Neglected Gem: Panic (2000)

Tracy Ullman and William H. Macy in Henry Bromell's Panic.

In Panic, written and directed by the late Henry Bromell, William H. Macy plays Alex, a Los Angeles man who is unhappy. By day, Alex sells mail-order junk (“lawn ornaments, kitchen geegaws, sexual aids”); but by night – or day, as the case may be – he kills people for hire. He didn’t get into the assassination business by accident. He was recruited by his father, Michael (Donald Sutherland), who now spends his semi-retirement coordinating his son’s hits; even Alex’s mother, Deidre (Barbara Bain), has been, in some undefined way, instrumental to the development of the family business and consequent warping of her son. Though he shares a deep rapport with his own son, the inquisitive, gentle-souled Sammy (David Dorfman), Alex and his wife, Martha (Tracy Ullman), are on marital life-support, trading off unpredictably between the affectionate ease and ashen boredom that come with long familiarity. Rapidly approaching a point where he will no longer be able to tolerate his life, Alex takes a breath, finishes his cigarette, and walks in for his first appointment with a therapist (John Ritter), to whom he reveals his secret profession.

Sonic Fantasies: The Incredible Future Music of Conlon Nancarrow

Conlan Nancarrow, composing in his Mexico City home. (Photo: John Fago)

Click here to experience the full Volumes I and II of Conlan Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano.

In 2015 Andrew Katzenstein created a grand profile of the marvelously obscure American composer Conlon Nancarrow for The New York Review of Books, one that firmly situated him where he certainly belonged: in the upper pantheon of experimental musicians and composers if the 20^th century. The title he used (or perhaps his editors imposed), however, the Prince of the Player Piano, somehow struck me as diminishing his true stature by making his sound like a novelty (someone who wrote music to be played automatically like a toy) rather than what he, in my estimation, truly was (an avant-garde composer whose vision was so rigorous that live human beings couldn’t possibly reproduce his intentions).

Granted, the newly reopened Whitney Museum of Art in New York was then hosting an eleven-day festival celebrating the work of this stunning American expatriate (he fled to Mexico at one point to avoid the repercussions of his early Communist leanings) and Katzenstein also shared his appreciation for those innovative and complex “studies” for the pseudo-automated instrumentation which drew on “styles as disparate as jazz and serialism and made use of multiple tempos played simultaneously.” A slightly better title may have been that of the documentary film about Nancarow from 2012, Virtuoso of the Player Piano. But there we again get mired in pitfall which in my opinion mistakenly positions him as a novelty.

Odd One Out: To Kill a Mockingbird at Stratford

Matthew G. Brown as Tom Robinson in Stratford's production of To Kill a Mockingbird. (Photo: David Hou)

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel about racial intolerance in the American South, is now a play at Canada’s Stratford Festival where so much of what is on the written page comes vividly to life. In this, Nigel Shawn Williams’s direction of Christopher Sergel’s 1970 stage adaptation, children play most of the central roles, and they are sensational. Chief among them is Clara Poppy Kushnir, the young girl who plays Scout.

This memorable six-year-old character, familiar to us from required middle school readings of the book, is Lee’s alter ego in the novel. From a child’s straightforward perspective, Scout recounts events in her fictional small town of Maycomb, Alabama, including the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man. Her older brother Jem, meanwhile, wonders aloud why his father, the town lawyer defending the black man in question, isn’t like other dads and not just because he takes the moral high ground. He won’t play sports and he downplays his proficiency with a gun. At Stratford, Jem is played with mounting grit and maturity by Jacob Skiba, who easily forms a sympathetic relationship with his onstage sister.

Music Memory: Steven Hyden's Twilight of the Gods

Author and classic rock aficionado Steven Hyden. (Photo: Uproxx)

Steven Hyden’s Twilight of The Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock (Dey St./Harper Collins) is one of the best books about a life in music from a non-musician that I’ve ever read. His short volume is a blend of memoir, music history and criticism that is so full of wit that it’s hard to resist laughing to oneself on every other page. Here’s the first line: “For as long as I can remember, classic rock has been there for me.” Classic rock? Really? By revealing his love for classic rock albums and its famous performers, Hyden’s book is really a long-winded yet fascinating story about his relationship with music from his early years until the present.

From Somewhere in Asia with Love: Dancing Ninja (2010)

Lucas Grabeel as the titular "martial artist". (Photo: Filmovi s Ruba)

If you search for Dancing Ninja (2010) on YouTube, you'll find three kinds of video. First is the trailer. Second is the entire film, in poor quality, dubbed in French (which I don't speak), sans subtitles. Third is a video review by two people who spend five minutes dismissing the film and 25 minutes recounting its unusual production history. Granted, it really isn't for everyone, or for everytime: I happened to catch it on TV on a lazy Thursday afternoon. Yes, I still have a TV, precisely because I might stumble across films like this – and whaddaya know? I loved this film!

