Julianne Moore talks about her role as an Alzheimer's patient in "Still Alice" (pictured); the British holiday stage tradition known as panto comes to the Pasadena Playhouse; and a movie marketing executive assesses Sony's challenge with "The Interview."
'Sleeping Beauty' panto production debuts at Pasadena Playhouse
There’s a type of British theater that’s popular around Christmas-time known as panto.
That term comes from the word pantomime, but while panto is a grab-bag of theater genres – part musical, part fairytale, part vaudeville, part singalong — panto has no miming. In fact, it’s not quiet at all. There’s music, outlandish costumes and lots of audience participation.
There's always an evil villain — they call that character "the baddie." There's usually one male character in drag. There are topical jokes and pop songs. And they’re all based on familiar fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Aladdin.
For the British, panto is a holiday tradition – and it may explain how they came up with Monty Python and Willy Wonka. Children in the UK typically attend pantos every year. Kris Lythgoe wants the same thing for American children. He's the writer and producer of "Sleeping Beauty," his company's newest panto at the Pasadena Playhouse.
"There’s 'The Nutcracker.' We know and love 'The Nutcracker' – sort of," Lythgoe said. "And we know and love ' A Christmas Carol.' But there really isn’t anything that speaks to the kids through pop music and the fairytales that everybody knows."
Lythgoe grew up in England in a showbiz family. His dad is the TV producer Nigel Lythgoe, who is best known in the U.S. as the creator and resident judge on "So You Think You Can Dance." When Kris was a kid, his dad would write pantos for fun after work. And his mom, Bonnie, would direct them. So it may not surprise you that he’s joined the family business.
"The first feeling I had really about bringing panto to America was when my son was born," Lythgoe said. "And I really wanted to introduce him to theater. And I kept going to these theaters where the actors kind of talk down to the kids, and don’t include the kids so much. With panto what you do is you put kids on the pedestal, and they kind of become your buddies."
So Kris got his mother on board to direct, and they began producing pantos in Los Angeles. This is the third year their show is playing at the Pasadena Playhouse. And as always, the script is tailored for Angelenos.
"The big thing with panto is that you always play on the locality of where the theater is," Lythgoe said. "So by Americanizing it, our prince is the Prince of Alhambra. Our king is the King of Pasadena. We have a few of American jokes in there. We make fun of the Yankees, for instance. Because obviously they are everybody’s team, supposedly."
Lythgoe has made a couple of tweaks for the U.S. audience. For example, he knows that American kids, unlike British ones, won’t automatically know to boo and cheer during the show – so he writes cues into the script.
"The comedy character, just before the evil character comes on, reminds the audience to boo. And then, straight away, the evil fairy enters the stage," said Lythgoe, adding that the performers in his pantos are better singers than in the traditional British versions.
"I always say that in the UK, they don’t mind having a soap star who cant really sing because they go with the underdog tactic, where they are kind of praying that he reaches the note, and that happens several times. But I don’t think American audiences would get that," he said.
Over the past five years the Lythgoes have cast Ben Vereen as a genie, Bruce Vilanch as an old dame, and Neil Patrick Harris even made an appearance as a talking mirror. This year they have "American Idol" powerhouse Tamyra Gray as a fairy. The Lythgoes also look for up-and-coming Disney stars.
"The problem that we often have, which we overcome, is that they are so popular, or beginning to get so popular," said director Bonnie Lythgoe. "And we know they are going to be stars. So we want to encourage them to come and do our show."
Two years ago, Ariana Grande played Snow White in their panto production. Now she’s a pop superstar.
This year the Lythgoes have Disney Channel stars Garrett Clayton and Olivia Holt playing the Prince and Princess. Spoiler: they fall in love. They also have Lucy Lawless of "Zena: Warrior Princess" fame. They also cast veteran stage actor Patrick Cassidy as the King of Pasadena. Cassidy said, like most of the cast, he has never performed in a panto before, so this production has been an education.
"Every night it changes based on the audience participation," Cassidy said. "It’s that sense of, What’s going to happen next? You really don’t know because we have a 3-year-old wandering through the Sleeping Beauty castle," he said, describing one of many times the cast will be asked to improvise and interact with the young audience.
For each performance, the theater sells a limited number of golden tickets. For an additional $50, a kid can go onstage during the show. And Lythgoe says, with any luck, they'll be back for years to come.
"What we’re trying to do is introduce kids into theater, because there’s millions of kids who have never been to the theater and never will go to the theater, because there is no introduction," he said.
"Sleeping Beauty" runs at the Pasadena Playhouse through January 4.
Julianne Moore hopes her role in 'Still Alice' changes the stigma surrounding Alzheimer's
Julianne Moore has been nominated for an Academy Award four times, but despite amazing performances in "Boogie Nights" and "The Hours," she's never brought home an Oscar. This might be Moore's year, as she's receiving rave reviews for her role in "Still Alice."
Based on the 2007 novel of the same name, "Still Alice" tells the story of a Columbia University psychologist who develops early onset Alzheimer's. The film explores the effects of the degenerative disease on both Alice and her family.
The film's directors, Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, are a married couple who are facing their own version of this tragic story.
Shortly before choosing to adapt "Still Alice," Glatzer was diagnosed with ALS, the motor-neuron disease that gradually destroys cells that control essential voluntary movement. Famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking has a version of the disease, but most who are diagnosed don't live longer than a few years.
