Reviews

Review: Fame

A PG-rated, post- High School Musical remake: why, exactly?

By BRETT MICHEL | September 30, 2009

1.5 Stars

Oh, MGM: I realize you're staving off bankruptcy, but is remaking past hits the answer? Are a PG-rated, post-High School Musical version of Fame (Alan Parker's 1980 original was rated R) and the upcoming Red Dawn update what it will take for your studio to stay in business and follow through on the promise that "James Bond will return?"

Let's hope that Kevin Tancharoen's dull, morally sound TV-ready film (hey, isn't that Frasier and Lilith playing music and dance instructors?) doesn't end up offering stockholders a license to kill our favorite spy. As in Parker's superior film, we follow students through a compressed four years at New York's High School for the Performing Arts, where the average age appears to be 25.

One "gifted" pianist (Naturi Naughton, who plays Lil' Kim in Notorious) conceals her love of hip-hop from her disapproving parents. Imagine their horror if they saw their baby getting it on with Biggie Smalls. Not in this movie, though.

A powerhouse play
For a play titled Small Tragedy , playwright Craig Lucas certainly has packed in a bundle of large feelings.
A Raisin in the Sun at Trinity, Bad Jazz at Zeitgeist
The centerpiece of George C. Wolfe's 1986 satire The Colored Museum is a scathing sketch called The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play . A Raisin in the Sun is the über-mama-on-the-couch play.
Review: Theater of War
John Walter had been immersed in Brecht for two decades, and he wanted to make a film about the great German poet/playwright.
The Earth moves
There is an element of bare-bones pageantry in Brecht's play — which, the dramatist being a Marxist, has as much to say about knowledge and the marketplace as it does about the father of modern science's impassioned head butt to the opiate of the people.
Autumn garden
It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.
Review: Michael Jackson's This Is It
The Star Wars –style titles that begin Kenny Ortega’s hastily assembled Michael Jackson tribute documentary explain that the film has been whittled down from 100 hours of behind-the-scenes video shot between last April and June during rehearsals for the King of Pop’s planned 50-date “This Is It” London concert series.
Review: The Seagull, The Corn Is Green
The Seagull begins with a theatrical experiment — a brief symbolist drama dreamed by young Konstantin Treplev, who's struggling toward artistic expression while endeavoring to showcase his girlfriend and impress his actress mother.
Review: Doubt
John Patrick Shanley's Doubt on screen
Brush up your Porter
With its supreme Cole Porter score and its robustly entertaining book by Sam and Bella Spewack, the 1948 Kiss Me, Kate is surely one of the half-dozen best Broadway musicals.
Play’s the thing
On the high-tragedy chessboard of Hamlet , the title characters are pawns, but in Tom Stoppard’s spooky, hilarious, and ingenious Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead , they are, existentially, the stars.
Night music
Classic musicals make substantial enterprises —this is now the best thing the Pops does.
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