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Finally caught up with the outstanding documentary Every Little Step about casting the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line.
Though some Chorus Line purists balked at the revival, I was pretty fond of it, mostly because I got to cover its out-of-town tryout at the Curran Theatre here in San Francisco as part of the SHN/Best [...]
My love of things Disney is no secret, so imagine what a thrill it was to get a chance to talk with Disney songwriter Richard M. Sherman about his long-running rift with songwriting partner and brother Robert B. Sherman and about the just-released documentary about their lives and careers, The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, [...]
Let’s go watch a Chazz Palminteri movie … with Chazz Palminteri!
While the venerable movie and stage actor is in town with his one-man show, A Bronx Tale (Sept. 23-Oct. 19 at the Golden Gate Theatre), he’s going to head up Market Street to the Castro Theatre for a screening the 1994 Woody Allen movie Bullets [...]
Not only is Pixar’s WALL-E an extraordinary movie – it’s also, in its strange way, a paean to musical theater.
You just don’t head into a computer-animated film set in the 2100s to feature tunes by the great Jerry Herman, but that’s exactly what you get. WALL-E is about a soulful little robot, one of the [...]
So much information to digest.
First comes news that Annie Proulx’s extraordinary short story, “Brokeback Mountain,” which was turned into a less extraordinary but admirable film, is now becoming an opera. New York City Opera has commissioned American composer Charles Wuorinen to create an opera based on “Brokeback” for the 2013 spring season. I, for one, [...]
Got a little excited when I saw the Mamma Mia! trailer in a movie theater recently. With the success of Hairspray last year, it looks like summer is becoming the season for frothy stage musicals turned silver screen tuners.
Here’s one of the trailers. I like this one because it actually shows Meryl Streep singing.
Here’s the [...]
This holiday weekend I saw some movies on the big screen (Indiana Jones and the blah blah Crystal Skull – exactly what you think it would be, enjoyable but nothing more; Iron Man, which made me love Robert Downey Jr. all over again – oddly more human than Indiana Jones) and at home.
One of the [...]
Anika Noni Rose and Terrence Howard in the Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Photo by the New York Times
Interesting article in Variety about the recent Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Terrence Howard and Anika Noni Rose.
Not surprisingly, this camera-ready [...]
The movies have not been all that kind to Stephen Sondheim.
His early Broadway hits, for which he supplied lyrics only, West Side Story and Gypsy, became classic studio musicals (with West Side Story being a movie for the ages and Gypsy being an interesting movie with some good work by Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood).
But [...]
When does a movie become theater? The easy answer is when it’s adapted a la Hairspray, The Lion King, The Producers and the like.
But there have been rare instances when movies become theater, usually when music is involved. I’m thinking of the rock band Spinal Tap, which, after their mockumentary became a hit, toured like [...]
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