Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

There’s no getting around the fact that for more than 40 years now, Dolly Parton has been a bright light of show business. She quickly transcended her beginnings on country radio and corny country TV shows to become a pop icon, movie star and savvy businesswoman.

She’s one of the most recognizable women in the world, and the curious thing is that under all that hair, makeup, glitz and God-given curviness, Parton is an extraordinary talent. Her voice is so unique it’s immediately recognizable and difficult to imitate, and her songwriting skill – which is criminally underrated – will eventually have its own section in the Great American Songbook.

The 62-year-old Parton was in the Bay Area Tuesday night at the Greek Theatre on the UC Berkeley campus as part of her Backwoods Barbie tour. As amazing as she was – and boy howdy was she amazing – I was disappointed she didn’t mention the latest feather in her cap: Broadway composer.

One of Parton’s biggest movie and musical hits, 9 to 5, is heading to Broadway. In addition to the title song, she has written about 20 new songs for the show, which is directed by Joe Mantello of Wicked fame. The new musical has its world premiere Sept. 3 through Oct. 19 at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles before heading to Broadway’s Marriott Marquis Theatre. You can get tickets to the L.A. run here. Check out the site for the Broadway run here. Alison Janney heads the cast in the role played on film by Lily Tomlin.

Parton has always had a flair for the theatrical, so it’s not at all surprising she’s finally made her way to musical theater. And reports from rehearsals in L.A. are that Parton is so enthused about the project she shows up early and stays late whenever she can.

But rehearsing a Broadway show must be difficult when you’re taking your own show on the road.

Sadly, the crowd at the 8,500-seat Greek was not at capacity. Reports are that it was around 50 percent – a disappointing turnout for a living legend – but that was a wildly enthusiastic 50 percent, a fact Parton acknowledged when she said there may have been more people at the L.A. shows a few nights previous, but they weren’t as loud, as welcoming or as attractive.

Even before much of the crowd had taken its seats, indeed before the clock had even struck 8, Parton was rarin’ to go with “Two Doors Down,” which led directly into one of her rowdy pop-honky tonkers, “Why’d You Come In Here Lookin’ Like That?”

In between songs, while courteously taking flowers from fans and chatting with some kids in the audience (who know her as godmother to Miley Cyrus aka Hannah Montana), Parton showed off her glam high heels to the front few rows and, as a result of her short, spangly gold skirt, revealed more than she wanted. “Ohhh,” she squealed. “I think I just showed him the box office!”

Whether singing one of her classics (”Jolene”) or covering someone else’s (John Denver’s revised “Thank God I’m a Country Girl”), Parton is an extraordinary performer with boundless energy. I wasn’t always convinced the vocals were entirely live, but a girl does what she needs to do, and the Teleprompters on each side of the stage ensured there would be no lyrical gaffs.

From the spirited new album she performed a cover of Fine Young Cannibals’ “Drives Me Crazy” (complete with hoedown section) and the title track, which features the lyric: “I might look artificial but where it counts I’m real.”

Playing the dulcimer she sang “Shattered Image,” then accompanied herself on the autoharp for a touching version of “Coat of Many Colors.” Then she picked up the penny whistle for the Celtic-tinged “Only Dreamin’.” Act 1 ended in blaze of gospel glory with “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” bookending a mega-medley of gospel tunes.

Act 2 brought a sassy red dress and some of the most impressive showmanship I’ve seen on a stage. After a rousing “Baby I’m Burning,” Parton tore through two songs from the new album – the inspirational and funny “Better Get to Livin’” complete with video starring Amy Sedaris and the forgettable but fun “Shinola” – and then got down to some serious vocals.

Surrounded by the seven male members of her band, she sang an a cappella version of “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind,” and the already Dolly-crazy audience went ballistic. She stayed on the a cappella track with her two female backup singers for a chilling, thrilling “Little Sparrow” that made you long for an entire Parton concert with no band at all.

Then came the hit parade: “Here You Come Again,” “Islands in the Stream” (with Richard Dennison), “9 to 5″ (and no mention of the Broadway show) and, of course, “I Will Always Love You.”

Because of time restrictions at the Greek (city noise ordinances or some such), Parton trimmed the piano version of “The Grass Is Blue” she usually does, but she did end with her fiery new song “Jesus and Gravity.”

