After having seen the musical Priscilla, I’ve decided to come out: I’m a Sondheim fan. Yes, Into the Woods, Sweeney, the lot… even Merrily We Roll Along and The Frogs. Every cd, the live recordings, the scores. Now I’ve got that off my chest, I can say how thoroughly enjoyable I find Priscilla, Queen of…
Dirty Dancing comes to Milan with the biggest advance booking since Stage Entertainment took over the Teatro Nazionale, beating even Beauty and the Beast and Mamma Mia! The producers must be breathing a sigh of relief as the Italian economy’s bumpy ride doesn’t seem to be affecting ticket sales, such is the film in the cultural…
There are comebacks and comebacks: the rather sad, end-of-the-pier affair, because money’s run out and there’s alimony to pay; the small cameo ‘because I miss the applause’; and Alessandra Ferri. Ferri’s various comeback projects are classy with a piece being created for her by Martha Clarke based on Colette’s novel Cherì with ABT’s Herman Cornejo, a new ballet about Eleonora…
Q&A When did you start dancing? At age 8. A short time ago. Why did you start dancing? Apparently I preferred it to walking; actually I still do. Music was frequently played at home. My mother loved musicals and I think she secretly would have wished me to be in musical theatre. BUT, I saw…
Styne and Sondheim‘s Gypsy is the Hamlet of the musical theatre: many try, many fail, but a success in the role adds a magical aura to a career. Thank goodness that Loretta Goggi, as Italy‘s first Rose, had the taste, guts, and believability to carry it off, because it was one of the few things that truly…
On 15 January, Milan will welcome a new Rose to the stage as Gyspy opens in Italy. Loretta Goggi has been a household name in Italy for half a century. She made her début in television as a girl and hasn’t been far from the small screen or stage since. Starting out as a child actress,…
Producers Barbra Streisand and Joel Silver have set Academy Award-winning writer Julian Fellowes to pen the screenplay adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents‘ Tony Award winning musical, Gypsy, which Streisand and Silver are currently developing for Universal Pictures. Streisand will portray “Momma Rose” in the new version, her first musical film since Yentl in…
Judi Dench is to be the voice of the giant in the Giggleswick school production of Into the Woods. She delighted pupils at the North Yorkshire boarding school by agreeing to take a part in their school play. Pupils wrote asking her to take part with the cast of 90 schoolchildren. She is patron of the Richard…
The Los Angeles Times have many wonderful entertainment journalists, the sort that have you reading a review of something you’d never want to see. Christopher Smith writes about Elaine Stritch’s latest venture at Manhattan’s vast Town Hall who, at 86, has still got what it takes. Here is part of Smith’s sensitive and sensible review: Wearing her trademark…
Stephen Sondheim is to receive New York City‘s highest honour for achievement in the arts. The award is given by the City of New York for contribution to the city’s intellectual and cultural life. Previous recipients include Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The Handel Medallion will be presented by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and actor…
The Los Angeles Times asked Patti Lupone to name four people who have influenced her artistically: Edith Piaf I’m an Italian and my emotions are just under my skin…. There’s just a purity and rawness in her singing that goes straight to my heart and my gut and it always has. There’s such expression in…
Tom Aldredge, an Emmy-winning actor who for five decades was ubiquitous on stage and screen, seen in everything from Sondheim to “The Sopranos,” died on Friday in Tampa, Fla. He was 83. “I knew at the beginning I was nobody’s leading man,” Aldredge told The New York Times in 1985, when he was 57 and…
Shrek The Musical has opened in London’s West End and seems to have generally won over the nation’s critics. It’s New York run wasn’t a runaway success and producers must have been a little nervous on the press night. Lots of the New York production has been recycled, even Shrek’s green rubber suit… yuk! Nigel Lindsay plays…
Stephen Sondheim‘s ‘new’ musical, ‘Road Show’ is the third collaboration between Sondheim and book writer John Weidman (Pacific Overtures and Assassins). But ‘Road Show’ is yet another version of ‘Wise Guys’ (directed by Sam Mendes in 1999) and ‘Bounce’ (2003). It recounts the story of brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner and their adventures across America from the…
Arthur Laurents, the playwright, screenwriter and director who wrote and ultimately transformed two of Broadway’s landmark shows, Gypsy and West Side Story, and created one of Hollywood’s most well-known romances, The Way We Were, died yesterday in his home in Manhattan. He was 93. Laurents once described writers as “the chosen people” and said he…
On May 7 for five weeks there will be a production of Stephen Sondheim‘s Follies where Elaine Paige will sing “I’m Still Here” for the first time. A strong cast includes Bernadette Peters. Paige talked to Playbill about the role: She is a survivor and somebody that is not that dissimilar to me probably. In…
At the 2011 Olivier Award ceremony this year Stephen Sondheim was presented with a lifetime achievement award. Part of the tribute to the 80 year-old composer was from his 85 year-old star Angela Lansbury. Lansbury’s first ever Broadway musical was in 1964 with Stephen Sondheim’s short-lived Anyone Can Whistle. In May 1973, the first revival of Gypsy opened in London’s…
The eagerly anticipated project to re-film the musical “Gypsy” with Barbra Streisand as Mama Rose has been aborted. The playwright and director Arthur Laurents, one of the rights holders to the work, talked very openly to the Hartford Courant: at 93 you can say want you want. A few years ago, she called me. It…
Rich will leave the paper to join the New York Magazine. He has been an op-ed columnist at the New York Times since 1994, and was the paper’s chief drama critic from 1980 to 1993. New York Magazine editor-in-chief Adam Moss writes, Frank Rich is a giant — a powerhouse critic of politics and culture,…
The role of Mama Rose in “Gypsy” has always attracted great divas, from Ethel Merman to Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly to Patti LuPone. And now comes word that the greatest diva of them all — Barbra Streisand — is next in line. Streisand is deep in negotiations to direct, produce and star in a movie version…
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