Musical Mondays! Guys and Dolls

The first Broadway show I ever saw was Les Miserables when I was about eight or nine.  Not long after, I saw the revival of Guys and Dolls.  I actually saw the final performance of the original cast - Nathan Lane and Faith Prince, Peter Gallagher, J.K. Simmons, among others.  It was an amazing performance, Peter Gallagher was moving on after that night.  A few years ago I went through a period of obsession with Frank Sinatra, his music, his movies, etc. and caught Guys and Dolls.  I'd seen scenes from it over the years, but hadn't watched the whole movie, which also stars Marlon Brando (yes he can seriously sing), Jean Simmons, and Vivian Blane, as well as Sinatra.  It came out in 1955, five years after the Broadway premier, and is set somewhere in the 50's or so and is one of the greatest romantic comedies ever.  Sinatra and Brando play gamblers Nathan Detroit and Sky Masterson.  Nathan runs a craps (dice) game that floats around New York City wherever they won't get caught, catering to rich other gamblers.  Nathan has been engaged to cabaret singer Adelaide for fourteen years (they keep getting off the train at Saratoga on their way to Niagra Falls to get married!).  Meanwhile, Nathan has made a bet with Sky that he can't get the head of the local church mission, Sarah Brown, to go to Havana with him (this is pre-Bay of Pigs).  Sky is smooth, cunning, and sexy as hell thanks to the magic Brando could still exude back then.  He convinces her to go with him by promising to bring 12 sinners to the mission so she can reform them.  In Havana, she gets drunk and there's a huge dancing scene.  That's probably my only criticism with the show and the movie, the extended dance sequences.  There's another one near the end when Sky is trying to convince 12 guys to come with him, by rolling craps for them.  "Luck be a Lady" is the song, and is often really extended for dances.  The title song describes Nathan and Sky's final problems - that guys will do anything for a doll (woman, in case you don't speak 50s).  There are quite a few more kitschy songs, but all tell something of the story - "If I were a bell" is Sarah's drunk song about how she'd rather be uninhibited and ring like a bell.  Adelaide has two songs at her cabaret show (one was written just for the movie), as well as her laments about Nathan not marrying her.  Near the end Adelaide and Sarah get together and sing about nailing down their guys and marrying them as soon as possible.  The movie does a terrific job bringing the play to life.  All the exterior scenes are cartoonish graphic representations of New York City or Havana, but all the interior scenes (which are the majority) are perfectly depicted to represent the places all the gamblers hang out.  The direction is good, but not particularly different than the plays I've seen.  My favorite song from the movie, "Adelaide" was actually written specifically for Sinatra for the movie.  It describes how he actually loves Adelaide and can't believe she loves him too.  I couldn't find it on Youtube, but the one below demonstrates Brando singing. 

Musical Mondays! Pixar music

This week, instead of watching a single movie musical, I've been haunted by the music from older Pixar movies, so I thought I'd actually check out which ones were nominated for Academy awards, and whether every movie even had a song attached to it.  The ones below were nominated, but only "If I didn't have you" won, giving Randy Newman his first Oscar. I am planning to watch Finding Nemo today so I'll check out whether there's music to add from that.  Enjoy a musical interlude for Monday.  Which is your favorite?  (Tom, I'm looking at you for comment!)

"Down to Earth" from Wall*E, sung by Peter Gabriel.  Sadly a fairly forgettable song, from a wonderfully memorable movie. 



"Our Town" from Cars, sung by James Taylor


"If I didn't have you" from Monsters, Inc.  A terrific song, particularly when sung by John Goodman and Billy Crystal.  It plays over the end credits during the film.


"When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2.  When I looked this up, I didn't remember it at all.  It was an odd pairing for a children's movie if you ask me.
 

"You've Got a Friend" from the original Toy Story.  It plays over the introductory scene and is my absolute favorite song from a Pixar film. 

Musical Mondays: Little Shop of Horrors

Nick over at Random Ramblings of a Demented Doorknob shares my love for this musical, and thankfully Netflix shows it on their Watch Instantly service so I didn't have to buy the DVD yet.  When I decided to watch it this week all I really remembered was the music, not so much the dialogue or the look of the movie.  I actually saw the 2003 revival on Broadway (though it's a misnomer given that it had never appeared on Broadway before, only touring companies and regional theater) with Hunter Foster and an Audrey II that grew and reached out far into and above the audience. It was pretty amazing to see, but I like the movie better.

