Epps’ decision to have them play Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan hinders their chance to really offer unique interpretations of the roles. The cast is very good with Gleason and Schwartz delivering solid singing and acting performances. Sheldon Epp’s Sleepless in Seattle: The Musical with a book by Jeff Arch, (who also co-wrote the original screenplay), music by Beth Toth and lyrics by Sam Forman, is the newest of the bunch attempting to do what the movie did and accomplishing it in a limited way. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Catch Me If You Can and Priscilla Queen of the Desert have all been recently staged with varying levels of success. “We’re not like the movies,” Annie proclaims.Īnd that in itself presents the challenge for any producer adapting a film into a musical. The musical, like the film, follows the two month interim leading up to that moment. Becky’s motives however include forging a letter to Sam asking him to meet her (Annie) at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. Back in Baltimore, Annie (Chandra Lee Schwartz), who is a print journalist, gets assigned to follow the Sleepless in Seattle story by her best friend/editor Becky (Sabrina Sloan). That is because the updated version, now appearing at the Pasadena Playhouse, is a musical.įollowing Jonah’s (Joe West) phone call, Sam (Tim Martin Gleason) becomes a national sensation receiving bags of mail from women (and some men) who are searching for the perfect balance of sensitivity and security that Sam seems to offer. The time around, however, there is no Hanks, no Ryan, and a whole lot of singing. The 1993 chick-flick Sleepless in Seattle was a huge hit, cementing Tom Hanks as a star and continuing the Nora Ephron/Meg Ryan connection for at least one more film, the 1998 romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail. And guess who – on the other side of the continent and eating one potato chip at a time – is listening in to her dream romance form? Jonah, taking his father’s love life into his own hands, decides to phone an on air ‘Love Doctor’ and tell her that his Christmas wish is for his father to find a new woman to love. In Baltimore, Annie isn’t ready to give up on the storybook romance she is longing for, but agrees to marry her lukewarm boyfriend Walter after he proposes to her on Christmas Eve. A real treat.In the city of Seattle, Sam is still coping with the loss of his wife who died one year ago leaving behind a pre-adolescent son, Jonah, for him to raise on his own. Shamelessly slushy fluff it may well be, but you'd have to be hard-hearted indeed to leave the cinema without feeling just that touch gooey inside. The soundtrack may be at times surprising (Jimmy Durante singing As Time Goes By?), and at times too literal for its own good (do we really need In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning to tell us what we already know?), but Ryan looks good enough to eat, Hanks women will find hard to resist, and the kid is one of the most appealing on screen for years. Conspiring to keep the star-crossed lovers apart for the majority of the film, Ephron's script is often uproariously funny (Hanks and buddy extolling the merits of The Dirty Dozen is especially memorable), while there is able support from O'Donnell and Rob Reiner as Annie's and Sam's best buddies respectively. Very much in the vein of When Harry Met Sally, this cannily uses clips from the 1957 Cary Grant vehicle An Affair To Remember to delightfully screwball effect, even going so far as to have Jonah arrange a meeting between Hanks and Ryan atop the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day. Plucking from the burgeoning pile a letter purporting to be from Annie, who Jonah is convinced is the one, he hatches a scheme to introduce them, despite their living 3,000 miles apart. These include lovelorn Baltimore journo Annie Reed (Ryan) who finds herself becoming increasingly obsessed by his description of his first meeting with his wife as "magic" and fears that if she marries her sensible but sterile fiance Walter (Pullman) she will settle for "satisfactory" rather than "magical".Īs the offers of marriage flood in for "Sleepless", Jonah (Ross Malinger) takes it upon himself to play matchmaker and find himself a mother, and his dad a new wife from the thousands of applicants. When recently widowed architect Sam Baldwin (Hanks) is conned into taking part in a late night Christmas Eve phone-in radio talk show by his young son Jonah, his on-air "why-I-loved-my-wife" confession has heart-string tugging repercussions throughout the land as women all over America fall in love with the disembodied voice known only as "Sleepless in Seattle". A hugely enjoyable romantic comedy, directed by the writer of When Harry Met Sally, this attacks both funny bone and tear-ducts with equal success.
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