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
Thursday, August 27, 2009
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
Casting complete for TBPAC's new 'Wonderland' show
By John Fleming, Times Performing Arts Critic
In Print: Wednesday, August 12, 2009
TAMPA — Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Adventure is all set and ready to go. The new Frank Wildhorn musical, which is being produced by Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and will have its premiere there on Dec. 5, officially announced complete casting Tuesday.
Janet Dacal will play Alice, as first reported in July by the St. Petersburg Times from an interview with composer Wildhorn. Dacal, a Cuban-American who lived in Miami, is now playing Carla, the ditsy redheaded beauty salon assistant in In the Heights, the Tony Award-winning musical set in the Manhattan barrio.
"If you don't have the right Alice, the show won't work," said Jack Murphy, who is writing the book and lyrics of the musical, inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
Though Alice is a British expatriate children's book author living in New York in the musical, the character won't change with a Latina in the role, Murphy said.
"We were very excited to get Janet. This is not going to be your mother's Alice in Wonderland. This is a modern woman who speaks to today's audience."
Tuesday's announcement confirmed that principal cast members include Karen Mason (Sunset Boulevard, Mamma Mia!) as the Queen of Hearts, Eugene Fleming (Fosse) as the Caterpillar and Nikki Snelson (Legally Blonde) as the Mad Hatter.
The 25-member cast also has Julie Brooks playing Alice's 10-year-old daughter, Chloe; Jose Llana as El Gato; Ed Staudenmayer as the Rabbit; and Sarasota native Darren Ritchie as Jack/White Knight. For the complete cast see blogs.tampabay.com/arts.
Wonderland, directed by Gregory Boyd, begins rehearsals at the TBPAC on Oct. 12. The show will be staged in Ferguson Hall and start preview performances Nov. 24 and open Dec. 5. After the Tampa run closes on Jan. 3, the production will make a quick transfer to the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, where Boyd is artistic director. It will play the Alley Jan. 15-Feb. 14.
John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8716. He blogs at Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.
http://www.tampabay.com/features/performingarts/article1026845.ece
In Print: Wednesday, August 12, 2009
TAMPA — Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Adventure is all set and ready to go. The new Frank Wildhorn musical, which is being produced by Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and will have its premiere there on Dec. 5, officially announced complete casting Tuesday.
Janet Dacal will play Alice, as first reported in July by the St. Petersburg Times from an interview with composer Wildhorn. Dacal, a Cuban-American who lived in Miami, is now playing Carla, the ditsy redheaded beauty salon assistant in In the Heights, the Tony Award-winning musical set in the Manhattan barrio.
"If you don't have the right Alice, the show won't work," said Jack Murphy, who is writing the book and lyrics of the musical, inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
Though Alice is a British expatriate children's book author living in New York in the musical, the character won't change with a Latina in the role, Murphy said.
"We were very excited to get Janet. This is not going to be your mother's Alice in Wonderland. This is a modern woman who speaks to today's audience."
Tuesday's announcement confirmed that principal cast members include Karen Mason (Sunset Boulevard, Mamma Mia!) as the Queen of Hearts, Eugene Fleming (Fosse) as the Caterpillar and Nikki Snelson (Legally Blonde) as the Mad Hatter.
The 25-member cast also has Julie Brooks playing Alice's 10-year-old daughter, Chloe; Jose Llana as El Gato; Ed Staudenmayer as the Rabbit; and Sarasota native Darren Ritchie as Jack/White Knight. For the complete cast see blogs.tampabay.com/arts.
Wonderland, directed by Gregory Boyd, begins rehearsals at the TBPAC on Oct. 12. The show will be staged in Ferguson Hall and start preview performances Nov. 24 and open Dec. 5. After the Tampa run closes on Jan. 3, the production will make a quick transfer to the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, where Boyd is artistic director. It will play the Alley Jan. 15-Feb. 14.
John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8716. He blogs at Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.
http://www.tampabay.com/features/performingarts/article1026845.ece
Spider-Man The Musical Is Dead Dead Dead!
As we previously mentioned, the upcoming Spider-Man Broadway musical has run out of $$$$$$, and….
The entire cast - including Evan Rachel Whore - has just been released from their contracts and the crew has been put on "hiatus" until further notice because the $45 million dollar musical broke the bank!
Spider-Man, with Julie Taymor on board as director and music penned by Bono and The Edge, was destined to be a mess from the beginning.
Taymor devised an "installation show" for the musical, but sources say the director was in over her head with the amount of special effects she hoped to include in the show.
The show was said to have a running cost of $900,000 a week, which would have required the show to sell out at New York's Hilton Theater every night for five years straight just for the producers to break even!
Ridiculous!!!
Spider-Man is still set to open for previews on February 10th, 2010.
Yeah right!
Posted: August 12, 2009 at 2:30 pm
http://perezhilton.com/2009-08-12-spider-man-the-musical-is-dead-dead-dead
The entire cast - including Evan Rachel Whore - has just been released from their contracts and the crew has been put on "hiatus" until further notice because the $45 million dollar musical broke the bank!
Spider-Man, with Julie Taymor on board as director and music penned by Bono and The Edge, was destined to be a mess from the beginning.
Taymor devised an "installation show" for the musical, but sources say the director was in over her head with the amount of special effects she hoped to include in the show.
The show was said to have a running cost of $900,000 a week, which would have required the show to sell out at New York's Hilton Theater every night for five years straight just for the producers to break even!
Ridiculous!!!
Spider-Man is still set to open for previews on February 10th, 2010.
Yeah right!
Posted: August 12, 2009 at 2:30 pm
http://perezhilton.com/2009-08-12-spider-man-the-musical-is-dead-dead-dead
Spiderman Needs Some Ca$$$h
Oops!
Someone forgot to tell the producers of the Broadway-bound Spiderman show that we are in economic crisis! One of the backers of the lavish production, Hello Entertainment, are halting production on the show due to "unexpected cash flow problem."
So you ran out of money? Got it!
The studio released this statement explaining the hold-up: "Plans necessary for this correction are in hand now and it is expected that activities, including work in the theater, will resume within the immediate future."
Not likely. Not many people have thousands of dollars lying around to save a Broadway show.
Good luck with that!
Posted: August 10, 2009 at 2:22 pm
http://perezhilton.com/2009-08-10-spiderman-needs-some-cah
Someone forgot to tell the producers of the Broadway-bound Spiderman show that we are in economic crisis! One of the backers of the lavish production, Hello Entertainment, are halting production on the show due to "unexpected cash flow problem."
So you ran out of money? Got it!
The studio released this statement explaining the hold-up: "Plans necessary for this correction are in hand now and it is expected that activities, including work in the theater, will resume within the immediate future."
Not likely. Not many people have thousands of dollars lying around to save a Broadway show.
Good luck with that!
Posted: August 10, 2009 at 2:22 pm
http://perezhilton.com/2009-08-10-spiderman-needs-some-cah
Production on New Spider-Man Musical Temporarily Halted
By Andrew Gans
09 Aug 2009
Production on the eagerly awaited new Julie Taymor musical Spider-Man, Turn Off The Dark has been temporarily halted, according to The New York Times.
Hello Entertainment, one of the producers of the big-budget musical, released a statement to the Times explaining production had been suspended due to "an unexpected cash flow problem."
The statement, however, added, "The plans necessary for this correction are in hand now, and it is expected that activities, including work in the theater, will resume within the immediate future and with no material impact upon the planned production schedule."
Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark is currently scheduled to begin previews at Broadway's Hilton Theatre Feb. 25, 2010. A spokesperson for the musical previously told Variety that the work stoppage is not expected to affect the preview date.
