A Hovering Dream: The Mark Morris Dance Group in Toronto

Mark Morris Dance Group performing L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (Photo by Ken Friedman.)

Brooklyn’s Mark Morris Dance Group closed the 2013 edition of Toronto’s Luminato Festival last weekend with a bang. The 20-member company performed the Canadian debut of one its signature works, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, set to the eponymous George Frideric Handel oratorio. On this occasion, it was played live by Toronto’s baroque orchestra and chamber choir, Tafelmusik, and conducted by Jane Glover with soloists Karina Gauvin, Shannon Mercer, Thomas Cooley and Douglas Williams gorgeously singing the set of odes by English poet, John Milton.

Recognized as one of the greatest American choreographers of the late 20th century, Morris is inspired by music, first. To have at his disposal an orchestra of such a high calibre, every inch as committed to the music at hand as he is, produced fireworks. The audience at Toronto’s Sony Centre jumped to its feet following the first of three shows which commenced last Friday night. As the crowd dispersed into the night, people could be heard exclaiming how moved they were. (The words “beautiful” and “spectacular” hung in the air.) Morris, who took a curtain bow with his dancers, grinning from ear to bearded ear, dressed in sandals, a long scarf and flowing white shirt with pants, was likely not surprised. Since its debut in 1988 as a sprawling, epic-style work performed in bare feet which he created when he was a 32-year-old dance director of Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato has risen to among the top of the heap of original dance creations. The work is a modern masterpiece.

Mark Morris's Pepperland: Getting High

Mark Morris Dance Group in Pepperland. (Photo: Gareth Jones)

Pepperland, American choreographer Mark Morris’s latest work, is a new Beatles-inspired dance and, to paraphrase the Fabs, it takes you on a boat on a river to travel back to a not-so-distant time when patchouli scented the air and love was all you needed to change the world. Inspired by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but taking its title from the George Martin instrumental in the animated film Yellow Submarine, the Beatles project which soon followed the 1967 record that Rolling Stone calls the greatest rock album of all time, the nearly hour-long work reimagines the Swinging Sixties as a Technicolor dream. That's how Paul McCartney once described the decade he and his bandmates not only dominated but redefined. Accordingly, the mood is nostalgic in a sunny, giddy, carefree sort of way. The dancing, dexterously and whimsically performed by 14-members of the Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group, skips and leaps and somersaults. The direction is up.

Notes from the Other Side: The Evil Hours and The Invisible Front

US soldiers participating in the Yoga For Veterans program. (Photo: Give Back Yoga Foundation)

“No other people in history has sent as many (soldiers) as far away with as little sacrifice demanded of the average citizen as we do. No other people in history is as disconnected from the brutality of war as the United States today. Were the truth of war to become apparent to Americans, we wouldn’t continue to train, equip, and deploy warriors the way we do. Nor would we ask them when they came home if they killed anyone.”
—David F. Morris, The Evil Hours.
 
“Must you carry the bloody horror of combat in your heart forever?”
—Homer, The Odyssey, cited by Yochi Dreazen in The Invisible Front.

 
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was officially recognized in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in large part because of a decade-long campaign by Vietnam veterans to secure wider knowledge and research into the affliction they suffered. But as David J. Morris asserts in his compelling The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), psychological trauma has always been “part of the human condition,” but badly misunderstood. Part memoir, cultural history, investigation into the scientific research and critique of modern treatment, Morris interweaves the wisdom of psychoanalysts, poets, novelists and historians, with his own struggle with post-traumatic stress. Recognizing that most PTSD sufferers are not veterans, Morris supplements his “biography” with the stories and insights of non-military victims of PTSD, including natural disaster survivors, mountain climbers, and raped women, thereby imbuing his study with a wider human dimension.

