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This is a Must Watch. But I don’t want to say why. In part because the “why” is on so many levels – the words, the performance, the sense of history and more. But also, the less you know beforehand, the more it builds-up, the more the surprise of it all is impactful. A couple nights ago, Ian McKellan was a guest on Stephen Colbert's show. This is the full, extended interview including material that didn’t get on television. The whole thing is fun, but that's not the “Must Watch” part. The “Must Watch” part starts at the 20-minute mark. But actually, jump before that to the 19-minute mark. McKellan tells something for a minute that didn’t make the broadcast, but it’s wonderful, with a payoff that gets an explosion from the audience. The “Must Watch” part starts immediately following. Some may have seen brief clips of it -- Katy Tur showed about 30-seconds near the end which didn't do this justice. Not just because it's only a small part of...well, let's just say "the ending," and because it left out the audience cheering at the end, but also it's the story and history behind it all that adds to its impact. I wish I had just the section in question to post, so you don't have to jump to the 19-minute mark. But that's what was posted. As I said, the whole segment is wonderful -- the words, the performance, the story, the sense of history. But what it leads to and says is remarkable. Not to build this up too much, of course... But I think it can hold up to anticipation.
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Okay, it's time. The other night I popped in my DVD of the holiday gem Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol for my annual viewing, so it's only fitting that today we offer its wonderful songs. (And a joyous addendum soon to follow -- Watch This Space.) The classic show was the first-ever animated holiday special, made in 1962 and for eight years it got repeated annually through 1969. But its simplistic animation finally caught up and alas it went out of the rotation. A shame since it's such a terrific production. For all its being Mr. Magoo and only 52 minutes long, it's a very nice adaptation of the story. And the score...well, it's Broadway quality and probably the best musical score for an animated TV special, and one of the best for TV, period. The music is by Jule Styne (Gypsy, Bells are Ringing) and the lyrics by Bob Merrill (Carnival, Take Me Along) who -- while writing this -- were, in fact, in the middle of working on Funny Girl. Though no longer on network TV, for a long time the show could be found every year on syndication. But unfortunately even that has largely faded away, though occasionally it pops up. But on its 50th anniversary in 2012, NBC brought it back to prime time, and happily its DVD release gave the show new life. By the way, because one can really not have enough of Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, I have a wonderful and joyous addendum to this which I'll be posting soon. Here are the wonderful songs. The first, "Ringle Ringle" introduces us to Scrooge and Bob Cratchit. When Scrooge visits the Crachit house in Christmas Present, the family sings the rousing showstopper, "The Lord's Bright Blessing." In Christmas Past, Scrooge returns to an almost-empty schoolhouse of his youth and sings a duet of himself as a young boy, "I'm All Alone in the World." Still in Christmas Past, Scrooge's fiancé Belle breaks up with him for find a new idol to love -- gold, and she sings wistfully about their love lost, the lovely "Winter was Warm." And in Christmas Future, Scrooge visits a junk shop run by thieves who have ransacked the now-empty house of a man who was died -- which he doesn't realize yet is him -- and they explain with very amusing glee that "We're Despicable." And now, we have a bonus -- more of an an addendum of sorts to the songs from Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol. For those who were skeptical of me calling this a Broadway-quality score, It turns out (aside from the reality that it is) that the show did play on Broadway -- sort of. In 2014, the Actors Fund did a benefit concert with a fairly elaborate staged reading of the TV show, with full costumes, limited sets and even some choreography. And this is a 3-1/2 minute montage. And it looks absolutely wonderful. And sounds like they used the original music arrangements. (At the end of the video are some credits, and it notes being done with DreamWorks Animation and Margaret Styne. I'm going to guess that the former hold the rights to the TV special and the latter may hold some rights since she was the wife of composer Jule Styne.) Since the show is only about 52 minutes, it's much too short to mount a full production, but I suspect it could be paired with another one-act show or also done in community theaters. By the way, their adaptation of the thieves' song, "We're Despicable," is scary-good how close they came with the casting and even the animated choreography. Even down to the tiny details, at one point, of the comically-weird, twisty hand movements. And the Actors Fund repeated this as a fundraiser in 2019. But here are those excerpts from the 2014 production. Curtain up...! Today, once again (and again and again...) marks the anniversary of when Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap opened on London's West End. That was on November 25, 1952 -- 73 years ago today. It's still running, after reaching 30,000 this year on March 19! Doing the best I can to figure its current status, I believe it's now run for 30,278 performances. By way of comparison, not long ago Phantom of the Opera closed as the longest-ever running production in Broadway history. It ran for 13,981 performances, over the course of 35 years. If it hadn't closed and played for another 35 years…it still would be short of The Mousetrap. And that's only if The Mousetrap closed tomorrow. Even the longest-running show in New York, off-Broadway's musical The Fantasticks, which had a remarkable run of 42 years and 17,162 performances fell far short, just over half as long. And again, The Mousetrap is still running. I have a theory about that. At some point long ago, it stopped by just a long-running play and instead become a tourist attraction, a stop to make when in London. As a kidling, I saw The Mousetrap on a family trip to Europe in 1966, the play's 14th year. A couple years later on another family trip, I picked up a poster which I have up on my walls.  