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Roseanne Barr is busy blaming Sara Gilbert for her implosion on TV and the end of the “Roseanne” show. This is her latest gambit in fobbing off blame for her racist Tweets about Valerie Jarrett. Since then, Barr has dug her own career grave attacking AOC and making all kinds of crazy comments.
None of her publicity has helped sell tickets for her five upcoming stand up comedy dates. In Raleigh, NC, Ft Wayne, Indiana, Detroit, Michigan, her arena dates in May have been left unsold. You can get a ticket at any of these places. Or ten tickets. Or twenty.
Roseanne has only sold a few tickets to two dates. One of them is in a place called Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Since Jim Thorpe was born in Oklahoma and died in California, I don’t know why there’s a town named for him between Scranton and Wilkes Barre. Also, some tickets have been sold at the small Lerner Theater in Indiana.
Otherwise, Roseanne may have to cancel those big arenas if sales don’t pick up soon. She’s become a tragic figure, that’s for sure.
French TV audiences didn’t clamor for “Leaving Neverland.”
According to reports from Paris, the controversial documentary scored 1.8 million viewers its first part, and 1.1 million in its second part.
That’s about equal to what it did in the US. Audiences have not been excited to hear stories about Jackson as an alleged pedophile. There have also been reports of the documentary being edited for foreign territories as more and more discrepancies are noted by fans.
One such fact problem is when Mrs. Safechuck declares that she “danced” when she heard Michael Jackson was dead. She was thrilled he couldn’t harm any more children. But Jackson died in 2009, and the Safechucks say Jimmy only realized he’d been molested in 2013. So that doesn’t work at all.
Fan sites and Twitter accounts are brimming with such information. Many of Wade Robson and Jimmy Safehuck’s stories don’t line up with actual events they say they attended.
I told you about the Broadway show “Ain’t Too Proud” a month ago after its first performance. The story of the Motown group The Temptations opened last night to a wildly enthusiastic crowd despite a steady, heavy rain last night.
Motown founder Berry Gordy and all time Supreme Mary Wilson were among the guests in the audience to cheer on original Temptations member Otis Williams. He started the group in 1963, and the musical is based on his autobiography.
Dramatist Dominique Morisseau has fashioned a book that doesn’t always stick to the facts– let’s call them alternative facts– but she tells the story of the original members of the Temps starting with Williams and including Eddie Kendricks, David Ruffin, Paul Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Dennis Edwards. (Altogether there have been 24 members of the group, but those were always the main players.)
Otis Williams had to keep switching up the members as they succumbed to fame, fortune, and drugs. But it’s not a downer story because Ruffin and Kendricks were really superstars even after they left the Temps, and Dennis Edwards had one of the all time greatest pop hits still heard today constantly called “Don’t Look Any Further” once he exited the group.
But while they were Temptations they created the most popular R&B group in history, with hits like “My Girl.” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” and “Just My Imagination.” The musical showcases two dozen of them from the Motown catalog, and oddly includes a non Motown song “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” from Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, written by Gamble and Huff for their Philly International label.
The Motown music– mostly from Smokey Robinson and Norman Whitfield– is what propels the show. The orchestra, which is on stage behind the action, is sensational. And the actors are just knockouts. Derrick Baskin, James Harkness, Jawan M. Jackson, Jeremy Pope, and Ephraim Sykes are each headed to Tony nominations. Rashidra Scott and Nasia Thomas are no slouches either as Williams’ long suffering wife, and tragic Motown ingenue Tammi Terrell, who died at age 24 of a brain aneurysm. Baskin plays Otis, who can sometimes come off as a little self-righteous, but Morisseau does a lot to underscore that. Pope as Eddie Kendricks has real star power. And Ephraim Sykes as Ruffin may wind up being the breakout. You will never get tired of hearing Jawan Jackson’s bass baritone. Trust me.
It’s not a coincidence that “Ain’t Too Proud” comes at the same time as Motown’s 60th anniversary. A CBS special will air next month, taped in February right after the Grammy awards. That night, Otis Williams and Mary Wilson got short shrift– or no shrift– even though they were in the audience. But last night they basked in the limelight, and deservedly so. Gordy, who had to listen to some light criticism of him on stage, remains amazing at 88 years young (I mean, really, I don’t get it– he looks 20 years younger). No matter what, he made Motown into a genre of music. You can see it in this show. “Ain’t Too Proud” shows off a phenomenon.
In the audience last night: Josh Groban, as well as Steve and Maureen van Zandt, Brenda Vaccaro, football great Harry Carson, and many more.
Jeanine Pirro will not be stirring the pot with her usual insanity this weekend.
Her Saturday night show has been bumped for a second week by Fox News. This is part of her unannounced suspension. It shows rare good judgement on the part of the fake news network.
