dirac

Hi, sidwich, good to hear from you. You're right, they don't actually say "We're going to do a revue" and I think Astaire does say something like "we're going back to what the Martons wanted to do" but given the string of unrelated numbers (and as I remember they're introduced that way) it's hard to see how they could have presented anything else. Greetings to you, too, AnthonyNYC. It's my favorite Astaire duet not involving Ginger Rogers or a coat rack .Also parodied memorably by Steve Martin and Gilda Radner back when.

According to Albert Johnson at a Pacific Film Archive or UCLA screening, Buchanan was very ill when he did the movie, everyone thought he would be dead the next day - but then he went on to live a few years more. Thanks, Quiggin. The first half of the movie is pretty much all Buchanan (and he's marvelous) but once the decision is made to change the show to a straight revue he has less to do. But I doubt this had anything to do with his health so much as the structure of the story. Great picture of Penn Station.

Thank you for that article, innopac. I liked this story:

I had the impression that Ronnie requires little encouragement in that regard. I can't say the show was really my cup of tea in most respects but I did follow it. If this is indeed the end of the road I'm glad Sklute and Ballet West took the plunge and I hope they benefit from it.

Apart from what I remember as big flower appliques on Cyd Charisse's strapless number at the end of the movie, I don't recall the costumes from "The Band Wagon" as being all that bad, either. There's a story behind the white dress (which I agree is a wonderful one, perfect for the number) that I heard on TCM - the costume designer, Mary Ann Nyberg, found it for $25 but since it was no longer in production the studio had to make a new one from scratch. I forget for how much but it was a lot more than $25. I tend to lose interest in "The Band Wagon" after "Dancing in the Dark" and the disastrous preview sequence. The Astaire-Charisse romance more or less disappears from view without further development, Jack Buchanan's role is reduced, and although "The Girl Hunt" is the most entertaining of the big ballet sequences from the musicals of the era that is not saying very much. I also don't like the art v. entertainment conflict set up by Comden and Green -- as if musicals can't be serious and art can't be entertaining. Crosby does look supremely at ease, doesn't he? (Grace Kelly was also unwise in inviting comparisons to Katharine Hepburn, but she's good enough for the movie she's in, I guess. But watching both performances is a great opportunity to compare a star versus an actor/star). miliosr, as I remember Liza Minnelli's segment wasn't bad, either. My memory could be failing me.

No apologies necessary. In defense of Gene Kelly, the choreography of "The Babbitt and the Bromide" is much more Astaire-friendly than Kelly-friendly.

The last direct living link to Bloomsbury died in May at 93. The Guardian The Telegraph

True artists are always rare, but the technical level generally has risen across the board, which could account for that.

My impression is that the-faceless-technicians-have-taken-over is a perennial complaint heard with every relatively recent generation. I don't doubt the sincerity of those who express the sentiment, and no doubt it's often accurate enough, but it's not exactly something that's never been said before.

They also had a lover/husband in common, George Marshall (of the Washington Redskins, not the general). In fairness to Moore Brooks was never the star that she was. Brooks does enjoy more posthumous fame, but it came at a pretty steep price.

RIP to a very amusing and accomplished woman. I would say the media fuss is partly due to her status as a successful female writer-director, still unusual in Hollywood, and she was also an exceptionally well-connected media person and mediapersons tend to make a special fuss over the death of mediapeople (cf. the prolonged wailing and rending of garments over the late Tim Russert). The reaction is also an indicator of how her writing and her movies spoke to many people, mostly but not exclusively women, who identified closely with her work in spite of the fact that she really wasn’t in any way typical. That of course is also a tribute to her. I enjoyed her journalism and essays and she was always a great interview. With all due respect to the positive opinions expressed here, I didn’t think much of "Heartburn," which seemed rather slight, stretched out with recipes and slightly larger than normal font, at least in my copy. It did have its juicy gossipy aspect and the book (not the movie) was interesting on the subject of being Jewish in the Washington of that era. I have mixed feelings about her filmography but some of her light comedies were like little oases in a desert full of pictures aimed at 13-year old boys of all ages. She was upfront about the importance of making films that spoke to women and for that and many other reasons she'll be greatly missed.

