BETTE MIDLER – “Hello Dolly” – On Broadway! “What else do you need to know?” ask the TV commercials for this apparently hard-to-fail concoction.

Well, in response to those ads … I’d say that, apart from dates, times, ticket-prices, etc … we might also need to know that this classic musical from 1964 is these days looking and feeling tired.

THE KKK IS A BENIGN FORCE. That is, when it’s the Kinetic Kevin Kline.

Of course this multidextrous actor repeatedly brings his universally acknowledged comic genius to film, tv and theater performances – as well as, just as often, profoundly serious dramatic mastery. But this time it’s specifically his movements that dominate, during his tent-pole performance in the new Broadway revival of Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter”, at the St James Theatre until July.

DATELINE : Austin, Texas – THREE INTO ONE WILL GO. It’s proven every year at South By South West. The proof comes as we convene in the Texan capital during March, braiding together the festivals’ three strands: of music … of film … and of digital arts and sciences — that third category being stamped since 1999 with the vague rubric “Interactive” … which is still accurate more often than it isn’t.

NOW IT’S THE TURN OF THE IRISH. America’s media industry has been, like it has for many years, observing Black History Month in February, and as we make the turn into March it’s considered a good time to be emphasizing all matters Irish – if only because St Patrick’s Day happens to fall a little over half-way through the month.  

AS THE MOVIE industry indulges itself in awards and congratulations at Oscar time, here on the East Coast the medium of stage drama has hit one of its own commanding heights. And crucial to its success is a movie star, Jake Gyllenhaal.

On January 14 2017, the PBS NewsHour Weekend carried  David Tereshchuk‘s interview with the new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, part of his overall profile of Khan as the first Muslim to run any Western-world capital city.

With the Gilded Age of Trump about to dawn … I’ve become almost desperately eager as a news consumer for some different journalism to leaven the prevailing diet of outraged disgust vying with abject hero-worship.

WASHINGTON SLOUCHES TOWARD Inauguration Day like the poet’s rough beast – and yes, I have found myself in the nation’s capital once again.

I’ve mercifully not been covering preparations for the (gilded?) Trump Presidency, but I did complete a journalistic exercise that has its own relevance for our new age.

WE IN THE MEDIA MADE MORE MISTAKES in 2016 than in any previous year, ever. I feel confident in baldly stating that as incontrovertible fact.

Where, after all, is the data to contradict me? And to whom would I have to apologize anyway?

A PRESIDENT-ELECT STARTS, as he said he would at some point, to act Presidential. In the early hours of Wednesday November 9th Donald J Trump claimed victory and said among other things “We must reclaim our country’s destiny.”

It was a somewhat elevated version of his “Make America Great Again” slogan, stepping up a bit from the 3rd-Grade level vocabulary that has characterized Trump when not sticking to a scripted delivery.  

IT CAN’T HAVE ESCAPED your notice, especially given American election coverage, that the media possess an deeply inbuilt tendency to finger-point and to blame.

An early professional role-model of mine decreed to those of us under his influence that: “All serious journalism boils down to two simple variants – WE NAME THE GUILTY MAN … and … ARROW POINTS TO DEFECTIVE PART”.

ECLIPSED, that striking depiction, as fictional drama, of women in crisis – Liberian women to be specific – closed last night after its 15-week Broadway run.

But not before dedicating its 117th Golden Theater performance to saving the lives of Liberian women in reality. That life-saving work is being carried out on the ground by The Women: Global Cancer Initiative (TheWomen.org) whose main international program is testing for and treating female cancers in Liberia, and also sexually-transmitted diseases.  

THE THEATER WORLD, rightly, was shadowed but not fully darkened by the Orlando terrorist hate-crime, as the Tony Awards ceremony presented the all-conquering Hamilton cast performing the Battle of Yorktown – rather bizarrely, but pointedly and arrestingly – with firearms completely removed from the scene.  

THE DEVIL IS REPUTED by some to have had all the best tunes. But those claiming to be on the side of the angels can often have the better technique.

Sometimes, though, they’ll employ that advantage in what amounts to an abuse of power bordering on the devilish.

UNNOTICED GLOBAL developments are something of an obsession with me. I had my attention stirred recently by a lot of media attention that focused on the whole continent of Africa being officially expected to lower its economic growth-rate this year. But I was stirred even more (with angry disappointment) by how few media outlets stressed how phenomenally high the continent’s growth-rate has been over the past twenty years.   

THE SOUTH BY SOUTH-WEST Festival of 2016 finally finished this week. In the end it seemed, more sprawlingly than ever, to take over the city of Austin for even longer than I previously remember – and I’ve now been an attendee for a dozen years or so.

Dateline: Austin, Texas —  IT CAME. AND IT WENT. In flash, it seemed.

“SXSW Interactive”, or the digital tech part of that annual multimedia extravaganza called the South by SouthWest festivals is now over – and it was on steroids this year, opening with the first-ever appearance by a sitting US President.   He provided, by the way, a text-book Obamite keynote address, sharp and deeply engaged while calmly de-fraying the fray of bitter controversy.

THOUGH NEVER A HUGE ATTENTION-GETTER, the Best Foreign Language category in this weekend’s Oscar awards contains, as often, some very powerful cinema among its five nominees.

And if the runes cast before us by earlier rounds of the awards season are any guide, one film is close to being a shoo-in for the ‘Best Foreign’ statuette.

THOUGH FOR MANY OF US THE YEAR ahead may look pretty dismal, 2016 promises one great breakthrough – a major step toward ending Africa’s particular and hobbling form of the great Digital Divide.

MY YEAR-END SCHADENFREUDE-FEST has rolled around again, all too soon.

It’s been a pretty good year for some striking media corrections and apologies.

And for some telling non-apologies.