Wednesday, March 19, 2008

me on the radio (FINAL NOTICE)

One more reminder that later today — between the hours of 4 PM and 6 PM Pacific (7 PM and 9 PM Eastern) — I'll be talking about myself on Stu's Show, which you can hear on Shokus Internet Radio. Click on the above banner and follow instructions that are so simple, even John McCain couldn't get them confused.

In fact, if you're reading this between 4 PM and 6 PM Pacific,click right here now and listen in.

• Posted at 10:20 AM · LINK

Knowing Me, Knowing You

While I was composing the previous post, the following arrived in my "press release" mailbox. I reproduce what they sent exactly, including the misspelling of the show's name...

The Mammia Mia! film fansite is NOW live! This is THE place where fans of the worldwide smash hit musical merge with movie buffs from all of over the country to discover a new world of friendship, conversation, support, and community... Universal Pictures cordially invites you to join the Mamma Mia! fansite today! Join fans worldwide, swap information, trade trivia facts and learn more about the upcoming film version of the musical starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Dominic Cooper and Amanda Seyfried. "My My, how can you resist that? ..." Check out the film’s official Mamma Mia! fansite and sign up today!

And there's also a link to this video preview. In the tradition of the recent Sweeney Todd film, it doesn't make the product look like a musical and certainly doesn't say "based on the smash Broadway show." In this case, they've decided to pass it off as a teen sex comedy starring Meryl Streep. Or maybe that's the movie they made.

• Posted at 9:39 AM · LINK

Monster Mash

This article in the New York Post says that the Young Frankenstein musical can be considered a "flop" and that it may vacate its theater sooner than some are admitting to make way for the forthcoming Spider-Man musical. (Thanks to James H. Burns for the link.)

Speaking as an utter layman and outsider here: I liked Young Frankenstein and think it's paying a certain price for the overhype. Its ticket prices and promotion have grown humbler. I would also hope they still don't have so many people in the lobby being quite so pushy about selling you t-shirts and other souvenirs. (I really think that harmed the show a bit for some folks. It did for me. Made it feel like you were filing in to a ride at Disneyland, not a Broadway musical.) I assume they haven't changed a few of the musical numbers that ended with a soft thud but there's still enough in there that you can leave humming something.

But I don't know the math on this kind of thing and it may well be in trouble. If so, I wonder what this means for the future of the show. The New York production is so expensive and elaborate, I can't imagine any regional theater ever mounting a comparable production. That might be a good thing because in some ways, the show is diminished by its size. I actually think the show could lose its rough edges if its creative team — or others they empowered — did some more work on it.

Alan Jay Lerner once wrote that the reason Camelot was not as fine a show as he wanted it to be was that they had too large an advance sale. Coming as it did from the same crew that had just done My Fair Lady, the show could not delay its New York opening long enough to fix all that needed fixing. They'd sold too many tickets for the Broadway run. Also, the show was so costly with its lush sets and costumes that it was difficult to rewrite and in many ways a prisoner of its technical needs. They actually wound up making some significant changes, including cutting two songs, several months after the show had begun playing in New York.

That almost never happens. If a show is changed after it opens on Broadway, it's usually only to scale back its budget, not to improve things. I don't think they've done either with Young Frankenstein. Maybe they could.

• Posted at 9:35 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

One of my favorite "kid's shows" (which is to say it was not just for kids) was Hot Dog, which ran on NBC Saturday morning back in 1970. That was the year that network yielded to rather feeble public pressures and tried to program their kidvid lineup with more "enlightening" shows. The entire schedule suffered a humiliating rejection in the ratings, partly (I thought) because kids wanted comedy and adventure, not school on Saturday mornings; partly because (I thought) most of the educational shows weren't very good.

An exception was Hot Dog, which was a show about how things were made. They'd show you how things were made but before and during the presentation, there'd be little spots with three "experts" — Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen and Joanne Worley — offering their insights on the topics for that week.

Here's four and half minutes of Hot Dog, tackling the burning question of how to make a baseball glove. Ms. Worley isn't in this one but Woody Allen discusses the subject at hand (all improvised on the spot) and Jonathan Winters does a brilliant bit of mime with vocal sound effects. The off-camera voice you'll hear asking questions — and I'll bet he's one of the people you'll hear laughing at Johnny Winters, too — is Frank Buxton, a friend and frequent contributor to this site. Actually, several people involved in the making of Hot Dog read this site but only one of them, and it isn't Frank, has the power to get Hot Dog released on DVD. I wish this person would get off his ass and arrange it.

• Posted at 12:25 AM · LINK