Bad Lieutenant: The Musical

From: The Hollywood Report; 5/21/10

Cage Drops Lieutenant

Nicholas Cage (The Rock) has announced he is to step down from the starring role in the forthcoming multi-million dollar Broadway adaptation of his own hit movie Bad Lieutenant; Port of Call New Orleans.

Bad Lieutenant! which was due to open next month, will be directed by Greg Zhalick (Mapplethorpe!); chosen because of his unconventional stagings of Irreversible and The Borrowers and features a number of original songs by Marvin Hamlish (The Way We Were). Cage, who would have been singing on stage for the first time in his career, would have been belting five new numbers written expressly for him including; ‘Crack Rock’, ‘You’re a bad girl baby (but you’re good to me)’ and the titular ‘I’m a bad, bad, bad Lieutenant’:

‘I like guns, I like drugs, I like prostitutes,

I’m on the street lookin’ for old ladies to shoot,

Yeah I’m a bad, bad, bad Lieutenant

Chorus: All the way from New Orleans!

Yeah I’m a bad, bad, bad Lieutenant’

©Zube Productions 2009

The production will be rescheduled with the lead being taken by relative newcomer Zed Rippton (The Rock!). It also features Biff Hipshorn (Mamma Mia 2: The Legacy) as his imaginary sidekick Iggy the Hallucinated Iguana and Duine Bensey (Alas Smith and Jones!) as Golden-hearted Nancy, his prostitute girlfriend. Some of the songs are already generating buzz on the ‘net especially the show stopping: ‘Don’t point that gun at me young man’ and the sultry ‘I’m not resisting, officer’.

The songs were written by Hamlish for the movie under its production title; ‘Werner Herzog’s Able Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant; Port of Call – New Orleans: The Musical’ but they were dropped for the sake of coherence. Cage’s reasons for dropping the role are unclear although it’s widely rumoured that he has accepted a lucrative contract to appear in a sequence of in-house infomercials for Satan himself.

My letter to Karen Jennings (Labour candidate for Hornsey and Wood Green)

Dear Karen,

I live in Bounds Green and am writing to wish you luck in the upcoming election. I will be voting for you after having voted Lib Dem in the previous election and in spite of my general disappointment with the party.

I don’t imagine you’ll have chance to read this before the election, I hope you are out foot-slogging and winning votes door to door. But I’d like to express my sense of political disenchantment, and hope you will understand that I cannot vote for a party I believe in without expressing my disquiet at its recent behaviour.

While recognising that political parties campaign in poetry and govern in prose, I can’t help but feel that Labour has strayed from its core values in the last eighteen years. Dropping clause four felt to many like a capitulation; as though a generation of punishing political effort directed towards putting social equality on the political main-stage had simply been washed away.

I am a thirty year old student studying politics and have lived in this borough my entire life. I was a child when the Conservative government shut down the GLC, but I remember the sinking feeling which accompanied it. There was a sense that the people running our country were unaccountable and simply, fundamentally against us. When Labour took power in 1997 we felt a sense of euphoric release, but it was mixed with uncertainty.

As my generation has reached maturity many of us have simply failed to find a political expression of our ideals. We cannot find inspiration in a party with a compromising agenda which promises change while refusing to make tough, principled decisions on key issues. We are being attracted to a Liberal party which hides it’s cynicism behind cautiously selected, shop-window policies. We are naturally suspicious of a government which supported a dubious war, which rolled back banking oversight in the first place, which has committed itself to replacing Trident.

I believe that Labour is the only party which can embody the changes we need to see in this country and I will be rejoining the party, perhaps too late in the day now, and voting for you on May 6th. But I will do so in the knowledge that I am nearly alone amongst my peers.

I will support Labour, even in opposition, but my support won’t come for free.

I believe that central government is a closed shop, uncommunicative and unresponsive to the rank and file of the party. I believe this situation is as much me and my generation’s responsibility to remedy as it is the party’s. We have allowed ourselves to be excluded and failed to make our voices heard and it has backed us into a corner where we (or many of us) will be voting for a party that does not share our values, thereby allowing a party who is actively opposed to them into power.

My generation badly needs something to believe in and the Labour party will need us to survive. Please let me know how I can help in the future.

Yours truly,

J W