Evan Rachel Wood will play Mary Jane Watson, Peter Parker's girlfriend, and Tony winner Alan Cumming will star as Norman Osborn (aka Green Goblin), Spider-Man's most notorious nemesis.
The Lion King's Taymor directs. Spider-Man, Turn Off The Dark features music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge and a book by Taymor and Glen Berger.
Drawing from over 40 years of Marvel comic books, Spider-Man, according to press notes, "spins a new take on the mythic tale of a young man propelled from a modest rowhouse in Queens to the sky-scraping spire of the Chrysler Building, the bustling offices of the Daily Bugle, through the dizzying canyons of Manhattan, to new vistas never before seen. The musical follows the story of teenager Peter Parker, whose unremarkable life is turned upside-down — literally — when he's bitten by a genetically altered spider and wakes up the next morning clinging to his bedroom ceiling. This bullied science-geek — suddenly endowed with astonishing powers — soon learns, however, that with great power comes great responsibility as villains test not only his physical strength but also his strength of character. Spider-Man's battles will hurtle the audience through an origin story both recognizable and unexpected — yielding new characters as well as familiar faces — until a final surprising confrontation casts a startling new light on this hero's journey."
The creative team also includes choreographer Daniel Ezralow ("Across the Universe," The Green Bird), set designer George Tsypin (The Magic Flute, The Little Mermaid), costume designer Eiko Ishioka (Academy Award for "Bram Stoker's Dracula," Tony nomination for M. Butterfly), lighting designer Donald Holder (Tony Awards for The Lion King, South Pacific), sound designer Jonathan Deans (Fosse Young Frankenstein, Ragtime) and musical supervisor Teese Gohl ("Across the Universe," "Frida").
The musical will be produced on Broadway by Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle, Martin McCallum, Marvel Entertainment/David Maisel, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Jeremiah Harris. It will be produced in association with Omneity Entertainment/Richard Weinberg, the Mayerson/Gould/Hauser/Tysoe Group, Patricia Lambrecht and Jam Theatricals/S2BN Entertainment.
Interested theatregoers, who possess an AmEx card, can call Ticketmaster at (800) 745-3000. Tickets will go on sale to the general public Sept. 12.
Group tickets are also now on sale by calling (800) Broadway.
The Hilton Theatre is located in Manhattan at 213 West 42nd Street.
For more information visit http://www.spidermanonbroadway.com/.
http://www.playbill.com/news/article/131805-Production_on_New_Spider-Man_Musical_Temporarily_Halted
09 Aug 2009
Production on the eagerly awaited new Julie Taymor musical Spider-Man, Turn Off The Dark has been temporarily halted, according to The New York Times.
Hello Entertainment, one of the producers of the big-budget musical, released a statement to the Times explaining production had been suspended due to "an unexpected cash flow problem."
The statement, however, added, "The plans necessary for this correction are in hand now, and it is expected that activities, including work in the theater, will resume within the immediate future and with no material impact upon the planned production schedule."
Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark is currently scheduled to begin previews at Broadway's Hilton Theatre Feb. 25, 2010. A spokesperson for the musical previously told Variety that the work stoppage is not expected to affect the preview date.
Evan Rachel Wood will play Mary Jane Watson, Peter Parker's girlfriend, and Tony winner Alan Cumming will star as Norman Osborn (aka Green Goblin), Spider-Man's most notorious nemesis.
The Lion King's Taymor directs. Spider-Man, Turn Off The Dark features music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge and a book by Taymor and Glen Berger.
Drawing from over 40 years of Marvel comic books, Spider-Man, according to press notes, "spins a new take on the mythic tale of a young man propelled from a modest rowhouse in Queens to the sky-scraping spire of the Chrysler Building, the bustling offices of the Daily Bugle, through the dizzying canyons of Manhattan, to new vistas never before seen. The musical follows the story of teenager Peter Parker, whose unremarkable life is turned upside-down — literally — when he's bitten by a genetically altered spider and wakes up the next morning clinging to his bedroom ceiling. This bullied science-geek — suddenly endowed with astonishing powers — soon learns, however, that with great power comes great responsibility as villains test not only his physical strength but also his strength of character. Spider-Man's battles will hurtle the audience through an origin story both recognizable and unexpected — yielding new characters as well as familiar faces — until a final surprising confrontation casts a startling new light on this hero's journey."
The creative team also includes choreographer Daniel Ezralow ("Across the Universe," The Green Bird), set designer George Tsypin (The Magic Flute, The Little Mermaid), costume designer Eiko Ishioka (Academy Award for "Bram Stoker's Dracula," Tony nomination for M. Butterfly), lighting designer Donald Holder (Tony Awards for The Lion King, South Pacific), sound designer Jonathan Deans (Fosse Young Frankenstein, Ragtime) and musical supervisor Teese Gohl ("Across the Universe," "Frida").
The musical will be produced on Broadway by Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle, Martin McCallum, Marvel Entertainment/David Maisel, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Jeremiah Harris. It will be produced in association with Omneity Entertainment/Richard Weinberg, the Mayerson/Gould/Hauser/Tysoe Group, Patricia Lambrecht and Jam Theatricals/S2BN Entertainment.
Interested theatregoers, who possess an AmEx card, can call Ticketmaster at (800) 745-3000. Tickets will go on sale to the general public Sept. 12.
Group tickets are also now on sale by calling (800) Broadway.
The Hilton Theatre is located in Manhattan at 213 West 42nd Street.
For more information visit http://www.spidermanonbroadway.com/.
http://www.playbill.com/news/article/131805-Production_on_New_Spider-Man_Musical_Temporarily_Halted
"Spider-Man" Musical Suspended By "Cash Flow Problem"
ROLLING STONE
8/11/09, 1:16 pm EST
Tickets for the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which features music by U2’s Bono and the Edge, are supposed to go on sale starting a month from tomorrow. But the show’s producers announced in a statement this weekend that work on the production has been temporarily suspended due to an “unexpected cash flow problem,” the New York Times reports. “The plans necessary for this correction are in hand now, and it is expected that activities, including work in the theater, will resume within the immediate future and with no material impact upon the planned production schedule,” the producers said in the statement.
As Rock Daily previously reported, the Spider-Man musical is scheduled to begin with preview performances on February 25th (the original start date was January 2010). Because of the scope of the blockbuster show — and the amount of talent involved, like U2 members and director Julie Taymor — the musical’s budget is reportedly in the $40 million range, making it the most expensive musical in Broadway history, the NYT reports.
So far, Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming have been cast in the roles of Mary Jane Watson and Norman Osborn/Green Goblin, respectively. Over at the Spider-Man official site, you can also hear a snippet of what sounds like the Edge performing what could be the song’s main theme. “It’s unlike any Spider-Man you’ve ever seen,” Wood said.
http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/08/11/spider-man-musical-suspended-by-cash-flow-problem/
8/11/09, 1:16 pm EST
Tickets for the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which features music by U2’s Bono and the Edge, are supposed to go on sale starting a month from tomorrow. But the show’s producers announced in a statement this weekend that work on the production has been temporarily suspended due to an “unexpected cash flow problem,” the New York Times reports. “The plans necessary for this correction are in hand now, and it is expected that activities, including work in the theater, will resume within the immediate future and with no material impact upon the planned production schedule,” the producers said in the statement.
As Rock Daily previously reported, the Spider-Man musical is scheduled to begin with preview performances on February 25th (the original start date was January 2010). Because of the scope of the blockbuster show — and the amount of talent involved, like U2 members and director Julie Taymor — the musical’s budget is reportedly in the $40 million range, making it the most expensive musical in Broadway history, the NYT reports.