You're very welcome, polyphonyfan. I also forgot to mention a more recent example of an aging ballet star extending herself to contemporary dance, Sylvie Guillem. I saw her not too long ago and she looks great even if I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about her choice of vehicle.

Some have already done so, polyphonyfan (and welcome to the board). Nureyev and Baryshnikov both looked to modern dance while they were still active as ballet dancers for creative nourishment and more pragmatically as a possible backstop for that time when ballet was beyond their capacity. (Nureyev, alas, continued dancing classical roles long after his sell-by date.) Here is a link to an article from some years ago about Martine van Hamel. There was a time when ballet dancers could continue well into their forties and fifties, albeit with steadily diminishing returns, but technical demands and the wider range of non-classical works ballet dancers are required to perform nowadays have more or less ended that. Ballet dancers, like athletes, face a short career span and that is just how things are. Like you I agree that retired dancers can and should explore other options in dance.

Thanks, miliosr. It’s nice that Brooks’ book, "Lulu in Hollywood," is being reissued, although the stories in it should be taken with several grains of salt. It’s not 100% clear why Brooks didn’t write her memoirs, although she claimed to have destroyed two drafts, but I expect the reasons had less to do with unbuckling the Bible Belt than booze intake and her ex-lover and benefactor William Paley, who would probably not have appreciated too much candor in print from Brooksie. The late Veronica Geng wrote a marvelous parody, "Lulu in Washington."

So sorry to hear this. I always enjoyed his writing in danceviewtimes and back when he wrote for The Independent, and his Nureyev bio is on my bookshelf. RIP.

A lot of those teenage girls are ballet fans. I'd not be too hard on their taste.

Second episode aired last night. The cast struggled valiantly but sank into what I’ll call quirksand and Sherman-Palladino launched another monster curve at the audience in the last minutes. The dead guy called his lawyer while on the road from Vegas with a blacked-out showgirl in his car to change his will? Very forward-thinking of him. Plainly, there were some mother issues Episode 1 barely hinted at. Sticking with the show for the present, but it's not coming easy.

Vidal has written about his brief affair with Lang. The latter was apparently chasing (and catching) anything that wasn't red hot or nailed down and there are limits to the open-relationship thing, one gathered. The "picnic table" photo is well known and widely reproduced, most recently I think when Donald Windham died.

The network repeats the program at least once that I've seen, although I don't remember when offhand. If you have Comcast it may show up on demand sooner or later.

That's good news. The show isn't bad at all by the standards of the genre, at least those examples that I've come across, and it would be nice to see more of it beyond half a dozen episodes.

That's how I would interpret the wish as well, Bart Birdsall. Demographics aside, the pilot has already demonstrated that whatever its other virtues Bunheads is not going to have the most plausible setup, so I doubt such an inclusion would present a ghastly violation of the show's scrupulous realism.

I would call it a question of inclusiveness, not "quotas." And I've seen people of various hues in Northern California coastal towns.

That's right. A few days ago I posted a Q&A with Sherman-Palladino in the Links where she said that the Sutton Foster character's wild-thing-party-girl aspect was a loose imagining of how Watts might have ended up if she hadn't gotten her act together at NYCB. Maybe she would have been blacking out and finding herself married, however briefly, to the guy from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but who can say.

I never saw Gilmore Girls but I understand it was a good show. I gather from this episode that Sherman-Palladino is a sort of distaff Sorkin with mucho walk-and-talk. Some of it worked, some of it didn't - I was tickled by the extended Godzilla metaphor. I did not find the premise remotely plausible but Sutton Foster's performance did a great deal to lend credibility. However, a curve was thrown in the last few minutes of the episode that did much to undo her work. The next episode will certainly be interesting.

That was part of my original point, yes. If you keep your people constantly on edge, you'll get results but eventually the returns diminish.