The Unwatchable Watchable: Errol Morris' The Unknown Known

Errol Morris (and his subject) in The Unknown Known

Film director Errol Morris once worked as a private investigator and his best part is his investigative-journalist side – the muckraking detective. While planning a documentary about a forensic psychiatrist who became notorious for his “expert witness” testimony in capital punishment cases, he happened to come across a death row conviction that didn't smell right and made a film (The Thin Blue Line) that ended up getting an innocent man released from prison. But Morris’ reputation as one of the greatest living filmmakers, and very likely the greatest living specialist in documentary feature filmmaking, isn't based mainly on 25-year-old headlines generated by his breakthrough movie. It’s based on his being a “stylist” – on his artistic pretensions and the easily recognizable visual and aural tics that make up his style.

Morris has been known to reject the term “documentary” in favor of “nonfiction film,” because he feels that having his movies called documentaries lumps them in with films shown in classrooms and on public television. Frederick Wiseman may well be the most important documentary filmmaker of the past fifty years, but if you happened to walk past a TV set while High School or Basic Training was showing, you could take a glance for a few random seconds and mistake them for a clip from any old TV news show. Morris’ movies look and sound like Errol Morris movies. How impressed you are by the fact that, more and more, they all look and sound like the same Errol Morris movie may depend on whether you use the word “auteur” in casual conversation.

Another Heiress: Victoria Stewart's Rich Girl

Amelia Broome, Sasha Castroverde, Joe Short, and Celeste Oliva in Rich Girl. (Photo by Mark S. Howard)

Victoria Stewart’s Rich Girl, which is receiving its Boston premiere at Lyric Stage, is a contemporary version of The Heiress, Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s superb 1947 dramatization of the Henry James novella Washington Square. Standing in for James’s heroine, Catherine Sloper, a retiring, socially awkward young woman who falls for a fortune hunter, is Claudine (Sasha Castroverde), the titular rich girl who is swept off her feet by an actor and theatre director named Henry (Joe Short). Catherine’s brilliant, icy father, who sizes up her suitor – and whose wisdom about the match is inseparable from what she correctly assesses to be a contempt for her – has become Eve (Amelia Broome), who runs a foundation that employs Claudine and hosts a popular show about finance.

Present Laughter and Pride and Prejudice: Present-Day Laughter

Andrew Scott and Indira Varma in Present Laughter. (Photo: Manuel Harlan)

The relentless updating of classic material continues apace with the Old Vic revival of Noël Coward’s 1942 Present Laughter (recently broadcast in the NTLive series) and Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, currently being performed at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. Present Laughter stars Andrew Scott as Garry Essendine, the narcissistic stage star Coward wrote as self-parody and starred in himself in the West End. The director, Matthew Warchus, has queered the material by making Garry explicitly bisexual and gender-switching the roles of his backer, Hugo, and his wife Joanna, still an outsider to Garry’s inner circle, who almost ruins everything by first carrying on an affair with Garry’s producer, Morris, and then seducing Garry himself. In this version, Hugo has become Helen (Suzie Toase) and Joanna is now Joe (Enzo Cilenti), so his dalliances with both Morris (Abdul Salis) and Garry are same-sex. Plus, as Garry reveals in the last act, Helen is sleeping with another woman.

Sweet Charity: Manhattan Waif

Julie Martell (centre) with the cast of Sweet Charity, at Niagara-on-the-Lake's Shaw Festival. (Photo by David Cooper)

The 1966 musical Sweet Charity is built around a debased modern version of a fairy-tale heroine, an eternally optimistic New York taxi dancer who falls for men who invariably let her down. The book, which Neil Simon based on the great Fellini movie Nights of Cabiria, employs the Manhattan setting to localize Charity’s story, just as Fellini made use of Rome; one episode, where Charity, in the right place at the right time, finds herself on an improbable date with a dishy Italian superstar who’s just quarreled with his paramour, is straight out of the film. But Simon and the songwriters, Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, and the director-choreographer, Bob Fosse – who conceived the project as a vehicle for his frequent muse and one-time wife Gwen Verdon, a magnificent show dancer with an endearing cracked voice full of burgundy bubbles – softened the narrative. Cabiria (played, unforgettably, by Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina), is a hooker who pictures herself living out the last act of a romance; the first man who treats her like a lady, Oscar (François Périer), turns out to be a thief who swindles her out of her life savings. (One of Fellini’s coups is the way he uses a pair of props, a cigarette and a pair of shades, to suggest a sinister side to Oscar moments before Cabiria intuits his true intentions.) In the musical, Oscar is a timid, earnest fellow Charity connects with when they’re trapped in an elevator together; their courtship takes them all over the city, including a hippie church and Coney Island).

