Go-Go’s going to Broadway

‘Head over Heels’ brings a merry, musical mashup

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, (AP): When the idea first came up, the GoGo’s found it so improbable and offbeat that they instantly fell in love with it.

As band member Jane Wiedlin puts it: “Several of us are turning 60 and it’s like, ‘What, we’re still here? And now we’re going to Broadway! Are you kidding me?”

“Head Over Heels,” set to debut this summer on Broadway, is a merry, musical mashup of the Go-Go’s 1980s pop tunes with a 16th century romantic comedy — spoken in iambic pentameter with a wide-ranging conversation on gender fluidity. Sound bizarre? “That’s what we loved,” the band’s lead guitarist Charlotte Caffey told The Associated Press. “Because it’s outside of the box, it’s unusual. And that’s kind of like our band. We’re kind of weird gals.”

Before heading to New York, “Head Over Heels” is doing a fourweek warmup at San Francisco’s Curran theater and still undergoing tweaks and tightening ahead of its July 26 opening at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. Three of the five Go-Go’s walked the red carpet at its West Coast premiere Wednesday night and then cheered from the audience along with the show’s A-list backers, including producers Gwyneth Paltrow and Donovan Leitch.

Lead singer Belinda Carlisle, who is currently living in Bangkok, Thailand, didn’t make the soft opening but reunited with the band in January in New York for their first show in six years to announce the new

emergency visas to Russian athletes and pilots could no longer be guaranteed due to lack of staff. (AFP)

LOS ANGELES:

PUBG Corp revealed on Steam it’s bringing map selection to its popular battle royale shooter “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.” It’s a feature many players worldwide have asked for since the game’s second map, Miramar, was announced last year.

The way it works is simple: people can musical.

“Head Over Heels” weaves the Go-Go’s infectious tunes — “We Got the Beat,” “Our Lips Are Sealed,” and other hits with deep cuts and Carlisle’s subsequent singles — to tell an updated take on Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia.” It is an Elizabethan tale about a royal family trying to escape an oracle’s prophecy of doom, using Shakespearean conventions and reveals and mistaken identities.

Performances

But this is Tudor with a modern twist, jazzed up with the choreography of Emmy-nominated Spencer Liff (“So You Think You Can Dance”), costumes by Tony- and Oscar-nominated Arianne Phillips, who is Madonna’s longtime costume designer, and musical direction by Tom Kitt, a Tony, Emmy and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer.

Standout performances include RuPaul’s Drag Race star Peppermint, who makes a glittery and commanding Oracle of Delphi. The role will be Peppermint’s Broadway debut and make her the first trans actress to create a principal role on Broadway, says director Michael Mayer.

The Tony Award-winning Mayer (“Spring Awakening,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and the Green Day musical “American Idiot”) says the show speaks to a cultural moment in a way he hadn’t anticipated when he started working on it three years ago.

“It’s kind of shocking how urgent it feels,” Mayer said. “Even though it’s incredibly entertaining and

click to choose maps they want to play. If they don’t want to play a particular map, they can unselect it. If more than one map is checked, the game will randomly pick one each time a player starts a match. PUBG Corp said the feature is nearly complete, and it will come out soon after spending some time on the test server.

Map selection won’t affect matchmaking, PUBG Corp said. It analyzed tens of millions of matches and sorted data by server, mode, and time to make sure it would work for every region’s players, even ones with naturally funny, the show deals with gender identity and the concept of feminism in the face of centuries of patriarchy and the concept of finding a new way of governing in the face of historic chauvinism.”

Its creators took a few liberties with certain Go-Go’s songs which, he said, the band “completely supported.”

“Mad About You” gets a pronoun tweak in a gender-bending number to become “Mad About Them.”

“Heaven on Earth” is staged as a raucous, entertaining orgy where actors appear backlit in enlarged silhouettes.

Children of the 80s will recognize “Vacation,” staged as a Technicolor nod to the iconic 1982 MTV video of the Go-Go’s waterskiing in tutus and tiaras.

Nostalgia aside, the Go-Go’s musical is a new milestone for a group that made rock ‘n’ roll history, said Martha Quinn, one of MTVs early video jockeys.

“I wish every girl would watch the Go-Go’s,” said Quinn, who got a group hug from the band members when she arrived at Wednesday’s premiere in pink vinyl leggings and a cropped black leather jacket. Wiedlin, in a black leather corset and platform combat boots, told Quinn: “You look so good! Holy crap.”

The Go-Go’s remain the only allfemale band that wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to top the Billboard charts.

“These ladies right here are pioneers,” Quinn told the AP. “They are rock and rollers and everyone should really take notice of these girls.”

low server populations. It also gathered feedback from around the world, which led to it scrapping and reworking the feature’s design several times.

“Ultimately, we created a version of map selection that we think is unlikely to cause issues for matchmaking. That said, we’ll still have to keep a close eye on it, since it could become problematic as new maps continue to be added,” the developer said. (RTRS)

LOS ANGELES:

Rising country star Kelsea Ballerini has signed with the powerhouse Nashville management firm Sandbox Entertainment, Variety has confirmed.

The news, first reported by Hits, comes on the heels of the previous day’s confirmation that Ballerini had parted ways with longtime manager Fletcher Foster. His Icon Management had represented the singer since the release of the star-making single “Love Me Like You Mean It,” the first of her four No. 1 country airplay singles to date.

Jason Owen adds Ballerini to a stable that already includes a number of top female artists, including Kacey Musgraves, Little Big Town and Faith Hill, as well as the chart-topping upstarts Midland and Dan + Shay. For years Owen was known for representing Shania Twain, a flagship client whose touring comeback was overseen by Owen, before she decamped for Maverick two years ago.

Owen is also a label executive. In January, he and songwriter/producer Shane McAnally joined forces to launch Monument Records, a rebranding of a classic Nashville imprint, as a joint venture with Sony Music. (RTRS)