A moment with The Muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show for January 17, 1971…

The gender-inverted production of the musical Company opened last night on Broadway and the reviews are in. They range from The Daily Beast…

Two and a half hours of sublime entertainment that becomes more sublime and more pleasurable as it continues, it is a transporting experience, an emotional one, a full meal with dessert, and at least two drinks of your choice.

…to The New York Times which called it "confusing, sour remake" and went on to say…

…the revival that opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater is not the Company Sondheim and the book writer George Furth (along with the director Hal Prince) unleashed on Broadway in 1970. Sure, the score remains great, and there are a few perfectly etched performances in supporting roles, especially Patti LuPone's as the undermining, pickled Joanne. As directed by Marianne Elliott, however, in a gender-flipped version abetted by Sondheim himself, what was once the story of a man who is terrified of intimacy becomes something much less interesting: the story of a woman who is justifiably tired of her friends.

Most of the reviews found something to love but even the raves don't make me yearn to see it…which is fine because I probably won't. I do have some curiosity if the lack of coherence I felt in the productions I've seen has been remedied…but I won't be going East for quite a while.

There don't seem to be any good clips from the show online yet so here's the big number — "Being Alive" — performed by a man. This is from the 2010 BBC Proms in concert version and the man is Julian Ovenden…

• Joe Biden signed papers today raising the debt limit of the United States. The least he could have done was raise mine while he was at it.

These days, everyone seems to think they have to have an opinion about everything, including but not limited to books they haven't read, TV shows they haven't seen, movies they haven't seen and which may not even have been made yet, and many, many things that can in no way affect them.  What's more, they feel they have to tell us all these unnecessary opinions and sometimes even get angry at those who do not share them.

As I demonstrated back here and here, I am trying to minimize the number of opinions I have, especially about matters that don't matter to me.  Like, I have never cared what some Big Star wore to an awards ceremony.  Hundreds…sometimes thousands of opinions are voiced about Scarlet's gown or Denzel's tux.  I have no such opinions of any sort.  I probably don't even care about the awards ceremony, either.

Some people get offended and even angry when you don't listen to their opinions and judge them to be right and proper.  It's sometimes like: "If you don't care about my opinions, you don't care about me."  Nonsense.  I can separate the two.  The fact that I don't care about some opinion you have doesn't mean I don't care about you.  I can not care about you for all sorts of reasons.

Here are a few other things I don't care about. I don't care about Being the Ricardos, the new movie from Aaron Sorkin about Lucy and Desi and their iconic sitcom. I care a little about the old I Love Lucy show, though not as much as some friends of mine do. I thought it was a cleverly-written show (most of the time) and I thought everyone in the cast was good — Desi, especially. I respect Lucille Ball's efforts and contributions but I just never sparked to her as a performer, especially in her movies and her three subsequent situation comedies.

And I have less interest in a semi-bio film that purports to show us what folks like that were like and then invents conflicts and dialogue and generally fictionalizes famous lives. We might admire the effort but I usually feel we're being offered drama at the deliberate expense of truth. I have felt that way so often — most recently, Stan & Ollie and the Judy Garland film with Renée Zellweger — that I'd feel "fooled again" if I expected anything else. I always end up, dazed and flat on my back, with Lucy (Van Pelt, not Ball) chuckling how she pulled the ball away at precisely the right moment to prank me again.

I've just stopped caring enough about these films to even have an opinion.

And while I'm at it, I'll add in that I don't have an opinion about this year's Academy Awards, what the members of the Beatles secretly thought about each other at some specific moment in time, anything about Kanye, just about anything about anyone who became famous on a so-called "reality show," the many varieties of Pringles, and The War on Christmas, which I think is about as real as The War Against Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies.

I think this is a good approach and you can get way ahead of me on this by not having an opinion about me not having these opinions. Give it a try or don't. I don't care.

• Sad news about Mike Nesmith, a great talent and one of the reasons his group overcame being a corporate creation and turned into a real rock band. Condolences to all his fans and to L.M.S. Micky Dolenz…Last Monkee Standing.

Hadley Freeman talks with Mel Brooks, whose autobiography has just come out. I decided to buy this as an audiobook because hearing Mel say it for real will be better than imagining his voice in my head.