So far, Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming have been cast in the roles of Mary Jane Watson and Norman Osborn/Green Goblin, respectively. Over at the Spider-Man official site, you can also hear a snippet of what sounds like the Edge performing what could be the song’s main theme. “It’s unlike any Spider-Man you’ve ever seen,” Wood said.
http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/08/11/spider-man-musical-suspended-by-cash-flow-problem/
Broadway Spidey Hits a Bump
By RACHEL LEE HARRIS
Published: August 9, 2009
There’s been another setback for those eagerly awaiting Spider-Man’s arrival on Broadway early next year.
A statement on Sunday from the publicists for Hello Entertainment, one of the producers of “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark,” said work had been suspended on the musical because of “an unexpected cash flow problem.” The statement went on to say: “The plans necessary for this correction are in hand now, and it is expected that activities, including work in the theater, will resume within the immediate future and with no material impact upon the planned production schedule.” No date for resuming production work was given. The show comes with a high-profile pedigree: the creative team includes the director Julie Taymor with music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge of U2, while the cast includes Evan Rachel Wood (as Mary Jane Watson) and Alan Cumming (as Norman Osborn). The budget is equally high profile: insiders put the price tag at $40 million, which would make it the largest in the history of Broadway. In June it was announced that previews, at the Hilton Theater, would be delayed by a month, from January to February.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/theater/10arts-BROADWAYSPID_BRF.html
Published: August 9, 2009
There’s been another setback for those eagerly awaiting Spider-Man’s arrival on Broadway early next year.
A statement on Sunday from the publicists for Hello Entertainment, one of the producers of “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark,” said work had been suspended on the musical because of “an unexpected cash flow problem.” The statement went on to say: “The plans necessary for this correction are in hand now, and it is expected that activities, including work in the theater, will resume within the immediate future and with no material impact upon the planned production schedule.” No date for resuming production work was given. The show comes with a high-profile pedigree: the creative team includes the director Julie Taymor with music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge of U2, while the cast includes Evan Rachel Wood (as Mary Jane Watson) and Alan Cumming (as Norman Osborn). The budget is equally high profile: insiders put the price tag at $40 million, which would make it the largest in the history of Broadway. In June it was announced that previews, at the Hilton Theater, would be delayed by a month, from January to February.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/theater/10arts-BROADWAYSPID_BRF.html
'SPIDER-MAN' A NO-SHOW
MICHAEL REED
Last updated: 12:04 pm
August 12, 2009
Posted: 2:49 am
August 12, 2009
SPIDER-MAN has vanquished Green Goblin, Electro, Doc Ock and Lizard.
But when it comes to the greatest supervillain of them all -- The Riedeler -- Spidey has met his match.
The $45 million "Spider-Man," directed by Julie Taymor and written by Bono and The Edge, is caught in my net, and I can report today that escape is virtually impossible.
Mwahahaha!
Last week, production crews at both the Hilton Theatre and the scene shop where the show was being built were put on "hiatus" because the producers ran out of money. Assistants in the scene shop "ran to the bank to cash their checks because they weren't sure they'd clear," a source says.
Now comes word that the actors have been released from their contracts, with no incentive (i.e., money) to hang around waiting for the production to get back on track.
Meanwhile, ticket agents are desperately trying to get refunds for deposits from theater parties that booked early previews.
"I hope they don't stiff us the way Garth Drabinsky did," says one ticket agent, referring to the disgraced impresario recently sentenced in Toronto to seven years in jail.
A desperate attempt was made last week to save "Spider-Man" by bringing in a couple of veteran producers. But they're too smart to get involved in what's turning out to be the biggest fiasco in Broadway history.
And so, while the official line is "the production will begin previews on Feb. 25, 2010," the betting is that the Hilton Theatre, whose insides have been gutted for this show, is going to be an empty barn this winter.
"Spider-Man" has been in trouble from the beginning, done in by the inexperience of its producers -- Sony, Marvel Comics and David Garfinkle, a Chicago lawyer who, sources say, had almost no Broadway experience.
"He was in over his head," a source says.
Taymor, the director of "The Lion King," conceived of "Spider-Man" as an "installation show," something big and bold and full of special effects. Something, in other words, like Cirque du Soleil.
That's fine if you're going to put the damn thing up in Las Vegas, where "installation shows" run several times a day and are funded in large part by hotels and casinos.
But at $45 million -- and with a weekly running cost of almost $900,000 -- "Spider-Man" at the 1,700-seat Hilton could never be profitable.
The show would have to run five years, selling every single seat in the house, to just break even.
"That," says a source who crunched the numbers, "is insane."
Artistically, it's impossible to tell if "Spider-Man" is any good.
The designs for the sets and costumes that I saw were impressive, and some of U2's songs weren't bad -- moody and melodic, if not all that theatrical -- but even people working on the show weren't quite sure what it was going to be like.
"A lot of it seems to exist only in Julie's head," one source says.
Which may be where it remains for a long, long time.
michael.riedel@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08122009/entertainment/theater/spider_man_a_no_show_184141.htm
Last updated: 12:04 pm
August 12, 2009
Posted: 2:49 am
August 12, 2009
SPIDER-MAN has vanquished Green Goblin, Electro, Doc Ock and Lizard.
But when it comes to the greatest supervillain of them all -- The Riedeler -- Spidey has met his match.
The $45 million "Spider-Man," directed by Julie Taymor and written by Bono and The Edge, is caught in my net, and I can report today that escape is virtually impossible.
Mwahahaha!
Last week, production crews at both the Hilton Theatre and the scene shop where the show was being built were put on "hiatus" because the producers ran out of money. Assistants in the scene shop "ran to the bank to cash their checks because they weren't sure they'd clear," a source says.
Now comes word that the actors have been released from their contracts, with no incentive (i.e., money) to hang around waiting for the production to get back on track.
Meanwhile, ticket agents are desperately trying to get refunds for deposits from theater parties that booked early previews.
"I hope they don't stiff us the way Garth Drabinsky did," says one ticket agent, referring to the disgraced impresario recently sentenced in Toronto to seven years in jail.
A desperate attempt was made last week to save "Spider-Man" by bringing in a couple of veteran producers. But they're too smart to get involved in what's turning out to be the biggest fiasco in Broadway history.
And so, while the official line is "the production will begin previews on Feb. 25, 2010," the betting is that the Hilton Theatre, whose insides have been gutted for this show, is going to be an empty barn this winter.
"Spider-Man" has been in trouble from the beginning, done in by the inexperience of its producers -- Sony, Marvel Comics and David Garfinkle, a Chicago lawyer who, sources say, had almost no Broadway experience.
"He was in over his head," a source says.
Taymor, the director of "The Lion King," conceived of "Spider-Man" as an "installation show," something big and bold and full of special effects. Something, in other words, like Cirque du Soleil.
That's fine if you're going to put the damn thing up in Las Vegas, where "installation shows" run several times a day and are funded in large part by hotels and casinos.
But at $45 million -- and with a weekly running cost of almost $900,000 -- "Spider-Man" at the 1,700-seat Hilton could never be profitable.
The show would have to run five years, selling every single seat in the house, to just break even.
"That," says a source who crunched the numbers, "is insane."
Artistically, it's impossible to tell if "Spider-Man" is any good.
The designs for the sets and costumes that I saw were impressive, and some of U2's songs weren't bad -- moody and melodic, if not all that theatrical -- but even people working on the show weren't quite sure what it was going to be like.
"A lot of it seems to exist only in Julie's head," one source says.
