• IndieWire the problem of too much television for Emmy voters • Vanity FairBook Club is getting a sequel with its quartet of stars returning. VF wants Andy Garcia back as well and we concur. • Variety an ouch ouch pan review of Nicolas Winding Refn's new TV series (which he keeps saying is a movie) • Variety this seems like a bad-omen move. Amazon is only giving their chief Oscar hopeful The Report (starring Adam Driver and Annette Bening) a two week theatrical window before it streams...
[More after the jump including Madonna's Madame X, Daredevil's longshot fight sequences, news on King Richard, and Catherine O'Hara visiting Broadway...]
Fosse/Verdon wrapped its 8-episode run this Tuesday, and here’s a quick recap on the final three episodes, and some overall thoughts on this captivating mini-series.
Episode Six, “All I Care About is Love” Episode six concerned Fosse’s heart attack during the editing of Lenny (1974) editing and rehearsals for Chicago on Broadway. It was one of the weaker episodes of the series, especially coming off the previous episode, the almost-staged-play episode with the characters locked in a Hamptons house, arguably the show’s high-water mark. That episode gave director Thomas Kail (who went from Hamilton to TV with graceful ease) the opportunity to put in the nails early on and keep screwing tightly, with all the actors laser-focused on their objectives and obstacles. Episode Six, on the other hand, contained some material handled directly in All That Jazz, and it felt more like a transitional episode for the final narrative haul of the show...
Tony season is (nearly) upon us so we're reviving the Stage Door column toward the end of March. But before we start reviewing shows, a history lesson.
Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Dolittle
My Fair Lady began its classic life in 1956 as a Broadway musical. No, that's not quite right. It began its life as George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, which premiered way back in 1913, over a century ago! That play inspired the stage musical by Lerner & Loewe. On March 15th previews will begin for the latest Broadway revival. Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) headlines as Eliza Dolittle, with Harry Hadden-Paton as Professor Henry Higgins, two time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz (♥︎) as Eliza's father, and showbiz legend Dame Diana Rigg (The Avengers, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Game of Thrones, etc...) as Higgins' mother.
This will be the sixth major incarnation of the hit musical. Let's recap...
Last week here in Manhattan The Film Experience was invited to attend a very exclusive special screening and dinner for Netflix's new series Bloodline. How did they know we had a thing for Kyle Chandler and Sissy Spacek? Even more mysterious: How did they know about our deep abiding love for Norbert Leo Butz and Katie Finneran, two Tony-winning Broadway musical comedy sensations who are surprising but great choices to play husband & wife in a swampy thriller / family drama / murder mystery fusion.
The storyline concerns the Raeburn family, a rich Southern Florida clan who own and run a very lucrative beachfront hotel. In the premiere episode the parents (Sam Shephard and Sissy Spacek) are celebrating an anniversary and home come there four adult children played by Kyle Chandler, Linda Cardellini, Norbert Leo Butz, and their eldest and most troubled prodigal son Ben Mendelsohn. (Mendelsohn's management team might want to look into a curveball next time he takes a role because seeing his face is now already shorthand for TROUBLE!)
I've long dreamed of a film adaptation of Jason Robert Brown's possibly unfilmable The Last Five Years which is, frankly, my favorite original musical of this millenium (thus far). Only Michael John LaChiusa's The Wild Party and Adam Guettel's Light in the Piazza come anywhere near it in terms of my obsessiveness. I know every word backwards and forwards. Literally at that; half of this romance-gone-awry musical (Hers) is told backwards and the other half (His) is told forwards.
Turns out a film version is very much in the works. Writer/Director Richard LaGravenese wants to make it and Anna Kendrick, she of the perfect pitch, plans to star in it. They'll have to get funding and a male lead still. The right male lead won't be easy to come by. He's got to be a) convincingly Jewish b) comedically and dramatically gifted c) blessed with enough sexual and intellectual charisma to have the audience buy into his sudden literary stardom and understand if not quite forgive his extramarital flings and he's got to be able to sell the show's single best dramatic song "Nobody Needs to Know".
It's tough to imagine anyone surpassing Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott who originated the roles off Broadway but that's a problem that only those theater aficionados who were lucky enough to see it during its run in 2002 have to contend with.
One of Broadway's best - Sherie Rene Scott
I'm not sure what to make of this filmmaking combo. LaGravenese's work is all over the place quality wise from the sublime (The Fisher King's screenplay) to the let's-not-talk-about-that (two poorly received Hilary Swank vehicles for starters.) Anna Kendrick won't have any trouble selling the comedy or the vocals but it's tough to imagine Kendrick, who has made her career on scarily driven type A bitches (Camp, Up in the Air) who would eat Cathy alive, selling her frustrating doormat qualities and lack of confidence with the endearing comic neurosis and empathic sweetness that Sherie Rene Scott mastered. I love Kendrick's voice and y'all know I am thrilled that we're arriving in a place (possibly) where actors with actual vocal gifts are routinely cast in musicals, but the role is just such a 180º from the roles that made her famous.
Are there any other Last Five Years fans in the house? Speak up. Convince your fellow TFE readers to grab that CD.
Friday, June 14, 2019 at 8:00AM 