Genre Shift: The Royal Family of Broadway

The cast of John Rando's The Royal Family of Broadway. (Photo: Daniel Radler)

George Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s 1927 The Royal Family is a high comedy classic about a celebrated family of narcissistic actors, three generations of them, whose lives are an ongoing melodrama. Fanny Cavendish, the crusty matriarch, performed for decades on the road with her late husband and is anxious to return and impatient with the health problems that have sidelined her. She views herself as a sort of pioneer, inured to the challenges of the frontier. Her daughter Julie is a Broadway queen, floating from vehicle to vehicle. Her son Tony is a movie star, a matinee idol whose outrageous behavior and sexual conquests have made him a favorite topic for the tabloids. Her brother Herbert has fallen on hard times, professionally speaking, because he refuses to acknowledge his age; rather than taking “gray parts,” he pursues the folly of attempting to beat actors twenty and thirty years his junior at their own game. Julie’s daughter Gwen is poised to follow in her mother and grandmother’s footsteps; she and Julie are about to begin rehearsals together for a new play. The family’s entourage includes their long-time producer and manager, Oscar Wolfe, who entered the business when Fanny’s star burned as brightly as Julie’s does now and who is devoted to all of them, and Bertie’s wife Kitty, a third-rate actress whom neither Fanny nor Julie has ever taken seriously. The play is premised on the struggle, for both Julie and Gwen, between the impulse to settle down with the men who want to marry them (Julie divorced Gwen’s father long ago; he’s barely even spoken of, except as a bad actor) – and their recognition that, finally, the theatre means more to them and they could never settle for ordinary lives.

The Famous Ones, and Everyone Else: Gender & Class in the Novels of Meg Wolitzer

Author Meg Wolitzer. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

"She understood that it had never been about talent; it had always been about money." – Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“The people who change our lives . . . give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don’t feel we’re allowed to be.” – Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

Recently, I discovered a major talent when I read The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer (Riverhead Books, 2018). I was astonished that I had never heard of her before. I mentioned my enthusiasm for it to a friend who had a similar experience with her 2013 book The Interestings so I decided to read it as well. I still wondered why Wolitzer was unfamiliar to me until I read her 2012 essay in The New York Times. Although at that time she had published nine books, she lamented that few female writers of literary fiction are taken seriously by men unless their major protagonist is a male, they write short stories, or they embarked on their writing careers during the women's movement of the 1970s. Perhaps her piece had touched a collective literary nerve, since the publication the following year of The Interestings turned out for her to be a breakout novel, deservedly so, about the lives of both men and women.

Reading these two absorbing novels together has the benefit of revealing certain Wolitzer trademarks: her interest in exploring a broad range of relationships over a large span of time (romance, friendship, that between parents and their offspring, and that between mentors and acolytes); her penchant for fictionalizing a character or situation that will remind readers of real-life personalities or events; her ability to connect the lives of her characters to larger real-life issues such as presidential politics; her interest in the power of cults to prey upon the vulnerable; her fascination with the 1980s AIDS crisis and the 2008 financial crisis; and the fact that her writing is laced by turns with verbal brio, acerbic and funny lines, and astute observations. Above all her novels are character-driven and it would be hard to review them without familiarizing the reader with her characters – sometimes with more detail than I generally prefer – and the trajectory of their lives before addressing the issues that animate Wolitzer.

The Women Who Write: Michelle Dean's Sharp

A close-up of the cover art for Michelle Dean's Sharp. (Photo: Amazon)

The incontestable assertion behind Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (Grove Atlantic; 384 pp.) is that “the forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists.” The book, whatever its minor shortcomings, is a witty, healthy corrective to a myopia that afflicts many of us. An obvious fact of American literature is that it has been overwhelmingly phallocentric in nature, from its romantic traditions to its symbology – not to mention the critical canon, erected by men, that has only in the last few decades begun to be meaningfully dismantled. Even, or especially, for a reader who loves the likes of Melville, Hemingway, and Mailer, the mighty winds of maleness can grow stale and suffocating. One tires of that world of suffering loners, bilious bromance, and bullet-headed misogyny; one needs to immerse oneself in other minds, hear other voices, be maddened and inspired by other egos. And so one falls gladly and hungrily upon the singular works of – oh, I don't know – Shirley Jackson, Zora Neale Hurston, Patricia Highsmith, Vernon Lee, Mary Shelley, Mavis Gallant, Paule Marshall, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Iris Murdoch, Carson McCullers, Muriel Spark, Joyce Carol Oates, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alice Walker, Edith Wharton, Flannery O'Connor, Gertrude Stein, Colette, Alison Lurie, Grace Paley, Dawn Powell, and many others less famous.