East End Identity Crisis: The Infidel (2010)

Archie Panjabi, Omid Djalili and Amit Shah in The Infidel (2010).

"Look not at what a man has done, but what he hopes to do."

– Mahmud's four-year-old daughter, in The Infidel.

The Infidel (2010) tells the story of Mahmud Nasir (played with grumpy charm by British comedian Omid Djalili), an East London British-Pakistani family man, who discovers upon the recent death of his mother that he was adopted and (to his dismay) that he was born Jewish. The resulting crisis of identity leads him to try to track down his birth parents, with the help of his equally ill-tempered American Jewish neighbour Lenny (Richard Schiff, of West Wing fame). At the same time, his moderate Muslim life is unsettled by the imminent visit of his son's future father-in-law, a hard-line Egyptian cleric named Arshad Al-Masri (played by Israeli actor Yigal Naor, HBO's House of Saddam), who is coming to make sure that his daughter's new family are, as Mahmud's precocious four-year-old daughter puts it, "Muslim enough." These twin pressures lead to a slapstick process by which Mahmud alternately tries on both identities, and finds that neither truly fits. It is an amusing – sometimes hilarious – fable, told with a gentle, prodding eye on hypocrisy and all the holier-than-thou ways we often police one another's behaviour without taking our own into account.

Produced in the UK on a small budget, The Infidel was directed by Josh Appignanesi (whose only other feature is 2005's haunting Jewish-themed Song of Songs) and written by David Baddiel. In 2010, the movie created some buzz at the Tribeca Film Festival and ultimately became a modest hit in theatres worldwide (even inspiring a 2015 Bollywood remake). In 2014, Baddiel launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund his own stage musical adaptation of the script, which would eventually premiere at London's Theatre Royal Stratford East replete with songs by Erran Baron Cohen. But it is the original film that bears revisiting, especially at the close of this dark year.

The House that Tina Fey Built: Women Take Charge of the New Fall Sitcoms of 2011

Tina Fey

We are now firmly in the second week of the new fall TV season, and so far one thing seems clear: quirky and complicated women seem to be taking over our airwaves. Beginning in mid-October, ABC will offer two new comedies with a male perspective, Last Man Standing and Man Up – both promising to look at the modern beleaguered man. But for now, September is awash with new sitcoms boasting an array of strong, funny women: Zooey Deschanel in New Girl on Fox; Kathryn Hahn in Free Agents, and Whitney Cummings in Whitney on NBC; and Kat Dennings in 2 Broke Girls on CBS.  

Strong female characters are of course nothing new in the history of the American sitcom: Gertrude Berg (The Goldbergs) and Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy) basically invented the situation comedy in the early 1950s, playing women who were brazen, funny, and regularly willing to make themselves the joke. But as the TV mother and wife evolved through the decades, fallible and funny women characters were generally replaced by the long-suffering and inordinately pretty wives of fallible and funny men – roles like Mary Richards, Maude Finlay, and Roseanne Conner became the exception instead of the rule. No doubt emboldened by the critical and ratings successes of Tina Fey (30 Rock) and Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation), executives have clearly decided that perhaps it is time to return to their roots. And generally speaking, the viewers are all the better for it – though as usual, not all the new shows are equally worth our time.

