It’s follow-up Wednesday, so here’s the latest on a couple of my Shubert Alley-shattering scoops.
Our old football buddy, Ghost Skipper, is still, I regret to say, “haunting” director Rob Ashford’s radical reinterpretation of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” as a musical.
Last week, I revealed that Ashford’s added several songs, including “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover,” to a work that, if I’m not mistaken, Tennessee Williams intended to be a dramatic play.
(A reader from London wondered if an Ashford-directed “A Streetcar Named Desire” would contain the “Trolley Song” from “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Or maybe “I’ve Always Depended on the Kindness of Strangers in the Night”?)
Ashford also added the character of Ghost Skipper, Brick’s dead best friend.
The revival’s producers wanted to cut Ghost Skipper, but didn’t have the guts to confront Ashford. I thought I was doing them a favor by handing them, in the guise of a column, a knife.
But a source says Ashford’s dug in his heels and doesn’t want to be seen bowing to pressure from The Post.
He might, however, want to check with his leading man, Benjamin Walker, and his leading lady, Scarlett Johansson.
I’m told they’re not too happy with Ghost Skipper either, because he draws focus from their intensely intimate scenes.
Well, I did my best. Now it’s up to the critics to perform the exorcism — which, I assure you, will not be pretty!
A spokesman declined to comment on Ghost Skipper’s future afterlife with the production.
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It isn’t just the New Amsterdam that’s undergoing a renovation when “Mary Poppins” closes March 3.
The theater’s next tenant — Disney’s “Aladdin” — is also undergoing an overhaul. A stage version of the 1992 movie opened two years ago at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle. It was seen, by Disney, as a test run. Chad Beguelin (“The Wedding Singer”) wrote the script and Casey Nicholaw (“The Book of Mormon”) directed and choreographed.
But that production isn’t the one Disney’s bringing to New York. The script is going to be rewritten, and Alan Menken, who scored the charming movie, will add more songs. Tony-winning set designer Bob Crowley is being hired to create a new physical production for the Broadway run.
“It will be a much more elaborate production than it was in Seattle,” says a source.
Another revamped production in the Disney pipeline is “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which premiered several years ago in Berlin but wasn’t deemed strong enough to play Broadway.
Peter Parnell’s writing a new script (James Lapine did the original), and Menken and Stephen Schwartz are doing some new songs.
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Changes are afoot at the Tony Awards.
Alan Wasser, the veteran general manager who’s guided the Tonys for the past several years, has left the job. His replacement is Carl Levin.
Who?
When I first heard this news, I thought why on earth is Carl Levin giving up his position as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee to run the Tonys?
But after some crackerjack reporting, I learned that there’s another Carl Levin, the one who produced “Rock of Ages.”
Levin’s been telling everybody that it’s time to get a new host for the Tonys (bye, bye Neil Patrick Harris) and that the show has gotten a little too insular, with last year’s jokey references to “gays” and “Jews” running Broadway.
But he’d better tread lightly, since the real power at the Tonys remains the management committee, made up of producers from the Broadway League and board members from the American Theatre Wing.
“Carl’s been brought in to be a line producer,” one person says, bluntly. “Nobody cares about his ‘creative’ ideas.”