Wednesday April 20, 2016
THE DAILY ATHENAEUM
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | 5
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Michael Strahan leaving daytime’s ‘Live’ for ‘GMA’ NEW YORK (AP) — Former football star Michael Strahan is being shifted from the daily talk show he co-hosts with Kelly Ripa to work full-time on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The change comes as “Good Morning America” tries to shore up sinking ratings at a time of tighter competition with NBC’s “Today” show and reflects the importance of the show to parent Walt Disney Co.’s bottom line. Strahan has worked a couple of days a week at “GMA” for the past two years, but he always has to leave midway through to head to the “Live with Kelly and Michael” studio on Manhattan’s upper West Side. He’s joining the show’s regular cast of Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, Lara Lo-
gan, Amy Robach and Ginger Zee. Starting in September, he’ll be there five days a week for the full two-hour show. The former New York Giant was selected in 2012 to replace Regis Philbin as Ripa’s co-host on the talk show, which airs directly after “Good Morning America” at 9 a.m. in most markets. “Michael’s proven to be a tireless and versatile broadcaster with an incredible ability to connect with people, from veterans and all kinds of newsmakers to a host of American cultural icons,” said ABC News President James Goldston. “He is a great modern thinker and leader.” “Good Morning America” remains television’s most popular morning show, averaging 4.96 mil-
lion viewers a day since the beginning of the year. But that audience is down 10 percent from 2015, according to the Nielsen company. Mo re i m p o r t a n t l y , “GMA” is down 15 percent among viewers aged 25to-54, and that’s the demographic that most advertising rates for news programs are based upon. NBC now leads ABC in this category for 2016. Given a choice of trying to help one show while simultaneously hurting another, it was no contest: Disney has much more money at stake with “Good Morning America” than with “Live with Kelly and Michael.” ABC said Tuesday that a search for Strahan’s replacement as Ripa’s partner will begin in the fall. “Live” is a solid performer in the ratings, and was a
close second to “Dr. Phil” among daytime syndicated shows in the most recent ratings report. Ripa and Strahan shared an Emmy for outstanding entertainment talk show hosts last year. “The combination has been great for the show,” said Bill Carroll, an expert in the syndication market for Katz Media. “Michael has brought a new audience to the show and a great energy working with Kelly.” The show’s chief advantage in
searching for a replacement is longtime producer Michael Gelman, who dates back to the show’s formative years with Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford, he said. The show has commitments to be on the air at least through 2020. Strahan, who retired from the NFL in 2008 following a 15-year playing career, will remain as a cohost of “NFL on Fox” on the weekends.
Young adult fiction booms on Broadway Shelton lawsuit NEW YORK (AP) — When actress and playwright Claudia Shear was first approached to turn a novel for young adults into a Broadway musical, she was slightly stunned. “You want me for a children’s thing?” she asked the producers. Shear, after all, often writes about fearless women making their way in an unforgiving world and isn’t frightened by suggestive situations or salty language. She agreed to the new project but didn’t change her style. “I went at it without any concept of it being for children,” she said. “Truth is truth and humanity is humanity. That is the thing that supersedes any genre.” The musical was “Tuck Everlasting,” Natalie Babbitt’s powerful story about a girl who stumbles onto a mysterious family that has discovered a fountain of eternal life. It opens on Broadway on April 26. It will cap a remarkably rich few years for shows based on young adult fiction, including “Matilda the Musical,” ‘’War Horse,” ‘’Aladdin” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” All stubbornly refuse to talk down to kids.
