La-di-da / WED 5-01-24 / Soprano ___ Te Kanawa / Covers with a glossy black varnish

Theme answers: (all are against the "edge" of the puzzle)

• [Disney princess who sings "A Whole New World"] for JASMINE
• [Basic yoga position] for LOTUS
• ["The Black ___" (1987 crime fiction best seller)] for DAHLIA
• [East Egg resident in "The Great Gatsby"] for DAISY
• [Scented ingredient in some hand creams and shampoos] for FREESIA
• [One of Indiana's state symbols] for PEONY
• [Rainbow's end] for VIOLET
• [Subject of an annual festival in the Netherlands] for TULIP

Word of the Day: KIRI (Soprano ___ Te Kanawa) —

Dame Kiri Jeanette Claire Te Kanawa, born Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron, is a New Zealand opera singer. She had a full lyric soprano voice, which has been described as "mellow yet vibrant, warm, ample and unforced." On 1 December 1971 she was recognised internationally when she appeared as the Countess in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at the Royal Opera House in London.

Good evening, friends! It's Malaika, subbing for our fearless leader! Despite everything, I loved this puzzle, which is one of my favorite types to critique! When I love (or even just like) a puzzle that I think is without major flaws, it's tough to write anything at all. And when I hated a puzzle, I feel mean criticizing the author, who is surely a lovely person who is very proud of what they created. But puzzles like today are fun in that I get to unpack the "bad" things about them as well as why I didn't care. (Unrelated: I wrote this while listening to the bonus tracks on "GUTS (spilled)" if you'd like to join in.)

For the most part, I breezed through this puzzle which can mean a variety of things. For instance, it could mean that I am a Puzzle Solving Genius. (I am not.) In this case, I just vibed with a lot of the trivia / phrasing that our constructor and editors were using. It feels good to drop in 1-Across without even thinking about it, and it feels even better when 1-Across is a substantial length. Many entries in this grid were complete no-brainers to me, and it's only upon going back through that I wonder how others fared. If you can't easily input SERENA as [Wimbledon-winning Williams] I feel you are living under a rock... But was TAMORA (fantasy author Pierce) hard for others? To me she is incredibly famous. HEIDI (classic children's novel set in the Swiss Alps) and DAISY (theme answer) were other literary gimmes that I genuinely don't know how will fare with others.

Then (welcome to the Critique Part of this review) there were a series of Crossword Words that, personally, I could enter without thinking but New Wednesday Solvers may have found incredibly unforgiving. (Looking at them now... "series" perhaps does not do justice to the amount... I'm seeing a lot: ARTY, NIH, ELS, SOL, PSST, SRA, ATT, ANA, LTS, ILK, ESTA, ITE.) I think this didn't bother me that much because I knew them (well... I knew the ones that I listed... I didn't know INT or KIRI or MIR) and, as a constructor, I understand that placing your theme answers along the edges of the puzzle (plus an 11-letter central entry!!) is very tough! But I'm wondering if any of you commenters felt alienated by the quantity of what some (but not I!!!) might call "crosswordese."

Something else that didn't bother me (Critique Part 2) is the "double meanings" of the theme answers. I think the "correct" thing to do for themes like this is to use words that are the names of flowers, and then write a clue that has nothing to do with flowers in order to mask the theme. (JASMINE, DAISY, and VIOLET do this the best, in my opinion. DAHLIA and LOTUS are solid efforts. PEONY and TULIP fail at this but at least are specific, and FREESIA is the worst offender since the answer could be basically anything.) I understand that concept, I understand its elegance, I understand why people care about it and yet... I just really didn't care! The entries were all cute! The flowers all made me think of spring and golden sunlight pouring across NYC and illuminating the botanical gardens and my budding tomato plants! The first two entries that I encountered were masked well enough, and (very important!) when I reached the revealer at 36-Across, it did not highlight (and thus immediately give away) all of the other entries. So.... what about it???

Bullets:

• DAISY— "The Great Gatsby" is an incredibly polarizing book, and Broadway shows are an incredibly polarizing genre, and adaptations are an incredibly polarizing category and yet-- I will say that I saw Broadway's adaption and adored it. It is trite and frivolous and obvious and sparkling and luscious and the tech is gorgeous and Eva Noblezada is perfect. 
• JASMINE— Oh, did you think we were done with musicals? Ha! Sorry, pals. I've been to Mexico City many times on vacation, and many of my friends (going on vacation there for the first time) ask me what my favorite thing I've done there is. The answer is quite unhelpful, which is that I saw a now-closed production of Aladdin (in Spanish) that was hysterical, affordable, and dazzling. Cannot recommend enough... I literally wept at during the magic carpet scene and feel zero shame because honestly if you don't weep, that's on you.
• [Rule of ___ (comedic principle)] for THREE— What's your favorite examplee of this? I always think of Pulp Fiction, where he grabs the hammer, then baseball bat, then chainsaw.... and then wrecks the rule and grabs a fourth, even better object (katana)... But this is also hard to beat.
• This is the part of the review (hidden at the very, very end, like where you'd put the poison in an ingredients list if you were someone selling a snack that had poison in it) where I reveal that I couldn't finish this puzzle-- the crossing of JAPANS / INT plus KARMA / KIRI led me to guess on (what was ultimately) the N and the K. And yet! I still had fun :) 

xoxo Malaika