During filming, Glatzer's condition worsened to the point that he had to communicate via a texting app on an iPad. The disease is, in a way, the exact opposite of Alzheimer's, but Glatzer's experience informed Moore during filming.
When Moore stopped by The Frame recently, we asked what drew her to "Still Alice," learning from people with early onset Alzheimer's, and the movie's potential to change the conversation and stigma surrounding the disease.
Interview Highlights:
Why do you think it's important to bring a movie about Alzheimer's to the big screen?
There's a tremendous amount of stigma. I think it has to do with lack of information, lack of knowledge about the disease. I think dementia has been considered to be a condition of aging, so people feel like, Oh, if I'm having some kind of mental impairment I'm not seen as youthful. When, in fact, Alzheimer's, and lots of other forms of dementia, are diseases. They're not symptoms of aging.
When you first encountered this script and this book, how did you react to the story? Did you react to it emotionally? Physically? Do you start seeing this film, hearing yourself as this character? What are the steps that you take before you decide that you want to make a film?
You know, you pick up the script, and you kind of look at it, and you see how quickly you read it. [laughs] I think one of the tip-offs is that if you get through it very quickly without getting up to do something else, that usually means you're pretty engaged. And I was very, very engaged, and I felt very emotional; I think I cried at the end of it, and I was shocked by how emotional it was, how resonant the story felt to me. Right away I thought, Wow, I want to do this.
It was true in terms of what it said about Alice? True about what it said about an infirmity? True in what it said about a family trying to stay together through a difficult period?
I think all of the above. I think what's so remarkable is that I really had never seen a disease represented on film subjectively. Generally, whenever you see these kinds of movies, it's from the point of view of the caregiver or a family member, but this was the first time I'd encountered something that gave you the perspective of the patient. It's sort of inside-out, her journey through it.
One of your directors [Richard Glatzer] has a degenerative disease [ALS], which is almost the opposite of Alzheimer's in that he's robbed of his body but not of his mind. Did you have conversations with him about that, and was there anything you could take from what he was going through that shaped your performance?
Oh my gosh, yeah. Particularly in the speech that Alice delivers to the Alzheimer's conference. One of the places where I kept hitting a bump was with that speech; I just didn't feel that it was ... I didn't understand it, I'm not feeling it. Finally I [said], "Look, what would you want to say? What does it feel like to be in this situation? How do people treat you?"
We were about to start pre-production, and I said, "Oh my god, this speech is finally perfect!" Rich was on Skype and Wash [said], "Rich wrote it." And I think he really distilled everything that he was going through into that really, really beautiful, very unsentimental, and very restrained speech.
When you were making this movie, who were you turning to besides your filmmakers about what it is like to have Alzheimer's?
I didn't talk to my filmmakers about it, because they had other stuff to do. [laughs] I had tremendous, tremendous resources working on this: I started with the head of the [Judy Fund at the] Alzheimer's Association, Elizabeth Gelfand Stearns, and talked to her about her experience. And they then set me up with different women across the country who have been diagnosed with early onset, or younger onset, they call it.
One woman had been diagnosed at 45, the other two were in their early 50s, and I talked with them about their experiences. From there I went to Mount Sinai [School of Medicine in New York City] and I talked to Dr. Mary Sano, who's the head of research there, and her colleagues, and had the cognitive tests administered by a neuropsychiatrist. And they are extensive.
And when you're going through these batteries of tests, do you start thinking about your own mental ...
Oh my gosh, of course, everybody does! And the thing that was really interesting was that the doctors ... are so opaque. We finished doing the tests and she didn't say anything. And I thought, Oh boy, what's that about? It wasn't until about a week or two later when I had to e-mail her about something else that she said, "Oh, by the way, your results were normal." [laughs] You're just like, "Thanks, thanks for telling me."
But in that week you're like, What did she see that I haven't heard?
Yeah, exactly! Maybe she's writing up the report now.
And what do you take away from all of that, and specifically, what did you imagine to be true that was not?
What I took away was how individualistic this disease is. It isn't like everybody's painting with the same brush; people have all sorts of different reactions. And I think the notion that people have of a person disappearing, being obliterated by the disease, isn't true at all. With every person that I spoke to, I found that who they are, no matter where they are with the disease, was very prominent. Even in people who were in long-term care, it was remarkable how much personality came through.
This is a movie that can change the conversation about its subject, which is different than a lot of movies that you might make. Does that have a special appeal to you, and if this movie succeeds in changing the way people think about Alzheimer's, how might that work?
Well, I don't think that movies should be polemics. I think that movies are a way to talk about who we are as human beings, and what it's like to be alive, and to tell stories that help us understand things. However, if this movie does help us understand what it's like to live with this terrifying disease and to bring awareness to that and change the conversation about what it's like to have it and who it affects, then that's fantastic.
One of the things that I like about "Still Alice" is that I don't feel it's a polemic. I think it's a story about a family and an individual, but in that way the most personal story is the most universal. I think that's the note that it hits: you see an individual's experience with Alzheimer's, but it resonates in a really universal way.
The movie's just now coming out, but it's getting a lot of great critical attention. Are you aware of that? Do you try to shut it out, or do you actually pay attention to it?
I think it's hard to not be aware of it. [laughs] It's so pervasive, it's so loud, and frankly we are so grateful. It's very welcome. This is a movie we made for $4 million in three-and-a-half weeks, not even a year ago, so the fact that we even got distribution is astonishing. We're really, really happy about that, and that it's getting attention? Wow! How lucky are we? [laughs]