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    No safety season

    Broadway at the Hobby goes Tony bold with Carrie Fisher, underground Memphis

    Joel Luks
    Feb 9, 2011 | 6:42 am
    • Carrie Fisher in "Wishful Drinking"
      Photo by Joan Marcus
    • A scene from the "Tree of Life" segment in "The Lion King"
      Photo by Joan Marcus
    • Montego Glover and the cast of "Memphis"
      Photo by Joan Marcus
    • "Million Dollar Quartet," original Broadway cast
      Photo by Joan Marcus
    • "Come Fly Away," original Broadway cast
      Original Broadway Cast © 2010, Joan Marcus
    • "The Addams Family," original Broadway cast
      Photo by Joan Marcus

    Bold artistic moves can be risky. But they can also pay off when the risk is calculated.

    For its 2011-2012 season, Gexa Energy Broadway at the Hobby Center focuses solely on shows never staged in Houston, a drastic change in strategy from the 2010-2011 lineup — musicals like the revival of Jerome Robbins production of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats (the longest running North American touring production) and Mamma Mia, a love story through ABBA's popular tunes, are traditionally good investments. Tickets sell rather well.

    Memphis, Million Dollar Quartet, The Addams Family, Come Fly Away and Wishful Drinking may not necessarily ring a musical bell with Houston audiences, but have certainly made a mark on Broadway earning more than a handful of Tony Awards.

    And for those that need something familiar and epic, there is always The Lion King, coming back to Houston for the third time.

    Winner of the 2010 Tony Award for Best Musical (and three others) and four 2010 Drama Desk Awards, Memphis brings the underground clubs of the 1950s to the foreground through the lives of a white radio DJ and a black club singer who follow their passions together. But there is more to this show than just good singing and dancing. Issues of racism and segregation add sophistication to the otherwise stereotypical story of the pursuit of happiness.

    Written by Joe DiPietro who brought you I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change with music by Bon Jovi's founding member David Bryan, Memphis premieres in October.

    Behind the dark weirdness of The Addams Family lies the all familiar American story of the girl that falls in love with an unacceptable suitor — in this case, a nice respectable man. Maybe it was Nathan Lane (legendary in The Birdcage and The Producers) as Gomez or Bebe Neuwirth (who played the cold and analytical Lilith Sternin in Cheers) as Morticia that propelled this show forward, or the nostalgic familiarity with the original characters by cartoonist Charles Addams.

    Houston is definitely strange and quirky enough to host The Addams Family. Opens January 2012.

    Everyone loves a true story set to music, especially when music is the center of the story. Million Dollar Quartet is inspired by that infamous recording session that brought music legends Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins together at Sun Records in Memphis. Currently playing in Chicago and Broadway, this classic rock 'n' roll drama comes to Houston in February 2012.

    Come Fly Away is so new, their website is coming soon. The show mingles classic sultry Frank Sinatra melodies with Tony Award-winner Twyla Tharp, who has been choreographing Sinatra songs since the 1970s.

    The skilled ballroom dancers narrate love stories accompanied by a rowdy 14-piece big band. The runs starts in April 2012.

    Having premiered in 2006 in Los Angeles, Wishful Drinking traces the life of Star Wars icon Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia). Winning the 2010 Outer Critics' Circle Award, New York Times Times critic Ben Brantley described it as "an extremely funny full-frontal confession" divulging mischievously into the drinking and sobering of this Hollywood legend. Opens May 2012.

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    Movie Review

    New Pixar film Elio is fun but falls short of Disney's top tier

    Alex Bentley
    Jun 19, 2025 | 6:00 pm
    Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio
    Photo courtesy of Pixar
    Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio.

    Pixar has done a ton of different things in the 28 feature films they’ve released over the past 30 years, but the one they’d never done is deal with aliens (and, no, the alien toys in Toy Story don’t count). Now they’re going where many storytellers have gone before, but in their own unique way, in the new film Elio.

    Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a space fanatic who has recently lost both of his parents in an unnamed event. His Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is now his guardian, and because she happens to be a member of the U.S. Space Force, Elio finds himself tantalizingly close to communications from space. With a desire to be abducted by aliens for both curiosity and sentimental reasons, Elio sends a message into space, hoping for some kind of response.

    He gets that and more when a ship full of multiple types of beings takes him into space, believing him to be a leader instead of a child. An encounter with a hostile force led by Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) gives Elio both a new friend, Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), and responsibility for maintaining peace during an unexpected galactic crisis.

    Pixar has not typically followed the route of many Disney movies of giving their child protagonist the trauma of dead parents, and doing so here is the first of a few minor missteps. Having Olga be his mom instead of his aunt would have altered their dynamic, but only slightly. While Elio is shown to miss his parents, his major focus is on making contact with aliens. Since the film only briefly deals with his grief, it would have been better served by excising it altogether.

    For the most part, the film is goofy, with Elio’s enthusiasm for aliens matched by the oddness of the creatures he meets in space. The filmmakers - there are three credited directors and three credited writers - seem to have taken inspiration from sea creatures and Pixar’s own history, as the main bad guy emulates Mike and Sully’s boss from Monsters, Inc. Almost every character in the film is heightened to a degree that makes for funny situations, but not as much sentimentality as other Pixar offerings.

    Surprisingly, especially since the film ends with a voiceover from notable astronomer Carl Sagan, the filmmakers play fast and loose with real-life science. Elio’s journeys to and from the alien spaceship are treated as close-to-instantaneous trips, even involving portals directly to Earth. The idea of the story doesn’t allow them to delve into things like relativistic time dilation, but there still could have been other scientific references to keep the story aboveboard.

    There are very few stars to be found among the film’s voice cast other than Saldaña and Garrett, who are each fine if unmemorable. Kibreab and Edgerly are given many more scenes than anyone else, and they each do a great job of bringing out both the joy and naivete of their characters. Some lesser-known actors like Jameela Jamil, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Brendan Hunt show up in minor roles, but they don’t stand out in any way.

    The story and characters in Elio are sweet and fun, but the film as a whole falls well short of the top tier Pixar movies. The filmmakers could have gone many different directions with a story about a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, and the way they chose ended up being innocuous and less than compelling.

    ---

    Elio opens in theaters on June 20.

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