'just link a prayer, your click can take me there... 🎵

• Guardian has a really fascinating interview with Sean Penn about his novel (yes he wrote one), his ex-wives, his humanitarian work, the Me Too movement and more
• AV Club Netflix suggests it's going to back away a bit from its war against the movies... or at least from competing on the awards battlefield. Does this mean they're abandoning their Oscar campaigns? This statement is quite vague.
• Boy Culture connects two of my favorite things of all time: Madonna's "Like a Prayer" phase and... Natalie Wood?
• Time Can Oceans 8 bring back the glamourous caper?

• EW Uma Thurman willing to work with Quentin Tarantino again
• W interviews Grace Jone about her fierceness "I pack a good wallop"
• Variety YES! A24 is planting the seeds for an Oscar campaign for Toni Collette in the horror film Hereditary
• Coming Soon For some reason Monty Python's Spamalot is going to become a movie
• Variety Olivia de Havilland talks about being Cannes very first female jury president decades ago
• Electric Literature "storytelling" in WestWorld and how literary it actually is
• Awards Daily Academy votes to expel Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby
• AV Club Steve Martin and Martin Short are actual best friends
• i09 beautiful posters for King Kong's Broadway musical debut
• Playboy "Hollywood's pansexual moment" - interesting points in this article but I'm really quite annoyed that we've jumped from gay rights to "let not define ourselves and let's explore fluidity" and are acting like homophobia is solved / gays are accepted. There are literally still laws being pushed in the US to discriminate against queer people - even this very week! 

Click to enlargeAvengers Mania
<-- This Captain Marvel poster going around looked so official I thought it was. Apparently it's actually fan art by a Brazilian illustrator Fabio Rodrigues

• Vulture Infinity War facial hair rankings
• Monkey See Glen Weldon coins a genius term for the ending of Avengers: Infinity War. Well worth a close read.
• Crooked Marquee Eric D Snider wins the award for "best headline to an Avengers Infinity War review"
• /Film Black Widow's solo film actively looking for a director (even though no screenplay is written yet. Hmmm)
• AV Film how are we supposed to care about Ant-Man and the Wasp post the brutal ending of Infinity War
• Coming Soon Infinity War has been out just one week and it's already nearly at a billion dollars globally. Jesus.
• Express a very elaborate theory on how Captain Marvel and Ant Man could save the day in Infinity Wars Part 2

Tweets in the Hand

A+ shade here for the ever problematic Roseanne, who was recently mouthing off about the White House Press Correspondence Dinner...

And another tweet that is so true that I'm shook to my soft flabby core.

VERY excited to announce that the role of my summer body will be played by my winter body !!!!!

— Tim Federle (@TimFederle) May 2, 2018

Ha ha. After the jump...

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Natalie and "The Boys in the Band"

by Nathaniel R

Natalie and the Boys

Did you know that without Natalie Wood, the seminal gay play and subsequent film The Boys in the Band (1970) might never have existed? 1970 is our year of the month but the story began much earlier when Natalie met the playwright Mart Crowley on the set of Splendor in the Grass (1961). He was working as an assistant to Elia Kazan but Natalie immediately snatched him up for herself, taking him along for her West Side Story ride...

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Tveit Sings A "Moulin" Tune!

Chris here. Plenty of folks may be ho-hum about this year's Tony nominations and the past season in general, but the good news is that we have major Broadway events just ahead - namely the long awaited stage adaptation of Baz Luhrman's masterpiece Moulin Rouge!

Lucky folks in Boston will get to see its pre-Broadway tryout next month, but theatre lovers elsewhere just got the first sampling of what awaits us on stage.

An opulent music video of star Aaron Tveit singing the musical's signature ballad "Come What May" has arrived. While I'm not a much of a fan of Tveit's voice (sorry!), the video does quite a bit to assuage any doubts that the stage would be cheapening Luhrman's decadence and luxouriousness. Guys, the smoke and paper/rose set dressing and plushy simplicity is simply gorgeous!

Now all that awaits is a glimpse of Karen Olivo filling the very large shoes of Nicole Kidman as grand courtesan Satine - but we're fine with the wait if it makes her arrival half as iconic as Kidman's emergence onscreen. Theatre fans know what an event Olivo's eventual Broadway return will be (for the unawares: post West Side Story Tony win, Olivo left the profession and since has returned via regional theatre and the Chicago production of Hamilton). For now, we await the sparkling diamond. What do you think of Tveit's take?

Blueprints: "Thoroughbreds"

This week, Jorge goes into the stables to talk a murderous teenage girl rampage.

Films come from many sources - novels, comic books, video games. The stage has been one of the largest pools of not only source material for the screen, but also of playwrights that eventually make the jump to Hollywood. 

Thoroughbreds was conceived and thought of as a play. It tells the story of two teenage girls (one without empathy; the other one with too much) plotting the murder of one of their abusive stepfathers. As the project evolved, writer-director Cory Finley realized it would be better told as a film. However, its stage roots are still very much present in the text.

Let’s take a look at a particularly theatrical moment, a monologue in which one of the girls recalls her actions, and in doing so puts forward her entire character...

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