ACROSS
1 Long __
4 Spartan
colonnades
9 Belief of more
than a billion
14 *1952 #1 hit for
Leroy Anderson
16 “Done!”
17 *Math reciprocal
18 Expand
19 Numskull
20 Start of a rumor
22 Fuel economy
testing org.
23 Business card
word
26 On the table
30 With 35-Across,
question the
starred clues
might ask
33 Zhou __
34 Wide size
35 See 30-Across
42 Boston Coll. is in
it
43 ’90s runner
44 Response to 
30-/35-Across,
and a hint to a
hidden word in
14-, 17-, 61- and
66-Across
50 Pith
51 Medit. land
52 Revised
versions: Abbr.
55 Sharp
57 Stop on Amtrak’s
Lake Shore
Limited route
58 Theodore’s first
lady
61 *“Atomic” Crayola
color
65 Event with pole
bending
66 *Bogged down
67 “Octopus’s
Garden”
songwriter
68 Holds up
69 Sch. units

DOWN
1 Start of a
children’s song
2 Gluttonous
Augustus in
“Charlie and the
Chocolate
Factory”
3 Posse target
4 Stop: Abbr.

5 __ sale
6 Word with man
or horse
7 Latin lambs
8 To make sure
9 Confessor’s
words
10 Haberdashery
stock
11 Directed
12 Exist
13 Sign on a door
15 Put away
21 Djibouti neighbor:
Abbr.
23 Canine
24 Hun king, in
Norse legend
25 Capital of
Shaanxi Province
27 Several
28 “Twittering
Machine” artist
29 Observer
31 Mother __
32 Fools
35 2/3, say
36 Big name in
publishing
37 Decorates, in a
way
38 Mountain sighting
39 JFK list
40 Queen dowager
of Jordan

41 Wall St.
purchase
45 Rattletrap
46 Hold
47 “Born on the
Bayou” band,
briefly
48 “Mean Streets”
co-star
49 How ghost
stories are told
53 “2 Broke Girls”
setting

54 Origins
56 Actress Delany
57 Bit of work
58 Triage ctrs.
59 Finish, as a letter,
perhaps
60 Wyo. neighbor
62 Some Windows
systems
63 Hood’s gun
64 U.S. Army rank
abolished in
1815

By Jacob Stulberg
©2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
03/27/15

03/27/15

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Friday, March 27, 2015

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

xwordeditor@aol.com

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6 — Friday, March 27, 2015
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

‘Monologues’ to 
tell women tales

Play returns to the 

‘U’ with diverse 
cast and female 
empowerment

By GRACE HAMILTON

Daily Arts Writer

For students touring the Uni-

versity, their starting point is 
often the Michigan Union on 
State Street. For 
the past month, 
an 
enormous 

banner has wel-
comed 
these 

students 
with 

“The 
Vagina 

Monologues” 
stretched con-
fidently across 
the arch of the 
entrance, deco-
rated with pink 
and purple. The 
bold placement 
of 
the 
sign, 

unable 
to 
be 

missed by pass-
ersby, 
echoes 

the confidence 
of 
the 
play 

it 
promotes. 

There’s no beating around the 
bush here. 

This Thursday and Friday, 

March 26 and 27, Eve Ensler’s 
triumphant 
play 
of 
female 

empowerment will be performed 
at Rackham Auditorium and the 
Trotter Multicultural Center. 
This is the 5th annual showing 

of “The Vagina Monologues,” 
sponsored 
by 
Students 
for 

Choice, a student organization 
which advocates for pro-choice 
legislation. 

The cast of 15 is a diverse 

group of women ranging in age, 
race and acting experience. 
With recent criticism of the play 
for being non-inclusive of cer-
tain identities, “our mission has 
been to prove to people that it’s 
still relevant and that we are 
being as inclusive as we possibly 
can; there is a place for everyone 
to be in and enjoy this play,” said 
year’s director Kayla Smith, an 
LSA sophomore. 

Both Smith and producer 

Rhani Franklin, an LSA sopho-
more, are new to theater at the 
University, and first time direc-
tors and producers. This fact 
seems only to have added to the 
strength of their vision and con-
nection to the play. 

“Art and performance can be 

a really powerful way to com-
municate a message and enact 
social change,” Smith said of the 
play. “‘The Vagina Monologues’ 
will make you laugh, it’ll make 
you cry, but it will also make 
you think about real issues.”

The breadth of issues that the 

play is able to address makes it a 
powerful catalyst for conversa-
tion and thought. 