Which may be where it remains for a long, long time.
michael.riedel@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08122009/entertainment/theater/spider_man_a_no_show_184141.htm
'SPIDER-MAN' NEEDS RESCUE
MICHAEL RIEDEL
Last updated: 12:35 am
August 7, 2009
Posted: 12:06 am
August 7, 2009
THERE was a twitching on my web this week, and when I crawled out to see what I'd caught, there -- all tangled up and weary from the struggle -- was Julie Taymor's "Spider-Man."
The $45 million Broadway musical -- otherwise known as "The Show Produced By People Who Have No Idea What They Are Doing" -- is in deep, deep trouble.
Production crews at both the Hilton Theatre and the scene shop where the gargantuan sets are being constructed have been put on "hiatus" because the money has run out, several theater sources have confirmed.
At the beginning of the week, production staffers were convinced the whole thing was going to be scrapped.
But a "Spider-Man" spokesman insists: "The production is scheduled to begin previews on Feb. 25, 2010, as previously announced."
If that happens, I'll eat my young.
This show is in chaos, plagued not only by financial problems but also by a nasty internal power struggle.
Sony, which produced the "Spider-Man" movies, and Marvel, which controls the comic-book character, have lost faith in lead producer David Garfinkle, theater sources say.
The two corporations, with the backing of U2's Bono and The Edge, who've written the score, are going to sideline him, sources say.
One source speaks diplomatically of "restructuring."
Another is more blunt: "He'll be out by the weekend."
Garfinkle is a showbiz lawyer from Chicago who has virtually no producing experience. But he managed to get hold of the show when the original producer, Tony Adams, a seasoned veteran, died of a heart attack four years ago.
"David was Tony's lawyer, and then Tony died and suddenly David was the producer of 'Spider-Man,' " one person says.
Garfinkle has never been able to tame Taymor, whose talent for creating thrilling stage images (as she did in "The Lion King") is matched only by her talent for blowing through budgets.
"You've got to be on top of her all the time," says a person who worked with her on "The Lion King."
"She'll spend days and days on one minute of stage time. It will be a brilliant minute, but it's expensive."
At a presentation for group-sales ticket agents last spring, the dynamic Taymor introduced Garfinkle to the crowd. A young, sweet-looking little guy in a suit waddled nervously onstage.
You thought: Here comes her lunch! And by all accounts, she's devoured him.
"So far, she has gotten pretty much everything she's wanted," says a source who thinks that, the way things are going, the budget for "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" could easily hit $50 million.
(Maybe if they lose the pretentious "Turn Off the Dark," they'll save a couple of million.)
The betting is that Sony and Marvel will put Alan Wasser, a respected general manager, in charge of the show, keeping a tight leash on Taymor.
(Watch it, Alan, or you'll be her dinner.)
The "Spider-Man" spokesman insists: "There is no change in the production team."
The show's financial structure is odd. You can invest in the show ($45 million and counting) or in the redesign of the theater ($10 million).
Garfinkle has had trouble raising money for the theater redesign.
Industry insiders also wonder why "Spider-Man" hasn't started a big advertising push yet.
"It's a $45 million show -- they need money, and they're invisible," one person says.
Production sources say there'll be a "Spider-Man" ad blitz in the fall.
Meanwhile, once Garfinkle's been sidelined, Sony will restart production.
That's a relief.
For a minute, I was worried I wouldn't have much to write about this summer.
michael.riedel@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08072009/entertainment/theater/spider_man_needs_rescue_183315.htm
Last updated: 12:35 am
August 7, 2009
Posted: 12:06 am
August 7, 2009
THERE was a twitching on my web this week, and when I crawled out to see what I'd caught, there -- all tangled up and weary from the struggle -- was Julie Taymor's "Spider-Man."
The $45 million Broadway musical -- otherwise known as "The Show Produced By People Who Have No Idea What They Are Doing" -- is in deep, deep trouble.
Production crews at both the Hilton Theatre and the scene shop where the gargantuan sets are being constructed have been put on "hiatus" because the money has run out, several theater sources have confirmed.
At the beginning of the week, production staffers were convinced the whole thing was going to be scrapped.
But a "Spider-Man" spokesman insists: "The production is scheduled to begin previews on Feb. 25, 2010, as previously announced."
If that happens, I'll eat my young.
This show is in chaos, plagued not only by financial problems but also by a nasty internal power struggle.
Sony, which produced the "Spider-Man" movies, and Marvel, which controls the comic-book character, have lost faith in lead producer David Garfinkle, theater sources say.
The two corporations, with the backing of U2's Bono and The Edge, who've written the score, are going to sideline him, sources say.
One source speaks diplomatically of "restructuring."
Another is more blunt: "He'll be out by the weekend."
Garfinkle is a showbiz lawyer from Chicago who has virtually no producing experience. But he managed to get hold of the show when the original producer, Tony Adams, a seasoned veteran, died of a heart attack four years ago.
"David was Tony's lawyer, and then Tony died and suddenly David was the producer of 'Spider-Man,' " one person says.
Garfinkle has never been able to tame Taymor, whose talent for creating thrilling stage images (as she did in "The Lion King") is matched only by her talent for blowing through budgets.
"You've got to be on top of her all the time," says a person who worked with her on "The Lion King."
"She'll spend days and days on one minute of stage time. It will be a brilliant minute, but it's expensive."
At a presentation for group-sales ticket agents last spring, the dynamic Taymor introduced Garfinkle to the crowd. A young, sweet-looking little guy in a suit waddled nervously onstage.
You thought: Here comes her lunch! And by all accounts, she's devoured him.
"So far, she has gotten pretty much everything she's wanted," says a source who thinks that, the way things are going, the budget for "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" could easily hit $50 million.
(Maybe if they lose the pretentious "Turn Off the Dark," they'll save a couple of million.)
The betting is that Sony and Marvel will put Alan Wasser, a respected general manager, in charge of the show, keeping a tight leash on Taymor.
(Watch it, Alan, or you'll be her dinner.)
The "Spider-Man" spokesman insists: "There is no change in the production team."
The show's financial structure is odd. You can invest in the show ($45 million and counting) or in the redesign of the theater ($10 million).
Garfinkle has had trouble raising money for the theater redesign.
Industry insiders also wonder why "Spider-Man" hasn't started a big advertising push yet.
"It's a $45 million show -- they need money, and they're invisible," one person says.
Production sources say there'll be a "Spider-Man" ad blitz in the fall.
Meanwhile, once Garfinkle's been sidelined, Sony will restart production.
That's a relief.
For a minute, I was worried I wouldn't have much to write about this summer.
michael.riedel@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08072009/entertainment/theater/spider_man_needs_rescue_183315.htm
Monday, August 10, 2009
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Andrew Lloyd Webber: ‘I’m a quality control freak’
Aug 1 2009 by Karen Price, Western Mail
So says Andrew Lloyd Webber as he puts the Cardiff cast of The Sound of Music through their paces. Arts correspondent Karen Price is granted a rare audience with the king of musical theatre
IT’S late in the afternoon and Andrew Lloyd Webber is deep in concentration. The king of musical theatre is standing behind the orchestra pit at the Wales Millennium Centre during last-minute sound checks for the new touring version of The Sound of Music.
As a casually-dressed Connie Fisher and her co-star Michael Praed stand on stage singing the chorus of their duet Something Good, the Lord, as Andrew is affectionately known, clearly isn’t happy about the sound.
“It’s just not right is it?” he says to the musical director. “It should be...” And then he cuts off to hum a little.
Watching Andrew at work, you know you are in the company of a hugely-respected master of his game.
Despite the fact he’s responsible for penning the music to some of the biggest productions ever staged – The Phantom of the Opera, Evita and Cats are just the tip of the iceberg – and amassed a clutch of major gongs, from Tonys and Grammys to an Oscar, Andrew isn’t locked away in his ivory tower. Instead he’s very much a hands-on impresario.