Quick plot summary:  Seymour is a loser who works in Mr. Mushnik's flower shop and is in love with the other employee Audrey (Ellen Greene) who is dating a sadistic dentist (Steve Martin).  The business is failing (partly because it's located on Skid Row) and to help business Seymour puts a "strange and unusual plant" in the window that he found at a market after a total eclipse of the sun.  He names the plant Audrey II.  It does improve business hugely, and Mr. Mushnik insists Seymour make the plant grow.  It turns out Audrey II drinks blood.  Once it outgrows what it can suck from Seymour's fingers, Seymour has to start killing to keep his life going.  In exchange for killing people, Audrey II promises Seymour the world, including his love, Audrey.   Most of the named cast dies, but when Audrey II goes after its namesake, Seymour stops it all and attempts to kill the plant.  The final scene leaves you unsure of whether Audrey II takes over the world or dies.

Rewatching Little Shop of Horrors today, I was reminded of why the movie version is the best.  The three main characters - Seymour, Audrey, Mr. Mushnik - matter, but it's really the supporting cast that can make or break the show.  Particularly the three girls (Crystal, Chiffon, and Ronette - named after girl groups of the '50s) who intro the show, and basically sing back up for much of the rest of the show.  However, they also have dialogue and need to be pretty good scene-stealers to make their short moments in the spotlight stand out enough that you remember them.  The women in the movie are strong enough that they stand out perfectly.  The versions I've seen on stage didn't cast those roles strongly enough and I think the whole production suffers for it.  The other thing that makes the movie work so well is the cinematography and production design.  The scenes could all have been from a 1950s comic book.  The edges of the shot are soft and slightly out of focus, even indoors.  Even scenes at the dentist are sometimes from inside a mouth (that's the girl group behind him) are perfectly crafted to invoke the fantasy/horror of those genre rather than strictly the musical genre, even though it's not particularly scary, just creepy at times.   Also, Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene are perfectly cast as a couple of losers who fall in love, make good and after escaping the plant, live happily ever after (we hope). 

Musical Mondays: A Chorus Line

Careful, this review could potentially put songs in your head that won't go away no matter how hard you try.  At least that's often the case for me when I watch A Chorus Line.  Filmed in 1985, based on a stage play from 10 years earlier, and starring Michael Douglas as the only still recognizable actor, it's still got some of the best songs from musicals.  It ran continuously on Broadway for 15 years and is currently the fourth longest running show in history (behind Phantom, Cats, and Les Mis).  For such a simple show it must be one of the most profitable.  There are no superstars; everyone in the show is actually auditioning to part of the chorus for a pretend Broadway show, so being a nobody is actually a requirement.   Michael Douglas plays the choreographer/director trying to cast the chorus of his show.  He's using non-traditional auditioning techniques by asking the final 16 actors to actually talk about themselves in addition to singing and dancing.  We learn little bits of their stories about how they got into dancing ("I can do that", "At the Ballet" and "Nothing").  The biggest difference between the stage play and the movie is the love story in the movie between Douglas and one of the actresses, Cassie, who used to date Douglas.  One of the most famous songs from the show is "What I Did For Love", which in the stage version is sung by the entire cast about what they've given up for their love of dance and the need to be a dancer.  In the movie, Cassie sings it about how her career changed because she fell in love with Douglas.  One other smaller difference that I much prefer in the film is the song Cassie sings "Let Me Dance For You" rather than "The Music and the Mirror".  It's more exciting and explains her character better than just the love of dance.  However, the big things that make this movie incredibly dated even though the themes are relate-able at any time is the synthesized music background, and the unbelievably bad hair extensions they make Cassie use in the flashbacks to her life with Douglas.  Both make it seem out of place.  However, it's still one of the best musicals.  "One" is the song that gets stuck in my head.  "One.  Singular sensation, every little step she takes.   One.  Thrilling combination, every move that she makes.  One smile and suddenly nobody else will do."  It runs through my head.  That scene at the end where they fill the stage with all the other dancers who audition for the chorus all in matching outfits is the one over the top moment that gives you chills when it's done right.  On stage it doesn't work as well, but on film it's kind of magical.