If a few names are conspicuously missing from that list, it’s because they are present in Sharp. This critical history is a rogues’ gallery of literary femaleness – even though most of the women in it rightly bristled at being defined as “woman writers.” Dean’s exemplars are, in chapter if not birth order, Dorothy Parker; Rebecca West; Hannah Arendt; Mary McCarthy; Susan Sontag; Pauline Kael; Joan Didion; Nora Ephron; Renata Adler; and Janet Malcolm. Most have at least a few things in common. While some succeeded in other genres, almost all are distinguished for their non-fiction, with fully half reaching eminence via The New Yorker. Several were at the center of at least one major literary controversy (McCarthy’s feud with Lillian Hellman; Adler’s New York Review of Books attack on Kael; the defamation suit brought by one of Malcolm’s subjects). Each was or is noted for, as Dean’s subtitle puts it, “having an opinion”: that is, a contentious opinion, boldly and unequivocally stated. Above and beyond these are other commonalities – of spirit, of temperament – which enabled the women to power through sexist barriers that limited, or shut out altogether, many of their contemporaries. “Through their exceptional talent,” Dean writes, “they were granted a kind of intellectual equality to men other women had no hope of.”

Neglected Gem: The Sterile Cuckoo (1969)

Wendell Burton and Liza Minnelli in The Sterile Cuckoo. (Photo: Getty)

Alan J. Pakula’s first movie, before Klute and The Parallax View and All the President’s Men, was a small-scale adaptation of a first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo by John Nichols, written when the author was only twenty-three and published in 1965. It’s a touching chronicle of a college romance that gets crushed under the weight of passing time and shifting perspectives and the alcohol-soaked traditions of higher education; you feel the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the descriptions of party nights where things go wrong and can’t be put right. But even without the drinking, the relationship between Jerry Payne and Pookie Adams, the first real one for both, is too fragile to survive:

"It got so that we were always off balance together: one second I would love Pookie so much my intestines twinged, the next second I would dislike her intensely and sincerely wish that she would take herself and her wisecracks and go far away. It seemed that gradually our love affair was slipping out of our hands altogether, as if, while our backs had been turned... the magic had mysteriously drained out of it."

Pakula’s movie is a very different animal from Nichols’s book. The screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, reshaped the story to make Pookie – played by twenty-three-year-old Liza Minnelli, already a veteran of stage musicals but in only her second movie role – a freakishly unconventional and deeply neurotic young woman who inhabits her own private world and draws Jerry (Wendell Burton) into it, attempting to lock him inside it and everyone else out. Sargent had been writing for television for nearly a decade and a half, but The Sterile Cuckoo was only his third screenplay, and I think that the fact that the picture was put together by and with relative novices – Burton’s only previous movie role was a walk-on in The Gypsy Moths, though he’d played Charlie Brown on stage – contributes to its freshness, which it has maintained over half a century.

Love, or the Lack of It: Morgan Neville's Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Fred Rogers with the Neighborhood Trolley on the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. (Photo: IMDB)

As a Canadian kid, Fred Rogers wasn’t supposed to be my children’s television mainstay. The afternoon kiddie slot for my generation was the realm of Mr. Dressup (played by Ernie Coombs), whose lighthearted show about costumes, arts & crafts, and puppet pals effortlessly won the hearts of my peers (and inspired more than a few people I know to refer to any large container in their home as their own personal “tickle trunk”). But I didn’t love Mr. Dressup the way most Canadian kids did – I was much more entranced by an American import shown on our local PBS channel about a kind, quiet, genial man, his friends and neighbours, and the things they learned and shared in their neighbourhood. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired right alongside Sesame Street, but it didn’t need to live in such good company to endear itself to me. The show, in the same gentle, unassuming way as its host, did that all by itself.

Thus it was with a level of interest that’s uncommon (but not absent) among my Canadian peers that I watched Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, about the life and work of Fred Rogers, and I was floored by its sensitivity and emotional power (just as I was, and still am, by Rogers himself). And the same unusual sense of subversion I felt as a Canadian who preferred an American kid’s show pervades the film, which depicts Rogers’s kindness and empathy as qualities that probably shouldn’t feel as radical as they do.

