Other Successes
Ben Folds, an American singer-musician-songwriter and judge on NBC's a cappella vocal-group competition series The Sing-Off, credited Sedaka on his "iTunes Originals" album as an inspiration for song publishing. Hearing Sedaka had a song published by the age of 13 gave Folds the goal of also getting a song published by his 13th birthday, despite the fact that Sedaka did not actually publish his first song until he was 16.
In 1985, songs composed by Sedaka were adapted for the Japanese anime TV series Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. These included the two opening themes "Zeta - Toki wo Koete" (originally in English as "Better Days Are Coming") and "Mizu no Hoshi e Ai wo Komete" (originally in English as "For Us to Decide", but the English version was never recorded), as well as the end theme "Hoshizora no Believe" (written as "Bad and Beautiful"). Due to copyright, the songs were replaced for the North American DVD.
In 1994, Sedaka provided the voice for Neil Moussaka, a parody of himself in Food Rocks, an attraction at Epcot from 1994-2006.
A musical comedy based around the songs of Sedaka, titled Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, was written in 2005 by Erik Jackson and Ben H. Winters; it is now under license to Theatrical Rights Worldwide.
A biographical musical, Laughter in the Rain, produced by Bill Kenwright and Laurie Mansfield, starring Wayne Smith as Sedaka, had its world premiere at the Churchill Theatre, in the London borough of Bromley, on 4 March 2010. Sedaka attended the opening and joined the cast onstage for an impromptu curtain call of the title song.
Read more about this topic: Neil Sedaka
Famous quotes containing the word successes:
“Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground where other men’s aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind; feet is he to the lame. His failures, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)