Stage Door: "The Prom" is a delight

by Dancin' Dan

The Prom caused a big splash at the Thanksgiving Day Parade last year, giving us the first same-sex kiss ever aired as part of the parade broadcast. The uproar that followed almost single-handedly justified the musical's existence, proving that maybe the world does "really need" a musical about a bunch of past-their-prime Broadway stars who travel to Indiana to help a young gay teen who isn't being allowed to bring her girlfriend to prom. If that plotline makes The Prom sound insufferable, a hopelessly pandering piece of liberal agitprop designed to make the Broadway audience feel oh so very good about themselves for having the same morals as the show's creators, well... that's not exactly the case. The Prom has more up its sleeve than that, and it all comes down to the show's tone.

It's clear from The Prom's first scene that the musical's main target is not the people of Edgewater, Indiana, but rather the vainglorious Broadway stars who insert themselves where they don't belong...

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50th Anniversary: Bob Fosse's "Sweet Charity"

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...

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Stage Door: The misunderstood, exquisitely sung "Superhero"

by Nathaniel R

Don't let the title fool you though it's not at all deceptive. Tom Kitt's (Next to Normal) newest musical both does and doesn't involve superpowered do-gooders. This anguished but gorgeous intimate drama is, more specifically, about a teenage boy who loves comic books (new find Kyle McArthur who has been with the show since its developmental process). The boy is still reeling from the death of his father two years before the play begins. He loves to draw superheroes which we see projected on to the stage at times. His widowed depressed mother (Kate Baldwin), struggles to connect with this typical juvenile obsession ("What's Happening to My Boy?") especially since they really need each other given the sorry fate life handed them.

Early in the musical the boy becomes obsessed with a mysterious neighbor who he is convinced is either a superhero or supervillain --  the jury still being out...

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Soundtracking: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

by Chris Feil

If you want to look to reinforcement of traditional gender roles in the movies, sadly you can look to the history of movie musicals for consistent examples. It’s a genre that consistently returns to tropes and archetypes for its structure, but that just makes it all the more rewarding when there are examples to the contrary. Take Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for example - no seriously, take it and watch it on a loop because it is perfect cinema.

The film gives us two unique musical heroines in Jane Russell’s Dorothy Shaw and Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee, a team on the stage and in dealing with men. They are two ingenues that subvert genre tropes and traditional images of women looking for love on screen, and you can see how they do so in their solo songs...

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Sunset Boulevard. Should we worry or rejoice?

by Nathaniel R

As you have no doubt heard, the 1993 stage musical Sunset Blvd., Andrew Lloyd Webber's adaptation of the film noir classic Sunset Boulevard (1950) now has a green light for the movies. The stage musical premiered in London in '93 with Patti LuPone in the lead role before a legally-fraught switcheroo to Glenn Close for its Broadway debut in '94. The musical would go on to win 7 Tonys (including Best Musical and Best Actress) and roughly ever since then (we're talking 25 years now!) there's been talking of adapting it back to the screen, its original home and subject matter. This wouldn't be the first time that's happened of course. The most recent example is Hairspray which proved a hit in all three incarnations: 1988 / 2002 / 2007.

This project has been talked about for years and now a sudden green light with shooting scheduled for October. Was it Glenn Close's year long comeback of sorts as she undoubtedly came close to winning that elusive Oscar that finally did it...

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