Ben Brantley's review of Top Girls this morning is a qualified rave — a thumbs-up, according to the helpful Brantley-simplifiers at DidHeLikeIt.com — and it makes us, if possible, even more excited for the show than we already were. But then we're rabid Caryl Churchill fans who have long lusted after a high-profile New York production of Top Girls, a play we consider one of the most fascinating of the past 50 years. Evidence elsewhere suggests that the show may be meeting a much more mixed reception on Broadway, where the audiences aren't always looking for, say, complex, time-shifting dramas with confusing theatrical conceits utilized in the service of a political message. Not to mention all that overlapping dialogue! Do audience members actually hate Top Girls?

A few weeks ago, in a post preceding Manohla Dargis's broadside in Sunday's Times bemoaning the lack of leading ladies in this summer's movie releases, we worried that the heroines of this summer’s four major superhero movies might be pushed to the sidelines by their male co-stars. Based on available evidence, we tipped Selma Blair, Hellboy 2's world-saving pyrokinetic Liz Sherman, as the sidekick most likely to transcend her second-fiddle status — but we're happy to report that the impeccably suited, no-frills Virginia "Pepper" Potts, played by Gwyneth Paltrow in Iron Man, gives Liz Sherman a run for her superness.

When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced yesterday that it had nabbed the prince of the podium Riccardo Muti as music director, it meant that he has jilted a besotted New York Philharmonic not just once or twice, but three times. In 2000, after months of fruitless courtship, he turned down the music directorship of our hometown ensemble. By some reports (his own, mainly), he did so again last year. "I love [the Philharmonic], and they love me very much," he told the Chicago Tribune last September, "but I told them very clearly that I want to be absolutely libero" — free — "and don't want to have any [titles]." He did accept one honorific from the Philharmonic — principal guest conductor — that he will now certainly relinquish, since there’s a tacit rule that the music director of a top American orchestra doesn’t moonlight with another. Muti is an old-fashioned maestro, aloof, glamorous, and deeply sensitive, and it’s a shame that New York will have to do without him (except, of course, for the Chicago Symphony’s regular visits to Carnegie Hall). But New Yorkers shouldn’t consider themselves deprived: A year before Muti ascends to the top job in Chicago in September of 2009, the New York Philharmonic will get its own new man, Alan Gilbert, who brings less European cachet and a less maguslike demeanor, but whose musical tastes and instincts for what a New York orchestra needs to be will probably prove a closer match. —Justin Davidson

And the Brass Ring Goes to Chicago Symphony: Riccardo Muti Says Yes [NYT]

Related: Justin Davidson on Alan Gilbert [NYM]

In side-by-side essays in yesterday's New York Times, esteemed critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott take stock of American cinema now that Judd Apatow has wholly remade Hollywood in his own image. Perpetual jester Scott laments that too many leading men are stuck in arrested development, citing several of Apatow's serial protagonists along with prototypical moron-hero Adam Sandler, who returns next month in You Don't Mess With the Zohan (co-written by Apatow): "The attachment to the emotional world of childhood and adolescence — along with the fetishistic, fake-ironic clinging to tokens of that world — is so widespread that it almost escapes notice," he writes. "Impulsive, self-centered, loyal to our pals, anxious about women, physically restless, slow-witted and geeky: that's just what we're like, isn't it?" No! And it's high time Hollywood started producing some comedies for grown-ups! (In the interest of full disclosure, we'll concede that this post was written by a 26-year-old who spent nineteen hours this past weekend playing Grand Theft Auto IV in his pajamas.)

Many music fans (like us) harangue their friends in bars about the lame aging-rocker move of recording throwback albums whose expensively lush production, tasteful arrangements (often featuring pedal steel), and similarity to beloved past work tricks critics into overlooking dull songwriting. For those fans, the general excellence of Tom Petty's throwback album, Mudcrutch, despite its high-quality production and embrace of pedal steel, is fairly upsetting. (Stream it here.) And it turns out the album's origins are actually pretty interesting, as this endearing Times profile explains. Mudcrutch was Petty’s pre-Heartbreakers, pre-fame band. They were apparently the toast of early seventies Gainesville, Florida (awesome) but fell apart when they tried to make it big. Two members stayed on with Petty (guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tensch), but two dropped out (another guitarist and a drummer, both of whom ended up with normal-person lives teaching music to kids). Recently, Petty decided it would be fun to get back together, and because he's Tom Petty, he called everyone up and they did.

