BOTTOM LINE: Just like Dancing With the Stars. With more dancing. And fewer C-Listers.
Let’s say you’re a major celebrity like oh, Elton John. And let’s say it’s your 50th birthday and you’ve recently become a big fan of contemporary ballroom dancing. Maybe you like the sparkly costumes. So your peeps decide to honor your special day by hiring amazing dancers to create a show for you to be performed at your soiree. Now let’s say you’re a power-player with money who happens to be a guest at Sir Elton’s birthday party. And you see this show and you think “this is both awesome and potentially lucrative.” You put your monacle back in your eye, take out your checkbook and adapt the show into a worldwide hit called Burn the Floor.
I’m not totally positive that’s how it all went down, but suffice to say this show got its roots in 1997 in Sir Elton’s honor. After a decade of developing and re-working, it has played in England and pretty much traveled the rest of the world on various tours. Burn the Floor has now set up shop at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre for a limited engagement through January 2010. (more…)
Brian Yorkey is not an asshole. The playwright of the new Broadway musical Next to Normal would never write disparaging comments on a blog post critical of his show. He actually welcomes intellectual discussions about Next to Normal and is much more humble than proud. So it was obviously disconcerting when he discovered an impostor was posting offensive comments as “Brian Yorkey” on a handful of websites this past spring as Next to Normal opened on Broadway.