Show Biz Grab Bag

-- Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong has called out the "Enfield high school board" because the musical department of Enfield High School in Enfield, Connecticut isn't going to do the musical version of the band's 2004 album American Idiot. According to the group's director, some folks complained about the show's content as inappropriate for a high school production, so it was scrapped and will be replaced with Little Shop of Horrors. Armstrong, using the hashtag "enfieldidiot" in an Instagram post, lambasted the decision since the company had been planning to do a much cleaner version than the profanity and drug heavy original Broadway stage production. He overlooks the salient points that the "Enfield high school board" didn't make the decision and the overblown ego-fest of a musical created from the overblown ego-fest of an album isn't anywhere near as good as Shop, anyway.

-- Actor Danny DeVito offered his opinion on the controversy over the monochromatic list of nominees in this year's Oscar awards. Nominees are selected from the top vote-getters in the different categories, and those Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members active in that category do the voting. In other words, actors vote on actors, technical specialists vote in their specialty, and so on. DeVito's opinion: Americans are "a bunch of racists." He overlooks the salient point that it wasn't Americans who voted on the Oscar nominees and selected an all-white slate of honorees. It was Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members. Americans may or may not be "a bunch of racists," but it would probably be better to sample a wider range of them than DeVito and his co-workers to find that out. For what it's worth, I saw several performances by nonwhite actors this year, and all of them were better than Bryan Cranston or Jennifer Lawrence in their nominated roles. Or every episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia that has been or ever will be filmed.

-- As of this writing, Donald Trump is refusing to do the Thursday night debate among Republican presidential candidates, since it is carried on Fox News Channel and will be moderated by Megyn Kelly, who has apparently been mean to him. You may say, wait, the post title suggests this is supposed to be a collection of show-biz anecdotes and this is a political item. I disagree: These debates are pure theater and Trump is a swinish clown who cannot have anything be about anyone other than himself -- what category other than showbiz fits such a diva?