Whatever Happened to My Stars?

A very important public service announement before I get around to posting a recap of last night's "Dancing with the Stars" results show.

I hate what's happened to Broadway.

Have you seen these pictures of the new Les Miserables revival? It makes me wish they'd ban Rosco fog once and for all.


All right. There's like four men in the chorus, and maybe one of them looks distinguishable. Is this what downsizing has become? Or did they spend the chorus budget on special effects? Looking at this picture, you would never know the guy up front is Aaron Lazar, the leading man of such Broadway musicals as The Light in the Piazza and Oklahoma! and is that really so wrong? Because I'd hate to think if that stuff was toxic. The guy in front looks asphyxiated.

Notice how he's covering up his face with his arm.


And then there's this. And its gloriously well-written pan by Mssr. Isherwood. Yeah, I don't know about you, but, judging from the pics alone, it looks sofa king dumb.

And, while it's great to see John Cullum on Broadway again, why is he providing the canned voice of a human playing a dog? That's right, a human playing a dog. Because, between this, The Wiz, and Times They are a'Changin', I'm starting to worry that it's going to be de rigeur, and Broadway dogs won't be needed in shows anymore. Poor Sandy and...whatever dogs were in Awake and Sing! and Chitty.

Anyway, this picture just really reminded me of this great documentary called Broadway: The Next Generation, and this interview with Tovah Feldshuh on it. Surprisingly, she has a lot of complaints about the state of Broadway musicals today. And she goes off on a whole unexpected rant about Why Musicals Suck Now. And she's all, "I paid five hundred bucks to see Beauty and the Beast, and why is there a disembodied head and some gigantic teapot apparatus where you can't even see Betsy Joslyn under all that makeup as Mrs. Potts, goddamn it! There is a real human actor in there!" Even Tovah really doesn't like Beauty and the Beast. Can you believe it?

Tovah, I love you.

Anyway, a friend of mine was very recently just going off about how she had seen Patrick Page, who plays the Grinch, in The Lion King, and how he was so brilliant as Scar that he was the first actor to ever really humanize that character and add depth to him...I mean, as deep a cartoon lion that sounds like Jeremy Irons can get. And he was this classically-trained actor who had appeared in Julius Caesar with Denzel Washington, he was married to "that woman from cable," and blah blah blah gush. And he was so great that everyone cheered when he "died" onstage.

And this is the capper to his brilliant career: Being totally unrecognizeable under scads of makeup as the Grinch. Nobody will ever know who he is.

That kind of sucks. At least he gets to come home to Paige Davis, though.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.