![]() ![]() Yes, you read that right! The Athenian Inn, which was founded by the three Pappadakis brothers, who hailed from Greece – hence the “Athenian” in the name – first opened over one hundred years ago, in 1909. ![]() As you can imagine, I could NOT wait to see those photographs for myself! So, after grabbing a coffee at the very first Starbucks store, which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, Kerry, her husband Jim, the Grim Cheaper, and I all headed across the street to Pike Place Market, where the Athenian Inn has been located for over a century. And two, because fellow stalker Kerry had previously visited the place and told me that there were numerous photographs of the filming displayed on the restaurant’s walls. One, because as I’ve mentioned before, Sleepless has long been one of my very favorite movies. I had been absolutely dying to stalk the restaurant for what seemed like years for a couple of reasons. “Sleepless,” however, might be the first musical to use a song titled “Rock Stars” to describe two characters in mourning.Another location at the very top of my Must-Stalk-While-in-the-Pacific-Northwest list was the Athenian Inn Seafood Restaurant and Bar, which made a brief, but quite memorable appearance in the 1993 romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle. With “Sleepless,” songwriters Ben Toth and Sam Forman gives us an array of song titles that define the word “generic”: “We’re Doing Fine,” “Stuck Here,” “We Can Make It,” “Look at Me Now” and “Something’s Calling Me.” There’s a word nobody uses anymore to describe these tunes: “jingles.” And when a character sings “a new inning,” you know that “spinning” and “beginning” are soon to follow. In “ West Side Story,” the Tony character lets us know “Something’s Coming.” But that’s Bernstein and Sondheim. Otherwise, they’re just kind of marking time, yearning half-heartedly for somebody or something. That moment never arrives in the musical “Sleepless” because Sam and Annie spend most of their stage time with a girlfriend Victoria (Katharine Leonard) and a fiance Walter (Robert Mammana) they don’t much care about. In good musicals, characters generally break into song because the emotional stakes are so high that merely speaking the words no longer suffices. It helps if you’ve seen the movie before seeing the musical, which makes seeing this musical completely superfluous. That’s the scene in the movie where Annie is driving and falls in love at first listen upon hearing Sam’s voice on the radio talking about his dearly departed wife, and the radio shrink dubs him Sleepless in Seattle. Oh, wait a minute, it’s not a bumper car at an amusement park. ![]() In the musical “Sleepless,” it’s not clearly established in the beginning that Sam (Tim Martin Gleason) and Annie (Chandra Lee Schwartz) actually live in different cities, or that Sam’s wife is dead, or why he and son Jonah (the big voiced Joe West) take up residence on a house boat, or what Annie is doing in a bumper car at an amusement park. If ever there were characters who had no need to sing, they are Sam of Seattle and Annie of Baltimore, the now-unfortunate would-be lovers of “ Sleepless in Seattle - the Musical,” being given its world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse. ![]() “Sleepless,” the movie, ran on the fumes of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan’s charm and the slight conceit that they played lovers who didn’t really meet until the movie’s final minutes. The 1993 romantic comedy “Sleepless in Seattle” has been turned into a stage musical that can best be described as pointless in Pasadena. ![]()
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