Monthly Archives: February 2016

Here's one from Baden Smith…

A local grump has tweeted: "Just caught a bit of #GreaseLive. Nice lip synching there kids. Anything but live."

I can never tell the difference these days, but figured you'd know, so…mimed or not?

I can usually tell the difference, at least in the close-ups. Most of them looked live to me. Plus, they advertised it would all be live vocals and the place was crawling with reporters and technicians and extras. Seems to me some of them would have blown the Twitter whistle if they saw evidence it wasn't live. (More proof: The audio wouldn't have gone out twice if the singing had been pre-recorded.)

You know, I've watched this thing a couple of times, marvelling at the technical expertise. I've been trying to figure out stuff like where the hell they placed the cameras in certain scenes where they were shooting from one angle, then from another. Or how certain actors made certain costume changes so fast without upsetting their body microphones. Or how they hit certain marks so they didn't ruin key shots. I could sure have forgiven the director for pre-recording a few shots or songs here and there to make things easier. Apparently, they didn't. Simply amazing.

We've been telling you on this blog for a while that James Corden should host the Tony Awards telecast. This year, on June 12, he will.

As I said the other day here, I don't think the Iowa Caucuses tell us all that much about who's going to be the major parties' nominees, let alone our next president. But they do have their value: They caused Martin O'Malley and Mike Huckabee to shut down their campaigns.

Ted Cruz won in the same way that Huckabee did last time. What does that tell you? Anyway, if you're worried that Cruz might be on a path to becoming the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, read Matthew Yglesias about why he thinks Cruz is unelectable. And he didn't even get into the fact that so many people who know the guy seem to hate him.

A very funny, talented man is being mourned this week, especially by those in the improv comedy community. Ron House was an actor, producer, writer and teacher. A graduate of Second City in his native Chicago, he later founded a group called Low Moan Spectacular whose members wrote, staged and starred in plays. A sensation in the London underground Theatre Company, they eventually relocated to New York where their show El Grande de Coca-Cola was an off-Broadway hit that ran three years there and additional years in other cities. Other theater groups still mount productions of it and the other fine plays with which Ron was involved.

Their next one, Bullshot Crummond, ran in London, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco for over four years and was made into a film by George Harrison. Others followed, including Footlight Frenzy, which may be the funniest thing I've ever seen on a stage in my life. That's about when I got to know Ron and other members of Low Moan.

He had a fine career as a film and television actor with roles on Roseanne, All My Children, L.A. Law and many more but his first love was the stage. Not long ago, he completed a successful run in a revival of El Grande de Coca-Cola in which he re-created his starring role from the original 1973 production. I saw it twice and raved about it here.

Ron died early last Friday morning, losing a long battle with throat/tongue cancer. The plays he authored or co-authored though will continue to be performed around the world. The last one — a sequel to Bullshot Crummond — is scheduled to open next month at the Lakewood Center for the Performing Arts in Oswego, Oregon. Its title? The Evil Eye of Jabar and The Invisible Bride of Death. If it's like everything he did, it will be very humorous and very special, just like he was.

Here is a brief clip from the original Bullshot Crummond showing Ron in action. The lady is Brandis Kemp. Her two co-stars are Ron. This will give you just the briefest sense of how clever and funny he could be…

I just took a Season Pass on my TiVo for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, which starts February 8. I thought it was on TBS but at least the first episode is airing on that station, on Headline News, on TNT, on TruTV and on Cartoon Network. I assume that's just the first one.

Tonight on GetTV and several over times the next few days, they're running an episode of The Merv Griffin Show from 1965 with guests Richard Pryor, Eartha Kitt, Lainie Kazan and Phil Spector. Next week, they're running Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, the 1969 TV special that brought Mary Tyler Moore back to TV after her movie career fizzled, and which led to her starring in The Mary Tyler Moore Show the following year.

Grease: Live seems to have been both a critical success and a ratings one. It drew 12.2 million viewers — not as much as NBC's presentation of The Sound of Music, which had 18.3 million but more than The Wiz (11.5 million) and Peter Pan (9.2 million). The percentage of viewers in the 18-49 demographic category was also especially good. One presumes Fox will air their Grease a few more times. They'd better. They spent a reported $16 million on it.

I'm trying to think what show someone could do next that would have the same appeal. Hairspray and The Rocky Horror Show are already in the works. If I were deciding — and putting aside my own personal views of what's a great musical versus what isn't — I'd probably try to set up Mamma Mia. It has youth appeal and great sing-along tunes…and the plot would allow it to be opened up for a lot of spectacle, roaming over some studio's backlot. Plus, the movie did quite well.

