Blur hanging around

The real disappointment about Damon Albarn having to be dragged off stage is that nobody actually pulled him off stage with a giant hook, along these lines:

On the other hand, as Blur have just launched an own-brand ice cream which you can buy in actual shops, maybe a gentle hook is too good for him.

Actually, judging by the unimpressed reaction to his Alice musical, it's possible a gentle hook is beyond Albarn these days.

John Lydon's Herod slaughtered while still innocent

Whoever booked the Jesus Christ Superstar revival with John Lydon as Herod, one of Incubus as Judas and a random N'Syncer as Pilate seems to have sobered up. The tour has been axed.

It turns out their collected draw - even with the addition of that bloke who won the being Jesus on ITV last year - just wasn't enough to interest anybody into shelling out for tickets:

The next morning, Mr. Forster and Mr. Chasez were rehearsing with Mr. Connor when the company’s general manager entered the studio.

Describing what happened next, Mr. Forster said, “He was like, ‘Guys, take a break. We need to chat. It’s not going to happen.' ” At this point in his recollection, Mr. Forster simply gasped.

Mr. Boyd, who has no previous musical theater experience, suspected he was being hazed. “I thought it was like a prank that you pull on the new guy,” he said. “But no.”

Unsurprisingly, John Lydon has reached for his default "knew it all along" setting:

“I had a run-in with the alleged promoter [Michael Cohl] in New York,” Mr. Lydon said. “I didn’t like him and I instinctively didn’t trust him.”

Of course, John. Of course.

Cohl was also involved in the U2/Spiderman thing, so at least this time he's stopped things before anyone got hurt. Physically hurt, anyway.

We have yet to reach the bottom of the musical barrel

There are still terrible, terrible ideas for musicals left to be discovered.

Here's the latest:

Country music songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane Mcanally are developing a new musical based on American variety show Hee Haw.

Yes. A sketch-and-tunes TV programme is being adapted into a musical. How, exactly?

Clark and MCAnally are the composers for the musical, which is about a "wily sexpot from (Hee Haw's fictional rural town) Kornfield Kounty" who wants to explore the world before walking down the aisle with her boyfriend.

A wily sexpot, eh? There must have been a lot of thought poured into developing that well-rounded character.

If this sounds terrible, the real fear is that it might be a success. And if 'musical based on variety TV' becomes a thing, we're only two years away from Seaside Special: The Musical.

Be afraid people. Be afraid.

Dreadful Spice Girls musical killed off by people telling others it was dreadful - official

Jennifer Saunders, who helped to create Viva For Seven Months Before The Empty Theatres Forced Closure, the Spice Girls jukebox musical, feels it was culled because of the press:

She tells the Bbc, "I felt there was a certain group of journalists who... were told by their editors to be nasty about it."

Saunders also thinks the world economic crisis was the blame for the show's failure, adding, "It came right at the recession time and I just thought it was unlucky in a way."

Unlucky. Journalists. World recession.

All those things.

Also, being a dreadful idea poorly executed doesn't help.

Lennon musical plans coagulate together

Could there be any idea worse than a musical based on multimillionaire ascetic John Lennon's life?

Apparently, yes:

Cast frontman John Power is to portray John Lennon in a new musical

Contactmusic looks on the bright side:

Power is a great choice to play the rock legend - he went to the same Liverpool schools as Lennon.

David Cameron went to the same school as George Orwell. Not entirely sure this means Cameron would be the obvious person to play Orwell in a dramatisation of Down And Out In Paris And London.

Viva not forever?

The Daily Star is predicting the closure of Viva Forever, the Spice Girls musical:

SPICE Girls show Viva Forever! may be axed if ticket sales don’t pick up.

Are ticket sales that bad, then?

Performances are reportedly often three-quarters full for the show based on songs by Posh Spice Victoria Beckham’s pals.

Even before you get to that tortuous "Posh Spice Victoria Beckham's pals" that sentence is twisting like a mountain snake after a groundhog. "Often three quarters full" sounds bad, but really feels like an attempt to throw the worst possible light on the size of the houses.