At one point early in the show, as the sun was setting, the sky turned a soft shade of pink over the stage as if to underscore the point that one of the best places in the universe is in the audience for a Dolly Parton show.

Here’s a pirated video from Parton’s European tour last month of “Little Sparrow.” The sound’s not perfect, but you’ll get the idea.

Tony Award-winning singer/actress Idina Menzel once was Wicked.

Now she’s going viral.

Menzel, who is on a concert tour promoting her most recent solo album, “I Stand,” received a fan video as a birthday present inspired by the title song from her new album.

Now Menzel has her own channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Idinamenzel?ob=1

And there’s a site on Facebook as well: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Idina-Menzels-I-Stand-Page/29492957536

She’s asking fans to submit their own videos declaring what they stand for. So far on the channel there are five videos. Maybe you should submit one.

Menzel’s concert tour pulls into San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts Theatre Aug. 14. Visit http://www.idinamenzel.com/ for information.

A Tony Award-winner for Wicked (and we all know it isn’t easy being green), Idina Menzel is bringing her concert tour to the Bay Area.

The former Rent star, who just released a major label album called I Stand, will play the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre on Aug. 14.

Though touring to support her new disc, Menzel (who appeared on big screens, but did not sing in Disney’s Enchanted), will not disappoint fans who want to hear her sing some of her famous show tunes. As Menzel told Playbill.com: “It’s not such a hard stretch because the shows I’ve been in are contemporary. I take them out of their context and unplug them a little bit and strip them down and put them more into the context of my show. They seem to work really well, and they’re not changed so much that die-hard theatre fans would be disappointed, I don’t think. I feel like I’m getting a good response. So that’s really nice for me, to kind of join all my worlds together, and it doesn’t feel like it’s so erratic. It feels cohesive, and it feels like all one artist.”

For information visit www.idinamenzel.com.

In terms of Broadway composers, Stephen Schwartz is up there with Sondheim and Lloyd Webber as one of the latter-day saviors of modern musical theater.

From his first show, Godspell, right up through his most recent hit, Wicked, Schwartz has been up, down and in between, but his work has been constant. Some of that work has been for movies as well. He won Oscars for his work on Disney’s Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and earlier this year, three of the songs he and Alan Menken wrote for Disney’s Enchanted were nominated for Academy Awards.

At 60, and with Wicked showing no signs of slowing down (the national tour hits the Bay Area yet again in February 2009), Schwartz doesn’t need creative projects, but a long-gestating revue/musical – we’ll call it a revusical, though Schwartz himself calls it a “musical scrapbook” – is coming up for air once again. Way back in the mid-’90s, Michael Scheman and David Stern, who were then both working on one of Broadway’s most notorious flops, Nick & Nora, approached Schwartz about using songs from his existing catalogue and turning them into something more than a revue – a book musical that told a story through songs and gave the songs – some familiar, some obscure – a new spin.

“They had a lot of down time working on Nick & Nora,” Schwartz explains on the phone from the TheatreWorks rehearsal hall in Mountain View. “They had the idea of taking my songs and putting them into a new story framework. I said it would be impossible for me to allow that. I’d never seen it done successfully and frequently seen it done unsuccessfully. But I said do a reading, I’ll come and we’ll see. They did, and I have to say, they had some interesting takes. For various reasons, nothing went much further. A few years later, the thing reared its head.”

The show, called Snapshots, saw incarnations in Norfolk, Va., and more recently at Seattle’s Village Theatre in 2005, but the TheatreWorks version that begins previews today (June 18) and opens Saturday, June 21, is even more fully revised and includes songs from Wicked.

Schwartz insists that this is not a revue because it does indeed tell a story (penned by Stern) about a middle-age couple whose marriage is on the brink of collapse. A box of old photos sends the couple reeling into the past. The structure allows six actors to play the couple at various ages. Schwartz thinks the concept really works this time around.

“I’ve seen this tried before, and the script and the songs are inconsistent in both lyrics and tone,” Schwartz explains. “The songs were clearly not meant to fulfill dramatic moments in this particular story. It always seemed like a shotgun marriage. When I saw what was being developed for this story in terms of interesting relationships, I said if you’re really going to do this, the lyrics ought to be revised and songs ought to be rearranged or put into medleys to tell the story properly. That’s what we’ve done. This is truly a hybrid in almost the true botanical nature of the word because it yields a strange, exotic flower for fruit.”

