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After 11 episodes of Grease: You're the One That I Want!, Max Crumm and Laura Osnes were named as the leads of the latest Broadway revival of the musical Grease. The reality show attracted an average of only eight million viewers and NBC cancelled it after one season. Some would say that the series was a failure but they might be missing the real bottom line.

You're the One That I Want! is actually based on the British reality show How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?. The series was produced by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (The Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard, etc.) and producer David Ian and was a competition to find the female lead for a West End revival of The Sound of Music. It was successful enough to spawn a spin-off to cast the male lead for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Ian brought the...

NBC has teamed with BBC Worldwide Prods. for a midseason reality series that will have aspiring singers compete for the two lead roles in a Broadway revival of the musical Grease. The show will be titled You're the One That We Want, a variation of the name of one of the most popular songs from the musical, You're the One That I Want, which is performed by Sandy Dumbrowski and Danny Zuko, the two characters that will be cast though the NBC series. The aspiring performers on the show will be judged by Grease co-creator Jim Jacobs; two-time Tony Award-winner Kathleen Marshall (The Pajama Game), who will direct and choreograph the new Broadway production of Grease; and prolific British theater producer David Ian, who shepherded the hit 1993 London revival.

Clear Channel Entertainment said that it is combining its international and North American theatrical operations to "further its position as a leading global theatrical organization." David Ian will serve as chairman of Global Theater, teaming with North American Theatrical CEO Steve Winton and chief operating officer David Anderson as well as European Theatrical chief operating officer Stuart Douglas to lead the division.

Opens

Friday, May 30

Diving into their most realistic and ambitious setting yet, the talents at Pixar have produced an exhilarating fish story in the perfectly cast comic adventure "Finding Nemo". Not as flat-out inventive as "Monsters, Inc". or as sardonic as "A Bug's Life" and the "Toy Story" pics, "Nemo" finds its own sparkling depths, achieving a less mechanical feel than its predecessors through a stripped-down, fluid narrative and new levels of visual nuance.

Pixar vet Andrew Stanton demonstrates confidence and exuberance in his first stint at the helm, working from a script he co-wrote with Bob Peterson and David Reynolds. With the exception of toddlers who might find a few scary moments too intense, kids will get right into the flow of "Nemo", while those viewers old enough to drive will appreciate the plentiful humor designed to sail right over kids' heads -- not least of which is the inspired chemistry between leads Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres. Disney is primed to make a whale of a splash at the summer boxoffice.

The marine milieu calls for more visual delicacy and aural subtlety than in past Pixar features -- challenges the filmmakers have met through the work of myriad technicians and artists. Before taking poetic license with their CG creations (real fish don't have eyebrows), the animators and designers took lessons in ichthyology (among other things), to good effect. Their imagery captures not only the play of light through the ocean's depths but the texture of its roiling surface and the luminescence and character-defining locomotion of its inhabitants. Add to that Gary Rydstrom's meticulous sound design and the grown-up music score by Thomas Newman, and the result is the most complex and fully realized environment of any Pixar film.

"Nemo" dazzles from the get-go, beginning with a pre-credits sequence that might prove more frightening to parents than kids, dramatizing as it does the notion that bad things can happen even in suburbia. Clown-fish couple Marlin and Coral (Brooks, Elizabeth Perkins) have just moved to a nice, quiet neighborhood of the Great Barrier Reef -- a peaceful vista of jewel-toned sponges, anemones and sea grasses, and a good place to raise their 400 offspring, who will soon be hatching. Tragedy strikes, leaving Marlin widowed with one survivor in the fish nursery, whom he names Nemo and swears to protect always.

It's no wonder that Marlin turns out to be a nervous, overprotective father who follows little Nemo (Alexander Gould) on his first day of, um, fish school. Nemo's a spirited kid with an endearing flaw -- a smaller right fin that flutters constantly -- and a healthy sense of rebellion, which he takes to extremes in Dad's anxious presence, venturing off the reef into open waters. A diver promptly snares him as an exotic specimen.

Propelled by his frantic search for Nemo, Marlin ventures farther than he'd ever dreamed of going, joined by good-hearted blue tang Dory (DeGeneres). She's eager to help and unfazable, the perfect complement to Marlin's neurotic timidity, however exasperating her continual lapses in short-term memory become. They're two lost souls: He provides her with a purpose, and she lends the traumatized Marlin a newfound resilience, as well as being able to read the Sydney address on the mask the diver left behind. Their journey to the big city unfolds as a series of set pieces centering on encounters with would-be predators and helpful sea folk.

