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Broadway Grosses: Week Ending 2/25/24  Feb 27 2024, 05:51:07 PM

Jarethan said: "Really happy about Sweeney. Proves that Foster gets people into seats…I don’t know how much of a following Tveit has, although I admit to being surprised at all the shrieking when I saw Catch Me..

I’m pretty sure Tveit is a factor, too. He has a ton of female fans. They are really enjoying his look/performance as ‘Sweeney.” Why are you guys so dismissive of him?


Aaron Tveit, Sutton Foster will next star in ‘Sweeney Todd’  Feb 20 2024, 05:01:06 AM

Joe Locke had nothing to do with the $1.2 million gross increase during the week of 2/6-2/11, when Foster and Tveit joined.

Locke joined the show the previous week and it only grossed $857,422.


Color-blind and gender-blind casting  Oct 31 2020, 12:05:16 PM

I'm guessing HogansHero is a far-left liberal with major white guilt and a white savior complex, who thinks in black-and-white terms (no pun intended). In these extremists' simple minds, one size fits all. But not every play/musical can be easily cast color-blind, especially when it takes place in a specific time and place. For example, in Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella, which is set in a magical fairyland where anyth


Lyric changes in MISS SAIGON  Oct 2 2016, 10:25:29 PM

QueenAlice, but "Now That I've Seen Her" doesn't try to make Ellen sympathetic. She actually says (or sings, rather) that she will do what it takes to keep Chris.


Lyric changes in MISS SAIGON  Oct 2 2016, 07:42:31 PM

Wildcard, I believe Maltby wrote the English lyrics -- or rather, translated Boublil's French lyrics.

 

"Maybe" makes no sense. Kim has just revealed that she and Chris were more than a one-night stand, and Kim has screamed in Ellen's face, so why should she suddenly feel compassion for Kim? "Now That I've Seen Her" is a far better reaction to that.


Lyric changes in MISS SAIGON  Oct 1 2016, 03:04:12 PM

QueenAlice, that excerpt is from the original London production/OLCR. By the time it came to Broadway, the lyric was:

 

Gigi:  Each day more GI's disappear.

Engineer: There's still some left and they'll all be here.

All Girls:  A girl can trust the Engineer.

 


Lyric changes in MISS SAIGON  Oct 1 2016, 11:57:37 AM

IMO, the original Broadway production was the best. They were still tinkering with it in London, but by the time it arrived in NY, I thought it was the definitive edition. I don't understand all these rewrites and revisions and new songs. They make the piece worse. I hate these new lyrics changes and the inclusion of "Too Much for One Heart" and "Maybe." At least, the former uses the same melody (and some lyrics) as "Please," but the latter is a travesty


CATS Reviews  Aug 6 2016, 12:31:25 PM

TheatreFan4: "What the f**k? I mean Cynthia Erivo was lauded to high heavens and you want to throw out "They didn't like her cause she's not American!" about a production of a British show. That was Composed, Written, Designed, Costumed, & largely choreographed by Brits? This is such a stupid statement that I question your objectivity on really anything."

 

T.S. Eliot, the author of the poems th


Why did Bonnie & Clyde flop?  Aug 4 2016, 12:18:52 PM

CATSBTrevival: "It also helped that the show did not open with their deaths in La Jolla. We already know they're going to die when we take our seats so I've never understood the point of opening the show with the shootout like they did on Broadway."

 

Since they used historical photographs throughout the show, they should've started the show with the "How 'Bout a Dance?" instrumental prolog play


Why did Bonnie & Clyde flop?  Aug 3 2016, 03:38:18 PM

I agree that Act II needed a bit of work. This is when they should've introduced one or two members of the Barrow Gang, particularly W.D. Jones  and/or Henry Methvin. Jones was 16 (later turned 17) and from the same squatters' camp (under the Oak Cliff Viaduct) as the Barrows. In fact, he was a good friend of Clyde's younger brother and idolized Clyde, who was six years older.  He was on the run with B&C for longer (nearly a year)&n


Why did Bonnie & Clyde flop?  Jul 30 2016, 12:04:14 PM

They already did the impotent angle in the 1967 film. After they scrapped the ménage à trois nonsense, the writers decided to make Clyde impotent, instead, because they argued that Bonnie and Clyde couldn't just commit felonies and be happy. They needed something to keep them apart, to overcome -- in this case, his impotence, which Bonnie finally 'cures' by writing the poem about them. Somehow that did the trick in the movie.

&


Why did Bonnie & Clyde flop?  Jul 29 2016, 06:46:59 PM

¿?Macavity?: "These are all interesting points, but why has this thread come back? I have no problem with it, it just seems to come out of the blue."

