Send in the (Green) Clowns

I'm off to a slow start this morning. Sometimes it can't be helped. Enjoy this first photo of Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern while I hook up my coffee IV, finish Oscar page revisions, and write about Inception... all while humming Sondheim's brilliant A Little Night Music score. What a mashup that will be.

BTW, loved the Broadway show last night. Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch are theater legends for a reason. Peters was exceptionally moving during "Send in the Clowns" -- I've never heard a Broadway audience go that quiet, basking in every nuance of that spectacular inimitable voice of hers -- and very funny hamming up the comedic portions of the show. There's this line in the second act about watching the summer sky smile, where Elaine Stritch says "That smile was particularly broad tonight." That line reading just killed. It felt like an affectionate elbow to the cast surrounding her that evening. Stritch was so funny that the young actress playing her granddaughter regularly had to wait a few extra beats to be heard above the laughter. Since this 1973 Stephen Sondheim musical is based on Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and the film version of the musical in 1977 starring Elizabeth Taylor isn't definitive by any measure, I wonder why it doesn't get a second cinematic go? It couldn't be that expensive to mount since it basically only involves a few locations: mostly people's bedrooms and the grounds of a country estate.

"Desiree" via Eva Dahlbeck (55), La Liz (77), CZJ (09) and Bernadette (10)

All you need is a great actress of a certain age with a killer voice and a good comedic supporting cast. Plus beautiful costumes and careful outdoor cinematography. You're good to go. Do justice to the show's humor and the actress-playing-an-actress theatrical pathos and you've got Oscar nominations for Actress, Supporting Actress and a few tech categories at least.

[Trivia Tangent: Because we've been talking about the EGOT and the triple crown lately due to the upcoming Emmy awards, here's how that shakes out. As you know Catherine Zeta-Jones just won the Tony for this role so she only has to win an Emmy to get a triple crown. Bernadette, replacing her, has multiple Grammys -- or does she? -- and Tonys. She's been nominated for Emmys but hasn't won and the Oscar (let alone a nomination) eluded her even at the heighth of her fame in the late 70s / early 80s when she was in the mix at the Golden Globes winning for Pennies From Heaven and nominated for Mel Brooks' Silent Movie. Elaine has a Tony and multiple Emmys. No Grammy or Oscar.]

Switching gears*, to say the least...

I'm still sad there's going to be a Green Lantern movie instead of a Green Lantern Corps cable series. That could have been the next great complex and fascinating sci-fi television series to follow Battlestar Galactica with the right team. Instead I fear it will be a generic superhero movie franchise. It certainly looks generic. We need another great sci-fi series on television way more than we need another superhero movie.

If you had a power ring, what kind of things would you make it do? I mean, besides conjuring up free Broadway tickets.

*I apologize for the schizophrenia of this post. Everyone knows that superheroes and musicals don't go together.
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