TV/ ABC CENSORS "HAPPY ENDINGS" BIN LADEN JOKE: Just days after President Obama announced that Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was killed, an unlikely television series found itself in a bit of a bind. ABC's midseason comedy Happy Endings aired an episode Wednesay night called "Of Mice and Jazz-Kwon Do," taped weeks prior, in which Zach Knighton's character compared an elusive mouse in Elisha Cuthbert's apartment to a "Bin Laden." During the airing in the U.S, Knighton told Cuthbert, in discussing the hardships of trying to capture said mouse: "He's my Bin Laden, Jessica Bin Laden, a super hot Arab girl I went to college with". Then the audio cuts out, though Knighton's mouth is still moving. The line cut out was: "She was the one that got away". The online version of the show was also censored. The show was not censored in Canada and media reports say it was only censored in the US as viewers might be sensitive at this time.
FILM/ MORE STARS JOIN SPIELBERG'S "LINCOLN": Steven Spielberg is rounding out the large cast of his Abraham Lincoln biopic, DreamWorks' "Lincoln". Tommy Lee Jones and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, both are pictured, along with Hal Holbrook, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, Bruce McGill and Joseph Cross are in negotiations to join the pic. David Costabile, Byron Jennings, Dakin Matthews, Boris McGiver, Gloria Reuben, Jeremy Strong and David Warshofsky are also in negotiations to board the movie. Lincoln, which sees Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president of the United States and Sally Field as his wife, Mary Todd, is based on "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin and adapted by Tony Kushner. Jones will play Thaddeus Stevens, a Republican leader and congressman from Pennsylvania. Stevens was a staunch supporter of abolishing slavery and was critical to writing the legislation that funded the American Civil War. Gordon-Levitt will take on the role of Robert Todd Lincoln, eldest son of President Lincoln and the only one to live past his teenage years. The other actors will make up the supporting roles in this telling of Lincoln's journey to abolish slavery and end the Civil War. The project, which will shoot this fall in Virginia, is eyeing a late 2012 release via Disney's Touchstone label.
The UK's Fairbanks Productions has announced the hire of director Nick Hurran to helm the company's Dusty Springfield biopic "Dusty". Hurran is to direct "Dusty," a biopic of the legendary singer, who died in 1999, from a script written by former newspaper columnist, screenwriter and author Ray Connelly and based on Sharon Davis’s book, "A Girl Called Dusty". Connelly wrote the screenplays for "That’ll Be The Day" and "Stardust". Casting and start date of production are due to be announced on a later date.
THEATRE/ "MAN AND BOY" BOOKS BROADWAY RUN: Maria Aitken, whose "The 39 Steps" was a UK and Broadway hit, will direct 3 time Tony Award winner Frank Langella, pictured, in a fall Broadway production of Terrence Rattigan's 1963 play "Man and Boy," Roundabout Theatre Company announced yesterday. Langella ("Frost/Nixon") will play ruthless financier Gregor Antonescu in the drama about a father reuniting with his estranged son in order to solve financial issues in a time of economic turmoil. Additional casting and creative team will be announced. Previews will begin September 9 prior to an opening of October 9 at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway. This will be a limited engagement through November 27. The synopsis of the show, according to producers, is: "At the height of the Great Depression, ruthless financier Gregor Antonescu's (Langella) business is dangerously close to crumbling. In order to escape the wolves at his door, Gregor tracks down his estranged son Basil in the hopes of using his Greenwich Village apartment as a base to make a company-saving deal. Can this reunion help them reconcile? Or will this corrupt father use his only son as a pawn in one last power play? "Man and Boy" is a gripping story about family, success and what we're willing to sacrifice for both".
The already closed musical "The Scottsboro Boys," which received 12 Tony nominations this week, has set dates for its West Coast premiere. "Boys" will play The Old Globe in San Diego from April 22-June 3, 2012, followed by ACT in San Fransicso from June 19-July 15, 2012. The musical will resurface with the same creative team and (if schedules allow) members of the original Broadway cast, under Broadway director-choreographer Susan Stroman. Producers said that discussions with resident not-for-profit theatres in Seattle, Chicago and Boston are ongoing. "The Scottsboro Boys" tells the true story of nine black youths accused of raping two white women in the Depression-era South. The darkly comic show borrows the conventions of the outmoded "minstrel show" to tell the fact-inspired tale of racial injustice. It opened on Broadway last fall. The reviews were mixed (from tepid and encouraging to wildly enthusiastic). Despite a cult of fans, the show did not catch fire at the box office and closed. Rumours persist that "Boys" will return to Broadway. With the 12 Tony noms this week, the rumours have only grown. Should the musical win big at the awards, it may very well end up back on Broadway before its West Coast premiere.