“I’m a complete quality control freak,” he tells me when I later join him for a glass of wine.
You also get the impression that he’s very fair, allowing his team to develop while giving constructive criticism.
“It’s a hard key change isn’t it?” he says to one of the sound men before demonstrating a few chords on a keyboard.
As rehearsals wrap up, Andrew is happy with how things have worked out.
“Thank you very much guys,” he says to the orchestra. “You’re a really great band. Have a great one tomorrow.”
And it seems that a word from him, a single note of encouragement, is all they need to carry on with added vigour.
Andrew first travelled to Cardiff last weekend to prepare for the opening night of The Sound of Music UK tour at the WMC. It comes just five months after the London Palladium production, which he produced, closed after a run of two years. Days later he returned to the Welsh capital with the notes he’d made on opening night.
“I thought it would be good to go through the orchestra today to kick it off,” he says as we relax in the WMC’s bar.
“I’ve not really been very close to it (The Sound of Music) in the last few months. Once it closed in London, I was doing other things. It’s in very good shape. It’s great to see Connie back. She’s on good form. I think she was nervous on Sunday night but she came through it really well.
“It’s odd sometimes for me because I didn’t write it but I feel very personally about the music. Tiny little alterations will creep in and I say, ‘You can’t do that’ as if I’ve written the music.”
Andrew, 61, has long been a fan of the Rodgers and Hammerstein production, which initially opened on Broadway in 1959 with Mary Martin as feisty nun Maria.
“I wrote Richard Rodgers a fan letter when I was a kid. In those days, Rodgers and Hammerstein were incredibly unfashionable. We’re talking about 1962 and the birth of The Beatles. Rodgers and Hammerstein? You didn’t mention their names. I knew of them through the movies. The Sound of Music came to London with the worst advance publicity from the opinion makers.
“Noel Coward said it was ‘a ghastly evening with snivelling children’. I saw it and thought it was one of the great scores of all time but something was wrong with the production.
“I was only 13. I started putting two and two together years later – Mary Martin was in her 50s but Maria was supposed to be 18.”
Of course, Andrew famously cast his Maria through the BBC series, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? It paved the way for further TV searches for Joseph (Any Dream Will Do) and Oliver and Nancy (I’d Do Anything).
“The reason we went with the television casting was because I couldn’t think of anyone who could fill a big theatre in London,” he says of Maria. “I felt it should be an unknown girl. I talked to one person, Scarlett Johansson, but her movie commitments were so huge.”
So did he do the right thing in allowing the public to play a part in such a vital decision, particularly as he’s a self-confessed control freak?
“I think we did you know,” says Andrew, who’s dressed down in jeans and a pale blue open-necked shirt.
“That first television show casting unlocked a lot of doors. It opened up theatre again to an audience who had simply forgotten it. When we were doing Joseph it really cemented it. We started getting letters from kids who had seen Joseph and were putting their names down to go to the National Theatre.”
Andrew also took musical theatre to a younger audience when he had a cameo role in the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks.
Summer Strallen had already been lined up to take over from Connie as Maria at the London Palladium when she took on a role in Hollyoaks as a would-be musical star. Her TV character auditioned for – and won – the role and Andrew even put in an appearance. But he confesses it wasn’t the greatest moment of his career.
“A friend of mine was producing Hollyoaks at the time and asked if I’d ever thought of the idea of blurring fact and fiction,” he says.
“It was an interesting experiment. I’m not convinced it completely worked though.”
But his TV searches for new leading stars is a different matter, averaging around six million viewers a show. However, plans for Andrew’s next BBC search to find Dorothy for his new stage version of The Wizard Of Oz looks doomed.
The channel wants to broadcast it live from January to April, but in March Andrew will be launching one of the biggest projects of his career, the West End follow-up to his smash-hit Phantom – Love Never Dies.
Following criticism in the past that Andrew was using licence fee payers’ money to promote his own projects through the series, he believes this one could create a real furore as Love Never Dies will be released right in the middle of the run.
Now the plans appear to be up in the air, especially as ITV have also approached him about broadcasting it.
“I felt it was extremely difficult to go ahead with the BBC who want to do The Wizard Of Oz,” explains the father-of-five, who was knighted in 1992 and created a life peer five years later.
“Last year there was a bit of criticism in the Press about the BBC using licence payers’ money to promote me promoting a musical even though it (Oliver!) was not my musical.
“Personally, I think it’s nonsense.
“The BBC have said we cannot mention Love Never Dies. If every paper is mentioning it and there’s no mention of it (on the programme) it looks curious.
“The Phantom Of The Opera has been seen by 100 million people around the world. I don’t want one of you lot (journalists) saying I’m promoting it (Love Never Dies) indirectly by doing The Wizard Of Oz.
“On ITV it doesn’t matter as it’s not using licence payers’ money. I just want to enjoy putting it on at this stage of my career and don’t want the waters muddied by unnecessary negative PR.”
He points out that the five finalists from I’d Do Anything now all have leading roles on stage – in shows he has no connection with: “The value of television should be proved by that point.”
He adds that many other high-profile people chosen to front BBC shows also have “day jobs”.
And he believes The Apprentice star Sir Alan Sugar will also find himself in hot water now that he’s been offered a job as the Government’s “enterprise champion”.
“I believe Alan Sugar is going to be in this situation and may not be able to continue. Just how Jeremy Clarkson does it (presents BBC2’s Top Gear) and then does a huge great stadium tour based on Top Gear I don’t know.
“On one occasion, the girls on I’d Do Anything said they wanted to do a programme of my songs. If the BBC can’t because of editorial guidelines and they can’t be seen to be promoting ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber’ on television, there’s almost no point in doing a programme. When I was on American Idol they did two programmes devoted to my songs.
“ITV have approached me. They could make a really good programme because they don’t have constraints but I don’t want to lose contacts at the BBC because they’ve been very good to me.
“There’s no way we can do The Wizard Of Oz on the BBC at the time they can do it, but I have to produce it (on stage) next year otherwise I will lose the rights.
“I would rather not do it at all than compromise it.”
Compromise is certainly not a word in Andrew’s book.
Brought up immersed in music – his father was the organist William Lloyd Webber and his brother is the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber – his work is clearly his passion.
Although the TV search for a new Dorothy may be up in the air, he has very clear ideas about what he wants from The Wizard Of Oz.
“I think The Wizard Of Oz needs about half a dozen new songs,” says Andrew, who has been married three times.
“Obviously Over The Rainbow would be there. They have given me the rights to add some numbers where I think they need to be.
“For example, there’s no song for the Wizard or no song for Dorothy until she gets to Over The Rainbow. There’s nothing about her home or Toto (her dog). It’s been tried in theatre several times now and has never worked. I think, and I may be wrong, that people have tried to take what’s in the film and put it on stage. It needs to be done as a stage show. The Sound of Music may be dated now but it’s an incredibly crafted piece of theatre work which started in the theatre.”
While many famous people who have achieved remarkable success can come across as aloof during interviews, Andrew is genuinely warm and friendly and keen to hear about my love of musical theatre too.
He also has a sense of humour and when an announcement comes over the WMC tannoy calling for a the owner of a certain car to remove their vehicle because it’s causing an obstruction, he jokes: “It’s mine! Tell them to tow it away and chuck it in the docks.”
Back to the subject of The Wizard Of Oz and he says he believes a TV search for Dorothy could prove the most successful of the lot.
“When you’re finding a Dorothy, everyone’s got a view. One of the things about Dorothy is she’s a really exciting character to cast. She’s a teenage girl in small town America who wants to get out. She’s got to have a bit of attitude.
