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UPDATED SEE BELOW– Release date set for November 21st.
Once upon a time, the Beatles had their “Anthology” series.
There were three double CD albums that featured outtakes and songs never heard, different takes of hits.
Now it seems they’re teasing a fourth Anthology set because you know, Christmas is coming, and they’ve run out of albums to remix and repackage. Seriously, I love the Beatles and all their anniversary box sets. An Anthology 4 would be very welcome.
Seriously, it’s the 30th anniversary of the original albums. So why not add one and promote the whole series? Plus, new vinyl versions would also be a hit.
Is there any extra material left? Quite a lot, I think, judging by all the bootlegs floating around. And Apple would be smart to fix up the original set of albums and videos for a new generation. You Tube is filled with fan made versions of an Anthology 4 with all kinds of amateur remixes including one of the whole Band — somehow – playing on John Lennon’s “Grow Old With Me.”
“Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo is getting the Santa Barbara International Film Festival Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film.
Erivo is starring in “Wicked 2: For Good,” coming in December.
Erivo deserves all awards, but the intense push is on for “Wicked 2: For Good” to win a lot of Oscars. Studios arrange with film festivals for the actors from the Oscar-buzzed movies to get these honorariums. The publicity within the Academy, they hope, will turn into gold statues.
Festivals like Santa Barbara and Palm Springs are close by Los Angeles, and that’s where all the action is. Some of these awards are genuine appreciation of an actor’s talent — as in this case. But some — beware — they’re bought and paid for.
Will Erivo win Best Actress in 2026 for playing Elphaba twice? The odds are good, and she’s worked hard for it. Will “Wicked” pull off Best Picture? That remains to be seen.
There were so many stars in the opening night audience last night for Jeff Ross’s Broadway debut that it was dizzying.
Ross, famous for being a “roast master,” pulled off a coup with his one man “Take the Banana with You.” He surprised everyone with a hilarious, sometimes raunchy but incredibly touching evening. It’s always nice when theater pulls a fast one on you.
Ross could easily now be compared to Billy Crystal and even Mel Brooks with his delivery, comic timing, his mixture of pathos with humor. We needed a big laugh and we got it, even with some tears.
But what a crowd! I sat next to Susie Essman, who told me she’s definitely joining Larry David in his new 6 episode HBO sketch series. “I’m playing a definite character,” she revealed, “Larry doesn’t want it to be like Saturday Night Live.”
In front of us, on the aisle, Billy Crudup (with long hair) sat next to Jimmy Kimmel and his wife, Molly. John Stamos was a few rows behind us. B.J. Novak was in between. Scattered through the house were Ice T., comic actor Craig Robinson, Sarah Silverman, David Schwimmer, John Mayer, Carson Daly, Dana Delany, rapper Flava Flav, and even Steve Buscemi.
Buscemi told me he didn’t even know Jeff that well, but was invited because they’d been in a project together for two minutes. Ross nevertheless gave him a shout out as he walked through the audience, along with Stamos and Flava Flav.
A big part of the show, maybe the centerpiece, is when Ross — wearing his banana yellow suit — strolls through the audience, microphone in hand, asking people to stand up if they have a personal story of survival. Then, like a genial Don Rickles, he “roasts” them with warm zingers. What does he do when there are no celebs in the audience? He told me at the after party, “You can’t believe how many people want to get up and share.”
I’m not surprised considering what Ross tells us about his kind of Oliver Twist life in the preceding hour. At 59, he has just survived colon cancer — this year — which was so mean feat. He grew up poor in New Jersey as Jeff Ross Lifschultz, where his family ran a catering hall. His mother died very young, and his father did, too, after a brief reverie as a single man. Ross was raised by his grandfather, who he lived with well into his 20s while he was trying to make it as a comic. It was the grandfather who used to say, “Take the banana with you,” when giving him some food for the road.
All of these people are featured in personal photos projected onto the backdrop behind Ross, including friends and relatives who stood behind him when the chips were down. He’s dated a lot, never married, and his closest companions are two German shepherds with their own stories. (One of then is in the show.) He does beautiful memorials for three famous friends who did recently around the same time, much too young: Bob Saget, Gilbert Gottfried, and Norm McDonald.
Ross is so quick on his feet and facile with language that he can tailor the improvisational part of it with ease. Of course, Ross — despite the sadness he endured and leavened with hilarity — still has some Catskills shtick in him (even though he’s two generations removed). Most New Yorkers will appreciate a section called “Don’t Mess with the Jews,” which Jackie Mason and Alan King are applauding in heaven.
Don’t miss this show. Ross is booked at the smallish Nederlander Theater for just six weeks, although I’m sure he could be persuaded to stick around.
PS Kudos to Stephen Kessler, the director who makes his own Broadway debut with aplomb.
Barbra Streisand’s latest duets album, “Partners II: The Secret of Life,” has zoomed back up the charts.
It’s number 7 on iTunes and number 2 on amazon.com.
The album was released June 27th and fell flat. Streisand did no direct promotion for the album, there seemed to be no marketing plan, and the result was a terrible sales disappointment.
So what’s going on?
One of Barbra’s duets is with up and coming singer Laufey. On the album they perform one of Laufey’s songs, called “Letter to My 13 Year Old Self.” For some reason, Sony/Columbia just ignored it at the time of release.
But this past Sunday, on CBS Sunday Mornings, Laufey was featured. The power of that show is enormous. Laufey’s records took off, as viewers wanted to know more about this Grammy winning young star.
The CBS Sunday piece heavily featured the Streisand duet, with a clip of the video and of Streisand saying that singing with Laufey “was like buttah.”
