If you usually steer clear of musicals like you do fresh roadkill, don’t let that scare you away from Tim Burton’s bloody good Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a re-imagining of Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning Broadway hit. Starring Johnny Depp as the throat-slashing titular barber out for revenge, and Helena Bonham Carter as the inventive London shop owner who recycles his victims for her meat pies, the Oscar-winning Sweeney Todd sings a different tune altogether. Not only is it morbidly funny, violent and gleefully Gothic, the film features two lead actors who have never sung on film before, yet do so brilliantly. Rounding out the impressive cast are Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman and Sacha Baron Cohen, who steals scenes as Sweeney’s rival barber and proves that he’s no one-trick pony with Borat.
Talk about a double dinger. Perhaps the new Baseball Preview issue of Sports Illustrated will once-and-for-all settle whether being on that cover is a curse.
On the front of the mag, not only do they have six young studs (the Brewers’ Ryan Braun, the D’backs’ Justin Upton, the Rockies’ Troy Tulowitzki, Red Sox Jacoby Ellsbury, Clay Buchholz, and Nat Ryan Zimmerman), but each one is holding a cover on which he also appears.
With that kind of extra bad mojo working, you would expect at least one of them to get decapitated by a fastball this season. We’ll keep track.
Rocky had the unfortunate task of covering Playboy’s Spring Break for Playboy U in Cabo. This week we're publishing a daily excerpt from his running diary posted on the college network site. If you are a student and have an .edu address, you can sign up for admission to the site to read all of Rocky’s experiences and belong to a community of like-minded students.
Sorry yesterday’s post wasn’t about girls. Here’s some girls:
One of my duties during was to interview Spring Breakers on video. This is one of the few things I’m not good at so I was relieved (in more ways than one) when this girl Liz from Penn State grabbed the microphone and took over my job.
Have you ever found suddenly overtaken with the burning desire to listen to some a cappella? Me neither, but that wasn’t going to stop me from inviting The Mendicants up to our editorial offices for a quick performance yesterday. Led by one of last year’s “Best Dressed Men on Campus”, these twelve Stanford undergrads serenaded us with some Van Morrison and Sublime, all while wearing snappy red blazers. The Mendicants aren’t quite at the level of a group like Rockapella, but then again, who is?
Rocky had the unfortunate task of covering Playboy’s Spring Break for Playboy U in Cabo. This week we're publishing a daily excerpt from his running diary posted on the college network site. If you are a student and have an .edu address, you can sign up for admission to the site to read all of Rocky’s experiences and belong to a community of like-minded students.
-Nine of us peer off the pool deck and witness what seems like a harmless gag. When an elderly vacationing couple strolls by the box a Mexican jumps out and scares the crap into their Depends. Willem mentions that he has a bag of filled water balloons that are about to go to waste.
-After several failed attempts with an industrial slingshot we decide to try point-blank.
-We spot a professional camera crew in the bushes filming the stunt that we just Punk’d. We are probably huge right now on Mexico’s Funniest Home Videos:
It’s true that Hillary Clinton COULD still win the Democratic nomination this year, but it’s also true that I could be elected Pope. Any Catholic male over the age of 7 is eligible, and I’ve got that covered. To be the democratic nominee, you need to have a majority of the delegates, and Hilary is nowhere near reaching that numbers. Nor is she likely to. The polls don’t favor her, the slate of remaining primaries doesn’t favor her, there’s not going to be do-overs in Michigan and Florida, and her opponent keeps turning hay (Jeremiah Wright) into gold (a pitch-perfect speech on race), while she keeps stumbling into unforce errors like claiming she was shot at in Bosnia. At this point, her path to victory would require Obama to melt down in almost a Spitzer-like way. It’s just not likely—not even remotely likely. Right now, the smartest move she could make for herself and for her party is to suspend her campaign, if not actually throw in the towel. Here’s why:
Jonathan Littman continues his coverage of the case against Barry Bonds:
SAN FRANCISCO – Nothing much happened Friday in Courtroom No. 10, which is not the way Team BALCO was hoping its centerpiece perjury case against Barry Bonds would go. For the second time in a month, lead prosecutor Matthew Parrella asked the judge for more time to consider the government’s options in its effort to put Bonds behind bars for allegedly lying about steroid use.