The first Broadway show with music and lyrics by S. Sondheim was almost a musical called Saturday Night. It never made it to The Great White Way because its producer died. Here's one of the songs written for it as sung by Benjamin Love…

The Carpenters had a pretty big hit in 1970 with a song officially called, I believe, "[They Long To Be] Close To You." You need to include the part in brackets. It came from the same album as another huge it of theirs, "We've Only Just Begun," which made it to the top of the charts but not — and I'm sure they were crushed about this — to my mixtape.

I liked The Carpenters a lot. It was pretty sad in 1983 when Karen Carpenter died from heart failure brought on by complications of anorexia. Two years earlier or so, a producer I was later glad I never worked for took me to lunch and said he was closing a deal with ABC for a weekly Carpenters TV series and he wanted to lock me in as head writer. I was not sure that either ABC or The Carpenters knew about this and many years later when I met Richard Carpenter, I found out they didn't.

I decided at the time that even if the series was a real offer, I was going to pass on it. Before I did — or maybe after I did but before this producer gave up on the project and/or involving me — he sent me over a package of all the Carpenters records to date. I played them. I enjoyed them. Gee, that lady had a pretty voice.

The records were messengered to me in a package that contained the receipt from Tower Records, which was where the producer had purchased them. That heightened my suspicions that he wasn't in tight with the Carpenters. If he couldn't get a few free records out of them, he probably couldn't get a contract out of them. But I was grateful for the records.

I finally got around to watching the video of Alec Baldwin being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos about the tragedy on the set of the movie Rust. There is, of course, a mystery as to how that awful thing happened but I'm not going to speculate from afar. There's an ongoing investigation and if the folks conducting it can't figure it out with access to all the evidence and witnesses, I'm sure not about to crack the case sitting here.

There are two other mysteries here, one being why Baldwin consented to the interview and if he did so against the advice of his attorneys. He must have known that if he broke down crying — as he did — people would just say, "He's an experienced actor. He knows how to cry on cue."

That may or may not be so but he's not going to win any sympathies with it, nor will saying — as he did in several forms — "I would go to any lengths to undo what happened." That's kind of a hollow, easy thing to say when we all know that there's no way to undo what happened.

There will presumably be a report that will spread blame around to many but to one person in particular — whoever was responsible for the live charge in the gun. That person will pay a high price and there will be civil suits where someone or someones will pay a high price. Some people will never believe the "official" conclusion because some people never believe the "official" explanation of anything. And there will be some new rules or policies about guns on movie sets which may do the teensiest smidgen of good.

And the other mystery is why I watched that interview…and that one, I can answer. I think I was just dumb and I would go to any lengths to undo…

What we have here is the opening number from The Book of Mormon as performed Zoom-style by actors who would never be cast to play these roles in a conventional production. This is from a group called Limelight Performers who do what they call "Miscast Musicals" that are consciously cast that way…

• Ever since the invention of cell phones with hands-free earphones, I can't tell which people I see on the street who are alone and talking are engaged in an actual phone conversation and which ones are just talking to themselves.

George Perez is a very fine comic book artist best known for "team" comics like Teen Titans and The Avengers and any other popular comic that would cause another artist to say, "No, no! I won't draw that book with that many characters in it!" He is also an extremely nice man about whom I have never heard a bad word.

He has not been well for some time. His vision is failing and he is no longer drawing. Worse, it has just been announced that he is suffering from Stage 3 Pancreatic Cancer. More details are available on his new Facebook page. Great guy. Great talent. Very sad news.

Here from The Ed Sullivan Show for October 8 of 1967, we have The Muppets — and an early prototype of Cookie Monster…

Back here, I mentioned how reprehensible it was that after Donald Trump tested positive for COVID, he and his aides hid that fact and he continued to meet with unsuspecting people and to appear at a debate with Joe Biden. This was, we are told, revealed in the forthcoming book by Trump aide Mark Meadows.

Several folks wrote to "inform" me that the story is Fake News and as near as I can tell, they were basing that wholly on denials by Trump and Meadows…as if those two men had no reason to lie and never have. I still await the release of the Meadows book so we can all see if the reporters who quoted him were quoting him inaccurately or if the book does indeed say what they said it says. I suspect that if the quote was inaccurate, Meadows would have released the relevant passages along with his denial.

But we can wait and see that. In the meantime, William Saletan catalogues the way in which Meadows' account is "evolving," which in this case is another way of saying he can't seem to get his story straight.