PlaybillBaby It’s You is a new musical, which tells the story of how a housewife from New Jersey discovered The Shirelles in the 1960s and subsequently established a record label to showcase new in the pop music industry. The following description is taken from the press release provided by the Pasadena Playhouse, where the show has been running since 13th November:
Wrapped in the sensational songs of the ’60s, [i]Baby It’s You![/i] is the new musical about the groundbreaking girl group, The Shirelles, and Florence Greenberg, the New Jersey housewife who discovered them. With the help of African-American songwriter-producer Luther Dixon, who became her lover, Florence took on a male dominated industry and revolutionized pop music. Her company, Scepter Records, created the most important songs in the golden era of rock ‘n’ roll, from artists including The Isley Brothers, The Kingsmen, Chuck Jackson and Dionne Warwick.
So it’s a reverse gender Jersey Boys? But if we look at the photos – here are just two from a larger gallery at Playbill –
– perhaps it looks more like a low-key, low-budget [i]Dreamgirls[/i] with one extra dream.
Wicked became the first musical to gross more than $2 million for one week of performances, for the week that ended yesterday. I guess having a 1900-seat theatre with exorbitant ticket prices helps – something like an average of $144 a ticket in this particular week, the highest average for musical ticket prices in that week. I’d love to see what Stephen Schwartz’s royalty cheques for the show look like.
BroadwayWorld has a photo flash of The Addams Family in rehearsal. Just one of the shots to wet your appetites:
Make sure you check out the other shots too. It’s certainly done a lot to make me a bit more excited about the show than I did before. It makes me feel like the show is coming to life, as does this article about the show’s development from Variety. The most interesting quotation for me is this one, about the score:
“What kind of musical would Uncle Fester put on if Uncle Fester put on a musical?” [book co-writer Marshall Brickman] asks. (An old-fashioned, vaudeville affair, it turns out.) “Gomez, having Spanish origins, lives in a flamenco-inspired world. Wednesday’s music has electric guitar and Morticia’s has a leitmotif with a gypsy fiddle.”
It’s interesting to hear the score described in terms of language in the extract above, because that is one of the main problems I’ve had with Lippa’s work in the past, that he doesn’t seem able to (or lacks the discipline to) define a musical language that works dramatically for the world he’s creating on stage. I hope he manages to tie this one all together. It has the potential to be great!
This was definitely my favourite performance from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Yes, we’ve seen “America” countless times before and, sure, it would have been great to see a number like “Cool” instead. But putting that point to one side, the performance of this number was super and I may like Natalie Cortez even more than Karen Olivo. The dancing is super and, except for some weird angles from the way they’ve had to use the performance space, this extract was just about perfect – even if one moment of choreography was made a little more family friendly than usual. The “location” performances really do deal with many of the same challenges in the context of this parade, and this one faced them head on and came out tops for me.
Of the performances I’ve watched so far, Billy Elliot is one that I’ve enjoyed more than many of the others. Strange, perhaps, as this song has never been one of my absolute favourites in the score and I only really appreciate it when I see the staging, which makes it work despite any inconsistencies that might be found in the number itself. In this clip, it’s sold by the cast in terms of energy, which is all you can really ask for from one of these Thanksgiving Day performances can get. Polished in spite of the difficulties inherent to performing the number in this kind of setting; all it’s lacking is the dynamic of seeing it live in the theatre – and since that’s an impossibility, this is absolutely fine.
So this is the Bye Bye Birdie clip from Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. It’s quite fun watching Uncle Jesse go though the moves, although director-choreographer Robert Longbottom hasn’t done anyone any favours with his lame choreography – although the idea of all the girls being sad is nice. John Stamos is perhaps not ideal, but he is doing the best Dick van Dyke impersonation I think he can and, since it’s clear that Longbottom isn’t a(n actor’s) director, who can blame him?
I found the Ragtime performance in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade underwhelming. The setting is lovely, but the lip synchronization is very out at the beginning and I found the performer’s bodies lacking in energy, which is fine when the camera is on their faces but as soon as it pulled out to show their whole bodies… well, it was just dead. It kicks into a higher gear when the camera pans to the ensemble for a chorus or two of the opening number, but even this doesn’t look like a fully energised or committed performance, particularly from the folks in white and the African Americans.
I realise it’s difficult and early for the performers and all that, but… I just didn’t find it as thrilling as I think it should be.
CAPTION: Daniel Day Lewis tries to explain to Rob Marshall how Nine works dramatically and how so much of what seems to be happening to turn it into another Marshall-fest seems to work against that.
Marshall knows that many viewers loved Dreamgirls‘ staged musical numbers but had a problem with its more organically rendered tunes (like the one Jamie Foxx sang while strutting down an alley). ”The big question always is, why do people sing?” he says. ”One of the reasons I looked to Nine was that its songs are fantasy. So they can take place in an alternate reality.’
Personally, I’m getting very tired of that excuse and the technique of including musical numbers as a part of alternate realities is becoming old hat. People can be comfortable with characters singing on screen if it is set up and handled well, which is something that wasn’t successfully done in Dreamgirls. I also don’t believe that that was the sole reason that Dreamgirls didn’t grab a Best Picture nomination; the film had other fundamental flaws, which I’ve briefly discussed on Musical Cyberspace already.
Back to Nine – I guess what I’m wondering is how the transitions between reality and alternate reality will be handled. The contrivance of presenting the musical numbers as performance worked in Chicago because it had the concept of the performance being the ideas the Roxie turned into performances in her mind’s eye, which were then recorded in her journal. But what’s the justification for the concept here? Will the scenes be shot in a realistic location and the songs have the characters transfer into the big fantasy stage set, with all the flashy lights and glamorous costumes? Is this is meant to be how Guido, the director, sees the woman in his life? Are the numbers what Guido sees in his mind as ideas for his film? Is that too obvious a concept? Will it all end up being a film that has more style that it has depth? How Marshall handles these transitions could be the difference between a film that is entertaining and stylish and a film that is truly great.
Meanwhile, here’s another interesting quote by Rob Marshall in The Daily Mail:
In a way, it’s a new musical because we took the wonderful bones of what Nine was and re-shaped it as a film…. There will be no dubbing. Everyone can carry a tune and they’re all having singing lessons. They’re in pretty good shape, and we’ll have a 60-piece orchestra in the studio when we record the songs. It’s all going to be very sexy.
Marshall seems to love selling his musicals as “sexy”, doesn’t he? Focusing on the first point, however, I think this is a huge challenge. While I’m all for adapting stage musicals to suit the medium of film and think that, as an adaptation, Chicago was super, I hope Marshall manages to find that same mix as he did there and doesn’t make the same mistakes that, say, Dreamgirls, Hairspray and even Sweeney Todd did in their transition from stage to screen. I mention those three rather than examples like Phantom of the Opera or The Producers because I feel that they are all great film musicals that have a few fundamental flaws that simply prevent them from being completely brilliant, whereas the latter two are so bogged down by incompetence that they’re barely worth mentioning.
Another interview with Marshall:
Not much said there that’s controversial, but its nice to hear him talk about the cast and the cinematography.
So – to sum up – my doubts are primarily in regard to whether Marshall’s concept will end up justifying all of the choices he’s made in the making of Nine. If, in the final analysis, it works, then it works and the cuts (and interpolations) won’t matter. Whether it does (and whether they do) is what we’re waiting to see. Even with these huge concerns regarding the concept of the film and the way Marshall seems to be handling it from the statements he’s released, I’ll probably get swept away by it. I hope I do.
Musical Cyberspace 