TV surname at 742 Evergreen Terrace / THU 3-21-24 / Apt key for a musical prodigy? / Radius of a unit circle / Repeated sound that can be "cured" / Opera that premiered in Cairo / Longtime Los Angeles sports venue / Iconic painting housed at Oslo's Nasjonalmuseet

Constructor: Joe Marquez

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: ESCAPE ROOM (54A: Puzzling activity, as seen four times in this puzzle?) — a rebus puzzle with "ESC" (from the "escape" key) found inside four different boxes ("rooms") in the grid:

Theme answers:

• MIDDLE SCHOOL (17A: Awkward period, for many) 
• "TRÈS CHIC!" (6D: "Ooh-la-la!")
• CHASE SCENE (28A: Action movie highlight)
• STAPLES CENTER (10D: Longtime Los Angeles sports venue)
• "WE'RE SCREWED!" (38A: "It's so over for us!")
• "THREE'S COMPANY" (25D: 1970s-'80s sitcom about a trio of zany roommates)
• PRESCRIBE (44A: Allow to take, perhaps)
• THE SCREAM (40D: Iconic painting housed at Oslo's Nasjonalmuseet)

Word of the Day: STAPLES CENTER (10D) —

Crypto.com Arena (formerly Staples Center) is a multi-purpose indoor arena in Downtown Los Angeles. Opened on October 17, 1999, it is located next to the Los Angeles Convention Center complex along Figueroa Street, and has since been considered a part of L.A. Live. Owned and operated by Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), it is currently the home venue of the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League (NHL)—which are both owned in part by AEG's founder Philip Anschutz, as well as the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA and the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks.

It is the only arena in the NBA shared by two teams, as well as one of only three North American professional sports venues (alongside SoFi Stadium in nearby Inglewood, and New Jersey's MetLife Stadium) to currently host two teams from the same league. The venue is also frequently used for major concerts, and has been the most frequent host of the Grammy Awards ceremony since its opening.

Crypto.com Arena will host the basketball competition during the 2028 Summer Olympics. In 2024, the Clippers are scheduled to leave Crypto.com Arena for their own arena, Intuit Dome. (wikipedia)

• • •

I knew the STAPLES CENTER was called something stupid now, but I had no idea how stupid. Crypto.com Arena!? LOL. Congrats, you win Most Embarrassing Arena or Stadium Rebrand. Yikes. If nothing else, this puzzle made me laugh by teaching me about the existence of Crypto Dot Com Arena. Actually, this puzzle had other pleasures, though in general it was way too straightforward. It's about as basic as rebuses get and the revealer isn't exactly a revelation. I mean, you've got all those ESCs staring at you, so ESCAPE's being in the revealer is kind of a given. And then ROOM ... OK, you wanna call the boxes "rooms," that's fine, that works. But the concept is a bit ho-hum. You've got a four-square rebus, where all rebus squares are the same (and very easy to pick up). The puzzle's not doing anything particularly interesting with the rebus form, but it does what it does in a solid, workmanlike way. "WE'RE SCREWED!" at least gives us some attitude and energy—always nice when, in addition to fulfilling the requirements of the theme, the theme answers have personality. That "WE'RE SCREWED!" / "THREE'S COMPANY" crossing was the thematic highlight, for me. The other "ESC" answers were somewhat more ordinary, but they're solid. Two anomalies in the theme today. First, PRESCRIBE, which is the only answer that fails to break "ESC" across two words, which is the optimal way to "hide" an embedded word (you can tell it's optimal because this puzzle does it with the other 7 answers). That PRESCRIBE rebus square is anomalous in another way as well, which is that it has no symmetrical equivalent. It's just shoehorned in here to give us a fourth (bonus?) rebus. The other "ESC" square all appear in the longest answers, which are symmetrical—well, STAPLES CENTER and "THREE'S COMPANY" are symmetrical, and then MIDDLE SCHOOL is symmetrical with the revealer, ESCAPE ROOM, leaving no room for the fourth "ESC" within the established symmetrical pattern. So it's in a kind of no man's land. I wouldn't mind if the four "ESC" squares were randomly strewn about, but to establish symmetry and then shove another square in just ... because? ... that seems inelegant. [Update: I think this puzzle would've been Next Level if the rebus squares had been ESC in the Acrosses and APE in the Downs]

The fill today is notably bad, especially toward the bottom, so once again I'm asking everyone involved in the making of these puzzles to Try Harder. EENY EIRE GRAN SSN TSKS (plural?) TYR TTOP EWS (plural?) EMMAS (plural?), NEAP ... it's a lot to take. ARTE Johnson! Wow, haven't seen him in a while. No, I take that back. I did see him recently, but not in the puzzle. I've been watching old Love Boat episodes, and he shows up on that show a lot. The segment I saw him in was from Season 1, Episode 12. It was called "The Painters" ("Inept painters (Arte Johnson, Pat Morita) make a shambles of the Captain's cabin"). But back to the puzzle. Crossing AMINO with AMINOR would generally be a no-no. Letter strings that long usually don't repeat *anywhere* in the grid, let alone *cross* one another. I enjoyed the PELICANS and the AIR JORDANs, but the short stuff was way worse than it ought to be in a modern puzzle. 

As for difficulty: bizarrely, HUED was probably the hardest thing in the grid for me to get. Had the "HU-" and still no idea. It fits the clue [Tinged], but only as the back end of a hyphenated term with a color at the front end. "Purple-HUED," say. You'd never just say HUED (unless you were writing bad poetry). Whereas you would just say [Tinged]. Hence my confusion. I also spelled CHE wrong, opting for the more familiar (to me) Spanish spelling, QUE. But obviously we're not dealing with Spanish. The clues says that explicitly. Anyway, it wasn't too hard to fix. I also had NOSE-something before figuring out NOSTRIL (24A: Part of your body that smells the most?). I know TYR from crosswords Of Extreme Yore (and from an embedded-word puzzle I once made using Norse gods—I hid TYR inside BETTYRUBBLE). If you didn't know TYR, don't feel bad. Aesir aficionados and old-timers like me have the advantage there. Maybe you didn't know BOOLE, but you could probably infer BOOLE from "Boolean" (as I did), and anyway his crosses are all fair.

I know there are some people who hate rebuses. I'm not sure why, but they do. As rebuses go, this one should have been pretty easy to pick up and work through, so I hope that even if you'd rather not see this puzzle type, you were at least able to work through it successfully today. See you later.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. I'll be reminding you all week that These Puzzles Fund Abortion 4 is now available. Here is my description of the details (from this past Sunday's write-up):

These Puzzles Fund Abortion 4 (four!) just dropped this past week—over 20 original puzzles from top constructors and editors—and you can get the collection now (right now) for a minimum donation of $20 (donations split evenly among five different abortion funds—details here). You can check out a detailed description of the collection and a list of all the talent involved here. I not only guest-edited a puzzle, I also test-solved puzzles. I have now seen the finished collection, and it's really lovely, across the board. General editors Rachel Fabi and Brooke Husic and C.L. Rimkus put in a tremendous amount of work ensuring that it would be. The attention to detail—test-solving, fact-checking, etc.—was really impressive. Anyway, donate generously (assuming you are able) and enjoy the puzzle bounty!

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