 

Last weekend, I finally watched a bootleg of the Broadway show, which I enjoyed very much (to my surprise), so I searched to see if there were any B&C threads remaining, just to see what people had to say at the time, since I didn't participate in


Why did Bonnie & Clyde flop?  Jul 29 2016, 06:28:21 PM

WhizzerMarvin: "I also remember there being some director's note in the Playbill about how Clyde wasn't a homosexual or bi-sexual, or at least it hadn't been substantiated and therefore they weren't going to include it in their musical. It was this kind of announcement of wholesomeness and stripping of the gritty that would have been fine in the 1950s, but by 2011 I would much rather have seen an exploration of what life was like to be in the Barrow gang and explore Clyde's sexual proclivities."

 

Oy, this tired rumor! Clyde was not gay. He had several girlfriends before Bonnie, and two of their names he got tattooed on his body. (Bonnie also had a tattoo of two hearts with the names 'Bonnie & Roy.' Yes, he was repeatedly raped in prison by a much bigger guy. Clyde was only 5'7", 135 lbs, and had a very youthful appearance. When he went to Eastham Prison Farm, he had just turned 20, but looked two or three years younger. (Bonnie also looked very young, since she was quite petite.) At Eastham, Ed Crowder, who stood 6'4" and was an imposing figure, took advantage of the boyish Clyde. Prison life did change Clyde, but he didn't "turn gay" as a result. Rather, it made him very angry with the Texas prison system (and the law, in general) and he emerged from it an even more dangerous man, intent on revenge. Before Eastham, he had been just a petty thief, who stole cars, turkeys, and other odds and ends. Crowder, whom he lured to a secluded spot and bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe, was his first murder victim.



In the early drafts of the script, the Beatty/Dunaway film originally featured a love triangle between Clyde, Bonnie, and the C.W. Moss character, who was a composite of W.D. Jones (until Buck & Blanche are captured) and Henry Methvin, whose father betrayed B&C. The rumor at the time was that Bonnie was a nymphomaniac and Clyde a homosexual, so to satisfy both their needs, another man was incorporated into their lovemaking, but all this info was taken from trashy, pulp novels, which were written more for sensationalism than accuracy.

 

Here's what W.D. Jones, who was 16-then-turned-17 during his time with B&C, had to say about Clyde's supposed homosexuality in the aforementioned  '68 Playboy interview.

 

"I run with Clyde and Bonnie for more than eight months. That was all I could stand. I left them up in Mississippi and hitchhiked back to Texas. The law caught me in Houston. My running was over. I was in the joint when word came on May 23, 1934, that Clyde and Bonnie was killed near Arcadia, Louisiana. I've heard stories since that Clyde was homosexual, or, as they say in the pen, a 'punk,' but they ain't true. Maybe it was Clyde's quiet, polite manner and his slight build that fooled folks.

"He was only about five feet, six inches tall and he weighed no more than 135 pounds. Me and him was about the same size, and we used to wear each other's clothes. Clyde had dark hair that was wavy. He never had a beard. Even when he didn't shave, all he had on his chin was fuzz.

"Another way that story might have got started was his wearing a wig sometimes when him and Bonnie had to drive through a town where they might be recognized. He wore the wig for disguise and for no other reason.

"Clyde never walked right, either. He'd chopped off his big toe and part of the second toe on his left foot when he was in prison, because he couldn't keep up, with the pace the farm boss set.

"Or the story could have come from sensation writers who believed anything dropped on them and who blew it to proportions that suited their imagination.


"I knew a lot of convicts the years I was in prison -- some of them years on Eastham Farm where Clyde had served his time-and none of them had a story on him being a punk. Matter of fact, nobody -- not the police who asked me questions for hours and hours or the reporters who got in to see me-ever mentioned it. The subject just never come up then.

"It's just here recently, more than 30 years since Clyde was killed, that I've heard the story. I was with him and Bonnie. I know. It just ain't true."

 

More of the interview in the link below:

http://www.cinetropic.com/janeloisemorris/commentary/bonn%26clyde/wdjones.html


Why did Bonnie & Clyde flop?  Jul 29 2016, 05:34:37 PM

newintown: "Actually, authentic history shows us that they murdered at least 13 people and robbed small family-owned stores, as well as banks patronized by poor and lower-class investors, taking the money of those who could least afford to lose it or defend themselves."

 

Correction: the Barrow Gang (which at one point consisted of 9 members) was responsible for 13 murders (mainly lawmen), not just by Bonnie & Clyde themselves. In fact, Bonnie may not have ever (intentionally) killed anyone, though there are reports that she fired a gun several times during the gun fights/getaways (including in Blanche Barrow's memoir, My Life With Bonnie and Clyde), but she mainly loaded the weapons that likely killed others (per gang member W.D. Jones' account in a 1968 Playboy interview, which described her as "a hell of a loader". At any rate, she was an accomplice to 100 or more felony criminal acts, including several murders, kidnappings, robberies, auto thefts, and that major jailbreak I mentioned above (not where Bonnie smuggled a gun into Clyde, but the bigger one years later, after they gained notoriety), in which a guard was killed in the melee and several prisoners escaped. So, yeah, I agree she was equally responsible for aiding & abetting Clyde, but more often than not she didn't pull the trigger, though she and Clyde were the face of the gang, since he was the leader and she his "moll."

