Monthly Archives: May 2010

Patrick Healy discusses an important aspect of what gets to play on Broadway…the shortage of (and therefore, competition for) theaters. Some shows don't reach the Great White Way because, quite simply, there's no suitable house available when they need it.

There are all sorts of stories about this kind of thing. Richard Sherman told me that the stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang only got to Broadway because the revival of 42nd Street closed at the Hilton Theater. There were only one or two houses that could accommodate the special effects necessary for the show's flying car and the rest were booked solid, probably for years to come.

All sorts of shows are aspiring to make it to New York in the next year or two. Just in the musical category, we have revivals of How to Succeed, Brigadoon, Godspell, Dirty Dancing and Fosse's Dancin' and new musicals adapting Betty Boop, Spider-Man, Paradise Lost, the life of Bruce Lee, the life of Harry Houdini, and the life of Liberace, as well as a number of movies including Catch Me If You Can, Father of the Bride, Robin and the Seven Hoods, Pure Country, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Leap of Faith and the Jerry Lewis masterpiece, The Nutty Professor. There are at least thirty other plays or original musicals that have announced an intention to play Broadway. There can never possibly be enough theaters for half of them.

Today is Free Comic Book Day, which means you can go to your local comic book shop and get some free comics. There's a story about it on the CNN website and it's illustrated with the above graphic. Apparently if you hurry, you can go to your local comic book shop and get free copies of the first printings of Detective Comics #27 and Action Comics #1. Don't be greedy. One of each to a customer.

Roger Ebert explains why he hates 3-D in movies. I don't like 3-D, mainly because it puts me to sleep…and if it's not adjusted perfectly, it gives me a headache. So that's my reason for not liking it, and since that's enough of a reason, I never stopped to ask myself if there's any case to be made for the process. Does it add anything besides gimmickry and higher-priced tickets? If it does, I haven't seen an example so I suspect Ebert's right on that point.

Still, I don't have quite his emotional rage on the topic. This may be because I don't have a job that pretty much requires me to see every movie that comes out.

Attention, Southern Californians! This coming Friday night, you have a rare opportunity to see our friend Frank Ferrante perform his unnatural act, which basically consists of him transforming himself into Groucho Marx for ninety very funny minutes. By "rare," I mean that though he travels the country with it, you usually won't find him Grouchoing anywhere those of us who live in Los Angeles can get to easily. It'll probably be at least a year until your next opportunity and it might well be longer.

Friday evening, May 7, he's doing it down at the newly-refurbished — I hear it's magnificent — Fox Performing Arts Center in Riverside, California. This is about an hour's drive from L.A. and a lot of us are making it to see the guy. I've seen him…well, this will be my fifth time, I think, but so much of Frank's show is improvised that I could see it again and again. We're going to car pool down to Riverside, eat first at a restaurant near the theater and then go see a Groucho double-feature. They're running the movie Duck Soup at 6:30 and then F.F. goes on, live and in person, at eight.

Duck Soup has been shown at this theater before, by the way. It opened there first-run on November 26, 1933, sharing the bill with a 20-minute short called Bye-Gones, starring torch singer Ruth Etting.

The restaurant, also by the way, will not be the Old Spaghetti Factory, as I mentioned here once before. We've decided the occasion calls for someplace a little fancier. Which reminds me: When are they going to start opening New Spaghetti Factories?

I have given Frank many a rave here but I can pay him no greater compliment than this: I intend to drive the Pomona Freeway on a Friday afternoon at rush hour in order to see him. If you're anywhere in the vicinity, I suggest you click here to get tickets and join us.

Journalist Matt Taibbi has been the stud duck in the whole Goldman Sachs scandal. He said their execs were scum who's committed criminal fraud and it's beginning to look like he erred on the side of being too nice to them. Here's his latest piece in Rolling Stone about how people lost jillions of bucks. Makes me glad I put all my money into that line of Muhammad comic books for the Muslim audience.