‘Lights. Camera. Cure.’ Theatrical Event Raises Over $20,000 For American Cancer Society Relay For Life

Originally published by Encore Michigan and BroadwayWorld

Photo Credit: Lia DeBiasi [More photos here.]

Lights. Camera. Cure. – a special theatrical event held on Wednesday, February 6, that featured classic film hits as sung by local performers at The Village Theater at Cherry Hill – was a sell-out success with a capacity crowd of 400 patrons. The show raised over $20,000 for the American Cancer Society Relay for Life Canton-Plymouth.

Producer/director Denise Staffeld of Lake Michigan Credit Union observed, “Last year, we had a vision to do a Cancer Society fundraiser that celebrated the healing power of Broadway. We sold out the house, and raised over $15,000. I had hoped this year would exceed last, both financially and artistically, but I never anticipated this. I am so very grateful.”

[View the show finale “Come Alive” here.]

Music direction was by Kevin Robert Ryan, Director of Music and Liturgy at St. Thomas a’Becket Catholic Church. Jeff Mongrain, Sonny Teodoro, and Joel Walter rounded out the orchestra. Songs included numbers from movies like The Greatest Showman, The Lion King, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Mary Poppins, Dirty Dancing, Oklahoma!, First Wives Club, The Bodyguard, Aladdin, Quest for Camelot, Moana, Pearl Harbor, The Secret Garden, Fiddler on the Roof, The Jungle Book, and many more. 

Roy Sexton, director of marketing for the Clark Hill law firm, emceed the evening as well as performed. A published author of two books of film reviews Reel Roy Reviews, Sexton noted in his opening remarks that “film is a great unifier, helping audiences to escape the troubles of daily life and to aspire to something greater.”

The cast was comprised of semi-professional and professional talent from throughout Southeast Michigan’s theatre community: Shirley Auty, Denise Staffeld, Aimee Chapman, Christina Bair, Cathy Golden, Cathy McDonald, Caitlin Chodos, Noel Bittinger, Julzie Gravel, Bethany Basanese, Keri Mueller, Janine Creedon, Tracey Bowen, Diane Dimauro, Roy Sexton, Jeff Steinhauer, AJ Kosmalski, Bruce Hardcastle, Tim Chanko, Kurt Bowen, Tracy Neil, Carl Nielsen, Anna Nielsen, and David Dilsizian.

[Enjoy the cast’s take on “carpool karaoke” here.]

Kelvin Elvidge served as sound designer/engineer. Lia DeBiasi was the production’s stage manager, and Daniel Pocock assistant stage managed. There were special appearances by Tom Cassidy and Canton Township Supervisor Pat Williams opening remarks by Kim Scartelli, and event support by Megan Schaper (American Cancer Society) and Tammy Brown and Marion Rozum (Chicks 4 Charity.

Before the performance, there was a red carpet reception, with silent auction and desserts. A Facebook Live pre-show was hosted by Canton Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Paden and Stephanie Tierney. [View video here.]

American Cancer Society Community Development Manager Megan Schaper noted “This event truly embodies the motto attacking cancer from every angle. I was in awe of the show and I can’t wait to see and support what this show inspires these communities to do next.” Schaper supports Canton, Plymouth, Westland, Wayne, Ypsilanti, Livonia and Redford.

NOTE: I had an amazing time working on LightsCameraCure – honored to have been part of this exceptional evening where over $20K was raised for American Cancer Society. Thank you, Denise Staffeld and Kevin Ryan, for the opportunity. It was an incredible experience. This cast was divine!

Thank you to my sweet friends who came out and supported: Nikki Bagdady Horn, Lauren Crocker, Colleen McConnell Fowler, William Fitzgerald (longest journey – from CHICAGO!), Ashley Kryscynski, MSW, Michelle McAllister, Melissa Francis, Lori (Rundall) Compagner, Gabby Rundall, Pattie Curtis, Jim Paglino, Leo Babcock, Mary Newton, Nico LaFoudj, Christopher Tremblay, Ed.D., Sheri Hardcastle, and anyone I missed. ❤️

________________________

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital).

In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by BookboundCommon Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan.

My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

 

 

“Life is about putting it out there … and then swatting it away.” Sisters (2015)

Sisters_movie_poster

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s latest movie yukfest Sisters is more of a yuckfest. Ever since the seismic arrival of Kristin Wiig’s Bridesmaids, Hollywood has been smitten with this arguably unremarkable, though infinitely profitable, thesis: “Hey, women can be raunchy too!”

Yup, anybody can act like an 8th grader, regardless of one’s gender. The problem is that notion, in and of itself, is just not terribly interesting and, for anyone over 40 in the audience, can just seem kinda sad.

