The Playgoer: Dumb-Censorship Watch

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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Dumb-Censorship Watch

Typical of overreacting school boards...

The Associated Press reports that the Richland School District in Johnstown, PA, canceled its February 2012 production of Kismet following concerns raised by community members over staging the Baghdad-set musical about a Muslim street poet so close to the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The community is a relatively short distance from the Shanksville, PA, crash site of United Airlines Flight 93."We're not saying there's anything bad about the musical. We may potentially produce it in the future," school superintendent Thomas Fleming told the AP.
So no Muslims in musicals--not that there's anything wrong with them!

And banning positive images of the Arab world--and of the country we just spent a decade decimating--helps heal wounds how...?

By the way, in case you're wondering how threateningly foreign this 1953 all-singing, all-dancing, all-jihad show is, this will certainly make you want to call Homeland Security pronto...




Yes, the music is adapted from that Russian sleeper-cell agent, Alexander Borodin.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How about they don't do it because it's an orientalist pile of kitsch?

Tom Shea said...

It's also a leetle adult-themed for high-schoolers, in my opinion. A little too much with the sexytalk and the rahadlakum.