Profile for Jennifer Lynn

I agree. I'm all in favor of new adaptations of stage musicals. I'm all in favor of giving movies the benefit of the doubt and not getting on one's high horse about them, but... ...WHY would they update this to contemporary times when the whole show (and indeed, the strip it was based on...at least when it started) revolved around the Great Depression? It's not like, say, a Shakespeare play when a setting update can shed a new light on what the author intended...it was what the original show ...

Here's the thing...we enjoy seeing different stage productions of the same musical, so why not different screen adaptations of it? As much as I love the original WSS movie, I wouldn't mind seeing what a new team could bring to it. That said, I hope they would not update it to contemporary times. Usually, the only effect that has is making it look MORE dated. Somehow, if you can keep it nominally in its 1957 time period (and don't forget, that time period's important...it was the time of a new...

I do hope that they do some sort of tribute to Marvin Hamlisch. The Oscars did, and I think the Tonys would be even more appropriate.

Why on earth wasn't this number on the Christmas Story cast album?! (Which, incidentally, was my favorite present this past Christmas. Wonderful score! I kind of wish they'd featured "Somewhere Hovering Over Indiana" since that's my favorite song on the CD.)

There are no words for how wonderful this man's voice is. But I also got a huge kick out of the camera focusing on the one girl happily lip-synching the lyrics. I can relate--that's one of my favorite songs off the Prince of Egypt soundtrack too! Anyone figure that poor girl's family is going to trot out this video at EVERY family gathering in the future?

I posted about this on the Musicals.Net board. It's gotta be a difficult line to tread...they want actors with some screen presence, but who can handle this material. I'm not crazy about the idea of Russell Crowe as Valjean, but then, I've never heard him sing. Hugh Jackman, I think, would make a better Valjean than a Javert. As for Javert...Brian Stokes Mitchell. He straddles the line between stage and screen, his name is well-known enough, and the voice, the voice, MY GOD THE VOICE. (And Ja...

This is the first I've heard of this. I'd like to know, as a Beatles fan...does this contain the incident where the Marcoses give the Fab Four a hard time for turning down a party invitation?

I'm with the rest of you who think that movies-into-musicals isn't necessarily bad. It's just that it has to be conscientiously done, with an eye to good source material, and composers and writers who'll do it justice. After all, didn't The King And I owe at least as much to the Rex Harrison movie Anna And The King as to the original Margaret Landon novel? I, for one, am really looking forward to Ever After (which I hope won't be delayed forever) and Somewhere In Time. They're both lovely, ro...

Hope I can catch this! I always wanted to see a musical episode of DC or Marvel comics animation! What a shame Kevin Conroy doesn't do Batman's voice for this show! He showed in an episode of Justice League that he has a GREAT singing voice! "Am I blue, am I blue...ain't these tears in my eyes tellin' you?"

As I said in another thread, scuttlebutt (from a Disney news site) is that both the dancers and the animatronic programmers had put tons of work into preparing--only to be told, sorry, we're just doing film clips. Which screwed over all their hard work. I feel especially bad for the dancers...that rehearsal isn't child's play. (And I was looking forward to seeing Wall-E. I love that little robot.)

Actually, I just read on Jim Hill's Disney news site that basically, after the performers had been rehearsing the Jerry Herman tribute number (which included Hello Dolly) for weeks and the programmers had worked hard to program the live-action WALL-E, the Tony producers just up and told them, "Sorry, we're going to go a different direction and just show clips of the classic actors." Which screwed over the hard work of both the performers and the Disney Imagineers. Pretty damn shoddy, you ask ...

Hair looks wonderful and I like it...but...I was really hoping it'd be WSS. West Side Story has literally been my favorite classic show since earliest childhood (my parents had all these 8-track Broadway cast albums that they played in the car, and I knew all the songs before I was five!). But...more power to them and that was a great acceptance speech! Anyone else ponder the significance of *Anne Hathaway* being in a *Shakespeare* play? And now for the sixty-four thousand dollar question... ...

Yay Karen! Whenever I make it to NY to see the revival, I hope she's still in it. Such a sweet speech. Is it me, or did Martha Plimpton mouth something like "Love you, Uncle David" when the camera was trained on her?

Having just watched the entire original movie ending...I can see where the happier one worked better for the movie. There's the reason Frank Oz gave...that we didn't see the characters do that last song, and we didn't see them take a bow, so we lacked the reassurance. But I can think of another reason. The ending of the stage show may be dark, but it's a "black comedy" kind of dark, with the dead characters in the flowers. Audrey II may have won, but we still laugh a little at the ending. In ...

I'd always put Billy as no more than twenty-one, and even more immature than that emotionally. Probably between eighteen and twenty-one. But, who knows? Someone as talented as Hugh might pull it off.

As much as I adore Hugh Jackman, I think Billy's extreme youth is central to his character. His immaturity only adds to his anger issues.

Actually, I double-checked on Ever After...it's getting a pre-Broadway tryout in San Fran, but I don't know when it's going to make Broadway. Unless it's going to be in late 2009, in which case it'd be for the 2009-2010 season, and so not make this list. (Just so they don't delay on a CD for me to put on my Christmas list.)

Nothing about Ever After? That's the one I'm really looking forward to. (What advance buzz I've read--from those who've seen a workshop--is good.)

Sigh...I had hopes. I mean, I'll still give the CD a listen when it comes out... I'd defended this musical from those who were ready to dismiss it out of hand before seeing it or hearing a note, saying that with the right composer and the right adaptation, it could work. Now I see that apparently (and maybe they'll save it, I don't know) they haven't had either. For something of this scale, maybe they should have gone with a tried-and-true composer rather than an unknown. (What Ahrens and Fla...

The thing is--the show as it stands has, if not a "moral" in the strictest sense, a deeper theme that is very subtle. In his autobiography, Alan Jay Lerner discussed the script with someone--I can't remember who--giving a run-down of what the show was about. And the other person said, "No, Alan, that's not the show you've written at all. What we have here is a story about a romantic who is searching and a cynic who has given up. And the romantic lets himself be talked into cynicism for a whil...