D.E. Williams, Reuters
December 18, 2009, 5:47 pm
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - James Cameron is "the king of the world" again. "Avatar," the director's first feature since 1997's "Titanic," opens worldwide this weekend amid critical acclaim and expectations of boffo box office.
He recently spoke with the Hollywood Reporter about his early days, commercial success and his struggle to make "Avatar."
WHEN YOUR CAREER BROKE BIG IN 1984 WITH "THE TERMINATOR," YOU WENT FROM BEING A PART-TIME TRUCK DRIVER AND UNKNOWN FILMMAKER TO A HOT HOLLYWOOD WRITER-DIRECTOR.
Cameron: Well, I was actually a full-time truck driver and part-time scriptwriter! I remember pulling the truck over to the side of the road and hiding behind a billboard to write for 20 minutes, hoping that the other drivers wouldn't see me.
BUT AFTER THESE YEARS OF STRUGGLE, YOU BECAME A SORT OF QUINTESSENTIAL "OVERNIGHT SUCCESS." DID YOUR PERCEPTION OF FAME CHANGE?
I never thought of the director as ever being famous. My fantasy of it was that you sort of work in the shadows, creating these things. The actors become famous. But when I really got to the point of being recognized, even away from a venue where one of my films was screening, that's when it really started getting strange. The peak of that was, of course, the couple of weeks after the Academy Awards in 1998. Every other person on the street here in L.A. was looking at me.
THE "JAMES CAMERON" BRAND IS ON THE LEVEL OF A "GEORGE LUCAS" OR "STEVEN SPIELBERG." EVERY WRITER-DIRECTOR DREAMS OF HAVING THIS STATUS, BUT IS IT ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE?
It's very helpful when you try to do something radical and new, like "Avatar." When I pitched it at Fox, it was good to have a track record of successful films, to be able to say to them that I've never directed a film that has lost money, and I'm not about to start now. That was maybe the most compelling thing I said when I was asking them to fund a very expensive film in which the main characters were going to be completely CGI, with blue faces and big golden eyes and tails! Sometimes they'd ask, "Do they need to have tails?" Like it was about the tails. Well, it wasn't about the tails, it was about the fact that they were computer-generated characters and their unease with that. But I had this track record, which helped. I don't care how good the script was, I could not have gotten "Avatar" funded if I hadn't made "Titanic."
HOW DID "TITANIC" ALLOW YOU TO PURSUE OTHER INTERESTS DURING THE PAST 10 YEARS?
The success of "Titanic" assured me of two things. First, I've got an income for a while. Second, I've got a career that's not going to evaporate. I've had enough hits that people can't say it was a fluke. So I could go do some other things. And my logic was that I can't lead a deep-ocean expedition, riding around on 50-foot seas in a Zodiac, when I'm 80 years old. But I can direct a movie when I'm 80. So if I want to go do this expedition stuff (chronicled in Cameron's 2003 documentary "Ghosts of the Abyss"), this is the time to do it. And I didn't want to dabble in it; I wanted to embrace it and be good at it and have the respect of the institutional oceanographic community -- at least to the point that I wasn't just some crackpot. And that took some time. And it also took some time to build the technology -- camera housings, and even some things that sound simple, like a pan-and-tilt camera head that operates outside a submersible vehicle at great depths. That didn't exist. We had to make it, and make it work at 12,000 or 16,000 feet down. We built a lot of stuff -- robotics, lighting systems -- and those designs subsequently found their way into the work of other oceanographic institutes. Hollywood doesn't know about that world or even recognize it, but that's fine. I don't mind that, but it's a little funny when people ask me, "So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years?" Well, I've been really, really busy.
WILL IT SURPRISE PEOPLE TO HEAR THAT ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL DIRECTORS ON THE PLANET STILL HAS TO STRUGGLE TO GET HIS VISION TO THE SCREEN?
Well, if it was just about ego for me, I'd get to this point and then make some small movie -- small-er movie -- maybe a $50 million or $60 million film and just tell them to show up at the premiere. I'd just handle the rest. And I could probably get that deal, but that's not the kind of movie I want to make. And so long as I want to make these big films that have so much at risk, then I have to be in a more collegial partnership.
YOU POKED FUN AT YOUR OWN PUBLIC IMAGE IN MOVIES AND AT THE OSCARS WHEN YOU SAID YOU WERE KING OF THE WORLD. HOW DOES HUMOR HELP ONE DEAL WITH FAME?
I don't think some people understood that I was having fun with that moment at the Academy Awards. I think they thought I was just being an egotistical jerk! I think humor is very important in my day-to-day world. As a director you're a leader, whether on set or in post working with visual effects crews. It can get very tense and you have to be focused. But you can't constantly be this disciplined and detail-oriented guy. You have to crack up the room once in a while.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/entertainment/6604654/avatar-director-james-cameron-back-in-spotlight/
Friday, December 18, 2009
I believe in thing called (Meat) Loaf
Published: 12 Dec 2009
MIGHTY MEAT LOAF is making a comeback with former DARKNESS frontman JUSTIN HAWKINS steering his return to the big time.
Wow. What a combination. I predict Meat Loaf's voice and the rocker's guitar magic will spell sure-fire success.
Hawkins has penned five tracks for the forthcoming collection. And I understand an eight-minute axe epic called Love Is Not Real is the standout song so far.
Hawkins - whose track I Believe In A Thing Called Love was a No2 hit in 2003 - is hot song-writing property. He penned an anthem on American Idol runner-up ADAM LAMBERT's For Your Entertainment album, which hit No3 in the Billboard charts. And he's had loads of offers since.
Loaf's last studio album was 2006's Bat Out Of Hell 3. But the new offering won't be another in the series.
A source said: "There's a huge buzz about the material. They're amazing rock tracks and everyone is excited."
I can't wait to have a listen.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/2769002/Justin-Hawkins-backing-Meat-Loaf-comeback.html
MIGHTY MEAT LOAF is making a comeback with former DARKNESS frontman JUSTIN HAWKINS steering his return to the big time.
Wow. What a combination. I predict Meat Loaf's voice and the rocker's guitar magic will spell sure-fire success.
Hawkins has penned five tracks for the forthcoming collection. And I understand an eight-minute axe epic called Love Is Not Real is the standout song so far.
Hawkins - whose track I Believe In A Thing Called Love was a No2 hit in 2003 - is hot song-writing property. He penned an anthem on American Idol runner-up ADAM LAMBERT's For Your Entertainment album, which hit No3 in the Billboard charts. And he's had loads of offers since.
Loaf's last studio album was 2006's Bat Out Of Hell 3. But the new offering won't be another in the series.
A source said: "There's a huge buzz about the material. They're amazing rock tracks and everyone is excited."
I can't wait to have a listen.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/2769002/Justin-Hawkins-backing-Meat-Loaf-comeback.html
Thursday, December 17, 2009
LOVE NEVER DIES FULL CAST ANNOUNCED
17 December 2009
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long awaited new show “LOVE NEVER DIES” will have its World Premiere in London at the Adelphi Theatre on Tuesday 9 March 2010, followed by New York on Thursday 11 November and Australia in 2011.
“LOVE NEVER DIES” continues the story of ‘The Phantom’, who has moved from his lair in the Paris Opera House to haunt the fairgrounds of Coney Island, far across the Atlantic. Set ten years after the mysterious disappearance of ‘The Phantom’ from Paris, this show is a rollercoaster ride of obsession and intrigue...in which music and memory can play cruel tricks...and ‘The Phantom’ sets out to prove that, indeed, “LOVE NEVER DIES”.
“The Phantom of the Opera”, based on the French novel by Gaston Leroux, has proved a huge success the world over and has been seen by over 100 million people, making it the single most successful entertainment entity in history. The show has been translated into 15 languages and has played in over 25 different countries, including China, Brazil, Poland and Korea. “The Phantom of the Opera” opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on 9 October 1986 starring Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford and celebrated its 23rd London birthday on 9 October 2009. “The Phantom of the Opera” has won a staggering 50 awards worldwide, whilst global album sales currently stand at over 40 million copies.
Ramin Karimloo will create the role of ‘The Phantom’ in “LOVE NEVER DIES”, having already played the role to great acclaim in “The Phantom of the Opera” in London. Ramin’s other stage credits include starring as ‘Enjolras’ in “Les Misérables” in the West End, ‘Chris’ in the UK tour of “Miss Saigon” and ‘Artie Green’ in the UK tour of “Sunset Boulevard”. Ramin also played ‘Raoul’ in the West End production of “The Phantom of the Opera”, as well as the role of ‘Christine’s Father’ in Joel Schumacher’s film, making him the only actor to play all three of ‘Christine’s’ loves.
Sierra Boggess will create the role of ‘Christine’ in “LOVE NEVER DIES”. Sierra made her Broadway debut creating the lead role of ‘Ariel’ in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”, receiving both Drama League and Drama Desk Award nominations and a Broadway.com Audience Award for ‘Favourite Breakthrough Performance’. She also understudied the role of ‘Cosette’ in the U.S. national tour of “Les Misérables”. In 2007 Sierra was handpicked by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hal Prince to originate the role of ‘Christine’ in the brand new production of “Phantom - The Las Vegas Spectacular”. “LOVE NEVER DIES” marks Sierra’s West End debut.
Joseph Millson will play ‘Raoul’. He has worked extensively in theatre, film and television, including many roles at both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was nominated as ‘Best Actor 2001’ at the Royal Television Society Awards, and as ‘Most Promising Actor 1999’ and ‘Best Actor 2000’ at the National Television Awards for his starring role as ‘Sam Morgan’ in five series of “Peak Practice”.
Liz Robertson will play ‘Madame Giry’. Liz Robertson has starred in many West End and regional musicals, including “The King and I”, “The Sound of Music”, “I Love My Wife”, “The Mitford Girls” and “Song and Dance”. She starred as ‘Eliza Doolittle’ in “My Fair Lady” at the Adelphi Theatre for which she earned rave reviews and The Variety Club’s ‘Most Promising Actress’ Award, as well as an ‘Olivier’ nomination for ‘Best Actress in a Musical’.
Summer Strallen will play ‘Meg Giry’. She, also, has starred in many West End musicals, including “Scrooge”, “Cats”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Guys and Dolls”, “The Boyfriend” (for which she was nominated for the 2007 ‘Olivier’ Award for ‘Best Supporting Role in a Musical’) and “The Drowsy Chaperone” (for which she was nominated for the 2008 ‘Olivier’ Award for ‘Best Actress in a Musical’). She recently starred as ‘Maria’ in the London Palladium production of “The Sound of Music”, having won the role whilst playing ‘Summer Shaw’ in “Hollyoaks” on television.
‘Fleck’, ‘Squelch’ and ‘Gangle’ will be played respectively by Niamh Perry, Adam Pearce and Jami Reid-Quarrell. Niamh has recently starred as ‘Sophie’ in “MAMMA MIA!” at the Prince of Wales Theatre and was one of the twelve finalists in “I’d Do Anything” on BBC 1, in which she came fifth. Adam spent four years with the National Youth Music Theatre and has subsequently played in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat” and “Evita”, both at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Jami has worked with the English National Opera, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and was in the recent West End production of “Equus” and played the lead in “Depeche Mode” for television.
The cast will also include Derek Andrews, Dean Chisnall, Helen Dixon, Lucie Downer, Paul Farrell, Charlene Ford, Chris Gage, Lucy van Gasse, Celia Graham, Simon Ray Harvey, Jack Horner, Erin Anna Jameson, Pip Jordan, Jessica Kirton, Louise Madison, Janet Mooney, Colette Morrow, Tam Mutu, Ashley Nottingham, Tom Oakley, Mark Skipper, Jonathan Stewart, Tim Walton and Annette Yeo.
Lyricist Glenn Slater was nominated for the 2008 Tony and Grammy Awards for Disney’s theatrical production of “The Little Mermaid”. He is lyricist on the current London production of “Sister Act”. Bob Crowley, set and costume designer, recently worked on “Phèdre” with Helen Mirren at the National Theatre. His many award-winning productions include “The History Boys”, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, Disney’s “Aida”, “Mary Poppins” and “The Year of Magical Thinking”. Choreographer Jerry Mitchell recently made his directorial debut with “Legally Blonde”, both on Broadway and in the West End, and choreographed the award-winning musical productions of “La Cage aux Folles”, “Hairspray”, “The Full Monty” and “Catch Me If You Can”, which recently opened in Seattle. Director Jack O’Brien directed the award-winning London production of “Hairspray” and won Tony awards for the Broadway productions of Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia”, “Hairspray” and the 2004 production of “Henry IV”. His other productions include Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love”, “The Full Monty”, “Hapgood”, “Damn Yankees”, “The Little Foxes”, “Catch Me If You Can”, and operas including “Street Scene” at New York City Opera and “Il Triticco” at the Metropolitan Opera.
The World Premiere of “LOVE NEVER DIES” will take place in London on 9 March 2010 at the Adelphi Theatre. Previews begin on 20 February. The show will subsequently open in New York on 11 November 2010 and then in Australia in 2011.
March 2010 sees the Polydor/Universal release of the album of “LOVE NEVER DIES”, the long awaited follow up to “The Phantom Of The Opera” (the eighth best-selling album of ALL TIME, unprecedented for a musical theatre album). The album release will coincide with the opening of the show in London’s West End and will be available in both deluxe and standard versions.
http://www.loveneverdies.com/news/
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long awaited new show “LOVE NEVER DIES” will have its World Premiere in London at the Adelphi Theatre on Tuesday 9 March 2010, followed by New York on Thursday 11 November and Australia in 2011.
“LOVE NEVER DIES” continues the story of ‘The Phantom’, who has moved from his lair in the Paris Opera House to haunt the fairgrounds of Coney Island, far across the Atlantic. Set ten years after the mysterious disappearance of ‘The Phantom’ from Paris, this show is a rollercoaster ride of obsession and intrigue...in which music and memory can play cruel tricks...and ‘The Phantom’ sets out to prove that, indeed, “LOVE NEVER DIES”.
“The Phantom of the Opera”, based on the French novel by Gaston Leroux, has proved a huge success the world over and has been seen by over 100 million people, making it the single most successful entertainment entity in history. The show has been translated into 15 languages and has played in over 25 different countries, including China, Brazil, Poland and Korea. “The Phantom of the Opera” opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on 9 October 1986 starring Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford and celebrated its 23rd London birthday on 9 October 2009. “The Phantom of the Opera” has won a staggering 50 awards worldwide, whilst global album sales currently stand at over 40 million copies.
Ramin Karimloo will create the role of ‘The Phantom’ in “LOVE NEVER DIES”, having already played the role to great acclaim in “The Phantom of the Opera” in London. Ramin’s other stage credits include starring as ‘Enjolras’ in “Les Misérables” in the West End, ‘Chris’ in the UK tour of “Miss Saigon” and ‘Artie Green’ in the UK tour of “Sunset Boulevard”. Ramin also played ‘Raoul’ in the West End production of “The Phantom of the Opera”, as well as the role of ‘Christine’s Father’ in Joel Schumacher’s film, making him the only actor to play all three of ‘Christine’s’ loves.
Sierra Boggess will create the role of ‘Christine’ in “LOVE NEVER DIES”. Sierra made her Broadway debut creating the lead role of ‘Ariel’ in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”, receiving both Drama League and Drama Desk Award nominations and a Broadway.com Audience Award for ‘Favourite Breakthrough Performance’. She also understudied the role of ‘Cosette’ in the U.S. national tour of “Les Misérables”. In 2007 Sierra was handpicked by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hal Prince to originate the role of ‘Christine’ in the brand new production of “Phantom - The Las Vegas Spectacular”. “LOVE NEVER DIES” marks Sierra’s West End debut.
Joseph Millson will play ‘Raoul’. He has worked extensively in theatre, film and television, including many roles at both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was nominated as ‘Best Actor 2001’ at the Royal Television Society Awards, and as ‘Most Promising Actor 1999’ and ‘Best Actor 2000’ at the National Television Awards for his starring role as ‘Sam Morgan’ in five series of “Peak Practice”.
Liz Robertson will play ‘Madame Giry’. Liz Robertson has starred in many West End and regional musicals, including “The King and I”, “The Sound of Music”, “I Love My Wife”, “The Mitford Girls” and “Song and Dance”. She starred as ‘Eliza Doolittle’ in “My Fair Lady” at the Adelphi Theatre for which she earned rave reviews and The Variety Club’s ‘Most Promising Actress’ Award, as well as an ‘Olivier’ nomination for ‘Best Actress in a Musical’.
Summer Strallen will play ‘Meg Giry’. She, also, has starred in many West End musicals, including “Scrooge”, “Cats”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Guys and Dolls”, “The Boyfriend” (for which she was nominated for the 2007 ‘Olivier’ Award for ‘Best Supporting Role in a Musical’) and “The Drowsy Chaperone” (for which she was nominated for the 2008 ‘Olivier’ Award for ‘Best Actress in a Musical’). She recently starred as ‘Maria’ in the London Palladium production of “The Sound of Music”, having won the role whilst playing ‘Summer Shaw’ in “Hollyoaks” on television.
‘Fleck’, ‘Squelch’ and ‘Gangle’ will be played respectively by Niamh Perry, Adam Pearce and Jami Reid-Quarrell. Niamh has recently starred as ‘Sophie’ in “MAMMA MIA!” at the Prince of Wales Theatre and was one of the twelve finalists in “I’d Do Anything” on BBC 1, in which she came fifth. Adam spent four years with the National Youth Music Theatre and has subsequently played in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat” and “Evita”, both at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Jami has worked with the English National Opera, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and was in the recent West End production of “Equus” and played the lead in “Depeche Mode” for television.
The cast will also include Derek Andrews, Dean Chisnall, Helen Dixon, Lucie Downer, Paul Farrell, Charlene Ford, Chris Gage, Lucy van Gasse, Celia Graham, Simon Ray Harvey, Jack Horner, Erin Anna Jameson, Pip Jordan, Jessica Kirton, Louise Madison, Janet Mooney, Colette Morrow, Tam Mutu, Ashley Nottingham, Tom Oakley, Mark Skipper, Jonathan Stewart, Tim Walton and Annette Yeo.
Lyricist Glenn Slater was nominated for the 2008 Tony and Grammy Awards for Disney’s theatrical production of “The Little Mermaid”. He is lyricist on the current London production of “Sister Act”. Bob Crowley, set and costume designer, recently worked on “Phèdre” with Helen Mirren at the National Theatre. His many award-winning productions include “The History Boys”, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, Disney’s “Aida”, “Mary Poppins” and “The Year of Magical Thinking”. Choreographer Jerry Mitchell recently made his directorial debut with “Legally Blonde”, both on Broadway and in the West End, and choreographed the award-winning musical productions of “La Cage aux Folles”, “Hairspray”, “The Full Monty” and “Catch Me If You Can”, which recently opened in Seattle. Director Jack O’Brien directed the award-winning London production of “Hairspray” and won Tony awards for the Broadway productions of Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia”, “Hairspray” and the 2004 production of “Henry IV”. His other productions include Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love”, “The Full Monty”, “Hapgood”, “Damn Yankees”, “The Little Foxes”, “Catch Me If You Can”, and operas including “Street Scene” at New York City Opera and “Il Triticco” at the Metropolitan Opera.
