ATC GOES BEDDIE-BYE

posted by James Reel

    This just in from Arizona Theatre Company:

Arizona Theatre Company gets bright and brassy, sexy and sassy with the addition of a brand new revival of the classic Broadway musical The Pajama Game to its 2007-2008 season. … ATC’s all-new production of The Pajama Game replaces the scheduled run of Mask. Due to unexpected scheduling issues with other projects for the creative team of Mask, that project cannot happen at this time.

    “Unexpected scheduling issues”? Is that the theater equivalent of bureaucrats and corporate officers leaving their jobs in order to “spend more time with their families”? Sounds ominous in its innocence.
    Honestly, I wasn’t sure I was looking forward to a musical version of the good, unpretentious movie Mask; what would it turn out to be, some kind of Phantom of the Trailer Park? And Cher is in retirement again, so what’s the point? That aside, how, exactly, can the 1954 Pajama Game be considered a viable substitute? The two musicals occupy utterly different universes. (Oh, and “brand-new revival” is supposed to make this old show seem fresh?)
    A much better replacement would have been something like Urinetown, except that’s on next season’s schedule at the University of Arizona. Or if ATC was in the market for a classic musical, how about the greatest of all American operettas: Candide? Oh, wait, they’re doing that at the UA, too. Hmm …

WITH FANFARE

posted by James Reel

    Among my several income sources—it takes several to make a living as a freelancer—is Fanfare magazine, for which I write CD reviews and features, and also serve as a sort of Webmaster. I don’t think of myself as a real Webmaster, building and repairing the site's structure; I’m more like a gardener, transplanting bits and pieces of the magazine to the Web site. I took over the job from a fellow who had just died, and who had designed the site back when it wasn’t expected to be much more than a billboard advertising the availability of subscriptions to the print edition. These days, a site has to be much more than that, and now Fanfare’s is, thanks mainly to the work of my more tech-savvy colleagues Celeste and Pete Stokely. A few days ago we went live with a completely new design, and lots more reviews available on a rotating basis to non-subscribers. I’ve been plotting several new features to roll out one by one in the coming months, but already the Stokeleys have made a very successful overhaul. Please pay it a visit, and let us know what you think.