FAME will Live Forever

In the beginning there was the movie. And the movie had Irene Cara and some great songs by the guys who would eventually write the infamous musical version of Carrie. And the world said "It is good".

Then there was a TV show, which I suppose people enjoyed (it was before my time), but it doesn't seem to have had much of a life in syndication.

Then there was the BIG BROADWAY (style) MUSICAL. I guess it played in London for awhile, and it toured the US. It was a big hit when the youth theater did it my summer at Barrington Stage Company. The musical was not the film on stage, though it did feature the title song. Instead it was a look at a whole new class of troubled-but-talented youngsters putting in time at the High School of Performing Arts. (The writers are also trying to shop around a sequel to the musical in which the kids from the musical version show up for some sort of reunion or something. A character that dies in the 1st musical comes back as an angel or something. Did I mention these are the guys who wrote Carrie: The Musical?)

With the High School Musical Trilogy giving tykes a renewed interest in seeing teenagers look like homos (perhaps HSM--and the consternation in parents of overly obsessed young boys--indirectly led to the passing of Prop 8), FAME is coming back as a Major Motion Picture. From the looks of this promo-reel, I garner that this will focus on yet another new set of kids and follow them through their time at the High School of Performing arts. Anyway, here's that promo reel. Anyone who saw that production of Dark at the top of the Stairs I worked on a couple of years ago may recognize Paul Iacono who played The Boy Who Mumbled.

Okay, I admit it, I'm excited.

Also, while we're talking about the LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts, I might as well share this video, taken from their recent production of Ragtime. The "Girl-on-the-Swing", incidently, was also in a show I worked on. And we reminded her of this video daily.