“It’s fun and different and 

shocking,” 
Franklin 
said. 

“There’s so much I wouldn’t 
have thought to talk to people 
about until seeing this play.” 

Beyond 
just 
being 
a 

conversation starter, the play is 

a call for action. 

“It also encourages activism 

for ending violence against 
women and gender violence to 
college campuses,” said Kylee 
Smith, an actor in the play, said. 
Kylee, a master’s student in the 
School of Social Work, will be 
performing in the play for the 
fifth time this year. 

“The most important message 

is that violence against women 
needs to be stopped,” she said.

While responses to the play, 

both at the University and across 
the nation, have ranged from 
disgust to kneeling praise, “The 
Vagina Monologues” is intend-
ed to relate to all people — men 
included. 

“I think a lot of times when 

people try to explain to men why 
feminism should matter to them, 
they say things like, ‘Well, how 
would you feel if someone did 
this to your mother or daughter 
or sister?’ ” Smith said. “I find 
issue with that because men 
shouldn’t have to feel sympathy 
or that they are involved and 
invested in feminism because 
of someone close to them, they 
should feel this way because 
women are humans, women are 
half the population.” 

College is a time for people to 

enter into conversations they’ve 
never had before, listen to voices 
they’ve never heard and explore 
issues that are shushed in other 
settings. “The Vagina Mono-
logues” presents these challeng-
es and profound privileges, all 
in one. It is guaranteed to open 
some eyes.

The Vagina 
Mono-
logues

March 26th 
at Rackham 
Auditorium, 
March 27th 
at Trotter 
Multicultural 
Center

7:30 p.m.

Tickets at Mason 

Hall: $5 presale, 

$10 at the door

A ‘Big Happy’ mess

By SOPHIA KAUFMAN

Daily Arts Writer

Executive 
producer 
Ellen 

DeGeneres and her fellow creators 
of “One Big Happy” have clearly 
realized 
that 

non-traditional 
families 
on 

TV shows are 
proof of being 
socially 
con-

scious. Unfor-
tunately 
for 

their audience, 
they 
seem 

determined 
to prove how 
with the times 
they 
are 
in 

the most grat-
ing and gratuitous ways possible. 
Even the title lends itself too easily 
to criticism — the show is nothing 
more than One Big Flop. 

The pilot opens with Lizzy 

(Elisha Cuthbert, “The Girl Next 
Door”) buying prenatal vita-
mins in a drugstore, accompa-
nied by her straight best friend 
and roommate Luke (Nick Zano, 
“What I Like About You”). The 
two are planning on raising a 
child together and are disap-
pointed when they find out that 
their latest try to get pregnant 
failed. Later, Luke meets a flirty 
and fun Manic Pixie Dream Girl, 
Prudence (Kelly Brook, “Pira-
nha 3D”), who encourages him 
to hop over the bar, fix himself a 
drink like she has done and live 
life to the fullest. She likes sci-
ence fiction and walking around 
the apartment naked for no rea-
son. Predictably, Luke has never 
met a woman like her before and 
is devastated when he finds out 
the beautiful Brit is about to be 
deported. Lizzy can’t wait to see 
Prudence go — after several quips 

about Lizzy not being a “very 
good lesbian” because she prefers 
not to hug Prudence in the nude, it 
is abundantly clear the two don’t 
get along.

Then, Luke and Prudence get 

married, Lizzy tells them she’s 
pregnant and Luke is the father 
and Prudence decides that it is 
too much for her and runs to the 
airport. Lizzy has a change of 
heart, follows her there and gets 
down on one knee to “get the girl” 
for her straight best friend — and 
thus ends the episode in true sit-
com fashion.

“One Big Happy” is full of 

strained one-liners about lesbians, 
stereotypes about straight guys 
and more off-color boob jokes than 
the 2013 Oscars. Brook does the 
best she can with the inherently 
sexist, one-dimensional character 
she has been given, which incor-
porates a lot of hair flipping, forced 
smiles and gratuitous prancing 
around with pixelated body parts. 
Zano looks confused as to wheth-
er he should be emphasizing the 
dude-bro or ready-for-parenthood 
side of his personality, although 
it doesn’t really matter as the one 
is as unbelievable as the other. 
Cuthbert seems to be perpetually 
looking around for a live studio 
audience to appreciate her lines, 
but her hopeful gaze is met only 

with the hollow emptiness of 
canned laughter. The few other 
characters in the show are there 
only to set up jokes so that these 
three can triumphantly deliver 
their punchlines.

