All Shook Up: Grooving on the Elvis Presley Jukebox

Ryan Mac and the company of All Shook Up. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

The current production of All Shook Up, Joe DiPietro’s parodic jukebox musical, at the Goodspeed Opera House is a homecoming of sorts, since the original version, directed by Christopher Ashley, began there in 2004 before opening on Broadway the following year. It never really caught on in New York; it ran for five months and then toured the country in 2006 and 2007. Seeing the show for the first time in its revival at the Goodspeed, I honestly can’t imagine why it wasn’t a hit from the outset. I can’t say, of course, what the current director and choreographer, Daniel Goldstein and Byron Easley, have brought to the show, but the material is charming and the production is inspiriting. The twenty-five songs were all recorded by Elvis Presley (I recognized most but not quite all of them). The musical revamps the low-budget rock ‘n’ roll movie musicals of the fifties like Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock starring Alan Freed, the DJ credited with popularizing rock. (Freed is also the main character of the vivid 1978 film American Hot Wax, where he’s played, memorably, by Tim McIntire.)

Splat: James Gunn's Superman

Superman (David Corenswet), looking glum. (Warners Brothers.) 

The beginning of James Gunn’s new iteration of the Man of Steel is somewhat promising: Superman (David Corenswet) has intervened to prevent a foreign war, and Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) is running a successful PR campaign to convince people the supposedly apolitical Supe took sides and broke international law. But things rapidly devolve from there. A giant robot machine thingy from the aggressor country is terrorizing Metropolis, except it’s really not a giant machine robot thingy, it’s regular sized, and it’s not really a robot, it’s a supervillain under Luthor’s sway. I’m sure the supervillain’s name was mentioned, but I missed it, and he’s sort of indistinguishable from Luthor’s attack squad, The Raptors, who are either robots or superbeings themselves. Luthor breaks into the Fortress of Solitude and discovers that the message from Jor-el (Bradley Cooper) and Lara (some woman I thought was Lady Gaga but wasn’t) that Superman can only listen to half of—because the second half was damaged—is actually a message telling the Man of Steel to enslave the earth and rule over it. (I’m pretty sure that’s not canon.) Luthor also has a private prison in a “pocket universe” where he keeps his enemies and ex-girlfriends, and there are portals in and out that are in danger of decaying and becoming black holes that could destroy Earth. I think the guards in this prison realm are also Raptors but they might not be. When Superman is captured and put in one of the cells in the pocket universe, there’s a superbeing in his cell who can turn his body into Kryptonite, which is how Supey is kept under control. The superbeing is kept under control because his alien baby is in a cell opposite with someone else who will kill the alien baby if the guy in Superman’s cell doesn’t do what Luthor wants—which, as stated previously, is keep Superman under control. Lex is, of course, a combination of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and it turns out he’s in league with the aggressor country because he wants to develop the lesser one as Trump wants to do with the Gaza Strip. Also the Justice League, which consists of Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) and some really deep cuts from the DC stable, Hawkgirl and Mr. Terrific, is around to help Superman out when needed. Maybe. Green Lantern refers to the group as the “Justice Gang,” and Hawkgirl objects to the name, which you’d better find funny because it happens 87 times. I have no idea what Mr. Terrific’s superpower is, but he’s really good with tech stuff. Not to mention another supervillain called the Engineer—not sure what her powers are either—and a murderous clone of Superman, just for fun. Exhausted yet? I sure am.

Hauntology: Spectral Realism in Literature, Film and Art

(University of Texas Press.)                                   (Duke University Press.)

“What remains to be said about an absence that cannot be undone?”

Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence

“The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living in it from day to day.”

Roberto Bolaño

One dark and storm night, I wanted to find way into the densely obscure and hermetic writing of the late Spanish novelist and essayist Roberto Bolaño and I made it halfway there by sating my obsession for the late American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, his brother from another mother. They were temporal siblings of sorts, eminently talented thinkers and hyperactive writers who ravished their readers with words calculated to astonish and exhilarate. Both were writing concurrently on opposite sides of the world, the first in Chile originally and the second in multiple locations in America. The rest of the way into Bolaño’s gorgeous and terrifying literary dimension I was vouchsafed, as usual for me, via the most unexpected of alternate routes. An additional signpost leading to the capital city of both Bolaño’s and Wallace’s heart was the twin apparition of two books that pointed the circuitous way further in: Haunting Without Ghosts by Julia Martinez and Baroque New Worlds, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup.

Idealism and Identity: Camelot and Out of Character

Dakin Matthews as Pellinore and Ken Wulf Clark as King Arthur in Camelot. (Photo: Daniel Rader.)