Tony Kushner's new play, "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures," opened last night Off-Broadway to mixed reviews. In his new play, Kushner, author of the groundbreaking "Angels In America," takes on the issues of life and death, along with many other social issues, as the patriarch of a family announces that he no longer wishes to live. In its mixed review, The New York Times said: "From the get-go it is clear that while the resulting debate may be intellectual, it won’t always be intelligible. Roughly 10 minutes into this nearly 4 hour production, just after that first sexy phone exchange, “Guide” explodes into a babel of fast-talking, passionate voices, slapping and overlapping, twining and crashing into one another. And you may find yourself sitting back and grinning at this noisy spectacle of so many people having so much to say with so much passion and eloquence that you can’t follow a single one". The Hollywood Reporter said: "The Bottom Line: "This is unmistakably a Tony Kushner play--sprawling, stimulating and powered by unquenchable intellectual curiosity". They went on to say: "Cast is fully committed to the complexities of these flawed and often far from sympathetic characters, conditioned by a set of beliefs and values they struggle to honor". The New York Post said: "Kushner seems to prefer ideas to humans, especially those who aren't neurotically intellectual. It's an odd, neglectful lack of empathy that "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide" can't overcome". And in its review, AP said the play was "too wordy," and then went on to say: "Oh, but it's also lush and beautiful, funny and an education. It is poignant and smart, gloriously messy and wonderfully acted. And never, ever boring. You know what? Brevity is overrated". "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures" runs 3 hours and 35 minutes and is playing at the Public Theater until June 12.
Sada Thompson, a Tony-winning actress of stage and film known for her way with maternal and earthy characters, died May 4 in Danbury, CT. She was 83. Routinely described as one of her generation's finest actors, Thompson did not gain stardom until she was in her 40s, and was fixed in the public imagination as somebody's mother, often wise and noble, sometimes selfish and terrible, but always a figure of age and experience. Her breakout performance was in the original, 1970 staging of Paul Zindel's "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds". She earned a Drama Desk Award and an Obie for her work in the Zindel play. 2 years later, she won her Tony Award, as well as another Drama Desk Award, for "Twigs," a group of 4 short plays by George Furth. In 1988, she was nominated for a Joseph Jefferson Award for Actress in a Principal Role in a Play for "Driving Miss Daisy" in Chicago. But her image as a mother derived for the most part from "Family," the 1970s landmark television drama in which she starred alongside James Broderick, Meredith Baxter Birney and Kristy McNichol. She was Emmy-nominated 4 times for her performance as Kate Lawrence, pictured bottom right in cast photo, the calm, dignified head of the family. The show was applauded for dealing with issues such as marital strife, homosexuality, divorce, infidelity, that were either taboo or ignored by other shows. Thompson won an Emmy for "Family" in 1978. She was also nominated for Emmys for her Mary Todd Lincoln in "Lincoln" (1976); Jack Lemmon's wife in "The Entertainer" (1976); "Our Town" (1978); "Cheers," in which she played Rhea Perlman's mother (1991); and "Indictment: The McMartin Trial" (1995). Thompson is survived by her family.
Arthur Laurents, a Tony Award winning playwright and director who wrote the books for the classic Broadway musicals "West Side Story" and "Gypsy" and later wrote the hit movies "The Way We Were" and "The Turning Point," died Thursday. He was believed to be 93. Laurents, pictured in 1948 and 1984, died in his sleep at his home in New York City after a short illness. For his work on Broadway over more than 6 decades, Laurents won 2 Tony Awards: In 1968 as author of the book for best musical Tony winner "Hallelujah, Baby!" and in 1984 as best director of a musical for "La Cage aux Folles". But he is best known for writing the books for "West Side Story" and "Gypsy," both of which were Tony Award nominees for best musical and later were turned into movies. "West Side Story," with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, was a contemporary Romeo and Juliet love story involving rival New York street gangs. It ran on Broadway from 1957 to 1959. It was followed by "Gypsy," "a musical fable suggested by" stripper Gypsy Rose Lee's memoir and focusing on her driven, larger-than-life mother, Rose, played by Ethel Merman. "Gypsy" ran on Broadway from 1959 to 1961. "I think the book for 'Gypsy' is probably the best book ever written for a Broadway musical," said the president of the Institute of the American Musical, echoing a widely held view. Among Laurents' other plays is "The Time of the Cuckoo," a 1952 comedy that earned Shirley Booth a Tony Award for best actress in a play. A romantic tale of a lonely American spinster who finds romance in Italy, the play was turned into a 1955 film called "Summertime" starring Katharine Hepburn; and Laurents later adapted his play into the 1965 Broadway musical "Do I Hear a Waltz?" As a Broadway director, Laurents also received recognition for "I Can Get It for You Wholesale," a 1962 musical comedy that marked 20-year-old Barbra Streisand's Broadway debut. And he received Tony nominations for directing the 1974 Broadway revival of "Gypsy" starring Angela Lansbury and the 2008 revival starring Patti LuPone. In 2009, he was back on Broadway as the director of a revival of "Westside Story". As a screenwriter in Hollywood for a few years after his 1945 Broadway debut, Laurents rewrote the troubled screen adaptation of "The Snake Pit," a 1948 drama about a woman's mental breakdown starring Olivia de Havilland, but was denied screen credit. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1948 Alfred Hitchcock thriller "Rope". Among his other screen credits are "Anastasia" (1956), "Bonjour Tristesse" (1958), "The Way We Were" (1973) and "The Turning Point" (1977). While in Hollywood in the late `40s, Laurents began an affair with Farley Granger, one of the stars of "Rope". Granger died in March at 85. In his 2000 memoir "Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood," Laurents candidly discussed his homosexuality, his time on the Hollywood blacklist and his personal and working relationships with numerous Hollywood and Broadway legends. In 1955, Laurents met would-be actor Tom Hatcher when Hatcher was manager of a Beverly Hills men's shop. They were together until Hatcher's death from lung cancer in 2006. "I had the most marvelous life that anybody could have with another person," Laurents said in a 2009 interview. "That, I'm proud of. That's an achievement. `Cause most people quit on each other. And we never did".
No comments:
Post a Comment