 

newintown: "Some may like to romanticize this kind of pathological behavior, but there is absolutely nothing to admire about these two psychopaths who chose to hurt rather than help."

 

I'm not romanticizing; I'm being realistic. All of the reputable B&C biographies/historians say the same thing, that Clyde hated being and looking like poverty and aspired to be a famous outlaw, like his childhood heroes Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Bonnie's misfortune was meeting Clyde and falling madly in love with him. From the moment they met, the pair was inseparable, except for the two years Clyde spent at Eastham (though they wrote each other passionate letters), and early in their career when Bonnie was captured after a botched robbery and spent two months in jail. She immediately rejoined Clyde after her release, and for the next two years, they were always together. No one could convince her to give herself up, not even her own mother, with whom she had been close to prior to Clyde. Even Clyde tried to get her to save herself, but she refused. She knew that Clyde was going to be killed, eventually, and she wanted to die with him.

 

For his part, Clyde proved his devotion to Bonnie by always looking out for her well-being (within the context of their fugitive life), especially in their last year, when Bonnie's leg was badly burned, after Clyde accidentally flipped the car over and it caught fire. From then on, she walked with a limp, or sometimes had to be carried by Clyde.  IMO, this incident  is evident that Clyde was not a true psychopath, as some have tried to paint him. A psychopath would not have devoted himself to caring for Bonnie so tenderly after such an accident. Some folks told Bonnie's family that they could expect to find her dead in a ditch, because there was no way that cold-blooded killer Clyde Barrow was going to keep a woman around who was a burden to him and an actual danger to his life on the run; however, Clyde loved and cared for Bonnie the best he could. He always made sure she escaped with him during the gun battles, and, in fact, by the end, they were the two remaining Barrow Gang members. The others were either captured, killed, or left of their own accord.

 

It seems to me that you are the one who is relying on old, debunked, sensational accounts of the pair, in which they were portrayed as sadistic, mad-dog killers, a la Mickey & Mallory Knox. First of all, they only shot to fight their way out of roadblocks and such, never for the thrill of killing people. Most of their murders were accomplished this way. Furthermore, they weren't even master criminals or efficient thieves. Their take was never large, and they often screwed up robberies, in which people got killed or injured. In fact, John Dillinger, who tried to avoid violence as much as possible, called them "A bunch of punks, who are giving bank-robbing a bad name." What made them legendary was Clyde's driving talent, the many gun battles, their almost superhuman ability to evade capture (until they were betrayed), and, of course, the presence of Bonnie Parker. She added a feminine touch to an otherwise male-dominated underworld. Also, Bonnie never divorced her husband Roy (she thought it was in bad taste to do so while he was in prison), so a married woman shacking up with a known criminal was scandalous then.

 

In short, the story of Bonnie and Clyde is really just the tragedy of two kids from the West Dallas slum, who fell in love and then willingly traded their lives for excitement and fame, albeit briefly. I used that term, because in tragic plays, the protagonists are doomed by tragic flaws and moral weaknesses that cause their eventual demise.


Why did Bonnie & Clyde flop?  Jul 27 2016, 01:11:59 PM

newintown wrote: "I would say that it had an unusually bad book, idiotically reducing two complex anti-social psychopathic murderers to sexy misunderstood kids just trying to express their individuality, like an episode of a YA TV show."

 

You obviously don't know anything about the real Bonnie and Clyde, which is who the musical was trying to capture (pun intended, I guess). I've studied the pair for over twenty years, and they were not at all like the blood-thirsty, ruthless killers of legend. Believe it or not, they were just "kids," barely out of their teens. Clyde was 20 and Bonnie 19 when they met, and they died four years later.

 

As a pseudo-historian on the subject, I was reluctant to watch this musical, but I was impressed by how much they didn't play fast and loose with the facts. Sure, they oversimplified it and condensed the narrative -- for instance, there were more Barrow Gang members, and other events were omitted -- but all the facts are still there. My only gripe was that they made Bonnie a redhead; she was a towheaded child who became a strawberry-blonde as an adult.

 

Here's what the musical got right:



 - Buck and Clyde were brothers, who were petty thieves and crooks

- Clyde grew up dirt-poor and aspired to notoriety and the best things in life

- Bonnie was a bored, starry-eyed waitress and wannabe actress/poet/singer

- Bonnie married a few days before her 16th birthday, but her crooked husband (Roy Thornton) was never around and eventually wound up in prison

- Bonnie's mother disapproved of Clyde and refused to have them buried together (as they had wished), saying, "He had her in life; he can't have her in death."


