Ellen Winter, cousin of my cousins on the other side, is associate musical director
and keyboardist of The Elementary Spacetime Show. The new production written by César Alvarez and directed by Andrew Neisler is playing through Sept. 24th as part of the 2016 Fringe Festival in Philly. You can find out more on Facebook.
I’ll wager that most of you are familiar with James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke, a
— really, the — standout feature of his brief tenure as host of The Late Late Show on CBS. You’ve probably already seen its latest installment, in which Corden drives around Manhattan with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Audra MacDonald, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Jane Krakowski. So you don’t need me to link to it.
But I just did anyway.
Watching the Tony Awards telecast last Sunday, I found myself coming up with
comics-related twists on the titles of various plays and musicals. The game continued for several days until my list grew long enough to split into two — one for Marvel, one for DC (last post) — even after paring down by about half. Some entries are more accessible to non-comics-reading folks than others; the only rule was passing over titles that wouldn’t need to be changed at all, such as The Iceman Cometh or Beauty and
The Beast.
Now take your seats for my...
Top Twenty Marvel Comics Broadway Mashups
20. You’re a Mole Man, Charlie Brown
19. Dirty Rotten Fandral
18. Jess Is the Spider-Woman
17. Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Hulk
16. Thoroughly Modeled Millie
15. Lady Sif at Emerson’s Bar & Grill
14. Mandarin of La Mancha
13. Twelve Angry X-Men
12. A Slim Summers Night’s Dream
11. Who’s Afraid of Virginia, Wolverine?
Watching the Tony Awards telecast last Sunday, I found myself coming up with
comics-related twists on the titles of various plays and musicals. The game continued for several days until my list grew long enough to split into two — one for DC, one for Marvel (next post) — even after paring down by about half. Some entries are more accessible to non-comics-reading folks than others; the only rule was passing over titles that wouldn’t need to be changed at all, such as Man and Superman.
Now take your seats for my...
Top Twenty DC Comics Broadway Mashups
20. Riddler on the Roof
19. My Fair Lady Blackhawk
18. Ain’t Mister Mxyzptlk
17. Captain Carrot and His Amazing Technicolor Zoo Crew
16. The Justice League of American Buffalos
15. Koriand'rolanus
14. Same Time, One Year Later
13. Glengarry Pete Ross
12. Bizarro #1 Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next
11. Oedipus Rex Mason
The downside to not sharing my entries in hashtag games here within a day or so of them being a thing on Twitter is that anyone interested in heading over there to see the full range of contributions will turn up zilch.
Maybe a hashtag comes back into fashion or someone joins in late or a totally different group of people hit on the same idea, maybe, but those earlier entries are gone. Twits seem to leave Twitter’s institutional memory pretty quickly, unless there are tricks to its search function I don’t know about (which is very, very possible). You can at least head to my own Favorites on Twitter, scroll down a bit, and see a heaping handful of others’ offerings that I found amusing enough to save. It’s not at all the same, though, as being in the thick of it — and this one, #unpromisingsequels, was a good one.
And so, in roughly the order they were posted, it’s time for my...
Top Twenty-Five Unpromising Sequels
25. The Day After the Day After
24. Hastily-Dressed Lunch
23. Monday in the Park without George
22. Acquaintances on a Train
21. Love in the Time of Cholera Vaccines
20. The Executive Producers
19. Fiddler at the Window
18. Evaporation Man
17. The Well-Scrubbed Dozen
Here’s a neat video retelling — in 4½ minutes — the story of the Jews’ Exodus from Egypt, performed by the Attraction Black-Light and Shadow Theatre group, forwarded to me by my mother.
I saw Anderson Cooper kidnapped by the Broadway version of The Green Goblin
last night in Times Square. Spider-Man rescued him. The whole thing played out on CNN.
Now, I’m usually watching ABC’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, at least in the background, on New Year’s Eve. It’s frankly more habit than tradition, since I grew up in the days where it was just about the only (and certainly the most popular) deal on the air broadcasting the ol’ ball drop.
Last night, though, CNN was the channel of choice. I’d heard good things about Cooper’s bizarre annual pairing with Kathy Griffin — he (largely) pretending to be annoyed with yet obviously appreciating her unfiltered chatter.
When these posts began their avowed purpose was to make sure the blog had some content while my focus was largely directed elsewhere, stoking my own and hopefully my readers’ enthusiasm for the new Muppet movie.
These past few months have ended up being among the busiest on the blog, however, not only in terms of posts posted but viewers viewing them — one big reason why I decided to keep fresh content flowing, Muppet Monday included, even after the movie opened. I’ll share an update on bloggy business down the road a bit; right now I’m wrapping up this feature with links to a half-dozen sites for Muppet lovers interested in further exploration, most official and most mentioned on the blog before.
I have more conversations about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark with folks who don’t read comics than with folks inside the hobby and business. Part of that, I suspect, is because I’m not very plugged into the comics world these days. But part of it is also because the show’s talent, spectacle, and travails are intriguing — yet “comics people” already know, in a way others might not stop to realize, that Dark has little to do with comics at all.
Poster © 2011 Marvel Entertainment. Art/Design: Unknown.
Spider-Man comics, as well as the in-revival Spider-Man movie franchise and general merchandising, will be fine no matter what happens on stage. Neither Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film nor the Christopher Nolan takes in 2005 and 2008, all of which were blockbusters, had any appreciable affect on comics readership except in ancillary fashion: The long-running Batman animated series that launched on Fox in 1992, now one of the most definitive and well-respected versions of the Dark Knight mythos, was influenced by — even more to the point, made attractive to Fox and Warner Bros. by — the 1989 film’s success and the 1992 release of Batman Returns. Many of the creative personnel of that series worked on comics set in the animated continuity (yes, it’s art imitating art imitating art) for DC, and Harley Quinn, created as The Joker’s gun moll especially for the show, was eventually introduced into the mainstream Batman comics. In terms of brand awareness through DVD sets and related items like toys, Halloween costumes, and not-quite-comics storybooks, more kids might have been introduced to Batman than would have had Bruce Timm and friends’ string of animated series from the Caped Crusader’s to the action-figure bonanza Justice League Unlimited not been such a success, but the films themselves didn’t drive adult moviegoers to comics shops; a Spider-Man musical is going to interest a larger number of comics readers in Broadway than it will Broadway regulars in comics, and that number will be small.
