"West Side Story" Casting Pt 1: Meet the Sharks

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...

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Stage Door: What's in the running for Tony nominations this year?

With Emmy nomination voting still two months away, the Awards calendar is now strictly focused on the Broadway stage: it's Tony season!

The 2019 Tony Award eligibility runs May 31st, 2018 through April 25th, 2019. The eligible shows will find out their fate when Bebe Neuwirth and Brandon Victor Dixon announce the Tony nominations on Tuesday, April 30th. A Tony win, even moreso than an Emmy or Oscar triumph, can result in a huge change in the financial fortunes of the nominee/winner. That's especially true if the show doesn't come with a major marketing hook like "based on a popular movie" or "hear all your favourite songs by so & so!" in the case of jukebox musicals. 

So what's eligible this year? It's not time for predictions yet but we've compiled all the titles for you in chronological order because that's more interesting than alphabetical...

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Howard Keel Centennial: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

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...

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Howard Keel Centennial: "Calamity Jane"

We're celebrating musical star Howard Keel's Centennial this week. Here's Tim Brayton...

Presenting a musical in which Howard Keel plays the obnoxious gunslinger love interest to a famous woman from the Wild West. My apologies if you feel a little bit of déjà vu from that logline: Nathaniel did, after all, just write about Keel's breakout performance in 1950's Annie Get Your Gun, about which every word of that sentence equally applies. And that's absolutely no accident. Warner Bros. had fought to get the rights to that stage musical as a vehicle for its up-and-coming singing star Doris Day, but lost out to MGM. When that film proved to be a hit, Warner's responded by developing an original Western musical based - oh so very loosely - on the life of Calamity Jane, famous frontierswoman and scout.

So eager was the studio to recreate that Annie magic that they even went to the trouble of borrowing Keel from MGM for the span of this one production. Not that you could tell any of this just by looking at 1953's Calamity Jane...

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Stage Door: "The Cher Show" and "Aint too Proud"

by Nathaniel R

Musical theater has its own version of limited and wide release / indie and blockbuster if you will. The analogy is far from perfect but those movie groupings are sort of comparable to Off Broadway and Broadway. Every Broadway show is trying to be a four-quadrant blockbuster.  

One of the safest routes to a quick buck (if not necessarily continuous sales) is the jukebox musical. Not all of them try to double as biographies of whoever's songbook it is but many do. That way they're easily marketable, excessively familiar, and can rely on nostalgia and sight-unseen goodwill to fill the house...

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