LAT's McNulty blasts Pulitzer in drama

Charles McNulty's public rant about the Pulitzer Prize awarded today in drama is unusually interesting, not because he's the L.A. Times theater critic but because he was chair of the official jury of drama critics and playwrights that recommended a different prize winner. The jury's choice (which he can't reveal) was overruled by the Pulitzer board, a group of mostly news journalists that apparently go to the theater and decided to give the prize to "Next to Normal," over among others the L.A.-premiered "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo."

"In honoring Next to Normal, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey's musical about a household grappling with a mother's mental illness, the mandarins at Columbia University's journalism school, where the prizes are administrated, ignored the advice of its drama jury in favor of its own sentiments," McNulty writes on the LAT website. "I can't help being ticked off. Two points, in particular, rankle: the blinkered New York mentality and the failure to appreciate new directions in playwriting. The board had an opportunity to correct these long-standing shortcomings, and it blew it."