Aladdin Pt 1: The 'street rat' and the princess with an edge

Three-Part Mini-Series
Occasionally we'll take a movie and baton pass it around the team and really dive in. If you missed past installments we've gone long and deep on Rebecca, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma & Louise, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, A League of Their Own, and Rosemary's Baby in the past.  -Editor

Part 1 by Ben Miller

Welcome to Team Film Experience's Aladdin Retrospective.  This film was a big part of my childhood and I’m proud to join in on the fun to revisit it with you before the live-action remake hits.  Disney in the 1990s might have been the animated studio's peak.  They were coming off the surprise success of The Little Mermaid in 1989 follwed by the monster hit and then-historic Best Picture nominee of Beauty and the Beast in 1991.  The massive success of Aladdin the very next year felt like a commercial/critical apex (at least until The Lion King arrived two years later).

0:00:26 – Alan Menken probably does not get enough credit for the score he put together.  Yes, he won an Oscar for it, but it doesn’t get put into the conversation enough for GREAT animated scores.

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Stage Door: A startling new take on "Oklahoma!"

by Deborah Lipp

Gabrielle Hamilton, nominated for a Chita Rivera award, for a very different take on the dream ballet in "Oklahoma!"

Wow, that was a lot.

Leaving the new Broadway revival of Oklahoma!, a reconceptualization of the show that pulls no punches, I felt a little staggered, like it was too soon to have a celebratory dinner afterwards. (Context: I’m assuming you know the basics of this classic of musical theater, and I won’t consider any of its points “spoilers”. I will hold back potential spoilers, though, for this version.)

Daniel Fish’s unique production changes not one word, either spoken or sung, but it all feels very new...

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Doris Day (1922-2019)

by Nathaniel R

"Legend" and "Icon" and "Classic" are all overused words in showbiz prose, and we're as guilty of anyone at letting those words fly out with abandon. But they're nothing like overstatements when it comes to the career of Doris Day, one of the 20th Century's most beloved and successful stars. She began her career as a teenage big band singer and nine years later debuted on the big screen in her most regular genre, the romantic comedy (with or without songs) via Busby Berkeley's Romance on the High Seas (1948).

She was an instant hit with audiences but it took a few more years for her true classics to emerge...

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Stage Door: The musical adaptation of "Tootsie"

by Nathaniel R

“I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man.” So went the famous arc-completing line in Tootsie (1982) that resonates backwards through the movie, and carried you out of the theater, not just on a comic high but with zeitgeist capturing depth. Though it’s little remarked upon today in the now-now-now of popular culture, the early 80s were a cinematic time rife with the questioning of traditional gender roles just like our culture is today. Hit films like Victor/Victoria, Yentl, Mr. Mom,  and Tootsie all arrived in quick succession, though the then preferred vernacular was androgyny and gender-bending, as opposed to today’s non-binary and genderqueer designations.  It’s not surprising, then, to see Tootsie come round again to popular culture in 2019 in the form of a Tony-nominated musical comedy. What’s more surprising is that that resonant quotable capper is one of the few famous lines to be lifted directly from the movie.

As shocking as it is to type, they wrote new jokes!  This is, as you may have guessed given Broadway’s strange new role as a regurgitator of old movies, not the norm…. 

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Showbiz History: Evita, Black Widow, and Fred & Ginger

six random things that happened on this day in showbiz history

1919 Maria Eva Duarte de Peron is born in Argentina. She will later be known globally by just one nickname "Evita." Her story will inspire a 1979 Andrew Lloyd Webber stage sensation (starring Patti LuPone) which wins 7 Tony Awards including Best Musical. Later it becomes a successful 1996 movie musical with Madonna (picture above in a promotional photoshoot for the film) in the leading role, which everyone including Michelle Pfeiffer and Meryl Streep wanted at the time. Madonna takes the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical...

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