It’s now just over a week to Christmas. I’m still planning to attend Jewmongous in Manhattan with a friend on Christmas Eve, and she’s trying to get others to join us, but I’ll be getting up to some hijinks this weekend as well. My mom’s coming to visit this weekend, and she wants to take me to see something in Manhattan as a holiday present. (Forgive me, Thespis, for I have sinned. It’s been over two years since my last show …) Depending on what time we can get into the city, we may try hitting the ever-awesome TKTS half-price ticket booth to see what they have available. I’m rather leaning towards The Addams Family because I’d be interested in seeing Roger Rees perform live, but I wouldn’t say no to Wicked, Bonnie & Clyde, or Billy Elliot.
Random bit of interesting-ness: The Germanic musical team Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay did a musical adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s book Rebecca some years back. I was just poking around on Broadway.com, and I found that there’s going to be an English-language adaptation of this musical coming to Broadway. I’m intrigued because I’ve acquired and enjoyed the German soundtrack, and rather leery because of what was done with Tanz Der Vampire/Dance of the Vampires ten years ago. Tanz der Vampire is the Jim Steinman/Michael Kunze musical based on Roman Polanski’s movie The Fearless Vampire Killers. It opened in its original German form in Vienna, Austria in 1997 and it’s had numerous revivals in Europe since then. It was adapted for the American stage and brought to Broadway in the fall of 2001 with Michael Crawford as the big-name star. I saw and enjoyed the production (enough to go back for the evening performance after catching the matinee), despite the fact that it was incredibly cheesy and the audience kept reacting to the fact that many of the songs were adapted from ones that Steinman wrote for Meat Loaf. I bought a copy of the double-disc Austrian cast album, and based on that alone I can safely say that the German-language version has to be better than what I saw in New York. This is why I’m both excited and nervous about this production of Rebecca.
