What happened to original stories? [...] How do we go from West Side Story, The King and I, and Cabaret to Big, Legally Blonde, and Spiderman? So all three of those shows are actually adaptations as well:
West Side Story is a retelling of Romeo & Juliet The King and I is adapted from Landon's "Anna and the King of Siam" Cabaret is adapted from Van Druten's play "I Am a Camera" and its source material, Isherwood's "The Berlin Stories"
I'm not claiming that Big and Legally Blonde are good shows, but just because a show is adapted from a movie doesn't mean they're bad.
The Full Monty and Thoroughly Modern Mille are some the better new musicals of this decade and just take a look at Spamalot or The Producers.
What happened to character-driven drama? Also three of the shows you listed are high on the drama side of things. In its early days, musical theatre was the funny, mass-market reflection of opera, which tended to tackle the high-drama stories.
Not until Showboat in 1927 did musicals even get to the business of telling a traditional story and what you'd call 'character-driven drama' probably didn't occur until Carousel in 1945. So the musical theatre you talk about is a fairly new thing. I think that the light, fluffy comedies and the 'character-driven drama' are both valid forms of musical theatre, though both might not to be everybody's preference.
Broadway is mostly run by the media conglomerates nowadays. Flashy, big-budget shows of the 80's like Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera are to blame. They made a huge profit, but also had some artistic merit to their production. Other producers wanted to get the same profit and churned out shows with more and more special effects (Titanic, Beauty and the Beast, Jekyll & Hyde). These shows were produced at outrageous cost and got the public crying for more and more effects, which keeps the smaller players out of the ballgame.
The recent glut of popular movie adaptations is from the commercial success of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King (the latter of which a critical success). This has shown that big-budget Broadway shows are a great way to diversify a media corporation's income.
The type of work you are talking about is a little more underground these days. Look for work by Jason Robert Brown (Parade, Last 5 Years) or Michael John LaChiusa (Hello Again, Wild Party, Bernarda Alba).
The avant-garde musical theater you're talking about is out there, it's just been pushed underground in the past 20 years.
I agree completely with the comment about epic musicals. You just can't substitute special effects for artistic vision. However they can be commercial and artistic successes - look at Les Miserables, which has been derided recently but opened to very positive reviews.
Julie Taymor is one of the best impressionistic stage directors out there. If this fails, I promise that it will not be because the production is too realistic and relies on big-budget special effects.
She tends to rely on puppets and imagery rather than pyro and wires.
The Lion King is her most profitable stage show and whatever you think of The Lion King, the puppetry and distinct style were astounding. The first 15 minutes are damn good theater.
Honestly, when I read the headline, I thought "Good Lord. This will fail unless they do it how Julie Taymor would do it".
If you're curious about her work, I'd recommend some movies: Titus, which is a top-notch Shakespeare-to-screen translation or Frida, which came up in this thread earlier.
Also, I'm not too worried about the studios (yes, the movie studios run Broadway nowadays) botching this show. Ms. Taymor tends to demand total artistic control of her productions before she agrees to them. It'll succeed or fail on her merits.
In short, I've never disliked anything she has put on the stage and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this show sees the light of day. It'll certainly be interesting.
Let's just hope that it's better than "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman" from the 60's. I don't know what traits make a superhero musical work, but that show had none of them.
... But Berkeley Breathed will also forever be known in my home for writing quite possibly the best Christmas story ever published (and possibly also the best children's story):
If, in order to maintain a respectable uptime on a Windows 98/SE/ME box, a user is required to command a deep understanding of all the intricacies of the technology, that it's quite obvioiusly not made for the mainstream consumer market.
I personally know of the limitations of this OS, but I doubt that most PC users do.
If a piece of software (any software, from OS to MP3 player) comes broken out of the box, what use is it to anybody?
> no direction - there's no-one who can find what the focus groups want and then enforce it.
I'd love to see the focus group Microsoft used to conclude that the average consumer wants an operating system that crashes an average of 4 times a week.
Though I haven't used any myself, it seems that products that reduce glare such as the Eclipse Computer Light would help out.
The idea behind this particular one is that you can turn off the flourescents in your office, put this lamp on top of your monitor, and be on your merry, eyestrain-reduced way.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to feasible as all the press demos I've heard about have been on the 360.
Here's one I could find on short notice.
I'm not aware of Rockstar ever showing the press the game engine running on a PS3.
Anybody have examples of that?
West Side Story is a retelling of Romeo & Juliet
The King and I is adapted from Landon's "Anna and the King of Siam"
Cabaret is adapted from Van Druten's play "I Am a Camera" and its source material, Isherwood's "The Berlin Stories"
I'm not claiming that Big and Legally Blonde are good shows, but just because a show is adapted from a movie doesn't mean they're bad.
