Drew Gasparini is a composer who has been writing Broadway scores for more than a decade-and-a-half. He shared that in mid-2018 the producers from Gorgeous Entertainment were reaching out to his agents asking about his interest in submitting songs for a new musical production of The Karate Kid. Drew said, “I rolled my eyes because I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of the musical and how silly it sounded.” He talked about how we are in an age on Broadway where there are a lot of movie adaptations that look like cash grabs for producers. He admits he was one of those artists who had his nose in the air at that entire idea. “Thankfully,” he recounts, “the producers kept persisting and asking him for songs for 6-months. Frankly, I really don’t know what it was about my music that they saw as connecting tissue to this piece.”
Emi Wada, the Japanese costume designer who won an Oscar for her work in Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran,” has died, Japanese media reports said Sunday. She was 84. Wada died Nov. 13, the reports said, citing unidentified family sources and not giving the cause of death. Wada was catapulted to stardom by the samurai costumes she…