Pirro is being punished for her anti-Islamist outbursts. Three weeks ago, she made inflammatory comments that Fox actually had to distance themselves from. Pirro is a promoter of hate, and this was one step too far.
Four advertisers pulled their ads from her show including personal finance company NerdWallet, online marketplace Letgo, and drugmakers Allergan and Novo Nordisk. Dozens more have left Tucker Carlson’s nightly show, Sean Hannity’s and Laura Ingraham. To make matters worse, during the week, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has been pulling higher numbers than the Fox News lineup.
Pirro will be replaced by an episode of “Scandalous,” a documentary about the William Kennedy Smith rape case. Last week’s episode didn’t have enough viewers to make the top 150 cable shows of the night. Pirro previously had 2 million fans at 9pm on Saturday, the week before.
There’s a rock music footnote to the tragedy of the New Zealand mosque massacre which claimed the lives of 50 innocent people last week.
The Australian-born white supremacist who carried out the murderous mission decided to live-stream his attack on Facebook. Despite Facebook taking down the original video – copies of it have spread like wildfire. In just 24 hours Facebook took down over 1.5 million re-posts of the video. And it is still proliferating like a virus all over the internet and dark web.
After he had completed his murder spree at the second mosque, the killer returned to his car and with his camera still rolling he played his specially-chosen anthem for his deeds – the 1968 song “Fire” – a pioneering psychedelic hard-rock record that was a worldwide hit for a British band called The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. The heart of the band was its composer/singer Arthur Brown. The disc was a #1 hit in his native UK and a Billboard #2 in the USA. It didn’t hurt that the record was produced by Kit Lambert, the manager/producer of the Who and had Pete Townshend as Associate Producer. At that time Arthur Brown was on Kit Lambert’s label Track Records. His label-mates were the Who, Jimi Hendrix and Thunderclap Newman (“Something In The Air”)
During live performances and in the legendary promotional film clip for the record, Brown performed the song wearing a fiercely burning helmet. A dangerous prop that led to stage fires at rock festivals and in TV studios.
Though Brown’s own musical career burned out within a couple of years – his aggressive musical style and flamboyant stage appearances (with much face paint, voodoo dancing and pyrotechnics) significantly influenced numerous artists who followed in his wake – including Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, George Clinton, Kiss, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Marilyn Manson. There were notable covers of the song by The Who, ELP, Ozzy Osbourne. The recording was sampled by artists such as Marilyn Manson and Prodigy.
Brown semi-retired from music, becoming at various times a life counseler, painter and carpenter. He still makes occasional returns to music – particularly in Europe where there is a circuit for rock artists of the 60s and 70s. He just launched a small US tour – his first in 50 years. This June he will be 77.
Spool forward to last Thursday night (Friday afternoon in New Zealand). Within minutes of news of the massacre hitting the media – reports appeared stating that the murderer had played Arthur Brown’s song ‘Fire’ as an anthem to his murder spree on his Facebook live-stream. (The record starts off with a thunderous spoken introduction ‘I am the God of Hellfire – and I bring you FIRE!’)
Observing the news coverage in L.A. was producer Martin Lewis, a very old pal of the record’s associate producer Pete Townshend. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis is very media-savvy and he immediately surmised a potential danger to the reputation of the song and Arthur Brown.
“I thought of how Charles Manson mis-appropriated the Beatles songs ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Piggies’. The Beatles were galactically huge and it was easy for them to brush off Manson’s idiotic claim. But I thought that Arthur has just that one song that people recall and it’s his primary heritage. He needs to rapidly and strongly disavow this maniac’s abuse of his creation.”
Though Lewis didn’t know Brown (“we’d met fleetingly at a Kit Lambert party in the early 70s”) he was an admirer. He decided to track him down in the middle of the night and give him the heads-up of what had just happened. By chance, Brown was not in his native Britain but in Austin, Texas where he was playing some low-key gigs as part of the SxSW Festival. Initially reached at midnight Central Time at their merchandise table after that night’s show, Brown and his manager/partner Claire Waller were totally stunned by the news – unable to comprehend the awful gravity of it. Over the next 24 hours Lewis tried to guide them through the crisis by phone, text and email. Conveying the import of Brown issuing a statement denouncing the use of his song and giving them suggestions and guidance.
It took until 48 hours after the massacre, but finally Brown released a statement (see below).
Lewis offered the following thoughts about the situation:
“I think Arthur did remarkably well. He is a truly creative man. He defines that phrase ‘ahead-of-his-time’. He never reaped the full rewards of being a pioneer of that style of music. That success fell to other artists. But we must recall that it’s 50 years since he was at the center of the media vortex. To suddenly have your famous creation usurped and traduced into an anthem for a massacre by a vicious white supremacist was just paralyzing to Arthur. It took him time to process and respond. I give Arthur major props for navigating this crisis with such grace and dignity. His statement speaks volumes.
