit the use of any amplification in a public space, beyond a megaphone and a music instrument, without a special licence (which should be seldom given). Our country has poor productivity and I can't imagine how difficult it must be to try to work in nearby offices when amplified, loud music is played, for example, in Trafalgar Square or Westminster Square. At Tube stations, buskers play music with amplification and it is extraordinary the Mayor of London allows it. One can't always hear the station PA because of this noise and I'm concerned emergency announcements may not be heard clearly, endangering public safety. One can only imagine that the deputy district judge who backed the activist is never affected by loud music in his court or office. Lester May, Camden Town Was that really about the Pope? To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Up Next Previous Page Next Page Sir Keir Starmer said Pope Francis – who died on Monday – was 'a Pope for the poor, the downtrodden and the forgotten' (Metro, Tue). Was he talking about the people of the UK, I wonder – ie pensioners and war veterans? Martin, South Croydon It's not 'bouncing' anymore Delia El-Hosayny, of Derby, the UK's first female bouncer thinks the profession should be renamed (Credits: Tom Maddick / SWNS) In response to Delboy from Yorkshire (MetroTalk, Mar 24), who mocked the woman who described her job as an 'ejection technician' rather than 'club bouncer'. I would have agreed with the derogatory word 'bouncer' 15 years ago but the ship that brought in the bouncers has since sailed. Where are all the 'bouncers' in the supermarkets, stores and public spaces 'bouncing' out shoplifters and feral youths running amok? What we have now been presented with over the past 18 years are 'security officers' trained to manage and reduce risks and conflicts, as opposed to 'bouncing' customers out of licensed premises. The reason or reasons why the majority of these door staff and security seem timid or risk-averse is another discussion entirely. Dee Folarin- Oshile, Lecturer In Security And Conflict Senior citizens, not pensioners Who wants to be defined by the fact they've reached pension age? (Credits: Getty Images) I would just like to offer the view that we should not refer to people over the age of 66 as 'pensioners' but what we always used to call them – 'senior citizens'. This is a far more dignified and appropriate title for a person who has lived a life and reflects the fact that they are far more than just someone in receipt of money from the government or a private pension fund. I wonder how we dropped the original title in the first place? Trevor, Worthing Put the ball in the right place Are the referees tampering with the game? (Picture: Getty) When are the football authorities going to stop this ridiculous behaviour of placing the ball outside the quarter circle when players are taking a corner kick? The number of goals scored from the ball being in the wrong position is disgraceful, including Aberdeen's first goal in Saturday's Scottish cup semi-final. Allan Somerville, Bonnyrigg Scooters aren't toys Are we now selling scooters to children? On an evening shopping trip in a London suburb I was horrified to encounter a lad of about ten speedily riding along the pavement complete with a bright front light. It seems that those born since the turn of the century have 'speed in the blood', perhaps because they have spent their earlier childhood being ferried around in cars. It explains how some of them regard the pavements as their natural right of way, regardless of other users. And of course there is never a policeman around. Antony Porter, London Arrow MORE: You can buy these London homes with a deposit under £10,000 Arrow MORE: H&M launches new Move running collection ahead of the London marathon
