WALL-E to honor Jerry Herman at Tony Awards

Posted by brandy

on June 4, 2009M at 10:13 pm

Film WALL-E Jerry Herman

WALL-E

Jerry Herman Andrew Stanton

The Disney/Pixar character WALL-E will reportedly participate in Sunday night’s Tony Awards as part of a tribute to “Hello, Dolly!” composer Jerry Herman.

According to Broadway World, Herman will be honored at this year’s Tony Awards with a special lifetime achievement award. The Tonys will air Sunday night on CBS.

The rumor is that Disney’s Living Character Initiative version of the quirky robot will introduce the “Hello, Dolly!” portion of the tribute to Herman.

The movie “WALL-E” features two songs from “Hello, Dolly!” that are adored by the lonely, trash-compacting robot. WALL-E loves watching Michael Crawford singing the show’s classic songs “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes A Moment” in the 1969 film version of the musical. “WALL-E” won the Oscar for best animated film of 2008.

Herman also is the composer-lyricist behind the musicals “Mame” and “La Cage aux Folles.”

Last summer, I talked to “WALL-E” director Andrew Stanton about why he picked Herman’s songs for the Pixar film, which is set in a distant future in which humans have abandoned the trash-covered Earth.

“I came up with this idea of wanting to have old-fashioned music juxtaposed with the future. I just thought that that was a great contradiction and just interesting. I hadn’t sort of seen those two flavors put together,” Stanton told me in a one-on-one interview in Houston.

“It was just sort of for aesthetic reasons that I liked it at first, but then I started to put a little bit more weight on what I thought would be the more substantial reason to use these songs. And then I started realizing that I could use them as devices for the actual storytelling, ways to convey to the audience what WALL-E’s thought process was and why he was thinking certain ways.”

The two-time Oscar winner said he was combing iTunes and remembered doing “Hello, Dolly!’ when he was into musical theater as a kid. He thought the opening line of “Out there …” from “Sunday Clothes” was perfect to open a sci-fi film.

“It’s about two nerdy guys that have never been out in the world and all they want to do is really go out and experience life and kiss a girl and I thought, that’s perfect,” Stanton said.

When he looked at the film footage of “It Only Takes a Moment,” he was struck by the way the couple clasps hands at the end.

“I thought that is the best device I could ever use for characters who can’t say I love you to show that they do,” Stanton said.

WALL-E and his robotic love interest, EVE, have limited vocabularies in the film, so it will be interesting to see how WALL-E pulls off an introduction at the Tonys.

-BAM

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