A Wing and a Prayer: Ireland's Swan Lake

Alexander Leonhartsberger, Rachel Poirier, and Mikel Murfi in Swan Lake. (Photo: Marie Laure Brian)

An Irish Swan Lake floated into Toronto’s Luminato arts festival for five packed shows only, June 6-10, attracting both awestruck and baffled stares. An evocative piece of dance theatre created by choreographer and director Michael Keegan-Dolan (formerly of Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre) and performed by the 13 dancers, actors and musicians in his Teac Damsa (House of Dance) company, the 75-minute production traversed a nonlinear path (hence the bafflement) and hypnotized with its dream-like sequences of stark, emotionally jarring imagery and performances both precise and raw.

Swan Lake / Loch na hEala remakes Tchaikovsky’s 1875 ballet not as a classical dance with pointe shoes but more as a multidisciplinary creation borrowing from the original to (likewise) explore the struggle between light and dark forces. Merging powerfully poignant contemporary dance with visceral storytelling and an original minimalist score created and performed live on stage by the Dublin trio, Slow Moving Clouds, this extraordinary work appeared as esoteric and stringently crafted as a Yeats poem: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / Above the staggering girl . . . ”

Once More unto the Breach: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2012)

Sabine Azéma  and Pierre Arditi in Alain Resnais’s You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2012).

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Vous n’avez encore rien vu, 2012), Alain Resnais’s penultimate film but in the form of what any other filmmaker would choose as a last film, is a stupendous achievement. Featuring a veritable Who’s Who of the French cinema playing themselves in a film (based on the premise of a play) about a play performed alongside the same play caught on film (which is adapted from an actual play), it manages the rare feat of evoking multiple levels of emotion and intellectual delight with a single conceit.

London and Stratford: The Shakespeare Report

Jack Laskey and Nadia Nadarajah in As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe. (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

While I was watching As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe, the two quotations that kept running through my head – when I wasn’t boiling up with rage or, alternately, feeling like the life had been drained out of me – were the Stage Manager’s casual pronouncement in the third act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, “Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” and Mollser’s query at the end of act one of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars to Nora Clitheroe about whether there’s anyone around with “a titthle of common sense.” What prize collection of idiots would mount a production of Shakespeare’s sublime romantic comedy with a male Rosalind, a female Orlando and a deaf actress as Celia? I say “collection” because, though two people, Federay Holmes and Elle While, are listed as co-directors, the Globe’s modus operandi, under its latest artistic director, Michelle Terry (who plays three male roles in the production), is to assemble a show democratically, with the directors serving more as organizers than as auteurs. Even the costume designer, Ellan Parry, worked with each actor individually to select his or her clothing, items that come from all over because the show isn’t set in a specific period. What this catch-as-catch-can eclectic approach to costume doesn’t explain is why the outfits are so consistently ugly to look at. Were they selected to punish the audience further throughout the three interminable hours of the performance?

Podcast: Interview with Author Monica Hughes (1982)

I think there's no excuse for hiding things [from children]. I've never believed in fairy tales, in the sense of fairy tale as a disguise for reality. I love fairy tale as fantasy, as an expression of creative joy . . . but not for hiding reality.

– Monica Hughes, in conversation with Kevin Courrier (1982)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1982, I sat down with English-Canadian children's and young adult author Monica Hughes.

Born in Liverpool in 1925, Monica Hughes spent her childhood in Cairo, London, and Edinburgh before moving to Canada in 1952. She was the author of over 40 books, including her award-winning Isis Trilogy (1980-1982) and Invitation to the Game (1990). At the time of our conversation, her ninth book, Hunter in the Dark, hads just been published. Her last published work was The Maze, in 2002. Monica Hughes passed away in 2003, at the age of 77.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Monica Hughes as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.

Synchronicity: The Haunting of Renata

Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m the one who is haunted and not her, or not the photographs of this compelling, spooky, charming and frightening photographer. Maybe I like being spooked. I admit it. I search for it, I have an appetite for the melancholy readiness to witness the poetry of everyday life posing right in front of us so brazenly that it’s all but a mirage, ghostly and seemingly invisible to the average happy eye. Most of these arresting images are from 2016.

Neglected Gem: Twilight (1998)

Paul Newman and Susan Sarandon in Twilight (1998).