Musical Mondays: The Sound of Music

There is no musical that is more family friendly than The Sound of Music.  This also means that the more times you watch it, as you age, you'll get more out of it.  As another disc in my Rodgers and Hammerstein collection that I've never unwrapped (because it's always on TV at least once a year, and usually more), I figured it was time to pay attention to it for a bit.  And since I had a ton of work to get done today, and this has a running time of just under 3 hours, The Sound of Music was a terrific option.  It is Rodgers and Hammerstein's final collaboration, as Hammerstein passed away soon after the Broadway premiere.  Then it was brought to the screen in 1965 after 1,443 performances on Broadway, with Mary Martin as Maria, though Julie Andrews played her in the movie.  However, Andrews won the Oscar the year before for Mary Poppins and was a much more popular choice for The Sound of Music, for which she was also nominated, but lost to Julie Christie for Darling.  It tells the story of Maria, a woman studying to be a nun, who becomes a governess for the Von Trapp family, around 1938.  She helps Captain Von Trapp recover from the loss of his wife, and relate to his 7 children again, mostly through music.  They fall in love and marry, and the whole family flees Austria in 1938 after it was annexed by Germany, rather than serve the Nazis.  They settled in Vermont, and I've actually been to the Von Trapp Family Lodge near Stowe, VT. 

The music in The Sound of Music is really what brings it together.  A few songs from the Broadway show were cut and a few were added, and I definitely prefer the movie versions.  The songs removed were fairly gimmicky songs that didn't help the story.  "Do-Re-Mi", "The Sound of Music" (which I remember as "The Hills Are Alive"), "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" and of course as tune turned into a popular Christmas song, "My Favorite Things".  Everyone who sings has a gorgeous voice and does a terrific job.  "Climb Every Mountain" by the Mother Superior is amazing every single time.  Only "Edelweiss" is sung sitting in place.  All the other songs have a lot of theatricality, but they took advantage of being a film, and many of the songs roam around the city, countryside and mountains.  This is something no stage version I've ever seen has come close to living up to.  The film went above and beyond any constraints and took advantage of the beautiful landscape and then the cinematographer used it perfectly.  The opening scene when a helicopter brings the camera from really far away onto Julia Andrews' face has been copied in many different ways and places. 
Definitely one of the best musicals ever brought to film. 

Musical Mondays!

Because of the holiday, Musical Mondays will return next week.  In the meantime, check out the blog-a-thon over at Encore's World of Film and TV.  A bunch of people wrote posts and submitted them to be included in the blog-a-thon.  Check it out here.

Musical Mondays! RENT

First and foremost, Rent is a Broadway musical.  I was really excited when I heard they were bringing this Pulitzer-prize winning show to the big screen, but nervous because I wasn't sure how it would work.  Would they just do a filmed version on the stage, or actually make it a legitimate film.  They found a good middle ground, taking the elements of staging and movement from the stage, but incorporating elements that are only possible on film, such as dream sequences, memories, etc. while the music was going on.  Rent is a rock opera, which usually means all the dialogue is sung, between actual songs.  For the film, they took some of the dialogue-type music and made it a spoken rather than sung, though not for everything thank goodness or it would have lost some of the characteristic charm of the stage production. The biggest thrill for seeing the film is that they used nearly the entire original cast (Rosario Dawson replaced an actress who was pregnant, though possibly also for big-name status).