The World Premiere of “LOVE NEVER DIES” will take place in London on 9 March 2010 at the Adelphi Theatre. Previews begin on 20 February. The show will subsequently open in New York on 11 November 2010 and then in Australia in 2011.
March 2010 sees the Polydor/Universal release of the album of “LOVE NEVER DIES”, the long awaited follow up to “The Phantom Of The Opera” (the eighth best-selling album of ALL TIME, unprecedented for a musical theatre album). The album release will coincide with the opening of the show in London’s West End and will be available in both deluxe and standard versions.
http://www.loveneverdies.com/news/
Roy Disney, nephew of Walt, dead at 79
By Adam S. Miller, Canwest News Service
December 16, 2009 4:03 PM
The revered nephew of Walt Disney died Wednesday after struggling with cancer, according to Clifford A. Miller, a spokesman for Disney's company Shamrock Holdings, as reported by the L.A. Times.
Roy Edward Disney was best known for his revival of Disney's famous animation team, and made headlines after organizing the dismissal of two of Disney's top executives — Ron Miller in 1984 and Michael Eisner in 2005.
He first began working for the Disney Company as his uncle's personal assistant director, producing True-Life Adventure films in 1954. He then married Patricia Ann Dailey in 1955 and had four children with her. He continued to work as a director, producer and writer until 1967 when he was elected to the Walt Disney Company Board of Directors.
Disney worked mainly on nature films for the first 20 years of his career with the company, including The Owl That Didn't Give A Hoot, Pancho, A Dog of the Plains as well as an Oscar-nominated short Mysteries of the Deep.
After Walt Disney died in 1966, followed by Roy's father in 1971, Roy was criticized for wanting to take on a larger role in the company. He decided to quit in 1977 over disagreements with corporate decisions at the time, but remained on its board, where he was largely a symbolic figurehead in the company.
He spoke of the controversial decision to resign later in life: "I just felt creatively, the company was not going anywhere interesting. It was very stifling."
In 1984, he resigned his seat on the board amid the turmoil of a corporate takeover, and after Ron Miller was replaced as CEO and company president by Michael Eisner and Frank Wells, Roy hastily returned to the company under the title of vice-chairman of the board of directors and head of the animation department.
In recent years, Disney saw his power in the company decline, which prompted his decision to resign from the board on Nov. 30, 2003, citing "serious differences of opinion about the direction and style of management."
He wrote a critical letter of Eisner's managing principles, stating that Eisner had gravely mismanaged the company, neglected the studio's animation division, failed deals with ABC, timidly handled the theme park business and most importantly instilled a corporate mentality in the company, which turned the Disney into a "rapacious, soulless" company.
After his resignation, Disney helped create the website SaveDisney.com, intended to oust Eisner and his supporters from their positions and to revamp the Walt Disney Company.
As criticism of Eisner increased, his position within the company became increasingly less significant and on March 13, 2005, Eisner announced that he would step down as CEO of the company one year before his contract was to expire.
Roy Disney's efforts to oust Eisner from the Disney Company were well-documented by author James B. Stewart in his best-selling book Disney War.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Disney+nephew+Walt+dead/2349151/story.html
December 16, 2009 4:03 PM
The revered nephew of Walt Disney died Wednesday after struggling with cancer, according to Clifford A. Miller, a spokesman for Disney's company Shamrock Holdings, as reported by the L.A. Times.
Roy Edward Disney was best known for his revival of Disney's famous animation team, and made headlines after organizing the dismissal of two of Disney's top executives — Ron Miller in 1984 and Michael Eisner in 2005.
He first began working for the Disney Company as his uncle's personal assistant director, producing True-Life Adventure films in 1954. He then married Patricia Ann Dailey in 1955 and had four children with her. He continued to work as a director, producer and writer until 1967 when he was elected to the Walt Disney Company Board of Directors.
Disney worked mainly on nature films for the first 20 years of his career with the company, including The Owl That Didn't Give A Hoot, Pancho, A Dog of the Plains as well as an Oscar-nominated short Mysteries of the Deep.
After Walt Disney died in 1966, followed by Roy's father in 1971, Roy was criticized for wanting to take on a larger role in the company. He decided to quit in 1977 over disagreements with corporate decisions at the time, but remained on its board, where he was largely a symbolic figurehead in the company.
He spoke of the controversial decision to resign later in life: "I just felt creatively, the company was not going anywhere interesting. It was very stifling."
In 1984, he resigned his seat on the board amid the turmoil of a corporate takeover, and after Ron Miller was replaced as CEO and company president by Michael Eisner and Frank Wells, Roy hastily returned to the company under the title of vice-chairman of the board of directors and head of the animation department.
In recent years, Disney saw his power in the company decline, which prompted his decision to resign from the board on Nov. 30, 2003, citing "serious differences of opinion about the direction and style of management."
He wrote a critical letter of Eisner's managing principles, stating that Eisner had gravely mismanaged the company, neglected the studio's animation division, failed deals with ABC, timidly handled the theme park business and most importantly instilled a corporate mentality in the company, which turned the Disney into a "rapacious, soulless" company.
After his resignation, Disney helped create the website SaveDisney.com, intended to oust Eisner and his supporters from their positions and to revamp the Walt Disney Company.
As criticism of Eisner increased, his position within the company became increasingly less significant and on March 13, 2005, Eisner announced that he would step down as CEO of the company one year before his contract was to expire.
Roy Disney's efforts to oust Eisner from the Disney Company were well-documented by author James B. Stewart in his best-selling book Disney War.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Disney+nephew+Walt+dead/2349151/story.html
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Purchased my copy of Love Never Dies CD thru eBay
From the same link that (at one time) was listing the tracklist. It's great because we use PayPal and not credit card and I was kinda depressed that I wasn't able to pre-order through the website. I have the money, and the payment should be made anytime between now and next week. I can't wait until March. At least I know the CD's coming. If I find it in the stores before it arrives, I'll pass it on to someone else.
Ryan.
Ryan.
Love Never Dies CD Tracklist?
According to an auction on eBay, this is supposed to be the (current) tracklist for the CD of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Love Never Dies", the sequel to "The Phantom of the Opera". This has since been removed (for good reason, I'm sure) but the information is still available on several other sites and frankly I'm amazed I didn't catch it sooner.
Disc 1
1. Prologue
2. The Coney Island Waltz
3. That's the place you ruined, you fool!
4. A Little Slice of Heaven
5. Only For Him/Only For You
6. The Ayrie
7. 'Till I Hear You Sing
8. Giry Confronts the Phantom/'Till I Hear You Sing (Reprise)
9. Christine Disembarks
10. Arrival of the Trio/Are You Ready to Begin?
11. What a Dreadful Town!...
12. Look With Your Heart
13. Beneath a Moonless Sky
14. Once Upon Another Time
15. "Mother Please, I'm Scared!"
16. Dear Old Friend
17. Beautiful
18. The Beauty Underneath
19. The Phantom Confronts Christine
Disc 2
1. Entr'acte
2. Why Does She Love Me?
3. Devil Take the Hindmost
4. A Little Slice of Heaven (Reprise)
5. Ladies... Gents!/The Coney Island Waltz (Reprise)
6. Bathing Beauty
7. "Mother, Did You Watch?"
8. Before the Performance
9. Devil Take the Hindmost (Quartet)
10. Love Never Dies
11. "Ah, Christine!..."
12. "Gustave! Gustave!..."
13. "Please, Miss Giry, I Want to Go Back..."
For the record now, my iTunes play count for "The Coney Island Waltz" is 39 and "Till I Hear You Sing" 20. It's some of the best music I've heard from a musical in years now.
Ryan.
Disc 1
1. Prologue
2. The Coney Island Waltz
3. That's the place you ruined, you fool!
4. A Little Slice of Heaven
5. Only For Him/Only For You
6. The Ayrie
7. 'Till I Hear You Sing
8. Giry Confronts the Phantom/'Till I Hear You Sing (Reprise)
9. Christine Disembarks
10. Arrival of the Trio/Are You Ready to Begin?
11. What a Dreadful Town!...
12. Look With Your Heart
13. Beneath a Moonless Sky
14. Once Upon Another Time
15. "Mother Please, I'm Scared!"
16. Dear Old Friend
17. Beautiful
18. The Beauty Underneath
19. The Phantom Confronts Christine
Disc 2
1. Entr'acte
2. Why Does She Love Me?
3. Devil Take the Hindmost
4. A Little Slice of Heaven (Reprise)
5. Ladies... Gents!/The Coney Island Waltz (Reprise)
6. Bathing Beauty
7. "Mother, Did You Watch?"
8. Before the Performance
9. Devil Take the Hindmost (Quartet)
10. Love Never Dies
11. "Ah, Christine!..."
12. "Gustave! Gustave!..."
13. "Please, Miss Giry, I Want to Go Back..."
For the record now, my iTunes play count for "The Coney Island Waltz" is 39 and "Till I Hear You Sing" 20. It's some of the best music I've heard from a musical in years now.
Ryan.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Jim Steinman's BAT OUT OF HELL A New Musical Spectacular
Website now online, just a sign-up page for news updates at this stage BUT A MIRACLE FOR JIM'S FANS!
Apparently there is also a double-page spread personally designed by Jim in the London Evening Standard. If anyone has this, please send in a scan.
http://www.batoutofhellthemusical.com/
Apparently there is also a double-page spread personally designed by Jim in the London Evening Standard. If anyone has this, please send in a scan.
http://www.batoutofhellthemusical.com/
Friday, October 30, 2009
Wow
I HAVE to point out this fantastic new video from YouTube containing images/film excerpts of classic Disney villains against the backdrop of one of Steinman's most theatrical songs. When I was younger, Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" was my all-time favourite film and I watched it repeatedly, and "Bat out of Hell 2" was my favourite album. Now, in what almost seems like a dream come true, my childhood inspirations have almost been combined, childhood inspirations that inspired me to become a writer: Jim Steinman's music and Walt Disney's artistry. This is incredible. Anyone with any interest in Disney films and Steinman music has to stop everything they're doing RIGHT NOW and watch this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa46GFQ3_qQ
Ryan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa46GFQ3_qQ
Ryan.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Updates to the website
* New home-page write-up
* New Essay section
* Press/Articles page combined
* FAQ slightly revised to include mention of Scaramouche who nobody @ Dark Knight Of The Soul has any contact with for those minority writing in & asking.
Recently site reached 33,333 hits after 3 years and 3 weeks precisely! How ironic!
Ryan.
* New Essay section
* Press/Articles page combined
* FAQ slightly revised to include mention of Scaramouche who nobody @ Dark Knight Of The Soul has any contact with for those minority writing in & asking.
Recently site reached 33,333 hits after 3 years and 3 weeks precisely! How ironic!
Ryan.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Andrew Lloyd Webber Disses Coney Island of Today
By John Del Signore in Arts and Events on October 20, 2009 2:54 PM
When news broke two weeks ago that Andrew Lloyd Webber had set his hotly-dreaded Phantom of the Opera sequel in Coney Island circa 1919, the AP quoted Webber saying, "[Coney Island] was the eighth wonder of the world. Think of Vegas and then triple it." But the wire service left out the best and most controversial part of that quote, and some Coney Island locals have been insulted a little bit.
The full quote Webber gave at the press conference included this declaration of war on the entire borough of Brooklyn: "Of course, Coney Island today is nothing at all.." Damn, you gonna take that Coney? Not Dennis Vourderis, co-owner of Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park, who tells the Daily News, "What he said is insulting. If we're 'nothing at all' why did he set his new musical here?" And Dick Zigun, founder of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, retorts, "We have a more authentic freak show than what he's got onstage."
A publicist for the sequel, called Love Never Dies, has tried to placate locals by insisting that Webber was "simply pointing out that it is a different place today than it was 100 years ago." Which is certainly true, but not for nothing, it's not "nothing." Until Weber personally apologizes to Coney Island, we're boycotting the Broadway transfer of Love Never Dies!
http://gothamist.com/2009/10/20/andrew_lloyd_webber_disses_coney_is.php
When news broke two weeks ago that Andrew Lloyd Webber had set his hotly-dreaded Phantom of the Opera sequel in Coney Island circa 1919, the AP quoted Webber saying, "[Coney Island] was the eighth wonder of the world. Think of Vegas and then triple it." But the wire service left out the best and most controversial part of that quote, and some Coney Island locals have been insulted a little bit.
The full quote Webber gave at the press conference included this declaration of war on the entire borough of Brooklyn: "Of course, Coney Island today is nothing at all.." Damn, you gonna take that Coney? Not Dennis Vourderis, co-owner of Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park, who tells the Daily News, "What he said is insulting. If we're 'nothing at all' why did he set his new musical here?" And Dick Zigun, founder of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, retorts, "We have a more authentic freak show than what he's got onstage."
A publicist for the sequel, called Love Never Dies, has tried to placate locals by insisting that Webber was "simply pointing out that it is a different place today than it was 100 years ago." Which is certainly true, but not for nothing, it's not "nothing." Until Weber personally apologizes to Coney Island, we're boycotting the Broadway transfer of Love Never Dies!
http://gothamist.com/2009/10/20/andrew_lloyd_webber_disses_coney_is.php
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Summer Strallen brings a little Ohh La La to the West End
By Baz Bamigboye
Last updated at 12:41 PM on 16th October 2009
Summer Strallen's definition of Ooh La La is 'it's like wow and fireworks at the same time'. In a way, she epitomises the term herself. She sashays through a lobby and heads turn. She moves the way Kay Thompson (Liza Minnelli's real-life godmother) did in Funny Face: as if her long legs are moving to a cool rhythm only she can hear.
As we exited my office building for a cup of cappuccino, I expected lush music to accompany her as she strode across the road.
Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and director Jack O'Brien have cast Summer to play the Ooh La La girl in the big-time musical Love Never Dies, which follows the Phantom from the Paris Opera across the Atlantic to Coney Island, where he calls himself Mr Y and runs the Phantasma funfair attractions.
The Ooh La La girl is the name Mr Y has given to Meg Giry, who was the young ballet student in the original Phantom musical.
'In the first Phantom, Meg's very quiet - not very outlandish - so when she goes to Coney Island she changes a lot. She wants attention and thinks she's going to be a star.
'She's from France and hasn't forgotten how to be French, so the French aspects, coupled with being in America, bring out the ooh la la in her! It's like "wow" and when you watch a firework display . . . Ooh la la! There's going to be fireworks, we hope,' Summer, 25, told me. Unfortunately, Mr Y feels Meg lacks style. 'He doesn't believe she has that class that Christine, his former protegee, possesses,' Summer told me.
Instead of writing Meg stirring arias, Mr Y gives her end-of-the-pier fare - and that's exemplified in Summer's big song-and-dance number Bathing Beauty, which director O'Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell plan to build into a rousing vaudeville turn.
'Meg's a dancer who wants to be a star,' is as much as the actress will give away.
Summer sang on the show's concept album and her character's story arc is brilliantly dramatic. But people will have to wait until preview performances begin on February 20 to discover what fate awaits her at Phantasma.
Summer will feature opposite Sierra Boggess as Christine and Ramin Karimloo, playing the Phantom.
Liz Robertson will play Meg's mother Madame Giry and Joseph Millson has the role of Christine's husband Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny.
Official rehearsals start early in January, although a lot of technical work has already been accomplished and Lloyd Webber's sublime score is complete.
Summer, who was in The Sound Of Music and Land Girls on BBC TV, is looking forward to the official opening night at the Adelphi on March 9. Her family will turn out in force and there's an affinity with the venue, too, because her father Sandy Strallen played there in Sunset Boulevard (another Lloyd Webber show) in the Nineties and her mother, Cherida Langford, trained children who have appeared there.
'My mother is already beside herself - and we haven't opened yet,' Summer declared.
The show will open to what could be the biggest box office in West End history.
By last night some £4.7 million worth of tickets had been snapped up in a week.
Interestingly, seats are being sold, through the Really Useful Company at least, without a booking fee.
Prices range from £25 to £67.50. Adding a booking fee would have sent prices to the £70 mark, which would have stirred up a revolt .
'The psychology is that £67.50 sounds a lot cheaper than £70,' one West End sage explained.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1220772/Summer-Strallen-brings-little-Ohh-La-La-West-End.html
Last updated at 12:41 PM on 16th October 2009
Summer Strallen's definition of Ooh La La is 'it's like wow and fireworks at the same time'. In a way, she epitomises the term herself. She sashays through a lobby and heads turn. She moves the way Kay Thompson (Liza Minnelli's real-life godmother) did in Funny Face: as if her long legs are moving to a cool rhythm only she can hear.
As we exited my office building for a cup of cappuccino, I expected lush music to accompany her as she strode across the road.
Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and director Jack O'Brien have cast Summer to play the Ooh La La girl in the big-time musical Love Never Dies, which follows the Phantom from the Paris Opera across the Atlantic to Coney Island, where he calls himself Mr Y and runs the Phantasma funfair attractions.
The Ooh La La girl is the name Mr Y has given to Meg Giry, who was the young ballet student in the original Phantom musical.
'In the first Phantom, Meg's very quiet - not very outlandish - so when she goes to Coney Island she changes a lot. She wants attention and thinks she's going to be a star.
'She's from France and hasn't forgotten how to be French, so the French aspects, coupled with being in America, bring out the ooh la la in her! It's like "wow" and when you watch a firework display . . . Ooh la la! There's going to be fireworks, we hope,' Summer, 25, told me. Unfortunately, Mr Y feels Meg lacks style. 'He doesn't believe she has that class that Christine, his former protegee, possesses,' Summer told me.
Instead of writing Meg stirring arias, Mr Y gives her end-of-the-pier fare - and that's exemplified in Summer's big song-and-dance number Bathing Beauty, which director O'Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell plan to build into a rousing vaudeville turn.
'Meg's a dancer who wants to be a star,' is as much as the actress will give away.
Summer sang on the show's concept album and her character's story arc is brilliantly dramatic. But people will have to wait until preview performances begin on February 20 to discover what fate awaits her at Phantasma.
Summer will feature opposite Sierra Boggess as Christine and Ramin Karimloo, playing the Phantom.
Liz Robertson will play Meg's mother Madame Giry and Joseph Millson has the role of Christine's husband Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny.
Official rehearsals start early in January, although a lot of technical work has already been accomplished and Lloyd Webber's sublime score is complete.
Summer, who was in The Sound Of Music and Land Girls on BBC TV, is looking forward to the official opening night at the Adelphi on March 9. Her family will turn out in force and there's an affinity with the venue, too, because her father Sandy Strallen played there in Sunset Boulevard (another Lloyd Webber show) in the Nineties and her mother, Cherida Langford, trained children who have appeared there.