The writer-director Robert Benton adapted Richard Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool to the screen in 1994, and the movie’s depiction of small-town lives interlocked in a hop-along Rube Goldberg fashion has a lot of charm. The dawdling humor and the performances of the three leading actors, Paul Newman, Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith, almost make up for the way the story is shaped as the salvation of Newman’s character, an irascible old bastard who has to learn the value of his family and of friendship, to face old demons, to patch up his son’s ailing marriage, and to teach his grandson not to be afraid. That’s a hefty load of personal growth for 112 minutes. I prefer Twilight, which Benton made four years later from an original screenplay that he and Russo co-wrote, an autumnal detective noir in which the major characters are all aging Angelenos. Newman is Harry Ross, an ex-drunk ex-cop turned P.I. who’s been living rent-free in the home of the last client who employed him, Jack Ames (Gene Hackman), and his actress wife Catherine (Susan Sarandon). Officially Jack is Ross’s employer, but it’s really a sinecure. Ames’s daughter Mel (Reese Witherspoon) wounded Harry when he tried to get her back – for Ames – after she’d run away with her gold-digger boyfriend, so keeping Harry on the payroll is Jack’s way of compensating him. Mostly he retains Harry as a poker buddy. But he does send him on the occasional errand, and one of these has the feel of a blackmail pay-off – especially when it turns up the corpse of another retired cop (M. Emmet Walsh, who gets a good moment or two of screen time before the picture kills him off).

The Medium of the Message: Form and Function in Documentary Film

A scene from Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson (2016).

Documentaries are often – aesthetically speaking – very, very boring. Man on Wire (2008), which holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, put me to sleep at the theater (though a lack of sleep the night before surely didn’t help). The problem is that, just as a majority of fiction filmmakers think that plot is key and forget the rest, and just as a good number of filmmakers of a more literary bent make the same mistake with character (consider Blue Valentine, 2010), documentaries are often so focused on the truth of their subject matter, and how important it is for it to be spread far and wide, that they prioritize writing an exposé over making a film. Such motivations are noble and worthy, but they are political rather than aesthetic, and as such they can be equally well served using other media. In other words, this common kind of documentary doesn’t consider itself first and foremost a film. Not all documentaries are like this, of course. The Act of Becoming (2015), about John Williams's sleeper-hit novel Stoner, is a good case in point.

How Green is my Cabaret: Ireland’s RIOT at Luminato

RIOT runs until June 16 in Toronto. (Photo: Fiona Morgan)

RIOT, the hit Irish variety show kicking up a storm at this year’s Luminato festival, is just that: a riotously varied free-for-all that’s funny, subversive and wildly entertaining. Created and directed by Jennifer Jennings and Philip McMahon, founders of the Irish theatre company, Thisispopbaby, the globe-trotting sensation debuted at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2016 and is now in Toronto for 18 shows, concluding June 16 at the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre. You’ll likely have to riot to get tickets as strong word of mouth has made them extremely popular. The reason is simple.

Band of Brothers – Michael Barclay’s The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip

Gord Downie performing with The Tragically Hip in Vancouver in 2016. (Photo: Andrew Chin)

Michael Barclay’s biography of The Tragically Hip, published by ECW, is a comprehensive tome about one of Canada’s favourite rock groups and Gord Downie, the band’s popular front man and lyricist, whose final years battling cancer made front-page news. Barclay takes a holistic approach to the tale and invites his reader to think about his book with a smaller narrative arc. He states from the top that “half of this book is a chronological history . . . the other half extrapolates on various themes throughout the band’s 32-year career . . . All chapters are written in a way that they can be read in isolation . . . in whatever order you like.” I’m sure the author had good intentions in setting up his history in this fashion, but it’s bad advice. By creating a split focus, right down non-sequential chapters, he lessens the impact of the book overall.

Barclay’s opening salvo is a successful dissertation on “what makes a band, and especially The Hip, ‘Canadian’.” This particular notion of a so-called Canadian sound continues to be fodder for Canadian critics who need to discuss such things and Barclay is no exception. For him the band’s “Canadianness” is based not only on their subject matter, but on their lifestyle as well; the group relishes its privacy and is friendly to the point of doing the dishes at house parties. In a way, this reduces what being Canadian is to a stereotype and the members of the Hip are polite to a fault.

Effigies of Wickedness!, The Rink, Brief Encounter: Words and Music

Lucy McCormick, Le Gateau Chocolat, Peter Brathwaite, and Katie Bray in Effigies of Wickedness! (Photo: Helen Murray)