“The only difference between them and us is that they’re smaller and they know a little bit less,” said playwright Dennis Kelly, who won a Tony Award for adapting “Matilda” from the children’s novel by Roald Dahl. “Their brains are just as good as ours and they know as much about the world as we do.” It turns out that Shear was in good company: Musicals based on young adult books have recently attracted writers who usually deal with adult material and don’t want to coddle their younger audiences. Kelly, like Shear, wasn’t someone you’d immediately associate with children’s literature. He writes caustic satires, including a play about how a climate of terror can lead neighbors to torture, and another about the evils of greed-is-good capitalism. “When I was doing ‘Matilda,’ I didn’t think I was writing for kids. I was just having a really good time,” he said by phone from London. “I mean, clearly, there are some things you might well steer clear of, but you’ll find you’re naturally steering clear of it.” Playwright Simon Stephens was similarly an in-
teresting choice to adapt Mark Haddon’s best-selling novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” about a teenager with Asperger’s syndrome. He writes gritty dramas that are often bleak, dark and violent. “My imaginary world tends to be a dark old place populated by psychopaths and killers,” Stephens said. But it was precisely that dark quality that appealed to Haddon: Stephens wouldn’t be sentimental when it came to adapting his novel. For “Tuck Everlasting,” the central character comes to learn that eternal life might be a curse and not a blessing. It explores living in the moment and the meaning of life and death. Shear was naturally attracted to it. “Children’s’ literature is so potent,” she said. “All great children’s literature has death in it - Beth dies in ‘Little Women,’ the horse dies in ‘Black Beauty,’ ‘Bambi.’ Any great children’s book deals with things that are so profound. It isn’t just the pretty dress.” She teamed up with Tim Federle - who has written a series of children’s books like “Better Nate Than Ever” and just published “The
Great American Whatever,” his first young adult novel. Federle said their object was to not just write a good show for children but one adults and children could love. “Our goal is to always give them a sophisticated show that feels like it’s worth a Broadway ticket price but that evokes the magic of being young,” he said. More family-friendly musicals are expected to land on Broadway in the next 18 months, including “Frozen” led by edgy director Alex Timbers, “Anastasia” with a book by Tony-winner Terrence McNally, and another Dahl adaptation, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Kelly, who created a truly unforgettable villain in the terrifying headmistress Miss Trunchbull for “Matilda,” said his advice for any young adult adapters is always to focus on the story, not the audience. “Kids, more than anything else, are responding to a story. They just want to be told a good story. And if you can’t do that, then you’ve got no chance with them,” he said. And, he advised: Don’t hold back: “We really do expect them to be stupid but they’re big thinkers. They love a big old think.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Blake Shelton’s defamation lawsuit against In Touch Weekly will proceed after a judge Tuesday rejected a motion to dismiss the case by the tabloid’s publisher. U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder in Los Angeles ruled that the country music star had shown that a headline the tabloid published in September 2015 that declared “Rehab for Blake” could be interpreted by the average reader as meaning the singer was receiving addiction treatment. Shelton sued Bauer Publishing Co. in November over the headline and an accompanying story that included several anecdotes of the country music star’s supposed drunken antics. Shelton, who is a judge on NBC’s “The Voice,” denies several key events in the story occurred and states he does not have a drinking problem. Bauer’s attorney Elizabeth McNamara did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment. She said last week that if Snyder’s ruling becomes official, it will be appealed. She argued that the Grammy-nominated singer had created his “entire reputation around excessive
drinking.” Snyder rejected that argument in her ruling, saying that Shelton was not in fact “libel proof.” Shelton’s attorney Stanton “Larry” Stein attacked McNamara’s arguments during a hearing last week and In Touch’s story, saying it was “absolutely 100 percent false.” Snyder urged the attorneys at the April 11 hearing to settle the case, saying it would be costly for both sides if it went through an appeal. The “Boys ‘Round Here” singer has also denied the magazine’s claims, writing in a sworn declaration submitted to Snyder, “Not only was I not in rehab or headed to rehab when it was published, but I also do not have a drinking problem.” Shelton noted the September 2015 story came at a time when he was working on new music, negotiating endorsement deals and his role hosting Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards was about to be announced. “I felt that the Rehab Story jeopardized both my personal and professional reputation and that I needed to do everything I could to set the record straight,” Shelton wrote.
