Need you ask who discusses the subject of nudity in opera (among other performing arts) in today’s Times?

[W]hen nudity seems called for and natural, it can lend disarming humanity to a drama.

There was, for example, Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” at the Public Theater in 2002, about a superstar baseball player who reveals that he is gay. The play could not have explored how the interpersonal dynamics of baseball’s locker-room culture are shaken by the star’s announcement without showing the players in the clubhouse showers.

. . . . Already in previews at the Broadhurst Theater on Broadway is Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” a new production from London of the 1973 play. Naturally, fans of the young Daniel Radcliffe will be enticed by the chance to see him, our adorable Harry Potter, in the buff.

La Cieca kids, of course, because Tony Tommasini would never stoop to conscious lasciviousness. In fact, in the current screed, our scribe remains relentlessly high-minded in his rehashing of 1960s cliches about how “when nudity seems called for and natural, it can lend disarming humanity to a drama.”

Your doyenne should add here that, though she’s no Biblical scholar, she is shocked that Mr. Tommasini should be laboring under the misapprehension that the Gospels of  Mark and Matthew are part of the Old Testament.

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