The final original episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" will air May 25. Winfrey's Chicago-based Harpo Productions confirmed the date Friday. Winfrey announced live on the show in November 2009 that she would end its run after 25 years. She since has launched cable's Oprah Winfrey Network.
"The Oprah Winfrey Show" has been in reruns for the last few weeks. But Winfrey tweeted Thursday that she was "hard at work planning the final shows" and new episodes would begin April 7.
The final episode brings an end to what has been television's top-rated talk show for more than two decades. It airs in 145 countries worldwide.
Pop star Lady Gaga may not want to form an exclusive arrangement with Target Corp., but other music stars aren't following her lead.
Target announced Monday that Grammy Award-winning singer Jennifer Hudson had signed an exclusive deal with the Minneapolis-based retailer for a deluxe edition of her new album, "I Remember Me."
The deluxe edition, which includes four additional songs and bonus video material, will only be available at Target starting Tuesday, the company said in a news release.
It was widely reported earlier this month that Lady Gaga had ended her deal with Target for exclusively selling a deluxe version of her new album, "Born This Way." Lady Gaga said Target wasn't doing enough to help gay and lesbian causes.
Target was still offering customers the opportunity to pre-order the deluxe version on its website on Monday. But so were other retailers, such as Amazon.com. The album will be available May 23.
Winfrey has become our national confessor, our friendly, neighborhood billionaire philanthropist, the wizard who sprinkles magical dust over every author, entrepreneur, do-gooder and politician within her orbit. What Winfrey doesn't do is as powerful a statement as what she does. How dare she not interview Sarah Palin! The culture, it seems, has declared ownership of "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
Winfrey begs to differ - but only to a point. "I feel it's very much my show in that every decision you see on the show has come from that desk," she says, gesturing toward the pale green, bean-shaped table in her office. "The part that belongs to the culture is every single person who has watched . . . who has found or discovered a piece of light from it. Flecks of light, that's what I call it."
No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left.
Fast forward to Fall 2010, in their two most famous works, Cabaret and Chicago, composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb used popular forms of entertainment as metaphors for our tainted world. A resigned Sally Bowles insisted that “life is a cabaret,” while cocksure Billy Flynn asserted that “it's all a circus … the whole world, all show business.”
Th
e Scottsboro Boys, Kander and Ebb's troubling new musical, begins with a slightly less definitive pronouncement. “Everyone's a minstrel tonight,” sings the Interlocutor (Tony Award winner John Cullum, the only Caucasian in the cast) at the start of this show that repurposes the trappings of minstrelsy to revisit a racial injustice from the not-so-distant past.
Now getting its Broadway premiere in a powerful and unsettling production by Susan Stroman, The Scottsboro Boys is in fact the final collaboration between Kander and Ebb, assuming the former doesn't have any unfinished shows hiding away in a drawer somewhere. (Ebb died in 2004.)
Under the command of the Interlocutor, a company of dynamic African-American performers perform the true story of the Scottsboro boys with a little help – and hindrance – from the sadistic stock minstrel characters Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones (the formidable caricaturists Forrest McClendon and Colman Domingo),
Riding the rails in 1931 Alabama, nine black boys aged from 12 to 19 were arrested and accused of the gang rape of two white women. After they were sentenced to death, their objectionable convictions became a cause célèbre that led to the Supreme Court and, at one point, to 300,000 Americans protesting in 110 U.S. cities.
As the illiterate Haywood Patterson, who eventually learned to write and penned a book in prison, Winnipeg-born Joshua Henry gives a tremendous lead performance. Throughout his incarceration, Haywood remains defiant and tells the truth even when, in a cruel paradox, a lie would set him free. Henry plays him with a quivering, furious integrity, but also enough flawed humanity that he never turns into a symbol.
While Henry showed off his tank of a body in Green Day's American Idiot earlier this year, he now gets to prove what kind of dramatic ammunition he is packing in numbers like Nothin', in which, stuck in an impossible situation, Haywood performs a brutally slow, mocking shuck-and-jive.
Kander's catchy music – a mix of ragtime and American folk song – is effectively undercut by Ebb's lyrics. A song like Southern Days is beautiful, even as its ironic lyrics aim to wring all the nostalgia out of standards like My Old Kentucky Home that owe their origins to minstrel shows.
Stroman, who showed that nothing succeeds like excess with The Producers, here directs with impressive economy. With a few quick movements, the cast transforms the simple set of chairs and wooden planks into, for instance, a train chugging out of Chattanooga with tambourines for wheels.
Her most chilling staging comes during Electric Chair, a dream tap ballet in which the youngest of the boys (the naturally talented Jeremy Gumbs) has a nightmare about his upcoming execution that turns into what seems like a mad Mickey Mouse cartoon (Mickey being one of the few remaining pop-culture icons still to bear the traces of minstrelsy and blackface).
While Stroman's choreography and the energetic performances keep tempting you to enjoy The Scottsboro Boys's spectacle, the form the show takes never allows you to do so with a clear conscience.
The minstrelsy aspects – including a scene in blackface – have proved controversial, with small protests organized outside the show on recent weekends. But the cast's twisted portrayal of the women who made the accusations and the boys' Jewish lawyer are more potentially offensive than anything involving the African-American characters, whose side the show takes unequivocally.
Soon enough, Ali builds a friendship with a featured dancer (Julianne Hough), finds an enemy in a troubled, jealous performer (Kristen Bell), and garners the affection of Jack (Cam Gigandet), a bartender and fellow musician. With the help of a sharp-witted stage manager (Stanley Tucci) and gender-bending host (Alan Cumming), Ali makes her way from the bar to the stage. Her spectacular voice restores The Burlesque Lounge to its former glory, though not before a charismatic entrepreneur (Eric Dane) arrives with an enticing proposal…
Burlesque opens November 24th.
United Airlines has unveiled "The Oprah Winfrey Show" farewell season plane to honor the iconic talk show host's 25th and last season on CBS before embarking on running her own cable channel.
The Boeing 757 aircraft is newly painted with imagery from the TV show. The interior also has been redecorated and passengers will be greeted by a special onboard video welcome from Winfrey.
At a send-off event Thursday at Chicago O'Hare International Airport, customers heard a special message from Winfrey before boarding the flight. One passenger will win enough United Mileage Plus miles for a trip around the world. Each customer on the inaugural flight also received a monogrammed "Oprah 25" fleece blanket.
In conjunction with the unveiling of plane, United is launching the "Million Mile Giveaway" -- a sweepstakes that will award one million United Mileage Plus miles to one winner each month through May 2011. Additional prizes include Oprah Store e-cards. Details for the sweepstakes can be found at the airline's dedicated microsite for the promotion: www.unitedmillionmiles.com.
United will fly the plane to and from cities in United's domestic network through May 2011. At the end of the show's season, the plane will be repainted.
Customers and "Oprah" show viewers are encouraged to take photos of the plane and upload them to the plane photo gallery on the sweepstakes Web site. Initial photos on the site include shots of the artists painting the outside of the plane.
Q&As about the plane on United's Web site include: Q: Will Oprah Winfrey be on the Plane? A: No. Oprah Winfrey will not be on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" Farewell Season Plane. However, unique to the plane will be an onboard video welcome from Oprah Winfrey.
"As Chicago's hometown airline, United is proud to celebrate The Oprah Winfrey Show's Farewell Season with our customers, employees and 'Oprah' show fans," said Mark Bergsrud, senior vice president of marketing for United, in a statement. "This unique plane represents the global reach of two great Chicago icons."