“She’s got to have a bit of an edge. She goes on a journey but then wants to go back home. We have got to have someone who wants to go on that journey. It’s a very interesting role because it goes so deeply into the middle-American psyche.
“People are obsessed with the whole story of Dorothy, hence the success of (stage show) Wicked.”
While he’s still working out his plans for The Wizard Of Oz, when it comes to Love Never Dies everything has been completed.
He’s now counting down the days to the London premiere next March, which he says will be one of the biggest nights of his career.
“It’s finished and recorded and done and dusted from my point of view. I have to keep it under wraps now. It’s odd to have something this far ahead finished.
“The next stage is the production. We will announce the cast in a few weeks’ time. The album’s finished and I’m very pleased with it. The cast are well-known in theatre terms. Someone has played the Phantom before and the girl has played a lead on Broadway. I think there will be quite a lot of people who would like to record the songs before the show opens.”
Andrew says plans to resurrect his beloved Phantom – which opened in the West End in 1986, with his then wife Sarah Brightman as Christine, and had grossed more than $5bn worldwide by 2007 – have been in the pipeline for a long time.
“I thought about it a long, long time ago and couldn’t make it so abandoned it. I started thinking about it again two years ago.
“I was working on something completely different with Ben Elton and explained to him what the problem was.
“He said, ‘I can give you an outline which I think will unlock it completely.’ Ben and I put together a synopsis which showed promise.”
Even hugely successful people suffer with nerves it seems, and Andrew admits he will be nervous about the reaction to Love Never Dies.
“This one is unlike anything I’ve done before. It’s the continuing story of something that’s not only been the biggest thing in my career but the biggest thing there’s been in entertainment in the last 20 years. To that extent there will be a huge spotlight on it. I’m slightly relieved to have recorded the album first. People will have the chance to see what they think of the music in advance of everything else.”
While he’s not revealing the names of the cast, one person who’s definitely not in it is Katherine Jenkins.
“I know her very well,” he says of the Neath-born singer.
“We have never worked together. She’s a very interesting girl – very beautiful and a wonderful personality with a great voice. It’s just that everything happens at different times.
“She would not be quite right for me for Love Never Dies – she’s a mezzo soprano, not a soprano.
“She has recorded my songs and I would love to do something for her. She’s pretty special. There’s nothing I’ve got that’s immediately right for her. She would probably be pretty good in My Fair Lady.”
Someone else Andrew admires is Simon Cowell, whom he’s worked alongside on American Idol.
But he didn’t get to see Cowell’s massive hit Britain’s Got Talent this year, which produced singers Susan Boyle and Shaheen Jarfargoli, the Swansea schoolboy who went on to perform in front of millions at Michael Jackson’s memorial service.
“We’ve talked about doing something together but we’ve never actually quite worked out what,” he says of Cowell.
“There’s a huge difference between Simon and myself. Simon’s absolutely superb at doing television. He’s brilliant at what he does.
“That’s his job. He’s also a superb A&R man. I’m a composer of musicals and musical theatre is my job. The television offers I’ve had have surprised me. Some of them have been absolutely huge, particularly in the States.
“But I can’t lose sight of the fact I employ 100 people in London all in one company and that’s my job.
“I can’t give up my real love which is to write for musical theatre.”
Although parallels can be drawn between Britain’s Got Talent and Andrew’s TV searches – after all, they are both about unearthing new raw talent – he says they are also very different beasts.
“The difference between Britain’s Got Talent and what I do is there has to be a physical production at the end of it.
“I’m a complete quality control freak and I don’t want people spending money and getting a production and they don’t like it.”
Although most people would kill to be able to say they wrote the music for theatre greats like Phantom, Jesus Christ Superstar, Starlight Express and Aspects of Love, are there any musicals which Andrew’s not been involved with that he wishes he could put his name to?
“Most of Rodgers and Hammerstein, West Side Story, My Fair Lady,” he says, ticking them off on his fingers.
“I heard the score of Hair again the other day and it’s really much better than I remembered it. If I had written Porgy & Bess, one would have been over the moon. But I just love musicals.
“I must be honest, there’s no score I’ve heard in the last 20 years that I wish I could have killed to have written. Nothing has come out for a long time now which you could truthfully say, ‘yeah that’s going to be there for a long while’.
“Sometimes you get things that are critical successes but not popular successes. I’m very proud of something like Sunset Boulevard, which got me a lot of Tonys, and The Beautiful Game with Ben Elton. It won the London Critics’ prize but lasted 11 months.
“It’s hard finding something today that’s going to be the next Cats or Les Mis, apart from The Lion King and Wicked.
“I would have loved to have produced Wicked but as a composer I don’t think I would have gone there. Although there are some fabulous things in the score, it’s not very me. I would have liked to have written Wicked for the pay cheque,” he laughs.
Five years ago, The Phantom of the Opera was released as a film and, of course, Madonna famously played Evita on the big screen, but Andrew admits he doesn’t think musicals work well in the cinema any more.
“I’ve not really had any of mine transfer to film that I’ve been happy with so far. The history of musicals in cinema in the last two or three decades has not been great. There are exceptions. One has to honourably accept Mamma Mia! It’s a wonderful film but even that has not really done quite as well as the big old musicals used to do in film.
“I think there has to be an era of movie musicals soon. I don’t think anyone yet has come through as a young director who can really do for them what some of the great theatre directors in the past have done for stage musicals.”
Although it seems that Andrew spends most of his time immersed in music, he also has two other great loves – art and architecture. In fact, the day after our meeting, he’s planning his perfect day off – visiting historic sites around South Wales.
“It goes back to my childhood,” says Andrew, who has amassed a collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, many of which went on show at the Royal Academy in London six years ago.
He tells me that while growing up he would visit places like Ewenny Priory in the Vale of Glamorgan and Cardiff Castle with his parents and take notes about the architecture.
“I’ve got my old architectural guides and my childhood notes and I’m going to Ewenny Priory and Margam Abbey tomorrow,” he says. “I know all of Cardiff’s major buildings. If I’ve got time I will go around Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch too.”
He was first introduced to William Burgess’ designs at Cardiff Castle as a boy.
“I was nine-years-old and my life was changed. The Victorian arc was the most important thing I’d seen.”
Today the roof of his country home is modelled on that at Castell Coch, a building he has also featured in his work.
“I did a video with my ex-wife Sarah Brightman in there. It was for the song Him which made about number 47 in the charts for a week. It’s not something I go into too much depth about,” he laughs.
Andrew often mixes business with pleasure.
“One of the most wonderful things about the TV casting programmes is going to see the families (of the contestants). On the one hand I actually love going to see them but it also takes me out of London to places I would never go to because of the day job. I have the best day. I pop in and do a little bit of filming and then I just take off. I went to Rhyl and there are some fantastic churches all around there.”
So is he a frustrated architect?
“Yes, I would like to be an architect,” he smiles.
But for now it’s all about Maria, Dorothy and proving Love Never Dies.
The Sound of Music is at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, until August 29. The box office number is 0870 040 2000
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/2009/08/01/andrew-lloyd-webber-i-m-a-quality-control-freak-91466-24280490/
So says Andrew Lloyd Webber as he puts the Cardiff cast of The Sound of Music through their paces. Arts correspondent Karen Price is granted a rare audience with the king of musical theatre
IT’S late in the afternoon and Andrew Lloyd Webber is deep in concentration. The king of musical theatre is standing behind the orchestra pit at the Wales Millennium Centre during last-minute sound checks for the new touring version of The Sound of Music.
As a casually-dressed Connie Fisher and her co-star Michael Praed stand on stage singing the chorus of their duet Something Good, the Lord, as Andrew is affectionately known, clearly isn’t happy about the sound.