Tribeca documentary ‘The Last Laugh’ surveys humor and the Holocaust NEW YORK (AP) — “Do you have a Holocaust joke?” That was director Ferne Pearlstein’s first, icebreaking question when she sat down to interview comedians for “The Last Laugh,” her documentary about taboos and comedy, particularly in regard to the Holocaust. Gilbert Gottfried, master of the over-the-top punchline, didn’t miss a beat. “There was a Holocaust?!” he replied. “Nobody told me!” “The Last Laugh,” which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, pokes and prods at the question of “Where’s the line?” in comedy, teasing out comedy’s cathartic, healing role in even the worst tragedies. It’s a debate with many differing perspectives, even in the comedy community where stand-ups are often taken to task for “going too far” or “too soon.” Pearlstein’s film doesn’t only examine the issue from those with a microphone, but through Holocaust survivors who add a deeper dimension to the film: humor as a necessary survival tool. Some, like 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone, frankly confess that among themselves, survivors, too, tell jokes about life in the camps. “Humor kept me going after the Holocaust,” Firestone said in an interview alongside Pearlstein and her co-writer and husband Robert Edwards. “Without humor I don’t think I would have lived this long.” By seeking humor in the darkest dark, “The Last Laugh” gets at the intrinsic nature of comedy. “Comedy puts light onto
‘The Last Laugh’ interviews famous comedians such as Mel Brooks (above) on how humor can help bring light to the darkest topics. darkness, and darkness can’t live where there’s light,” Sarah Silverman says in the documentary. “So that’s why it’s important to talk about things that are taboo because otherwise they just stay in this dark place and they become dangerous.” But there is discord even within many of the comics in the film. (Among them are Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Larry Charles and Susie Essman.) Brooks, creator of the Hitler-skewering “The Producers,” acknowledges he can do Nazi jokes, but not Holocaust jokes. When he reflects on Silverman’s
introduction of him for a 2014 AFI lifetime award, he cringes at her joke: “What do the Jews hate most about the Holocaust? The cost.” “The film doesn’t answer the question,” says Pearlstein of what’s offlimits. “We wanted to provoke discussion.” One thing everyone comedians and survivors alike - seem to agree on: Roberto Benigni’s 1997 Holocaust tragicomedy “Life Is Beautiful” is sentimental, implausible claptrap. Brooks calls it “the worst movie ever made.” Famously never released was Jerry Lewis’ “The Day
the Clown Cried,” made in 1972, in which Lewis plays a German clown forced to entertain children before they were sent to the gas chambers. (Lewis has sworn no one will ever see it.) For Pearlstein, a veteran filmmaker whose previous films include the 2003 Japanese wrestling documentary “Sumo East and West,” it’s a complex chemistry that goes into determining whether a joke is offensive or not: Who’s telling it? When was it said? Was it funny or not? “I don’t have a philosophy about it,” Carl Reiner says in the film. “I just
know that it’s much more fun to laugh than not to laugh.” In some scenes in the film, Pearlstein documented survivors watching YouTube clips from the likes of Larry David and Ricky Gervais. “Watching Renee’s face during these jokes, it was not the same,” said Pearlstein. “I was hearing them differently. It hit me differently.” The line may be evershifting, impossible to pinpoint and necessary for comedy to flirt with. But what’s most important to both Pearlstein and Firestone, is not to censor discussion.
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“I feel very strongly that in order to move beyond these horrible events, everybody has to know about everybody’s pain,” says Pearlstein. Firestone, who travels tirelessly to speak about genocide as a threat to all people, vividly recalls the absurdity of Auschwitz. One doctor examined her and advised her to have her tonsils removed should she survive. “Our treatment was so ridiculous that you either had to cry or laugh about it,” says Firestone. “Wherever there are survivors, any kind of survivor, they must have some humor.”