4 posts tagged “musicals”
I went and saw Urinetown: The Musical tonight at the college. This is a Broadway musical produced locally with local talent, and I am very happy to yell KUDOS to my good friend Laura for doing an outstanding job as Little Sally. Laura, you stole the show!
So, Urinetown. It's a very strange show, and is very self-referential and is pretty much a spoof of musicals while being a real musical itself. The purposely ridiculous premise is that there has been a 20-year drought and that both private toilets and public urination have been outlawed, so that everyone now has to pay a monopolist public toilet magnate for the privalege of going to the bathroom in a public commode. I can't imagine a more bizarre concept, but it's camped up the point that you can't help but laugh.
A big round of applause also to Adam Savage, who played the toilet mogul Mr. Cladwell, and did an outstanding job, as well as to the actors who played Hope, Officer Lockstock, and Bobby Strong.
Again, Laura: you rock!
This movie can really be summed up in two words: Holy Crap.
I had seen the play once years ago, but had to leave at intermission because I was working nights and the play was very long. Of course, seeing half of the stage production cannot prepare you for this extremely bloody screen adaptation of the morbid musical known as Sweeney Todd.
Excellent performances by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman make this very watchable, even if you do occasionally have to look away from the screen because of the buckets and buckets of blood. And oh, is there blood! You could fill a swimming pool with it, then go for a dip, the way this movie uses it. Still, if you like your darkness dark and your mobidity morbid, this is your movie. Plus, true to Tim Burton form, he made sure to spray a lot of blood directly into Johnny Depp's face.
Interesting trivia: Former Branagh-Thompson homewrecker Helena Bonham Carter is now engaged to director Tim Burton. This isn't really news, because they've apparently been engaged for six years and have had two children in the interim. So what do out-of-the-box actress Bonham Carter and creative genius Tim Burton name their first child? Billy Ray. Go irony.
In unrelated theatrical news, I auditioned for the next Theater Arts Ensemble play last night and this afternoon, and got a call today telling me that I got one of the lead roles. It's called Love, Sex, and the IRS, and it's a farcical romp and is going to require a lot more on-stage physicality and running around than I've done up to this point, to it should be interesting.
Originally posted on my old blog on March 28, 2006:
Tonight, Stina and I watched The Producers, a 1968 movie staring Zero Mostel and a young Gene Wilder. There's a remake out now staring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, which I have not yet seen but it has to be better than the original. The original Producers is very zany, which you would expect from Mel Brooks' directing debut, but for too much of the movie it went beyond zany into just plain old bizarre.
Strix and I have gone to see two outdoor plays recently at the Lions Wilderness Amphitheater. The first one we went to see was Cyrano de Bergerac. As most everyone knows the basic premise, I won't bore you with it, but it was very well done, and the lead role was very expertly played by Brian McCann, an actor from Philadelphia who is spending the summer in New Mexico. I was also quite impressed with the swordplay.
On a side note, I didn't know until I just looked it up know that the play Cyrano de Bergerac was based on a real person.
The second play we saw was Crazy for You. This is a cobbled-together musical, recycling a number of old Gershwin toons like "I Got Rhythm" and "They Can't Take That Away From Me." The plot of the play is that a young man who wants to sing and dance on stage, but really works for a bank that his mother owns, is sent to Nevada to foreclose on an already-closed playhouse in a little dying town called Deadrock. Predictably, he falls in love with the woman whose father owns the playhouse (the only woman in Deadrock) and decides to try to put on a play in the playhouse to raise enough money to save it from foreclosure. The woman won't have anything to do with him, and while she's secretly smitten with him she thinks he's a crackpot. The man then does what any sane person would do, and dresses up as a famous producer from New York and tells her that he is there to help her put on the play. Eventually, of course, the real famous New York producer shows up, and wackiness ensues.
I will say that I was in a bad mood at the amphitheater when we watched this play, anyway. There was a busload of ill-behaved teens from a church youth group there that night, and then the family in the row in front of us and to our left kept talking during the play and jostling the bench back. That being said, I don't think I would have liked this play under the best of conditions. It is just a contrived, empty way to reintroduce old songs from old plays. The lead character, Bobby Child (played by Robert Mitchell), was as ridiculous a character as I've ever seen, the total stereotype of the young man with stars in his eyes who just knows that if he got his break he could make it big!
That being said, the actor Robert Mitchell does know how to tap dance, quite well, and the actors did the best they could with the material they had.
The amphitheater itself is quite small, and the only seating is in the form of stone benches, so bring a cushion. If you're lucky, you can get one of the benches with a wooden back to it. Unless, of course, the people sitting in the same row as you keep jostling the wooden back, in which case you are unlucky again.