“It’s just not right is it?” he says to the musical director. “It should be...” And then he cuts off to hum a little.
Watching Andrew at work, you know you are in the company of a hugely-respected master of his game.
Despite the fact he’s responsible for penning the music to some of the biggest productions ever staged – The Phantom of the Opera, Evita and Cats are just the tip of the iceberg – and amassed a clutch of major gongs, from Tonys and Grammys to an Oscar, Andrew isn’t locked away in his ivory tower. Instead he’s very much a hands-on impresario.
“I’m a complete quality control freak,” he tells me when I later join him for a glass of wine.
You also get the impression that he’s very fair, allowing his team to develop while giving constructive criticism.
“It’s a hard key change isn’t it?” he says to one of the sound men before demonstrating a few chords on a keyboard.
As rehearsals wrap up, Andrew is happy with how things have worked out.
“Thank you very much guys,” he says to the orchestra. “You’re a really great band. Have a great one tomorrow.”
And it seems that a word from him, a single note of encouragement, is all they need to carry on with added vigour.
Andrew first travelled to Cardiff last weekend to prepare for the opening night of The Sound of Music UK tour at the WMC. It comes just five months after the London Palladium production, which he produced, closed after a run of two years. Days later he returned to the Welsh capital with the notes he’d made on opening night.
“I thought it would be good to go through the orchestra today to kick it off,” he says as we relax in the WMC’s bar.
“I’ve not really been very close to it (The Sound of Music) in the last few months. Once it closed in London, I was doing other things. It’s in very good shape. It’s great to see Connie back. She’s on good form. I think she was nervous on Sunday night but she came through it really well.
“It’s odd sometimes for me because I didn’t write it but I feel very personally about the music. Tiny little alterations will creep in and I say, ‘You can’t do that’ as if I’ve written the music.”
Andrew, 61, has long been a fan of the Rodgers and Hammerstein production, which initially opened on Broadway in 1959 with Mary Martin as feisty nun Maria.
“I wrote Richard Rodgers a fan letter when I was a kid. In those days, Rodgers and Hammerstein were incredibly unfashionable. We’re talking about 1962 and the birth of The Beatles. Rodgers and Hammerstein? You didn’t mention their names. I knew of them through the movies. The Sound of Music came to London with the worst advance publicity from the opinion makers.
“Noel Coward said it was ‘a ghastly evening with snivelling children’. I saw it and thought it was one of the great scores of all time but something was wrong with the production.
“I was only 13. I started putting two and two together years later – Mary Martin was in her 50s but Maria was supposed to be 18.”
Of course, Andrew famously cast his Maria through the BBC series, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? It paved the way for further TV searches for Joseph (Any Dream Will Do) and Oliver and Nancy (I’d Do Anything).
“The reason we went with the television casting was because I couldn’t think of anyone who could fill a big theatre in London,” he says of Maria. “I felt it should be an unknown girl. I talked to one person, Scarlett Johansson, but her movie commitments were so huge.”
So did he do the right thing in allowing the public to play a part in such a vital decision, particularly as he’s a self-confessed control freak?
“I think we did you know,” says Andrew, who’s dressed down in jeans and a pale blue open-necked shirt.
“That first television show casting unlocked a lot of doors. It opened up theatre again to an audience who had simply forgotten it. When we were doing Joseph it really cemented it. We started getting letters from kids who had seen Joseph and were putting their names down to go to the National Theatre.”
Andrew also took musical theatre to a younger audience when he had a cameo role in the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks.
Summer Strallen had already been lined up to take over from Connie as Maria at the London Palladium when she took on a role in Hollyoaks as a would-be musical star. Her TV character auditioned for – and won – the role and Andrew even put in an appearance. But he confesses it wasn’t the greatest moment of his career.
“A friend of mine was producing Hollyoaks at the time and asked if I’d ever thought of the idea of blurring fact and fiction,” he says.
“It was an interesting experiment. I’m not convinced it completely worked though.”
But his TV searches for new leading stars is a different matter, averaging around six million viewers a show. However, plans for Andrew’s next BBC search to find Dorothy for his new stage version of The Wizard Of Oz looks doomed.
The channel wants to broadcast it live from January to April, but in March Andrew will be launching one of the biggest projects of his career, the West End follow-up to his smash-hit Phantom – Love Never Dies.
Following criticism in the past that Andrew was using licence fee payers’ money to promote his own projects through the series, he believes this one could create a real furore as Love Never Dies will be released right in the middle of the run.
Now the plans appear to be up in the air, especially as ITV have also approached him about broadcasting it.
“I felt it was extremely difficult to go ahead with the BBC who want to do The Wizard Of Oz,” explains the father-of-five, who was knighted in 1992 and created a life peer five years later.
“Last year there was a bit of criticism in the Press about the BBC using licence payers’ money to promote me promoting a musical even though it (Oliver!) was not my musical.
“Personally, I think it’s nonsense.
“The BBC have said we cannot mention Love Never Dies. If every paper is mentioning it and there’s no mention of it (on the programme) it looks curious.
“The Phantom Of The Opera has been seen by 100 million people around the world. I don’t want one of you lot (journalists) saying I’m promoting it (Love Never Dies) indirectly by doing The Wizard Of Oz.
“On ITV it doesn’t matter as it’s not using licence payers’ money. I just want to enjoy putting it on at this stage of my career and don’t want the waters muddied by unnecessary negative PR.”
He points out that the five finalists from I’d Do Anything now all have leading roles on stage – in shows he has no connection with: “The value of television should be proved by that point.”
He adds that many other high-profile people chosen to front BBC shows also have “day jobs”.
And he believes The Apprentice star Sir Alan Sugar will also find himself in hot water now that he’s been offered a job as the Government’s “enterprise champion”.
“I believe Alan Sugar is going to be in this situation and may not be able to continue. Just how Jeremy Clarkson does it (presents BBC2’s Top Gear) and then does a huge great stadium tour based on Top Gear I don’t know.
“On one occasion, the girls on I’d Do Anything said they wanted to do a programme of my songs. If the BBC can’t because of editorial guidelines and they can’t be seen to be promoting ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber’ on television, there’s almost no point in doing a programme. When I was on American Idol they did two programmes devoted to my songs.
“ITV have approached me. They could make a really good programme because they don’t have constraints but I don’t want to lose contacts at the BBC because they’ve been very good to me.
“There’s no way we can do The Wizard Of Oz on the BBC at the time they can do it, but I have to produce it (on stage) next year otherwise I will lose the rights.
“I would rather not do it at all than compromise it.”
Compromise is certainly not a word in Andrew’s book.
Brought up immersed in music – his father was the organist William Lloyd Webber and his brother is the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber – his work is clearly his passion.
Although the TV search for a new Dorothy may be up in the air, he has very clear ideas about what he wants from The Wizard Of Oz.
“I think The Wizard Of Oz needs about half a dozen new songs,” says Andrew, who has been married three times.
“Obviously Over The Rainbow would be there. They have given me the rights to add some numbers where I think they need to be.
“For example, there’s no song for the Wizard or no song for Dorothy until she gets to Over The Rainbow. There’s nothing about her home or Toto (her dog). It’s been tried in theatre several times now and has never worked. I think, and I may be wrong, that people have tried to take what’s in the film and put it on stage. It needs to be done as a stage show. The Sound of Music may be dated now but it’s an incredibly crafted piece of theatre work which started in the theatre.”
While many famous people who have achieved remarkable success can come across as aloof during interviews, Andrew is genuinely warm and friendly and keen to hear about my love of musical theatre too.