Judge Susan Ilston seemed taken aback, but she consulted her calendar and granted Parrella’s request to return June 6 for a status hearing, meaning that filing the new indictment will take even longer than that.
The government’s move did not appear to be a vote of confidence in the biggest performance enhancement case in history. Three weeks ago, Ilston ruled for the defense, ordering the government to fix its confusing and ambiguous indictment – or start all over.
Rocky had the unfortunate task of covering Playboy’s Spring Break for Playboy U in Cabo. This week we're publishing a daily excerpt from his running diary posted on the college network site. If you are a student and have an .edu address, you can sign up for admission to the site to read all of Rocky’s experiences and belong to a community of like-minded students.
We're all for freedom of expression, and we're amazed by the flowering thereof occasioned by the recent ascendance of YouTube. That said, we're not sure if John McCain is all that excited about endorsements from the lumpy, off-key wing of his party. We can't wait to see what kind of detritus starts washing up on the intertubes once the campaign season spins up in earnest.
Copy Editor Joe Westerfield has been going to the theater so you don’t have to. If you don’t want to, that is.
In some ways the new rock musical Attorney for the Damned, which is playing at the Kraine Theater in New York, invites comparisons to Law & Order, Silence of the Lambs and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But the show, with book and lyrics by Denis Woychuk, doesn’t really work as a procedural; Hannibal Lechter would have it for appetizers; and there is a nary a transvestite to be seen anywhere, except maybe in the audience. That said, Attorney is fun.
The music, which comprises 90 percent of the show, is a tuneful and eclectic mix. It may not always move the plot along, but it makes the exposition easy to take.
The plot revolves around a defense attorney whose clients are criminally insane. Through no fault or much effort of her own, two clients are set free, and, as they say, mayhem ensues.
Attorney is staged as a rock musical, featuring an onstage band complete with backup singers, the Jurettes--though I swear I heard them introduced as the Tourettes. Either way, I laughed.
“I’m back from hell with a story tell,” sings lead vocalist Imani Coppola in Little Jackie’s “Black Barbie,” a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the media’s obsession with the comings and goings of Paris, Britney, Lindsay and their ilk. The New York-based duo certainly knows how to wrap innuendos around smooth beats influenced by ‘70s funk, ‘60s doo-wop and modern hip-hop. The “Black Barbie” video, which features dolls in all sorts of compromising positions, boasts the most impressive toy sex since Team America: World Police. Little Jackie’s debut album, The Stoop, is due out on June 10 from S-Curve Records.
If you usually steer clear of musicals like you do fresh roadkill, don’t let that scare you away from Tim Burton’s bloody good 
An even worse curse?
It’s true that Hillary Clinton COULD still win the Democratic nomination this year, but it’s also true that I could be elected Pope. Any Catholic male over the age of 7 is eligible, and I’ve got that covered. To be the democratic nominee, you need to have a majority of the delegates, and Hilary is nowhere near reaching that numbers. Nor is she likely to. The polls don’t favor her, the slate of remaining primaries doesn’t favor her, there’s not going to be do-overs in Michigan and Florida, and her opponent keeps turning hay (Jeremiah Wright) into gold (a pitch-perfect speech on race), while she keeps stumbling into unforce errors like claiming she was shot at in Bosnia. At this point, her path to victory would require Obama to melt down in almost a Spitzer-like way. It’s just not likely—not even remotely likely. Right now, the smartest move she could make for herself and for her party is to suspend her campaign, if not actually throw in the towel. Here’s why:
Jonathan Littman continues his coverage of the case against Barry Bonds:
Copy Editor Joe Westerfield has been going to the theater so you don’t have to. If you don’t want to, that is.