Ryan's Reviews

Before I begin this review, there is something that I have to point out here. One of the first musical movies I can remember watching was 1992's "Sister Act" with Whoopi Goldberg as lounge singer Delores Van Cartier placed in witness protection after accidentally witnessing her gangster ex-boyfriend performing an execution. She becomes Sister Mary Clarence at Saint Katherine's Convent in San Francisco and after a disagreement with the Reverend Mother winds up joining the choir. If you've seen this movie before, you absolutely know what's going to happen next. Imagine this though! Delores/Sister Mary Clarence is played by Bette Midler in an earlier alternate version of the film, before Whoopi ever became involved. Please don't get me wrong, because Whoopi in both movies is not only one of the great nineties pop culture highlights but a beloved performance to this day, but imagine what Bette would have done with this part. Not to mention how it would have af...

It's been a while since I've looked at the remainder of the Billy Joel discography but let's have a bit of a refresher here.  By 1997, Billy had released these albums: Cold Spring Harbor (his debut from 1971 issued through Family Productions and made available again in a 1983 remix on Columbia Records), Piano Man (1973), Streetlife Serenade (1974), Turnstiles (1976), The Stranger (1977 and the beginning of Billy's collaboration with producer Phil Ramone, not to mention the involvement of Billy's live band in his studio albums), 52nd Street (1978), Glass Houses (1980), Songs in the Attic (1981, the live album of songs from the pre-Stranger albums), The Nylon Curtain (1982), An Innocent Man (1983), Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II (1985), The Bridge (1986), Концерт (1987), Storm Front (1989) and River of Dreams (1993). Looking through his singles catalogue, Billy had also fired off these classics as part of all of these albums: She's Got A Way, Everybody Lov...

There are about three entertainment announcements I can remember vividly in my life. The first one was Andrew Lloyd Webber at his Royal Albert Hall birthday concert (available on DVD) hinting at a sequel for "The Phantom of the Opera". This was followed by a book published in 1999 called "The Phantom of Manhattan" written by Frederick Forsyth. Another one was Pink Floyd announcing 2014's "The Endless River", drawing on material from a projected instrumentals album from the 90s, as well as paying tribute to band member Rick Wright. God rest his soul. Since I mentioned the Floyd, I have to add their appearance at Live8 in 2005. David, Roger, Rick and Nick onstage again for the first time in more than twenty years, well it just defied description at that point. What a way to bring attention to a good cause! A third one was that Michael Crawford—you may recognize him as Frank Spencer in the classic sitcom "Some Mothers Do 'ave 'em" or the...

I was talking about the prospect of a Batman musical earlier and I wrote this: "To me, Batman was a human superhero. He didn’t have any extraordinary, supernatural powers. It was psychological. He was responding to an incident of trauma, and all of these characters, heroes and villains alike, seemed to have been psychologically affected by one thing or another. When you put that against the backdrop of Gotham City, which to me is like a cartoon version of the dark side of NYC, suddenly it all starts to sound very exciting to me. A musical with a character triumphing for good in New York—that place where "West Side Story" one of the greatest musicals of all time was set. Done right, I think it would have run like "Chicago" and "The Lion King". But that's the key thing, isn’t it? *Done right*. Did any of this make sense or am I just talking nonsense?" Historically, there were articles surfacing in 1998 and 1999 announcing the development of a B...