- Clyde was beaten and raped at Eastham Prison Farm, and he eventually bludgeoned to death his assailant, Ed Crowder; his time in Eastham forever changed Clyde, turning him "from a schoolboy into a rattlesnake," according to  a friend; Bonnie and Clyde would later engineer a successful jailbreak at Eastham, as revenge

- Bonnie smuggled a gun into jail, which Clyde used to escape

- They once tried to rob a bank that had closed its doors a few days before; this scene was also featured humorously in the '67 film

- Blanche's father was a lay minister (I'm deducing the Preacher character was her dad), and she worked in Buck & Clyde's sister Nell's beauty shop.

- Blanche convinced Buck to turn himself in, but (after his release) she reluctantly followed him when Buck insisted on joining Clyde

- Buck is mortally wounded in a shootout, and Blanche stays behind with him and is apprehended; she was sentenced to 10 years in prison (for aiding & abetting) and served six

 -  Deputy sheriff Ted Hinton, who was part of the six-man posse who hunted down Bonnie and Clyde, did personally known both Clyde and Bonnie. He grew up with the Barrow boys (he was Bucks' age), and he often frequented Bonnie's diner, where she was his favorite waitress. In his 1977 memoir, Ambush: The Real Story of Bonnie and Clyde, he writes fondly of Bonnie and admitted to having had a crush on her.

Anyway, you get the point. Despite the myth, the fact is they were two, young, poor, starstruck kids who got in way over their heads and paid the ultimate price. I believe the tagline for the classic 1967 film got it right: "Their paths crossed like two hot wires. They roared off on what might easily have been a wild, romantic lark. But almost before they knew it -- with their giggles still in their ears -- they had bloodied up four states."

 

Incidentally, earlier this year, American Experience featured a new documentary on Bonnie and Clyde, which I would recommend (that's Bonnie and her husband, Roy, on the inset):

 

newintown wrote: "I also found the musicalization of the story to be baffling, featuring meaningless songs about the love of driving cars, which neither says anything interesting about the characters nor advances the story in any way."

Whatchootalkinaboutwillis? The song is very much character development. Clyde Barrow was known to be an expert driver, and that's one of the main reasons why they always managed to get away. They mentioned several times in the musical what a great driver Clyde is (including this song), and the scene starts off with their talking about Ford, Clyde's favorite make, especially the V8, which was the fastest car on the road. Having a fast car was very important to Clyde, because it meant an easier escape. Thus, the song is not pointless. Incidentally, Clyde once wrote a letter of appreciation to Henry Ford, thanking him for the V8, The letter is currently on display at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI.

 

In conclusion, if your only knowledge of Bonnie and Clyde is as natural born killers who terrorized the Southwest, I can see why you'd think a musical based on their lives would be hokey. But the real story is more tragic. Clyde was a child delinquent and teenage hoodlum who led Bonnie (a straight-A student) astray. In fact, some historians speculate that Bonnie may have suffered from hybristophilia, which is when someone (usually a woman) gets turned on by dangerous men. For instance, the many women who write fan mail and marriage proposals to convicted killers, e.g. Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez.  In fact, hybristophilia is colloquially known as "Bonnie and Clyde syndrome."


Monique Wilson  Jul 16 2016, 03:45:46 PM

One Eponine/Kim similarity: They both died happily in the arms of the object of their affection.


New song for Ellen in Miss Saigon - Translation  Jun 24 2016, 05:22:07 PM

Ellen also finds out that Kim meant much more to Chris than he had told her. 

 

Not to mention that Ellen didn't learn about Kim until after the "Bui-Doi" number (a month before the "Room 317" confrontation). Before then, Chris had never mentioned Kim (except by shouting her name in his sleep) nor shared his experiences in Vietnam with Ellen. That's why, in "I Still Believe," she frustratingly laments


Scherzinger backs out of CATS, Lloyd Webber furious  May 15 2016, 09:59:54 PM

'Can we focus on the obvious question? How in the world does ALW actually think that the actress playing Grizabella would have an easy shot at the Tony????? This isn't the 80's Andrew.'

 

'Totally agree - we are not casting Rose in GYPSY here. This is a musical that has already had its limelight come and go, and from the perspective of people I have encountered on this forum at least, the show has not exactly he


Unpopular Opinions  May 13 2016, 07:38:54 PM

He has said before that there are hardly any roles for latinos and the ones that there are he isn't suited for so he writes his own. 

 

Yeah, 'cause Alexander Hamilton was very Latino.


Crucible Revival  Aug 6 2015, 05:31:15 PM

Isn't Actors' Equity usually adamant about foreign actors (regardless if they're Irish or British) displacing American talent? What's going on here?


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