Schwartz estimates that all the songs – most from his shows and movies, with only the title song freshly penned – have been about 50 percent rewritten, which could irk his fans.

“I can see how audiences will either be intrigued by it and think it’s cool or some will say it’s too weird and that they’re not accustomed to hearing certain songs with new words,” he says. “It’s adventurous and challenging, which makes it fun.”

Admitting that some might consider it sacrilege to re-write songs like “Meadowlark” from The Baker’s Wife or “Popular” from Wicked, Schwartz says he relishes revisiting and revising his own work. In some cases, there are only a few lyrical changes, a verse here, a line here. In others, it’s the same tune with entirely new words.

“If, for instance, you know `Lion Tamer’ from The Magic Show, you’re suddenly going to hear words you’ve never heard before,” Schwartz says. “Other songs, like `Popular’ are pretty much the same except for a few words but in a totally different situation. If people are willing to get their heads turned around a little bit, then it’s fun. If that’s hard for them to do, it will just be annoying or disturbing.”

The last time Schwartz was in the Bay Area was to fine tune the world premiere of Wicked. He was so busy then that he didn’t deign to chat with journalists.

“In all honesty, the San Francisco run couldn’t have been better for us,” he says. “The show was well enough received that no one was panicking or feeling it was a disaster – no throwing of bathwater or babies. It was clear there was work to be done and revisions to be made in the book and the score. The critical community was, frankly, very helpful to us. We learned a lot from the reviews, which were honest and constructive in the aggregate, unlike New York, where the critics make up their minds before they come to the theater. It’s not just the negativity the critics express but their corruption.”

TheatreWorks, thankfully, is far from that critical crowd. Schwartz says he had enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the company and its founding artistic director, Robert Kelley, who is directing Snapshots. Schwartz even remembers – barely – a previous attempt at a Schwartz musical revue done at TheatreWorks in the late ’70s or early ’80s, but he can’t quite remember the name.

His big project at the moment is an opera commissioned by Opera Santa Barbara based on the movie Séance on a Wet Afternoon, a 1964 British film about a psychic who kidnaps a child to “prove” her abilities. The opera is slated to have its premiere in December 2009.

And for Wicked fans who were hoping that Schwartz and team might turn the book’s sequel, Son of a Witch, into a musical, don’t get your hopes up.

“I’m not big on sequels,” Schwartz says. “I don’t quite get why other than for economic incentive, they’re necessary. We told that story. I can understand the perspective of Gregory Maguire (the book’s author) about writing a sequel. I encouraged the writing of the sequel and another. I think he should make it a trilogy.”

Snapshots continues through July 13 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, corner of Castro and Mercy streets, Mountain View. Tickets are $26-$64. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.

Megan Hilty (left) as Glinda and Eden Espinosa as Elphaba from the original LA company of Wicked. Photo by Joan Marcus

Old friends, new winners mark 30th anniversary season

Carole Shorenstein Hays and Robert Nederlander’s new SHN/Best of Broadway season marks a milestone: 30 years of bringing Broadway to the Bay Area.

The new season, announced today, kicks off in February 2009 with a “third time’s the charm” production of Wicked, the monstrous hit musical that had its world premiere at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre. This time around, the musical about the witches of Oz, will play the Orpheum Theatre.

In March of 2009, Grease is the word. This is the production directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall that got famous for being the first Broadway musical to cast its leads on national television (through the NBC show “Grease: You’re the One That I Want.” This is also the production that marries the original stage version with the movie version, so songs such as “Hopelessly Devoted to You” and “You’re the One That I Want” are included.

Things get exciting in April 2009 with a world premiere musical. Ever After, with a book by Marcy Heisler and Theresa Rebeck, music by Zina Goldrich and lyrics by Marcy Heisler, is directed by Doug Hughes (a Tony winner for Doubt). Ever After, which plays the Curran, is based on the 1998 movie starring Drew Barrymore and is a new twist on the Cinderella story by banishing all the bibbi-dee-bobbi-dee boo elements and focusing on a spirited young woman defying societal constraints.

In August of 2009, the theater scene gets hot with Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for drama. The Steppenwolf production (currently scorching Broadway) is directed by Anna D. Shapiro. The San Francisco production at the Curran Theatre kicks off the national tour.

A final show is yet to be named, but is described in press materials as a “Broadway blockbuster.” The show will be revealed, according to the Web site, in July.

