Monthly Archives: February 2010

A Little Night Music With Bette
By Jerry Adler | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Sep 27, 1993

IN 1964, SUSAN SONTAG, WHOSE IDEAS ARE ESSENTIAL FOR appreciating the intellectual context of Radio City Music Hall, described camp as “a private code among small urban cliques”–NYU grad students, for instance, crowding the revival houses to laugh themselves silly over “Dark Victory.” What Sontag could not have foreseen was how that elite sensibility would someday sweep the nation. just a few years later a young Honolulu-born chanteuse named Bette Midler would wow the connoisseurs of outrageousness at New York’s gay bathhouses. And now, a decade since her last tour, she’s back on stage, leading a chorus line of mermaids in motorized wheelchairs flipping their tails to “New York, New York.” Last month she played Washington–the city that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, is virtually the last bastion of literal-mindedness left in the world. Last week she opened in New York, and by the time her “Experience the Divine” tour leaves on Oct. 23, the cognoscenti who are in on the joke will have filled the 5,874 seats of Radio City 30 times over (the longest stretch of sold-out shows in Radio City history)–and then headed home, happily buckled into their Volvos, to the sophisticated precincts of Long Island, New Jersey, or, in my case, Brooklyn. Read More