Albert Bridge
"Chicago" was better than I thought it would be. In fact, when Jake and Brian Fountain were going to go see it on opening night and asked me along I said no way. Musical theater gives me hives... Or really, I just find it kind of tedious. I guess "musical theater" does cover a lot of ground from shit like "The King and I" and "Oklahoma" to modern suburbanite crap like "Phantom" and "Cats" (I've seen 'em both... when I lived in the suburbs) to what I know really best because my parents were big fans... Sondheim. We had the "original cast recordings" for all the big ones -- "Sunday in the Park" and "Little Night Music" and stuff like that. The only shows I saw was a big production of "Into the Woods" at the Kennedy Center as a kid and then in high school a black-box version of "Company," which is his most super 70s show. I'd seen Sweeny Todd on TV and I had a tape (and loved) of his big flop "Merrily We Roll Along." This is what I know about Musical Theater.
The Fosse shows never made it down to Washington... my first exposures were the movies (one we had to watch in a film class) which all seemed to feature skinny obviously gay men in various states of undress looking very 70s. When the musical of Chicago reopened and Cabaret was playing at Studio 54 it seemed to fit that mold pretty well. So, Fosse shows involve very 70s looking skinny people in outmodedly complicated undergarments doing calculatedly erotic grope dancing. The movie of Chicago features a lot of this as well, but they intercut between the Fosse Fosse Fosse dance numbers and the fairly Hollywood period piece "realistic scenes." The closest analogue I can think of was Moulin Rouge, which no doubt paved the way, with the big production sparkle numbers and vague old-timey-ness, but this wasn't half as annoying as Moulin Rouge. A big discussion Gunshow had fairly early was whether Moulin Rouge was awesome or crap... I admire shows that really divide people like that.
Chicago has a much more interesting plot... rather than just "it's a musical so how about a love story," it's a pretty unappealing murder drama with intentionally morally ambiguous characters. Also, Queen Latifah has tremendous boobies... they truss her up like genetic fusion of Mae West and Minnie the Moocher and have her to a slow bump and grind number... it happens pretty early in the show, so you spend the rest of the movie with that burned into your retinas thinking "These white women are so skinny." The songs were less gratingly 70s that I remember although I really have heard only one song before -- Mr. Cellophane -- which was on some PBS fundraiser concert show. The guy on the concert and Jon C. Reilly did basically the same dance, so they must be working from the master's notes there. I find myself thinking "how did they do that" in some of the fancier stage pieces (the puppet number)... I guess it shows how limited movies have been recently that special effects haven't been used that much to create totally weird tableaus rather than just realistic style explosions.
Enough of escapist fantasy! Back to Julliard, who has barely talked to me the whole day. We file out and both say how much we liked the movie and then he says "I have to get back to Brooklyn and walk my dog," and he left. He wasn't all that great and I wasn't even that attracted to him, but I got really sad after a pretty solid rejection. I walked back to the subway and took the L to the 6 and kept going down to Canal St. I had dinner alone at Excellent Dumpling House and felt very sad indeed.
"Chicago" was better than I thought it would be. In fact, when Jake and Brian Fountain were going to go see it on opening night and asked me along I said no way. Musical theater gives me hives... Or really, I just find it kind of tedious. I guess "musical theater" does cover a lot of ground from shit like "The King and I" and "Oklahoma" to modern suburbanite crap like "Phantom" and "Cats" (I've seen 'em both... when I lived in the suburbs) to what I know really best because my parents were big fans... Sondheim. We had the "original cast recordings" for all the big ones -- "Sunday in the Park" and "Little Night Music" and stuff like that. The only shows I saw was a big production of "Into the Woods" at the Kennedy Center as a kid and then in high school a black-box version of "Company," which is his most super 70s show. I'd seen Sweeny Todd on TV and I had a tape (and loved) of his big flop "Merrily We Roll Along." This is what I know about Musical Theater.
The Fosse shows never made it down to Washington... my first exposures were the movies (one we had to watch in a film class) which all seemed to feature skinny obviously gay men in various states of undress looking very 70s. When the musical of Chicago reopened and Cabaret was playing at Studio 54 it seemed to fit that mold pretty well. So, Fosse shows involve very 70s looking skinny people in outmodedly complicated undergarments doing calculatedly erotic grope dancing. The movie of Chicago features a lot of this as well, but they intercut between the Fosse Fosse Fosse dance numbers and the fairly Hollywood period piece "realistic scenes." The closest analogue I can think of was Moulin Rouge, which no doubt paved the way, with the big production sparkle numbers and vague old-timey-ness, but this wasn't half as annoying as Moulin Rouge. A big discussion Gunshow had fairly early was whether Moulin Rouge was awesome or crap... I admire shows that really divide people like that.
Chicago has a much more interesting plot... rather than just "it's a musical so how about a love story," it's a pretty unappealing murder drama with intentionally morally ambiguous characters. Also, Queen Latifah has tremendous boobies... they truss her up like genetic fusion of Mae West and Minnie the Moocher and have her to a slow bump and grind number... it happens pretty early in the show, so you spend the rest of the movie with that burned into your retinas thinking "These white women are so skinny." The songs were less gratingly 70s that I remember although I really have heard only one song before -- Mr. Cellophane -- which was on some PBS fundraiser concert show. The guy on the concert and Jon C. Reilly did basically the same dance, so they must be working from the master's notes there. I find myself thinking "how did they do that" in some of the fancier stage pieces (the puppet number)... I guess it shows how limited movies have been recently that special effects haven't been used that much to create totally weird tableaus rather than just realistic style explosions.
Enough of escapist fantasy! Back to Julliard, who has barely talked to me the whole day. We file out and both say how much we liked the movie and then he says "I have to get back to Brooklyn and walk my dog," and he left. He wasn't all that great and I wasn't even that attracted to him, but I got really sad after a pretty solid rejection. I walked back to the subway and took the L to the 6 and kept going down to Canal St. I had dinner alone at Excellent Dumpling House and felt very sad indeed.