"Often", so not always, or regularly, but just sometimes; and the rest of the time, presumably, the theatre must be more than three-quarters full or else it would have been those figures which would have formed the heart of the claim.

So, that's 'West End Show doesn't always fill auditorium in January', then. Well done, Daily Star.

Ruining two great things at once

Obviously, if you make a crappy jukebox musical out of Jeff Buckley songs, you'd not only want to treat Buckley shabbily; why not beat up another much-loved cultural institution at the same time?

A Jeff Buckley musical is reportedly set to enter development in New York.

The show, titled The Last Goodbye after one of Buckley's best known songs, will be a contemporary telling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, set to the late singer-songwriter's music and lyrics.

Spoilers: They all die in the end.

I mean, it's obvious. If you can't be arsed to write a few new songs for your musical, why would you be bothered about coming up with a new story?

The Money Will Roll Right In: Nirvana - The Musical

In the midst of his testimony over at the Britney Spears trial, Sam Lufti appeared to suggest on oath that there's plans for a Nirvana version of Mama Mia.

It might sound unlikely, but for two things.

One, Lufti currently represents Courtney Love.

And, two, the fact that an idea is a bad one won't stop it if it can make a lot of money.

Rumours that Ben Elton is already trying to think up ways to wrap a cheery family evening around a full cast bellowing of Rape Me could not be confirmed at this time.

Freddie Mercury returns to the stage

Because we can't leave the dead alone anymore, of course Freddie Mercury is going to be dragged on stage for the 10th anniversary of We Will Rock You.

Speaking to the BBC, [Brian] May said the anniversary performance of the popular West End show, on May 14 at the Dominion Theatre, will be celebrated with an "an optical illusion of sorts" that will leave the audience saying "'did we actually see Freddie?'"

No, I don't think they will. If Freddie Mercury really was on the stage, I don't think anyone would be in any doubt, would they?

And, seriously, who'd go to all the trouble of reanimating a corpse unless people were going to notice?

May is quite clear what this won't be:

He added that the effect would be similar to the one created for the late rapper Tupac, who 'appeared' onstage at last month's Coachella Festival in California as a hologram. May explained: "It's a little unfortunate they did that thing with Tupac as we've been trying to make Freddie appear on the stage for quite a while."

May went on to say that they would not, however, be using the same technique to bring back Mercury, who passed away in 1991, saying the hologram technology "is something we've looked at ourselves but I think probably for a show that runs eight shows a week it's not really quite practical."

In other words it's too expensive, then.

Not clear exactly what the "optical illusion" will be, then: perhaps it'll be a drawing that's a duck when you look at it one way, but then is a still from Crazy Little Thing Called Love when you look at it another? Or maybe the programme will have a little flicker book of Mercury in the corner, and the audience will be told to thumb through their pages in tune to Radio GaGa?

Videobit: Ken Russell

Ken Russell, the film director, who has died at the age of 84 had more than a few links with the music world.

Perhaps most famously, he filmed a pop video for his lawyer as payment for a court case won, but it went much deeper than that. His day job saw him turn Tommy into a film, the only movie ever to use Quintaphonic sound. He also had a chance to create an even bigger part of British pop cinema, when he was offered the chance of directing Summer Holiday.

Although that was not to be, he would work with Cliff later. He did the video for She's So Beautiful, which escaped from the soundtrack of Time: The Musical, and looked like this:

It's probably safe to say that wasn't his greatest work.

There had been talk of him producing a Hamlet with David Bowie and Elton John. In fact, there was a lot of talk of Russell and John doing something more substantial than John's appearance in Tommy, but all that came of it was a video for Nikita:

There's nothing that unlikely about a girl called Nikita, is there? Russell appears to have made a Cold War Boy Named Sue.

Perhaps the most frustrating lost music project, though, is the proposed video as part of a Sgt Pepper collection. Different directors would have a go at each song; Russell was supposed to do When I'm 64.

Still, there's always The Boyfriend to enjoy:

Gordon in the morning: The dream of blue collar workers

Beware, beware: Sting has written a musical, warns Gordon:

The musical is set in the 1980s in the North East's shipbuilding industry.

