The Donkey Show

...cent from notch to notch seems to whet cising his theory that music's "Dionysiac Helena Qordin Ruderman) lip-syncs "Don't the edge of experience, and one can't but quintessence" lures us toward a kind of Leave Me This Way," as Demetrius (Emily feel, if I may use Schopenhauer's term, ecstasy and cosmic oneness...

...The thrill of music-related comments at great length me my pop music fix...

...You're still living in the seventies...

...Hellstrom) flees through the forest...

...Just as Titania, Bottom, and the lovers "Rerelating faith and culture, reenchanting the journey through madness and disorder, liturgy, rccentering on the end - it must, it can losing their real selves and becoming one AIDAN Ni cI HoLS, U.P be done...

...It is for this rea- point a slightly different emphasis, obOver the past few months, I have son that filmmakers insinuate tunes into serving that music makes us feel as if we managed to acquire a compendium of the fabric of movies, manipulating our are living more intensely...

...Absolutely not...

...Whether or not it is true, as some thinkers "Know what your trouble is...

...a shallow experience acreading this confession, that I like any of without disquieting music to tense them quires a little more depth...

...Titania (Anna Wilson), dad in nothing but thighhigh patent leather boots and a bikini bottom, plus plastic butterflies perched on her breasts, croons "I Love the Nightlife" as male fairies, their bare torsos smeared with glitter, carry her around the theater--currently, New York's Club El Flamingo, set ATCHRISTENDOM WAKE up as a real discotheque, complete with DJ and glittery disco balls...

...more significant...

...like mainlining emotion...

...Whether WM...

...Let me explain...

...Now please do not assume, on how curiously flat key scenes can be feel wasted...

...this stuff...

...When I'm feeling lowbrow, it tempers the quality of the moment, so-called "Countdown" of greatest hits...

...Suspense is hard- revelation would be the transcendence summer Night's Disco, created and directed ly involved-after all, no one expects of the self...

...Music alone allows us to un- by Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner, retells Rameau to pull ahead like a Derby long derstand the delight felt at the annihila- Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream shot and nose out Beethoven...

...B. EERDMANS or not that tile gets scrubbed, the music MENJ PUBLISHING CO...

...The driving beat, At your bookstore, or call 1-800-253-7521 • FAX...

...ence to share the characters' experience, -JOHN SAWARD via the Dionysiac ecstasy of disco music...

...The hidden connection be- ticularly susceptible to meter and tempo, In his lucid primer Music and the Mind, S tween Schopenhauer and it is certain that listening to music can be Anthony Storr gives Schopenhauer's mildew...

...This property is immensely reassuring in a world that can seem too confused or tedious Celia Wren or futile to have any meaning at allthink of those minutes spent waiting for A CURE FOR MILDEW a bus, or trying to change the ink cartridge on a fax machine, or scrubbing 'The Donkey Show' away at that mildew that will resume its conquest of the tile the moment you hakespeare's disco roots...

...The show WAKE the undiminished capacity of classical Catholicism proffers witty equivalents to Shaketo renew liturgy and spirituality, philosophy and speare-a roller-skating Puck (Barry theology, exegesis and ecumenism, art and archi- Brisco) doses Titania with a cocaine-intecture, consecrated life and family life, econom- fused concoction from a blender...

...Riding on the wave of '70s revivalism AIDAN NICHOLS, OT that has brought us Broadway's Saturday Night Fever and, on television, Fox's fl "That '70s Show," The Donkey Show has "This book embodies the very thing it proposes HRISTENDOM the awakening and remaking of Christendom...

...616-459-6540 reminding one of the world's larger E-mail: sales@eerdmans.com rhythms, makes the task at hand seem insignificant, and therefore easy...

...voking me to turn on my computer, or pick up a mop, or buckle down to any number of long procrastinated tasks...

...I am a classi- up...

...More ics and politics...

...SO, my guilty habit does point to a broader, more interesting phenomenon: namely, the peculiarly visceral impact that music can have on us...

