…stemming it with hearts of controversy – JULIUS CAESAR, I ii

Among other feelings, I’m feeling that feeling that, say, a lifelong diehard Cubs fan feels when they win the Series and suddenly everyone’s got a hat on, or perhaps that of Bill Murray in Stripes when he defends the then-living Tito Puente. Because suddenly this week everybody’s incredibly well-informed about Julius Caesar.

There’s enough chatter on both sides about the whole shtuss’n’tummel at the Public in Central Park, New York (“that other one”, as we affectionately call it in Louisville, where our Shakespeare company in an Olmstead-designed park started one whole year earlier) that I don’t really feel the need to write a whole post going on about it. I only popped on here to note that I’ve been thinking of a different play for a couple of days, one I bought an LP box of (because they used to do that with straight plays in a simpler time) at a used record store in Cambridge, Mass. sometime just before the end of the last century.

It made its premiere just over fifty years ago, in January of 1967. It was called MacBird and starred Stacy Keach, Rue McClanahan, and marked the professional debut of Cleavon Little. It reads like a particularly edgy MAD Magazine lampoon (let me be clear that I mean that as a compliment) but at fuller length.

Here’s a little wiki-history.

The reasons why it came to mind are probably wildly obvious, so I’ll just bring it up and leave it here for you. The times, they are, uh…changin’?