Stage Door: Carrie White, Sweeney Todd, and More...

Some people just can't be killed. Carrie White is one of them.

The bastard girl was born from a sweaty brief affair between religious fanatic Margaret White and a man unknown. (Maybe Margaret doesn't even know since the memory of sex seems to fill her with such masochistic horndog fever; can we trust anything that pours from her mouth not to have been thoroughly reworked by her demented faith?) By 1974 the shy teenager was infamous having massacred her whole town in the pages of Stephen King's best seller "Carrie". Brian de Palma's film adaptation Carrie (1976) immortalized the teenage telekinetic once and for all. Carrie White "burns in hell" but she's still aflame in popular culture, too. There will be no snuffing her out.

So what better time to resurrect her again than now when teen bullying is such a hot news topic? "Carrie" (the musical) was an infamous flop on Broadway in 1988 but the shy awkward girl has been given a makeover and is born again Off Broadway at the MCC Theater where she will rampage through April 22nd.

It's always a bit hard to imagine Carrie rampaging when you first meet her all shy awkward and lonely in that hell on earth: the high school locker room.

Marin Mazzie and Molly Ranson in "Carrie" Off Broadway

MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

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Sing "Far From Heaven", Sing!

Far From Heaven, one of our favorite movies here at TFE, is stage bound. Musical stage bound to be more precise. Not every property was meant to be reinterpreted for the musical form but you've generally got a head start on greatness if the story or appeal is already heightened as it were...

Some emotions are too deep to speak. You have to sing them. Imagine Cathy Whitaker's voice soaring over some poignant melody while her heart is quietly breaking? Imagine the opportunities for a great 11th hour duet that maybe becomes a solo at the train station.

Gives you chills it does.

Viola Davis in "Far From Heaven"But this could all go horribly wrong. Perhaps big brassy pastiche numbers like "Mr & Mrs Magnatech" await us? And Mr Whitaker's gay escapades in musical context could veer way too far into unintentional camp rather than 50s homage. The musical will premiere in July 2012 at the Williamstown Theater Festival but no cast has yet been announced.

Do you think they'll give the best sidebar song to Sybil the maid (the Viola Davis role) or Cathy's evil bestie Elle (the Patty Clarkson role)?

Invent song titles in the comments. May the best amateur composer win!

The musical is being written by the team behind the musicalized Grey Gardens. If you've never heard any songs from that show I've included the best one after the jump "Around the World".

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10 Things I Learned About Kathleen Turner This Week

Kathleen Turner as Molly Ivins

Those of you in the Los Angeles area have two enticing theater options coming up. The first -- an absolute must see -- is the Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies. It's coming to LA soon from Broadway intact but for Bernadette Peters who will be replaced by another major but less famous talent, Victoria Clark (The Light in the Piazza). The other theater option is currently playing. I can't vouch for since I haven't seen it, but it's the one and only Kathleen Turner playing Molly Ivins in the one woman show Red Hot Patriot.

I have however seen Kathleen Turner live on stage twice (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and High) and she doesn't lose even one ounce of her charisma or gift on the stage the way many screen stars do when they attempt the transfer. Earlier this week she had a live chat at the LA Times Culture Monster and, though I've never participated in one of those before it was my darling Kathleen (she along with Pfeiffer and Streep is how I became such an actress-obsessive in my formative years) so I had to!

I told her I missed her onscreen and her response went like so.

I have a film coming out called A Perfect Family sometime this Spring. I still enjoy camera acting, but it's not as exhilarating to me as being on stage."

Ten other things I learned during her chat with fans after the jump...

10 Notable Bits From Kathleen Turner's Live Chat

10. Her favorite actors are Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Judi Dench. How strange is that? MOMENTS before this live chat we had just made a major plea for them to present at the Oscars together. This is empirical evidence that Kathleen was reading the Film Experience as she answered questions! ;) But in all serious lord knows if she ever googles herself, she's seen the site.  