And a little more time might need to pass since its movie but Jersey Boys could probably draw quite an audience.

Others? Thinking about shows with youth appeal might lead you to Tommy or Little Shop of Horrors. The latter with its small cast might not yield enough spectacle for some, plus there's the question of how you'd do the plant live in a way that wouldn't pale next to the one in the movie. But it's a funny-enough show that someone may give it a try.

It wouldn't surprise me if someone gave A Chorus Line a try, opening it up with live "flashbacks" to some of the stories told on that stage. It also wouldn't surprise me if they did and then realized that the show loses its intimate foundation when you do that and also interrupt every twelve minutes for commercials. Guys and Dolls doesn't have a lot of intrinsic appeal to younger viewers but it has great songs and if you cast it with the right young, well-known stars, it might soar.

And if Berry Gordy doesn't make Motown: The Movie out of the stage version, I could see that being a great live TV event.

That's about as far as my thoughts on this topic extend. Whatever anyone does, I hope they do it in front of a live audience. I wonder if the folks who did Grease: Live have a complete video of a dress rehearsal without all those audience members in place. That might make for a fascinating comparison. I'll bet it wasn't anywhere as fine a performance.

I believe we've completed all the tech stuff involved in moving this blog from its old server to its new server. If you come across any missing graphics, please let me know. Also, if you find any link to elsewhere on this site that doesn't work, let me know. Links to other sites may not work if the link has changed and I don't update those…but when we link to an article or an earlier item on this blog, that's supposed to connect.

The new server should be more stable and a lot faster. It had better be because it's costing me a lot more than the old server. If you notice and appreciate the difference, a donation to this site would not be outta line. Or you can just use our Amazon link and spend a lot of money. But don't do it if you can't spare it, please.

Gee, that was impressive.

I just watched last night's Grease: Live presentation and I was blown away by how elaborate and costly the whole thing was. In fact, the weakest thing about it I thought — and this is not much of a complaint — was that at times it felt like the actors and cameras moved too much and that the tech guys were just showing off, saying "Hey, look what we can do on a live show!"

And somewhere, the folks behind NBC's live musicals — The Sound of Music, Peter Pan and The Wiz — were moaning, "God, if only we'd had that kind of budget."

Of course, this was not a TV version of a stage musical. It was a TV version of a hit movie based on a stage musical…and at times, I felt it stayed too close to the film for no good reason, kind of like that pointless shot-for-shot remake someone did of Psycho a few years ago. Still, I guess that's what people think Grease is — a movie, not a play — and that's what was expected.

The cast was superb. The only review I've seen so far felt the leads were too bland compared to John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. I'll grant them that Danny could have used a little more earthiness and Brandoesque hoodlum quality but I thought Aaron Tveit more than made up for it with dancing and body lingo. And hey, the role of Sandy is supposed to be bland until the finale and as far as I was concerned, Julianne Hough did it as well or better.

At times though, I felt all the actors were upstaged a bit by the production values. They all deserve Emmy Awards for hitting all their marks and getting it right the one time it counted. What those folks did is not easy.

I loved the live audience and the way they were integrated into some scenes. And I found myself wondering if the unions are going to say that some of those audience members should have been paid as extras. I also wonder if some of the more judiciously-placed ones were.

Nice that the rain didn't ruin their big finale. I suspect that the whole part of the carnival in which they sang "You're The One That I Want" would have been done outdoors if they'd been certain it wouldn't be storming, and that they moved that part inside since they weren't certain.

Also nice to see that Rydell High is finally integrated. Bet that bothered someone but by showing us all the scene changes and cameras and actors rushing off to change wardrobe, they tore down that symbolic fourth wall and said clearly, "This is a play." So sure, there can be anachronisms.

(And now that I think of it: Was that exterior set of Rydell High a redress of the same school front from which Robert Preston led "76 Trombones" in The Music Man? And where Conrad Birdie played "Honestly Sincere" in Bye Bye Birdie? I think that set is still standing on the Warner lot but the terrain around it seemed different from the last time I was there.)

So how hard did they beg/bribe Travolta and Newton-John to do cameos? I'm surprised these live shows don't try for a few surprises.

We heard that there were some audio problems with the live telecast to the east coast but they seemed to have all been fixed by the time it got out here. The biggest oops! I saw was that the kid at the end didn't do a great job of hitting the coach in the face with the pie.

Anyway, I still think it's not a very wonderful musical to begin with but they sure gave it a first-class presentation. So is this going to be the new standard? Have they raised the bar such that when NBC does its next one, Hairspray, they're going to have to up the budget and try to top this? Because it's going to be very hard — and expensive — to do that.