At the time, I was a little sorry that the poster had as many years as "16." Little did I know how paltry that number would be. A couple of fun tidbits about that first production in 1952. One of the actors in the play was Richard Attenborough, who of course went on to great fame as an actor (in such movies as The Great Escape and Jurassic Park), but even greater fame as a director, winning an Oscar for Gandhi. And also, when Agatha Christie signed a contract to give away the movie rights, it was under the condition that no movie of it would be made until after the play closed. That was 73 years ago. So far... (Incidentally, the producer who signed that contract was John Woolf. He went on to have a very successful career, despite this speed bump -- including winning a Best Picture Oscar for the movie musical Oliver!) If you've seen (or plan to) the 2022 movie See How They Run with Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan and Adrien Brody, it's a fun, comic-murder mystery that's centered around a murder that occurs backstage during the early days of The Mousetrap. The story is totally fictional, but real details are mixed in. And the play has still never yet run on Broadway. A couple weeks, Ethan Hawke was a guest on Seth Meyers' show. I was going to post this at the time, but other stories got in the way. But finally I can get around to it. After the commercial break during his appearance, he brought up that he was in rehearsals for a new play that would soon be on Broadway, and when... -- Well, I don’t want to say anything else about it. The only thing I'll add is – just watch. It’s wonderful. On the surface, this will seem an uncommon piece to post in the morning, seemingly just about entertainment, the kind of thing I usually post in the late afternoon. And on the surface it is. But that's not why I'm posting it now. In the current Northwestern alumni magazine, they had a story about a recent production there of “Man of La Mancha” -- and included a link to a 15-minute “making of” video about it. The video is extremely well-done, and much of it is very interesting (although it’s something one can jump through parts). However, what’s most interesting -- and the reason I'm posting it in the morning, usually what's been my "political slot" -- is that they re-focused the framing story. Normally, I don’t care much for doing that, but they came up with an extremely interesting concept. There's a reason for telling this, so bear with me. If you haven't seen "Man of La Mancha" (or not seen it in years), the story of Don Quixote is told with a bookending tale around it. The musical actually begins in a Spanish prison in 1597 when Miguel de Cervantes has been arrested an thrown into the infamous Seville prison (loosely inspired by real life, when Cervantes was a tax collector and had put the money he collected into a bank -- which went bankrupt, and the money was lost). The other rough prisoners already in prison when this newcomer arrives charge him with being a fool and a dreamer, and begin to ransack his possessions. And among all that is the manuscript of Don Quixote that Cervantes has been writing. The prisoners go to burn this silly waste of time. But Cervantes begs them not to and instead demands a trial, saying he can't be convicted as a fool without a chance to prove his innocence. And his defense is putting on an amusement, which is the tale of Don Quixote. What Northwestern did is change the setting of this "framing" story. And instead of it taking place in the Seville prison of 1597, it occurs in a modern day ICE detention center on the U.S.-Mexican border, and all those prisoners are immigrants who have been arrested, awaiting deportation to countries unknown. Whether this changed bookending works in full, I don’t know. (It very well may.) But I can tell from the video that it at least does work, and movingly, in part. (I will add as a side note that Trump has frozen $787 million in research funds from Northwestern. And just a couple weeks ago, in order to hopefully take pressure off the university as a target, the school's president resigned. None of that had anything to do with theater department adapting the framing story, that's just coincidence -- work on the show had begun months before any of that happened, and the focus of the changes is, instead, on the ICE arrests and deportations. But it adds perspective to what ended up on stage. Because the funding was frozen on April 8. And the first performance of this production took place just two weeks later, on April 25.) The whole video is interesting on how a college enterprise puts together a musical. And all the more so because the Northwestern theater department is high-end and renowned. It's not unreasonable to skim past some detailed parts, if the minutiae of theater is not your highest interest. But the video is very well-produced. However -- if you don’t want to watch the whole thing or even most of it, at the very least jump to the 13:00 mark for the last three minutes, where they show the final scene. That's the point of this. Trust me. But so that you know what's going in the final scene -- After telling the story of Don Quixote -- where, in the end, this dreamer of a noble world who has chased a fantasy, dies, but not before those who thought him crazy are transformed by his life -- the story returns to the "present day" of the prison. And the inmates (who had played the roles during the story) are themselves profoundly moved by the story about the efforts of one man trying to fight for justice and goodness against all reasonable odds. They return the manuscript to Cervantes, as the prison guards arrive to take him and his manservant with their trunk of possessions to their trial -- and the prisoners serenade him off (with impressively soaring voices here) to his destiny, with a reprise, as you might imagine, of the show's most memorable song. Starting at 13:00, watch the final scene to the very end of the video. This is why I'm posting it here. I hope some other schools and community theaters use this adaptation, at least for the time being. This has gotten a lot of promotion on CNN, but for those who don't often watch the channel or in case it fell through the cracks, I thought it deserved a reminder. But this coming Saturday, June 7 -- also known as "tomorrow" (if you're reading this when posted on Friday -- CNN is broadcasting live the second-to-last performance of the Broadway play, Good Night and Good Luck with George Clooney, based on the film he starred in and co-wrote with Grant Heslov. It airs live at 4 PM in Los Angeles. And 7 PM in the East.
(It's the "second-to-last" performance, rather than the last performance, because that is a matinee on Sunday.) The production was always planned as limited run, so it's not closing early. In fact, it set box-office records during its run. ("Box-office records" have been more common these days, given increased ticket prices...and massively increased ticket prices for celebrity-starring productions. Still, the show has to be good enough to bring in audiences willing to pay those sky-high prices.) CNN will also be having a discussion after the play. |
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. 
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