Blue Moon

[scenicdesign71]

Eric posted this review on FB and, not previously having been aware of this movie, I'm now really intrigued:

Hollywood Reporter:  Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley Mesmerize in Richard
                                            Linklater's Affecting Study of a Gifted Artist on a Downhill Slide
                                      Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott co-star in this real-time account of musical-theater lyricist Lorenz Hart
                                        getting pickled at Sardi's on opening night of his former writing partner's Broadway triumph Oklahoma!


It reminds me a bit of Raising Havoc — the tone may be quite different, but the inside-baseball view of midcentury Broadway has me itching to see Blue Moon.  Well, that and the gold-plated cast, and David Rooney's glowing review; and, sure, also the counterfactual inclusion of a 13-year-old "Stevie" at the opening night that would catapult his soon-to-be mentor's already remarkable career into the ionosphere.  (While Hammerstein did take the young Sondheim to see Oklahoma! at some point in 1943, SJS recalled his first-ever opening night as that of Carousel's Hartford tryout, on his fifteenth birthday, where the Act I finale so moved him that he stained Dorothy Hammersteins's fur with tears).

Apparently a US release is planned for this May.

In 2008 I designed a Rodgers & Hart revue which lightly traced both men's biographies, in the process making them more vivid to me than they had previously been — especially Hart, and especially in his long decline.  So I'm fascinated to see what Linklater (an established Sond-head in good standing) and Hawke (the genuinely nicest guy you'll ever meet, I've heard from a West Village neighbor of his) make of him.