I wonder how well that will work, given that the film AND the musical lean hard into Beetlejuice being a boorish sexual-harassment demon. I hope they haven't lost the original eleven o'clock number mock-praising dirty old men who chase teenage girls, as it was the only time in the show that the satirical beats REALLY landed in the version I saw. Very "Book of Mormon" for that one scene only.
The funny thing about The Humans is that the play's biggest fans and biggest detractors all point to the same thing as their major bone of contention: the willfully obtuse, surrealist quality of what is going on behind and above the family's awkward dinner together. Is there a supernatural presence in the building? Is the whole thing purely a series of coincidences and the tension ramps up indefinitely making something out of so much nothing? Is it all a matter of perception, being ob
I really enjoyed the show when I saw it staged at Pittsburgh Public. The fusion of conventional family drama with intrusive elements of psychological and even supernatural horror really got to me. This is going to be one of those unclassifiable cult films, if they do it right: I can't see it going mainstream and being a tentpole, but it's almost certain to be beloved by art film and genre film fans.
The more I think about this, the more complicated it gets. If we define a sociopath in broad strokes as "a person who is relentless in pursuing their own goals or ideals, feeling no guilt and even sometimes taking pleasure in the damage it causes," Evan wouldn't be a sociopath: he's clearly overwhelmed with guilt and paranoia about the whole thing throughout, though he can't seem to stop himself from going forward with it.
For what it's worth, the tie-in novel describes him explicitly as having an anxiety disorder and STRONGLY implies he is on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.
The Lion King and "Generations" in Children of Eden both feature an onstage "African band" playing polyrhythmic hand percussion.
Fun fact: I appeared as a Storyteller and "Generations" soloist in the Guiness World Record production of Children of Eden over the weekend, and was in charge of putting together the "African band" despite not playing a member of the Noah family, just because I was the one who had the instruments and we were strapped fo
They get packed into these nice reinforced cardboard boxes and go to the licensing house that owns the rights to the show, so that people who produce that particular show can rent the ensemble as well.
My Fair Lady Ending Mar 7
2019, 09:28:31 PM
You should see my notes for Artie Miller on punching up “Crucible.”
I see Sher has STILL ignored my originally-submitted alternate ending, in which instead of walking away when Higgins asks for his slippers, Eliza jumps in the air and does a spin kick that decapitates Higgins, before the entire cast takes a group bow to "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" by HOTEI.
Then again, Geoge Bernard Shaw continues to ignore my texts that "Pygmalion" needs more of the titular half-pig/half-chameleon monster, and that audiences are going to dem
AIDA revival? Feb 28
2019, 07:15:02 PM
If they'd go back, write more music and make it a show that tilted more towards rock opera with some book, as opposed to a score with some rather clunky book scenes between numbers, I think it could be really something.
Feb 28
2019, 10:42:58 AM
Also... they're fun sometimes. Even as a writer: wouldn't it be fun to play around in a certain artist's toybox of assembled themes, characters and ideas? The less generic the artist, the more fun of course: someone like Elton John, Alice Cooper, Kate Bush or Billy Joel, whose songs are packed with stories and characters and locations and monologues, gives you more to work with than, well... the Go-Gos.
Feb 27
2019, 07:34:20 PM
I’m surprised the Italian-American population hasn’t risen up against the term low-brow yet, given its association with phrenology and eugenics; if sleepy-eyed can become a slur last year, a term that deliberately implies that non-WASP physiology is linked to a simian state is probably next on the chopping block.
Not sure if I’m saying “watch your words” or more “use it while you can, it’s not long for this earth.”
Feb 27
2019, 12:08:50 PM
The flop shows that produced hit songs and standards were all in an era when musical theatre was not only in step with the popular tastes of the mainstream music scene, but WERE the popular tastes of the music scene, and the industry songwriters were mostly writing musicals and then farming the songs out, hit or flop alike.
To draw an equivalent today, Max Martin, Babyface, Desmond Child and Dr. Luke (to name a handful of studio songwriters with name recognition) are writing singl
Ditto for the other legendary broken bird Sinatra hooked up with, Judy Garland.
Who do we have today that devolved into an uninsurable mess today but made a comeback? Mariah Carey came back to some extent, but mostly as a singer, and her career has forever been teetering; Lindsay Lohan has gone into being a club manager and model rather than an actor, and Amanda Bynes is doing fashion design.
The great female legends of stage and screen from most of the twentieth century are hamstrung both by sexism and by a sea change in health and lifestyle: women getting pushed out of the spotlight due to the "onset of a certain age" happened with much greater frequency then, and due to a number of health-impacting factors, middle age and senescence set in MUCH earlier than they do today. (Consider that in 1969, Bobby in "Company" admits he is middle-aged and has been for a
Feb 24
2019, 09:50:26 AM
Theatre historians will also tell you that the jukebox musical came before even the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta- the "ballad opera" The Beggar's Opera, written and compiled by John Gay, built a score out of collected popular scores of the day.
Feb 22
2019, 01:44:54 PM
Seems a stretch to say we couldn't have anything as bold as Evita today, when in the past half decade we've had a number of shows with the same boundary-pushing dynamism: for example, Here Lies Love (pop opera about revolutionaries and controversial political figurehead, all depicted in shades of gray), and Fun Home (bracing psychological portrait of an antiheroic central character which gives us every reason not to love them, leading up to their death foreshadowed from the opening sc
Feb 22
2019, 11:18:14 AM
They're a symptom, I think, of chafing against a different cultural paradigm: the unbreakable singer-song connection. Up until the seventies, if you wrote a good song, that song belonged more to the songwriter and to the public than to the individual artist. They got passed around, sung, reinterpreted, used in multimedia in different ways. The rise of singer-songwriter as the only "authentic" musical paradigm meant that songs weren't written to be part of the culture anymore