'My mother is already beside herself - and we haven't opened yet,' Summer declared.
The show will open to what could be the biggest box office in West End history.
By last night some £4.7 million worth of tickets had been snapped up in a week.
Interestingly, seats are being sold, through the Really Useful Company at least, without a booking fee.
Prices range from £25 to £67.50. Adding a booking fee would have sent prices to the £70 mark, which would have stirred up a revolt .
'The psychology is that £67.50 sounds a lot cheaper than £70,' one West End sage explained.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1220772/Summer-Strallen-brings-little-Ohh-La-La-West-End.html
Phantom finds himself a new haunt
Friday, 16 October 2009
Andrew Lloyd Webber confessed that he has already sent the soundtrack of his latest musical, ‘Love Never Dies’ (sequel to ‘The Phantom of the Opera’) to two key figures – both of whom were involved in ‘Phantom’, and neither of whom have a part to play in the sequel: Cameron Mackinstosh, who worked with Lloyd Webber on the original, and Sarah Brightman (right), Lloyd Webber’s former wife and the first leading lady, Christine. Lloyd Webber said: “The two people in the world I most wanted to hear the soundtrack were Sarah Brightman and Cameron Macintosh.” After hearing the songs, Webber said that Cameron “wrote me one of the sweetest letters I have ever had”, while Sarah’s response was similarly supportive, and “funny”, he added. When quizzed about why Mackintosh was not producing the sequel, which takes place a decade after we last encountered the murderous phantom, now living on Coney Island, Lloyd Webber said: “Cameron has been incredibly supportive? but he has got his own life.” He said there would be no other sequels after this one. “I can’t say that the story could possibly continue.” The show opens on 9 March 2010 at the Adelphi Theatre, London
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/the-diary-andrew-lloyd-webber-john-walker-alice-channer-ian-mcewan-hilary-mantel-1803267.html
Andrew Lloyd Webber confessed that he has already sent the soundtrack of his latest musical, ‘Love Never Dies’ (sequel to ‘The Phantom of the Opera’) to two key figures – both of whom were involved in ‘Phantom’, and neither of whom have a part to play in the sequel: Cameron Mackinstosh, who worked with Lloyd Webber on the original, and Sarah Brightman (right), Lloyd Webber’s former wife and the first leading lady, Christine. Lloyd Webber said: “The two people in the world I most wanted to hear the soundtrack were Sarah Brightman and Cameron Macintosh.” After hearing the songs, Webber said that Cameron “wrote me one of the sweetest letters I have ever had”, while Sarah’s response was similarly supportive, and “funny”, he added. When quizzed about why Mackintosh was not producing the sequel, which takes place a decade after we last encountered the murderous phantom, now living on Coney Island, Lloyd Webber said: “Cameron has been incredibly supportive? but he has got his own life.” He said there would be no other sequels after this one. “I can’t say that the story could possibly continue.” The show opens on 9 March 2010 at the Adelphi Theatre, London
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/the-diary-andrew-lloyd-webber-john-walker-alice-channer-ian-mcewan-hilary-mantel-1803267.html
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
TILL I HEAR YOU SING...
TILL I HEAR YOU SING
From Love Never Dies
The day starts
The day ends
Time crawls by
Night steals in
Pacing the floor
The moments creep
Yet I can’t bear to sleep
Till I hear you sing
And weeks pass
And months pass
Seasons fly
Still you don’t
Walk through the door
And in a haze
I count the silent days
Till I hear you sing
Once more
And sometimes
At night time
I dream that you are there
But wake
Holding nothing but the
Empty air
And years come
And years go
Time runs dry
Still I ache
Down to the core
My broken soul
Can’t be alive and whole
Till I hear you sing
Once more
And music
Your music
It teases at my ear
I turn
And it fades away
And you’re not here
Let hopes pass
Let dreams pass
Let them die
Without you
What are they for?
I’ll always feel
No more than half way real
Till I hear you sing
Once more
From Love Never Dies
The day starts
The day ends
Time crawls by
Night steals in
Pacing the floor
The moments creep
Yet I can’t bear to sleep
Till I hear you sing
And weeks pass
And months pass
Seasons fly
Still you don’t
Walk through the door
And in a haze
I count the silent days
Till I hear you sing
Once more
And sometimes
At night time
I dream that you are there
But wake
Holding nothing but the
Empty air
And years come
And years go
Time runs dry
Still I ache
Down to the core
My broken soul
Can’t be alive and whole
Till I hear you sing
Once more
And music
Your music
It teases at my ear
I turn
And it fades away
And you’re not here
Let hopes pass
Let dreams pass
Let them die
Without you
What are they for?
I’ll always feel
No more than half way real
Till I hear you sing
Once more
Friday, October 9, 2009
Thoughts on the video for Love Never Dies
OK, I won't print any of the hundreds of articles now appearing on the internet, I'll just summarize...
We are treated to 2 songs from the show
The Overture/Coney Island Waltz & The Phantom's first solo
TILL I HEAR YOU SING...
Here are the lyrics a person from BroadwayWorld transcribed
QUOTE:
LYRICS:
The day starts
The day ends
Time crawls by
Night stealing(?)
Pacing the floor
The moment's creep yet I can't bear to sleep
Till I hear you sing
And weeks past, and months past
seasons fly
still you don't walk through the door
and in a hate I count the silent days
till I hear you sing once more
and sometimes and nighttime I dream that you are there
But wake holding nothing but the empty air
and eves come and leaves go
Time runs dry
Still I ache down to the core
My broken soul can't be alive and whole tell I hear you sing once more
and music your music, it teases in my ear
It turns and it fades away and you're not hear
Let hopes past. Let dreams past. Let them die
without you what are they for.
I'll always feel no more than halfway real
Till I hear you sing once more
[Sorry I can't structurally rewrite the lyrics for crap, and some I couldn't hear properly]
WATCH THE VIDEO @ www.loveneverdies.com!!!
The music is quite beautiful and soaring and I predict some success for Phantom 2 but, on the whole, it's nothing TOO special. It DOES feel like it will be better than most if not ALL of his scores since the original Phantom opened.
IMO.
Ryan.
We are treated to 2 songs from the show
The Overture/Coney Island Waltz & The Phantom's first solo
TILL I HEAR YOU SING...
Here are the lyrics a person from BroadwayWorld transcribed
QUOTE:
LYRICS:
The day starts
The day ends
Time crawls by
Night stealing(?)
Pacing the floor
The moment's creep yet I can't bear to sleep
Till I hear you sing
And weeks past, and months past
seasons fly
still you don't walk through the door
and in a hate I count the silent days
till I hear you sing once more
and sometimes and nighttime I dream that you are there
But wake holding nothing but the empty air
and eves come and leaves go
Time runs dry
Still I ache down to the core
My broken soul can't be alive and whole tell I hear you sing once more
and music your music, it teases in my ear
It turns and it fades away and you're not hear
Let hopes past. Let dreams past. Let them die
without you what are they for.
I'll always feel no more than halfway real
Till I hear you sing once more
[Sorry I can't structurally rewrite the lyrics for crap, and some I couldn't hear properly]
WATCH THE VIDEO @ www.loveneverdies.com!!!
The music is quite beautiful and soaring and I predict some success for Phantom 2 but, on the whole, it's nothing TOO special. It DOES feel like it will be better than most if not ALL of his scores since the original Phantom opened.
IMO.
Ryan.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
LOVE NEVER DIES has been ANNOUNCED!!!!
This is the email I just received from the newly rendered OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
PREVIEW PERFORMANCES BEGIN 20TH FEBRUARY 2010
TICKETS NOW ON SALE!
The principal characters of The Phantom of the Opera continue their stories in Andrew Lloyd Webber's LOVE NEVER DIES.
Ten years after the mysterious disappearance of The Phantom from the Paris Opera House, Christine Daaé accepts an offer to come to America and perform at New York's fabulous new playground of the world - Coney Island.
Christine arrives in New York with her husband Raoul and their son Gustave. She soon discovers the identity of the anonymous impresario who has lured her from France to sing.
LOVE NEVER DIES is a rollercoaster ride of obsession and intrigue...
in which music and memory can play cruel tricks... and The Phantom
sets out to prove that, indeed, LOVE NEVER DIES.
Watch the London launch at
www.loveneverdies.com
CLICK TO BOOK ONLINE
or call the Box Office on
0844 412 4651
ADELPHI THEATRE
Strand • London WC2
PREVIEW PERFORMANCES BEGIN 20TH FEBRUARY 2010TICKETS NOW ON SALE!
The principal characters of The Phantom of the Opera continue their stories in Andrew Lloyd Webber's LOVE NEVER DIES.
Ten years after the mysterious disappearance of The Phantom from the Paris Opera House, Christine Daaé accepts an offer to come to America and perform at New York's fabulous new playground of the world - Coney Island.
Christine arrives in New York with her husband Raoul and their son Gustave. She soon discovers the identity of the anonymous impresario who has lured her from France to sing.
LOVE NEVER DIES is a rollercoaster ride of obsession and intrigue...
in which music and memory can play cruel tricks... and The Phantom
sets out to prove that, indeed, LOVE NEVER DIES.
Watch the London launch at
www.loveneverdies.com
CLICK TO BOOK ONLINE
or call the Box Office on
0844 412 4651
ADELPHI THEATRE
Strand • London WC2
It begins...
Quote from BWW article (Can't find any others yet)
QUOTE:
"...Rialto Chatter has learned that "The Heart Is Slow To Learn", a number that debuted at Lord Lloyd Webber's 50th birthday concert and who's melody was used for the song "Our Kind Of Love" in his 2000 West End musical 'The Beautiful Game', will again return as part of the 'PHANTOM' sequel. Another song that struck a chord with people who have heard the score is the dark and romantic "Fortune Teller." Vocally the "Phantom" and "Christine" will be very different from their original musical identities. Interestingly, an audience member who witnessed the last full workshop, remarked that "Love Never Dies" is "a worthy chapter in the Phantom's story" and the most "romantic music we've heard in years."
http://broadwayworld.com/article/Lloyd_Webbers_LOVE_NEVER_DIES_Officially_Reveals_Itself_108_20091007
QUOTE:
"...Rialto Chatter has learned that "The Heart Is Slow To Learn", a number that debuted at Lord Lloyd Webber's 50th birthday concert and who's melody was used for the song "Our Kind Of Love" in his 2000 West End musical 'The Beautiful Game', will again return as part of the 'PHANTOM' sequel. Another song that struck a chord with people who have heard the score is the dark and romantic "Fortune Teller." Vocally the "Phantom" and "Christine" will be very different from their original musical identities. Interestingly, an audience member who witnessed the last full workshop, remarked that "Love Never Dies" is "a worthy chapter in the Phantom's story" and the most "romantic music we've heard in years."
http://broadwayworld.com/article/Lloyd_Webbers_LOVE_NEVER_DIES_Officially_Reveals_Itself_108_20091007
Monday, October 5, 2009
Thursday this week
It will not only be the press launch of "Love Never Dies", the sequel to "The Phantom of the Opera", but the day the new logo for my novel/night opera "Don Claude Devious" is unveiled on its respective website. I was really impressed with the results!
So big day Thursday!
I also heard back from Karla DeVito who sang on the original tour for "Bat out of Hell" in 1978, and recorded vocals for the Jim Steinman album "Bad for Good". She sent me a really sweet reply to my message about what it was like to record Jim's solo album which I think is brilliant and has never gotten the attention it deserved.
Ryan.
So big day Thursday!
I also heard back from Karla DeVito who sang on the original tour for "Bat out of Hell" in 1978, and recorded vocals for the Jim Steinman album "Bad for Good". She sent me a really sweet reply to my message about what it was like to record Jim's solo album which I think is brilliant and has never gotten the attention it deserved.
Ryan.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Andrew Lloyd Webber attempts to make history with Phantom of the Opera sequel
Andrew Lloyd Webber faces his greatest challenge yet this week when he launches the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera.
By Roya Nikkhah, Arts Correspondent
Published: 7:55AM BST 04 Oct 2009
Tickets to Love Never Dies are expected to go on sale on Thursday. The show, which is scheduled to open at the Adelphi Theatre in March 2010, will be the first ever West End musical sequel.
In a move that some theatre experts have described as "risky", Lloyd Webber will also attempt to make history by staging the first successful sequel to a musical anywhere in the world. All previous bids to repeat the triumph of original productions have failed miserably.
Love Never Dies continues the story of Christine Daaé, the beautiful Parisienne soprano who becomes the protégée of Erik, a mysterious, disfigured musical genius also known as the Phantom.
Billed as "a roller-coaster ride of obsession and intrigue", the sequel is set in 1907, 10 years after the mysterious disappearance of the Phantom from the Paris Opera House. The story unfolds as Christine accepts an invitation to perform at Phantasma, a new attraction at New York's Coney Island.
But when she arrives in New York with her husband, Raoul and their young son Gustave, she soon discovers the identity of the anonymous impresario who has lured her away from Paris
The original musical, which was based on the 1909 novel The Phantom of the Opera by the French author Gaston Leroux, opened in London in October 1986 at Her Majesty's Theatre. Composed by Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, it initially starred Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the leading roles.
The most successful live entertainment event of all time, it has spawned more than 20 productions around the world, taking over £3.5 billion at the box office and playing to more than 100 million people.
It also holds the record for the longest-running production on Broadway and the second-longest running in West End musical history, after Les Misérables.
Fans of The Phantom of the Opera have been hoping for a sequel since 1999, when the author Frederick Forsyth published the novel The Phantom of Manhattan with Lloyd Webber's approval. But plans to adapt the book for the stage were abandoned when it was poorly received by critics.
Lyrics to the £10 million production of Love Never Dies, which will feature a life-size automaton of Christine, have been written by Glenn Slater, who also wrote the songs for the hit West End show Sister Act.
It will star Sierra Boggess, the American soprano, and Ramin Karimloo, the Iranian-born baritone who is currently playing the lead in the London production of The Phantom of the Opera. If successful, the show is expected to open on Broadway next autumn.
Ken Davenport, a theatre producer whose shows include the Broadway musical 13 and Altar Boyz, the longest-running off-Broadway musical to open in the last 10 years, said that musical sequels were "a risky proposition".
"Nobody has attempted a musical sequel in a long time because there have been some really dismal failures in the past," he said. "It is an incredibly risky proposition and I was nervous when Andrew announced it.
"You could argue that sequels should only ever be done if the audience has had enough of the first run. But the Phantom is both a powerful global brand and a very romantic and mysterious character, so a lot of people will want to know what happened next.
"Certainly there is always the chance for a flop. People said in the past that Andrew could never write anything that wouldn't be a success, but then we got Whistle Down the Wind."
Whistle Down the Wind, Lloyd Webber's adaptation of the 1961 film about three children who discover a fugitive hiding in their barn, opened in Washington DC in 1996 to scathing reviews. Nicknamed "Whistle Down the Drain" by critics, its Broadway transfer was cancelled.
Musical sequels in the theatre have a woeful track record. The original production of Annie opened on Broadway in 1977 and ran for 2,377 performances, with similar success soon afterwards in the West End.
But a 1989 sequel, Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge opened to disastrous reviews and never made it to Broadway. In 1993, a second attempt at a sequel, Annie Warbucks, opened off-Broadway but fared little better, closing after only 200 performances.
The 1960 hit Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie, a satire of Elvis Presley, opened to critical acclaim and ran for 607 performances. But in 1981, the same creative team staged a sequel called Bring Back Birdie, which folded after just four performances.
A similar fate awaited the sequel to the 1978 Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which ran for 1,584 performances. Its successor, The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, opened in 1994 and closed after just two weeks.
Musicals with film sequels have avoided repeating the venture in the theatre. Grease and Dirty Dancing are both long-running West End productions as well as successful films. Their film sequels, Grease 2 and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, were commercial flops; neither has spawned a stage sequel.
Sir Tim Rice, the Oscar-wining lyricist who has collaborated with Lloyd Webber on musicals including Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, said that the fate of previous musical sequels was "irrelevant".
He said: "Rules are made to be broken and whether a musical is a sequel or original is irrelevant. All that matters is whether or not it is any good and word of mouth."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/6257769/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-attempts-to-make-history-with-Phantom-of-the-Opera-sequel.html
By Roya Nikkhah, Arts Correspondent
Published: 7:55AM BST 04 Oct 2009
Tickets to Love Never Dies are expected to go on sale on Thursday. The show, which is scheduled to open at the Adelphi Theatre in March 2010, will be the first ever West End musical sequel.
In a move that some theatre experts have described as "risky", Lloyd Webber will also attempt to make history by staging the first successful sequel to a musical anywhere in the world. All previous bids to repeat the triumph of original productions have failed miserably.
Love Never Dies continues the story of Christine Daaé, the beautiful Parisienne soprano who becomes the protégée of Erik, a mysterious, disfigured musical genius also known as the Phantom.
Billed as "a roller-coaster ride of obsession and intrigue", the sequel is set in 1907, 10 years after the mysterious disappearance of the Phantom from the Paris Opera House. The story unfolds as Christine accepts an invitation to perform at Phantasma, a new attraction at New York's Coney Island.
But when she arrives in New York with her husband, Raoul and their young son Gustave, she soon discovers the identity of the anonymous impresario who has lured her away from Paris
The original musical, which was based on the 1909 novel The Phantom of the Opera by the French author Gaston Leroux, opened in London in October 1986 at Her Majesty's Theatre. Composed by Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, it initially starred Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the leading roles.
The most successful live entertainment event of all time, it has spawned more than 20 productions around the world, taking over £3.5 billion at the box office and playing to more than 100 million people.
It also holds the record for the longest-running production on Broadway and the second-longest running in West End musical history, after Les Misérables.
Fans of The Phantom of the Opera have been hoping for a sequel since 1999, when the author Frederick Forsyth published the novel The Phantom of Manhattan with Lloyd Webber's approval. But plans to adapt the book for the stage were abandoned when it was poorly received by critics.
Lyrics to the £10 million production of Love Never Dies, which will feature a life-size automaton of Christine, have been written by Glenn Slater, who also wrote the songs for the hit West End show Sister Act.
It will star Sierra Boggess, the American soprano, and Ramin Karimloo, the Iranian-born baritone who is currently playing the lead in the London production of The Phantom of the Opera. If successful, the show is expected to open on Broadway next autumn.
Ken Davenport, a theatre producer whose shows include the Broadway musical 13 and Altar Boyz, the longest-running off-Broadway musical to open in the last 10 years, said that musical sequels were "a risky proposition".
"Nobody has attempted a musical sequel in a long time because there have been some really dismal failures in the past," he said. "It is an incredibly risky proposition and I was nervous when Andrew announced it.
"You could argue that sequels should only ever be done if the audience has had enough of the first run. But the Phantom is both a powerful global brand and a very romantic and mysterious character, so a lot of people will want to know what happened next.
"Certainly there is always the chance for a flop. People said in the past that Andrew could never write anything that wouldn't be a success, but then we got Whistle Down the Wind."