When the Nazis staged an exhibition of “degenerate music” in Düsseldorf in 1938, the accompanying manifesto characterized the targeted music – some the work of Jewish and black artists, much of it political and cynical and satirical, some of it experimental – as “effigies of wickedness.” The current co-production of the Gate Theatre and the English National Opera, a cabaret of German songs from 1920 through 1939 but mostly representing the Weimar era (which officially ended with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933), has taken that phrase as its title. This is social and political theatre – Brechtian theatre – at its most potent. In the Gate’s compact Notting Hill space above a pub, four dazzling singer-actors – Peter Brathwaite, Katie Bray, Lucy McCormick and the drag performer Le Gateau Chocolat – and three wonderful musicians (Geri Allen, Cassie Kinoshi and Fra Rustumji), under the direction of the Gate’s artistic director Ellen McDougall and the musical direction of Phil Cornwell, present fourteen songs, most of them translated into English by Seiriol Davies and David Tushingham. Many who love Bob Fosse’s Cabaret may understand that the Kit Kat Klub numbers are imitating a style of commentary art songs that was popular in the late twenties and early thirties, but we know almost nothing from the repertoire of Berlin’s kabarett theatre: the score of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), perhaps a smattering of songs from their Happy End and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929 and 1930 respectively). The only tune I recognized in Effigies of Wickedness! was “Petroleum Song” (lyric by Felix Gasbarra), which Teresa Stratas recorded in her magnificent two-album set of Weill songs nearly thirty years ago. All the others were revelations to me, and every one is a gem. The production illuminates the work of forgotten composers like Misha Spoliansky, Hanns Eisler and Frederick Hollander, whose name may be familiar to Marlene Dietrich aficionados. (He wrote the music for The Blue Angel and, emigrating to Hollywood in the crush of German-Jewish artists fleeing Hitler in the early thirties, worked on several of her American movies as well as many others.)

Gripping Courtroom Drama: Full Disclosure by Beverly McLachlin

Photo: Roy Grogan

Beverley McLachlin retired early this year after serving eighteen years as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, the first woman to hold that lofty position. According to an excellent profile by Sean Fine, McLachlin "shape(d) fundamental rights as much as any judge in the country's history from the legalization of assisted dying to a huge expansion of Indigenous rights to a rebalancing of how police and the legal system treat people accused of crimes."

Inspired by the example of P. D. James, a mystery writer she admired who maintained a day job and wrote by night, McLachlin began in the early hours of the morning for about a year before her departure from the Supreme Court to write a novel that had been percolating within her for over thirty years. The result of that effort is Full Disclosure (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and I am pleased to report that her debut novel is an engaging, well-written, dialogue-driven courtroom drama that has a distinctive Canadian sensibility.

Moving Pictures: Frame by Frame at the National Ballet of Canada

Artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Frame by Frame. (Photo: Karolina Kuras)

Film is a form of dance. – Norman McLaren 

Frame by Frame, a new Canadian ballet about National Film Board animator Norman McLaren, had its world premiere at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on June 1, and with results as variable as the lines and shapes animating one his low-budget, high-impact films. Masterminded by Canadian theatrical powerhouse Robert Lepage in collaboration with the NFB and National Ballet of Canada dancer and choreographer Guillaume Côté, the 110-minute work (whose final performances are this weekend) features 22 company dancers in addition to film, video and theatricalized special effects. But in addition to all the technological wizardry making this a ballet for the digital age, a small wooden body figure, the kind typically used by art students for figure drawing and appearing both at the beginning and the end of the intermissionless show, absorbs your attention. The bendable mannequin serves several purposes in the work, dramatically and thematically speaking.

First, it early on establishes the art-school roots of the Glasgow-born filmmaker who drew image and sound directly onto celluloid to expand the boundaries of creative animation. Second, it underscores McLaren’s deep-set fascination with the expandable kinetics of the human form and with movement in general, the inspiration behind his award-winning moving pictures. Third, being a kind of toy, it helps elucidate the filmmaker’s playful side. Finally, appearing at the end of the ballet as a stand-in for McLaren, who passed in 1987 at the age of 72, the double-jointed model symbolizes the hyper-flexible mind which shaped his long and arrestingly innovative career. It’s a small prop but it speaks volumes about the late Canadian film pioneer, and how well Lepage has read him in creating this, his first full-length ballet.

Recollected in Tranquility: Paterson (2016)

Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in Paterson (2016).

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, CJ Sheu, to our group.

Many reviewers praise Jim Jarmusch's Paterson (2016) for finding meaning in the quotidian. That’s not exactly true. Some reviewers call it a fantasy, and this gets closer to the heart of things. What makes Paterson such a wonderfully coherent and satisfying film, and what makes every shot meaningful, is its cinematic conceit: we are seeing the world as it is perceived by (but not necessarily from the point of view of) the protagonist, a poet named Paterson (an amazingly understated Adam Driver).

