I have tickets on the 15th for this at City Center but aside from the lead I haven't heard anything on casting. Anyone know anything? I'm hoping this is going to turn out well since I splurged for 3rd row tickets from my birthday.
I am going Nov. 11th and have been wondering about the others cast besides Brian Stokes Mitchell too. I love Kathleen Marshall and can't wait to see who gets the Cyd Charisse role. I hope for lots of laughs from the Douglas Carter Beane book. Looking forward to this.
Laura Osnes isn't old! :) I just hope this doesn't turn out to be like Bullets over Broadway. I wonder if they are thinking about making this a full production
"I just hope this doesn't turn out to be like Bullets over Broadway."
I don't see much of a chance of that. Bullets was the stage musical adaptation of a cynical, tough, dark screwball comic movie about Broadway. The Bandwagon is the stage musical version of a classic MGM musical about Broadway which although it has screwball and bittersweet elements, is the antithesis of cynical, tough and dark.
Bullets had a compilation score of period songs from different composers. Bandwagon has a classic Schwartz and Dietz score, some of which was written specifically for the story (including the standard "That's Entertainment") and has added some other songs from their canon.
The characters in Bullets are, with minor exceptions, hilariously self-consumed and driven by selfishness. The characters in Bandwagon are lovable show folk who just want to be happy, make others happy and put on a show.
Bullets is Woody Allen at some of his hilarious blistering best. Bandwagon is Comden and Green in their typical collegial witty snappy form.
The romantic relationships in Bullets are grappling and bitter, in Bandwagon they are mostly joyful and heartfelt.
The spirit of one piece is farcically neurotic and jaundiced, the spirit of the other is unabashedly ebullient and joyous.
I was looking forward to Bullets and didn't like it. In retro, the problems in musicalizing the movie now seem obvious. I'm looking forward to Bandwagon. But it's very easy to see how, in contrast to Bullets, the stage version might easily resemble the movie and in doing so work very well.
^ That assessment is accurate. The Bandwagon is one of my all time favorite MGM musicals. It's the one that introduced me to the wonderful Cyd Charisse. The movie poster is just gorgeous:
Pauline Kael’s review of the film from 1001 Nights at the Movies:
The Band Wagon (1953) – The Comden-Green script isn’t as consistently fresh as the one they did for Singin’ in the Rain, but there have been few screen musicals as good as this one, starring those two great song-and-dance men Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan. Actually, Buchanan’s dancing and his rosy-ripe way with his lines (a satirical cant about the theatuh) have such style and flourish that he steals the picture. (His role is a spoof of Orson Welles.) The plot, about a movie star (Astaire) trying for a comeback on Broadway and falling in love with a ballerina (Cyd Charisse), is a relaxed excuse for a series of urbane revue numbers, which includes “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan,” “That’s Entertainment,” “Triplets” (featuring Astaire, Buchanan , and Nanette Fabray), and culminates in the “Girl Hunt” dance sequence – a parody of Mickey Spillane’s bloody boudoir fiction, with Astaire as the detective and Charisse as the good-bad women in his life. When the bespangled Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around Astaire, she can be forgiven everything, even her three minutes of “classical” ballet and the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically. With Oscar Levant, in one of his best movie roles (he and Fabray play at being Comden and Green) and James Mitchell. The black shoeshine dancer is LeRoy Daniels. Directed by Vincente Minnelli; the choreography is by Michael Kidd; the songs are by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. The title and three of these songs are from a 1931 Broadway revue that starred Astaire and his sister Adele; Cyd Charisse’s singing was dubbed by India Adams. M-G-M. color.
This will no doubt be a minority opinion, but the movie The Bandwagon was one of two movies I vividly remember loathing as a kid for the way it lampooned serious theater artists. The preposterous scene with the director running all over the stage (was it the tech rehearsal?) shrieking about the smoke effects just reinforced every dreadful cliche Hollywood has of British-accented stage directors and their nance-like affectations. Sure, sure, I know Comden and Green are the greatest lovers of Broadway musical theater the world has ever seen, but frankly those scenes of folks always having to choose between HIGH ART and good plain fun just made me want to scream.
(So what was hated movie #2, you ask? Bye Bye Birdie-- mostly for that sadistic scene whence the orchestra conductor takes the pep pill forcing the "Serious" ballet troupe to double-time their choreography. Spills, falls, crashing in the wings-- hilarity for the audience but not for little pre-pubescent Someone in a Tree.)
I think Comden/Green were giving Broadway, theater directors, theater "folk" even ballerinas a very good natured ribbing in their script for this movie. Jack Buchanan is just so funny. It's really all so harmless.
Honorable mention: Sexy James Mitchell. He was just so, so gorgeous.
Whoops. No, the only thing to blame is my addled brain. Corrected.
Someoneinatree, I can see that interpretation. But I don't take the movie as a dualistic argument re: popular entertainment v. high art, but rather a lampoon of how lofty artistic ambitions can sometimes, though by no means always, prove misguided and pretentious. That in fact, does sometimes happen.
I really can't see Laura Osnes in the Cyd Charisse role: elegant, aloof and an Astaire-caliber dancer. She is so appealing right now that they must figure the audience will buy whatever she does.
Where has Tracey Ullman been for the last fifteen years? I'm one of the few people who enjoyed her on her television show more than enjoyed the Simpsons.
The Band Wagon has always seemed to me like a film musical that just missed greatness (or very-goodness). It starts out (with allowances for my memory) as a "modern" fifties musical with a colorable plot about a middle-aged hoofer (Astaire)with a fading career who is trying to revitalize that career by appearing in a new stage production pairing him with a young, lovely and talented dancer from the classical world. Standard plot complication is that each thinks that the other does not respect the talent of him/her. So the film plugs along for the first two thirds with the songs arising out of the plot developments. "Dancing in the Dark" is a classic clip. "By Myself" and "I Guess I'll Have To Change My Plans" are first-rate songs.
The show, an obvious preposterous flop, is crushed in tryouts and loses its financing. From here the whole story is neatly wrapped up in about fifteen minutes. Dancers reconcile and become a pair. Show is completely re-done in a few hours to be a hit "put on a show" musical that features about five major numbers in the score shown one after the other moving down through the program for the show. These songs include "Louisiana Hayride" and "Triplets" which are pretty good songs but don't belong near the conclusion of this film.
Film ends with a spirited performance of "That's Entertainment."
If they had taken the time or trouble to write a creditable final third instead of resolving all the conflicts and shoehorning in all the songs with little or no effort in minutes, this could have been a musical in the "Singing in the Rain" class.
As it is, there is still a lot to like.
Addendum: I have since learned that the contract of Comden and Green ran out in the middle of the creation of the film, which explains why the book abruptly ends and the remaining songs are tacked on to the end. Why they didn't finish the film after the contract expired I'll just have to wonder about.
Well, there are only a handful of original movie musicals in The Singin' in the Rain class (and some would argue only a handful of movies of any genre in its class0. And I agree Bandwagon (or is it Band Wagon?) isn't one of them. But it's still a pretty good movie with some great scenes and performances.
I also have questions about Osnes in the Charisse role (although I don't know her work well enough to really hazard a guess.) But as far as being anything approximating a Charisse or Astaire caliber dancer, is Brian Stokes Mitchell one (I'm asking because I really don't know)? Maybe they've changed the book a grew deal (Joey's concern).