Not part of the season but a “special attraction” is the umpteenth return of a Bay Area favorite: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. The show will run Nov. 26 through Jan. 4 at the Orpheum. Tickets go on sale Sept. 7.

For the new SHN/Best of Broadway season, subscriptions are $170 to $551. Call 415-551-2050 or 877-797-7827 or visit www.shnsf.com for information.

Listen to a podcast about the new SHN/Best of Broadway season here.

I knew there’d be a theater connection eventually so I could write about it here.

A point of pride for me the last seven years or so was that I had never so much as seen an episode of “American Idol.” It was hard not to know every detail of the show, even without watching it, because it is treated as big news by every news outlet imaginable (except maybe Horse & Rider).

But this season, under the influence of a loved one, I got sucked in and I have even — please don’t judge — voted more than once in the past few weeks.

If you don’t know the “Idol” way, they try to liven things up by having “mentors” come in. The first one this season was Dolly Parton, and when the Idols sang her songs, the results were generally better than you might expect. This week was Mariah Carey, and the boys, surprisingly, outshone the girls singing Ms. Carey’s songs.

Next week, the mentor is Andrew Lloyd Webber, which means that the six remaining finalists — David Archuleta, Jason Castro, David Cook, Sayesha Mercado, Carly Smithson and Brooke White (I did that from memory — somebody save me) — will be singing SHOW TUNES! Never mind that they’ll also be dealing with the weirdness that is Sir Andrew. Remember when he “mentored” on the Grease casting/reality show “You’re the One that I Want”? Honestly, I thought maybe he was a high-functioning autistic man. And remember how generally awful the young contestants were singing his songs? And those were show kids trying out for a musical. I’m nervous about these Idol popsters and the show tunes.

But I’m hoping David Cook (my fave at the moment) sings “Gethsemane” from Jesus Christ Superstar.

And may I just be petty and say how very happy I am that Kristy Lee Cook (KLC — The Colonel as they say on Television Without Pity) has moved on?

Here’s a little something from YouTube to tide us (notice how I say us assuming that since I’m watching, everyone is) over until next Tuesday. It’s David Archuleta, a young man from Utah with a beautiful voice, sort of butchering “For Good” from Wicked.

Our world is turning green and pink again. Those wildly wonderful and wicked women are coming back.

SHN/Best of Broadway has announced that the mega-hit musical Wicked is returning to San Francisco, the city where the show was born in 2003. Can you believe it was five years ago already? We saw Wicked again — with all of its Broadway revisions (including the excision of that horrible song “Which Way’s the Party?”) intact — in 2005.

And now it’s hauling a load of flying monkeys, wizards, dragons, broomsticks, Munchkins up from Los Angeles to the Orpheum Theatre sometime in late January of 2009. There’s no closing date, so Wicked could be here for a good, long time.

Sure the show will be casting its usual spell, but no word on the actual casting of the roles, nor on when tickets might be going on sale.

Visit www.shnsf.com for information.

Last night I attended a screening of Disney’s big holiday movie, Enchanted, and I have to say, I was pretty charmed by the notion of a classic Disney animated feature turned on its head and morphed into a modern-day, live-action musical.

The trailer gives you a pretty good idea what the movie’s all about:

The songs are by the Academy Award-winning dynamic Disney duo of Stephen (Wicked) Schwartz and Alan (Beauty and the Beast) Menken. The pair previously collaborated on Disney’s Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And though there aren’t enough songs for my taste, there are two — a huge, joyful production number in Central Park that ends in a veritable festial surrounding Bethesda Fountain, and a romantic waltz at a ball sung by Jon McLaughlin – that make me anxious for the CD (slated for release Nov. 20, and the movie comes out Nov. 21).

Amy Adams plays Giselle, a gentle (and somewhat simpleminded) lass who has Snow White’s woodland cottage and affinity for all creatures great and small. In her hand-drawn animation bliss, she has Ariel’s red hair and Belle’s taste in clothes. Her Prince Charming (Edward, actually, played by James Marsden in his second musical of the year after Hairspray) is more taken with himself than with Giselle, but every prince needs his princess.

Of course Edward’s stepmother, the Queen (Susan Sarandon chewing the scenery), has a problem with a potential new queen, so she and her bumbling sidekick (Timothy Spall) figure out a way to kick Giselle out of animated fairy tale land and into the harsh reality of Times Square.

