Midday

It's time again for a visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck, who joins Tom each week with her reviews of the regional stage. Today Judy spotlights a new production of playwright Kate Hamill's 2016 adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel, Sense and Sensibility, live on stage at Baltimore's Everyman Theatre.

Hamill's spirited but faithful adaptation of the 1811 best-seller follows the adventures (and misadventures) of the Dashwood sisters - sensible Elinor, hypersensitive Marianne and good-natured Margaret, the youngest - after the death of their father and sudden loss of fortune.

The play is directed at Everyman by Susanna Gellert and features a ten-member ensemble cast playing more than two dozen characters. Sense and Sensibility continues live on stage at Everyman Theatre in a newly extended run through May 8. For showtimes and ticketing information, click the theater links.

A digital streaming version will be available for ticketed patrons starting April 22 and continuing through May 15.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

The 2022 Session of the Maryland General Assembly came to a close last night in Annapolis, at midnight, with most of the business of the legislature wrapped-up before Sine Die and the bang of the final gavel.

Governor Larry Hogan called this year’s session the best he’s had in his eight years in office. Senate President Bill Ferguson agreed that it was successful. He described it as “historic.”

At this hour, Governor Hogan is holding a bill signing ceremony at the State House in Annapolis in which he will sign 79 bills into law. Several others will become law without his signature, and many will become law as a result of overrides of the Governor’s vetoes.

Joining Tom first to discuss some of the key legislative achievements of the session is Delegate Luke Clippinger, a Democrat who represents Baltimore City and the 46th District, and who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Del. Clippinger joins us on Zoom.

Then, Tom turns to Josh Kurtz, the founding editor of Maryland Matters, the online news journal covering Maryland politics and government, for more wide-ranging analysis of the 2022 session. Mr. Kurtz, a veteran journalist and State House-watcher, also joins us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

It's the Midday Healthwatch, our monthly focus on public health issues with Dr. Leana Wen.

For weeks, the state testing positivity rate for COVID 19 has been below 2%. But it’s starting to creep up again. As of this morning, it stands at 2.42%, nearly twice what it was three weeks ago.

At last week’s Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, about a dozen political A-listers, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Congressmen Adam Schiff and Joaquin Castro tested positive for the coronavirus. Do the rising numbers and high profile cases indicate that we should once again avoid large gatherings? Dr. Wen says, “No.” She writes in the Washington Post, “At this point in the pandemic, we have to accept that infections will keep occurring.”

Is another Coronavirus surge in the cards? The BA.2 sub-variant strain is even more transmissible than the original omicron variant, which itself spread much more quickly than the delta variant. During the last surge, nearly half of Americans contracted the virus, but many fewer people became seriously ill than in previous surges. If there is another surge, are we better prepared, this time around?

Dr. Leana Wen is with us for the hour to talk about all the latest COVID news.The former Baltimore City Health Commissioner is an emergency physician who's now a visiting professor at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health, a medical analyst for CNN, a health columnist for the Washington Post and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also the author of a compelling memoir, Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health.

As always, we welcome your questions or comments for Dr. Wen! Call us: 410.662.8780. Email us at [email protected], or Tweet us: @MiddayWYPR.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

I’m not going to talk about it. I’m going to be clear up top, I’ve talked about it enough. I kept talking about it. I kept thinking about it. I don’t want to talk about it, and you can’t make me talk about it...But I have a question…Do you want to talk about?..."
--The comedian and actor Jerrod Carmichael, in his SNL monologue last week.

“The Slap” as it’s come to be known, happened nearly two weeks ago, and we have not yet discussed it here on Midday. There is plenty of other news to ponder, and there have been plenty of people jumping-in to talk about what should happen to Will Smith, how Chris Rock handled the situation, and what the Academy coulda and shoulda done in the moment, and since.

Members of the Academy board are meeting in Los Angeles at this hour to discuss disciplinary measures against Mr. Smith.

We’re going to jump in now.

Joining Tom to talk it over is Dr. Theopia Jackson. She is the immediate past president of the Association of Black Psychologists. She connects with us on Zoom.

And Ann Hornaday is a film critic for The Washington Post. She joins us on our digital line.

And if you want to talk about it, give us a call, send us an email, or Tweet us.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today, a conversation about problems with Baltimore’s water system. Aging infrastructure, ineffective accounting and billing, and high costs to rate-payers are just some of the challenges facing the City's Department of Public Works (DPW).

Two weeks ago, problems got worse. The Maryland Secretary of the Environment, Ben Grumbles, ordered that the authority over the operations of the Back River wastewater treatment plant be taken away from the city, and transferred to the state. Late last month, state inspectors found that the Back River plant was discharging polluted water in violation of the Clean Water Act. Their scathing report on the plant cited "the precipitous decline of the functioning of several critical processes at the Plant in comparison with prior inspections.”

Yesterday, when Tom asked Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott about why problems at the city-owned Back River and Patapsco wastewater treatment plants hadn’t been addressed, the mayor noted that the problems pre-date his administration:

"We know the Back River and Patapsco wastewater issues in Baltimore, the issues have been there you know they don't just predate my administration but the administration that came before me and the one that came before that, and the one that came before that. We are committed to working with MDE and MES to get this facility into compliance. I actually personally met with the secretary right before this decision was made, and said that we want to continue to work with them.

But we know this is not an overnight fix. We're going to work collaboratively with them to combine resources to ensure that we're being good stewards of this service, right? And making sure that we are supporting our Chesapeake Bay. We know that there are supply-chain issues and staffing shortages that have made getting Back River...into compliance difficult."

— Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, speaking with Tom Hall here on Midday, yesterday.

We think it’s important to know what’s going on at these wastewater facilities, why these alleged violations of the Clean Water Act are serious, and what the city is going to have to do to solve these longstanding problems.

To help us understand, Tom invited two environmental advocates to join us for part of the hour today. Alice Volpitta of Blue Water Baltimore is the Baltimore Water Keeper. Blue Water Baltimore is part of the lawsuits that are currently in the courts…Angela Haren is a Senior Attorney at the Chesapeake Legal Alliance. She also happens to be a former Baltimore Water Keeper…

Alice Volpitta and Angela Haren join us on Zoom.

We apologize for the technical difficulties on Friday that delayed the publication of this post.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

It's time again for a visit with Midday's theater critic, J. Wynn Roususk, who joins us every week with her reviews of the regional stage. Today's she tells us about Pretty Woman: The Musical, the touring company production of the hit Broadway show that's currently lighting up the stage at Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre.

Based on the popular 1990 movie of the same name (which starred Richard Gere, and featured Julia Roberts in the title role), Pretty Woman: The Musical opened on Broadway in 2018 and closed a year later after 485 performances.

The touring company production's creative team is led by two-time Tony Award®-winning director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell (Hairspray, Kinky Boots, Legally Blonde), and features the original score by Grammy® winner Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance (“Summer of ’69”, “Heaven”), and a book by the movie’s late director, Garry Marshall and screenwriter J. F. Lawton.

Pretty Woman: The Musical continues at the Hippodrome Theatre through Sunday, April 10. Follow the theater links for showtimes and ticketing.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's next guest is Young Vo, a Baltimore-based artist, animator, and illustrator whose new children's picture book, Gibberish, has just been published by Levine Querido.

Vo's debut story of a young Asian immigrant who struggles to understand the language of his newly adopted home country mirrors Vo's own experience after coming to the United States as a young refugee from Vietnam.

Young Vo joins us on Zoom from Baltimore.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

It's Midday with the Mayor, and Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott joins Tom Hall for another of their monthly live conversations about key issues on the mayor's and the city's agenda.

In today's installment, they discuss the major points in Mayor Scott's State of the City address, the $45 million in state anti-crime funds, the problems at two of the city's wastewater treatment plants, a new city initiative to support the families of incarcerated citizens, and this week's post-COVID re-opening of City Hall, among other topics.

Mayor Brandon Scott joins us on Zoom from City Hall.

And you're welcome to join us as well. Call 410.662.8780. email us at [email protected] or Tweet us @MiddayWYPR.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

One of these days, it’s gonna get warm and sunny, and when it does, a lot of us will head Back to the Garden.

That's what we're doing today on Midday, in another of our seasonal conversations about what we're all growing around our homes, in our yards and our community gardens. And joining us once again with answers to all of your plant and gardening questions is Carrie Engel, the veteran plant specialist and Greenhouse Manager at Valley View Farms Nursery and Garden Center in Cockeysville, Maryland.

And a little later in this hour we'll also be joined by Richard Francis, better known as "Farmer Chippy," the director of The Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm, and the Agrihood in Northwest Baltimore.Carrie Engel and Farmer Chippy join us on Zoom.

Let us know what’s on your mind, and what’s going to be in your garden this year…

Join us! Call 410.662.8780 email: [email protected] Tweet us: @MiddayWYPR

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Yesterday, Governor Larry Hogan signed into law a revised map with new boundaries for Congressional districts, after a judge in Anne Arundel County threw out the original map drawn by Democrats last December. When MD Attorney General Brian Frosh changed his decision to appeal that ruling, the Governor agreed to the new maps, saying in a statement, that the maps, quote, “weren't, in my opinion, as good as the ones drawn by the citizen commission, and we shouldn't have wasted so much time—but they are a huge improvement.” The commission he referred to was a bipartisan group the Governor appointed.

A number of redistricting maps created by Republicans have been thrown out in court around the country because they were found to be unconstitutional due to gerrymandering. The decision in MD is the first time a map drawn by Democrats met the same fate.

The maps for state legislative districts remain in limbo. In a separate case, Republicans challenged those maps in court as well. The Court of Appeals is expected to rule in that case soon. Primary elections are scheduled for July 19th. Early voting will begin on July 7th.

Today on Midday, we continue with our election-year interview series, Conversations with the Candidates: 2022. Tom's guest is Wes Moore, who is one of 10 candidates in the Democratic primary for Governor.

This is Wes Moore’s first run for elective office. His career has included military service, with a tour in Afghanistan, a stint as a White House Fellow, and work in the financial industry. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling The Other Wes Moore and Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City, his account, co-written with journalist Erica L. Green, of what led up to, and what happened after the 2015 Freddie Gray uprising. He founded an organization called BridgeEdU, which helps students navigate the college experience, and before he entered the primary race, he was the CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, a national anti-poverty organization.

Wes Moore holds an Associate’s degree from Valley Forge Military College, and an undergraduate degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University. In 2001, he was elected a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.Mr. Moore is 43 years old. He and his wife Dawn have two young children. They live in Baltimore.

Mr. Moore has tapped Aruna Miller, a former Maryland Delegate who represented Montgomery County in the General Assembly from 2010-2018, as his Lt. Governor.

Wes Moore joins us on Zoom from Prince George's County, Maryland.

You are welcome to join us, too.Call us: 410.662.8780. Email us: [email protected] Tweet us @MiddayWYPR

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.