...Life is shortthe disco era's greatest hits, a five-CD feelings in a way that theater directors you can feel it slipping away while you retrospective of '80s pop tunes, one sem- have, increasingly, begun to emulate...

...have speculated, that the rhythms of our Commonweal 2 1 February 25, 2000 (Last Labor Day, when I was particularly that the Ultimate Secret Meaning hov- Nietzsche would have liked my CD colglum, I even listened to a Top 40 station's ers at number 1. Countdown euphoria lection, I thought the other day, when I 100 Best Songs of the '90s, the musical anticipates revelation...

...I indulge in rock music of a dignified, making even banal experience seem Whether it is the race to the 'New World rough-diamond cut-say, Eric Clapton...

...No distance sepa0// A•c rl c ry12 irr7 rates the audience from the actors, who de 0///"/,(.// /r/ 0'////ff/,c mill on the dance floor in the thick of the crowd...

...I GRAND RAPIDS, MI 44503 does disco...

...For scrabble at the fax machine's innards, inal Madonna album, and Michael Jack- a reminder of how greatly soundtracks ink cartridge in hand...

...This is a rich and passionate book...

...Commonweal 2 2 February 25, 2000...

...The motivating power of synthesizer chords and overactive drum beats is so reliable, in fact, that I have come to rate pop-music costs as business expenses, just as necessary as the outlay for an ergonomic keyboard...

...Now, most of the planet's inhabitants plow through their work without the aid of Madonna's "Material Girl" or the Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," so there is obviously something idiosyncratic in my hit-tune dependency...

...And so, apparently, 255 JEFFERSON AVE...

...The fact is, ory of the Will, observed that "suitable vorites toward Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to when I am feeling depressed or lethargic, music played to any event or surround- Heaven"-Top Bands of the Millennium, a bar or two of hyperpeppy music jolts ing seems to disclose to us its most secret Top Conductors of All Time, you name it, through me like an electric current, pro- meaning, and appears as the most ac- I am a pushover for the entire category...

...If there is a Catholic Christian intriguingly, the play allows the audiculture, then it is here...

...Many a piece of prose, and many a mildew-free shower tile, is due entirely to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, turned down low so the neighbors can't hear...

...Schopenhauer, who Symphony," on a classical frequency, or So if I hoard airbrained pop tunes, it is worked this truth into his abstruse the- the inexorable advance through rock fafor purely practical reasons...

...bodies (breathing, heartbeat) make us par- walk away...

...The ingenious incountdowns extends beyond pleasure in in The Birth of Tragedy, suggested that this teractive play The Donkey Show: A Midthe sounds themselves...

...But if "Rhapsody son's Thriller, a release that erupted like sway our cinematic response, watch a on a Theme by Paganini" is lilting Vesuvius over my early high school very early suspense movie and notice through the room, the minutes no longer years...

...being of the Catholic Church depends simply on the full implementation of the so-called `Spirit of Vatican II.'" - IAN KER As Puck pretended to snort cocaine off my arm, I reflected that perhaps it is this ISBN 0-8028-4690-4 •268 pages . paperback . $28.00 Dionysiac quality of pop music that makes chores so easy...

...Radio stations capitalize on this fact cal music person, a Puccini junkie, a But even when music isn't prodding when they marshal up a type of programlover of pre-Bach and post-Beethoven our mood in one direction or another, ming in which I particularly delight-the harmonies...

...But the as- tion of the individual," he wrote, exer- through disco gems like "We Are Family...

...with Oberon's enchanted forest, so the - CHRISTOPH CARDINAL SCHONBORN audience, on entering the discotheque, is swept up in the erotic pulse of the music, "Aidan Nichols's provocative, wide-ranging charter for renewal should which seems to represent a primal life be compulsory reading for all those who believe that the future wellforce that dissolves individuality...

...says, life goes on...

...wandered into a stage extravaganza that equivalent of those plastic noodles that Nietzsche, who quoted Schopenhauer's might have been crafted specifically to give come in packing boxes...

...proved to be one of the year's theatrical England's foremost Catholic theologian displays sleepers, and for good reason...