Soon Prince Edward, the sidekick and, eventually, the queen herself, end up in the real world, where people, doggone it, just don’t spontaneously burst into song.

Giselle is saved from a downpour by handsome lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey, naturally), single dad to an adorable princess-deprvied daughter (Dad wants her to have strong women role models like Marie Curie and Harriet Tubman). Of course they think this beautiful redhead is absolutely bonkers, but they both fall for her charms.

Robert’s somewhat harsh girlfriend is played by Idina Menzel (the Tony Award-winning star of Schwartz’s Wicked), who doesn’t even get to sing a song, which is a shame.

There’s a lot of charm in this movie — not the least of which is a computer-animated chipmunk named Pip that nearly steals the picture — and the “let’s make fun of musicals while loving them at the same time” tone works well .

That said, I have reservations — and they’re cynical and very non-fairy tale in spirit. I can just hear the Disney corporate meetings that concocted what amounts to a giant commerical for its new line of princess toys and princess costumes and princess birthday party kits and princess everything under the sun. The princess business is already booming, and this movie is sure to kick it into even higher gear (I hear there are already Macy’s tie-ins).

I’m all for girl-power, feminist-revisionist fairy tales, and when, at the end of Enchanted, it’s up to Giselle to save her mister in distress, it should be a lot more triumphant than it is. There were so many opportunities to be clever and smart here, and Adams’ utterly captivating performance (sincere and silly in equal measure, knowing and hearfelt and, yes, enchanting) could have take the movie to a much more finely etched portrait of female empowerment and charm. But the script (and the heavy-duty special effects) ultimately disappoints.

And may I chime in with all the 10-year-old girls and complain that we don’t get to see the final, most important wedding (there is a wedding, but it’s not really the one we want to see). And there should be a great final musical number, not a soundtrack song by Carrie Underwood.

Here’s the official Enchanted Web site. There are film clips and behind-the-scenes glimpses.

One of the most interesting documentaries of the year had nothing to do with health care or Iraq.

ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway sort of slipped in and out of theaters without a whole lot of fanfare, which is really too bad because director Dori Berinstein has created a fascinating glimpses behind the scenes of four major musicals opening in New York during the 2003-2004 season.

Luckily, the movie came out on DVD this week (Liberation Entertainment, $28.95).

For her movie, Berinstein picked four musicals to follow, and boy did she pick good ones: Wicked, Avenue Q, Caroline, or Change and Taboo.

Bay Area audiences, of course, got the first look at Wicked during its pre-Broadway tryout. We had the great fortune to see Caroline, and Avenue Q made its overdue local debut last August. The only real mystery in this bunch is Taboo, the Rosie O’Donnell-produced ’80s flashback revolving around Boy George: his life, his music and himself (he was in the cast).

Of the four, Wicked and Avenue Q were monster hits and are still running. Caroline is an esteemed flop by Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori. And Taboo is known as one of Broadway’s great disasters.

The movie follows each of the shows from the summer of 2003 up to the Tony Awards in 2004 when Avenue Q upset favorite Wicked for the Best Musical award.

Along the way, we get fascinating glimpses of the creative process, the marketing machine and the economics of Broadway. One of the juiciest threads involves tension between Jeff Marx, the co-composer of Avenue Q and Jeff Whitty, the book writer who was brought on board relatively late in the creative process.

It all ends happily, with Tony Awards for everyone, but the two did not get along, and it’s not pretty. Marx’s parents, by the way, turn out to be a highlight of the movie.

Director Berinstein includes several round-table discussions with New York theater critics, and this, to me, is a horror show. These nattering fools (save Charles Isherwood from the New York Times, who salvages a shred of dignity) make critics look like the lowest possible bottom feeders in the show business pool. Ouch.

Covering such a diverse assortment of shows, Berinstein ended up with more than 250 hours of video that had to be whittled down to 104 minutes.

“The season was a roller coaster with highly anticipated shows closing early and little shows coming out of nowhere to take Broadway by storm,” Berinstein says. “There was no way to predict where the Season was heading. Consequently, it was necessary to capture everything. Editing, as a result, was a massive and extremely difficult process. Narrowing down our primary storytelling to four musicals was excruciating. So many extraordinary moments are on the cutting room so to speak. I can’t wait until we assemble the DVD.”

Visit the movie’s official site at www.showbusiness-themovie.com.

Here’s the trailer from ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway, followed by a clip featuring Idina Menzel of Wicked.