Coming to the 650-seat Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, courtesy of Manhattan Theatre Club, next March after a run at Center Theatre Group's much larger Ahmanson Theatre in L.A.

NYT:  Eureka Day and Sondheim Revue Join Broadway's Next Season

Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga will remain from the London cast; no other casting has been announced yet.

I spent several weeks in the summer of 2022 commuting to Jersey City to work on this movie, which has finally been released on Prime Video after premiering at SXSW last month:


There are a few surface similarities to In The Heights: in a working-class Latine neighborhood maybe ten miles from Times Square, clave rhythms, capoeira-inflected Stomp-ography and magic realism betoken a world "made of music" -- here in a sometimes-hectically literal sense, albeit on a far smaller scale (and celebrating a community of Brazilian-American Newarkers instead of ITH's Spanish-Carribean upper-Manhattanites). 

But if its cast and story are smaller, its themes less lofty and its execution not as Hollywood-glossy, Música's charms are no less charming for their modesty—chief among them being writer-director-star Rudy Mancuso's indefatigable, Vine-ripened guerilla-filmmaking ingenuity.  During production I heard about the story's autobiographical-ish¹ premise, and worked on its playful visuals,² enough to become curious about how it would all come together onscreen, so it's really nice to finally see the finished film: in another coincidental echo of ITH, this ended up being another nearly-two-year wait, but the results are pretty nifty.

If you're in the mood for a quirky coming-of-age romantic comedy with its own distinctive low-budget zazz, Música will do nicely.  It was designated a Critic's Pick in yesterday's NYT.  And in a case of life imitating art, it brought Mancuso and his costar Camila Mendes together offscreen as well -- they've apparently been together ever since.


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¹ In addition to the hero's synesthesia and his devotion to music and puppetry — all traits shared with his creator — "Rudy"'s mom is played by Mancuso's real-life mother, a regular presence in his work since the Vine days; and her actual house likewise plays itself in the film.

² Including the PATH station (Hoboken standing in for Newark, dozens of ornamental cast-iron H's converted to N's using tape) with its piano-keyboard steps (black and white sticky vinyl, carefully plotted out several days in advance and then slapped down in a thirty-minute frenzy by about six of us scenics "on the day," while bemused commuters rushed past); the subway-busker hero's "puppet box" (walnut stain and ultra-matte black, IIRC — meticulously applied, because this either was Mr. Mancuso's own box or it was intended to become his after the shoot) and his buddy's culturally-versatile food truck (lots of interchangeable food graphics, and plenty of extra price stickers for the posh-neighborhood markup); the Brazilian-restaurant location for the story's farcical dating-two-people-at-once climax (I actually only went there to help restore the dining room afterward, so I never saw it fully-dressed — but, for what now looks to have been a relatively large, crowded and active scene with a lot of different camera setups, I don't recall there being as much touchup afterward as one might expect); and most of all, the entire one-shot sequence midway through the film, moving with exuberantly theatrical narrative economy through seven cleverly-designed and rapidly-assembled studio sets in four minutes.  Apart from Rudy's meticulously-recreated bedroom, the quickie sets in this sequence each tended to be designed around printed-vinyl graphic walls which, aside from the vinyl's sometimes cumbersome application, required careful wall prep to make the wooden flats perfectly smooth and seamless so they'd accept the vinyl without any bubbling or wrinkling.  Most of these mini-sets also involved furniture and prop pieces painted the same colors as the graphics, which called for precise color-mixing and painting (and lots of frog tape) to match their crisp, bright, Photoshop-heightened style.

Saw Bill McKinley there in the sun.
Heard Bill McKinley say, "Folks, have fun!
Some men have everything and some have none—
But that's just fine!
In the U.S.A., you can work your way
To the head of the line!"

If I were a pedant, I might point out that "some men have everything and some have none" suggests a parallelism it doesn't deliver, swerving from the syntax of everything/nothing to that of all/none for the sake of a rhyme which is thereby rendered just a mite awkward, if you ill-advisedly stop to think about it.  Then again, if I were a pedant, I might also idiotically complain that the first two lines are fragments, built on verbs with no subjects.  The Balladeer sings throughout in a unique idiolect that successfully combines Sondheimian fluency and crispness with the kind of studied folk-Americana "simplicity" that had SJS self-consciously droppin' his g's as a teenager.