Neglected Gem: The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)

Stella Stevens and Jason Robards in Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue. (Photo: Getty)

In a brilliant essay for Critics at Large on women in Sam Peckinpah’s movies, Amanda Shubert wrote that The Ballad of Cable Hogue “distills the romantic spirit at the core of Peckinpah’s sensibility: love without possession.” In the romance between Cable (Jason Robards), who finds water in the middle of the Arizona desert and turns it into a watering hole called Cable Springs for stagecoach passengers, and Hildy (Stella Stevens), a prostitute whom the citizens of nearby Dead Dog run out of town, love without ownership is merely an extension of the transitoriness to which they are philosophically dedicated because they recognize it as the state of things. In the movie’s opening episode, Cable is robbed by his partners, Taggart (L.Q. Jones) and Bowen (Strother Martin) – playing a variation on the bounty hunter roles they created in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch the previous year – and left for dead without water in the desert. He survives four dry days through sheer orneriness while, like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, he keeps up a running monologue to God, assuming that his maker has no intention of letting him die of thirst. He finds water just as he’s about to give up, but the sign of God’s grace at the eleventh hour and the sudden twist in his fortune impart an indelible awareness of morality and the fact that we don’t own time, or our own lives. For Hildy, Dead Dog – a town that deserves its name – where she ekes out a ramshackle existence, seeing customers in a room above the saloon, is merely a way station for her; her destination is San Francisco, and being forced to leave brings it that much closer. She stops by Cable Springs and lives with Hogue for a few blissful weeks – what the characters played by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight would call a “time out” from their lives. She wants him to come with her to San Francisco, but he’s stubborn about waiting for Taggart and Bowen to swing through the desert again so he can get his long-awaited revenge. So she goes on without him. She returns for him three years later, this time to invite him to New Orleans, after he’s had that revenge, or something like it; by now he’s ready to run away with her. But fate has other plans, and Hildy is its unwitting envoy: the chauffeur-driven automobile that brings her slides down a hill, Cable steps in, instinctively, to save Bowen, and he ends up getting run over. Hildy keeps him company during his last days, and leaves after his funeral.

Ballet Extravaganza: Saniya Abilmajinova's Follow Your Dreams

Saniya Abilmajinova with the Ballet Jörgen ensemble performing the Walpurgis Night ballet from Faust. (Photo: Jakub Kracmar)

To celebrate her 15-year dancing career, Saniya Abilmajinova gave herself the gift of a ballet gala which she presented – at her own expense – at the Toronto Centre for the Arts for two performances only, May 19 and 20. The Uzbekistan-born dancer, recently made a Canadian citizen, called her two-hour program Follow Your Dreams, an inspirational title suggesting an unwavering commitment to a personal goal. Rising repeatedly up on her pointes to perform the lion’s share of the work, both classical and contemporary, Abilmajinova never once lost hold of the electrifying elegance which makes her, a tiny dancer with an outsized talent, such a delight to watch.

A graduate of the Choreography College in Moscow, Abilmajinova started her professional career in Russia as a first soloist with the Natalya Sats Musical Theatre, a Moscow-based company specializing in ballet, theatre, and opera productions for children. She quickly distinguished herself, becoming a two-time medalist at the International Ballet Competition in Berlin (the silver in 2005 and the gold in 2007) and a semi-finalist at the International Ballet Competition in Moscow in 2009. That same year, she immigrated to Toronto to join Ballet Jörgen, a touring company routinely taking ballet across the country, often into far-flung communities where professional dance rarely ventures. In Canada, she found her dream job.

Exegesis: The Stalingrad Paintings of Joachim Waibel

Joachim Waibel self-portraited as a moment in his "Stalingrad" series.

I have observed and written about the mixed-media art works of Joachim Waibel for some years now. His style has been, up until now, recognizable as postmodern pop art with a charming conceptual twist and an abundant satirical humour. However, with his latest body of work, the “Stalingrad” series, his work has gone from compelling to utterly mesmerizing, and he has launched it into a darkly stratospheric level of aesthetic quality which is both thought-provoking and deeply emotional.

What does it mean for an artist to be a hero in his own time, or at least the hero of his own life? To an observing art critic and curator, and a lover of powerful images writing in the 21st century such as myself, it means persevering as a painter in the flickering shadows of the digital realm and stubbornly refusing to stop painting, to pick up a camera, video, film or computer equipment. To continue making archaic marks on a textile surface which harks as far back as the medieval period and reaches restlessly forward far into the haptic future. That stubbornness, a creative commitment to pigment and canvas, even when it’s exercised with an almost esoteric and alchemical charm as Waibel’s work does, is what makes an artist of today’s time a heroic figure.