In case you missed this phenomenon in the late 90s, here's a sum up of the story.  Mark (Anthony Rapp) and Roger (Adam Pascal) are roommates on the lower east side of Manhattan called Alphabet City (the avenues in that section are no longer numbered like 5th Avenue, but become Avenue A, B, C, D) in 1989, Christmas Eve.  Roger has HIV and wants to write a song he'll be remembered for ("One Song, Glory"), and Mark is an aspiring documentary filmmaker.  Their former roommate Benny (Taye Diggs) wants to collect their rent since he just bought their building and some others ("Rent").  In exchange for deferred rent, he wants them to shut down a protest that's brewing against the neighborhood changes, organized by Mark's ex, drama queen Maureen (Idina Menzel).  Maureen's new girlfriend, Joanne (Tracie Thoms) can't get the sound equipment set up for the concert, and Mark shows up and they lament dating Maureen ("Tango Maureen").  Another former roommate, Collins (Jesse L. Martin) and his new "girlfriend" Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia) - both HIV+ -  arrive to help out.  To get everyone out of the apartments, Benny cuts the power, and neighbor Mimi (Rosario Dawson) goes to ask Roger to help her ("Light My Candle" - my favorite song when I first saw it).  The protest goes off well ("Over the Moon") and Mark sells his footage of it to the news.  Roger and Mimi also realize they're both HIV+ and that they can make it work (.  The end of the first act is the best scene of the whole show "La Vie Boheme", where the whole group sings about the bohemian life they lead, open minded, with lots of cultural and pop references (here are the lyrics).  The movie then does a  bit of a good cheat, with music overlaying some fun images of the week between Christmas and New Year's.  The second act has more problems, with Angel getting sick and dying ("I'll cover you"), and Roger going away to write his song, and Mimi and Benny getting together, and Joanne and Maureen getting engaged (different from the play) and then breaking up ("Take Me or Leave Me").  Meanwhile, Mark has 'sold his soul' to take a job for a sleazy TV show, working for Sarah Silverman's Alexi Darling.  It's a really small part, but she brings a non-entity on stage to life well.  Even though it's a story about coming of age in a time of AIDS, poverty, violence, gay and straight, and all, it's still a Broadway musical, and things work out pretty well by the end.  The final song in the play is "Seasons of Love", but the movie puts it right at the beginning, and not as part of the movie, just all the characters standing in their own spotlights, in costume, on stage singing.  The music is revived at the end of the movie while they watch Mark's documentary about them all over the past year.   The movie does a good job bringing it to life a brilliant play and musical without losing the feel of the original work.  Also, having the original cast makes the voices really familiar if you're only familiar with the soundtrack.  I loved the play - I saw it my sophomore year of college on Broadway, then again my senior year, and once since college.  And I watch the movie now at least annually to be reminded of the overarching messages the music provides, which became the tagline for the film: "No Day But Today", meaning you never know what's going to claim you in the future, live for today.  Stage version 5+ of 5 stars, film 4.5 of 5 stars for it's originality at bringing a stage play to the screen.

Musical Mondays! NINE

This will likely be the newest musical I review for this feature, but as I just saw it, and would review it anyway, and it's a musical, this seems appropriate.  Nine is based on the stage musical from a few years ago, which was in turn loosely based on the film 8 1/2 by Fellini.  I've never seen the stage version, and I have seen very few Fellini films, and not 8 1/2.  So I went into this film based solely on the strength of the cast and director.  Rob Marshall did a terrific job bringing Chicago to the screen (that will be reviewed soon), so I had high hopes for this.  As it never came to my local theater, I had to wait for Netflix.  However, I'd heard the many unhappy reviews, but took them with a grain of salt given my higher-than-usual tolerance for musicals.  My mom used to say a good measure of a quality musical is whether you leave the theater humming the tunes.  While I did get some of the songs stuck in my head for the evening, Nine was disappointing. 

We meet Guido Contini (a whiny unsympathetic Daniel Day-Lewis), a maestro of Italian cinema in the 1960s.  He's tortured by lack of inspiration for his new film, and seeks it from the many women in high life.  The movie is mostly about the women, and for that I did enjoy it, but they too are kinda whiny and needy.  Most of the story is told through Guido's remembered fantasies about these women.  The ones who weren't were the ones I liked best: Judi Dench and Fergi.  Dench plays Guido's long suffering costumer.  She talks about her start at the Paris nightspot the Folies Bergere.  She tries to keep Guido in line and get his movies made the way he wants them.  A great big sister.  Fergie (from the Black Eyed Peas) plays the whore who Guido met as a child who gave him and his friends a bit of a show and told them how to treat women.  Her song was easily my favorite, and definitely the best sung song of the bunch.  Her voice and raunchy dance number, "Be Italian", were really terrific.  The rest of the women also each sing a song about their relationship with Guido - Marion Cotillard as his wife, Penelope Cruz (in an oddly Oscar nominated role) as his mistress, Sophia Loren as his deceased mother, Nicole Kidman as the actress from his movies, and Kate Hudson as a journalist interviewing him.  All the musical numbers were performed in Guido's head and on the same stage (save one song by his wife) and the sets did invoke the crazy unfinished nature of Guido's mind.  The costumes were also terrific, and I'm surprised weren't even nominated for an Oscar.  Overall, the movie didn't live up to my hopes, and didn't live up to the incredible cast.  Personally, I blame it on Day-Lewis being improperly cast - somehow I sense another actor could pull it off better.  I think Raul Julia and Antonio Bandares played it on Broadway, and that seems like better casting.  2.5 of 5 stars/lambs

Musical Mondays: Cabaret

Cabaret won 8 Oscars in 1973, including directing for Bob Fosse. It lost out Best Picture to The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppolla got his revenge on Fosse two years later when he and Godfather II beat Fosse who was also nominated for Lenny. Cabaret took Best Actress for Liza Minnelli, Best Supporting Actor for Joel Grey, as well as Sound, Music, Cinematography, Editing, and Art Direction. On Broadway, the Kander and Ebb musical also won lots of awards in 1967, including for Joel Grey again, and later Alan Cumming in the 1998 revival.

