Shrek Heads To Broadway

Shrek The Musical will open on Broadway this December, marking DreamWorks Animation's first legitimate theatrical venture.

The musical features Sutton Foster as Princess Fiona, Christopher Sieber as Lord Farquaad and Kecia Lewis-Evans as The Dragon, with book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire and music by Jeanine Tesori. Jason Moore directs.

Foster is currently starring on Broadway as Inga in Young Frankenstein.

Additional casting, including the title character and his friend Donkey will be announced shortly.

The musical took root around the time the second film was in production, when Sam Mendes of Neal Street Productions, Ltd. suggested the idea to DreamWorks Animation's Jeffrey Katzenberg. The two companies will produce Shrek jointly.

Source: backstage.com

Burlesque Is Alive And Well

Vaudeville's naughty cousin is back - and nowhere is it more popular than in New York. Rodney Bolt enjoys an evening of irony and titillation.


A Rubenesque woman in a sequined bikini arches an eyebrow and lowers a false eyelash as different bits of her wobble and shimmy independently, like a troupe of extraordinarily well-trained jellyfish.

A dancer drops the last stitch of clothing to reveal, not what one might expect, but a moustachioed Groucho Marx mask. In New York burlesque is back - but with a difference.

Burlesque blossomed last century, as a naughty cousin to vaudeville. After the Second World War, it went into slow decline and, from the 1950s, degenerated into seedy striptease.

In the 1990s, a German stripper named Ute Hanna began an underground revival of burlesque in a New York club called the Blue Angel.

Part of the point was to play with the glitz and innuendo of old-style burlesque, but in a way that was friendlier to women.

Singers, bawdy comedians and acrobats were slotted in between tongue-in-cheek strip routines, which sometimes veered off into zany performance art.

When Rudy Giuliani, New York's former mayor, began his pre-millennium crackdown on the city's seamy stripclubs, neo-burlesque (as it now known), with its campy irony and artsy audiences, survived.

Today, burlesque has its own section in the New York edition of Time Out.

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