In part 2, Rosenberg does a nice job of explaining SEO-driven “corporate” linking, the sort of idiocy that newspaper and magazine sites indulge in order to grab more page views and cram more ads and Google juice into every inch.

It’s possible for links to make meaning and money at the same time; one doesn’t have to exclude the other. But when driven by the prospect of profit, bad links can begin to swamp good ones

Shakespeare serves the The Donkey Show as an effective marketing tool, but the process is not adaptation. It is not reinvention. It is, simply and precisely, exploitation.  The resulting shows were popular, fun, and in one case visually stunning, but they contained none of the power, intellect, and beauty of Shakespeare. They didn’t need to. That’s not how they seek to impact the audience.

An Aviation is composed of gin, lemon juice, and maraschino liqueur. (Replace the marsachino with triple sec and you’ve got a white lady. Then replace the gin with tequila and the lemon with lime and you’ve got a margarita.) It’s also supposed to have crème de violette, but I don’t have any crème de violette and neither do you.

I came across a prolonged discussion the the Aviation on eGullet. I’d never heard of an Aviation before. Turns out it’s pretty tasty and interesting, and you’ve got to admit that the name is salty as hell.

Get the book.

Alexia Tarabotti is a Victorian spinster who labors under the weight of misfortune. Admittedly, her father is rich, and her mother, if no longer precisely good-looking, is at any rate fashionable and received in all the best houses. But Alexia is afflicted with a dusky complexion, an unruly spirit, two simpering half-sisters, a perception that she is unmarriageable, and a complete absence of soul. In consequence, the vampires and werewolves who populate the cream of London society are rendered temporarily human at her touch.

Inevitably, hilarity and marriage ensue. We visit the headquarters of London’s vampires in Westminster, and meet a Scottish Lord who happens to be (a) a werewolf and (b) the head of Her Majesty’s Bureau of Unnatural Registry. Centuries ago, the British reached an accommodation with their supernaturals, and the alliance of human and superhuman subjects has carried the British flag across the globe. In the end (of course) we also meet a scientific mastermind whose nefariously subterranean laboratories can only be reached through a tiny ascension room. Alexia inhabits a good, clean, and frothy world that is neither very deep nor very disturbing, and in place of overwrought angst we have good and (mostly) clean fun.

• Mixed appetizers
  • slices tomatoes, sungolds, coarse salt, balsamic
  • smoked trout (brushed with ginger syrup, thyme in cavity, 20 min. over alder)
  • grilled fresh figs, boucheron
• mushroom focaccia (shitakes and button mushrooms, cantal, goat cheese, and artisanal ricotta)
• pancakes and eggs and toast
  • eggs in purgatory
  • corn fritter pancakes
  • Ruhlman’s buttermilk dinner rolls
• blueberry lemon-curd tart
  • homemade blueberry and peach ice cream
  • candied, smoked pistachios

The meal proves that you can have too much food, even without meat. We drank vinho verde, which goes with the weather, and beaujolais, which goes with the mushrooms and maybe with the figs. The fritters were a failure: fritters must be fried to be worth eating, but I was deluded by a cookbook that suggested the pancake approach.

I got badly weeded in late prep and so the eggs in purgatory lacked their breadcrumb topping, and we've already discussed the pistachio brittle misadventure.

I lightly smoked the pistachios, and while they cooked I weighed out the sugar and water to the nearest gram. They got hot. They got hotter. Everything was fine. And then...

Suddenly, I had a pot of damp sugar crystals. For some reason, the sugar precipitated out of solution. What did I do wrong?

Breakfast of champions.

As Paulus heads into her second season at ART, she has largely replaced the company’s steady diet of serious avant-garde productions with audience-pleasing musicals and adventurous interactive experiences. She has been a commercial smash, while shedding actors — and longtime staffers — who defined the company for decades.

Now, she’s facing the ultimate byproduct of success, a backlash. To her supporters, Paulus is a crowd-inspiring theater revolutionary. To her detractors, she is the Broadway-obsessed, box-office-driven director who has dismantled a prized institution.

The piece, by Geoff Edgers, focuses on what appears to be a greater rift than the inevitable change that must accompany the appointment of a new artistic director. Actors, staffers, and long-time supporters are quietly furious.

One issue, clearly, is whether the American Repertory will be a repertory company. This, after all, was always the vision: a core group of actors who you’d see in many productions over a span of years. Watching familiar actors grow over time and handle unexpected challenges was often terrific, though inevitably some actors were cast in parts for which they weren’t ideal and others kept turning up in the same sort of part in every production.

Paulus didn’t use the resident company much in her first year; I assumed that might be transitional, but apparently it’s policy. That’s a loss.

The Globe story casts the change as a conflict between ART’s experimental tradition and Paulus’s desire to use more accessible material in order to reach new audiences. I think that’s the wrong frame. Sleep No More was one of the most experimental productions the ART has staged, and also one of the most memorable. The Globe story alludes to its sexiness, but that’s just old Boston prudery: the nudity in Sleep No More wouldn’t evoke comment in London or New York.

But I sense that the ART thinks its great success last year was The Donkey Show, a disco nightclub in which something like Midsummer Night’s Dream happens. I thought The Donkey Show was an intriguing failure, the sort of thing that you’d think was inspired if you accidentally wandered into it one night in Maastricht or Manchester, but that doesn’t function as the premiere production of the New Artistic Director. The real problem in my view, though, is they’re still doing it a year later, and seem intent on doing it forever. That’s not what Harvard’s theater should be doing; that’s dinner theater.

And repeated The Donkey Show shows no confidence in the concept itself; if you want to do drama in a nightclub, how about giving Tempest a try? Pal Joey? How about Antigone? The dramatic point of Donkey is to have drama happen just at the edge of your field of vision while other stuff is happening all around you. That should work for other stories. And if it can only work with Midsummer and that sells tickets, well, take it to North Shore or Charles or somewhere and be a nightclub and let the Cambridge theater space go back to doing theater.

For the rest of the first season, Gatz was brilliant, Paradise Lost was solid, Johnny Baseball was pleasant froth that needed a better book, and Best of Both Worlds didn’t gel. That’s not bad – for a transitional season. And in any case, if the ART is to be a repertory company, some change is inevitable; actors who came with ART to Cambridge with a 27-year-old Cherry Jones (in Midsummer) in 1980 are 30 years older today. But if ART is not a repertory company, what is it going to be?

That said, the Globe story uses Amanda Palmer as a symbol for popularity and accessibility. That’s wrong — especially before anyone has seen the new Cabaret. Sure, it might be lousy. But I think there’s a gritty play in Cabaret that could be liberated from our memory of Liza, and Palmer might be the one to do it.