Neglected Gem #71 – Babe: Pig in the City

Those who went to Babe: Pig in the City in 1998 – George Miller’s sequel to his great 1995 Babe – to see another naturalist’s adventure set on the Hoggett farm had their expectations upended. Miller and his co-writers, Judy Morris and Mark Lamprell, clearly had no interest in repeating the achievement of the first film. Though Pig in the City begins with a farm-wide celebration of Babe’s sheep-herding triumphs, within the first few minutes Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) is confined to his bed in a cast and a neck brace following a nasty fall down a well – a consequence of a miscalculation on Babe’s part about how best to help “the boss.” Then the bank threatens to foreclose on his property and Hoggett’s beloved pig-faced wife Esmé (Magda Szubanski) hatches a plan to enter Babe in a fair, which requires an international plane trip, and takes Babe away from all of his farm companions, the familiar supporting cast of the first Babe (as well as, of course, Hoggett himself). Mrs. Hoggett’s scheme is set off course when a drug-sniffing customs hound at the airport decides to show off for Babe’s benefit and gets the boss’s wife detained for dope smuggling; by the time customs clears her she and Babe have missed their connections. With no imminent flight available to return them home, they trudge over to the only hotel in the vicinity that welcomes pets. But circumstances conspire to separate Esmé and Babe. First their suitcase and then Babe himself are kidnapped by a family of chimps on the floor below – and one solemn, laconic orangutan, their Uncle Thelonius. They perform with the concierge’s Uncle Fugly Floom (Mickey Rooney, in a wondrous, absurdist Keatonesque cameo), a dilapidated vaudevillian who’s been reduced to entertaining in the children’s wards of hospitals. Then Esmé gets into more trouble with the law (don’t ask). Like Babe’s stint in Fugly’s act, it’s only temporary. But the separation is enough to throw Babe into the cold city of Metropolis, where animals who have been set loose by their humans are as likely to starve as not, and where the prevailing spirit is – if you’ll forgive me – dog eat dog.

Summer Musicals: Rock and Roll Man and The Light in the Piazza

The cast of Rock and Roll Man: The Alan Freed Story. (Photo: Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware)

Rock and Roll Man: The Alan Freed Story is a new jukebox musical, currently in a Berkshire Theatre Group production at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, about the DJ who coined the term “rock and roll” and helped to promote what had been called “race music” and kept off white radio stations. Freed was a tireless supporter of African American artists like Little Richard and Chuck Berry; when their songs were covered by white-bread singers like Pat Boone, he refused to play the white versions, and he featured them prominently in the concerts he produced. But his career was shattered in the late fifties by payola and copyright scandals, and he died from the effects of alcoholism at the age of forty-three, in 1965. (You can see him in cameos in the mid-fifties movies Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock, as well as a few others; Tim McIntire played a character inspired by him, memorably, in the nifty 1978 Floyd Mutrux picture American Hot Wax.)

Performance, Perspective, Emotion: Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell

 

It’s a truism that when actors make a career shift into directing, the strength of the movies they make is usually in the performance factor. The most recent example is Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet from last Christmas, a silly, sentimental comedy about retirees at a home for aging musicians that manages to stay afloat through a combination of the actors in front of the camera and the musicians on the soundtrack. Sarah Polley is a beguiling case, though. The movies she’s directed, Away from Her and especially Take This Waltz, find not only their shape but also their meaning in the performing rhythms of their female stars, Julie Christie and Michelle Williams respectively. In Away from Her, the more conventional of the two pictures (though hardly conventional by comparison to anyone else’s movies), about a woman’s entering an Alzheimer’s facility and her husband’s learning to accept it, Polley, a gifted actor herself, seems at first to be surrendering the movie to Christie – a choice that only makes sense for a debut filmmaker working with one of the greatest instinctual camera performers in the history of the medium. But it’s not as simple as that. The way Polley gets at the character’s altered approach to ordering the world around her while retaining the essential mystery of what she’s going through – since the prevailing consciousness of the movie is really that of the husband (beautifully played by Gordon Pinsent), not the wife – shows the already considerable skill and dominant presence of a talented director. (The balance Polley achieves with the two principal characters recalls Richard Eyre’s work with Judi Dench as the Alzheimer’s-afflicted writer Iris Murdoch and Jim Broadbent as her husband in the unjustly ignored Iris.)

