Mickey may have spent the best part of a century in the spotlight, but he's still going strong – and there's not an edgy video shoot or bad-boy boyfriend in sight.
It takes 50 seconds of Ultraviolence for the first bad-boy boyfriend to turn up – "you got your gun and you like to party" – and 80 before our old friend the red dress heaves into view.
If Wildest Dreams bears a hint of Lana del Ray, there's something hugely cheering about the way Swift turns the persona of the pathetic female appendage snivelling over her bad-boy boyfriend on its head.
(Marquis Theater, through Dec. 30, ticketmaster.com) BUBBES FROM QUEENS "Dollface," a new musical comedy from B. J. Sebring, David Forman and Rob Hyman, is set during Christmas 1956 near Utopia Parkway, and involves a Jewish amateur comedian named Dolores, her gentile mama's-boy boyfriend and double-crossing jewel thieves.
The shift was so radical, she said – "the antithesis of everything I've done so far" – that she had created a character to perform the new material, called Electra Heart, whose videos had a "Mulholland Drive/Paris, Texas vibe": cue footage of Diamandis in a blond wig and pastel-shaded 50s clothes, smoking insouciantly and trashing sleazy motel rooms with her bad-boy boyfriend.
But the real problem is that since that interview, another female singer-songwriter has emerged playing a character that portrays the corrupting, tragic side of the American dream with a distinct Mulholland Drive/Paris, Texas vibe – sleazy motels, insouciant smoking, pastel-shaded 50s clothes and bad-boy boyfriend all included.
But the sheer repetitiousness of the lyrics – in which one bad-boy boyfriend after another was pined for, and Del Rey either put her red dress on or took her red dress off with the frequency of a woman having a crisis in the changing rooms at TK Maxx – gave the impression that what the former Lizzie Grant had created was not a character, but a caricature.
Of course, some women might break ranks and forsake imposing the therapy in order to indulge their bad-boy boyfriends.
Then I find out that the mother of the family used to have one of those bad-boy boyfriends when she was in her teens.
She remembered a boy, a boyfriend she had for a while who played that song on his guitar.
