| Georgia Stitt Plays El Portal June 2
Composer and musical director Georgia Stitt will present the West Coast premiere of her recent CD, "This Ordinary Thursday," with a live performance at North Hollywood's El Portal Theatre on June 2.Stitt, who worked as the vocal coach on NBC's reality series "Grease: You're the One That I Want," most recently was the musical director of It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman at Reprise! Broadway's Best Marvelous Musical Monday in Los Angeles.Joining Stitt on stage will be special friends Susan Egan (Thoroughly Modern Millie), Shoshana Bean (Wicked), Jean Louisa Kelly (Into the Woods), Adam Hunter and Dan Callaway. Also scheduled to participate in the evening are two contestants from "Grease: You're the One That I Want," Chad Doreck and Kathleen Montelone.Stitt makes her living as a composer, lyricist, musical director, conductor, arranger, and pianist.
Rocky road to theater triumphs
In 2003, film producer Dori Berinstein set out on a mission. She wanted to capture an entire Broadway season on film, from casting and rehearsals to openings and closings. The result is the ultimate backstage story, Show Business: The Road To Broadway. The documentary primarily focuses on the four shows that went on to vie for the Tony as Best Musical that year - Wicked, Avenue Q, Taboo, and Caroline, or Change. Show Business has no narrator. Berinstein conducted more than 400 interviews, and the comments and analyses of actors, producers, creators, the press and the public tell the story. Aside from performers preparing, we glimpse the "business" of show business: composers at work, press events and strategy meetings. As marketing guru Nancy Coyne confides, "The stakes are high here." There's also plenty of dirt to dish.
Why are the Tonys on network TV?
This year the Tony Awards garnered the lowest ratings since 1992. Most people are quick to say that it's because they were broadcast on the same night as the finale of The Sopranos but we all know better, don't we? The Tony Awards are given for excellence on Broadway, which for many years now has been an oxymoron. Aside from the occasional movie star driven vehicle like Martin Short's Fame Becomes Me or blockbusters like The Producers, Broadway has done very little of note in a long time. More importantly, any decent Broadway production is overpriced while also being sold out, giving average Americans little chance to ever see a Broadway show. All that aside, it still puzzles me why anyone would be interested in spending three hours watching an awards show for productions and people they know next to nothing about.
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