Eating in a greasy spoon
To save on my dough.
At
My tiny flat,
There's just my cat,
A bed and a chair.
Still,
I'll stick it till
I'm on a bill
All over Times Square.

I got my taxes done today! I am getting a refund of $4300 from the federal government and $1,700 from the state. This means I can buy that snazzy new power steering pump I've had my eye on! Woo-hoo!

I'm just excited that I don't owe several thousand dollars. Every year I enter tax season with no idea of how things are going to go.

Maybe I'll buy some special dog treats as well. 

The bread, George.
I mean, the bread, George.
And then in bed, George...
I mean, he kneads me.
I mean, like dough, George.
Hello, George...?


Apparently painters aren't the only ones prone to objectifying their partners, even unconsciously, as mere accessories to their creative calling — to an artist, everyone's a model; to a baker, everything's dough?  But then again, as the lady says: the bread...  We should all have such agonizing choices, but despite "Everybody Loves Louis"'s charm and humor, one does feel the acute bind she's in, and it's not just an abstract emotional question of true love versus second-best expedience.

If she'd only been willful...
If she'd only have fled...
Or a little less skillful...
Insulted, insisting...
In bed...

Immersive design and staging can be tricky, no doubt about it.  I wish I had some sage thoughts on the subject, but my immediate reaction to your post is simply that TGC itself, as far as I can tell, has probably always been stronger on festive atmosphere than on storytelling clarity (no small shortcoming, given that, as you mention, there's a lot of story to cover even in this relatively slim slice of the novel).  I'm tempted to wonder whether this production team was simply playing to the show's strengths, such as they are. ("Did they purposely stage it so nobody had a good view at least some of the time?" sounds almost like a rhetorical question, but it does have a certain logic in an immersive context such as this one, where pure raucous showmanship seems at least as central to the show's DNA as Tolstoy, if not more so).

Speaking of theatergoing, I finally saw Appropriate on Broadway tonight and was as across-the-board impressed as I'd hoped to be; I had been in a bit of an ongoing nitpicky-critical phase for awhile, but recent outings (also including Days of Wine and Roses two weeks ago; and PBS's "Great Performances" airing of Dead Man Walking from the Met last week, though I guess not technically an "outing") have been very gratifying, with excellent -- indeed, sometimes breathtaking -- work tempered only by nits too minor to be worth picking.

Most importantly, all three were blessed with brilliant performances: a flawless ensemble in Appropriate and heartbreaking work from the central pairs in DoWaR and DMW.   If Guettel's and Craig Lucas's libretto for DoWaR impressed me somewhat less than Terrence McNally's for DMW (which should be studied by all would-be opera librettists, imho), or than Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins's laser-sharp writing in Appropriate, it's almost an unfair comparison.  And all three are being given ideal productions:  Ivo van Hove's established style has never felt more at home than in DMW, while Lila Neugebauer and the dots design collective make Jacobs-Jenkins's festering Arkansas plantation house a central character in Appropriate, and Michael Greif and Lizzie Clachan find a pleasingly intimate scale for DoWaR without skimping on storytelling.

Tomorrow night I'll be seeing Dead Outlaw.  And next on my wish list are An Enemy of the People and Ibsen's Ghost, but they might have to wait until I can cobble together more work.  If things really pick up, who knows: Uncle Vanya,  Illinoise,  Tommy... even by Tony-season standards, this seems like a very busy theatrical year.

The British feel these latest deal-
     ings verge on immorality.
The element of precedent
     imperils our neutrality!
We're rather vexed you're giving ext-
     raterritoriality—
We must insist you offer this t-
     o every nationality.

Nothing much is happening today, but I felt like starting a daily thread. Today I made a long list of all the junk food I need to buy the next time I go to Safeway, because they are having a huge junk food sale. Everything from Cheetos to ice cream sandwiches to a cheesecake platter. They've also got fried chicken and Coke on sale. I think that sometime this weekend sounds good to get a chicken and Cheetos feast.

All the snow that we got on Sunday is gone.

And... guess whose birthday is this Saturday?