Catherine Zeta-Jones: NIGHT MUSIC Stage Door

Posted on December 5, 2009 by David Fick

A short clip of Catherine Zeta-Jones at the stage door of A Little Night Music:

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PROMISES, PROMISES Poster

Posted on December 4, 2009 by David Fick

Courtesy of BroadwayWorld, we have a poster:

Promises, Promises Poster

Looks cool! I like it.

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Catherine Zeta-Jones in THE NEW YORK TIMES

Posted on December 2, 2009 by David Fick

There’s an entertaining interview with Catherine Zeta-Jones about the revival of A Little Night Music in The New York Times today: Send in the Song-and-Dance Gal. Here’s some of what Zeta-Jones has to say about the show:

There’s no jazzy hands, no high kicks, no fishnet stockings, but really that’s what excited me. With most musicals you have to fill in the gaps, but here you have what’s already a beautiful Chekhovian play, and the music is a bonus. The characterization is everything. It’s not one of those shows where you can dig about three inches and come out the other end. You can keep digging and digging and digging.

Also interesting is the section of the article in which Nunn justifies casting a younger Desiree in line with the film that inspired the musical, Smiles of a Summer Night. Enjoy it!

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First Look at A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

Posted on December 2, 2009 by David Fick

People has a first look of Catherine Zeta-Jones as Desiree:

Catherine Zeta-Jones

All right, haters, so she looks younger than Glynis Johns – but she does not look 18 either and one part of the approach to this revival is to pitch the characters’ ages in line with Smiles of a Summer Night. Eva Dahlbeck was 35 when she played the role in that film. Zeta-Jones is 40. They look absolutely comparable in terms of their “hit”. I’ve never heard anyone complaining about Dahlbeck and we’ve already been down this road before when Trevor Nunn’s production played London, where ultimately the idea seems to have worked just fine. And word of mouth at this point in time is that she’s good in the role, good enough to offer Christiane Noll, the obvious Best Actress candidate from Ragtime come Tony time, some stiff competition.

So have we got that out of they way? Good.

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RAGTIME to Close?

Posted on December 2, 2009 by David Fick

Officially, it has been said that there are “no plans to close at this time”, but Michael Riedel says in The New York Post that the rumour is that Ragtime will close on January 3rd…

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New SONDHEIM ON SONDHEIM Poster Art

Posted on December 1, 2009 by David Fick

Roundabout has released the newest poster artwork for their upcoming production of Sondheim on Sondheim, a revue that aims to use a high tech approach to get under the skin of Sondheim’s music and lyrics, including exclusive interview footage to contextualise the songs.

Sondheim on Sondheim Poster

The production will star Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams, Michael Arden and Leslie Kritzer, with proudction conception and direction by James Lapine.

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BABY IT’S YOU: a New Biographical Jukebox Musical

Posted on December 1, 2009 by David Fick

Playbill Baby 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 –

BABY ITS YOU 1
BABY ITS YOU 2

– perhaps it looks more like a low-key, low-budget [i]Dreamgirls[/i] with one extra dream.

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WICKED Breaks Box Office Record

Posted on November 30, 2009 by David Fick

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.

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THE ADDAMS FAMILY: Evolution of a Musical

Posted on November 30, 2009 by David Fick

BroadwayWorld has a photo flash of The Addams Family in rehearsal. Just one of the shots to wet your appetites:

THE ADDAMS FAMILY in rehearsal

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!

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WEST SIDE STORY at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

Posted on November 29, 2009 by David Fick

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.

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