“Now we music fans have a role to play. There was a famous moment in 1987 when U2 covered ‘Helter Skelter’ and Bono introduced it by saying ‘This is a song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles. Well we’re stealing it back.’ For all those of us who admire Arthur Brown, the many artists he influenced and the power of Arthur’s song ‘Fire’ – it is up to us to steal ‘Fire’ back from white supremacists – and restore it to its place in the pantheon of great rock songs. Don’t let ‘Fire’ become an anthem of hate. I suggest that contemporary artists should perform the song live as a show of support. And fans should express their views too.Hashtag: #ReclaimFire”
Statement by Arthur Brown
“As co-writer and performer of the song ‘Fire’, and creator of ‘The God of Hellfire’ persona, I would like to express my horror and sadness in the use of ‘Fire’, in an act of terror in New Zealand. My heart goes out to all the victims and families of victims of this atrocity – and to all the communities affected. I should like to say that I support no group or individual that uses terrorist tactics and killing as a means of dealing with other beliefs than their own.
I believe that all religions reach for the same root in the human being. I believe all people of all colours and all races deserve equal respect. I also believe that all people have a duty of care towards each other and all creatures on this earth.”
This week the Disney purchase of 20th Century Fox has been completed. Today Disney began laying off over 4,000 people who are considered “overlap.”
Fox, as we knew it, is dead. Very little will survive in the Disney empire except maybe Fox Searchlight, since Disney has not been able to make regular non animated or CGI movies with people in them. If they want comedies and dramas of lasting impact, they will keep Fox Searchlight.
But everyone else at Fox is up for grabs. It’s a shame because there are so many talented people there. Fox has great relationships with the press, too,
Already Fox Domestic Distribution President Chris Aronson is out, and he was responsible for the success of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” So that should tell us a lot about what will happen.
One industry insider said to me last night: “LA (the biz) cannot absorb that many people out of work.” True enough. And if I get a red state comment that the people deserve it– which is what I do get on Twitter– I’d like to remind them that’s a lot better to be out of work in Los Angeles than in the Rust Belt.
Stay tuned. Meantime, Paul Ryan, who suffers from spinal absence, has been named to the board of Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox company. And Donna Brazile, who was once a human being, will be a Fox News commentator.
On “Game of Thrones,” Sansa Stark has had seven rough seasons. She’s had so many bad things happen to her, they’re hard to count. At one point she was forced into marriage to Tyrion Lannister. Most of her family was killed at the Red Wedding. And they brought gifts, too!
But come this June, Sansa’s portrayer, Sophie Turner, will do down the aisle voluntarily. I’m told she will marry pop singer Joe Jonas in the South of France. The details have been in motion for a while. The wedding is on. Lucky for Turner, “Game of Thrones” last episode is May 19th.
It won’t be the Red Wedding, either, in which a lot of Sansa’s family met their makers. No, Turner’s and Jonas’s families will likely have a non violent, joyous time in Provence. Unfortunately for Jonas he will have wedding cake but not by the ocean– that’s a reference to his big hit “Cake By the Ocean.” Provence is not near the water. But the estate they’ve rented is sure to have at least one big pool.
Jonas right now is having a big career moment with his brothers, Nick and Kevin Jonas. They’re top of the pops with “Sucker,” their first ever number 1 hit. Kevin has long been married and last year Nick married actress Priyanka Chopra. So imagine the guest list of Throners and rockers, extended friends and family. And the music– because, of course, the Jonas brothers will play at the wedding.
Two best men? Why not? And all the Starks, living and dead. Where will they register?
Famed sportscaster Warner Wolf has lost his appeal of age discrimination against Don Imus in the Appelate Division of New York. Wolf will not want to “go to the video tape” once he get this ruling.
Last year Wolf sued Imus after the radio host refused to give him a new contract after Wold moved to Florida. Imus also made nasty comments about Wolf on the air. Imus lives in Texas, where his radio show may still be coming from. (No, it’s not. Imus went off the air a year ago.)
The decision:
Supreme Court properly dismissed plaintiff’s age discrimination claims brought under the City and State Human Rights Laws, because the impact on plaintiff from the termination of his employment occurred in Florida, where he lived and worked (see e.g. Hoffman v Parade Publs., 15 NY3d 285, 290-292 [2010]; Shah v Wilco Sys., Inc., 27 AD3d 169, 175-176 [1st Dept 2005], lv dismissed in part and denied in part 7 NY3d 859 [2006]). “Whether New York courts have subject matter jurisdiction over a nonresident plaintiff’s claims under the HRLs turns primarily on her [or his] physical location at the time of the alleged discriminatory acts” (Benham v eCommission Solutions, LLC, 119 AD3d 605, 606 [1st Dept 2014]).