Translations and An Ideal Husband: Classic Plays by Irish Playwrights

Adetomiwa Edun, Colin Morgan, and Seamus O'Hara in Translations. (Photo: Catherine Ashmore)

Brian Friel’s 1980 Translations, one of the great works in the modern repertory, dramatizes the earliest phrase of the Irish “troubles,” nearly a century before the term was coined for the Easter 1916 rebellion. Friel’s play is set in the rural town of Baile Beag in County Donegal in 1833, where the British Army has sent an expedition to draft a new map of the territory that Anglicizes – and implicitly alters irrevocably – the old Irish place names, which memorialize locals long dead, incidents long ago fictionalized, a mythology as well as a history. I last saw the play in a first-rate production by Garry Hynes on Broadway in 2007; the new revival at the National Theatre, directed by Ian Rickson, is just as good, and thanks to the work of the set designer Rae Smith and the lighting designer Neil Austin (as well as Rickson’s expressive staging), it’s even more beautiful to behold. The hedge-school that Hugh (Ciarán Hinds), the aging, alcoholic classics master, conducts in his home with the assistance of his son Manus (Seamus O’Hara) is a downstage playing area in suggested-realist style that morphs into expressionism as the set takes us into the surrounding countryside beyond. As the characters enter, Austin’s lighting silhouettes them against flashes of red, which is especially striking when the British officers, Captain Lancey (Rufus Wright) and young Lieutenant Yolland (Adetomiwa Edun), who is in charge of the actual mapmaking, appear to introduce themselves. When the scene shifts to evening at the top of the second act, specials hover above the stage, creating strange, cylindrical metaphors for starlight, and the field upstage of the hedge-school is dotted with lanterns. Gorgeous.

Podcast: Interview with Cynthia Rhodes (1987)

Patrick Swayze and Cynthia Rhodes in Dirty Dancing (1987).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with dancer and actress Cynthia Rhodes.

At the time, Rhodes had just completed her role as dance instructor Penny Johnson in Dirty Dancing, alongside Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. Rhodes's brief career in film had begun nine years earlier with a small ensemble role in Xanadu (1980). She went on to play Tina Tech in Flashdance (1983) and was then cast opposite Sylvester Stallone in Staying Alive, the appalling 1983 sequel to the 1977 hit Saturday Night Fever. Rhodes's most famous role, however, remains the one she played in Dirty Dancing.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Cynthia Rhodes as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Coming to an End: Recent Series and Season Finales

Lakeith Stanfield, Donald Glover, and Brian Tyree Henry in FX's Atlanta, whose second season ended May 10. (Photo: FX)

Note: This review contains spoilers for the recent series and season finales of Barry, Atlanta, and The Americans.

Late spring has always been an important time for television. Broadcast networks have traditionally timed their season finales to coincide with the crucial May “sweeps” period, when Nielsen collects data on viewership that help to determine ratings. More recently, the finish of the eligibility period for the Emmys, which comes at the end of May, has become a major milestone: the profusion of shows on every conceivable channel and platform means that a nomination can help raise a program’s profile, and those nominations often evince a bias towards whatever’s been airing most recently. It’s impossible to keep up with everything on television these days, but a number of recent season finales – and one major series-ending episode – offer a snapshot of what’s going on in the world of premium and cable shows.

Neglected Gem: The Painted Veil (2006)

Naomi Watts and Edward Norton in The Painted Veil. (Photo: IMDB)

My friend Michael Sragow, who currently writes for the online edition of Film Comment, quipped cleverly when the third adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil was released at Christmas of 2006 that it was the best movie of 1934. He didn’t mean it as a putdown, at least not entirely: the movie, which was written by Ron Nyswaner and directed by John Curran, provides many of the pleasures of old-style Hollywood filmmaking. But Maugham’s 1925 story – about a shallow, self-involved Englishwoman (Naomi Watts) in twenties London who marries a humorless adoring laboratory doctor (Edward Norton) to get away from her mother, moves with him to Shanghai, where she has an affair with a womanizing diplomat from home (Liev Schreiber), and has to pay for her transgression when her husband finds out – is a moral tale in which the adulterous heroine gets punished and learns her lesson. The first movie version actually did come out in 1934, with Greta Garbo and Herbert Marshall in the leads; it was beautifully lit and very dull, and it had a tacked-on happy ending. (Garbo’s most luminous performances were sometimes set in dross, but this isn’t an example.) The second was a 1957 CinemaScope release called The Seventh Sin, with Eleanor Parker and Bill Travers, which I haven’t seen. That the property remained on the shelf for half a century in between evidences the difficulty of making it appealing for a contemporary audience. (Several filmmakers tried their hand at adapting it in the interim, including Philip Kaufman.)