Nemo, meanwhile, is welcomed into a community of fish-tank eccentrics in a dentist's office not far from Sydney Harbor. A scarred, self-possessed Moorish idol named Gill (Willem Dafoe) is the only one of Nemo's tank mates who wasn't born in a pet shop, and the wide-eyed youngster inspires him to devise the latest in a long series of ludicrous escape plans. The goal is to get Nemo home before the dentist presents him as a birthday gift to his terror of a niece (LuLu Ebeling), a deliciously funny concoction of Brute Force and braces.

There's a built-in poignancy to the dynamic between son and single father that neither the script nor the actors overstate. That Nemo has no expectation his father will lift a fin to find him is the dark center of the story, setting in bright relief Marlin's every dance with danger as he pursues his stolen child. There's an especially perilous dash through a field of translucent pink jellyfish, culminating in a moment straight out of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", with Marlin struggling to keep Dory from falling into a deadly narcotic sleep. But it's not all rough waters: They also luck into the good vibes of surfer-dude turtles who take them through the East Australian Current. Director Stanton is a standout as sea turtle Crush, a mellow dad who teaches Marlin a lesson or two about the parental art of letting go.

The whole cast is aces, with turns from such vibrant talents as Barry Humphries, playing the repentant leader of a self-help group for sharks who are trying to beat the fish-eating habit, and John Ratzenberger as an annoyingly helpful bunch of moonfish showoffs. Geoffrey Rush voices a Sydney pelican who's well-versed in dental procedure, Allison Janney is a vigilant starfish, and Joe Ranft provides a French accent for a finicky shrimp.

But it's the give-and-take between DeGeneres and Brooks that gives the saga its big heart. DeGeneres' character was created with her in mind, so it makes sense that Dory is a fish with freckles, lips and a rueful smile. When, in an episode of lovely, freewheeling lunacy, she insists on communicating with a blue whale in its native language, the combination of vocal calisthenics and facial contortions is sublime.

Her goofy compassion would have only half the impact, however, without Brooks' contrasting nebbish-turned-hero. It's hard to imagine another actor who could deliver lines as angst-ridden and deliriously funny. This is, after all, the tale of a father who not only transcends fear to find his son against all odds but who learns how to tell a joke along the way.

FINDING NEMO

Buena Vista Pictures

A Walt Disney Pictures presentation of a Pixar Animation Studios film

Credits:

Director: Andrew Stanton

Co-director: Lee Unkrich

Screenwriters: Andrew Stanton, Bob Peterson, David Reynolds

Original story by: Andrew Stanton

Producer: Graham Walters

Executive producer: John Lasseter

Directors of photography: Sharon Calahan, Jeremy Lasky

Production designer: Ralph Eggleston

Music: Thomas Newman

Editor: David Ian Salter

Supervising technical director: Oren Jacob

Supervising animator: Dylan Brown

Art directors: Ricky Vega Nierva, Robin Cooper, Anthony Christov, Randy Berrett

CG supervisors: Brian Green, Lisa Forssell, Danielle Feinberg, David Eisenmann, Jesse Hollander, Steve May, Michael Fong, Anthony A Apodaca, Michael Lorenzen

Sound designer: Gary Rydstrom

Cast:

Marlin: Albert Brooks

Dory: Ellen DeGeneres

Nemo: Alexander Gould

Gill: Willem Dafoe

Bloat: Brad Garrett

Peach: Allison Janney

Gurgle: Austin Pendleton

Bubbles: Stephen Root

Deb (& Flo): Vicki Lewis

Jacques: Joe Ranft

Nigel: Geoffrey Rush

Crush: Andrew Stanton

Coral: Elizabeth Perkins

Squirt: Nicholas Bird

Mr. Ray: Bob Peterson

Bruce: Barry Humphries

Anchor: Eric Bana

Chum: Bruce Spence

Dentist: Bill Hunter

Darla: LuLu Ebeling

Tad: Jordy Ranft

Pearl: Erica Beck

Sheldon: Erik Per Sullivan

Fish School: John Ratzenberger

Running time -- 100 minutes

MPAA rating: G...