Results tagged “henryviii”

Another Will Ferrell sports flick will inflate this weekend, capping off a nationwide “Funny or Die” promotional tour that brought him to Radio City Music Hall Sunday night. The movie is Semi-Pro, which stars Ferrell as Jackie Moon, owner of the 1976 Flint Michigan Tropics, a team in the maverick ABA basketball league. To keep his career alive against all odds, Moon initiates off a series of increasingly desperate publicity stunts to attract fans – behavior that does sound awfully familiar.

In a city where there’s as much theater as there is here, we’re never too surprised when shows open that have a lot in common, but it’s always fun to note and wonder what was happening in the creative Zeitgeist to generate technically unrelated but similar works. This week, for instance, Rachel Shukert’s Bloody Mary opens, bringing the life of the notoriously unbalanced daughter of Henry VIII to the stage in suitably off-the-wall fashion (Mary has a guardian who just might be Jimi Hendrix; a New York lawyer somehow gets involved in the power struggles). Meanwhile, at the Pearl you can see Schiller’s dark, brooding Mary Stuart, which looks at the events surrounding the execution of Bloody Mary’s cousin, which was ordered by Elizabeth I. The Pearl always presents loving, carefully considered revivals, so the coincident dates with Shukert’s production should provide a good opportunity for comparing and contrasting visions of ye olde England.

Jane Seymour was Henry VIII's third wife.