Whistle Down the Wind, Lloyd Webber's adaptation of the 1961 film about three children who discover a fugitive hiding in their barn, opened in Washington DC in 1996 to scathing reviews. Nicknamed "Whistle Down the Drain" by critics, its Broadway transfer was cancelled.
Musical sequels in the theatre have a woeful track record. The original production of Annie opened on Broadway in 1977 and ran for 2,377 performances, with similar success soon afterwards in the West End.
But a 1989 sequel, Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge opened to disastrous reviews and never made it to Broadway. In 1993, a second attempt at a sequel, Annie Warbucks, opened off-Broadway but fared little better, closing after only 200 performances.
The 1960 hit Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie, a satire of Elvis Presley, opened to critical acclaim and ran for 607 performances. But in 1981, the same creative team staged a sequel called Bring Back Birdie, which folded after just four performances.
A similar fate awaited the sequel to the 1978 Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which ran for 1,584 performances. Its successor, The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, opened in 1994 and closed after just two weeks.
Musicals with film sequels have avoided repeating the venture in the theatre. Grease and Dirty Dancing are both long-running West End productions as well as successful films. Their film sequels, Grease 2 and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, were commercial flops; neither has spawned a stage sequel.
Sir Tim Rice, the Oscar-wining lyricist who has collaborated with Lloyd Webber on musicals including Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, said that the fate of previous musical sequels was "irrelevant".
He said: "Rules are made to be broken and whether a musical is a sequel or original is irrelevant. All that matters is whether or not it is any good and word of mouth."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/6257769/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-attempts-to-make-history-with-Phantom-of-the-Opera-sequel.html
Saturday, October 3, 2009
The oompaloompas, live and in person
By Steven Zeitchik
Willy Wonka could soon be kicking up his heels.
Warner Bros. is developing a stage musical based on "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the children's classic that it bought to the big screen four years ago.
Sam Mendes' and Caro Newling's Neal Street Prods. are on board to produce the project. Mendes is eyeing it as a directing vehicle, but is far from making a decision on helming, said people familiar with the situation.
David Greig has been hired to write the book. The Scottish playwright has penned a slew of plays, including "Damascus," "The American Pilot" and the real-estate drama "The Architect," which became a 2006 movie starring Anthony LaPaglia.
Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, meanwhile, will compose the music; both worked on Warners/New Line 2007 big screen treatment of "Hairspray."
The concept behind the stage version of "Factory" is to take the candy-colored set pieces -- seen most elaborately in the effects of Tim Burton's 2005 pic -- and translate them to the stage, while also creating new musical elements and transferring some that animated the pic.
The project is being overseen by Gregg Maday's Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures, which was also involved in the musical adaptation of "The Color Purple" and the Elton John vampire musical “Lestat.”
Roald Dahl's children's classic -- about a poor boy who wins a tour of a mysterious chocolate factory from the eccentric Willy Wonka -- first came to the screen in 1971 from Paramount as "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory." The Warners version, titled “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and starring Johnny Depp as Wonka, made nearly $500 million worldwide for the studio in 2005, fusing Dahl's quirky imagination with Burton's elaborate visuals.
Maybe more important -- and more encouraging for Warners -- the property historically has been known for its music. The 1971 version won an Oscar for best original score and featured hits such as "The Candy Man Can," while the 2005 pic featured a score composed (and a few songs sung) by Danny Elfman.
Mendes has been the rare presence who toggles between film and stage work. He came to prominence as artistic director at London's Donmar Warehouse, and on the British stage has directed the Stephen Sondheim musical "Assassins" as well as the revival of "Cabaret," among others. In the U.S., he has in the past few years helmed "Gypsy" and "The Vertical Hours" on Broadway and Shakespeare and Chekhov at BAM.
But he is only at the consideration stage of directing any stage version of "Factory." The hyphenate is currently contemplating a number of film projects, particularly at Focus Features, where he is developing the George Eliot novel "Middlemarch," the cattle-herding saga "Butcher's Crossing" and the post-9/11 tale "Netherland" as producing and potential directing vehicles. He's also attached to the comicbook adaptation 'Preacher." Mendes most recently helmed the young-parent dramedy "Away We Go" for Focus.
http://www.riskybusinessblog.com/2009/10/charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory-musical.html
Willy Wonka could soon be kicking up his heels.
Warner Bros. is developing a stage musical based on "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the children's classic that it bought to the big screen four years ago.
Sam Mendes' and Caro Newling's Neal Street Prods. are on board to produce the project. Mendes is eyeing it as a directing vehicle, but is far from making a decision on helming, said people familiar with the situation.
David Greig has been hired to write the book. The Scottish playwright has penned a slew of plays, including "Damascus," "The American Pilot" and the real-estate drama "The Architect," which became a 2006 movie starring Anthony LaPaglia.
Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, meanwhile, will compose the music; both worked on Warners/New Line 2007 big screen treatment of "Hairspray."
The concept behind the stage version of "Factory" is to take the candy-colored set pieces -- seen most elaborately in the effects of Tim Burton's 2005 pic -- and translate them to the stage, while also creating new musical elements and transferring some that animated the pic.
The project is being overseen by Gregg Maday's Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures, which was also involved in the musical adaptation of "The Color Purple" and the Elton John vampire musical “Lestat.”
Roald Dahl's children's classic -- about a poor boy who wins a tour of a mysterious chocolate factory from the eccentric Willy Wonka -- first came to the screen in 1971 from Paramount as "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory." The Warners version, titled “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and starring Johnny Depp as Wonka, made nearly $500 million worldwide for the studio in 2005, fusing Dahl's quirky imagination with Burton's elaborate visuals.
Maybe more important -- and more encouraging for Warners -- the property historically has been known for its music. The 1971 version won an Oscar for best original score and featured hits such as "The Candy Man Can," while the 2005 pic featured a score composed (and a few songs sung) by Danny Elfman.
Mendes has been the rare presence who toggles between film and stage work. He came to prominence as artistic director at London's Donmar Warehouse, and on the British stage has directed the Stephen Sondheim musical "Assassins" as well as the revival of "Cabaret," among others. In the U.S., he has in the past few years helmed "Gypsy" and "The Vertical Hours" on Broadway and Shakespeare and Chekhov at BAM.
But he is only at the consideration stage of directing any stage version of "Factory." The hyphenate is currently contemplating a number of film projects, particularly at Focus Features, where he is developing the George Eliot novel "Middlemarch," the cattle-herding saga "Butcher's Crossing" and the post-9/11 tale "Netherland" as producing and potential directing vehicles. He's also attached to the comicbook adaptation 'Preacher." Mendes most recently helmed the young-parent dramedy "Away We Go" for Focus.
http://www.riskybusinessblog.com/2009/10/charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory-musical.html
Friday, October 2, 2009
Love Never Dies Budget $8 Million US
5.5million UK pounds.
Compare this to the reports "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark" is costing a staggering $45 million US to produce.
Also read my posts on "Love Never Dies" and "Spider-Man" and you'll see why I can easily route for Phantom 2 over that horrifying gluttonous Bono-ridden spectacle from every young artist's nightmare about the future lying in the gutter covered in rejection slips!
Ryan.
Compare this to the reports "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark" is costing a staggering $45 million US to produce.
Also read my posts on "Love Never Dies" and "Spider-Man" and you'll see why I can easily route for Phantom 2 over that horrifying gluttonous Bono-ridden spectacle from every young artist's nightmare about the future lying in the gutter covered in rejection slips!
Ryan.
Lloyd Webber's angels are waiting in the wings
By Baz Bamigboye
Last updated at 12:26 AM on 02nd October 2009
Investors are being asked to fund Andrew Lloyd Webber's £5.5million sequel to Phantom Of The Opera, Love Never Dies, in £25,000 blocks.
Theatrical angels can buy as many £25,000 units as they want.
One well-known theatrical and literary figure told me he was considering stumping up £500,000 for 20 units of the show, which will begin previews at the Adelphi Theatre on February 20 and have its official world premiere first night on March 9. (However, because of the complexities of opening a new musical, those dates may shift.)
Angels are also being given the opportunity, if they so desire, to plough their money into the three productions of Love Never Dies being set for London, New York and Australasia.
Director Jack O'Brien and designer Bob Crowley spent most of August at the Adelphi ensuring that sets involving illusions and special effects were given test runs.
Lloyd Webber told me earlier in the summer that he didn't want the complex sets screwing up rehearsals and previews and insisted any kinks be sorted out well in advance.
On Thursday, Lloyd Webber will gather folk at Her Majesty's Theatre, Haymarket (home of Phantom Of The Opera) to announce what this page told you several months ago: that Ramin Karimloo will play the Phantom - although for a while in Love Never Dies he's a mysterious figure known as Mr Y who runs the Phantasma funfair attraction on Coney Island where the action, set in 1907, takes place. Mr Karimloo has played the Phantom in London, and also the role of Raoul.
Soprano Sierra Boggess will play Christine, a part she knows well. She played Christine in the Las Vegas production of Phantom and both she and Karimloo played their respective roles on the Love Never Dies concept album, which I have heard and which, for me, marks the composer's best score in more than a decade. Certainly, it's lush, dramatic and romantic.
If everything works at the Adelphi, audiences will be swept off their feet.
Tickets are being priced from £25 to £67.50, which includes a 75p restoration levy, which I have to say I find a bit of a con. A lot of theatres do this, I know, but when I go to Waitrose or Morrisons, they don't ask me to donate money to fix up any of their crumbling stores. So why should the Adelphi?
Arlene Phillips, a million-and-one times better than woeful Alesha Dixon, on Strictly... is about to follow the yellow brick road.
She will choreograph the new Wizard Of Oz stage musical that's being put together by director Jeremy Sams, with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Glenn Slater providing some new songs.
Glenn has also written lyrics for Love Never Dies and Sister Act at the London Palladium. Wizard Of Oz will be part of some awful TV casting show, but I'm more interested in the stage version, which will hit the West End late next year or early in 2011.
Can't wait to see Arlene put those Munchkins through their paces.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1217522/BAZ-BAMIGBOYE-Pianos-tuned-Lets-show.html
Last updated at 12:26 AM on 02nd October 2009
Investors are being asked to fund Andrew Lloyd Webber's £5.5million sequel to Phantom Of The Opera, Love Never Dies, in £25,000 blocks.
Theatrical angels can buy as many £25,000 units as they want.
One well-known theatrical and literary figure told me he was considering stumping up £500,000 for 20 units of the show, which will begin previews at the Adelphi Theatre on February 20 and have its official world premiere first night on March 9. (However, because of the complexities of opening a new musical, those dates may shift.)
Angels are also being given the opportunity, if they so desire, to plough their money into the three productions of Love Never Dies being set for London, New York and Australasia.
Director Jack O'Brien and designer Bob Crowley spent most of August at the Adelphi ensuring that sets involving illusions and special effects were given test runs.
Lloyd Webber told me earlier in the summer that he didn't want the complex sets screwing up rehearsals and previews and insisted any kinks be sorted out well in advance.
On Thursday, Lloyd Webber will gather folk at Her Majesty's Theatre, Haymarket (home of Phantom Of The Opera) to announce what this page told you several months ago: that Ramin Karimloo will play the Phantom - although for a while in Love Never Dies he's a mysterious figure known as Mr Y who runs the Phantasma funfair attraction on Coney Island where the action, set in 1907, takes place. Mr Karimloo has played the Phantom in London, and also the role of Raoul.
Soprano Sierra Boggess will play Christine, a part she knows well. She played Christine in the Las Vegas production of Phantom and both she and Karimloo played their respective roles on the Love Never Dies concept album, which I have heard and which, for me, marks the composer's best score in more than a decade. Certainly, it's lush, dramatic and romantic.
If everything works at the Adelphi, audiences will be swept off their feet.
Tickets are being priced from £25 to £67.50, which includes a 75p restoration levy, which I have to say I find a bit of a con. A lot of theatres do this, I know, but when I go to Waitrose or Morrisons, they don't ask me to donate money to fix up any of their crumbling stores. So why should the Adelphi?
Arlene Phillips, a million-and-one times better than woeful Alesha Dixon, on Strictly... is about to follow the yellow brick road.
She will choreograph the new Wizard Of Oz stage musical that's being put together by director Jeremy Sams, with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Glenn Slater providing some new songs.
Glenn has also written lyrics for Love Never Dies and Sister Act at the London Palladium. Wizard Of Oz will be part of some awful TV casting show, but I'm more interested in the stage version, which will hit the West End late next year or early in 2011.
Can't wait to see Arlene put those Munchkins through their paces.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1217522/BAZ-BAMIGBOYE-Pianos-tuned-Lets-show.html
Monday, September 28, 2009
Tim Curry
It just occurred to me while watching clips from Stephen King's IT that Tim Curry would make an excellent Joker in The Musical. It would be a great comeback for him and I have ALWAYS wanted to see him take on some Steinman.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Getting the word out on new musicals…
By Mark Shenton on September 21, 2009 11:37 AM
Regular readers of this column will know how much I love musicals and how much I like to champion them. But so often, unfortunately, they behave like a chronically unfaithful lover, and repeatedly let you down. And eventually, it’s tempting to simply give up hope. Never mind that the West End and Broadway are full of musicals: finding an original one is hard to come by. This year we saw the fast failure of the most original ones to venture our way in ages, when Spring Awakening came to the Novello and quickly went.
Only Sister Act has stayed around, and that - with its pre-existing film source and pastiche score - is merely mediocre, but makes us feel pathetically grateful that it least it’s a new one, even if it deliberately sounds instantly recycled. On Broadway, things have been better this year with the thrilling Next to Normal, but beside it there’s also been Rock of Ages, another dire rock compilation show.
At least the autumn season there sees the start of previews this week for a new musical Memphis, set in the rock ‘n’ roll world but with both an original story (by Joe diPietro) and score (by Bon Jovi’s David Bryan), while next month sees the transfer from off-Broadway of Fela!, that uses the music of Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti (no, I haven’t heard of him, either, but his work is apparently a blend of jazz, funk and African rhythm and harmonies) to create what is described as a “provocative hybrid of concert, dance and musical theater.” That’s at least stretching the template of musical theatre a bit; but otherwise, we’re being thrown back on some safe(r) revivals: Bye Bye Birdie (already in preview), Finian’s Rainbow and Ragtime are all on the schedule imminently.
In London, we may be in the midst of the busiest autumn of new productions of plays that I can remember; but there’s barely a musical, new or old, amongst them. Only the Young Vic is reviving Annie Get Your Gun (of all things), and then Legally Blonde - the Musical arrives in December, to begin a long preview period at the Savoy before opening in mid-January. Otherwise, there’s the odd fringe entry, like the arrival of Christopher Hamilton’s debut musical Over the Threshold from its Edinburgh premiere to Jermyn Street Theatre this week, or the British premiere of Michael John LaChiusa’s First Lady Suite at the Union next week - both, coincidentally, presented under the auspices of Take Note Theatre, a young company dedicated to bringing “lesser known musical works to new audiences as well as encouraging, producing and developing our own shows through to full production.”
It’s youthful initiatives like this where the future may well lie. At least they instinctively recognise one important factor: it’s all very well to workshop shows endlessly (the US model), but the best way to make shows happen is by actually getting them up on their feet and in front of an audience, however small that audience might be (Jermyn Street has 70 seats, the Union around 50).
On the weekend, I saw another option: the revival of the old-fashioned regional try-out route. While regional theatres have all but abandoned doing original musicals as part of their regular output - they are simply too expensive and too risky to programme, so instead tried-and-tested revivals are offered, usually in the panto Christmas slot - I travelled to Ipswich on Saturday to see a new musical version of the 1946 Frank Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life, being tried out at the New Wolsey Theatre there. I looked up the last (and only) time I’ve been there before I went, and was astonished to discover that it was all of 20 years ago, when Trevor Nunn did a try-out there for the UK premiere he directed of Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife in 1989, before bringing it to the West End’s Phoenix Theatre (where it sadly ran for just over a month, and I’m not referring to the running time of the show but the length of the entire run).
This is a delightful, intimate auditorium (seating 400), and Ipswich has an increasing arts profile: the New Wolsey now has Gecko physical theatre company based there as an associate company, and a brand-new dance theatre, the Jerwood DanceHouse, is being built in the town, too, as part of a new residential tower, while the independent Red Rose Chain Film and Theatre Company is soon to have its own, purpose-built waterfront home, the Witchbottle Theatre. The town has also developed its own annual fringe festival (Pulse, which drew an admiring blog](http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/aug/05/edinburgh-fringe-ipswich-pulse-festival) from Andrew Haydon on The Guardian website, which noted that it “serves its local constituency perfectly. It doesn’t get, but nor does it need, much coverage from the national press.”
Nor, frankly, has the Wolsey attracted much national attention of late, but partly thanks to the services of a London theatre PR for It’s a Wonderful Life, many of us have made the trip for It’s A Wonderful Life; Variety’s David Benedict was there on Saturday afternoon along with me, and the Daily Mail’s Patrick Marmion, the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, and Sam Marlowe and John Peter for respectively The Times and the Sunday Times, have all been in. Though they’ve already been rewarded with a four-star review in the Daily Mail, it may be a little too early for such detailed scrutiny - though critical reactions are, of course, part of the process of the development of a new musical, I hope that the creators aren’t either lulled into a false sense of security by the positive notice, or sent off track by others that may follow.
There’s something here already, but there’s also serious work still to be done. But it’s encouraging, at least, that the first steps have been taken towards realising this work so confidently and ambitiously; and what’s enabled Ipswich to produce It’s a Wonderful Life (with a cast of 17, plus 7 kids and orchestra of four) is commercial enhancement money from London comedy, television and occasional theatre management Avalon Promotions (who also previously took Jerry Springer - the Opera from BAC to develop at the National in 2003, before then taking it into the West End). I hope Avalon stick with it, but also accept this as only a first draft. Just as Steve Brown’s last, Olivier Award winning musical Spend Spend Spend began its life at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, it could yet end up in the West End, but it needs careful nurturing.
And that’s what British musical theatre needs more of, in every way. Last night I heard some of how much raw talent is on offer, in a showcase evening of new musical writing called Snappy Title, staged at Piccadilly’s Pigalle Club to mark the launch of New Musicals Network, a new networking site for those interested in the creation and promotion of new musical theatre works. The evening showcased the work of some 15 composers or composing teams, most of them as yet unknown, but who include one, Joe Robinson, who is just 17 and another team, Julian Chenery and Matt Gimblett, who have been writing together for nearly as long as long as Joe has been alive!
The best part of last night was that it gave a live outing to songs that exist otherwise mainly as demos, and that’s how songs live: by being sung. (A terrific cast of young West End talent was assembled to give them their best shot, too; though I was shocked by the professional discourtesy of two of them, Jenna Lee James and Jon Boydon, in whispering comments to each other constantly while they waited their turn onstage as Lucy May Barker performed Joe Robinson’s number).