The story differs only slightly between the stage and film versions. A few songs are added and subtracted, and my personal preference is for the recent revival which combines a bit of both. The movie soundtrack was always my favorite growing up. It was produced at a local theater when I was about 11, and my mom let me go not really realizing how adult the themes can be - adultery, abortion, sex, homosexuality, Nazis, etc.

American Sally Bowles works at a Cabaret in 1931 Berlin. She meets British Brian who rents a room nearby and hopes to teach English to pay his way. The emcee at the Kit Kat Club is the character who links the tumultuous romance between Brian and Sally, and what's happening in real-life Berlin. Brian is staid and proper, and Sally couldn't be more wild. She tries to live a bohemian life, but she really wants a happy secure life but can't seem to behave properly to get it. We see Germany deteriorating and the Nazis picking up their power, and its influence on all of the lives of the characters. Bohemian lifestyles aren't really allowed much in Nazi Germany. Most of the violence is played for laughs on stage in allegory, but interspersed with scenes of real violence. As most movies of the WWII type, nothing ends very well, which generally goes against the rules of previous musical theater. It's a gritty movie that happens to smooth over the roughest edges with song, often in the background or on stage at the club. Liza is wonderful as Sally Bowles. She's flighty, over the top and gets mad when other people tell her she's wrong with the way she's living. Michael York (the future Basil Exposition from Austin Powers) is also great; quietly judging Sally, but secretly wishing he could be more impetuous. And no one beats Joel Grey as the emcee. Alan Cumming and Neil Patrick Harris created their own versions, but Grey really set the standard that no one will ever live up to completely. The video is Cummings at the 1998 Tonys.



The theme of the movie comes from the title song told at the end, but pieces of every song become part of the same central theme. There's very little of a traditional musical theater model that the movie follows in terms of song. There's not really a bad guy - other than the amorphous Nazis - and the heroine isn't really someone worth rooting for when she continuously sabotages herself. "Maybe This Time" is her song about her hopes that life will be different now that she's met a different guy. Nothing's different (she cheats and everything goes down the tubes) - "...everybody loves a winner, so nobody loves me." When Sally meets a rich German guy who wants to date her, she and the emcee sings "Money (Makes the World Go Round)". The emcee sings one of my favorite songs (though I do like quite a few of them), to mock the Nazi hatred of Jews without getting in trouble. "If you could see her" usually has the emcee falling in love someone in a gorilla suit, and he sings "..if you could see her through my eyes, she doesn't look Jewish at all." The emcee gets away with a lot, but does a great job of actually retelling the story going on around him through songs that don't sound nearly as serious as everything actually is. And the final song, "Cabaret" states Sally's feelings perfectly, "what good is sitting alone in your room, come to the cabaret."

If you're trying to see more Oscar type movies, particularly from the 1970s (my own under-watched decade), this makes a great treat, whether or not you're a fan of musicals.

There is one story line that was completely removed from the movie, that of a quiet love story between the older owner of Sally and Brian's boarding house, Fraulein Schneider and a Jewish owner of a fruit stand, Herr Schultz. Ron Rifkin won the Tony for playing Herr Schultz on Broadway. Their story is sweet and shows a very non-bohemian effect of the Nazi terror toward Jews.

Musical Mondays! The Little Mermaid

I can't really explain why I chose The Little Mermaid for this week's Monday Musicals, except that Pandora (online radio) kept choosing songs from it when I set up a station based on the music from "Glee" (don't judge me, work was hard this weekend). And since it's been turned into a stage show, I think The Little Mermaid fully qualifies as a musical, even though it's animated. Oh, and over at Random Ramblings of a Demented Doorknob and The Movie Encyclopedia, their podcast was asking questions about opinions on the big 3 animation studios (Disney/Pixar, Dreamworks, and Studio Ghibli), so the time was apparently ready to watch this again. It also makes sense in my own chronology now that I think about it. It was the second videotape I ever owned (also on Betamax) and I think I watched it every single rainy day one summer. I saw it in theaters and loved it. I think it might have been the first CD I ever bought for myself too.
Anyway, rewatching it today I was struck by how incredibly outdated the animation seems now. While it was a huge jump ahead for it's day, and was a rebirth for Disney animation and started the whole Disney Princess creations, I don't think it's animation is anything spectacular even for hand-drawn animation. It's large and colorful, though mostly block colored without much detail. Watching the trailer for The Little Mermaid 3 (a straight to DVD, I imagine) at the beginning had much more detail and precision than the feature film. While Snow White and Sleeping Beauty were also hand-drawn Disney flicks, their style doesn't seem dated today, just a classic form of animation.
However, the music is still just as awesome as I remember, even the orchestral soundtrack is terrific. "Kiss Da Girl" and "Under the Sea" sung by the reggae-inspired crab Sebastian are still terrific songs, that I've heard redone by a cappella groups as well as pop singers. "Part of Your World" is still my favorite, when Ariel sings about her collection of human paraphenalia. It always makes me smile. I probably won't do too many animated films for this weekly musical feature, but I did enjoy watching The Little Mermaid again. The Princess and the Frog are next on my Netflix queue, so I'm excited to see how far Disney has come in 20 years. What are your favorite animated movie musicals?