High Comedies: Six Degrees of Separation and Present Laughter

Allison Janney and Corey Hawkins in Six Degrees of Separation. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The current Broadway revival of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation begins badly and doesn’t find its feet until its leading lady, Allison Janney, does – about two-thirds of the way through, during her reading of the speech that gives the play its title. The play, a brilliant high comedy, is about the way a young hustler named Paul disrupts the lives of a number of people whose paths he crosses, most (but not quite all) of whom belong to the New York elite of the last decade of the twentieth century. Paul is an outsider in every conceivable way: he’s black (race in this play equates to class), gay and homeless. When a moneyed M.I.T. undergraduate named Trent Conway picks him up on the streets of Boston and takes him home, Paul makes a deal with him – sex in exchange for information about the prep-school classmates in Trent’s address book, now enrolled at various Ivy League colleges. (Trent is delighted to furnish details: not only does he consider he’s getting fair return for the favor, but his sexuality has always made him feel like an outsider too; he fantasizes that he can turn Paul into such an appealing faux aristocrat that when Trent shows up on his arm everyone will just have to accept them both.) Then Paul presents himself at the doors of their parents, bleeding from a self-inflicted stab wound he says he incurred during a mugging, claiming to know their children. He also professes to be the son of Sidney Poitier, and all of the aristocrats whose homes he’s entered on false pretenses are sufficiently impressed to take him in for the night. Paul is a scam artist and a narcissist; he’s also, it turns out, delusional. He starts to believe he really is Sidney Poitier’s son, and then he believes his other invention: that he’s the illegitimate son of Flan Kittredge, the art dealer who, along with his wife Ouisa, shows him the most kindness. Six Degrees of Separation is about connection and imagination as well as class (a theme of all high comedy). But it isn’t centrally about Paul. He’s the catalyst whose interactions with those he comes across – Trent and the aspiring, adventure-seeking young actor from Utah, Rick (Rick and his wife Elizabeth also take Paul in, when they find him sleeping in Central Park) and the Kittredges – act in various ways on their imaginations. The protagonist of the play is Ouisa, who undergoes the most profound change as a result of meeting him.

Spare Parts: The Criterion Collection Release of Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984)

In British director Alex Cox's 1984 debut cult film, Repo Man, which the Criterion Collection has recently released on regular and Blu-ray DVD, people are long past being stirred by the sunny allure of Los Angeles. They're now well into its shady violence. The L.A. of this cheerfully nihilistic picture isn't even that sunny anymore. The neon-bright daylight skies (shot by the crack cinematographer Robbie Müller) could be lit by the same florescent bulbs that adorn a 7-11. The night scenes come across as black ink blots brightened by sparsely placed street lamps that make the city look about as desolate as its inhabitants. According to Cox, whatever appeal Los Angeles had in its past, by the Eighties it's nothing more than a junk yard of spare parts where people are essentially hanging on to whatever junk they've got left.

This maniacally funny science fiction comedy basically tells us that the dashed dreamers who once littered this west coast paradise are now hostile predators brutally protective of their possessions. And since it's a pretty common joke that people in L.A. only travel in their cars, it's the car that has now become the vehicle of their rage (just as it was in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend). Since the Hollywood hits of the Eighties were usually 'buddy movies' like Lethal Weapon (1987) and 48 Hrs. (1982), Alex Cox satirizes how in those weepies for men the buddies settle their personal conflicts to learn important life lessons about civility. Repo Man features two guys who really don't give a shit about civility (or each other). The only life lesson they learn is the tools to repossess a car in record time to survive the economic downturn. Cox's punk ethos, which is far less self-conscious than it became later in Sid and Nancy (1986) and Walker (1987), is totally refreshing and it clears your head. Repo Man – gratefully – doesn't set out to improve anybody.

Crime and Punishment: Scott Z. Burns’s The Report

Adam Driver in The Report.

After the September 11 attacks, the CIA requested authorization to use what it euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (“EIT” for short) and received authorization from National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to do so in July of 2002. (Not that the agency waited to start torturing – the authorization gave legal cover to what was already happening.) She did so after White House discussions with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, and after the Department of Justice drafted what have come to be known as “Torture Memos,” wherein Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo justified the torture of detainees believed to be involved with the 9/11 disasters. As late as 2010, after President Obama had ended EIT with one of his first executive orders, Cheney and Rice were still denying that the CIA had ever tortured prisoners in its charge.

