Theater Note #1: I’ve been using Spinner a lot lately, a program with streaming music channels for every taste and mood. It has a Showtunes channel, which is great, because it plays lots of pieces I’ve never heard before, and I never know what’s coming next. There’s also, strangely enough, a Smallville channel, which plays only music that has appeared on “Smallville.” And a WB channel, playing music that has appeared on the WB.

(Let’s see: Spinner is owned by Netscape… which is owned by AOL… which is part of Time Warner… which owns the WB, and also owns DC Comics, which owns Superman. There’s so much conglomeractivity here it makes the head spin.)

Theater Note #2: On Saturday I was at J&R Music World with Matt; the place has an amazing inventory of showtunes albums at great prices. I discovered Columbia Broadway Masterworks, which is a series of remastered classic cast albums, and J&R was selling them for $6.99 each. I bought “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music,” “South Pacific” and “A Chorus Line.” I figure if I’m expanding my showtunes collection, I may as well start with the basics. I also bought “On the Twentieth Century” for $6.99, an album that so far seems to be filled with delightful tunes. It kind of reminds me of “Anything Goes,” although the shows were written 40 years apart.

(This is a great place to slip in the fact that I got to play Moonface Martin in my high school production of “Anything Goes” — the most fun I’ve ever had in a show, hands down.)

Theater Note #3: I finally finished Not Since Carrie this weekend, which makes me want to run out and buy tons of albums. To replace it, yesterday I bought Ghost Light, Frank Rich’s memoir about finding solace from his parents’ divorce by absorbing himself in the theater. You might have gathered from this blog that I’m a fan of Frank Rich; his writing is just so, well, rich, and even if his complaints about the state of our culture get repetitive at times, his insights are almost always right. Because of his writing and because of what he’s accomplished, he’s one of my idols.

One, two, three theater notes! Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.