Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 10:00AM Please welcome guest contributor Maggy Torres-Rodriguez
Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. So if you’re looking for a flick to throw on, kick back and re-- really have your stomach churn, this is it. BUT before we get into that, can we first take a moment to talk about Dakota Johnson’s Met Gala dress (pictured above)...
Friday, April 26, 2019 at 4:06PM by Nathaniel R
Isnt It Romantic?
Did you know that Oscar once had a category for dance? Well, "Dance Direction" to be particular. Which is not quite choreography but close. The category was held for three years and discontinued after the 1937 Academy Awards. Despite the first three to four decades of Oscar ceremonies arriving in a time when movie musicals were plentiful, the Academy Awards never instituted a choreography category. The sole example, apart from Dance Direction was a special Oscar for Jerome Robbins for West Side Story (1961), a redundant trophy in a way since he also shared the Best Director Oscar win due to his choreography and dance direction on that immortal classic (currently being remade).
At any rate, the Chita Rivera Awards, which sprung back to life three years ago (they were once called the Fred and Adele Astaire Awards) DO give awards to movies for their dance sequences in two separate categories, in addition to their primary focus which is honoring Broadway and Off Broadway achievements...
Wednesday, April 17, 2019 at 1:00PM by Nathaniel R
David Alvarez will be taking on George Chakiris's Oscar winning role of "Bernardo" in the remake of WEST SIDE STORY
We'll have to take the West Side Story casting, which is now complete with filming to begin this summer, in two parts. It's a LOT to process. Though we are skeptical of the project given that West Side Story (1961) is so perfect despite its imperfections (you know how art works), but the material itself is so brilliant that perhaps we'll get two classics for the price of one?
With the casting complete, meet the Sharks...
There's a lot of Broadway talent (especially from Hamilton, On Your Feet, Carousel), some people from the Miami ballet world, and even some who've done West Side Story before in other forms. Links go to their instagram pages if we could find them...
Friday, April 12, 2019 at 4:00PM We're celebrating music man Howard Keel's centennial this week. Here's Lynn Lee...
In many ways, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) marked the peak of Keel’s MGM career, coming after his breakout role in Annie, Get Your Gun and his star turns in Showboat and the less-successful but still-classic Kiss Me, Kate! Keel’s film career would fade in the years that followed, although he continued to enjoy success on the stage and in later life would find TV fame with his role on “Dallas.” It was Seven Brides, though, that captured Keel in his screen prime as an appealing and charismatic musical actor who managed to make a problematic character (to say the least) surprisingly compelling.
Full disclosure: Seven Brides was one of my favorite movies growing up, and remains one of my all-time favorite musicals. As a young child I loved it even more than West Side Story and The Sound of Music because it felt like a happier movie than the other two...
Monday, April 1, 2019 at 11:33AM by Eric Blume
Fifty years ago today, audiences saw their first Bob Fosse film: Sweet Charity, the Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields musical for which he won the Tony for Best Choreography three years earlier. It’s fascinating to look back at this movie five decades later to see all the seeds that Fosse later brought to fruition in his subsequent films...