In 2005, CIA official Jose Rodriguez destroyed videotapes of the torture of two suspects in CIA custody, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Their existence was unknown until The New York Times revealed it in 2007. The report understandably caused outrage, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began to look into it. A young staffer named Daniel Jones reviewed documents covering the same time period and prisoners as the destroyed tapes and discovered that the treatment of the two men was far more brutal than anyone had been led to believe. He also discovered that the torture didn’t work: no actionable intelligence resulted from the horrific conduct.

The shocked committee expanded its investigations, which led to the creation and release of the “Torture Report,” a massive piece of work by Jones and his very small staff, who reviewed over six million documents in the face of CIA insistence that the torture was successful, stonewalling by John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, CIA intrusion into the Senate Committee’s computer networks, and the removal of documents from that network.

It’s Mourning in America (Again): Matthew Perry’s Go On

Matthew Perry stars in Go On, a new comedy series on NBC

“It was a car accident. She was texting. Janie …. was driving – not fast – but at that moment, and it couldn’t wait, she needed to tell me to buy a bag of coffee. So at least it was important.”
             – Ryan King (Matthew Perry), describing his wife’s death in the pilot episode of Go On

Last spring, NBC aired Awake, a fantasy-crime drama with a protagonist struggling with an almost unimaginable loss. As I wrote at the time, Awake’s rich ambitions and complicated narrative technique came as close to anything I’d ever seen on television to telling a sustained story from a mourner’s perspective. One reason was that the fantasy situation itself (its conceit that Det. Britten would effectively alternate one day to the next between two separate realities – one in which his wife had died, and another in which his teenage son had) gave weight and reality to the resistance one often feels in ‘moving on’ after suffering a comparable loss. Though Awake was unfortunately not renewed for a second season, its 13-episode first season still succeeds in telling a powerful, if prematurely abbreviated, story, and it is well worth seeking out.

What was so unique about Awake was that surviving the death of his family member wasn’t simply the situation that set the larger story in motion: it was essentially the substance of the story itself. Though Awake didn’t survive into this new season, it has a surprisingly inheritor in a new series on NBC, in of all things the new Matthew Perry comic vehicle, Go On. In Go On, Perry plays Ryan King, a minor local celebrity with his own sports radio talk show forced against his will into group therapy after the death of his wife Janie, where he finds a mismatched collection of others also trying to live on and survive their own stories of pain and loss. In character-driven sitcoms it is often the details that matter most, and even so early in the season, Go On has exhibited a knack for getting them precisely right. Among the otherwise underwhelming batch of new network comedies this fall, NBC’s Go On is one of the few bright spots.

Musicals Round-up Part I: Niagara-on-the-Lake and London

Kristi Frank and Michael Therriault in the Shaw Festival production of Me and My Girl. (Photo: David Cooper)

This article contains reviews of Me and My Girl (Shaw Festival), Dreamgirls (West End), and On the Town (Regent’s Park).

Michael Therriault is so thoroughly winning and energetic in Me and My Girl at the Shaw Festival that you feel he could carry the production on his back if he had to. The musical is built as a vehicle for the performer who plays Bill Snibson, the Lambeth Cockney who discovers he has inherited an earl’s title and is expected to relocate to Mayfair, and the diminutive Therriault, with his pop-eyed charm and apparently elastic body, claims squatter’s rights to every scene he’s in. Therriault is a well-known Canadian musical-theatre actor (he played Gollum in the musical of Lord of the Rings both in Toronto and in the West End), but the only time I’d seen him before this summer was in Studio 180’s production (in Toronto) of Parade, as the Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, framed for the rape and murder of one of his employees in pre-World War One Atlanta. He was superb, but the role was so downbeat that I didn’t immediately make the connection to the song-and-dance man who plays the lovable, insouciant Bill. Therriault’s peculiar gift is for balancing charisma with modesty – like Dick Van Dyke, though his musical-comedy gifts are more extensive than Van Dyke’s and he’s more believable as a Cockney than Van Dyke was in Mary Poppins.