Casting call for 101 Dalmations

I never realized that Playbill has a jobs section until I found information about auditions for the upcoming national tour of 101 Dalmations.

The description of what they're looking for in the musical's principal cast members is pretty amusing:

Prince: Male Dalmatian, 30s. Narrator of the show. Charming bon vivant. Hugh Grant-type.

Pongo: Male Dalmatian, 30s. New father who maintains his sense of humor even with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Dick Van Dyke-type, with a touch of Buster Keaton.

Missis: Female Dalmatian, 30s. Pongo's wife. Feminine, but can bristle when her family is threatened. Mary Tyler Moore (Laura Petrie) type.

Cruella DeVil: Woman, 30s - 40s. BIG belt. Larger-than-life villain who’s as much a diva as she is a devil.

Hey, you wouldn't want to confuse a Mary Tyler Moore (Laura Petrie) type with a Mary Tyler Moore (Mary Richards) type, right? I bet that sent some aspiring Dalmations scurrying to their Wikipedias. I wonder how many of them had ever seen The Dick Van Dyke Show?

Actually, I think this sounds like fun. I'm very fond of Hugh Grant, especially in any romantic comedy set in London. I always liked Rob and Laura Petrie, too.

PPAC's 2009-2010 season

All right, the Providence Performing Arts Center has finally released the schedule for its 2009-2010 season.

Here's the lineup:

Young Frankenstein: Sept. 29 - Oct. 4; Avenue Q: Oct. 20 - 25; Wicked: Dec. 16 - Jan. 10; Xanadu: Feb. 16 - 21; Beauty and the Beast: Feb. 23 - 28; 101 Dalmations: March 16 - 21; A Bronx Tale: April 16 - 18; Jersey Boys: May 12 - June 6.

I'm excited about Xanadu, since I never got a chance to see it on Broadway and it's supposed to be tons of campy fun - on roller skates! I love the movie of 101 Dalmations. And Chazz Palminteri got great reviews for A Bronx Tale when he did the one-man show in New York.

On the other hand, while it's great that Young Frankenstein is starting its national tour in Providence, I was disappointed when I saw it on Broadway and it did get very lukewarm reviews. This was one of those shows where everyone around me was laughing hysterically and I was only mildly amused.

Plus, we seem to be getting a lot of musicals that have been around for awhile: Avenue Q and Jersey Boys, Disney's Beauty and the Beast. I'm a huge fan of Wicked and I'll definitely see it again, but it was just here two years ago.

Next year's lineup also seems a lot less diverse than this year's, which includes Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, Spring Awakening and The Color Purple.

Compare PPAC's season with Hartford's Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, which is getting the national tours of three current, highly regarded Broadway shows: South Pacific, In the Heights and August: Osage County. I loved them all and they would have been in my lineup, along with Mary Poppins, Dreamgirls and Little House on the Prairie.

Granted, I'm looking at this as a theatre maven, not as your average theatre fan who doesn't get to New York - or even Boston. Jersey Boys and Avenue Q have the cachet of winning the Tony for Best Musical; Wicked, Young Frankenstein, 101 Dalmations and Beauty and the Beast have name recognition.

And who knows, maybe they weren't offered any of those other shows.

Some puppy love

The kid in me got pretty excited when I read this - a musical version of 101 Dalmations is going out on tour starting in the fall. Yeah, I know, the grin on that dog's face is a Photoshop special. But still, it's awfully cute.

Released in 1961, 101 Dalmations is one of my favorite animated Disney movies. Why do I love it so? It's set in London, it has romance, a terrific villain and an adorable, floppy-eared supporting cast. Plus, it's got the barking chain!

According to the story at Playbill.com, 101 Dalmations will feature a score by Dennis DeYoung, a founding member of Styx, and a story by director and lyricist B.T. McNicholl. Apparently, they're going back to the original 1957 novel by British writer Dodie Smith for inspiration.

The producers are Magic Arts & Entertainment, Troika Entertainment and Luis Alvarez, who produced a stage version of 101 Dalmations in Spain in 2001. Check this site for more information on the creative team and pictures from the Spanish production, which was quite successful for Alvarez.

And while there's no tour schedule yet, Broadway/San Diego has booked the musical for June 1-6 2010. You can read a brief synopsis of the show on their Web site.

A big question in any stage version of 101 Dalmations is, of course, how do you portray the dogs? I wrote a blog post about this last year, where I suggested the actors could wear abstract wire dalmation heads, like the horses' heads in Equus. But they're going a different route.

The director, Tony-winner Jerry Zaks, says the actors playing humans will be "in a heightened form of dress and scale so as to appear larger than life — as they would seem from a dog's point of view."

And the dalmations will have "no ears, no paws — but, rather, a clever use of costumes in the black-and-white palette that will immediately set them apart from the human characters."

Yeah, I know people running around in dog costumes has the potential to look a bit silly, but I'm still intrigued by this project. It's great to have more theatre choices that all ages can enjoy. This could be kind of fun - hopefully for adults as well as kids.