He also has a sense of humour and when an announcement comes over the WMC tannoy calling for a the owner of a certain car to remove their vehicle because it’s causing an obstruction, he jokes: “It’s mine! Tell them to tow it away and chuck it in the docks.”
Back to the subject of The Wizard Of Oz and he says he believes a TV search for Dorothy could prove the most successful of the lot.
“When you’re finding a Dorothy, everyone’s got a view. One of the things about Dorothy is she’s a really exciting character to cast. She’s a teenage girl in small town America who wants to get out. She’s got to have a bit of attitude.
“She’s got to have a bit of an edge. She goes on a journey but then wants to go back home. We have got to have someone who wants to go on that journey. It’s a very interesting role because it goes so deeply into the middle-American psyche.
“People are obsessed with the whole story of Dorothy, hence the success of (stage show) Wicked.”
While he’s still working out his plans for The Wizard Of Oz, when it comes to Love Never Dies everything has been completed.
He’s now counting down the days to the London premiere next March, which he says will be one of the biggest nights of his career.
“It’s finished and recorded and done and dusted from my point of view. I have to keep it under wraps now. It’s odd to have something this far ahead finished.
“The next stage is the production. We will announce the cast in a few weeks’ time. The album’s finished and I’m very pleased with it. The cast are well-known in theatre terms. Someone has played the Phantom before and the girl has played a lead on Broadway. I think there will be quite a lot of people who would like to record the songs before the show opens.”
Andrew says plans to resurrect his beloved Phantom – which opened in the West End in 1986, with his then wife Sarah Brightman as Christine, and had grossed more than $5bn worldwide by 2007 – have been in the pipeline for a long time.
“I thought about it a long, long time ago and couldn’t make it so abandoned it. I started thinking about it again two years ago.
“I was working on something completely different with Ben Elton and explained to him what the problem was.
“He said, ‘I can give you an outline which I think will unlock it completely.’ Ben and I put together a synopsis which showed promise.”
Even hugely successful people suffer with nerves it seems, and Andrew admits he will be nervous about the reaction to Love Never Dies.
“This one is unlike anything I’ve done before. It’s the continuing story of something that’s not only been the biggest thing in my career but the biggest thing there’s been in entertainment in the last 20 years. To that extent there will be a huge spotlight on it. I’m slightly relieved to have recorded the album first. People will have the chance to see what they think of the music in advance of everything else.”
While he’s not revealing the names of the cast, one person who’s definitely not in it is Katherine Jenkins.
“I know her very well,” he says of the Neath-born singer.
“We have never worked together. She’s a very interesting girl – very beautiful and a wonderful personality with a great voice. It’s just that everything happens at different times.
“She would not be quite right for me for Love Never Dies – she’s a mezzo soprano, not a soprano.
“She has recorded my songs and I would love to do something for her. She’s pretty special. There’s nothing I’ve got that’s immediately right for her. She would probably be pretty good in My Fair Lady.”
Someone else Andrew admires is Simon Cowell, whom he’s worked alongside on American Idol.
But he didn’t get to see Cowell’s massive hit Britain’s Got Talent this year, which produced singers Susan Boyle and Shaheen Jarfargoli, the Swansea schoolboy who went on to perform in front of millions at Michael Jackson’s memorial service.
“We’ve talked about doing something together but we’ve never actually quite worked out what,” he says of Cowell.
“There’s a huge difference between Simon and myself. Simon’s absolutely superb at doing television. He’s brilliant at what he does.
“That’s his job. He’s also a superb A&R man. I’m a composer of musicals and musical theatre is my job. The television offers I’ve had have surprised me. Some of them have been absolutely huge, particularly in the States.
“But I can’t lose sight of the fact I employ 100 people in London all in one company and that’s my job.
“I can’t give up my real love which is to write for musical theatre.”
Although parallels can be drawn between Britain’s Got Talent and Andrew’s TV searches – after all, they are both about unearthing new raw talent – he says they are also very different beasts.
“The difference between Britain’s Got Talent and what I do is there has to be a physical production at the end of it.
“I’m a complete quality control freak and I don’t want people spending money and getting a production and they don’t like it.”
Although most people would kill to be able to say they wrote the music for theatre greats like Phantom, Jesus Christ Superstar, Starlight Express and Aspects of Love, are there any musicals which Andrew’s not been involved with that he wishes he could put his name to?
“Most of Rodgers and Hammerstein, West Side Story, My Fair Lady,” he says, ticking them off on his fingers.
“I heard the score of Hair again the other day and it’s really much better than I remembered it. If I had written Porgy & Bess, one would have been over the moon. But I just love musicals.
“I must be honest, there’s no score I’ve heard in the last 20 years that I wish I could have killed to have written. Nothing has come out for a long time now which you could truthfully say, ‘yeah that’s going to be there for a long while’.
“Sometimes you get things that are critical successes but not popular successes. I’m very proud of something like Sunset Boulevard, which got me a lot of Tonys, and The Beautiful Game with Ben Elton. It won the London Critics’ prize but lasted 11 months.
“It’s hard finding something today that’s going to be the next Cats or Les Mis, apart from The Lion King and Wicked.
“I would have loved to have produced Wicked but as a composer I don’t think I would have gone there. Although there are some fabulous things in the score, it’s not very me. I would have liked to have written Wicked for the pay cheque,” he laughs.
Five years ago, The Phantom of the Opera was released as a film and, of course, Madonna famously played Evita on the big screen, but Andrew admits he doesn’t think musicals work well in the cinema any more.
“I’ve not really had any of mine transfer to film that I’ve been happy with so far. The history of musicals in cinema in the last two or three decades has not been great. There are exceptions. One has to honourably accept Mamma Mia! It’s a wonderful film but even that has not really done quite as well as the big old musicals used to do in film.
“I think there has to be an era of movie musicals soon. I don’t think anyone yet has come through as a young director who can really do for them what some of the great theatre directors in the past have done for stage musicals.”
Although it seems that Andrew spends most of his time immersed in music, he also has two other great loves – art and architecture. In fact, the day after our meeting, he’s planning his perfect day off – visiting historic sites around South Wales.
“It goes back to my childhood,” says Andrew, who has amassed a collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, many of which went on show at the Royal Academy in London six years ago.
He tells me that while growing up he would visit places like Ewenny Priory in the Vale of Glamorgan and Cardiff Castle with his parents and take notes about the architecture.
“I’ve got my old architectural guides and my childhood notes and I’m going to Ewenny Priory and Margam Abbey tomorrow,” he says. “I know all of Cardiff’s major buildings. If I’ve got time I will go around Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch too.”
He was first introduced to William Burgess’ designs at Cardiff Castle as a boy.
“I was nine-years-old and my life was changed. The Victorian arc was the most important thing I’d seen.”
Today the roof of his country home is modelled on that at Castell Coch, a building he has also featured in his work.
“I did a video with my ex-wife Sarah Brightman in there. It was for the song Him which made about number 47 in the charts for a week. It’s not something I go into too much depth about,” he laughs.
Andrew often mixes business with pleasure.
“One of the most wonderful things about the TV casting programmes is going to see the families (of the contestants). On the one hand I actually love going to see them but it also takes me out of London to places I would never go to because of the day job. I have the best day. I pop in and do a little bit of filming and then I just take off. I went to Rhyl and there are some fantastic churches all around there.”
So is he a frustrated architect?
“Yes, I would like to be an architect,” he smiles.
But for now it’s all about Maria, Dorothy and proving Love Never Dies.
The Sound of Music is at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, until August 29. The box office number is 0870 040 2000
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/2009/08/01/andrew-lloyd-webber-i-m-a-quality-control-freak-91466-24280490/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