Monday Musicals!

A new feature I'm hoping will catch on here at Insight into Entertainment is Monday Musicals. Nick over at Random Ramblings of a Demented Doorknob inspired the idea with his post about his life in musicals for the year 1986 when we both realized Little Shop of Horrors is still one of our favorite movies. I started working in musical theater when I was about 10 and participated in it (offstage only) through college. I have a decent collection of musicals on DVD (though TONS more on VHS) and rarely choose to watch them, though I love them all. I've now owned the Rogers and Hammerstein collection for several years and never watched them so here's my chance. I'll start this off with the movie that was my first movie on videocassette (Betamax rather than VHS, though). Oklahoma! is not my favorite musical ever, but it's easily the one I've see the most.

Like most musicals of the Rogers and Hammerstein genre, there's not a lot of story to go between the songs, but here goes. Curly (Gorden McRae) is a cowboy in Kansas before it was a state who has fallen for Laurie (Shirley Jones), but she's not sure what to do. There's a big dance coming to raise money to build a schoolhouse and Laurie agrees to go with her farm hand, Jud (Rod Steiger), rather than Curly, who takes her Aunt Eller. Before getting ready for the dance Laurie has a psychedelic dream about who she should marry (my least favorite part). Jud and Curly attempt to outbid each other for Laurie's picnic basket at the dance, with Curly coming out ahead and Laurie agrees to marry him (this IS a musical). However, Judd's pissed and attacks Curly at their wedding and dies. Very sad, but all's well that ends well. The B story is a friend of Laurie's, Ado Annie (I've never understood that name), is trying to decide whether she wants to marry cowboy Will who has nothing besides that he loves her, or traveling salesman Ali Hackim. Ultimately she picks Will but because he promises to love her, so again with the happy ending.

The most important part of Oklahoma! is the music. It opens with "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'", followed closely by "Surrey with a Fringe on top" (a common karaoke song - Harry and Sally fans know). As with most musicals, the first half is loaded with upbeat songs that might not exactly drive the story, but explain what's going on within the characters. Laurie dreams of a happy life with love, and nearly falls for Curly when he sings about taking her out in the luxury of the surrey. Later, Laurie sings to her girlfriends about how she won't complain when her man goes away or does something wrong ("Many a New Day") and then Laurie and Curly sing together about how people will gossip about them if they reveal their true feelings ("People Will Say We're in Love"). Curly also tries to manipulate (and foreshadow) Jud's life by telling him people really do like him and they'll prove it by attending his funeral ("Poor Jud"). The side story with Ado Annie has all the fun songs, "I cain't say no" (and she means it, the little hussy), "Kansas City" about Will's trip to the big city, and "All Er Nothin'" between Will and Ado Annie promising to love each other all the way. And of course the whole thing ends with the song "Oklahoma" which is totally how I still spell it in my head because they spell it during the song, and it's how I remember it. The only part I really don't like about the movie is Laurie's dream sequence. It starts out kind of happy, and ends really dramatically and scary, and it's about 10 solid minutes of interpretive dance without words or song. I've only seen Oklahoma on stage once and didn't really care for the actors taking on the parts of my beloved Shirley Jones and Gorden McRae, so I prefer to just watch this on TV when I feel the need. The new version on DVD is really crisp, both visually and audibly. I loved getting the chance to rewatch one of my favorites. Another thing I think suited a kid's attention span was the fact that the overture and entr'acte were both relatively short (under 3 minutes - for perspective, West Side Story's overture is nearly 15 minutes).