New musicals are clearly still being written, furiously, all over the place, but the challenge is now to translate that into wider distribution and hopefully production. Some composers are still trying the old-fashioned route of producing CD showcases - I’ve just received a beautifully produced one for Gareth Peter’s Bluebird, that features a cast that includes Ramin Karimloo, the current Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera and who will shortly be starring in Lloyd Webber’s follow-up Love Never Dies.
But I’ve also recently come across an even bolder attempt to use the internet to harness a potentially global audience to be interested in a new musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber may be getting his Phantom to twitter ahead of the launch of Love Never Dies, but as Lloyd Webber told me himself last year, the musical genre itself “will continue to change in ways that neither you nor I can see at the moment. In the next year or two - and it sure as hell won’t be me - there will be some kind of musical or entertainment that is evolved on the internet.”
And last week a musical writer Matthew Sweetapple wrote to me to say, “I read, with interest, your piece in which it’s suggested that Andrew Lloyd Webber believes the next big musical will originate on the internet. With this in mind, I wanted to bring the success of our on-line musical story to your attention as it demonstrates perfectly how well suited the internet/downloads etc are for musical story telling. Rockford’s Rock Opera was written by me, with Steve Punt (Now Show etc), it’s now been streamed by over 400,000 people and it’s being used in over 8,000 schools around the world. All though word of mouth on the web. I have loved musicals since I was very young. Crucially, for musical storytellers, the internet now provides an immediate world stage for our work.”
Now he wants to bring it to the theatre; as he wittily says, “Today the world, tomorrow the King’s Head?” Meanwhile, however, you can get a taster of what’s on offer by joining the online community: as Matthew says, “In true internet style, Part One is free so there’s lots to hear right now,” here.
http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2009/09/getting-the-word-out-on-new-musicals/
Regular readers of this column will know how much I love musicals and how much I like to champion them. But so often, unfortunately, they behave like a chronically unfaithful lover, and repeatedly let you down. And eventually, it’s tempting to simply give up hope. Never mind that the West End and Broadway are full of musicals: finding an original one is hard to come by. This year we saw the fast failure of the most original ones to venture our way in ages, when Spring Awakening came to the Novello and quickly went.
Only Sister Act has stayed around, and that - with its pre-existing film source and pastiche score - is merely mediocre, but makes us feel pathetically grateful that it least it’s a new one, even if it deliberately sounds instantly recycled. On Broadway, things have been better this year with the thrilling Next to Normal, but beside it there’s also been Rock of Ages, another dire rock compilation show.
At least the autumn season there sees the start of previews this week for a new musical Memphis, set in the rock ‘n’ roll world but with both an original story (by Joe diPietro) and score (by Bon Jovi’s David Bryan), while next month sees the transfer from off-Broadway of Fela!, that uses the music of Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti (no, I haven’t heard of him, either, but his work is apparently a blend of jazz, funk and African rhythm and harmonies) to create what is described as a “provocative hybrid of concert, dance and musical theater.” That’s at least stretching the template of musical theatre a bit; but otherwise, we’re being thrown back on some safe(r) revivals: Bye Bye Birdie (already in preview), Finian’s Rainbow and Ragtime are all on the schedule imminently.
In London, we may be in the midst of the busiest autumn of new productions of plays that I can remember; but there’s barely a musical, new or old, amongst them. Only the Young Vic is reviving Annie Get Your Gun (of all things), and then Legally Blonde - the Musical arrives in December, to begin a long preview period at the Savoy before opening in mid-January. Otherwise, there’s the odd fringe entry, like the arrival of Christopher Hamilton’s debut musical Over the Threshold from its Edinburgh premiere to Jermyn Street Theatre this week, or the British premiere of Michael John LaChiusa’s First Lady Suite at the Union next week - both, coincidentally, presented under the auspices of Take Note Theatre, a young company dedicated to bringing “lesser known musical works to new audiences as well as encouraging, producing and developing our own shows through to full production.”
It’s youthful initiatives like this where the future may well lie. At least they instinctively recognise one important factor: it’s all very well to workshop shows endlessly (the US model), but the best way to make shows happen is by actually getting them up on their feet and in front of an audience, however small that audience might be (Jermyn Street has 70 seats, the Union around 50).
On the weekend, I saw another option: the revival of the old-fashioned regional try-out route. While regional theatres have all but abandoned doing original musicals as part of their regular output - they are simply too expensive and too risky to programme, so instead tried-and-tested revivals are offered, usually in the panto Christmas slot - I travelled to Ipswich on Saturday to see a new musical version of the 1946 Frank Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life, being tried out at the New Wolsey Theatre there. I looked up the last (and only) time I’ve been there before I went, and was astonished to discover that it was all of 20 years ago, when Trevor Nunn did a try-out there for the UK premiere he directed of Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife in 1989, before bringing it to the West End’s Phoenix Theatre (where it sadly ran for just over a month, and I’m not referring to the running time of the show but the length of the entire run).
This is a delightful, intimate auditorium (seating 400), and Ipswich has an increasing arts profile: the New Wolsey now has Gecko physical theatre company based there as an associate company, and a brand-new dance theatre, the Jerwood DanceHouse, is being built in the town, too, as part of a new residential tower, while the independent Red Rose Chain Film and Theatre Company is soon to have its own, purpose-built waterfront home, the Witchbottle Theatre. The town has also developed its own annual fringe festival (Pulse, which drew an admiring blog](http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/aug/05/edinburgh-fringe-ipswich-pulse-festival) from Andrew Haydon on The Guardian website, which noted that it “serves its local constituency perfectly. It doesn’t get, but nor does it need, much coverage from the national press.”
Nor, frankly, has the Wolsey attracted much national attention of late, but partly thanks to the services of a London theatre PR for It’s a Wonderful Life, many of us have made the trip for It’s A Wonderful Life; Variety’s David Benedict was there on Saturday afternoon along with me, and the Daily Mail’s Patrick Marmion, the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, and Sam Marlowe and John Peter for respectively The Times and the Sunday Times, have all been in. Though they’ve already been rewarded with a four-star review in the Daily Mail, it may be a little too early for such detailed scrutiny - though critical reactions are, of course, part of the process of the development of a new musical, I hope that the creators aren’t either lulled into a false sense of security by the positive notice, or sent off track by others that may follow.
There’s something here already, but there’s also serious work still to be done. But it’s encouraging, at least, that the first steps have been taken towards realising this work so confidently and ambitiously; and what’s enabled Ipswich to produce It’s a Wonderful Life (with a cast of 17, plus 7 kids and orchestra of four) is commercial enhancement money from London comedy, television and occasional theatre management Avalon Promotions (who also previously took Jerry Springer - the Opera from BAC to develop at the National in 2003, before then taking it into the West End). I hope Avalon stick with it, but also accept this as only a first draft. Just as Steve Brown’s last, Olivier Award winning musical Spend Spend Spend began its life at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, it could yet end up in the West End, but it needs careful nurturing.
And that’s what British musical theatre needs more of, in every way. Last night I heard some of how much raw talent is on offer, in a showcase evening of new musical writing called Snappy Title, staged at Piccadilly’s Pigalle Club to mark the launch of New Musicals Network, a new networking site for those interested in the creation and promotion of new musical theatre works. The evening showcased the work of some 15 composers or composing teams, most of them as yet unknown, but who include one, Joe Robinson, who is just 17 and another team, Julian Chenery and Matt Gimblett, who have been writing together for nearly as long as long as Joe has been alive!
The best part of last night was that it gave a live outing to songs that exist otherwise mainly as demos, and that’s how songs live: by being sung. (A terrific cast of young West End talent was assembled to give them their best shot, too; though I was shocked by the professional discourtesy of two of them, Jenna Lee James and Jon Boydon, in whispering comments to each other constantly while they waited their turn onstage as Lucy May Barker performed Joe Robinson’s number).
New musicals are clearly still being written, furiously, all over the place, but the challenge is now to translate that into wider distribution and hopefully production. Some composers are still trying the old-fashioned route of producing CD showcases - I’ve just received a beautifully produced one for Gareth Peter’s Bluebird, that features a cast that includes Ramin Karimloo, the current Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera and who will shortly be starring in Lloyd Webber’s follow-up Love Never Dies.
But I’ve also recently come across an even bolder attempt to use the internet to harness a potentially global audience to be interested in a new musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber may be getting his Phantom to twitter ahead of the launch of Love Never Dies, but as Lloyd Webber told me himself last year, the musical genre itself “will continue to change in ways that neither you nor I can see at the moment. In the next year or two - and it sure as hell won’t be me - there will be some kind of musical or entertainment that is evolved on the internet.”
And last week a musical writer Matthew Sweetapple wrote to me to say, “I read, with interest, your piece in which it’s suggested that Andrew Lloyd Webber believes the next big musical will originate on the internet. With this in mind, I wanted to bring the success of our on-line musical story to your attention as it demonstrates perfectly how well suited the internet/downloads etc are for musical story telling. Rockford’s Rock Opera was written by me, with Steve Punt (Now Show etc), it’s now been streamed by over 400,000 people and it’s being used in over 8,000 schools around the world. All though word of mouth on the web. I have loved musicals since I was very young. Crucially, for musical storytellers, the internet now provides an immediate world stage for our work.”
Now he wants to bring it to the theatre; as he wittily says, “Today the world, tomorrow the King’s Head?” Meanwhile, however, you can get a taster of what’s on offer by joining the online community: as Matthew says, “In true internet style, Part One is free so there’s lots to hear right now,” here.
http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2009/09/getting-the-word-out-on-new-musicals/
Saturday, September 12, 2009
THE NEW BAT OUT OF EXCESS VIDEO BY ZOLTAR1979
NOW ONLINE @ MY JIM STEINMAN WEBSITE
http://www.freewebs.com/lordsteinman/
I love this guy's work! I'm so lucky to have been part of it.
You gotta check it out if you love Jim's music!
http://www.freewebs.com/lordsteinman/
I love this guy's work! I'm so lucky to have been part of it.
You gotta check it out if you love Jim's music!
Friday, September 11, 2009
The Trailer
I LOVE IT!
I hope they put this in the ads because it's so strange and frightening:
http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a206/rockfenris2005/batmanthemusical/loveneverdies1.jpg
THE MUSIC SOUNDS AS BRILLIANT AS "EVITA"!
I hope they put this in the ads because it's so strange and frightening:
http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a206/rockfenris2005/batmanthemusical/loveneverdies1.jpg
THE MUSIC SOUNDS AS BRILLIANT AS "EVITA"!
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
From the Webmaster
I can now reveal the first image from the opening video for the "Bat Out Of Excess" site ZOLTAR1979 has been working on. He sent me the rough tonight which I thought I was incredible. In all honesty, I was blown away. I don't know how he does it. We can't wait to reveal the full thing.
But here's the image.................................!
http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a206/rockfenris2005/batmanthemusical/excess.jpg
Ryan.
But here's the image.................................!
http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a206/rockfenris2005/batmanthemusical/excess.jpg
Ryan.
Patricia Sheridan's Breakfast With ... Michael Lee Aday (aka Meat Loaf)
Monday, September 07, 2009
By Patricia Sheridan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Meat Loaf, the man not the meal, made a name for himself as a hard-rocking, larger-than-life musician, but Michael Lee Aday (born Marvin Lee Aday) began his career on stage doing Shakespeare in the Park. Now 61, he is probably best known for his "Bat Out of Hell" operatic rock album trilogy that stayed on the charts for nine years and has sold more than 35 million copies. He stars in the Hallmark Channel's original movie "Citizen Jane" with Ally Sheedy on Saturday at 9 p.m.
So you play a detective in "Citizen Jane." I was wondering, when you were really young were you into true crime stuff since your father was a policeman?
Nah, I wasn't. The only thing I was into was the JFK conspiracy. One of my friends shook [President John F. Kennedy's] hand when he was leaving the airport. It was just all very strange in Dallas what went on.
So you come down on the side that there was a conspiracy?
Oh, absolutely. There was more than [Lee Harvey] Oswald.
Where did the onstage Meat Loaf persona come from, and are you surprised how enduring it has been?
Oh, that just came from me being a big ham, that's all. You know, it's very funny. I saw an interview from June of 1978 on a German TV show, and it makes me laugh.
I was playing such a character, it was unbelievable. I was playing the real Rock character at that point. [Laughs.] It makes me giggle. The problem is some of the people that do it, just keep going with it. They don't give it up. They keep that persona.
You were in a production of "Hair" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," and so many more movies and theater performances. Did you see yourself more as an actor?
Oh, I'm an actor. That's how I place it. It's what I do. That's exactly what I am and what I do. You know, other than my band, I don't get musicians. I don't understand. Actors are my friends.
After you wrote your autobiography "To Hell and Back" was there anything you wished you hadn't revealed?
No, there's a lot of stuff I didn't [reveal], a lot of stuff I didn't put in it on purpose, because I wanted to do another book. [Laughs.] I have seen a lot of things. I've been doing this 42 years now, knock on wood. When I went into show business, the first five years I didn't know it's what I was going to do. I was just kinda getting out of, you know, work [laughing]. I wound up doing "Hair." It was just fate. I think you are just meant to do things, and you just have to know when it's in front of you and just accept it and ride the river. Don't fight it.
I read that you turned down three different recording offers right out of the gate.
I did. I had been in L.A. about a week, and I got hooked up with these musicians. They said, "Let's go cut some demos," and I said, "OK." So we went into this studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. We were in there one day and by the end of the week we had three offers.
And you turned them down?
Oh, yeah. I knew that I had no clue.
That didn't go to your head?
I let very few things go to my head, actually. I've been fairly grounded. You know? People probably would have thought it went to my head because I was so driven to prove everybody wrong on "Bat Out of Hell." At the time we were doing "Bat Out of Hell" [in 1977] everybody was saying to me, "Oh, stop working with this guy Jim Steinman, and go to this and do that and go to this band." They said nobody would play these songs. Then we go play them live, and people went crazy. The record company people would come along and say, "Oh, these are only your friends. People don't react like this." I said, "These are not my friends. I don't have any friends." [Laughs.]
You were quoted as saying you never fit in and you are a true outcast. Don't you think your commercial success and the fact that you are starring in a Hallmark Channel original movie has moved you into the mainstream?
Oh, I've always said that about the music business. I have never felt that about the acting side. You know, you never get everything you audition for, which was something I didn't find out because when I was doing theater in New York, everything I auditioned for I got offered. I was really spoiled. So when they first rejected "Bat Out of Hell" I was really annoyed.
Did you run into a bit of a drug problem?
No, never did. I never did. I don't drink. At one point I had a nervous breakdown. That's what happened to me. I don't drink, and people knew I didn't, so when I started to drink, they said you're in trouble. That was a month maybe. It was short-lived. The godfather of my youngest daughter dragged me to a psychiatrist. Basically tied me up and set me in his office. So that worked out. It was fine. It was everything that had happened. The rejection, and then all of a sudden, after the rejection, you know, all the phoniness that comes out of it. "We believed in you the whole time," you know? One minute they are saying, "Get out of my office," and then patting me on the back, saying, "I knew you could do it." That kind of thing. It gets a little wacky. So that's the only time, so I never did have a drug or alcohol problem. The other thing that they say is I'm a diabetic. I am not a diabetic.
Because your dad was an alcoholic, wouldn't that keep you from it?
Yes, he was, and it really does. The other night we had dinner, and I had, like, half a glass of wine. That's my intake. I have such stage fright when we go on stage for shows that I do have a little sip of something before I go on.
You have stage fright, but once you are on you are OK?
Oh, yeah, it's just getting there. So not sleeping on the road, I understand completely. Most of the people I know, when we're on tour, have trouble sleeping. You know, when they were saying Michael Jackson had insomnia, I went "yeah." There have been times when I've said, "Hey, can you get me somebody in here to put me to sleep?" I'm so tired. I mean, it was unusual that somebody actually did it [for Michael Jackson], but to request it, I didn't find that unusual.
Do you have that same trouble when you are acting?
No. Stage is a different thing. That is more like touring. Acting is consuming but in a different way. When you are touring, you don't have 12-hour turn-arounds. You have to go with the flow because we are constantly traveling. That's the hard part of touring. It's really the most difficult. You can't wait to get off the road because you are so exhausted and so spent.
Is it true you were a vegetarian for nearly a decade and then started eating meat again?
Yes, but then I wanted to lose weight, so I went on an all-protein diet. I did lose some on Slim-Fast. I weigh less now than I did in the seventh grade. My knees are bad, and I broke a foot when I was in the eighth grade. If I do anything, the fracture comes back.
Last question: Will there be a "Bat Out of Hell IV"? It's like a franchise.
No, never. It was all about a trilogy and you know because of some of the things that happened. Jimmy wrote me an e-mail and said we need to do another thing, but it won't be called "Bat Out of Hell IV." I said, "Well, whenever you want to do it." I'm in the middle of a record now with a Rob Cavallo, who is like the god of producers at the moment. He's doing an Adam Lambert track, and I'm going over to meet Adam. Adam Lambert [of "American Idol" fame] is the only singer that I've ever thought was amazing. I think there have been great singers, you know, Freddie Mercury, Steven Tyler, you know, a lot of great rock singers. Michael Jackson was one, but Adam Lambert is one I haven't been awestruck with since [Janis] Joplin in the '60s. I don't think anybody actually comprehends how good this guy is. I mean, I downloaded everything he did for "American Idol." I'm like this Adam Lambert groupie.
Patricia Sheridan can be reached at psheridan@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2613.
First published on September 7, 2009 at 12:00 am
http://postgazette.com/pg/09250/996110-129.stm
By Patricia Sheridan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Meat Loaf, the man not the meal, made a name for himself as a hard-rocking, larger-than-life musician, but Michael Lee Aday (born Marvin Lee Aday) began his career on stage doing Shakespeare in the Park. Now 61, he is probably best known for his "Bat Out of Hell" operatic rock album trilogy that stayed on the charts for nine years and has sold more than 35 million copies. He stars in the Hallmark Channel's original movie "Citizen Jane" with Ally Sheedy on Saturday at 9 p.m.
So you play a detective in "Citizen Jane." I was wondering, when you were really young were you into true crime stuff since your father was a policeman?
Nah, I wasn't. The only thing I was into was the JFK conspiracy. One of my friends shook [President John F. Kennedy's] hand when he was leaving the airport. It was just all very strange in Dallas what went on.
So you come down on the side that there was a conspiracy?
Oh, absolutely. There was more than [Lee Harvey] Oswald.
Where did the onstage Meat Loaf persona come from, and are you surprised how enduring it has been?
Oh, that just came from me being a big ham, that's all. You know, it's very funny. I saw an interview from June of 1978 on a German TV show, and it makes me laugh.
I was playing such a character, it was unbelievable. I was playing the real Rock character at that point. [Laughs.] It makes me giggle. The problem is some of the people that do it, just keep going with it. They don't give it up. They keep that persona.
You were in a production of "Hair" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," and so many more movies and theater performances. Did you see yourself more as an actor?
