Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Take A Look In These Big Blue Eyes...


Capitalizing on the success of Hairspray, Broadway may have another winner with Cry-Baby, the latest musical adaptation of a John Waters film. Recent headlines indicate that the quirky 1950s musical will take residence at the Marriott Marquis, recent home to The Drowsy Chaperone, which sadly closed before I was able to honor the tickets I had in hand for February.

Photos of newcomer James Snyder are included in both of the articles that I read but this photo in particular caught my eye:



While James is a newcomer to Broadway, my introduction to him was via the definitive recording for bare: the musical. When I saw the above photo, I thought: “WOW! Those eyes are really blue!” I didn’t recall his eyes being that blue when I watched the DVD that accompanied the recording.

I then recalled a post I read from an online friend of mine about a lyric change in “You and I” in the bare recording. The lyric that several of us have become familiar from the sample CD is: “feel the beat of my racing heart and you’ll understand”. However, in the studio recording, this lyric has been changed to “take a look in these big blue eyes and you’ll understand”. So I thought, maybe James Snyder has really blue eyes and that’s why the lyric was changed.

But guess what!?!



So I’m befuddled. And I agree with my friend, the “racing heart” lyric says so much more. But I will save those observations for my very overdue review of bare.

Regardless of the color of the eyes doing the crying, I am very pleased to see that Cry-Baby has had good out-of-town notices and I will definitely make a point of seeing James in his Broadway debut. I was an early Johnny Depp fan thanks to 21 Jump Street so I have recollections of seeing this film on the big screen. Depp’s recent award-winning turn in the title role of Sweeney Todd has several people referencing his early days in a rock band. Similar references were made when Cry-Baby was released in 1990, since he did his own vocals as the Elvis-influenced bad boy of Baltimore. His vocals and the musical numbers must’ve been all right because somewhere I have the soundtrack on cassette. And since I have the soundtrack to Xanadu on vinyl, that could be a good omen for Cry-Baby

2 comments:

The Director said...

It's possible that the second photo was processed in Photoshop or something similar. It does have a yellowish tint to it, which would turn blue eyes green.

I don't know the source of that photo, but it looks like something that would show up in a magazine or on a website, which would almost definitely be Photoshopped to some extent (to correct the lighting, contrast, etc).

I tend to agree with your initial assumption -- he probably really does have blue eyes. Either that, or he's really got a vision problem and wears contacts. Blue contacts.

Alicia said...

Of course anything can be adjusted with Photoshop. Since he had brown eyes on the DVD and has brown eyes in his headshot (from IMDb), I'm guessing they are blue contacts specifically for the show...

Directorial/costuming choice perhaps?

Of course, I have blue eyes and went through a phase where I had brown contacts. So it's anyone's guess, really.