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Tag: Cole Escola

  • Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, & Cole Escola team up for a Miss Piggy movie | The Mary Sue

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    Being a fan of The Muppets is nothing short of a roller coaster. One minute, you’re legitimately mourning the loss of decades-old and lovingly-made theme park attractions starring the crew. The next, you’re being treated to the news of a new Disney+ special from Seth Rogen and Sabrina Carpenter, which could lead to a full-blown revival of The Muppet Show. And apparently, that’s not even the best new Muppet project to be in the works this year.

    A solo movie centered around Miss Piggy is in development. Not only that, but she has some pretty beloved names working behind the scenes to bring her story to life. Oscar-winning actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone are producing the project, with Tony-winning actor and playwright Cole Escola writing the script. The Internet-breaking news was announced by Lawrence during a recent appearance on Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’ Las Culturistas podcast.

    “I don’t know if I can announce this, but I’m just going to,” Lawrence revealed. “Emma Stone and I are producing a Miss Piggy movie and Cole is writing it.”

    While a lot of details still remain under wraps, Lawrence did tease that the project is “fucked up” and “really dark.” She was also asked on the podcast if she and Stone would appear in the movie, and answered with an enthusiastic, “I think so, we have to.”

    This will be Miss Piggy’s first solo outing, outside of the one-off variety television special The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show in 1982. It’s unclear, at this point, if the movie will end up in theaters or on Disney+ (although with these names attached, the former feels more than possible). Either way, in a week of movie news that already included the delightful reveal of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz returning for a new The Mummy movie, this Miss Piggy bombshell somehow managed to break the Internet even further.

    Believe in Moi!

    There’s so much to process here. The idea of any combination of Lawrence, Stone, and Escola working together already sounds like a dream. Both Lawrence and Stone have evolved their careers in beautiful ways in recent years, taking on projects either in front of or behind the camera that manage to surprise us. And over the past year, with the smash success of their Broadway play Oh, Mary!, Escola has quickly established themselves as a creative force to watch. They made history earlier this year as the first non-binary performer to win the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play, and their writing on the play was also among the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

    But when you fold in the reveal that their collaboration is going to be on a Miss Piggy movie, it is nothing short of magical. What glamorous and bizarre journey could the movie take us on? What guest stars could we expect? What is the over-under for how many karate chops we’ll see onscreen? The possibilities are endless.

    As some tweets celebrating the news have already joked, this is one of those headlines where every sentence is better than the last, and reads like “when people say their dogs favorite words to get them riled up.” Even if the Miss Piggy movie still remains in development, I know I’m definitely not alone in already being riled up for it.

    (featured image: Disney)

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    Jenna Anderson

    Jenna Anderson is the host of the Go Read Some Comics YouTube channel, as well as one of the hosts of the Phase Hero podcast. She has been writing professionally since 2017, but has been loving pop culture (and especially superhero comics) for her entire life. You can usually find her drinking a large iced coffee from Dunkin and talking about comics, female characters, and Taylor Swift at any given opportunity.

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    Jenna Anderson

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  • Review: Forbidden Broadway Mercilessly Mauls the Hits

    Review: Forbidden Broadway Mercilessly Mauls the Hits

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    Jenny Lee Stern and Danny Hayward in Forbidden Broadway. Carol Rosegg

    When I was a callow theater kid, I hated musicals: it was a bastard genre, inferior to the classics and modern drama. To be honest, I didn’t know any musicals, so my distaste was based on ignorance and secondhand derision—cartoons and spoofs. A Broadway-besotted college chum took pity and made me a Stephen Sondheim mixtape. He included (along with tracks from Merrily, George, Sweeney, et cetera) “Into the Words” from Forbidden Broadway: Volume 2 (1991). The piss-taking ditty lampooned the density and complexity of Sondheim’s lyrics to the tune of the “Prologue” from Into the Woods: “Into the words / That fly and try to make you / Choke the joke you’ve sung / Into the words / More letters than / They sell on Wheel of Fortune.” Somehow, this mockery increased my admiration even more. 

