I’m normally not one to pry, but my sources tell me that as of Thursday, May 4, there’s been a changing of the Spoleto Overview Critic guard at The Post and Courier.

A few months ago, I reported in the City Paper that Blair Tindall, last year’s Spoleto Overview Critic for the P&C, had decided not to return to Charleston for a second stab at the gig. Tindall was brought on last year as a replacement to the arguably

irreplacable Robert T. Jones, a good friend who covered 28 consecutive Spoleto Festivals for the P&C before passing away, too soon, in 2004.

It seems that after moving to L.A., eloping with Bill Nye the Science Guy (yeah, that one), and working up a film treatment of her salacious hit memoir Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, Tindall decided that Californication beats the hell out of schlupping around Charleston for two and a half weeks, day and night, in 95-degree

heat, while taking heat of an altogether different sort from the likes

of Mabou Mines Dollhouse director Lee Breuer. Tindall told me she planned to be shopping her screenplay to Comcast during Spoleto this year. And between you and me, she didn’t sound real

sad about it.

My sources tell me that only yesterday The Post and Courier settled on a replacement for Tindall. The word (still unofficial, and I hope somebody’s giving me credit for that) is that this year we’ll be reading daily Overview columns in the P&C from one Joshua Rosenblum. After the obligatory Google search (it’s almost scary, isn’t it?), I discovered that Rosenblum — and this is almost too good to believe — is a New York composer, conductor, pianist and lyricist known, among other things, for his current Off-Broadway hit Bush is Bad: The Musical Cure for the Blue State Blues, a satiric Tom Leher-style savaging of the Bush administration. And he’s gonna be covering Spoleto for The Post and Courier, a paper so red they’d use crimson ink if they weren’t afraid people would mistake it for blood.

The head swims with the irony of it.

Here’s how Rosenblum’s bio reads on the Bush is Bad website:

“Composer/Lyricist/Pianist Joshua Rosenblum has been described variously as “the new Tom Lehrer, except he can’t sing,” “much funnier than I used to think he was,” and “about to find himself in serious trouble with the federal government.” He has composed extensively for both the theater and the concert hall. His musical Fermat’s Last Tango received a critically acclaimed production at the York Theatre in 2000, and did not result in any lawsuits or prison sentences. When he is not pleading with people to perform his compositions, Rosenblum moonlights as a conductor, having led the orchestras for eleven Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, including one with a helicopter and one with a flying car. On the classical end, Rosenblum has served as guest conductor for the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and the American Repertory Ballet, after frantic, last minute searches produced no other viable candidates. Rosenblum is also a music journalist, and regularly contributes CD and concert reviews to Opera News, although he has almost no tolerance for criticism of his own works.”

I think we like him already.

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