Unless you’ve spent the last 50 years cryogenically frozen in deep space, you may have heard of Rosanne Cash‘s father, Johnny Cash. When Rosanne locked in on becoming a successful country singer/songwriter, she had a formidable set of footsteps to follow. But she isn’t one to duck a challenge. Twenty of her singles cracked the top 20 in the country charts from 1979 to 1990, with 11 reaching the number-one spot. Her new album, The List (out next week on EMI/Manhattan), is a terrific reworking of country classics, handpicked from a list of indispensable songs her dad made for her 36 years ago. Having Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy and Rufus Wainwright appear as guest artists on the record is a nice fit. Rosanne will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week long. Read our Q&A with her.
Cash: I saw God Of Carnage, by French playwright Yasmina Reza, early in its Broadway run, before it won the Tony for Best Play, which it rightly deserved. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much or so hard at the theater; even Nathan Lane in The Odd Couple didn’t tickle as much as this. The four cast members—James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis and Marcia Gay Harden—were superb. Reza covers a lot of social and moral ground in the play—bourgeois hypocrisy, African genocide, justice and conflict resolution—within a simple plot device. Two sets of parents meet to discuss their 11-year-old boys, one of which has injured the other on the playground. The meeting starts with enormous amounts of carefully contrived civility and degenerates into full-scale parlor war, which is absolutely fantastic. Egos disintegrate, ids take over. It’s wonderful. There is a moment when Harden bounces across the room like a fox terrier as she screams, “You lie! You lie!,” and it was so perfect and so incredibly funny, and so real, that she should have gotten the Tony just for the bouncing. The night I saw it, Gandolfini was choking on a throat lozenge in the opening scene and couldn’t get his line out. He finally said, “We’re going to start over,” and the audience went ballistic with delight. The four actors walked around, left the stage, came back, settled themselves and began again. It was so funny and somehow in context. I heard people after the show swearing that Gandolfini did that every night, that it was part of the play, but I doubted it. I asked a few other people who saw the play on different nights, and no, Gandolfini did not choke on any other night, so I feel privileged to have seen that small-yet-exciting bump in an overall exciting and fabulous evening.
