“Everything old is new again,” sings Hugh Jackman in The Boy From Oz , stopping the show nightly on Broadway. But 200 years old may just be a little too old for anybody to care. Is the 19th century all the rage again? All four of this year’s big holiday movies-Ron Howard’s The Missing , Read More
It’s a pleasure to report how terrific Hugh Jackman’s performance is in The Boy From Oz. Very rarely, perhaps once or twice if we’re very lucky, certain supreme musical stars are embraced absolutely by an audience. Mr. Jackman is one of them. He stops the show, and no wonder. From start to blazing finish, the Read More
In the forthcoming avalanche of big-budget, end-of-the-year Hollywood epics with limitless money for marketing and promotion, don’t overlook The Weekend and A Good Baby , two small, sincere, modestly financed but extremely intelligent independent films worthy of attention. The Weekend , written and directed by Brian Skeet, is a lushly photographed reverie about a group Read More
Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland , by Gerald Clarke. Random House, 510 pages, $29.95.
Somewhere over the rainbow Judy Garland is plaintively asking the bluebirds why then, oh why yet another biography? Didn’t the job get done in 1975, the year of Anne Edwards’ less-than-accurate biography, and Gerold Frank’s exhaustive study, and Read More
Liza! Like Dietrich, Jolson, Piaf and, yes, Garland, one word is all you need. They probably know it on Mars. But there are two Minnellis, and Liza celebrates them both with a fireworks display called Minnelli on Minnelli that heralds the most spectacular comeback in show-business history since Judy played Carnegie Hall.
You don’t walk Read More
Wednesday, Oct. 27
Chris Kattan was nowhere to be seen during the Oct. 23 episode of Saturday Night Live . That made sense, since the show was hosted by Norm Macdonald.
Apparently, Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Kattan hate each other.
In November 1997, Mr. Macdonald talked about his feelings toward Mr. Kattan in Read More
Kay Thompson, one of the most uniquely fascinating women in New York, passed away on July 2. Roy Rogers got more space, but Kay Thompson got more tears. None of the obituaries got it right and The New York Times didn’t even try. Yes, she was best known as the creator of Eloise, the precocious Read More
Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week
There isn’t really a more quintessential show-business drama than a love story between two professionals, one on the way up, the other on the way down. Variations abound, but the most famous of these-the “Star Is Born” story-has been made four times: The first, about a struggling young Read More