He said: "It's at the early stages.

"We had a big reading last week with 20 actors. I was very surprised about the emotional response.

"We're thinking about taking it up to Newcastle to workshop it.

"I'm really excited by it."

A musical about working-class men written by a man who uses "workshop" as a verb? Doesn't fill you full of hope, does it?

Songwriterobit: Hugh Martin

Hugh Martin, writer of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, has died.

Martin was born in Birmingham, Alabama; he wrote extensively for musicals and movies. If Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas was his commercial hit, his critical hit was this:



The Trolley Song, from Meet Me In St Louis, was nominated for best original song at the Oscars; he also got a nomination for Pass The Peace Pipe from Good News. That song has been recorded a fair few times, too; not often as fairly as this version:



Hugh Martin was 96; he died from natural causes at home in Encinitas, California.

Shirley Manson: Something new and charitable

Got 79p kicking about that you'd like to swap for something lovely and which will also help stand up to governments who would abuse human rights? Get yourself to the iTunes store and buy The Hunger, lifted from the Prometheus Bound musical and bringing together Shirley Manson and Serj Tankian.

It's all in aid of Amnesty International, so doubly worth investigating.

Spiderman. He's on the web.

You've got to have some sympathy for the New York Times. Because someone has given Bono a column in the paper, while the rest of the world might be laughing so hard milk spurts out their nose, the Times has to nod and pretend, hey, this guy has a point.

Even when he's talking about his Spiderman musical.

“Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning,” said Bono, leaning forward in Row A on the aisle, as Reeve Carney, playing Spidey, rehearsed onstage. “This feels like it.”

I don't know if anyone's spider sense is tingling right now, but our bullshit meter's certainly going off.

“We’re wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, ‘Wings of Desire,’ Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones — the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you’re separate from others,” Bono continued. “If the only wows you get from ‘Spider-Man’ are visual, special-effect, spectacular-type wows, and not wows from the soul or the heart, we will all think that we’ve failed.”

Hmm. Here's the advert they're using to try and flog tickets:



That really does look like the way Blake would be selling his work, and doesn't at all make it look like people dicking about on trapezes and great big monsters, right?

And bonus points, by the way, for Bono cramming his face into the advert for no real reason.

Back at the Times, Bono and June Taymor are talking up their show:

Bono observed: “The scope of this thing is just hard to grasp sometimes. It just doesn’t fit into the normal —— “

“Broadway mishegoss,” Ms. Taymor said.

“Right,” Bono said. “And trying to blend comic books — which is a very American contribution to the world of mythology — and rock music and Broadway into this thing of art that we don’t even have a word for.”

It's a musical, Bono. There's a really good word for it. Perhaps - if you must - rock musical.

[Thanks to Rob F and Michael M]

Bono & The Edge try to cheer everyone up

It's been a rough week or two for Ireland, so it's nice of Bono to give everyone a lift by describing the miserable progress of his pointless Spiderman musical from bad idea to rotten stage show:

"Is there jeopardy?" asks Bono, U2's main songwriter and lead singer. "Yes. Because it's technically very difficult. It has never been achieved before — the kind of scale of what we're looking for. There may be very good reasons. We're going to find out. The expense of it? A lot of it was the delays."

Oh, yes, of course. It'd have to be something nobody has ever attempted before, wouldn't it, Bono? Although it's just a bloke on a string. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang needed a flying car.

Gordon in the morning: What's the buzz?

This morning, Gordon has cleared his pages to make way for... well: can you guess?

Jesus Christ Hoofer Stars

Yes, the big scoop is, erm, photos promoting Jesus Christ Superstar when Derek Hough was in it.

There's really nothing much to say, so Gordon just copies some stuff from the programme and runs that as if it was somehow reporting.

Del-boy trousered little in the way of cash during his tenure at the 350-capacity playhouse near Tottenham - tickets were a mere £5.50 a pop.

"Surprisingly, the promotional material for the event was printed locally - by Aardvark Print in Charlotte Street; a world away from Wapping where this material would be recycled even more cheaply a few years later..."

