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The Book Of Mormon, now at the Eugene O’Neill Theater. ‘I think I just heard Eugene O’Neill turn over in his grave,’ says David Letterman.

From a commercial for the Broadway show The Book Of Mormon, pulling a quote from the Late Show host.

Heh.

Thank you to my parents, my mom and dad who are in the audience tonight. And I know there’s been a lot of thanking of mums, but this is slightly different, because my mum in 2007 was invited by some Australian friends in London to a fringe theatre play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called The King’s Speech. Now she’s never been invited to a play reading in her entire life before. She almost didn’t go, because it didn’t sound exactly promising, but thank God she did, because she came home, rang me up and said ‘Tom, I think I found your next film.’ So with this tonight, I honor you, and the moral of the story is ‘Listen to your mother.’

Best Director Oscar winner TOM HOOPER, recounting the amazing story of how The King’s Speech came to the big screen.

Fucking awesome.  LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER.

Okay, the use of forced perspective here — we’re supposed to be in mid-air, watching Spider-Man sling his way off the Chrysler Building and above a whole bunch of neatly-lined-up yellow cabs on a Manhattan street below — is pretty fucking cool.  But otherwise, the show sucks, writes Ben Brantley in the New York Times: This production should play up regularly and resonantly the promise that things could go wrong. Because only when things go wrong in this production does it feel remotely right — if, by right, one means entertaining. So keep the fear factor an active part of the show, guys, and stock the Foxwoods gift shops with souvenir crash helmets and T-shirts that say “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and lived.” Otherwise, a more appropriate slogan would be “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and slept.” I’m not kidding. The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from “How can $65 million look so cheap?” to “How long before I’m out of here?” Directed by Julie Taymor, who wrote the show’s book with Glen Berger, and featuring songs by U2’s Bono and the Edge, “Spider-Man” is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst. More of the Times’s Sara Krulwich’s fine in-show photography here.
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Okay, the use of forced perspective here — we’re supposed to be in mid-air, watching Spider-Man sling his way off the Chrysler Building and above a whole bunch of neatly-lined-up yellow cabs on a Manhattan street below — is pretty fucking cool.  But otherwise, the show sucks, writes Ben Brantley in the New York Times:

This production should play up regularly and resonantly the promise that things could go wrong. Because only when things go wrong in this production does it feel remotely right — if, by right, one means entertaining. So keep the fear factor an active part of the show, guys, and stock the Foxwoods gift shops with souvenir crash helmets and T-shirts that say “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and lived.” Otherwise, a more appropriate slogan would be “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and slept.”

I’m not kidding. The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from “How can $65 million look so cheap?” to “How long before I’m out of here?”

Directed by Julie Taymor, who wrote the show’s book with Glen Berger, and featuring songs by U2’s Bono and the Edge, “Spider-Man” is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.

More of the Times’s Sara Krulwich’s fine in-show photography here.

Coming soon to your local high schools and colleges - Andrew Lloyd Webber-approved productions of "The Phantom Of The Opera." File this one under "Things that make me wish I was still in high school or college."

Via Playbill.com:

High school and college drama programs will be able to present their own low-budget versions of the big-budget international musical hit, The Phantom of the Opera, starting this fall.

On June 3, R&H Theatricals, which licenses shows by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, begins accepting applications from schools eager to produce the show about a murderous deformed musical genius and the suggestible soprano who gladly follows him into the dank bowels of the Paris Opera House — all for the sake of love and art. The applications are for performances in the United States and Canada beginning Sept. 1. (Visit www.rnh.com.)

Anticipating the release of Phantom to schools, R&H Theatricals created a pilot project with RUG (Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group). In the 2007-08 academic year, the largely sung-through musical was presented (“in full productions and in its entirety,” according to a statement) by two colleges and four high schools: Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, OH; Elon University in Elon, NC; Carroll Senior High School in Westlake, TX; Nyack High School in Nyack, NY; Fairfield Senior High School in Fairfield, OH; and Capital High School in Charleston, WV.

“Andrew’s passion for bringing young people into the musical theatre is so deeply felt,” stated Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization president Ted Chapin, “that he has authorized us to release Phantom to schools even while it continues to thrive on Broadway and all over the globe. We always believed that school performances of Phantom would bring out the best in each and every student, and the pilot productions we saw across America more than confirmed that belief.”

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