Gossip Central

Mean Girls: Tina Fey’s Great Chain of Being

Everyone who loved the 2004 movie on which the new Broadway musical Mean Girls is based will be queuing up at the August Wilson Theater where Barbie pink reigns supreme. While you can never be sure about adaptations, you can count on Tina Fey’s witty words to lift even the most sophomoric subject to pure comic gold. It’s not just that this is high school, duh, the drive to dominate is understood in terms of jungle hierarchies. The class queen bee, Regina George (Taylor Louderman) is “apex predator,” determining all that matters in the cafeteria and fragile egos of her peers, especially the two girls, eh, attending maids in mega heels and mini skirts (Ashley Park and standout Kate Rockwell). In comes the new girl, Cady Heron (Erika Henningsen), a transfer from the wilds of Africa, whip smart and eager to fit in. She learns, just play by the rules: never wear a tank top two days in a row.

Scary Movies: A Quiet Place and The China Hustle

“This is a family story,” described John Krasinski at the premiere of his latest directorial effort, A Quiet Place. But isn’t this a horror movie? Krasinski stars alongside his life partner, as he refers to his wife Emily Blunt for this fresh take on a classic nail biter, featuring a family’s attempt at survival in a creaky house set in a world invaded by creatures sensitive to noise. “How far would you go to protect your family?” Krasinski asked the rapt crowd.

Casting Millicent Simmonds, the star of last year’s Wonderstruck is simply brilliant. A young actress from Utah, Simmonds is deaf, and the film’s family, her parents, and brother must sign with her. That is the near soundless world of this tight movie, in which Blunt’s character is challenged to give birth, alone in a bathtub, without making a single squawk. The audience becomes attuned to all aspects of the filmmaking, the cinematography (from Charlotte Bruus Christensen who worked with Blunt on Girl on the Train), and Marco Beltrami’s music for example. This is what innovative filmmaking is all about. Play with sound, and all senses are heightened.

Angels in America: Waiting for the Resurrection

1985, the year in which the 3 parts of Millennium Approaches, Part 1 of Angels in America is set, everyone is having fears and anxieties about the year 2000 like everyone is perched on the edge of a cliff waiting to fall off. Just as in the ‘90’s when Tony Kushner’s masterpiece was first staged, now at the Neil Simon Theater in a luminous production under the direction of Marianne Elliott, the characters experience dreamlike visions: Prior Walter hallucinates ancestors of the same name. He has mysterious lesions, as does Roy Cohn, the infamous McCarthy era lawyer visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. Harper Pitt on a Valium low suffers visions of falling into a black hole. Her husband Joe prowls the parks in search of what?  Along the way, the talk is of earth, Reagan, and race. The end of the world is coming. You know because the great book rises from the stage’s floor and bursts into flames. Yes, paranoia plagued us in 1985, and in 1993, when Angles was staged in New York, only now we know more about how our nightmares turn out. I am not yet over the delicious discomfort of this spectacle that is Angels in America.