Catching Up

Well, it's been a busy week, with clients just about every night, so I didn't get to catch up on my sleep until last night, and I slept almost 12 hours!!! It's been a nice relaxing day, although with my new classes starting on Monday, I've been perusing the syllabi and starting the readings for next week. I am so not looking forward to another 10 weeks, but at least it's just 10 weeks and then another few weeks off, which should be good timing. The Met is doing La Giocanda with Debbie Voigt, Olga Borodina, and James Morris at the end of September and I'd love to see it, and then we may be able to catch South Pacific and possibly Billy Elliot (although since I've already seen it in London, if there's something else by then, I'd go see that, but Billy makes for an excellent standby). Speaking of Billy Elliot, ever since I saw Young Frankenstein and Catered Affair last weekend, I've been rethinking my opposition to movies turned into musicals. Yes, stuff like Legally Blonde, Shrek, and now Dirty Dancing are wastes of time produced with a cynical eye towards profit, yet there are plenty of non-movies turned into musicals produced for the same reason, such as Three Days of Rain and the upcoming My Three Sons, where they think they can stick a high powered movie star in it and people will flock to it (which they do, further reinforcing the trend). But, this trend, which started with the powerful adaptation of Shenandoah in 1975, has also given us Nine, Grand Hotel, Xanadu, The Light in the Piazza, YF, Catered, Hairspray, and of course, Billy Elliot, and all of those do outweigh such crap as the aforementioned ones, plus The Producers, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and High Fidelity. So, I say, keep the quality movie adaptations coming. I would say let's see an adaptation of Muriel's Wedding, because that would make such a fabulous musical, but Mamma Mia kind of renders it unnecessary. However, there are plenty of other great ones to chose from. Jukebox musicals on the other hand, are getting very tired, and unless someone wants to do a Cher or a Carpenters musical (and how fabulous would either of those be?!), I can't see any need for any more of those. Lastly, it looks like while the rest of the country is getting lucky, Chicago is once again getting screwed. It was announced this week that Kyle Riabko has been doing such a fantastic job in Spring Awakening that he's been tapped to head the national tour starting this fall. So, he may be gone from NY by the time I get back, and, as usual, Chicago is the dead last stop of the show, it's not coming here until August 2009, by which time there's a good chance Kyle will be gone and we'll have someone else. It happened with Drowsey Chaperone (while we did get Georgia Engel, Bob Martin was long gone), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Light in the Piazza. At least though, we are getting Xanadu first and that's something to be proud of.