This evidently sent fans looking for the Streisand album. Crazy.
A year ago, Streisand’s producer, Peter Asher, mentioned to me that the Laufey/Barbra collaboration was exquisite. Now it’s come to bear fruit.
Maybe Sony and Streisand will be moved to put some elbow grease in on the project now. A door has been opened for them.
Meantime, Laufey now has 4 albums in the iTunes top 100, and several singles. Not bad! She’s an “overnight sensation”!
Cameron Crowe has found two major stars for his Joni Mitchell biopic.
Scoopster Jeff Sneider reports that “Both Sides Now” will star Meryl Streep as Joni now and Anya Taylor Joy as Joni in her heyday.
That’s a movie I want to see@
The Streep part indicates that we’ll see Joni overcome her devastating stroke only to make a triumphant return to performing. There won’t be a dry eye in the house!
Crowe is devoted to Mitchell and is certainly an expert in the field. Can’t wait@
The Toronto Film Fest is looking forward to a hot run next month. But there’s a wrinkle.
Last week they rejected, then reinstated Barry Avrich’s documentary, “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue.”
Now I’m told that “The Road Between Us” will just be shown once, and there are no press or industry screenings.
All of this is great publicity for the doc which follows how on October 7, 2023 retired Israel Defense Forces General Naom Tibon sprang into action on a mission to save his family — including his two granddaughters — who were surrounded by Hamas terrorists during the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Tibon also rescued survivors of the music festival massacre and helped wounded soldiers on his journey to save his family.
TIFF executive director Cameron Bailey at first said pulling the film had to do with properly securing rights to footage. He insisted it was not about censorship or fear of protests.
But then he reversed his position after an outcry from many groups including the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation and the Creative Community for Peace.
“I want to be clear: claims that the film was rejected due to censorship are unequivocally false,” he wrote in a letter addressed to members of the TIFF community. “I remain committed to working with the filmmaker to meet TIFF’s screening requirements to allow the film to be screened at this year’s festival. I have asked our legal team to work with the filmmaker on considering all options available.”
Subsequently, Bailey and Avrich issued a joint statement agreeing the film would be shown.
Now, “The Road Between Us” will be screened once, sometime on Monday. But access for press and possible distributors will be problematic. We can only imagine security will be high and interest will be off the charts. But this is a film that must be shown and distributed, to tell the story of what happened to innocent Israelis on that terrible day.
I told you about indie rocker Sombr a few months ago.
The 20 year old New Yorker, whose real name is Shane Boose, is the son of Elton John AIDS Foundation event director Andy Boose and his wife, amFAR PR director Bennah Serfaty.
His album, “I Barely Knew Her,” just turned 20 in July. But all of the last year he’s had two enormous pop hits that came out of left field. They are “Undressed,” and “Back to Friends.”
The very catchy records are streaming giants. The former has 400 million streams. The latter is at 658 million.
“Back to Friends” is number 6 on Spotify, the first record on this week’s chart that isn’t from K Pop.
“I Barely Knew Her” will be scrutinized as it launches Thursday night. Obviously, there’s a pent up demand for an album at this point. Boose has toured constantly, putting in the time also on social media building up a following.
But now the question is, Will there be a follow up hit? A more recent single, called “12 to 12,” didn’t go anywhere. The dreamy “Would Have Been You,” did only a little better. It’s not easy building off of early hits, just ask Benson Boone. He flipped all over the place but couldn’t sell the follow up to his hit inaugural album and single.
Sombr’s trademark is kind of a dreamy production in which his falsetto voice is drowned in the sonic equivalent of cotton balls and lace. You’d think he was a little guy from the sound, but he looks like he’s a very tall stringbean with Cat Stevens like rock n roll hair circa 1971.
So here we go. Will he go back to being friends with his fans this week, or will the romance stick?
MSNBC is the only outlet so far not reporting this story.
The left leaning news org and cable channel will change its name this fall.
MSNBC is losing its peacock feathers in its separation from NBC. It will now be called MS Now for My Source for News Opinion and the World.
It looks in the logo like MS — as in MS Magazine — Now.
You can imagine all the money and time that went into thinking this up, especially the logo.
Why now MS PACMAN?
I digress.
Many MSNBC journalists who doubled at NBC are staying with the channel as it develops its own newsroom and standing as a business.
The evening shows should remain in tact at least for a while to provide continuity. At this point, all the MSNBC shows beat their CNN competitors handily every night.
Meanwhile, for some reason, instead of controlling their narrative, new parent company Versant was the last to make this announcement. Go figure.
You can sort of feel JFK and Jackie rolling in their graves, but here we are.
Their grandson, Jack Schlossberg, now a full time, full fledged social influence, posts irreverent videos all of the day and all of the night.
Here’s one where he reads Melania Trump’s letter of peace that she sent to Vladmir Putin. Jack does it in her accent, wearing a blonde wig. Not Profiles in Courage, but definitely a sign o’ the times.
Donald Trump is known for the strangest one word Tweet of all time.
“Covfefe,” he posted years ago.
Now comes a new one, this morning, still on his Truth Social.
“Bela,” he wrote.
That’s it. “Bela.”
Bela Lugosi?
Did he fall asleep intending to write “Belated apologies to the American people and the world for trying to destroy us”?
Was he bela-bering the point?
We will never know.
Meantime Truth Social has been rife with trolls today including one account that posted a picture of Trump being played like a violin by Putin. Truth Social must have a full time person — Stephen Miller, maybe — on the case all day for funny mocking posts about the orange loser.
