|
Post by Admin on Nov 16, 2019 4:15:22 GMT
In a featurette released earlier this year, Swift and Lloyd Webber said that they wrote the song together. “When I first read the screenplay—and the film is seen through Victoria’s eyes—the first thing I said was, We have to have a song for Victoria. It’s an incredibly important, central part of the whole film,” Lloyd Webber said. In the film, Victoria is played by Francesca Hayward, a principal dancer at London’s Royal Ballet in her first feature-film role. “Beautiful Ghosts” is imagined as Victoria’s response to “Memory,” and though Swift did the original studio recording, Hayward sings the song in the film. “When you started playing the music, it was just this beautiful, haunting melody,” Swift said. She added that she looked to the original source material for the music, T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, for lyrical inspiration. “T.S. Eliot is such a specific type of writer and uses such specific language and imagery, and so reading through his work and everything, I just really wanted to reflect that within,” she added. “You can’t write a modern lyric for Cats, so if you can’t get T.S. Eliot, get T.S.” While the lyrics are inspired by Eliot, they also feature plenty of Swift’s classic themes, like dreams, friendships, and lost romance. They even provide her an opportunity to indulge in her Anglophilia. “I’ll never wander London streets, alone and haunted,” she sings, making the song an interesting answer to “London Boy,” the song from her album Lover that some fans think is about her relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. That tune drew criticism for its geographical misunderstandings about the city; no such specific details are supplied here.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Dec 3, 2019 18:39:25 GMT
On a grey London afternoon in late September, Taylor Swift slips quietly through the doors of a north London recording studio. It is an auspicious moment: the queen of confessional pop has come to meet Andrew Lloyd Webber, the king of musical theatre. Together, Swift, who turns 30 this month, and Lloyd Webber, 71, have written “Beautiful Ghosts”, a new song for the soon-to-be-released film adaptation of Cats – Webber’s 1981 extravaganza, which ran in the West End and on Broadway for a combined total of almost 40 years. When Lloyd Webber began playing the haunting, beautiful melody during an afternoon of rehearsals, Swift started singing right away. She wrote the lyrics more or less then and there. “I think [writing] is really important – also from the side of ownership over what you do and make,” says Swift, who balanced her school studies with songwriting sessions from her early teens. “Even if you aren’t a natural writer, you should try to involve yourself in the messages you’re sending.” Lloyd Webber agrees: “Today, very few people have a major career unless they write.” The impresario of the theatre world, who began plotting “dreadful musicals on terrible subjects” from the age of eight, recalls the first time he heard Swift’s seventh studio album, Lover. “Am I right in thinking you approached its recording just as though you were giving live performances?” he asks. “I did,” Swift affirms. “I was really singing a lot at that point – I’d just come from a stadium tour, and then did Cats, which was all based on live performances – so a lot of that album is nearly whole takes. When you perform live, you’re narrating and you’re getting into the story and you’re making faces that are ugly and you’re putting a different meaning on a song every time you perform it.” “Does that ever make you feel you want to be an actress?” interjects Lloyd Webber. “I have no idea,” she concedes. “When I was younger, I used to get questions like, ‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ I’d try to answer. As I get older, I’m learning that wisdom is learning how dumb you are compared to how much you are going to know. I really had an amazing time with Cats. I think I loved the weirdness of it. I loved how I felt I’d never get another opportunity to be like this in my life.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Dec 4, 2019 2:15:51 GMT
Swift’s co-stars, including the “lovely” Judi Dench, made shooting Tom Hooper’s surrealist take on TS Eliot’s quirky poetry volume, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, an experience to remember. “There is one scene that Idris [Elba, who plays Macavity] and I do with Judi [Old Deuteronomy], and someone walked up to me with this kind of gummy candy and I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve never had this before, this must be British candy, this is amazing.’ I was raving about this candy so much, and Judi must have overheard me, because the next day I got to my dressing room and there was a signed photo from Judi and, like, six bags of it.” Lloyd Webber was overjoyed when he found out the news Dench had accepted the role: “Judi was in the original version, but she snapped her Achilles tendon and had to withdraw,” he remembers. “Then I had this idea, which I ran past Tom, that we could make Old Deuteronomy a woman. Seeing her perform this time was quite an emotional thing for me, because it was a very, very sad day when she had to leave the original show.” Read the full conversation in the January issue of British Vogue, which is out on newsstands on 6 December.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Dec 8, 2019 18:40:16 GMT