    Decades after my classmate enlightened me, I’m the polar opposite of a musical-phobic youth: I have many opinions about Broadway shows. Especially recent ones—which take a jolly beating in Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song, the new batch of sung spoofs and malicious medleys by Gerard Alessandrini. The master satirist’s long-lived revue is 42 years old and a cottage industry (with national tours and multiple albums). He and his cast of wildly talented mimics took a long, hard look at the 2023–24 season and said, “Phooey!” To get the gags, is it essential to have suffered through—I mean, sat through—song-and-dance spectacles of past years? Not really. Idly browsing social media you probably learned that Eddie Redmayne’s Emcee from the Cabaret revival was divisive, to say the least.

    Nicole Vanessa Ortiz, Danny Hayward and Chris Collins-Pisano (from left) in Forbidden Broadway. Carol Rosegg

    To say the most (and Alessandrini does), the twitchy Brit stank. As droll accompanist Fred Barton plunks out the Kurt Weill–y vamp from “Wilkommen,” Danny Hayward enters in classic Joel Grey-as-Emcee drag, taking us on a tour of the role: camped up by Alan Cumming in the ’90s then clowned into garish nonsense by Redmayne. Hayward morphs between his nested impersonations with the help of Dustin Cross’s ingenious tear-away costumes. Jenny Lee Stern joins the savaging as a demented Gayle Rankin who shrieks her way through Sally Bowles’s titular tune: “What good is playing this role the ol’ way / Liza was just o.k.! / Come see my dark deranged display / Come drag my painted corpse away / When I murder Cabaret!” 

    Later, the formidable Stern appears in a sendup of “The Ladies Who Lunch” (Company was a couple of seasons back, but who’s counting). Stern delivers a pitchy-perfect version of Patti LuPone’s consonant-melting, lyric-chewing, melismatic snarl. Nicole Vanessa Ortiz likewise has fun reproducing Audra McDonald’s opera-meets-Broadway soprano in a melodramatic take on “Rose’s Turn,” as the six-time Tony winner shudders before the ghost of Ethel Merman. (Audra’s Gypsy opens in December.)

    Danny Hayward and Chris Collins-Pisano in Forbidden Broadway. Carol Rosegg

    Everybody comes in for a spanking, even straight plays. The impish Chris Collins-Pisano dons brunette pigtails as Cole Escola urging us to “attend the tale of Mary Todd.” Continuing the women-in-politics theme, Stern pops up as Shaina Taub (pronounced “Tobb,” for a nearer rhyme) heralded as “the Lin-Manuel of New Broadway.” Although grumbling that Broadway musicals are vulgar, derivative, and phony is like complaining that action movies contain violence, Alessandrini has standards and he’s not afraid to uphold them, with a wink. Ben Platt is a narcissistic warbler. Hell’s Kitchen is ersatz self-mythologizing. Lincoln Center is full of snobs. Merrily We Roll Along recouped only because of “Harry Potter, Inc.” One of the best extended gags involves Back to the Future’s Marty McFly (Hayward) and Doc Brown (Collins-Pisano) time-warping to 1945 (in search of musicals that were artful and affordable), and accidentally derailing the artistic development of 15-year-old Stephen Sondheim. Dazzled by Doc’s space-age DeLorean, Sondheim grows up to be a car designer, meaning that Broadway in the 23rd century is an AI wasteland of robots and reboots and celebrity branding (a video backdrop of the future Great White Way includes a marquis for the Sean Hayes Theatre.)

    Forbidden Broadway is a goof, but a virtuosic and stylish one, with infectious comic verve and lyrics that range from wittily inspired to boldly dumb (rhyming “earplugs” with “queer drugs”). It’s Mad Magazine with jazz hands; Saturday Night Live with people who can actually sing and dance; the antidote to hate watching; and a much-needed immunization for the season.

    Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song | 1hr 30mins. No intermission. | Theatre 555 | 555 West 42nd Street | 646-410-2277 | Buy Tickets Here   

    Review: Forbidden Broadway Mercilessly Mauls the Hits

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    David Cote

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