Lady Razz

It was one of the most cringe-worthy moments in the history of cinematic award presentations.  It was a major insult to the intelligence of many, and it could have been avoided if someone who clearly knew better had shown restraint.

Yes, having to acknowledge with a Worst Picture Razzie a filmed stage performance of Diana, The Musical that should never have been done is enough to make anyone cringe.

What, what did you think I meant?  😃

I once suggested that Broadway musicals would never come back to Broadway in a pandemic-ravaged New York theater scene, but I was wrong.  I also was wrong that Diana, The Musical would never make it to Broadway after COVID prevented its planned March 2020 premiere.  But I wasn't as wrong about any of that as you would have been if you thought a cheesy musical based on the short life of one of the most sainted and martyred women of the twentieth century would work.  And it didn't. Diana, The Musical opened in October 2021 and closed after 33 performances.  And yet, someone had the not-so-bright idea of filming a performance of it to show on Netflix.  And so the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation (GRAF) awarded to Diana, The Musical Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Actress (Jeanna de Waal), Worst Supporting Actress (Broadway Veteran Judy Kaye), Worst Director (Christopher Ashley) and Worst Screenplay (Joe DiPietro and David Bryan).  That's five out of nine nominations, folks.  You can go here to see what the other nominations were. 

(Aside: Basketball player LeBron James won the Worst Actor Razzie for his role in Space Jam: A New Legacy, which should serve as a warning to future basketball stars interested in working with Bugs Bunny and his friends: If it's not Michael Jordan with the Looney Tunes gang, it's just not the same.)

The GRAF called Diana, The Musical an "all-singing, all-dancing, all-awful, royal mess," but theater critic Jesse Green of the New York Times probably spoke for most people when he dismissed the effort to turn Princess Diana's troubled life into entertainment as tawdry and exploitative, adding that "if you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying."

But at least it didn't end with a car crash.

The movie version made for Netflix was not one of the Broadway performances from this past fall but was in fact filmed in the summer of 2020 under COVID restrictions without an audience.  Bad move.  If a filmed version had not been made, the musical would have been forgotten once it closed, and none of the actors involved would have been documented on screen for all eternity.  You can always get out of a bad play and you can move on from it without regret.  But you can never get out of a bad movie.

I would suspect that stage actress Jeanna de Waal (below), who played the title role, will have this 800-pound gorilla of a production on her back for the rest of her career - which could be a week.

The Golden Raspberry Award Foundation is cruel, but fair. And it's honorable.  As a joke, the GRAF created a special category for this year's Razzie Awards: worst performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 movie. Willis was nominated no fewer than eight times for the roles he played in 2021 for such movies as American Siege, Apex, Cosmic Sin (the winning performance), Deadlock and Out of Death.  But when it turned out that Willis is suffering from aphasia, a medical condition that makes it impossible to speak or understand speech, and is retiring from acting, Razzie co-founders John Wilson and Mo Murphy took back the award, saying that aphasia likely had an effect on Willis's acting of late and that it was in bad taste to mock someone for having to struggle at one's craft with such a disease to contend with.  

"If someone's medical condition is a factor in their decision making and/or their performance," Wilson and Murphy said, "we acknowledge that it is not appropriate to give them a Razzie."

Wilson and Murphy have class.  Unlike the people who put Diana, The Musical together.

As for Jeanna de Waal . . . honey, you're about to become the answer to a trivia question.

So I heard something happened at the Oscars?

(And tomorrow . . . the Grammys are on!)