Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer who is second to none when writing musicals about cats, roller-skating trains and falling chandeliers, has made an earnest but bizarre career decision in “Aspects of Love”....He has written a musical about people.

Whether “Aspects of Love” is a musical for people is another matter. Mr. Lloyd Webber continues to compose in the official style that has made him an international favorite, sacrificing any personality of his own to the merchandisable common denominator of easy-listening pop music. [The musical]...generates about as much heated passion as a visit to the bank. Even when women strip to lacy undergarments, the lingerie doesn’t suggest the erotic fantasies of Frederick’s of Hollywood so much as the no-nonsense austerity of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

...What neither Mr. Lloyd Webber nor his collaborators can provide is a semblance of the humanity that is also, to some, an aspect of love. The misogyny in this show is more transparent than in other Lloyd Webber musicals where the general rule is to present principal female characters as either prostitutes (“Evita,” “Cats,” “Starlight Express”) or sainted virgins (“Jesus Christ Superstar,” “The Phantom of the Opera”)....Their men, meanwhile, are overgrown English schoolboys who have no idea that women can be anything other than girls they pick up at Harry’s Bar or the nearest stage door.  

~ On Aspects of Love (1990)

…as written by Mr. Kushner with a witty, demonic grandeur worthy of a Shakespearean villain, and played with maniacal relish by the braying Ron Leibman in high, red-faced dudgeon, [Roy] Cohn is the Antichrist of “Angels in America”: the witchhunting accomplice of Joe McCarthy is seen in his final guise as an unofficial Mr. Fixit in the Ed Meese Justice Department and New York City’s most famous closeted gay AIDS patient. In one brilliant passage, Cohn argues that he is a heterosexual who has sex with men rather than a homosexual because gay men, unlike him, are “men who know nobody and who nobody knows, men who have zero clout.” It is Mr. Kushner’s sly point that gay people could learn something from the despicable Cohn about the amassing of political power, and it is one of the play’s most provocative strokes that this cutthroat often has the funniest and smartest lines.              

~ On Angels in America (1992)

As befits a show whose subject is the creation of a landmark in modernist painting—Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1886)—“Sunday” is itself a modernist creation, perhaps the first truly modernist work of musical theater that Broadway has produced. Instead of mimicking reality through a conventional, naturalistic story, the authors of “Sunday” deploy music and language in nonlinear patterns that, like Seurat’s tiny brushstrokes, become meaningful only when refracted through a contemplative observer’s mind.

~ On Sunday in the Park with George (1984)

I have long felt that it will be up to Mr. Bush’s own party to ring down the curtain on his failed policy, and after the 2006 midterms, that is more true than ever. The lame-duck president, having lost both houses of Congress and at least one war (Afghanistan awaits), has nothing left to lose. That is far from true of his party.

It’s another Vietnam-Watergate era flashback. It wasn’t Democrats or the press that forced Richard Nixon’s abdication in 1974; it was dwindling Republican support. Though he had vowed to fight his way through a Senate trial, Nixon folded once he lost the patriarchal leader of his party’s right wing.

That leader was Barry Goldwater, who had been one of Nixon’s most loyal and aggressive defenders until he finally realized he’d been lied to once too often. If John McCain won’t play the role his Arizona predecessor once did, we must hope that John Warner or some patriot like him will, for the good of the country, answer the call of conscience. A dangerous president must be saved from himself, so that the American kids he’s about to hurl into the hell of Baghdad can be saved along with him.

~ “He’s in the Bunker Now,” January 14, 2007

Under the guise of not speaking ill of a dead president, the bevy of bloviators so relentlessly trashed the living incumbent that it bordered on farce. No wonder President Bush, who once hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo’s medical treatment, remained at his ranch last weekend rather than join Betty Ford and Dick Cheney for the state ceremony in the Capitol rotunda....

Yet for all the media acreage bestowed on the funeral, the day in Mr. Ford’s presidency that most stalks Mr. Bush was given surprisingly short shrift—perhaps because it was the most painful. That day was not September 8, 1974, when Mr. Ford pardoned his predecessor, but April 30, 1975, when the last American helicopters hightailed it out of Saigon, ending our involvement in a catastrophic war. Mr. Ford had been a consistent Vietnam hawk, but upon inheriting the final throes of the fiasco, he recognized reality when he saw it.

~ “The Timely Death of Gerald Ford,” January 7, 2007

Enter Barack Obama. To understand the hysteria about a Democratic senator who has not yet served two years and is mainly known for a single speech at the 2004 convention, you have to appreciate just how desperate the Democrats are for a panacea for all their ills. In the many glossy cover articles about Obamamania, the only real suspense is whether a Jack or Bobby Kennedy analogy will be made in the second paragraph or the fifth. Men’s Vogue (cover by Annie Leibovitz) went so far as to say that the Illinois senator “alone has the potential to one day be mentioned in the same breath” as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. Why not throw in Mark Twain and Sammy Davis Jr.?

~ “Obama Is Not a Miracle Elixir,” October 22, 2006