Tribute: Mary Rodgers

Posted on June 28, 2014 at 6:16 pm

Mary Rodgers, writer and composer, died on Thursday at age 83. She was co-creator of the wonderful musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” based on the Princess and the Pea fairy tale. It was a breakthrough role for Carol Burnett on Broadway. Here she is singing, “I’m Shy.”

It was remade with Tracy Ullman.

Burnett played the role of the evil Queen.

Rodgers also wrote books for kids that have become classics, especially Freaky Friday, filmed three times, most recently with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShtvCen6So

She wrote a two-generation advice column with her mother for McCall’s Magazine and she worked with Leonard Bernstein on his famous series of Young People’s Concerts.

Rodgers was the daughter of one award-winning Broadway composer Richard Rodgers (“South Pacific,” “Pal Joey,” “The Sound of Music”) and the mother of another, Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins” and “The Light in the Piazza”). The New York Times wrote:

“The Light in the Piazza,” Adam Guettel’s 2005 musical, for which he won a Tony for best score, was based on a 1950s novel by Elizabeth Spencer about an American woman traveling in Italy with her mentally disabled daughter, who falls in love with an Italian man. Years ago, Ms. Rodgers had suggested the story to her father as ripe for musicalizing, but he decided against it. Decades later she passed the idea on to her son.

Why, she was asked in 2003, did she not adapt the work herself?

“I had a pleasant talent but not an incredible talent,” she said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. “I was not my father or my son. And you have to abandon all kinds of things.”

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People Who Cry At Airplane Movies

Posted on February 13, 2011 at 8:00 am

I love This American Life. This week’s episode is called “Tough Room,” and it has four stories about people who have to face and try to somehow persuade or ingratiate themselves with highly critical and skeptical crowds.
But the last story of the episode is exactly the opposite. It’s about an audience member who is exceptionally susceptible to what is in front of him. GQ’s Brett Martin tells about his experience as someone who never fails to cry at a movie on an airplane, even those that are dumb, cheesy, or just plain awful. And he finds a group of others who experience the exact same phenomenon.
Most movies are selected by viewers for their entertainment value. The one thing everyone in a movie theater has in common is that everyone wants to be there enough to get out of the house and pay for a ticket. But airplane movies are chosen for a captive audience who have nothing in common except that they all want to go to the same city. And the airline’s primary goal is to keep everyone calm. So they tend to be bland films chosen not for artistic quality but for being as unobjectionable as possible. You generally won’t see heart-rending drama or pulse-pounding thrillers on a plane. You’ll see a comedies and romantic comedies.
And that is why it is fascinating to hear Martin talk about how he cried in “Sweet Home Alabama.” All four times he saw it. It isn’t that he’s a big softie. He doesn’t cry in the circumstances most people do. And he isn’t afraid of flying. There’s just something about being on a plane. He talks to other people who are coping with this newly characterized plane movie crying syndrome, and, because I see so many middle-range movies, I found the list of films that sparked their tears and sometimes sobs very funny.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

Freaky Friday

Posted on July 19, 2003 at 2:48 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for mild thematic elements and some language
Profanity:	Schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	All major characters white, strong women
Date Released to Theaters:	2003
Date Released to DVD:	2004
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00005JMCW

Jamie Leigh Curtis and Lindsay Lohan play a mother and teenager who switch bodies in this third version of the book by Mary Rodgers.

Curtis is Tess, a compassionate therapist and a loving, if harried mother of two children (there is a cute moment as she loads her pager, cell phone, and PDA into her purse). Her husband died three years ago, and she is about to be married to the devoted and understanding Ryan (the always-gorgeous Mark Harmon).

Lohan is her daughter Anna, and like most 15-year-olds, she thinks that she has both too much of her mother’s attention (when it comes to telling her what to do) and not enough (when it comes to knowing what is important to her, which she should just be able to intuit, since Anna does not really want to tell her anything).

When the two of them get into an argument at a Chinese restaurant, the owner’s mother gives them magic fortune cookies. The next morning, they wake up as each other. While they figure out how to return to their own bodies, each has to spend the day living the other’s life.

That means that Tess has to cope with high school, including a teacher with a grudge, a former friend-turned rival, a guy Anna has a crush on, and a big exam. Anna has some fun with her mother’s credit cards but then has to cope with needy patients and a television appearance promoting her mother’s new book. And both start to understand the pressure of the schedule conflict that is at the center of their conflict with each other — the rehearsal dinner before the wedding is at the same time as an important audition for Anna’s rock band.

Curtis and Lohan are so clearly enjoying themselves that they are fun to watch and the story moves along so briskly that its logical flaws barely get in the way.

Parents should know that characters use rude schoolyard words (“sucks,” “blows,” etc.). Anna wants to get the side of her ear pierced, and when she is in her mother’s body, she does. There is some kissing (the ew-factor of Ryan’s wanting to kiss Tess, not knowing that Anna is occupying her body, is handled with some delicacy). There are some tense family scenes and the movie deals with issues of parental control and teen rebellion.

Families who see this movie should talk about why it is hard for Tess and Anna to understand each other at the beginning of the movie. If the parents and children in your family switched places, what would be the biggest surprises? Families will also want to discuss some of the choices Tess and Anna make, especially the resolution of Anna’s problems with her English teacher and the honors exam. And it might be nice to compare this to the original movie, in which the mother is a full-time mom in a two-parent household, and the daughter’s challenges center around housework.

Families who enjoy this movie will enjoy the original Freaky Friday or the 1995 made-for-television version starring Shelley Long. Mary Rodgers is also the author/composer of the delightful musical “Once Upon a Mattress.” It is not available on video, but you can get the marvelous original cast album with Carol Burnett on CD. And every family should see the movie musicals composed by Rodgers’ famous composer father, Richard, including Oklahoma, South Pacific, Carousel, and The Sound of Music).

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Movies -- format