There is nothing small about the musical The Light in the Piazza. The songbook is page after page of grand gestures, ornate flourishes and the kind of sweeping emotions that conjure romantic visions of the golden age of musical theater. The story the show tells is built on dark family secrets, the lightning strike of love at first sight and those explosive emotional twins, hope and frustration. Piazza unspools itself among the monuments and bustling streets of 1950s Florence, Italy. ...[more]
''I'll never be able to watch a Hitchcock movie again without laughing,'' said one viewer of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps in a posting to the play's YouTube page.Laughing at Hitchcock? Blasphemy! Not if you ask Harriet Newman Leve, one of the show's producers. ''It's very much a loving spoof,'' says Leve. ''We bill it as a comedy thriller, because we don't want to mislead people.'' The Tony Award-winning play, running all next week at the Warner Theatre, is based ...[more]
Just what is Sade's problem? Some might question why it took the singer Helen Folasade Adu -- Sade for short -- a decade to return to making music, and then only after coaxing from her bosses and bandmates. But that's really just an issue for her label. It's certainly not troubling the public: Soldier of Love became her first album to debut atop the charts, and it remained in the top spot for three weeks, having just recently fallen to ...[more]
''Grease has something to say about the family we choose,'' says Jeff Buhrman. ''GLBT people understand that concept about choosing our family, defending each other. It's all in this musical -- you've just never seen it that way before.'' Certainly you've never seen Grease the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington's way -- a new all-male production based on the original 1972 Broadway version. ''Over the years Grease has been sanitized,'' says Buhrman, GMCW's artistic director, noting that the original ''is ...[more]
Sometimes things don't turn out the way you expect. Sometimes the high school quarterback grows up and transitions into a woman. Sometimes an orphan discovers that he's the grandson of movie stars. And sometimes a story of a high school reunion morphs into a touching tale of a family struggling to remain a family. Kimberly Reed, a filmmaker from New York, grew up as Paul McKerrow in Helena, Montana, star of the football team and voted most likely to succeed. ...[more]
Once upon a time there was a young director named Tim Burton, and he created wonderfully bizarre and macabre worlds populated by a boy with scissors for hands and jack-o-lanterns that masquerade as Santa Claus. Then Tim met a girl named Alice, and all the wonder died. Okay, maybe it didn't die, but it certainly went away on a hiatus that lasted 109 minutes. A recent visit to the Tim Burton exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art' made a ...[more]
Most of the Oscar winners this year are sure-things. There, I did it. All of my Oscar picks for the year are cursed and I'm leaving myself wide open to ridicule and derision by declaring that the competition is over (if it really ever started). But seriously, the only drama surrounding the Oscars will fall to just one or two categories. The real suspense will be whether Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin can pull off the co-host thing (was Neil ...[more]
''I think if one were to ask Andy Warhol about the impact he's had on Josh Kornbluth in finding his Jewish identity, he would be both flummoxed and bemused,'' says David Dower. ''It wasn't the point.'' The late, gay Warhol, raised Catholic, had other intentions for his art. For starters, he was determined to live in infamy, well beyond ''famous for 15 minutes,'' the ubiquitous phrase he coined. In fact, Warhol serves as inspiration for Kornbluth's latest comedic monologue -- ...[more]
''Sometimes the resentment still comes up,'' says Thom Bierdz. ''But I believe in life after death, so I believe that mom's okay, just somewhere else.'' A star of CBS's The Young and the Restless, Bierdz had to deal with significant family tragedy over the past two decades. Specifically, he lost his mother 21 years ago in a horrific, personal way that would test the mettle of the strongest of souls. ''My brother killed our mother in 1989 with a baseball ...[more]
There are so many mysteries on the island that it feels like you're never going to get any answers. Is there a safe way off? Can the others be trusted? And are dead people really trying to speak to the living? Just when your head starts to spin, you remember that Ewan McGregor is a writer, not a detective, and you're watching The Ghost Writer, not Shutter Island. Or Lost. Yes, another island-based mystery. This time, instead of a trippy ...[more]
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