People forget that Bridesmaids and subsequent films like Anna Kendrick’s Pitch Perfect (the first one), Melissa McCarthy’s Spy, or Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck embraced debauchery with an anarchist’s glee and a feminist’s humanism. These films suggest that the great equalizer – across any number of markers: race, age, socioeconomics, faith, ethnicity, and, yes, gender – is our fundamentally base nature alongside our desire and ability to rise from the muck occasionally and do something kind or profound or, well, witty. You can poop in a sink, but you better make it matter.

Tina Fey’s Mean Girls was an early blueprint for these flicks, a sharp-edged, warm-hearted comic bottle rocket of a film in which gender meant everything and nothing, depicting the killing fields of the high school cafeteria where reductive reasoning and shallow judgment form the principle power currency. It’s a perfect film because it is a) gut-bustingly funny and b) discomfortingly trenchant.

Unfortunately, Sisters is only intermittently both, and it never fully gels. It has a lazy feel about it, as if old pals Fey and Poehler watched Risky Business and Sixteen Candles over a box of wine and thought it would be a lark to mount a Gen X mash-up tribute with middle-aged burnouts in the central roles.

As ideas go, that’s not the worst (nor freshest) high concept to come down the pike (see Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion), but it sure as heck needed more work before hitting cinemas this past weekend, aspiring as Sisters did to serve as Force Awakens’ counter-programming.

Fey and Poehler play against type as the titular siblings, with Fey as a “brassy” (her words) and hard-partying beautician/single mom and Poehler as a straight-arrow and newly divorced nurse/animal rescuer. Fey exclaims at one point, “Life is all about putting it out there,” to which Poehler mutters, “And then swatting it away.”

The Poehler/Fey dynamic has always been natural and warm if dangerously “in-jokey” – and that is true here as well. They have some sparkling moments, notably as they learn that their parents (a wry and believable Dianne Wiest and James Brolin) have sold the family home and moved to a pastel-hued, swingin’ yuppie condo complex without any warning to either daughter. With the kind of cracked passive aggressive logic that only occurs in movies like this, Fey and Poehler, unbeknownst to their folks, decide to have one last raging blow-out party (with all their former high school cronies) in the old homestead two days before its sale closes.

So, of course, the house gets completely destroyed in a simplistically escalating Rube Goldberg series of party hijinks. The kind of absurd crap that. does. not. happen. in. real. life. Has anyone actually ever witnessed a washing machine fill an entire home and its surrounding yard with copious bubbles because someone poured a whole bottle of detergent in the drum? No.

A rogues’ gallery of SNL and Comedy Central alums puts in appearances, to varying degrees of success. Samantha Bee, Kate McKinnon, Rachel Dratch, and Chris Parnell all suffer from underwritten roles with lame jokes and even worse ad libs. Bobby Moynihan is just plum obnoxiously unfunny as a past-his-prime class clown. The character is supposed to be moronic, but in Moynihan’s hands he is teeth-gratingly so.

Maya Rudolph has a Teflon-like ability to rise above (and rescue) just about any material, and she soars as a suburban doyenne who at first glance seems to be an assured Queen Bee bully but whose inner life is more longstanding adolescent alienation than smug superiority. John Cena continues to surprise with comedic home-runs, after this summer’s Trainwreck, as a stoically cerebral drug dealer with a soft spot for Dirty Dancing. John Leguizamo shows up as a skeezy former high school boyfriend of Fey’s, and, while he is always a welcome presence, his talents seem wasted here. Mad TV‘s Ike Barinholtz gives the movie its sweetness as a bemused potential beau smitten with Poehler’s quirky, self-conscious charms.

The film stumbles toward a resolution that is as forced as it is predictable. Fey’s character has a daughter (a painfully mincing and whiny performance from Madison Davenport) who hates her mother’s arrested development and is forced to couch surf from friend’s house to friend’s house since Fey can’t manage to keep a roof over their heads. The inevitable confrontation of mother and daughter and sister and parents is utterly contrived, borrowing equal bits from an episode of Lassie, Animal House, and The Family Stone.

Ultimately, Poehler fares best in the film, bringing poignant bite and rag doll charm to her role. It’s a shame that she and Fey (with director Jason Moore and screenwriter Paula Pell) couldn’t have worked out a better movie to feature Poehler’s character, focusing less on the shock humor and the messily filmed bacchanalia and more on the tricky web of love and fear shared between siblings, sisters trapped by the hollow promises of high school juvenilia – two emotionally stunted Gen X Americans for whom those scruffy, mixed-up four years of public education are the alpha and omega of intellectual and social development.

Image by Lee Gaddis of Gaddis Gaming

Image by Lee Gaddis of Gaddis Gaming

________________________

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by BookboundCommon Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.