She'd Be Fabulous At The Tonys

YES. Lady Gaga has the kind of in-your-face theatricality that most theatre people find hard to resist--and it's exactly the kind of theatricality that musicals have a long history of embracing. Although I'm a lyricist, it's Lady Gaga's music and arresting images and choreography in her videos that grab me. There's something about her music and her image that makes me feel like it tells some kind of story, or that it can at least be used in a narrative sense. I've long been a proponent of artists in other genres working in musical theatre, and (especially) of musical theatre artists drawing from other art forms. I think everyone working in theatre, particularly writers, can learn a lot from someone like Lady Gaga.

Ultimately, it may just be that Lady Gaga understand spectacle and emotion and how to balance the two. I find the opening notes of "Bad Romance" just as exciting as the opening words of Sunday in the Park with George. They're as different as they could possibly be, but they both have story and emotion at their core. That doesn't always happen in pop music, but it's thrilling when it does. And if Lady Gaga ever wrote a musical, I'd be there every chance I got.

Be Italian

I know I'm very much a minority on this, but I really enjoyed the Nine movie. I thought the cast overall was incredibly strong, and I liked how they rearranged the song order, even though I really missed "The Bells of Saint Sebastian" and "Be On Your Own." There were things that weren't perfect--and maybe I'd feel differently if the musical were a favorite of mine--but on the whole I think it's worth seeing.

My biggest complaint is with the use of musical numbers being Guido fantasy sequences, like in the Chicago film. That worked well there because Roxie wants desperately to be a vaudeville star, and those songs are very vaudevillian anyway. That doesn't make as much sense for film director Guido, which makes the songs come off seeming kind of gimmicky. I would have preferred a lot more singing and for the songs to be really integrated book songs, the way they are in the show--I totally buy the world of Italian cinema being heightened and intense in that way.

But if the songs had to be more an expression of Guido's psyche, I would have liked to see them occur within the real world, not in their own limbo musical number space. During a naturalistic scene, we could suddenly go into Guido's head, seeing real life the way he sees a movie set. Maybe then the fantasy sequence could be Guido "directing" the character in question, and her song would be what Guido wants her to sing (the way it actually is in the movie), while it's clear that she feels otherwise. That would be a slightly different movie, but I think that structure would get at Guido's particular issues more than using Chicago's structure did.

Nine Lives

She's back!



I knew Joss Whedon hadn't gotten rid of her for good, but damn am I relieved to hear Kitty Pryde's coming back. I haven't been really into comics for that long, and the only X-Men series I've read is Astonishing X-Men, but I absolutely adore Kitty in that and was upset over what happened to her. I'm still really enjoying Astonishing--with Warren Ellis writing it, how could I not?--and I like the current team a lot (especially Hisako and her interactions with Wolverine), but I miss Kitty. I'm definitely picking up that issue of Uncanny.