Devil

GEORGE FOREACRE is not a coldhearted guy. But he couldn't help but celebrate this week's death of notorious strip-club mogul Robert Laflar, who faced trial in October in the fatal beating of Foreacre's friend. "I know he [Laflar] has children, and they're innocents. That's the ones I feel bad for," said Foreacre, 37, who survived the 2009 attack outside Laflar's strip club that left him with four fractured vertebrae and his buddy Jimmy Koons dead. "But when you dance with the devil, you got to answer to the devil, and he answered to the devil today.

Ronald and Nancy Reagan will now be living in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, at what used to be 666 St. Cloud Drive. I read in the newspaper that the Reagans (who, as we all know, are just a tiny bit superstitious) arranged to have the address changed because in the Bible, 666 is the number of the Devil. So the new address of the house will be 668 St. Cloud Drive. That's all OK, except now where's the Devil supposed to live? You say that it's silly of me to worry about housing for the Devil, because the Devil doesn't actually exist.

Between its 1863 U.S. premiere at Philadelphia's Academy of Music and the opening of the Opera Company of Philadelphia's new production on Friday, Gounod's Faust has, time and again, lost its way. Though it's full of effective music, few people I know (including myself) have had thrilling live encounters with this least ambitious but most singable of all Faust operas. Gounod's Faust codified what are now perceived as operatic cliches, so these days no basic, stock-costume production will do. What will do is the big question.

A Southwest Philadelphia man told detectives that he stabbed his 8-year-old son more than 100 times in April and killed him because the child called him names. George O'Hara, 33, also told investigators he believed his child, Rory O'Hara, was the devil, according to testimony yesterday at a preliminary hearing in Municipal Court. "I was walking with him, and he started to call me names - all kinds of names. I started to rough him up, then I started to cut him up," O'Hara told detectives, Assistant District Attorney Jodi Lobel said.

The circus came to the Trocadero on Tuesday night, and Kid Rock was the ringmaster. The cigar-chomping white Detroit rapper and Renaissance man formerly known as Bob Ritchie was in town to push last year's Devil Without a Cause (Atlantic), which is just now gaining momentum, thanks to the hit "Bawitdaba. " Devil deals in an old-school rap-meets-rock combination a la the Beastie Boys' License to Ill and the Run-D.M.C./Aerosmith version of "Walk This Way," thrown down with a taste of Southern rock, country and soul.

Hark! What's that sound drifting down the halls of Phifer Middle School these days? Faust! Faust, you say? Listen. Fa, la, la, la, la, fa, fa is wafting out in a dizzying spiral from the girls' restroom. Bump, bump, bump . . . bam, bam, bam . . . baaaaaaa explodes from behind the main auditorium. Sweet, lyrical music - flutes and oboes and violins - floats up the long aisles of the auditorium, drifting over the wooden seats and out into the hallway. Yes, the original "the devil made me do it" - the French opera Faust - is here.

Little Green By Walter Mosley Doubleday, 291 pp. $25.95 Reviewed by Dan DeLuca   At the conclusion of his 2007 novel Blonde Faith , Walter Mosley did away with Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins. After 11 volumes featuring the African American World War II veteran and thinking man's detective, through whose eyes the social history of postwar Los Angeles unfolded, Mosley decided he had had enough. "I'm finished with that," Mosley, who's written more than 40 books, told CNN in 2009, when he was promoting a new series with a New York-based private dick named Leonid McGill.

Igor Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale never needs a festival to be updated, side-dated, or backdated in its morality tale of a soldier who bargains with the devil on his way home from war. As Faustian parables go, there's great interpretive leeway. The devil isn't wily enough to inspire admiration; the soldier temporarily outsmarts him despite himself. Gains, losses, and the reasons for them are blurry. So for their Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts entry, Mum Puppettheatre guru Robert Smythe and Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia cast an unusually wide net of presentation possibilities.

Many costumes and characters turned out for West Chester's annual Halloween parade yesterday. Among them were Andy Wade, who dressed up as a devil, and his daughter, Kay, 4. Kevin Ryan, 8, came as the Grim Reaper.

Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat is a classic opera that is widely discussed but not often performed in its entirety. Composed in 1918 in Switzerland with the primary purpose of making money for the composer (a goal it didn't achieve), the musical morality tale remains a seminal composition in terms of style and is still notable as a first draft for Stravinsky's better-known The Rake's Progress. Because the piece has been so often performed in shortened form, the complete reading Sunday at the Settlement Music School's Curtis Branch was all the more significant.