In Postcards from the Edge, Meryl Streep proved she could carry a tune. But does she have the pipes to handle an Andrew Lloyd Webber score eight times a week on Broadway?
According to sources, Streep is very much in the running for the role of Norma Desmond in Webber's musical version of Sunset Boulevard, based on the 1950 movie starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Webber's rep, however, says only that "no casting decisions have been made."
Still, Streep was among a number of guests invited to Webber's home in England last September to hear a working version of Boulevard. Some people close to the composer have doubts. "Andrew writes for very big voices," says a source familiar with the project. "Can Meryl Streep sing big? At this point nobody knows that but her."
MO' BETTA BLUES?
When we last left The Blues Brothers in 1980, Jake and Elwood, the characters made famous by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, were singing the blues in a prison hall.
Given that Belushi died in 1982, a sequel should prove all but impossible—everywhere but in Hollywood. A spokesperson for Aykroyd says the actor and Blues Brothers director John Landis "are working on the new script." The way it was explained to us, the sequel would begin with Elwood (Aykroyd) getting out of jail and learning that Jake, incarcerated in another prison, has died. Elwood's new mission: the formation of another band, without Jake. Why didn't we think of that?
FILMIN' IN THE RAIN
Scanning the end credits to The Last of the Mohicans, we noticed that along with star Daniel Day-Lewis, among those working on the movie was meteorologist Odell S. Sluder. Naturally we wondered why a movie company would have a weather forecaster on the set when Willard Scott is just a click away on free TV.
It turns out Sluder was there each day not to predict the weather but to measure it. Mohicans was shot in North Carolina over the unusually wet summer of 1991. Mohicans director Michael Mann says that as a precaution "Fox [the film's distributor] took out a rain-insurance policy." (A typical policy can cost $100,000 and pay up to $250,000 per lost day if more than one tenth of an inch of precipitation falls per hour in more than four hours of a shooting day.) With Sluder using that formula, Mann says, Fox collected "for four rain days."
CELINE’S INFERTILITY STRUGGLE: MY PRIVATE HEARTBREAK
Daily injections, painful tests and four failed IVF attempts: The singer, 41, reveal her dreams for a second baby. ‘I’ll try until it works’
