Lawrence Toppman

Isn't there something sinister about a waltz?

I started my fourth decade at a Charlotte newspaper today - always a time to reflect, assuming I can find my magnifiers to type this column.

Any "Alice in Wonderland" that gives top billing to the Mad Hatter must be as unbalanced as the Hatter himself.

Criticism would be a simpler business if a great artist was never a rapist, and a rapist was never a great artist.

Russian author Leo Tolstoy was many things: a writer of massive novels that entered the world canon ("War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina"), a Christian freethinker, a believer in nonviolent protest against authority, an advocate of serfs' rights (who owned a huge estate with serfs on it) and occasionally a crank: His attack on Shakespeare, which dismisses "King Lear" and its author as mediocrities, is the most dunderheaded essay by a major writer I've seen.

Many things separate the Children's Theatre of Charlotte version of "As You Like It" from traditional renderings: duration, casting choices, use of pop music for a background and especially the choice of ImaginOn's lobbies for the venue.

When was the last time you had to wait until the final sentence of a film to understand all the details?

True love waits, right? So devotees of opera shouldn't mind that Opera Carolina's "Love Notes" concert, which has traditionally been tied to Valentine's Day weekend, will take place next Saturday instead at Knight Theater.

For the last three years, "Black Pearl Sings" has been a work in progress, and I'm starting to wonder if it will ever really be done.

Fame is like a Ferris wheel: Almost nobody has enough courage to get off at the top. So hoist a memorial glass to Jerome David Salinger, who stopped publishing exactly halfway through his long life.