Oh, I'm an actor. That's how I place it. It's what I do. That's exactly what I am and what I do. You know, other than my band, I don't get musicians. I don't understand. Actors are my friends.
After you wrote your autobiography "To Hell and Back" was there anything you wished you hadn't revealed?
No, there's a lot of stuff I didn't [reveal], a lot of stuff I didn't put in it on purpose, because I wanted to do another book. [Laughs.] I have seen a lot of things. I've been doing this 42 years now, knock on wood. When I went into show business, the first five years I didn't know it's what I was going to do. I was just kinda getting out of, you know, work [laughing]. I wound up doing "Hair." It was just fate. I think you are just meant to do things, and you just have to know when it's in front of you and just accept it and ride the river. Don't fight it.
I read that you turned down three different recording offers right out of the gate.
I did. I had been in L.A. about a week, and I got hooked up with these musicians. They said, "Let's go cut some demos," and I said, "OK." So we went into this studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. We were in there one day and by the end of the week we had three offers.
And you turned them down?
Oh, yeah. I knew that I had no clue.
That didn't go to your head?
I let very few things go to my head, actually. I've been fairly grounded. You know? People probably would have thought it went to my head because I was so driven to prove everybody wrong on "Bat Out of Hell." At the time we were doing "Bat Out of Hell" [in 1977] everybody was saying to me, "Oh, stop working with this guy Jim Steinman, and go to this and do that and go to this band." They said nobody would play these songs. Then we go play them live, and people went crazy. The record company people would come along and say, "Oh, these are only your friends. People don't react like this." I said, "These are not my friends. I don't have any friends." [Laughs.]
You were quoted as saying you never fit in and you are a true outcast. Don't you think your commercial success and the fact that you are starring in a Hallmark Channel original movie has moved you into the mainstream?
Oh, I've always said that about the music business. I have never felt that about the acting side. You know, you never get everything you audition for, which was something I didn't find out because when I was doing theater in New York, everything I auditioned for I got offered. I was really spoiled. So when they first rejected "Bat Out of Hell" I was really annoyed.
Did you run into a bit of a drug problem?
No, never did. I never did. I don't drink. At one point I had a nervous breakdown. That's what happened to me. I don't drink, and people knew I didn't, so when I started to drink, they said you're in trouble. That was a month maybe. It was short-lived. The godfather of my youngest daughter dragged me to a psychiatrist. Basically tied me up and set me in his office. So that worked out. It was fine. It was everything that had happened. The rejection, and then all of a sudden, after the rejection, you know, all the phoniness that comes out of it. "We believed in you the whole time," you know? One minute they are saying, "Get out of my office," and then patting me on the back, saying, "I knew you could do it." That kind of thing. It gets a little wacky. So that's the only time, so I never did have a drug or alcohol problem. The other thing that they say is I'm a diabetic. I am not a diabetic.
Because your dad was an alcoholic, wouldn't that keep you from it?
Yes, he was, and it really does. The other night we had dinner, and I had, like, half a glass of wine. That's my intake. I have such stage fright when we go on stage for shows that I do have a little sip of something before I go on.
You have stage fright, but once you are on you are OK?
Oh, yeah, it's just getting there. So not sleeping on the road, I understand completely. Most of the people I know, when we're on tour, have trouble sleeping. You know, when they were saying Michael Jackson had insomnia, I went "yeah." There have been times when I've said, "Hey, can you get me somebody in here to put me to sleep?" I'm so tired. I mean, it was unusual that somebody actually did it [for Michael Jackson], but to request it, I didn't find that unusual.
Do you have that same trouble when you are acting?
No. Stage is a different thing. That is more like touring. Acting is consuming but in a different way. When you are touring, you don't have 12-hour turn-arounds. You have to go with the flow because we are constantly traveling. That's the hard part of touring. It's really the most difficult. You can't wait to get off the road because you are so exhausted and so spent.
Is it true you were a vegetarian for nearly a decade and then started eating meat again?
Yes, but then I wanted to lose weight, so I went on an all-protein diet. I did lose some on Slim-Fast. I weigh less now than I did in the seventh grade. My knees are bad, and I broke a foot when I was in the eighth grade. If I do anything, the fracture comes back.
Last question: Will there be a "Bat Out of Hell IV"? It's like a franchise.
No, never. It was all about a trilogy and you know because of some of the things that happened. Jimmy wrote me an e-mail and said we need to do another thing, but it won't be called "Bat Out of Hell IV." I said, "Well, whenever you want to do it." I'm in the middle of a record now with a Rob Cavallo, who is like the god of producers at the moment. He's doing an Adam Lambert track, and I'm going over to meet Adam. Adam Lambert [of "American Idol" fame] is the only singer that I've ever thought was amazing. I think there have been great singers, you know, Freddie Mercury, Steven Tyler, you know, a lot of great rock singers. Michael Jackson was one, but Adam Lambert is one I haven't been awestruck with since [Janis] Joplin in the '60s. I don't think anybody actually comprehends how good this guy is. I mean, I downloaded everything he did for "American Idol." I'm like this Adam Lambert groupie.
Patricia Sheridan can be reached at psheridan@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2613.
First published on September 7, 2009 at 12:00 am
http://postgazette.com/pg/09250/996110-129.stm
Monday, September 7, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Former Charlottetown Festival hit headed back to Broadway stage
DOUG GALLANT
The Guardian
A Canadian rock musical developed at the Charlottetown Festival more than 30 years ago could be headed back to Broadway for the second time.
Kronborg 1582, a musical retelling of William Shakespeare's Hamlet created by composer/lyricist Cliff Jones, has been optioned by a Broadway producer intent on seeing the show remounted.
Jones, who has summered on P.E.I. since Kronborg 1582 was first produced at the festival in 1974, said in an interview Friday that he has been offered a contract and will begin work in the very near future with award-winning director Michael Greif.
Greif is best known for directing the original Broadway productions of RENT, Grey Gardens, Jane Eyre and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.
Kronborg 1582 first appeared on Broadway in 1976.
Renamed Rockabye Hamlet by then, the show Broadway audiences saw was not the show audiences saw in Charlottetown.
"It was a totally different show," Jones said. "Actress Coleen Dewhurst was a big fan. She brought her producers in from New York to see the show. They liked what they saw and I ended up going to New York to work with them.
"When she went to see a preview performance some months later she wouldn't talk to me for six months. She said 'where is all that beautiful music I heard in Canada.' It wasn't there. Gower Champion had turned it into a rock'n'roll show. His inspiration was a performance by (Yes keyboard player) Rick Wakeman at Madison Square Gardens."
Jones had not been keen on the changes but Champion won out.
"Who was I to argue with Gower Champion, a legend of Broadway?"
That version played to packed houses in previews for several weeks but was dealt a fatal blow on the actual opening night by two reviews, one in the New York Times the other in the New York Post. It closed after seven performances. There were several good reviews but the Times and the Post were king then.
"Everybody had thought it was going to be a hit. Producer Martin Richards, who would go on to produce Chicago, told me years later that at intermission on opening night he was offered five times what he paid for his shares in the show and turned the offer down because he thought it was going to be huge.'
The show returned to the stage in Los Angeles in 1981 as Somethin' Rockin' in Denmark.
Significantly revised from the New York production the new version had a very successful run at the Odyssey Theatre, playing for the better part of 18 months.
The Los Angeles version won several major awards.
"I felt somewhat vindicated after that."
Since the completion of that run the show has basically sat in a box in the basement of Jones' Toronto home.
The latest chapter in the Kronborg story began two years ago when Larry Westlake, who'd been involved in a lot of community theatre in the Toronto area, asked Jones if he'd be interested in doing anything because he was going to come into some money and he wanted to do more in the theatre.
When Westlake received his anticipated inheritance he approached Jones again and the idea for a 'workshop' production of Something's Rockin' In Denmark took off.
"We talked about it further and decided to move ahead," Jones said. "Then, quite unexpectedly and accidentally, producer Barbara Whitman who had produced Spelling Bee on Broadway and Legally Blonde, expressed an interest in my Hamlet musical! So the Toronto producer and I 'upped the ante', so to speak, and decided to produce a much glorified concert version."
Jones and his partner produced three performances of the show - once again called Something's Rockin In Denmark - at the prestigious Jane Mallett Theatre in late July with a band of four and a cast of eighteen.
"It played to packed houses and got roaring, standing ovations, not common in Toronto. I've never been hugged so much in my life, half from people I knew, half from people I didn't know."
Whitman saw two of those three performances.
Less than two weeks later Jones got the call that could send the show back to Broadway.
"I practically went through the ceiling."
Jones said he's older and wiser now and should the show proceed to Broadway he won't allow things to be radically changed the way they were the first time.
"It will look a lot like the show did when it first played Charlottetown. There were some things in the New York show that I did like and I will look at using them, but it will look a lot like the original."
Jones believes he owes a lot of his success to the place where it all began, Confederation Centre, and to the Charlottetown Festival.
"I love this place. My wife and I so look forward to coming back here every summer. I have a very strong emotional attachment to the centre. There is, as they say, a lot of my blood on these walls."
Jones clearly recalls getting the call from Jack McAndrew in Charlottetown that started it all.
McAndrew had heard an early version of the show Jones created for CBC Radio's The Entertainers starring Cal Dodd as Hamlet and P.E.I.'s Nancy White as Ophelia.
"So I get this call just after New Year in 1974 from Jack. He said, 'it's Jack McAndrew at the Charlottetown Festival and we want to do your show."
Jones came to Charlottetown and working with then festival artistic director Alan Lund, music director John Fenwick, and Fen Watkin, who did a number of the original charts, transformed a radio piece into a dramatic, full-fledged stage production.
Through that production he had the opportunity to work with several future stars, including Tony Award-winner Brent Carver, Rory Dodd, who would go on to work with Meatloaf and Beverly D'Angelo, who would go on to make her name in film, starring in Hair and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. She would also go on to marry Al Pacino.
The festival has also produced a number of other Jones musicals over the years, Love In The Back Seat, The Rowdyman, Babies and Alexandra: The Last Empress.
As for the future, Jones is not taking anything for granted.
"Who knows what will happen? Showbiz is not a predictable business. But no matter what happens from this point on, I am totally indebted to Charlottetown, the support of all my friends here on P.E.I. and the great Charlottetown Festival for providing me with what has become 'the thrilling ride of a lifetime'."
16/08/08
http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/index.cfm?sid=162819&sc=98
The Guardian
A Canadian rock musical developed at the Charlottetown Festival more than 30 years ago could be headed back to Broadway for the second time.
Kronborg 1582, a musical retelling of William Shakespeare's Hamlet created by composer/lyricist Cliff Jones, has been optioned by a Broadway producer intent on seeing the show remounted.
Jones, who has summered on P.E.I. since Kronborg 1582 was first produced at the festival in 1974, said in an interview Friday that he has been offered a contract and will begin work in the very near future with award-winning director Michael Greif.
Greif is best known for directing the original Broadway productions of RENT, Grey Gardens, Jane Eyre and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.
Kronborg 1582 first appeared on Broadway in 1976.
Renamed Rockabye Hamlet by then, the show Broadway audiences saw was not the show audiences saw in Charlottetown.
"It was a totally different show," Jones said. "Actress Coleen Dewhurst was a big fan. She brought her producers in from New York to see the show. They liked what they saw and I ended up going to New York to work with them.
"When she went to see a preview performance some months later she wouldn't talk to me for six months. She said 'where is all that beautiful music I heard in Canada.' It wasn't there. Gower Champion had turned it into a rock'n'roll show. His inspiration was a performance by (Yes keyboard player) Rick Wakeman at Madison Square Gardens."
Jones had not been keen on the changes but Champion won out.
"Who was I to argue with Gower Champion, a legend of Broadway?"
That version played to packed houses in previews for several weeks but was dealt a fatal blow on the actual opening night by two reviews, one in the New York Times the other in the New York Post. It closed after seven performances. There were several good reviews but the Times and the Post were king then.
"Everybody had thought it was going to be a hit. Producer Martin Richards, who would go on to produce Chicago, told me years later that at intermission on opening night he was offered five times what he paid for his shares in the show and turned the offer down because he thought it was going to be huge.'
The show returned to the stage in Los Angeles in 1981 as Somethin' Rockin' in Denmark.
Significantly revised from the New York production the new version had a very successful run at the Odyssey Theatre, playing for the better part of 18 months.
The Los Angeles version won several major awards.
"I felt somewhat vindicated after that."
Since the completion of that run the show has basically sat in a box in the basement of Jones' Toronto home.
The latest chapter in the Kronborg story began two years ago when Larry Westlake, who'd been involved in a lot of community theatre in the Toronto area, asked Jones if he'd be interested in doing anything because he was going to come into some money and he wanted to do more in the theatre.
When Westlake received his anticipated inheritance he approached Jones again and the idea for a 'workshop' production of Something's Rockin' In Denmark took off.
"We talked about it further and decided to move ahead," Jones said. "Then, quite unexpectedly and accidentally, producer Barbara Whitman who had produced Spelling Bee on Broadway and Legally Blonde, expressed an interest in my Hamlet musical! So the Toronto producer and I 'upped the ante', so to speak, and decided to produce a much glorified concert version."
Jones and his partner produced three performances of the show - once again called Something's Rockin In Denmark - at the prestigious Jane Mallett Theatre in late July with a band of four and a cast of eighteen.
"It played to packed houses and got roaring, standing ovations, not common in Toronto. I've never been hugged so much in my life, half from people I knew, half from people I didn't know."
Whitman saw two of those three performances.
Less than two weeks later Jones got the call that could send the show back to Broadway.
"I practically went through the ceiling."
Jones said he's older and wiser now and should the show proceed to Broadway he won't allow things to be radically changed the way they were the first time.
"It will look a lot like the show did when it first played Charlottetown. There were some things in the New York show that I did like and I will look at using them, but it will look a lot like the original."
Jones believes he owes a lot of his success to the place where it all began, Confederation Centre, and to the Charlottetown Festival.
"I love this place. My wife and I so look forward to coming back here every summer. I have a very strong emotional attachment to the centre. There is, as they say, a lot of my blood on these walls."
Jones clearly recalls getting the call from Jack McAndrew in Charlottetown that started it all.
McAndrew had heard an early version of the show Jones created for CBC Radio's The Entertainers starring Cal Dodd as Hamlet and P.E.I.'s Nancy White as Ophelia.
"So I get this call just after New Year in 1974 from Jack. He said, 'it's Jack McAndrew at the Charlottetown Festival and we want to do your show."
Jones came to Charlottetown and working with then festival artistic director Alan Lund, music director John Fenwick, and Fen Watkin, who did a number of the original charts, transformed a radio piece into a dramatic, full-fledged stage production.
Through that production he had the opportunity to work with several future stars, including Tony Award-winner Brent Carver, Rory Dodd, who would go on to work with Meatloaf and Beverly D'Angelo, who would go on to make her name in film, starring in Hair and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. She would also go on to marry Al Pacino.
The festival has also produced a number of other Jones musicals over the years, Love In The Back Seat, The Rowdyman, Babies and Alexandra: The Last Empress.
As for the future, Jones is not taking anything for granted.
"Who knows what will happen? Showbiz is not a predictable business. But no matter what happens from this point on, I am totally indebted to Charlottetown, the support of all my friends here on P.E.I. and the great Charlottetown Festival for providing me with what has become 'the thrilling ride of a lifetime'."
16/08/08
http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/index.cfm?sid=162819&sc=98
Friday, September 4, 2009
All a' Twitter over Phantom sequel tickets
Tickets for Love Never Dies, the musical sequel to Phantom Of The Opera, will go on sale - finally! - on October 8.
That's the message I'm hearing in various Twitter cyber-stations. Indeed, I have it on the highest authority (from the Phantom himself) that he will begin making announcements on Twitter from Monday and later there'll be pronouncements from the bowels of the Paris Opera on Facebook and loads of other social internet sites.
I can tell you that performances will begin at London's Adelphi Theatre in March.
Rehearsals will begin early in January, although those who follow this column will know that Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyricist Glenn Slater, director Jack O'Brien, designer Bob Crowley, choreographer Jerry Mitchell, lighting designer Paule Constable and other members of the creative team have been working on and off for a year on the show.
This week they were locked away at the Adelphi, as Crowley and his operatives worked on a series of illusions and special effects.
The composer told me that he wanted technical problems sorted out now, rather than early next year. 'I don't want to get to the eve of the first preview and find we're being held up by some illusion,' he said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1211097/BAZ-BAMIGBOYE-Ruperts-taste-secrets-lies.html
That's the message I'm hearing in various Twitter cyber-stations. Indeed, I have it on the highest authority (from the Phantom himself) that he will begin making announcements on Twitter from Monday and later there'll be pronouncements from the bowels of the Paris Opera on Facebook and loads of other social internet sites.
I can tell you that performances will begin at London's Adelphi Theatre in March.
Rehearsals will begin early in January, although those who follow this column will know that Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyricist Glenn Slater, director Jack O'Brien, designer Bob Crowley, choreographer Jerry Mitchell, lighting designer Paule Constable and other members of the creative team have been working on and off for a year on the show.
This week they were locked away at the Adelphi, as Crowley and his operatives worked on a series of illusions and special effects.
The composer told me that he wanted technical problems sorted out now, rather than early next year. 'I don't want to get to the eve of the first preview and find we're being held up by some illusion,' he said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1211097/BAZ-BAMIGBOYE-Ruperts-taste-secrets-lies.html
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Bits and pieces
* A friend of mine is a musician who works in the West End and I was talking to him about the music from the "Phantom of the Opera" sequel which I very much want to hear. He says it sounds brilliant and answered a couple of my questions. "Move into the darkness" is one of the songs.
* The Italian genius who designed the music video for "Dark entwined with darkness", the Scaramouche song, is working on a new opening video for my "Bat out of Excess" Jim Steinman website which will be ready in a few weeks time. He tells me he checks the "Batman" site every day. I'm so grateful that my efforts have not been in vain...unlike my musical...
* There has been an almost complete lack of interest and professionalism where the readings for my musical "Don Claude Devious" with Adam are concerned. I can not explain how depressed and disappointed that has made me because I may have to cancel my venue and dates after weeks of negotiations! I'm sooo angry at the moment.
- Ryan
* The Italian genius who designed the music video for "Dark entwined with darkness", the Scaramouche song, is working on a new opening video for my "Bat out of Excess" Jim Steinman website which will be ready in a few weeks time. He tells me he checks the "Batman" site every day. I'm so grateful that my efforts have not been in vain...unlike my musical...
* There has been an almost complete lack of interest and professionalism where the readings for my musical "Don Claude Devious" with Adam are concerned. I can not explain how depressed and disappointed that has made me because I may have to cancel my venue and dates after weeks of negotiations! I'm sooo angry at the moment.
- Ryan
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Portrait of the artist: Tim Rice, lyricist
Laura Barnett
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 August 2009 22.30 BST
What got you started?