"PUSSY WILLOW"

09. Her favorite of her own films is Serial Mom because she has so many wonderful memories from the set ("most laughs") and she is still close with John Waters. This movie prompted the funnest questions from her gathered fans. Had she ever made a prank phone call "For heaven's sake, no! Nor will I". One fan said the house the real Serial Mom lived in in Baltimore was for sale. Should he buy it and give tours? "Good luck!" was her perfect succinct response. 

8-1 after the jump

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Anne Hathaway Sings "She's Me Pal" to Meryl Streep

The Kennedy Center Honors were a good hagiographic time last night on CBS (unless you were expecting something different in which case... where ya been? This is how lifetime tributes are). Musical theater fans would have had to enjoyed that endless Parade of Amazement when they trotted out a healthy cross section of Broadway's best female voices for the Barbara Cook homage (Sutton, Rebecca, Kelli, Patti, Audra + Glenn Close doing "Losing My Mind" !) but as for me.... as for me...

I got both my musical theater kicks and my 80s nostalgia and my Streep Mania and a current actress obsession (Hi, Annie!) all rolled up in one gift as Hathaway repurposed Streep's most indelible moment from Ironweed* (1987) to serenade Streep herself.

The line "her heart is as big as a ham" is accompanied by the splits, marking Anne Hathaway once again as a true kindred spirit PERFORMER/actress -- both ladies woulda been in vaudeville if they'd been born 100 years ago.

A+

I love that Hathaway can make her eyes well up with tears totally on cue. Acting is magic. The complete video is below. Hathaway comes in at the 11:40 mark.

*Ironweed was a flop in its day and I know so few people who have seen it but I still remember sitting in the movie theater absolutely electrified / paralyzed when Meryl belted out that "He's Me Pal" number for Jack Nicholson. At the time Meryl's musical-theater chops were a complete shock! It's easily one of my favorite moments from her entire lauded filmography.

'War Horse': Stage vs. Screen

Kurt here. I am not, by any stretch, an authority on theater, and it's only recently that I've been able to collect a good number of playbills. But I can say, without hesitation, that the Broadway production of War Horse is the best thing I've ever witnessed on stage. I saw the show last Sunday, three days before I caught Spielberg's big-screen translation. In technical terms, the play is flawless, so staggeringly well-executed that, at intermission, my partner and I just gave each other wide-eyed, open-mouthed looks. The story, as expected, is one of very typical structure, with a found-and-lost-and-found-again relationship between and adolescent boy (Albert) and an almost preternatural stallion (Joey). But the stagecraft, while clearly taking some inspiration from Julie Taymor's The Lion King (and, perhaps, the Daniel Radcliffe incarnation of Equus), feels wildly extraordinary, at once awesome and minimalistic in its design.

I've decided that what makes the play so potent, beyond its meticulously made yet intentionally haggard horse puppets, and its ripped-from-the-pages-of-history projection screen of a backdrop, is its fierce, unannounced insistence on getting in your space, nearly assaulting you when it's time for stagehands to hurriedly crisscross the performance space with barbed wire, line the aisles with pennant strings to prep for a recruitment scene, or pilot a massive, makeshift tank across an implied, strobe-lit battlefield (another highlight is an ultra-stylized, oversized bullet that's carried from the crowd and spun like a drillbit before striking a key character on stage).

And how does Spielberg's version measure up to all this? I did my best to not allow my first War Horse experience to make me biased against my second, and it's true that the two works are very different beasts. I was, however, keeping score as I basked in the orange glow of Spielberg's impossible skies, for this equine weeper's path to the screen yields a lot of pluses and minuses. Let's take a look (spoiler alert!) at how Spielberg bettered the material, and how he fell short of the merits of its past life.

Peter Mullan and David Thewlis

PLUS: Albert's Father

In the play, Albert's father, Ted Narracott is an irredeemable, profoundly hateable character (seriously, like please-shoot-him-right-now hateable). A drunk and alleged military deserter, he makes a pile of horrid choices—including impulsively selling Joey—and never considers for a moment how they will impact his son...

Fathers, Tradition, Human Animal Bonding after the jump

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