Occasionally on Mondays, Broadway's "dark" night, or uh... It's Wednesday (oops!)... we'll talk theater.
As I sat waiting for the revival of William Inge's "Picnic" to begin in its new Broadway run, I noticed that I couldn't keep my mitts off of Sebastian Stan. Playbills can get so smudgy if you keep pawing at them but it couldn't be helped with his face so blown up big on the program. The collection of actors onstage was about to experience the same handsy problem with Sebastian Stan as "Hal" the hunky drifter in this classic drama about the power of beauty and the complications of sexual attraction. Only it wasn't his face they wanted to rub themselves all over.
No sooner had the play begun than Ellen Burstyn was talking him out of his clothing (please to note: Sebastian Stan has been working out. A lot. God bless, presumably, Captain America: The Winter Soldier in which he'll square off with Chris Evans as his former friend 'Bucky' now resurrected/brainwashed as an arch enemy.) He spends the better part of the three act play sweaty and shirtless or half sweaty-shirted if you will.
Some people just can't be killed. Carrie White is one of them.
The bastard girl was born from a sweaty brief affair between religious fanatic Margaret White and a man unknown. (Maybe Margaret doesn't even know since the memory of sex seems to fill her with such masochistic horndog fever; can we trust anything that pours from her mouth not to have been thoroughly reworked by her demented faith?) By 1974 the shy teenager was infamous having massacred her whole town in the pages of Stephen King's best seller "Carrie". Brian de Palma's film adaptation Carrie (1976) immortalized the teenage telekinetic once and for all. Carrie White "burns in hell" but she's still aflame in popular culture, too. There will be no snuffing her out.
So what better time to resurrect her again than now when teen bullying is such a hot news topic? "Carrie" (the musical) was an infamous flop on Broadway in 1988 but the shy awkward girl has been given a makeover and is born again Off Broadway at the MCC Theater where she will rampage through April 22nd.
It's always a bit hard to imagine Carrie rampaging when you first meet her all shy awkward and lonely in that hell on earth: the high school locker room.
Marin Mazzie and Molly Ranson in "Carrie" Off Broadway
Today is the centennial of one Lucille Ball, born 100 years ago on this very day in New York. Her most famous incarnation was obviously "Lucy Ricardo" on television's beloved sitcom I Love Lucy. But until I Love Lucy and intermittently afterwards, she graced the silver screen, too.
The earliest entry in her filmography I've personally seen is the wonderful ensemble comedy Stage Door (1937) which is an absolute must-see for all actressexuals. No matter where you look on the screen in that film aboard a boarding house for Broadway dreamers, there's a screen goddess for your eyeballs: Hepburn, Ball, Rogers, Miller, Arden. Ball's last film was the ill fated musical Mame (1974) which is often ridiculed for its liberal use of ye olde 'smear the screen with vaseline' de-aging technique and for the quality -- or lack thereof -- in the singing. But even if Mame isn't anything like a classic, if you erase it from film history you lose that awesome scene of her and Bea Arthur crooning frenemy classic "Bosom Buddies" and we can't have that!
[Editor's note: Ugh, what is up with that clip. It's in widescreen but it looks like pan & scan. Is the aspect ratio off on all the vhs/dvd copies available?]
But the Lucy movie my mind always drifts to is Douglas Sirk's Lured (1947). It's worth a look for the curio factor alone, it being an early Sirk, a thriller which predates and predicts Hollywood's serial killer craze by a good 50 years, and an odd snapshot of a moment in time where it looked like she might become a dramatic screen star instead of the loveable goofball TV comic she was clearly meant to be.
If you're interested in Lucy, there's a new book out called Lucille Ball FAQ which is a treasure trove of weird trivia. For example, did you know that she actually auditioned for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (then again, who didn't?) or that she really wanted but just barely missed out on being Sugarpuss O'Shea in screwball classic Ball of Fire or that that she turned down the fabulous "Alexandra" in Sweet Bird of Youth?(Geraldine Page earned a well deserved Oscar nomination and got to fondle Paul Newman. What was Lucy thinking?)
A new book and a still from Stage Door (1937) with Hepburn, Ball and Ginger Rogers
Did you know that the first celebrity name-checked on I Love Lucy was the movie star Gregory Peck? Or that in one episode Ball mimics her Stage Door castmate Katharine Hepburn's most famous line-reading from that movie "the calla lilies are in bloom again"?
The subtitle of the book is "Everything Left To Know About America's Favorite Redhead". I 'm not well versed enough in Ball's lore to know if that's accurate but the book certainly offers 'A Lot to Know About America's Favorite Redhead.'
Wednesday, January 16, 2013 at 9:58PM 