The story is so great, actually, that we’ve already figured out the movie treatment. Cameron Crowe, are you listening?

Baby Mama surprised some by collecting $17.4 million at the box office last weekend, outdoing stoner buddy movie Harold and Kumar. Far from the "women's pictures" of the fifties or the soft-focus Bette Midler weepies of the eighties, Baby Mama is the pinnacle of the new era of female buddy movies — a genre we like to call the GFF, or the Girlfriend Flick. Better, funnier, and more dimensional than those movies pejoratively dubbed "chick flicks," the GFF presents a more honest view of female friendship — one that swaps weeping, man-chasing, and cancer for trash-talking and road trips.

The law students at Northwestern University are in a tizzy about their announced commencement speaker, Jerry Springer. Apparently he's not classy enough to address the future document reviewers of our nation's enormous law firms. ("Just wait until they're first-years and they have to listen to a partner extemporizing about how the caddies at the club don't know how to mix a good martini," our editor chimes in.) "Any message Springer delivers will seem incomplete, however, without a few flying chairs and a bald bouncer," according to an editorial yesterday in the Daily Northwestern.

With the release of the awesome, Internet-anticipated debut album from Santogold tomorrow, the eclectic Brooklyn chanteuse will officially enter the competitive international race to be the next M.I.A. Yes, even though her own debut, Arular, was released more than three years ago, Maya Arulpragasam — the winsome Sri Lankan singer whose excellent, low-selling albums were covered in a disproportionately huge number of magazine features and blog posts (most focusing on her wacky upbringing as the daughter of a Tamil militant) — has not yet appointed a successor. While Santogold has the advantage of working with M.I.A.'s producers (Diplo and Switch), she's not the only one-named electro-pop hopeful vying to be Pitchfork's next favorite commercially disappointing MySpace phenomenon — she'll face stiff competition from a raft of other knob-twiddling robo-divas. Who has the edge? Vulture plays oddsmaker, after the jump.

Quick: Who plays George W. Bush these days on Saturday Night Live? No, not Will Ferrell. Nope, not Will Forte. Jason Sudeikis is the current George W. Bush on SNL, but you can be forgiven for not knowing that; we only know because we e-mailed a friend who works on the show to ask. And why is Sudeikis so unmemorable? Because, according to our friend, Saturday Night Live hasn't had a sketch featuring George W. Bush all season. "There have been some attempts," he wrote, "but they never got on the show."

The two places that George W. Bush is showing up in pop culture this spring — besides, of course, taped appearances on game shows — confirm that the culture no longer views him as relevant to the discussion. The Times' Dennis Lim refers to Bush's depiction in this week's stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantánamo Bay as "arguably the most sympathetic movie portrayal of him to date" — but apparently he hasn't read the widely leaked early draft of the screenplay to Oliver Stone's biopic. Both portrayals mostly bypass direct criticism of the president, substituting bemusement and — dare we say it? — affection. He's not a bad guy, just an amiable buffoon — a figure to poke fun at, like an eccentric uncle, but not to revile.

It's admirable, in a way, that at his lowest point — with his popularity in the cellar and his political influence in the toilet — pop culture is willing to cut George W. Bush some slack. It's also disheartening that the leader of the free world is so unimportant that even self-righteous Hollywood blowhards can't be bothered to get angry at him.

From today's "Page Six" comes the news that Mel Brooks is reportedly considering following up Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein: The Somewhat Disappointing Musical with a Broadway adaptation of Blazing Saddles. To which we must throw up our hands and say: ENOUGH, MEL!

You took a mediocre movie, The Producers, and turned it into a good musical. You took a good movie, Young Frankenstein, and turned it into a mediocre musical. And now you want to take a fantastic movie and turn it into a musical? Even with the inevitable kick-line of farting cowboys, how could Blazing Saddles be anything but a disappointment onstage? If you're gonna turn another one of your movies into a musical, how about something that is remembered fondly but wasn't all that good? How about Spaceballs: The Musical? Think of the songs! "She's Gone From 'Suck' to 'Blow'"! "Ludicrous Speed"! And the eleven o'clock number, Princess Vespa crooning "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" in a rich baritone!

Or better yet, just write something new.

Blazing Brooks [NYP]