I'm glad I didn't bother to read the entire review. I haven't read 'Anthem' yet and I look forward to it after I'm done with 'We the Living'. I'd pay $70 to see the play, if I had $70 and was anywhere near New York. If you don't like the price, don't go, right? A family of four these days could pay nearly that much for movie tickets and snacks. And not even get a good lesson out of the deal.

Even after Rand apparently bludgeoned this person over the head with the lesson, the author of this article, while he could identify the lesson, did not absorb it. It's all just fiction, no way are people losing individual freedoms left and right...

And to blame capitalism for the economic crisis? Capitalism doesn't make people engage in stupid business practices, nor does it force the government to save businesses that do so. Sounds like this guy didn't even watch 'Inside Job', much less pay attention to anything else that was going on around him. Who made the regulations in the first place, then set up the system to allow the same entities they were supposedly monitoring to get away with self-destructive behavior?

While the Soviet Union may be gone, that doesn't mean the ideas behind communism are, too. That's about as logical as saying that since Hitler's gone there are no more Nazis anywhere. The ideology has just taken a different shape.

So what is it that apparently happens to people once they get out of college that causes them to no longer care about individual freedoms? This is the same thing I hear from everyone who criticizes Rand's work--it's all adolescent/young adult, for whatever reason. I'm still waiting for a reasoned-out critique on this issue. "It's for frat boys" is not a valid argument. That sounds like someone explaining why they don't like comic books, not why they disagree with a philosophy.

Anyway, I guess maybe I've had a little too much to think, I better sit down before I fall down...

Yeah...he 'got it' yet mocked it at the same time. Altruist?

If the Play was performed in a national park the government would “protect you from seeing it.” I hope a lot of people go see it; before the whole country is categorized as a national park and Obama’s civil defense force is unleashed.
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.” W.B. Yeats

He blames Capitalism for today's woes."Well, the Soviet Union fell and big scary Cold War Communism mostly disappeared. Capitalism "won," but where has it led us? To the largest socio-economic gap in recent history; to widespread unemployment; to a weak economy recovering from a financial collapse orchestrated in part by speculative derivative risk trading and predatory loan practices; to a couple decades of extreme deregulation, a massive taxpayer-funded bailout for those same institutions; and to a global economic system of exploitation, beset regularly by instability, dotted with conflicts on nearly every continent." America has not been Capitalistic since the end of our Civil War. This is typical leftist claptrap.

yes, the article is a lame hit piece.. But, mostly it makes me want to hop on a plane and go see the play in person..

Point for leetspeak lol

Straw man indeed. This "author" even tries to distance himself from the obligation of writing a review, and blames it on Rand. From the paragraph above the video of Paul Ryan: "But it's nearly impossible to approach the work itself, or a theatrical adaptation, as an object of critique in itself because Rand chose to unsubtly perpetuate her beliefs through bad fiction."

Yeah. What he said.

Actually, the writer is trying very hard to come off as an intellectual. He has used some hackneyed phrases to denigrate the work itself by issuing a polemic against ARs writing style. The style in which the story is written is demonstrative of the society which it describes: stilted, barely educated at the lowest levels, and restrictive in conduct and mobility. You are what you were born into and cannot rise above that level. The writer assumes the position the government, in its nanny state persona, must protect the general public from the play. He doesn't even attempt to posit that the individual can make the decision for themselves.

"If Rand's opinions didn't pretend to operate as legitimate philosophy, her work is immediately rendered more fun and insignificant. She was no writer, but she was even less of a philosopher. If Objectivism couldn't gain traction beyond small circles of self-serving elites and earnest frat boys during the Reagan-era, why should we pay any attention to it now?"
Yearsley spent quite a bit of HIS attention on this... Thanks Yearsley!

He even griped about the ticket price:

"Tickets actually will cost you $69.00-$89.00. I repeat, they are charging $70 dollars for this production."

The article is a hit piece. The author only wishes that anything he says, serious or not, would resonate as Rand's words have.