or much of the project’s lifespan, the question of what the cats in Cats would look like was shrouded in mystery. Back in April, we learned that they would be created with the help of CGI, and would be the size of actual cats. In May, Taylor Swift stoked our curiosity by explaining that performers were given “a tail that moves naturally, and ears and whiskers,” through a “new way that hasn’t been done before.” In July’s digital featurette, director Tom Hooper spoke of cutting-edge “digital fur technology.” But still the cats were kept under wraps. (Though we did get James Corden offering the reverent summation, “These are people, but they’re cats.”) Now, we’ve seen the release of not one but two official Cats movie trailers, and like a shy feline who’s spied an attractive-looking sunbeam, these cats are finally out in the open. Take a look! In the issue of the breasts, we get our first indication that Hooper’s attempt to digitally blend human performance with catlike verisimilitude may be destined to go awry. A filmmaker who prized the feline form above all else might have digitally smoothed performers’ busts, so that they more firmly resembled a real cat dancing upon its hind legs. A filmmaker with more outré sensibilities might have given his people-cats eight breasts rather than two, which would have been a different sort of realism. And a filmmaker who chose to retain the costumed looks of the original musical might have avoided the issue entirely, as the humanlike aspects of the performers would shine through more clearly, thus making their physical anatomy something of a meow-t point.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Dec 10, 2019 7:13:39 GMT
Taylor Swift earned another Golden Globe nomination for her original song for the movie adaptation of Cats. She cowrote “Beautiful Ghosts” with composer Andrew Llloyd Weber. Most feature film adaptations of Broadway musicals add a new original song, both to give the fans something new and to qualify for awards. Pre-existing music would not qualify awards so “Memory” can’t win any more awards. http://instagram.com/p/B5sSbVzDSmA Taylor Swift’s history with the Golden Globes “Beautiful Ghosts” is Taylor Swift’s third Golden Globe nominated song. They nominated her song “Safe and Sound” from The Hunger Games in 2013. She wrote that with T Bone Burnett, Joy Williams and John Paul White. One year later, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association nominated Swift for “Sweeter Than Fiction” from the film One Chance. She wrote that with Jack Antonoff. Should “Beautiful Ghosts” land Swift her first Oscar, she’ll be halfway to an EGOT. She’s got the Grammys on lock. She’ll just need an Emmy and Tony! How ‘Cats’ turns Broadway on its head The Broadway musical featured performers in feline costumes singing and dancing in a world built for them on stage. The movie uses all the technology of Hollywood to turn the cast into celebrity felines. So Taylor Swift is cat sized, and so are Idris Elba, Jason Derulo, Ian McKellan, Rebel Wilson, James Corden, Judi Dench and Francesca Hayward. In the play and film, the tribe of Jellicle Cats competes to be the one cat who gets to be reborn in the Heaviside Layer. Taylor Swift plays Bombulrina, a flirtatious queen who leads a portion of the Jellicle Ball. The original productions set theater records, becoming a Broadway mainstay for 18 years and running 21 in London. New productions have revived the show, but this is its first film, aside from recordings of the stage production. Tom Hooper directs. http://instagram.com/p/B52szZ-jq3G Taylor Swift’s adorable ‘Cats’ pun As Bombaulrina, Taylor Swift will presumably sing “The Old Gumbie Cat,” “The Rum Tum Tugger” (which would be a duet with Jason DeRulo!), “Grizabella: The Glamour Cat” and “Macavity: The Mystery Cat” in the film. She concluded her reaction post with the perfect line, but spelled it even more adorably. “This is just purrfect,” Swift wrote with a cat emoji. “I woke up today to the news that Beautiful Ghosts is nominated for a Golden Globe – it’s so cool that one of the most fun, fulfilling creative experiences I’ve ever had is being honored in this way by the HFPA.” http://instagram.com/p/B4Nm6X_jIPg This ‘Cats’ star inspired ‘Beautiful Ghosts’ Taylor Swift elaborated in her reaction to her Golden Globe Award nomination about what inspired the nominated song. It was ballet veteran Francesca Hayward as Victoria that inspired Swift. Victoria is a ballerina kitten “I ended up spending many days on set watching the other performers do their scenes,” Swift wrote. “Watching the character Victoria, played by @frankiegoestohayward inspired me so much and Beautiful Ghosts was the result. Congrats to my co-writer and buddy 4 life Andrew Lloyd Webber.”
|
|