George Galloway creates

What is it with former scourges of Thatcher and light musical theatre?

Yes, it's true: George Galloway really is working on a musical about Dusty Springfield:

The star who shines brighter than all the rest on this trip down memory lane is Dusty Springfield - as fresh today as a spring field should be. And, as it happens, one of the many projects on which I'm working - with Scots writer Ron McKay - is a stage Musical, eponymously entitled Dusty.

Angels who read the Daily Record - and I know there are many - urgently required.

If Ron McKay is doing the writing, and the music is coming from the back catalogue, presumably Galloway's role is to come up with the dance routines?

It's not entirely clear if Galloway is aware of Dusty The Musical, an, erm, musical about the life of Dusty Springfield. It was on Dragon's Den, although I suspect George wouldn't be a big fan of Jones and Paphitis trying to outbid each other to reshackle the working classes.

Still, maybe one will be the thesis, and the other the antithesis, resulting in people deciding to go and see Ben Elton's Queen thingy instead.

Before George gets to the request for funds, he worries about The Kids Today:

I'm the last man buying music on CD, it appears. When I was a kid, my father had a stack of brown paper-wrapped 78RPM records.

Younger readers may never have seen one. they were hard, brittle, and made a delightful sound on the turntable.

Many were made by His Master's Voice, which today's youngsters know as HMV without a clue of the source of the acronym.

I suspect most of today's youngsters aren't really sure what HMV even is, never mind the source of the abbreviation. (Not an acronym, George.) Probably doesn't help they downplayed the dog in the logo.

Black Francis: The Musical

The default approach for hearing a record is being turned into a musical is to start waving swords around wildly, screeching "die, Ben Elton, die". But this one might just work, as Black Francis' Bluefinger is getting the jazz-hands and dance-routine deal.

It has the benefit of having been a concept work in the first place, as Spinner reminds us:

the album is about Dutch musician/artist Herman Brood, who took his own life in 2001, after years battling depression, drugs and alcohol

It's not really going to be a firm family favourite. But while Little Orphan Annie might not feel the cold breath of competition breathing down the back of her city-issue blouse, Bluefinger does at least offer a prospect of an interesting night out.

Gordon in the morning: Men watch TV, cash registers

Gordon's big splash this morning actually isn't that bad: Coldplay have reversed their decision and will now allow Glee to use their music.

They'd turned the programme down right at the start - oddly, the sudden realisation that there's loads of money to made having your songs on a show that spawns mulit-million selling CDs seems to have made the band think again.

It's a great story; unfortunately, that's the entire story so Smart is forced to try and fill up the rest of the column with lazy stereotyping and, erm, reprinting chunks of TV schedule:

Let's be honest - it's a show for the girls and the gays.
[...]
I can't say the telly musical has got my vuvuzela blowing.

It was the final episode of the first series on Monday night on E4.

The Italy v Paraguay game clashed with it... no contest.

But there's no denying what a brilliant idea it is and what an entertaining show.

So you think it's brilliant and entertaining, but you don't like it. I see.

Miley Cyrus doesn't understand Glee

Miley Cyrus has a problem with Glee. Not just that the plot sometimes throws up characters who edge beyond 1.5 dimensions - like, who could keep up with something so in-tense - but also she finds the idea of the programme bemusing:

The ever-outpsoken Disney star explained her feelings to Billboard, saying, "“Honestly, musicals? I just can’t . . . What if this was real life and I was just walking down the street on Rodeo Drive and all of a sudden I just burst into song about how much I love shoes?” She added, “It would get you hits on YouTube.”

I don't know what's more worrying - that Cyrus finds the idea of a programme where peppy kids burst into song to be wrong, or that she worries that living like you were in a musical wouldn't work in real life.

To be fair, behaving like you were on a sitcom in real life - getting a team of men to write some words for you to say, in order to make a bunch of unseen voyeurs laugh and applaud - would almost certainly get you sectioned. It doesn't make Hannah Montana any worse than it already is.

Mind you, if the show pumped arsenic into the house of every viewer, it wouldn't make it any worse.