Tag: Stage/Theater (1-10 of 13)

May 10 2013 10:54 AM ET

'August: Osage County' trailer: Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, and more! -- VIDEO

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August: Osage County (out Nov. 8) may well become the year’s fanciest movie about a trashy family. It’s based on Tracy Letts’ hours-long, Pulitizer prize-winning play (which we said was “horrifyingly, deliciously mesmerizing”) and is directed by John Wells from Letts’ adaptation. The cast is stuffed from every angle with talent: Ewan McGregor, Sam Shepard, Abigail Breslin, Juliette Lewis, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Julia Roberts (as the favorite daughter), and Meryl Streep (as the hated mother).

As the film’s first trailer makes clear, Osage County is a Jenga-like drama of family dysfunction, with funerals and divorces piling atop dinner-table conflicts. Roberts is weary. Streep, with a frizz of black hair, has the juiciest role in the play. Edward Sharpe plays in the background.

Is it foolish to admit I’m most excited for Juliette Lewis?

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Mar 29 2013 08:35 AM ET

'Harry Potter' actor Richard Griffiths dies at 65

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Richard Griffiths, the versatile British actor who played the boy wizard’s unsympathetic Uncle Vernon in the Harry Potter movies, has died. He was 65.

Agent Simon Beresford announced Friday that Griffiths died a day earlier of complications following heart surgery at University Hospital in Coventry, central England.

He paid tribute to Griffiths as “a remarkable man and one of our greatest and best-loved actors.” READ FULL STORY »

Jan 25 2013 03:57 PM ET

Producers prep big-screen 'Jekyll & Hyde': 'It's long overdue'

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Image Credit: Smallz & Raskind Larry Busacca/Getty Images

If things go according to plan, Dr. Jekyll will be undergoing one more transformation: to the silver screen.

EW has confirmed that the producers behind Jekyll & Hyde (the musical) are planning a big-screen adaptation, with a hopeful eye toward a 2014 release.

“I think it’s long overdue, a musical version if it,” said Rick Nicita, one of the show’s producers, alongside Phoenix Pictures CEO Mike Medavoy.

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Dec 6 2012 10:00 AM ET

Barbra Streisand on 'Gypsy': What's age gotta do with it?

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Image Credit: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Barbra Streisand’s got one thing to say to anyone who thinks she might be too old to play Mamma Rose in the anticipated film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ legendary musical Gypsy: “What’s [age] got to do with anything?”

Ever since Universal announced plans last March for a Gypsy update — written by Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes and co-produced and starring Streisand — some critics have drawn attention to the difference between Streisand’s age, 70, and that of the real-life woman portrayed in the musical. The Academy Award-winning actress would not only have to depict a woman who, in parts of the production, is between 30 and 40 years younger than she is, she’d have to play the mother of children who are as many as 60 years younger than she is.
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Nov 27 2012 10:54 AM ET

Oscar-winning 'Chicago' producer Martin Richards dies

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Image Credit: Robert Mora/Getty Images

Martin Richards — or “Marty,” as those in the theater community called him — died of cancer Monday in New York City. Richards won an Academy Award in 2003 for producing that year’s Best Picture, Chicago. The Oscar was the culmination of Richards’s decades-long battle to bring that Kander and Ebb musical to movie theaters; it began in 1975, when Richards produced the show’s original Broadway production.

Of course, Chicago wasn’t Richards’s only project. The prolific stage producer — born Morton Richard Klein in the Bronx — was nominated for 10 Tony Awards throughout his career, winning for La Cage aux Folles (2004 revival), The Will Rogers Follies (1991), La Cage aux Folles (original 1983 production), and Sweeney Todd (1979). Richards also produced Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and the Gregory Peck Nazi thriller, The Boys from Brazil, as well.

Here’s a clip of Richards accepting his Oscar in 2002. Note the moment when someone from the audience reminds him to thank his wife, the late Johnson & Johnson heiress Mary Lea Johnson Richards — the voice in the crowd is Hilary Swank, who famously forgot to thank her own husband when she won her first Oscar in 2000.

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Oct 8 2012 09:00 AM ET

'Little Shop of Horrors' as you've never seen it -- EXCLUSIVE VIDEO

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Image Credit: Everett Collection

When Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors was released in 1986, fans of the cult 1960 Roger Corman B-flick (starring a very young Jack Nicholson) and those who’d seen the off-Broadway musical were shocked to see a major change in plot at the end of the movie: the hero and heroine live! It’s that version — the Oz version — that’s endured, with Ellen Greene as flower shop girl-slash-blonde bombshell Audrey and Rick Moranis as nerdy orphan-slash-amateur botanist Seymour. The two fall in love and Seymour saves Audrey (and the world) from being eaten by the sadistic flesh-eating Audrey II…. Or does he?