The Full Monty and Thoroughly Modern Mille are some the better new musicals of this decade and just take a look at Spamalot or The Producers. What happened to character-driven drama? Also three of the shows you listed are high on the drama side of things. In its early days, musical theatre was the funny, mass-market reflection of opera, which tended to tackle the high-drama stories.
Not until Showboat in 1927 did musicals even get to the business of telling a traditional story and what you'd call 'character-driven drama' probably didn't occur until Carousel in 1945. So the musical theatre you talk about is a fairly new thing. I think that the light, fluffy comedies and the 'character-driven drama' are both valid forms of musical theatre, though both might not to be everybody's preference.
Broadway is mostly run by the media conglomerates nowadays. Flashy, big-budget shows of the 80's like Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera are to blame. They made a huge profit, but also had some artistic merit to their production. Other producers wanted to get the same profit and churned out shows with more and more special effects (Titanic, Beauty and the Beast, Jekyll & Hyde). These shows were produced at outrageous cost and got the public crying for more and more effects, which keeps the smaller players out of the ballgame.
The recent glut of popular movie adaptations is from the commercial success of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King (the latter of which a critical success). This has shown that big-budget Broadway shows are a great way to diversify a media corporation's income.
The type of work you are talking about is a little more underground these days. Look for work by Jason Robert Brown (Parade, Last 5 Years) or Michael John LaChiusa (Hello Again, Wild Party, Bernarda Alba).
The avant-garde musical theater you're talking about is out there, it's just been pushed underground in the past 20 years.
I agree completely with the comment about epic musicals. You just can't substitute special effects for artistic vision. However they can be commercial and artistic successes - look at Les Miserables, which has been derided recently but opened to very positive reviews.
Julie Taymor is one of the best impressionistic stage directors out there. If this fails, I promise that it will not be because the production is too realistic and relies on big-budget special effects.
She tends to rely on puppets and imagery rather than pyro and wires.
The Lion King is her most profitable stage show and whatever you think of The Lion King, the puppetry and distinct style were astounding. The first 15 minutes are damn good theater.
Honestly, when I read the headline, I thought "Good Lord. This will fail unless they do it how Julie Taymor would do it".
If you're curious about her work, I'd recommend some movies: Titus, which is a top-notch Shakespeare-to-screen translation or Frida, which came up in this thread earlier.
Also, I'm not too worried about the studios (yes, the movie studios run Broadway nowadays) botching this show. Ms. Taymor tends to demand total artistic control of her productions before she agrees to them. It'll succeed or fail on her merits.
In short, I've never disliked anything she has put on the stage and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this show sees the light of day. It'll certainly be interesting.
Let's just hope that it's better than "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman" from the 60's. I don't know what traits make a superhero musical work, but that show had none of them.
Wasn't City of Heroes a cheap knockoff of the DC universe in the first place?
Actually, if all soldiers did was throw balls of tinfoil at one another, the world would probably be a better place.
So perhaps we should be promoting D&D players instead. For the good of humanity!
and I'll believe none of it until they produce a cure for sleep-kicking-your-boyfriend-in-the-shins.
My little brother managed to circumvent the locks my dad set on AOL. When my parents found out, they took his PS2 away from him and gave it to me.
I put about 40 hours into Final Fantasy X during finals week.
Now that's what I call dangerous.
... But Berkeley Breathed will also forever be known in my home for writing quite possibly the best Christmas story ever published (and possibly also the best children's story):
The Red Ranger Came Calling.
This book belongs in every library children have access to.
If, in order to maintain a respectable uptime on a Windows 98/SE/ME box, a user is required to command a deep understanding of all the intricacies of the technology, that it's quite obvioiusly not made for the mainstream consumer market.
I personally know of the limitations of this OS, but I doubt that most PC users do.
If a piece of software (any software, from OS to MP3 player) comes broken out of the box, what use is it to anybody?
> no direction - there's no-one who can find what the focus groups want and then enforce it.
I'd love to see the focus group Microsoft used to conclude that the average consumer wants an operating system that crashes an average of 4 times a week.
I used Adobe Premiere 5.0 for this conversion.
I'm not very familiar with video editing software for Linux.
Though I haven't used any myself, it seems that products that reduce glare such as the Eclipse Computer Light would help out.
The idea behind this particular one is that you can turn off the flourescents in your office, put this lamp on top of your monitor, and be on your merry, eyestrain-reduced way.
I found one product review here.
I was extra-special bored tonight, so I went ahead and converted the video from Quicktime to DivX avi!
I know it's a bit late in the posting process to get many hits, but it's the thought that counts, right?
Get yer copy at allecto.org.
Got a copy of the 8bit games video mirrored and running here.
Feel free to swamp me - bandwidth is included in the tuition here.
Well, barring the use of Napster, of course.