Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved On Tuesday, December 16 PBS showed a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker staged by the English National Ballet in 2024 that was at once fascinating and frustrating. It took me a while to find out information on this program because the PBS Web site is now more aimed at facilitating viewers who want to “stream” the program itself than in publishing information about it, including credits for the cast and crew. I managed to pull together a cast and crew list by transcribing it from the closing credits of the stream, and I also found an online site that gave the history of the English National Ballet’s involvement with The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is by far the most popular ballet ever created, and ballet companies all around the world regularly put it on during the December holiday season. They use it as a cash cow and virtually all ballet companies depend on a holiday production o...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, December 15) I put on a couple of TV shows on PBS and my husband Charles and I watched them together, though he had to bail on one of them a half-hour before the end because he got an emergency phone call from his church pastor. (Actually, it wasn’t that big an emergency; she just wanted to vent.) The first was formally titled Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir . The choir in question was formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and so were its Christmas specials, which frequently featured major guest stars like opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa. In 2024 they abbreviated the name of their show to Joy with the Tabernacle Choir , and they followed the same practice this year even though the Mormon connections were pretty evident: the show’s production was credited to the media department of Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Da...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After the 1961 Hammer movie Cash on Demand was over on Turner Classic Movies Saturday, December 13 I switched over to KPBS for a pledge-break special called I Want My ’80’s! which I figured my husband Charles would be interested in because he’s a much bigger fan of 1980’s pop music than I am. (That’s the nine-year generation gap between us again; I was born in 1953, he in 1962, and therefore I have living memories of the 1960’s and its music that Charles doesn’t. Once we were talking about Janis Joplin, of whom I have living memories even though I never got to see her live. Charles said, “To me, Janis Joplin has always been dead.”) I Want My ’80’s! turned out to be a concert presentation in which Rick Springfield was the headliner and Wang Chung and John Waite were basically his opening acts. Springfield got six songs during the show, which ran for an hour and a half though only about 45 to 50 m...