® It Was Inevitable: Harry Potter Musical in the works.

® No Publicity is Bad Publicity: From Michael Dale’s Broadwayworld.com review of Grease: “…the score is juiced up with four songs from the movie…glued together by a sluggish book that only lightly touches its Boy Meets Girl/Boy Ignores Girl/Girl Dresses Slutty And Gets Boy plot for most of the first act.” The great quotes just keep comin’…

® Follow Harvey Fierstein’s every move during the rehearsal process of his new Broadway-bound musical, A Catered Affair.

® Hey, guess what. Not all theatre happens in New York City. Check out this handy (and well organized) guide to regional theatre courtesy of Broadwayworld.com.

® Bolshoi ballet goes for the spectacle in Le Corsain”: “…A storm bursts forth. The characters on the ship scurry back and forth as the ship itself rocks dangerously. Lightning and thunder rattle around the theatre. A huge rock, ominously, and rather charmingly, suddenly pops out of one of the wings at the front. The villain falls overboard and vanishes into the blue sheeting. Finally the ship gives a final lurch and breaks entirely in half on the rocks.” Oh yeah, there’s dancing too.

® Theatre Geek TV: Check out this sneak preview of the ginormous musical version of Lord of the Rings.

® Neil Bartlett discusses bending gender in Twelfth Night, “If a theatre company announced that Shakespeare’s Antony was going to be played by a woman, everyone would want to know why. ‘It was written for a man,’ they’d say, ‘by one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived.’ But if Cleopatra is played by a woman, nobody thinks to say, ‘But that role was written for a man, by one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived.’ Yet those are the facts. So we shouldn’t ask ‘Why cross cast?’; what we should really be asking is ‘Why not?’”

® Warner Brothers suits objected to “human body parts being fed into a meat grinder to make meat pies” in dailys of the Tim Burton Sweeney Todd film. Did they read the SCRIPT before they gave it the greenlight? Thanks to The Playgoer for the heads up.

® The Sunday comics provided some insight on how adventurous theatre goers take what they get in this, the season where every city in the world is celebrating it’s Fringes. Cosmo (in Jeff Macnelly’s Shoe), ponders frame after frame after frame what to say in his review of the Treetops Mime Festival. Finally in the last frame, he types his succinct review: “It was the best of mimes; it was the worst of mimes.” Long live the Fringe.

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