Meeting Andrew [Lloyd Webber]. I was 19, and a law student. I knew I wanted to write something – songs or film scripts – but it seemed an impossible dream. Then I met Andrew through a book publisher, and he convinced me that it was all going to happen.
What was your big breakthrough?
A schoolmaster at St Paul's School in London asked Andrew and me to compose something for a concert in 1968. We wrote Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Sunday Times critic Derek Jewell came because his son was at the school, and wrote a review predicting a great future for us.
What have you sacrificed for your art?
Nothing deliberately. It has actually allowed me to do thousands of things I wouldn't otherwise have done – so sacrifice is 100% the wrong word.
What's your favourite museum?
The Frick Collection in New York. Almost every piece in it is good, and it has my favourite painting – Holbein's fantastic portrait of Sir Thomas More.
What one song would work as the soundtrack to your life?
Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's Alright. It's more realistic than most love songs – it's saying, I know you're wasting my time, but I don't mind.
Should musicals be taken more seriously?
If they're good. There are so many awful ones that the few brilliant ones get a bad name. But it's the same with opera – there are zillions of appalling operas, but no one says: "My God, all opera is crap."
Complete this sentence: At heart I'm just a frustrated . . .
Benign dictator.
What's the greatest threat to theatre?
I'm not sure there is one – people love live performance. Before too long, we might be able to download West End shows live to our front room in hologram form. But that's probably still a few weeks away.
Who would you most like to work with?
I would love to write a song with the Everly brothers. But it's probably best not to work with someone you admire: they'll just show up your inadequacies.
What's the best advice anyone ever gave you?
David Land, my original manager, said: "Don't put your own money into your shows." He was right: if you work for five years on a show and it's a flop, at least you've only wasted your time.
What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?
After Evita, a critic said: "Tim Rice has put in another strong claim to be the worst lyricist in the world." I wanted to write in and say: "Could you tell me who the second worst is, so I've got something to aim for?"
Born: Amersham, 1944.
Career: Best known for his work with Andrew Lloyd Webber. Also wrote the lyrics for Chess, last year's performance of which at the Albert Hall is released on CD and DVD on 14 September.
High point: "The opening night of Evita in 1978. Everybody in the show was at the top of their game."
Low point: "The 1988 production of Chess on Broadway. It was an absolute disaster."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/24/tim-rice-lyricist
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 August 2009 22.30 BST
What got you started?
Meeting Andrew [Lloyd Webber]. I was 19, and a law student. I knew I wanted to write something – songs or film scripts – but it seemed an impossible dream. Then I met Andrew through a book publisher, and he convinced me that it was all going to happen.
What was your big breakthrough?
A schoolmaster at St Paul's School in London asked Andrew and me to compose something for a concert in 1968. We wrote Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Sunday Times critic Derek Jewell came because his son was at the school, and wrote a review predicting a great future for us.
What have you sacrificed for your art?
Nothing deliberately. It has actually allowed me to do thousands of things I wouldn't otherwise have done – so sacrifice is 100% the wrong word.
What's your favourite museum?
The Frick Collection in New York. Almost every piece in it is good, and it has my favourite painting – Holbein's fantastic portrait of Sir Thomas More.
What one song would work as the soundtrack to your life?
Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's Alright. It's more realistic than most love songs – it's saying, I know you're wasting my time, but I don't mind.
Should musicals be taken more seriously?
If they're good. There are so many awful ones that the few brilliant ones get a bad name. But it's the same with opera – there are zillions of appalling operas, but no one says: "My God, all opera is crap."
Complete this sentence: At heart I'm just a frustrated . . .
Benign dictator.
What's the greatest threat to theatre?
I'm not sure there is one – people love live performance. Before too long, we might be able to download West End shows live to our front room in hologram form. But that's probably still a few weeks away.
Who would you most like to work with?
I would love to write a song with the Everly brothers. But it's probably best not to work with someone you admire: they'll just show up your inadequacies.
What's the best advice anyone ever gave you?
David Land, my original manager, said: "Don't put your own money into your shows." He was right: if you work for five years on a show and it's a flop, at least you've only wasted your time.
What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?
After Evita, a critic said: "Tim Rice has put in another strong claim to be the worst lyricist in the world." I wanted to write in and say: "Could you tell me who the second worst is, so I've got something to aim for?"
Born: Amersham, 1944.
Career: Best known for his work with Andrew Lloyd Webber. Also wrote the lyrics for Chess, last year's performance of which at the Albert Hall is released on CD and DVD on 14 September.
High point: "The opening night of Evita in 1978. Everybody in the show was at the top of their game."
Low point: "The 1988 production of Chess on Broadway. It was an absolute disaster."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/24/tim-rice-lyricist
Thursday, August 20, 2009
DEFYING GRAVITY
GLINDA
Why couldn't you have stayed calm, for once! Instead of flying off the handle -- !
I hope you're happy
I hope you're happy now
I hope you're happy how you've
Hurt your cause forever
I hope you think you're clever
ELPHABA
I hope you're happy
I hope you're happy too
I hope you're proud how you would
Grovel in submission
To feed your own ambition
GLINDA & ELPHABA
So though I can't imagine how
I hope you're happy
Right now
GLINDA
Elphie, listen to me. Just say you're sorry!
You can still be with The Wizard
What you've worked and waited for
You can have all you ever wanted -
ELPHABA
I know
But I don't want it - No!
I can't want it anymore
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by
The rules of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes
And leap...
It's time to try defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity
And you can't pull me down
GLINDA
Can't I make you understand
You're having delusions of grandeur?
ELPHABA
I'm through accepting limits
Cuz someone says they're so
Some things I cannot change
But till I try I'll never know
Too long I've been afraid of
Losing love I guess I've lost
Well if that's love
It comes at much too high a cost
I'd sooner buy defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye, I'm defying gravity
And you can't pull me down!
Glinda, come with me. Think of what we could do - together!
Unlimited
Together we're unlimited
Together we'll be the greatest team
There's ever been - Glinda!
Dreams the way we planned 'em
GLINDA
If we work in tandem
GLINDA & ELPHABA
There's no fight we cannot win
Just you and I, defying gravity
With you and I defying gravity
ELPHABA
They'll never bring us down!
Well, are you coming?
(GLINDA decides to stay behind.)
GLINDA
I hope you're happy
I hope you're happy now that you're choosing this -
ELPHABA
You too--
I hope it brings you bliss
GLINDA & ELPHABA
I really hope you get it
And you don't live to regret it
I hope you're happy in the end
I hope you're happy, my friend
ELPHABA
So if you care to find me
Look to the Western sky!
As someone told me lately
Everyone deserves the chance to fly
And if I'm flying solo
At least I'm flying free
To those who ground me
Take a message back from me!
Tell them how I am defying gravity
I'm flying high, defying gravity
And soon I'll match them in renown
And nobody in all of Oz
No Wizard that there is or was
Is ever gonna bring me down!!
GLINDA
I hope you're happy
CITIZENS OF OZ
Look at her
She's wicked
Get her!!
ELPHABA
Bring me down!
CITIZENS OF OZ
No one mourns the wicked
So we got to bring her -
ELPHABA
Ahhhh!
CITIZENS OF OZ
--Down!
Why couldn't you have stayed calm, for once! Instead of flying off the handle -- !
I hope you're happy
I hope you're happy now
I hope you're happy how you've
Hurt your cause forever
I hope you think you're clever
ELPHABA
I hope you're happy
I hope you're happy too
I hope you're proud how you would
Grovel in submission
To feed your own ambition
GLINDA & ELPHABA
So though I can't imagine how
I hope you're happy
Right now
GLINDA
Elphie, listen to me. Just say you're sorry!
You can still be with The Wizard
What you've worked and waited for
You can have all you ever wanted -
ELPHABA
I know
But I don't want it - No!
I can't want it anymore
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by
The rules of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes
And leap...
It's time to try defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity
And you can't pull me down
GLINDA
Can't I make you understand
You're having delusions of grandeur?
ELPHABA
I'm through accepting limits
Cuz someone says they're so
Some things I cannot change
But till I try I'll never know
Too long I've been afraid of
Losing love I guess I've lost
Well if that's love
It comes at much too high a cost
I'd sooner buy defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye, I'm defying gravity
And you can't pull me down!
Glinda, come with me. Think of what we could do - together!
Unlimited
Together we're unlimited
Together we'll be the greatest team
There's ever been - Glinda!
Dreams the way we planned 'em
GLINDA
If we work in tandem
GLINDA & ELPHABA
There's no fight we cannot win
Just you and I, defying gravity
With you and I defying gravity
ELPHABA
They'll never bring us down!
Well, are you coming?
(GLINDA decides to stay behind.)
GLINDA
I hope you're happy
I hope you're happy now that you're choosing this -
ELPHABA
You too--
I hope it brings you bliss
GLINDA & ELPHABA
I really hope you get it
And you don't live to regret it
I hope you're happy in the end
I hope you're happy, my friend
ELPHABA
So if you care to find me
Look to the Western sky!
As someone told me lately
Everyone deserves the chance to fly
And if I'm flying solo
At least I'm flying free
To those who ground me
Take a message back from me!
Tell them how I am defying gravity
I'm flying high, defying gravity
And soon I'll match them in renown
And nobody in all of Oz
No Wizard that there is or was
Is ever gonna bring me down!!
GLINDA
I hope you're happy
CITIZENS OF OZ
Look at her
She's wicked
Get her!!
ELPHABA
Bring me down!
CITIZENS OF OZ
No one mourns the wicked
So we got to bring her -
ELPHABA
Ahhhh!
CITIZENS OF OZ
--Down!
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Richard O'Brien article comments
gerard conway wrote:
I met Richard O'Brien some twenty or even thirty years ago at a friend's house. I'll never forget the evening where Richard entertained us, singing and playing on the piano, to his latest songs which he was putting together for a new musical. Among the songs was one called " The Little Black Dress"...a marvelous song which I've never heard since. I also recall,in detail, his eccentric dress. I liked him enormously. I look forward to seeing his next show.
August 18, 2009 6:15 AM BST
R L wrote:
I believe "Little Black Dress" was written for the sequel of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", "Rocky Horror Shows His Heels". Unfortunately, 20th Century Fox didn't stick with the script and the project developed into the under-rated equal "Shock Treatment". Richard actually sings this song with Patricia Quinn, Barry Humphries, Jessica Harper and Nell Campbell in that film. But I've always wanted to see the original idea for the sequel come to life. Did Richard say anything about the "Rocky Horror" sequel that was rumoured to be coming to the stage a few years ago?
August 18, 2009 7:42 AM BST
RL is me!
I met Richard O'Brien some twenty or even thirty years ago at a friend's house. I'll never forget the evening where Richard entertained us, singing and playing on the piano, to his latest songs which he was putting together for a new musical. Among the songs was one called " The Little Black Dress"...a marvelous song which I've never heard since. I also recall,in detail, his eccentric dress. I liked him enormously. I look forward to seeing his next show.
August 18, 2009 6:15 AM BST
R L wrote:
I believe "Little Black Dress" was written for the sequel of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", "Rocky Horror Shows His Heels". Unfortunately, 20th Century Fox didn't stick with the script and the project developed into the under-rated equal "Shock Treatment". Richard actually sings this song with Patricia Quinn, Barry Humphries, Jessica Harper and Nell Campbell in that film. But I've always wanted to see the original idea for the sequel come to life. Did Richard say anything about the "Rocky Horror" sequel that was rumoured to be coming to the stage a few years ago?
August 18, 2009 7:42 AM BST
RL is me!
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Richard O’Brien: Rocky Horror? It was all about my mother
From The Times
August 18, 2009
Richard O’Brien gave the world The Rocky Horror Show. Now he reveals its secret origins for the first time
Dominic Wells
Richard O’Brien dabs at his eyes with a white linen napkin. Somehow the waitress chooses this moment to take our order, and is waved away. We’ve met to discuss O’Brien’s new project, The Stripper, a revival of his 1982 musical, which previously has played only in Australia. Instead, just 20 minutes in, the writer and star of The Rocky Horror Show and host of The Crystal Maze is choked with emotion.
“Not so long ago,” he confides, “I fell off the wagon, stepped into the abyss.” He is small but elegant, like a cashmere jumper washed on too high a heat. His porcelain features, sardonic smile and shaved head strip two decades from his 67 years. And what does he mean exactly, “stepped into the abyss”? “Oh,” O’Brien replies, with a studied attempt at nonchalance, “I went completely crackers.
“All my life,” he explains with mounting emotion, “I’ve been fighting never belonging, never being male or female, and it got to the stage where I couldn’t deal with it any longer. To feel you don’t belong . . . to feel insane . . . to feel perverted and disgusting . . . you go f***ing nuts. If society allowed you to grow up feeling it was normal to be what you are, there wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t think the term ‘transvestite’ or ‘transsexual’ would exist: you’d just be another human being.”
Perhaps this shouldn’t come as such a surprise from the man who wrote the song I’m just a Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, and dressed his entire cast in basques, high heels and fishnet stockings. Yet apart from some elliptical programme notes about being “confined to a life in no man’s land”, O’Brien has never spoken in public of his sexuality. And to find a man of his age and success so confused . . . what happened?
“I’d been fighting, going to therapy, treating what I was as though it were some kind of illness to be cured. But actually, no, I was basically transgender, and just unhappy.” He’s centred enough now to explain the difference calmly: he’s not transsexual, which would mean he felt like a woman, to the extent of wanting an operation to turn him into one; but transgender, which means feeling like neither quite man nor woman. “There is a continuum between male and female,” he says. “Some are hard-wired one way or another, I’m in between. Or a third sex, I could see myself as quite easily.” But at the time, he was not so phlegmatic. “I lost the plot. Paranoid delusions, the works. It was at the time when Bush and Blair ruled the f***ing world, and trying to claw my way back to sanity, I saw no standard norm. I wanted to get back to normal, but where’s the benchmark of sanity? I was drowning and couldn’t find a surface. And then I was talking to my son in Canada, and he told me how much he loved me, how he absolutely . . .”
O’Brien shakes his head in wonder. “It was my children’s love that gave me a centre again. They gave me acceptance of myself, and allowed me to be myself.”
Surely his kids had already guessed that he wasn’t, shall we say, a traditional dad? Even on The Crystal Maze, the Nineties game show that was often Channel 4’s highest rated programme, O’Brien would leap about in skin-tight leather trousers and furry jacket, and speak archly of a backroom figure called “Mumsie”.
“Ha! You’re right!” O’Brien hoots. When he finally plucked up the courage to tell his children he was transgender, their first reaction was: “Dad, and your point is?”
When The Rocky Horror Show opened at the Royal Court Upstairs in 1973, it was joyous, liberating, shocking. A rock’n’roll musical about two clean-cut college sweethearts who spend a life-changing night in a castle with Dr Frank N. Furter and his eccentric retinue, it can be read as an allegory of a drug trip, a paean to (or warning about) sexual experimentation, a love letter to old B-movies, even as a satire on the political degeneracy of America: the 1975 film version, which has repaid its $1 million budget more than a hundredfold, is pointedly set on the night of Nixon’s resignation.
More simply, it’s a contemporary panto that for 35 years has given the audience an excuse to drag up, shout out the best lines, and pelt the screen with bread when Frank calls for “a toast!”. And it’s Frank — dangerously charismatic, thoroughly amoral and joyously polysexual, gloriously played by Tim Curry in the film version and by David Bedella in the forthcoming stage tour — who gives the show its beating heart.
And here a truly surprising thing happens. “He’s a drama queen, really,” O’Brien says of Frank. “He’s a hedonistic, self-indulgent voluptuary, and that’s his downfall. He’s an ego-driven . . . um . . .” and here his voice lowers to a stage whisper, “I was going to say, a bit like my mother.” What was that? Is O’Brien really revealing after all these years that the inspiration for Dr. Frank N. Furter is his mother? This psycho scientist in fishnets who creates a muscle-bound zombie to be his sex toy? Who beds first the innocent Janet and then her straight-as-a-die fiancé Brad? Who seemingly cares for no one and nothing beyond his own gratification? O’Brien’s mum?
“My mother was an unpleasant woman,” O’Brien says with sudden venom. “She
came from a working-class family: wonderful people, not much money, undereducated but honest, a great moral centre of honesty and probity. And she disowned them. She wanted to be a lady. And consequently became a person who was racist, anti-Semitic . . . It’s such a tragedy to see someone throwing their lives away on this empty journey, and at the same time believing herself superior to other people.
“I loved her, but stupid, stupid woman, she wouldn’t understand the value of that. She was an emotional bully. And sadly all of us, my siblings and I, are all damaged by this. She was bonkers, my mother, and I think by saying that I’m allowing her to be as horrible as she was without condemning her too much.”
This, it transpires, is the real reason O’Brien’s parents uprooted the family from Gloucestershire when he was 10 to a 120acre farm in New Zealand: so that Mumsie could reinvent herself as posh. Small and effeminate, the young O’Brien was no one’s ideal of Antipodean manhood, and he was routinely caned by teachers. He left school at 15. After five years training as a barber, of all things, he hopped on a boat to London just in time for the Sixties to swing. His breakthrough, ironically, was touring with Hair. The director Jim Sharman then cast him in Jesus Christ Superstar, after which they worked together on a musical O’Brien was calling They Came from Denton High. Sharman suggested the title The Rocky Horror Show, and the rest is hysteria.
If O’Brien ever doubts his legacy he need only remember this: in his home town of Hamilton, New Zealand, there now stands, bigger than life, a bronze statue of himself in his Rocky Horror guise.
And now comes The Stripper, a tale of “blondes, burlesque and bullets” that he adapted from a pulp novel by Carter Brown who, O’Brien says, “never introduced a girl unless he introduced her breasts at the same time”. O’Brien himself will play a cameo. And there’s yet another touring production of The Rocky Horror Show.
O’Brien gets all the devilish parts: the Child Catcher in the recent Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stage show; a one-man cabaret show as Mephistopheles; a corrupt druid in Robin of Sherwood on ITV; an alien in Dark City. You believe him when he says: “I’ve got a really bad temper. I get a few dinosaurs in the street, calling out comments when I’m all dressed up, and I’m like,‘You’re f***ing with the wrong drag addict’.”
Yet he’s a pussycat, really. He’s not currently in a relationship, and says he adores “pottering about” on his own: “You should never go looking for love. One day it will hit you smack in the face.” He’s been married twice, happily, and says of sexual attraction that he doesn’t see the gender, he sees the person.
He’s forgotten, but I first interviewed him more than 20 years ago. He flirted outrageously. “Did I?” he asks, in mock surprise. And as we part this time, no firm handshakes: instead he reaches up and softly strokes my cheek. And then he’s off, through the streets of Soho. In skinny white Armani jeans, a jacket with the shoulders cut off, chunky crosses, and a woman’s wraparound cardigan, he may be still somewhere between male and female, still in that sexual no man’s land. But at long last he’s called a ceasefire.