There are a few lines that sug-

gest the writers are hesitantly try-
ing to steer the show in a better 
direction, less focused on serious 
plot in favor of pointing out pat-
terns in movies and shows that 
incorporate so many of the same 
banal plot drivers. For example, 
when Lizzy says slowly to Luke’s 
drunkenly slumped form on the 
couch, “Maybe you shouldn’t 
let her get on that plane,” and, 
when he doesn’t understand her, 
exclaims, “Oh my God, have you 
never seen any movie ever?” 

If the writers continue pok-

ing fun at themselves and give up 
pretending this is anything other 
than a low-budget sitcom, they 
might arrive at something worth 
watching. But the main take-
away from the show for people 
who know anything about the 
executive producer is a general 
feeling of disappointment. “One 
Big Happy” is the first sitcom to 
feature a lesbian lead since Ellen 
DeGeneres’s “Ellen,” and it’s 
missing, above all, her wit and her 
spark. Come on, Ellen. We know 
you can do better.

C-

One Big 
Happy

Series

Premiere

NBC

Tuesdays at 

9:30 p.m.

NBC

This picture was taken moments before Ellen danced through the aisles.

EVENT PREVIEW
TV REVIEW

Release dates
don’t matter

By RACHEL KERR

Daily Arts Writer

Last week, Kendrick Lamar 

surprised us all by dropping 
his third studio album To Pimp 
A Butterfly. This came only 
days after he announced its 
March 23 release date. And 
while it’s being called an error 
on his label’s part, it only fur-
ther solidifies the fact that the 
release date is dead.

In the age of the Internet, 

labels have struggled to adapt to 
the way people listen to music. 
The CD died its first death 
when Napster was born in 1999, 
and the birth of iTunes in 2003 
finalized this transition into the 
digital music world. But Napster 
had changed something; people 
no longer believed they needed 
to pay for music. Though iTunes 
offered songs for only 99 cents, 
the Internet offered them for 
free. Doors had opened that 
could not be shut. 

Today we have streaming 

services such as Spotify and 
YouTube, which offer royalties 
to artists and require minimal 
payment from us. Still, album 
sales are down, so record labels 
try to combat the allure of the 
Internet. For instance, albums 
will inevitably leak. If your 
favorite artist has something 
out soon, you can probably hear 
it a couple days before some-
where in the crevices of the 
Internet. Artists know this and 
are adopting new promotional 
methods to prevent this, for 
example, by not using any pro-
motional methods.

It began with Beyoncé and 

her 2013 self-titled project; 
arguably the most influential 
artist of our generation ignored 
all album release precedent 
and dropped a full audio-visu-
al album without any prior 
promotion. 
The 
move 
was 

monumental. I mean, every-
one remembers where they 
were the first time they heard 
“Drunk in Love.” This wasn’t 
the only time an artist had dis-

regarded release conventions: 
Frank Ocean dropped CHAN-
NEL Orange on iTunes a week 
early, Radiohead barely gave 
us any notice before King of 
Limbs, Death Grips uploaded 
Government Plates to the Inter-
net with no warning. But some-
thing changed on that fateful 
December night when Beyoncé 
debuted. 

Since then, fellow artists, too, 

have abandoned the traditional 
album rollout. Most recently, 
Drake dropped If You’re Read-
ing This It’s Too Late without 
any announcement, the title 
itself a potential comment on 
the surprise release. And who 
can forget the whole U2 Songs 
of Innocence debacle, where 
everyone with an Apple account 
got the album uploaded to their 
iTunes for free, whether they 
wanted it or not? D’Angelo, 
Skrillex and Kid Cudi also 
made little to no announcement 
before releasing their 2014 proj-
ects, and both Kanye West and 
Rihanna have said that their 
2015 albums will drop when-
ever they want them to, without 
an official date. 

And while there’s an obvi-

ous difference between sur-
prise release dates and surprise 
albums – one involves promo-
tion and the other doesn’t – 
both disregard the calendar. But 
this strategy seems to work in 
an era where people want easy 
access to everything, where 
people want everything right 
now. Take Beyoncé, for instance. 
It sold over 800,000 copies in 
the first three days, despite no 
promotional 
announcements. 

What’s the point of putting a 
specific date on the release 
when the album will sell just as 
many copies, if not more, with-
out it? 

So, 
I’m 
glad 
Kendrick 

dropped his album early. After 
a year of artists forsaking tra-
ditional promotional strategies, 
I almost thought it was a little 
lame that he was even giving us 
a release date.

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