Plaintiff’s claim for tortious interference with contractual relations, also arising from the termination of his employment, was not viable because the documentary evidence demonstrates that his employer did not breach his employment contract, but declined to exercise its contractual right to renew the contract for an additional year (see American Preferred Prescription v Health Mgt., 252 AD2d 414, 417 [1st Dept 1998]; see also Willis Re Inc. v Hudson, 29 AD3d 489, 490 [1st Dept 2006]).
Paramount brought clips from Dexter Fletcher’s Elton John movie, “Rocketman” to New York tonight, at the Museum of Modern Art. The audience, I assure you, loved what they saw.
Star Taron Egerton came and read comments from Fletcher, who’s busy finishing the movie. Studio sources say they won’t be a locked print until early May. That will be right in time for Cannes, where the movie will either open or show within the first three days, according to sources. The studio is staying mum until details are sorted. But as I wrote yesterday, Sir Elton has kept May 13, 14, 16, and 17 open on his tour schedule. I’m also hearing he will perform one or two songs at the premiere party.
Egerton seems exactly right as Elton from the 70s and 80s. Jamie Bell plays Bernie Taupin. Other characters from the movie include Elton’s mum, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, Richard Madden as John Reid, Tate Donovan as Doug Weston, owner of the Troubadour in West L.A.
In the note Egerton read from Fletcher to the audience, the director sent a kind of warning: not everything will be completely factual. He was giving us notice about Elton’s debut at the Troubadour in 1970. The filmmakers have taken license and shown Elton playing “Crocodile Rock” at the 1970 gig, dressed in his Velvet Goldmine look. In fact, “Crocodile Rock” wouldn’t come for three more years. Neither would the outfit.
Fletcher’s note read: “But when we were shooting we loved the energy of the song for the scene and Elton gave us his bless to use artistic license, which as you’ll see we really went to town with.”
Once we’re past that speed bump, “Rocketman” feels like a happy hit. Richer looking than Fletcher’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” this film captures Elton’s giddy highs and lows, his incredible showmanship, and wild costumes. The music is what will sell the movie, though, not the details of the story. And you can see that Fletcher has staged dance numbers to go with Elton’s many hits, and they look like they soar.
Egerton told us after the screening that he spent three months learning the piano but “obviously you can only learn so much. I can play the opening to “Your Song” very well,” he conceded. “But the singing– that’s 100% us. I have no reservations telling you that.”
So get back, Honky Cat. I’m betting that the final “Rocketman” will have audiences singing and dancing in the aisles. Sir Elton’s had low points with drugs and shopping addictions, but you know it’s a story with a happy ending, and more smiles and laughs than any downers.
And PS — Egerton confirmed that Kiki Dee (played by an actress) does make an appearance. Now we can only sleep soundly!
I got a chance to see Sting on Tuesday night in Toronto, where he’s wrapping up a sold out 7 week run of his Broadway musical, “The Last Ship.”
The show has been overhauled since its 2014-15 Broadway run. Sting and the new team took it to the UK, to Newcastle, where it’s set, and the audience ate it up. Next January, “The Last Ship” sails to Los Angeles.
At Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theater, “The Last Ship” looks even better than it did in New York. A new set looks like it cost millions, and fills the enormous stage gracefully.
There’s a new cast in Toronto, too, starting with Sting who’s playing the role of Jackie White, longtime foreman of the shipyard that’s in danger of being closed. Yes, the audience comes to see Sting, and they get their money’s worth. In the tweaked script, Jackie is very much a center of attention, and has a lot of singing to do. Sting is the star but also a vital part of the show’s ensemble. His unmistakable voice is a pleasure to hear, and his Jackie is a reliable moral center of a play filled with riveting characters.
The rest of the cast is more than able, with some surprises, too. I really liked Jackie Morrison as Peg, Jackie’s wife, whose new story arc grows and grows. By the end of the show when she leads the cast in “Show Some Respect,” Morrison has blossomed into being a key player. Oliver Savile, Sophie Reid, and Frances McNamee are also standouts. A lot of the actors are real “Geordies”– i.e. from Newcastle or its environs. One of them, Marc Akinfolarin, needs a New York agent fast and a couple of good roles down here. He’s the Keala Settle, so to speak, of this show. Watch out for him.
Sting has nothing to prove for his legacy as a rock star, songwriter, performer, actor, all of it. He’s written over a dozen really gorgeous, hummable songs for “The Last Ship,” and doesn’t shy away from revising the story or improving it. Like a great vessel, “The Last Ship” has great bones, and he’s committed to it. I’ll be curious to see how it develops next year on the West Coast. “The Last Ship” remains a little bit of a work in progress, with incredible potential for more runs. One day it will sail back to Broadway, a la “The Color Purple” or “Chicago,” with raves in waves.