The Stripper is at Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, Essex (01708 443333), Aug 29-Sept 19; Milton Keynes Theatre (0844 8717652), from Sept 21; King’s Theatre, Glasgow (0870 0606648), from Sept 28. The Rocky Horror Show previews at Wimbledon Theatre, London (0844 8717646) from Sept 17 before a national tour: www.rockyhorror.co.uk
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article6799279.ece
August 18, 2009
Richard O’Brien gave the world The Rocky Horror Show. Now he reveals its secret origins for the first time
Dominic Wells
Richard O’Brien dabs at his eyes with a white linen napkin. Somehow the waitress chooses this moment to take our order, and is waved away. We’ve met to discuss O’Brien’s new project, The Stripper, a revival of his 1982 musical, which previously has played only in Australia. Instead, just 20 minutes in, the writer and star of The Rocky Horror Show and host of The Crystal Maze is choked with emotion.
“Not so long ago,” he confides, “I fell off the wagon, stepped into the abyss.” He is small but elegant, like a cashmere jumper washed on too high a heat. His porcelain features, sardonic smile and shaved head strip two decades from his 67 years. And what does he mean exactly, “stepped into the abyss”? “Oh,” O’Brien replies, with a studied attempt at nonchalance, “I went completely crackers.
“All my life,” he explains with mounting emotion, “I’ve been fighting never belonging, never being male or female, and it got to the stage where I couldn’t deal with it any longer. To feel you don’t belong . . . to feel insane . . . to feel perverted and disgusting . . . you go f***ing nuts. If society allowed you to grow up feeling it was normal to be what you are, there wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t think the term ‘transvestite’ or ‘transsexual’ would exist: you’d just be another human being.”
Perhaps this shouldn’t come as such a surprise from the man who wrote the song I’m just a Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, and dressed his entire cast in basques, high heels and fishnet stockings. Yet apart from some elliptical programme notes about being “confined to a life in no man’s land”, O’Brien has never spoken in public of his sexuality. And to find a man of his age and success so confused . . . what happened?
“I’d been fighting, going to therapy, treating what I was as though it were some kind of illness to be cured. But actually, no, I was basically transgender, and just unhappy.” He’s centred enough now to explain the difference calmly: he’s not transsexual, which would mean he felt like a woman, to the extent of wanting an operation to turn him into one; but transgender, which means feeling like neither quite man nor woman. “There is a continuum between male and female,” he says. “Some are hard-wired one way or another, I’m in between. Or a third sex, I could see myself as quite easily.” But at the time, he was not so phlegmatic. “I lost the plot. Paranoid delusions, the works. It was at the time when Bush and Blair ruled the f***ing world, and trying to claw my way back to sanity, I saw no standard norm. I wanted to get back to normal, but where’s the benchmark of sanity? I was drowning and couldn’t find a surface. And then I was talking to my son in Canada, and he told me how much he loved me, how he absolutely . . .”
O’Brien shakes his head in wonder. “It was my children’s love that gave me a centre again. They gave me acceptance of myself, and allowed me to be myself.”
Surely his kids had already guessed that he wasn’t, shall we say, a traditional dad? Even on The Crystal Maze, the Nineties game show that was often Channel 4’s highest rated programme, O’Brien would leap about in skin-tight leather trousers and furry jacket, and speak archly of a backroom figure called “Mumsie”.
“Ha! You’re right!” O’Brien hoots. When he finally plucked up the courage to tell his children he was transgender, their first reaction was: “Dad, and your point is?”
When The Rocky Horror Show opened at the Royal Court Upstairs in 1973, it was joyous, liberating, shocking. A rock’n’roll musical about two clean-cut college sweethearts who spend a life-changing night in a castle with Dr Frank N. Furter and his eccentric retinue, it can be read as an allegory of a drug trip, a paean to (or warning about) sexual experimentation, a love letter to old B-movies, even as a satire on the political degeneracy of America: the 1975 film version, which has repaid its $1 million budget more than a hundredfold, is pointedly set on the night of Nixon’s resignation.
More simply, it’s a contemporary panto that for 35 years has given the audience an excuse to drag up, shout out the best lines, and pelt the screen with bread when Frank calls for “a toast!”. And it’s Frank — dangerously charismatic, thoroughly amoral and joyously polysexual, gloriously played by Tim Curry in the film version and by David Bedella in the forthcoming stage tour — who gives the show its beating heart.
And here a truly surprising thing happens. “He’s a drama queen, really,” O’Brien says of Frank. “He’s a hedonistic, self-indulgent voluptuary, and that’s his downfall. He’s an ego-driven . . . um . . .” and here his voice lowers to a stage whisper, “I was going to say, a bit like my mother.” What was that? Is O’Brien really revealing after all these years that the inspiration for Dr. Frank N. Furter is his mother? This psycho scientist in fishnets who creates a muscle-bound zombie to be his sex toy? Who beds first the innocent Janet and then her straight-as-a-die fiancé Brad? Who seemingly cares for no one and nothing beyond his own gratification? O’Brien’s mum?
“My mother was an unpleasant woman,” O’Brien says with sudden venom. “She
came from a working-class family: wonderful people, not much money, undereducated but honest, a great moral centre of honesty and probity. And she disowned them. She wanted to be a lady. And consequently became a person who was racist, anti-Semitic . . . It’s such a tragedy to see someone throwing their lives away on this empty journey, and at the same time believing herself superior to other people.
“I loved her, but stupid, stupid woman, she wouldn’t understand the value of that. She was an emotional bully. And sadly all of us, my siblings and I, are all damaged by this. She was bonkers, my mother, and I think by saying that I’m allowing her to be as horrible as she was without condemning her too much.”
This, it transpires, is the real reason O’Brien’s parents uprooted the family from Gloucestershire when he was 10 to a 120acre farm in New Zealand: so that Mumsie could reinvent herself as posh. Small and effeminate, the young O’Brien was no one’s ideal of Antipodean manhood, and he was routinely caned by teachers. He left school at 15. After five years training as a barber, of all things, he hopped on a boat to London just in time for the Sixties to swing. His breakthrough, ironically, was touring with Hair. The director Jim Sharman then cast him in Jesus Christ Superstar, after which they worked together on a musical O’Brien was calling They Came from Denton High. Sharman suggested the title The Rocky Horror Show, and the rest is hysteria.
If O’Brien ever doubts his legacy he need only remember this: in his home town of Hamilton, New Zealand, there now stands, bigger than life, a bronze statue of himself in his Rocky Horror guise.
And now comes The Stripper, a tale of “blondes, burlesque and bullets” that he adapted from a pulp novel by Carter Brown who, O’Brien says, “never introduced a girl unless he introduced her breasts at the same time”. O’Brien himself will play a cameo. And there’s yet another touring production of The Rocky Horror Show.
O’Brien gets all the devilish parts: the Child Catcher in the recent Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stage show; a one-man cabaret show as Mephistopheles; a corrupt druid in Robin of Sherwood on ITV; an alien in Dark City. You believe him when he says: “I’ve got a really bad temper. I get a few dinosaurs in the street, calling out comments when I’m all dressed up, and I’m like,‘You’re f***ing with the wrong drag addict’.”
Yet he’s a pussycat, really. He’s not currently in a relationship, and says he adores “pottering about” on his own: “You should never go looking for love. One day it will hit you smack in the face.” He’s been married twice, happily, and says of sexual attraction that he doesn’t see the gender, he sees the person.
He’s forgotten, but I first interviewed him more than 20 years ago. He flirted outrageously. “Did I?” he asks, in mock surprise. And as we part this time, no firm handshakes: instead he reaches up and softly strokes my cheek. And then he’s off, through the streets of Soho. In skinny white Armani jeans, a jacket with the shoulders cut off, chunky crosses, and a woman’s wraparound cardigan, he may be still somewhere between male and female, still in that sexual no man’s land. But at long last he’s called a ceasefire.
The Stripper is at Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, Essex (01708 443333), Aug 29-Sept 19; Milton Keynes Theatre (0844 8717652), from Sept 21; King’s Theatre, Glasgow (0870 0606648), from Sept 28. The Rocky Horror Show previews at Wimbledon Theatre, London (0844 8717646) from Sept 17 before a national tour: www.rockyhorror.co.uk
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article6799279.ece
Friday, August 14, 2009
'SPIDER-MAN' LOSES THE GIRL
ACTRESS' AGENTS SEEKING NEW ROLES
MICHAEL RIEDEL
Last updated: 1:20 am
August 14, 2009
Posted: 12:06 am
August 14, 2009
HELLO Entertainment, the com pany run by twisting-in-the- wind "Spider-Man" producer David Garfinkle, continues to issue press releases insisting that this $45 million fiasco, which has suspended production, will start up again once "cash flow issues have been resolved" and begin previews Feb. 25 at the Hilton Theatre.
Hello Entertainment (which I suspect we'll soon be calling Goodbye Entertainment) might want to tell that to Evan Rachel Wood, who's playing Peter Parker's girlfriend, Mary Jane.
Wood, a charming actress, turned down a couple of movie roles to do the show. This week, her agents have been scrambling to get those offers back on the table.
"As far as they're concerned, it's over," says a source. "She's available for other work."
Garfinkle -- as well as Sony, which is co-producing "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" (better title: "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Show") -- may soon have some other headaches as well.
First of all, Julie Taymor, who's directing the show, is said to be steaming that she's being blamed for driving the production budget higher than the Himalayas.
Her defenders point out that an artist of her caliber can't worry about pesky little things like "cash flow." That, they say, is Garfinkle's job, and if the show is over budget, blame him.
(You won't get any objection from me!)
Meanwhile, Bono and The Edge, who've written the score, are, according to a source, "embarrassed" by the turn of events, although the source adds that at least they have something of value: their songs, which they can recycle as singles should "Spider-Man" vanish.
"You have a very unhappy and a very angry creative team," another source says. "Even if you can get the show going again, are they going to have any faith in the producers?"
On another front, Garfinkle and Sony, which is co-producing the show, may soon feel the wrath of Live Nation, which owns the Hilton.
The theater was being gutted for the production and is now in "a shambles," says a source.
Live Nation was hoping to sell it, but in its current state it's just a worthless barn.
(Even before it got torn up, it was a worthless barn, where big, lumbering shows such as "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and "Young Frankenstein" came to die.)
"Somebody's going to have to pay to put it back together," a veteran producer says of the Hilton. "It'll cost millions. There's going to be a major lawsuit here."
This week, there were rumors that a group of new producers -- including Fran and Barry Weissler ("Chicago") -- had been asked by another of Garfinkle's producing partners to take over the show.
The Weisslers have been down this road before, and it wasn't pleasant.
When jailbird Garth Drabinsky's company went bankrupt, they took over his show "Seussical: The Musical." Despite their best efforts, the show lost $12 million.
I pointed that out to Barry Weissler yesterday.
"You sure know how to hurt a guy!" he said, laughing.
He declined to comment on
"Spider-Man," but a source says that any rescue operation is a long way off.
"No one's seen the material, no one's seen the budget, no one knows the extent of the mess," this person says.
Before anybody steps in, "Spider-Man," as currently configured, is going to have to implode.
Only then can experienced producers take a look at it -- and, if they like the book and the score, persuade Taymor to create a musical that doesn't cost as much as the international space station.
michael.riedel@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08142009/entertainment/theater/spider_man_loses_the_girl_184431.htm
MICHAEL RIEDEL
Last updated: 1:20 am
August 14, 2009
Posted: 12:06 am
August 14, 2009
HELLO Entertainment, the com pany run by twisting-in-the- wind "Spider-Man" producer David Garfinkle, continues to issue press releases insisting that this $45 million fiasco, which has suspended production, will start up again once "cash flow issues have been resolved" and begin previews Feb. 25 at the Hilton Theatre.
Hello Entertainment (which I suspect we'll soon be calling Goodbye Entertainment) might want to tell that to Evan Rachel Wood, who's playing Peter Parker's girlfriend, Mary Jane.
Wood, a charming actress, turned down a couple of movie roles to do the show. This week, her agents have been scrambling to get those offers back on the table.
"As far as they're concerned, it's over," says a source. "She's available for other work."
Garfinkle -- as well as Sony, which is co-producing "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" (better title: "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Show") -- may soon have some other headaches as well.
First of all, Julie Taymor, who's directing the show, is said to be steaming that she's being blamed for driving the production budget higher than the Himalayas.
Her defenders point out that an artist of her caliber can't worry about pesky little things like "cash flow." That, they say, is Garfinkle's job, and if the show is over budget, blame him.
(You won't get any objection from me!)
Meanwhile, Bono and The Edge, who've written the score, are, according to a source, "embarrassed" by the turn of events, although the source adds that at least they have something of value: their songs, which they can recycle as singles should "Spider-Man" vanish.
"You have a very unhappy and a very angry creative team," another source says. "Even if you can get the show going again, are they going to have any faith in the producers?"
On another front, Garfinkle and Sony, which is co-producing the show, may soon feel the wrath of Live Nation, which owns the Hilton.
The theater was being gutted for the production and is now in "a shambles," says a source.
Live Nation was hoping to sell it, but in its current state it's just a worthless barn.
(Even before it got torn up, it was a worthless barn, where big, lumbering shows such as "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and "Young Frankenstein" came to die.)
"Somebody's going to have to pay to put it back together," a veteran producer says of the Hilton. "It'll cost millions. There's going to be a major lawsuit here."
This week, there were rumors that a group of new producers -- including Fran and Barry Weissler ("Chicago") -- had been asked by another of Garfinkle's producing partners to take over the show.
The Weisslers have been down this road before, and it wasn't pleasant.
When jailbird Garth Drabinsky's company went bankrupt, they took over his show "Seussical: The Musical." Despite their best efforts, the show lost $12 million.
I pointed that out to Barry Weissler yesterday.
"You sure know how to hurt a guy!" he said, laughing.
He declined to comment on
"Spider-Man," but a source says that any rescue operation is a long way off.
"No one's seen the material, no one's seen the budget, no one knows the extent of the mess," this person says.
Before anybody steps in, "Spider-Man," as currently configured, is going to have to implode.
Only then can experienced producers take a look at it -- and, if they like the book and the score, persuade Taymor to create a musical that doesn't cost as much as the international space station.
michael.riedel@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08142009/entertainment/theater/spider_man_loses_the_girl_184431.htm
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Dacal is Alice in Wildhorn's Wonderland; Mason, Llana, Snelson to Go Down Rabbit Hole
By Kenneth Jones
11 Aug 2009
Broadway stars will populate the world premiere of Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Adventure, the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center announced on Aug. 11. Karen Mason, Janet Dacal, Darren Ritchie, Jose Llana and more will bring the new Frank Wildhorn show to life, opening Dec. 5 in Florida.
Gregory Boyd, artistic director of Houston's Alley Theatre, directs the show inspired by Lewis Carroll's 19th-century fantasy fiction for kids. The music for Wonderland is from composer Frank Wildhorn (The Civil War and Jekyll & Hyde) with lyrics by Jack Murphy (The Civil War). The book is by Murphy and Boyd.
Wonderland is the first initiative of the Broadway Genesis Project at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Broadway Genesis is intended to help create new works of American theatre to play the Tampa market, and then possibly tour other performing arts centers or move to Broadway. It will launch at TBPAC's Ferguson Hall.
The principal cast will include Julie Brooks (Fiddler on the Roof national tour) as Chloe, Janet Dacal (In the Heights, Good Vibrations) as Alice, Eugene Fleming (Fosse) as the Caterpillar, Jose Llana (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) as El Gato, Karen Mason (Sunset Boulevard, Mamma Mia!) as the Queen of Hearts, Darren Ritchie (Dracula: The Musical) as Jack/White Knight, Nikki Snelson (Legally Blonde) as the Mad Hatter and Ed Staudenmayer (Forbidden Broadway) as the Rabbit.
The ensemble includes Tad Wilson, who will also take on the featured role of the Jabberwock, along with Grady Bowman, Sae La Chin, Dan Domenech, Mallauri Esquibel, Lori Eure, Derek Ferguson, Wilkie Ferguson, Ashley Galvan, Laura Karklina, Autumn Hurlburt, Rachel Markarian, Mary Mossberg, Julius Anthony Rubio, Melinda Sullivan, Chelsea Traille and Danny Stiles.
This entire company, along with the recently announced creative team, will begin rehearsals in Tampa on Oct. 12.
Wonderland: Alice’s New Musical Adventure will play TBPAC through Jan. 3, 2010, with preview performances scheduled Nov. 24 through Dec. 4 (the opening is Dec. 5).
http://www.playbill.com/news/article/131869-_Dacal_is_Alice_in_Wildhorn_s_Wonderland%20_Mason%20Llana%20Snelson_to_Go_Down_Rabbit_Hole
11 Aug 2009
Broadway stars will populate the world premiere of Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Adventure, the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center announced on Aug. 11. Karen Mason, Janet Dacal, Darren Ritchie, Jose Llana and more will bring the new Frank Wildhorn show to life, opening Dec. 5 in Florida.
Gregory Boyd, artistic director of Houston's Alley Theatre, directs the show inspired by Lewis Carroll's 19th-century fantasy fiction for kids. The music for Wonderland is from composer Frank Wildhorn (The Civil War and Jekyll & Hyde) with lyrics by Jack Murphy (The Civil War). The book is by Murphy and Boyd.
Wonderland is the first initiative of the Broadway Genesis Project at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Broadway Genesis is intended to help create new works of American theatre to play the Tampa market, and then possibly tour other performing arts centers or move to Broadway. It will launch at TBPAC's Ferguson Hall.
The principal cast will include Julie Brooks (Fiddler on the Roof national tour) as Chloe, Janet Dacal (In the Heights, Good Vibrations) as Alice, Eugene Fleming (Fosse) as the Caterpillar, Jose Llana (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) as El Gato, Karen Mason (Sunset Boulevard, Mamma Mia!) as the Queen of Hearts, Darren Ritchie (Dracula: The Musical) as Jack/White Knight, Nikki Snelson (Legally Blonde) as the Mad Hatter and Ed Staudenmayer (Forbidden Broadway) as the Rabbit.
The ensemble includes Tad Wilson, who will also take on the featured role of the Jabberwock, along with Grady Bowman, Sae La Chin, Dan Domenech, Mallauri Esquibel, Lori Eure, Derek Ferguson, Wilkie Ferguson, Ashley Galvan, Laura Karklina, Autumn Hurlburt, Rachel Markarian, Mary Mossberg, Julius Anthony Rubio, Melinda Sullivan, Chelsea Traille and Danny Stiles.
This entire company, along with the recently announced creative team, will begin rehearsals in Tampa on Oct. 12.
Wonderland: Alice’s New Musical Adventure will play TBPAC through Jan. 3, 2010, with preview performances scheduled Nov. 24 through Dec. 4 (the opening is Dec. 5).
http://www.playbill.com/news/article/131869-_Dacal_is_Alice_in_Wildhorn_s_Wonderland%20_Mason%20Llana%20Snelson_to_Go_Down_Rabbit_Hole
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