Free Republic

NORTH TUSTIN – A controversial play that drew protesters in November will return to the Church of the Foothills for an Easter Sunday performance. "Corpus Christi" depicts Jesus as a gay man living in 1950s Corpus Christi, Texas, playwright Terrence McNally's home town. The cast of 13 portray Jesus and the 12 Apostles. "It's a story of love and a story of passion, and the story of Christ, so actually it works out very well to have it on Easter," said Pastor Mike Holland of Church of the Foothills. Holland said the group chose to do the play on Easter...

A controversial student-directed play at Tarleton State University that would have portrayed Jesus as a homosexual has been canceled. According to a press release from the university, the professor of the theatre directing class decided to cancel the Saturday production of "Corpus Christi" because of safety and security concerns for the students, as well as the need to maintain an orderly academic environment.

As we all learned from watching “Little House on the Prairie,” being a mom on the prairie was tough. You had to deal with floods, blizzards, fires — maybe your oldest daughter would go mysteriously blind in a Very Special Episode. So by comparison, Melissa Gilbert has found that being a mom on the road isn’t so hard. Gilbert, a television icon for playing Laura Ingalls on the “Prairie” television show from 1974 to 1983, has now taken on the role of Ma Ingalls for a new musical version that arrives at the Overture Center on Tuesday. But on the...

ITHACA, NY--Somewhere, the late great Charles Schulz is rolling over in his grave. Schulz, the creator of the much-loved Peanuts comic strip (and a devout Christian), probably never envisioned a day when his characters would be appropriated for a “satirical story” about teenaged homosexuals. But that’s exactly what happens in the new play, “Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead," which the Ithaca Journal describes as “a satirical story that ... features characters from the ‘Peanuts’ comic strip gang in their volatile teenage years” It all begins with CB, Charlie Brown, who contemplates the death of his loyal dog,...

Hub-Bub has been awarded a grant for $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts for the Hub-Bub Artists-in-Residence program. Only 30 other artists' communities in the U.S. will receive funding from the NEA during this grant cycle. Hub-Bub will also receive funding in 2010 from the Dedalus Foundation, which fosters public understanding of modern art by facilitating research, publications and exhibitions in the field. Funding from Dedalus will be used to bring six visiting artists to Spartanburg over the next year for community-based art projects.

In his first year, President Obama has marshaled the largest infusion of cultural funding in decades -- despite a few stumbles. Though art advocates contend more support is needed, they have high hopes this president could transform cultural policy, funding and arts education for years to come. ``I think and feel he's very much in the John F. Kennedy tradition -- he embodies the humanities, essentially,'' said Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa whom Obama named chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. ``That doesn't mean a conservative leader can't also. Abraham Lincoln was a great conservative...

A play depicting Jesus as a gay man played to an appreciative audience in a packed church sanctuary tonight while a handful of protesters outside called it blasphemous. It was the second showing of "Corpus Christi" in Orange County in about two years. The show sparked protests and bomb threats at its 1998 opening at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. The play depicts Jesus as a gay man living in 1950s Corpus Christi, Texas, playwright Terrence McNally's hometown. The cast of 13 portray Jesus and the 12 Apostles. The Church of the Foothills in Santa Ana received hate...

CUNDY'S HARBOR, Maine On the big screen, the leader of the Dead Poets Society at an all-boys prep school was an inspirational teacher played by Robin Williams. In real life, it's a balding amateur poet who drives around in his "Poemobile," visiting and documenting the graves of dead poets and calling attention to their works. Walter Skold, founder of the Dead Poets Society of America, just finished a three-month road trip in which he visited the graves of 150 poets in 23 states. Skold boasts that he set a literary land speed record of 1.66 gpd (graves per day) over...

It seems Rocco Landesman, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, didn't get the memo, literally. On September 22, stung by controversy over the administration's effort to turn the arts community into proselytizers of its very special brand of hope and change, the White House issued a stern warning to all government agencies: Keep politics out of the arts. White House denied that was ever the intent. Many in the media, as is their wont, took the Obama administration at their word. But not the website Big Government (which broke the story) and the Washington Times. They demonstrated...

Former actor and present White House associate director of public engagement Kalpen Modi was directly involved in planning the controversial conference call hosted by a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) flack to encourage tax-supported artists to create propaganda for President Obama, according to emails obtained by Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The emails reveal that Modi worked with now-former NEA national communications director Yosif Sargant in planning the August 10 conference call that was first revealed by Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood.com web site. Participants in the conference call were encouraged to use their talents...

I'm amazed the NEA Chairman can make such a statement since Obama is hiding everything he published.

Obama 'Most Powerful Writer Since Julius Caesar,' Says NEA Chief Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, declared in a speech to art philanthropists in Brooklyn last week that President Obama is the world's most powerful writer since the days of Caesar. By Joseph Abrams FOXNews.com Wednesday, October 28, 2009 Et tu, Rocco? Maybe President Obama will win the Nobel Prize for Literature, too, now that the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts has declared that "Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar." Rocco Landesman rendered unto Obama that considerable compliment in...

Maybe Freepers need a forum devoted to movies, stage, acting, and the arts.

Government watchdogs are blasting taxpayer-funded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that send college professors on free vacations and pay for programs on topics like the "cultural significance of the circus poster" -- just a few items on an eye-popping list of questionable NEH projects.

ABC News' Yunji de Nies reports: This evening, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman released a statement on the controversial August 10 conference call, led by then-NEA communications director Yossi Sergant. On that call Sergant seemed to encourage artists to help support President Obama's agenda, which has now prompted the White House to issue new guidelines to prevent such a call from ever happening again. At the time Sergant himself seemed to sense he was on shaky ground, telling the group, "This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how...

Last month, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman said that, in American politics, ”the arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.” Well, the NEA has certainly earned that reputation these past few weeks. Just like the LGBT community, the NEA – which purports to help struggling artists of all kinds - is following in lockstep with The One, regardless of whether it’s good for artistic expression, free speech, or real people. Last fall, I was amazed at how many folks in the gay...

Back in the days of Joseph Stalin, that madman and his cabal made good use of the talents of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who had a natural ability to take the Soviet inclination to turn art and bend it to the will of the country's communist rulers and produce cinematic works that glorified Soviet accomplishment. ... Now, I'm not saying that Barack Obama is in any way similar to Joseph Stalin or Ivan the Terrible (especially Ivan, who'd have a peasant's head hacked off just for blinking the wrong way), but I'm sure one can see the parallels between Stalin and...

As an update to yesterday’s post, here is the link to the Big Hollywood expose by Patrick Courrielche on the National Endowment for the Arts using federal funds to promote Obama administration policies and projects. Is this a blockbuster? You make the call… From BigHollywood.com…

Should the National Endowment for the Arts encourage artists to create art on issues being vehemently debated nationally? That is the question that I set out to discuss a little over three weeks ago when I wrote an article on Big Hollywood entitled The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?” The question still requires debate but the facts do not. The NEA and the White House did encourage a handpicked, pro-Obama arts group to address politically controversial issues under contentious national debate. That fact is irrefutable.

"They were not going to report this blockbuster unless they were forced to. And they were. What's more, it ain't over yet. Not every hint I dropped in that piece about what was to come has played itself out yet. Stay tuned." ----snip---- "High praise to you, Mr. Stewart. It's nice to see there's someone out there in liberal media-land who would recognize there's something terribly wrong on these videos. And yes, there are more to come." At the very least, filmmaker James O'Keefe and actress Hannah Giles deserve a Pulitzer Prize for their expose of deep corruption and unspeakable...