All in Stage To Screen
My blog today was supposed to be an exploration of Broadway sequels, but I am going to have to postpone that to another day. No, time and space demand that I write a reaction to Fox Networks remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Oh, how I wanted to love it (or at least like it) but this production sits on one like a bowl of slightly spoiled rice pudding sits in your stomach. It's not something I needed to begin with, and now I'm slightly nauseous for the experience.
With Lin-Manuel Miranda poised to host Saturday Night Live, our nation’s most well-known and enduring sketch comedy show, I thought it might be interesting to suggest a few other faces from the Great White Way who would make fabulous hosts of the show. Broadway stars so seldom get the opportunity to show off their comedic talents to a larger viewing audience than the mere numbers a Broadway theatre can hold. Many great television and movie comedians of yesteryear have also spent time on Broadway AND appeared on SNL. But who of the contemporary theatre world would be good for a night of riotous laughter and a great opening monologue? Though it is very unlikely to happen to many (Hamilton is, after all, a national phenomenon and pop culture anomaly that has lifted Miranda and Hamilton into the stratosphere of iconic stardom), here are a few Broadway stars who I think would be up to the challenge:
Live from New York, it’s Saturday night… starring…
With the Tony Awards just around the corner and that shaping up to be a ho-hum night (thanks to forgone conclusions of a Hamilton sweep), no exciting new musicals on the immediate horizon (the Cats revival excites me like a case of distemper) and, just in general, no inspiring theatre news to get me riled up, I turned to one of my other favorite hobbies: TV Theme Songs (yes, I wrote a book on the subject). I like to go to Youtube.com and watch the opening sequences and clips of shows from days gone by. The other night, while doing this, I found so many Broadway performers in short-run sitcoms, stinkaroos that didn’t last for very long. Some of these shows were awful, but some of them were actually quite good. Here is a sampler of some of your Broadway favorites in sitcoms that just didn’t fly.
Like the tornado that lifted Dorothy to the Land of Oz, NBC’s presentation of The Wiz Live! blew me away to places I have never been where made-for-TV musicals are concerned. Skeptics be damned! The Wiz and its marvelous score are NOT dated properties and this version of the L. Frank Baum tale makes the best case yet for the musical to be revived on Broadway. In any case, at least it has washed away the stain of the misbegotten 1978 film version that, despite an all-star cast, was bleak and overwrought. This Wiz is magical.