The Blu-ray edition of Little Shop of Horrors, out Tuesday from Warner Bros., includes a 20-minute long director’s cut ending alongside the theatrical release. The new footage features a dark, tragic ending to the classic man buys plant, plant eats people, man gets famous tale. In this new/old version (26-year-old spoiler alert!) Audrey and Seymour are both devoured by a hungry Audrey II, who lives out his dream of taking over the world, destroying New York City with Avengers-like strength. Check out a clip of the carnage — as well as EW’s interview with Greene and Little Shop composer Alan Menken about the original ending – below:

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Oct 2 2012 08:35 AM ET

Catching Up With... Aileen Quinn, 30 years after 'Annie'

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Aileen Quinn was at a commercial audition in Los Angeles recently when the casting director approached her and said, “Okay, so Annie, you’re in the room next.” Quinn playfully called him out on it with a chiding “You did not just say that.” The man didn’t immediately realize his error, but then made a face, like, “Oops, I slipped.” It’s an honest mistake that Quinn has become accustomed to, since for a generation of moviegoers, Quinn is Annie, the adorable red-headed orphan from the 1982 movie that co-starred Albert Finney and Carol Burnett. With the film receiving a 30th anniversary Blu-ray today and a Broadway revival in the works this month, another generation of fans is due to fall in love with the show’s feisty heroine and classic music.

Quinn was only nine years old when she landed the coveted role, beating approximately 8,000 other young girls to star in director John Huston’s screen adaptation. She had been the “swing orphan” in the Broadway hit, responsible for knowing all the orphans’ roles and substituting when necessary, but when Huston introduced her on the Today show in 1981, she became the star. The film went on to become the year’s 10th biggest hit, and Quinn was contracted to make several sequels — which never came to fruition. READ FULL STORY »

Jun 29 2012 04:54 PM ET

Channing Tatum talks 'Magic Mike' musical: 'I'm a huge fan of stage'

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Image Credit: Claudette Barius

Save up those $1 bills: Magic Mike star (and inspiration) Channing Tatum, director Steven Soderbergh, and writer Reid Carolin are turning their stripper movie into a live stage show. The trio discussed the idea while working on Magic Mike’s script, but Tatum says he began taking it seriously thanks to his costar. “Matt Bomer started singing some of the songs while he was onstage, and he was like, ‘This would kill as a musical,’” recalls Tatum. “That cemented it for me.” READ FULL STORY »

Jun 26 2012 01:30 PM ET

'Avatar' sequels to shoot back-to-back... to back, says Sigourney Weaver

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Image Credit: WETA

When James Cameron told The New York Times last month that he was “in the Avatar business — period,” he meant it. He claimed then that he was focused only on making sequels to the biggest movie of all time — even hinting that he had three more chapters in mind, making Avatar the rare trilogy-plus-one. Now Sigourney Weaver has confirmed the quadrilogy, telling Showbiz411 that she’ll film the three sequels… back-to-back-to-back! Weaver, whose collaborative relationship with Cameron stretches back to Aliens, said she’ll head back to Pandora after starring in Christopher Durang’s Lincoln Center production of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which opens Nov. 12.

It’s understandable why Cameron and his financiers want to film all the sequels together, but for every successful Lord of the Rings that reined in costs with no apparent adverse effect on storytelling quality, there are twofer sequels like those of The Matrix that disappointed mightily. It would be foolish, however, to bet against Cameron, who has built an empire by defying convention and surpassing the highest expectations.

Read more:
‘Avatar 2′ still four year away…
Disney opening ‘Avatar’-themed park
‘Avatar 2′ might go under the sea

May 8 2012 06:56 PM ET

U.K. production of 'Frankenstein,' with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, to screen in U.S. theaters

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Image Credit: Catherine Ashmore

It’s alive! On screen! Again! Fathom Events announced today that on June 6 and 7, it will rebroadcast into select movie theaters the 2011 filmed U.K. stage production of Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, written by Nick Dear, and directed by Danny Boyle.

When the production played last spring at the Royal National Theatre in London, it won wide acclaim for Cumberbatch and Miller, who alternated playing Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature. (They shared an Olivier Award for Best Actor.)

The National Theatre already broadcast the play into U.S. movie theaters on two separate nights last March. But with the second season of Cumberbatch’s Sherlock pulling in great ratings on PBS – not to mention the actor’s villainous role in the upcoming sequel to 2009′s Star Trek – the fabulously monikered Brit’s star is very much on the rise. You can check out the creepy trailer for last year’s screening of Frankenstein below: READ FULL STORY »

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