Over the years I’ve grown wary of revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical Camelot, but that’s not because, over the six and a half decades since it opened on Broadway, it’s acquired a reputation for having unsolvable book problems. For last season’s production at Lincoln Center, Aaron Sorkin overhauled Lerner’s book – whether in an effort to rescue it or to make it more appealing to a twenty-first-century audience wasn’t clear, but Sorkin’s rewrite was disastrous. It was also unnecessary. I’ve known Camelot all my life and I think it has a script of remarkable depth and substance. As a little boy in love with theatre, I saw it on Broadway with the original cast and I’ve never forgotten the experience. Based on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and set in a magical version of medieval England, the musical is about the birth of idealism and the struggle to keep it alive in a world that defaults so easily to the embrace of human vices. It’s a hunk of a show, all right, but that’s because, like Fiddler on the Roof and Hamilton, it presents a layered, complex narrative with resonant themes embedded in it. And so it makes demands on directors, designers and actors that are perilously difficult to fulfill.

A Few Brief Thoughts on Just a Few More Interesting Short Films

My coverage of short films has fallen off a bit lately, but I’m still keeping an eye out for interesting ones. Here are eight more since my last roundup that I think are worth talking about, listed in the order in which I saw them.

The poster for Drew Marquardt's Act of War.

American Drew Marquardt’s Act of War (2022) is the perfect no-budget student film. On the morning of 9/11, an accountant (David Theune) working at the World Trade Center’s insurance company discovers a loophole that can help them avoid bankruptcy due to payouts: if the attacks are declared an act of war, then military conflict voids the policy. For most of the 8-minute runtime he debates with an in-house lawyer (Johnny Ray Meeks) in a bare office with only a desk, two chairs, and a phone, first about whether to get their Washington lobbyist (Richardson Cisneros-Jones) to act on this information, then about who should call him. The moral weaseling and self-justifications are compellingly scripted and enthralling to watch. Ultimately, they decide to do it, the call is made, and we hear George W. Bush use the key phrase in his televised address to the nation. An opening title card elevates the proceedings: “This really happened.”

Mixed Media Report

This round-up includes reviews of Adolescence, Good Night, and Good Luck and Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, as well as a tribute to Charles Strouse.

Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper in Adolescence. (Photo: Netflix.)

It’s a confirmed truth that British actors can do just about anything, but the consistency and range of performances in the recent four-part English series Adolescence (streaming on Netflix) is so impressive that it may have set a new standard. The style of the limited series, created and written by Stephen Graham, who plays one of the principal roles, and the prolific playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne and directed by Philip Barantini, is documentary realism, and the characters are etched in such precise psychological detail that they register more as figures in an Impressionist group painting come to life than as actors at work. You carry them away with you; I watched the first half at the end of the evening and woke up early the next morning with them still crowded into my brain. (I couldn’t get back to sleep until I’d finished the series.) My praise is meant to extend to the young performers, who give performances of unwavering authenticity on a par with the adults. Those of us who love watching English TV drama – and that includes almost everyone I know – have our favorite actors, but the only member of the cast of Adolescence I recognized was Graham, whom I’d admired as the captain of the whaling ship in The North Water and as Jamie Bell’s brother in the movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. I assume that my lack of familiarity with the others enhanced the freshness of the experience, but then British actors are chameleons anyway.

A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod: More Richly in Earth

(McGill/Queen's University Press.)

“Much we long for what we lack,
for what is closed within the grave,
our treasure and triumph, our glee without gloom.
What I myself have received thereof I shall remember long.”
                    --Mary MacLeod, “Marbhrann / Dirge”

New from Criterion: In the Heat of the Night and Killer of Sheep

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night. (Criterion Collection.)

Mark Harris’s wonderful book Pictures at a Revolution ingeniously uses the five 1967 films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar to chronicle the shift from the old to the new Hollywood. They covered the spectrum at the moment when a new sensibility – countercultural, free-spirited, ironic about the filmmaking shibboleths – had begun to slip in and captivate young audiences for whom the new retreads of old-fashioned movies held no appeal. Within a couple of years the studios, exasperated and baffled by filmgoers’ lack of interest in the latest expansively budgeted musicals and adventure spectacles and their preference for off-the-beaten-path items like Easy Rider and M*A*S*H, had turned the asylum over to the inmates: hipster writers and directors who shared a view of the world with their audiences. But in 1967 both Hollywoods were represented in the nominations. At one end were the leaden Doctor Dolittle, occupying the spot unofficially reserved for a lavish musical that was assumed to reflect big-studio production values (some years there were two) and the social problem drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, both of which offered embarrassing evidence that the old ways had stopped working. At the other end were Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, which the youth of America had turned into enormous hits. Bonnie and Clyde was the movie of the year, but in 1967 there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that it would walk away with the statuette. However, it was already too late for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with its simple-minded civics-class approach to the topic of race. The film that won the award was Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, adapted by Stirling Silliphant from a John Ball novel about a northern Black homicide detective (Sidney Poitier) who finds himself between trains in a small Mississippi town during a murder investigation and is hauled in reflexively for questioning by the local white cops. Released after producing his badge and calling his chief in Philadelphia, he winds up helping the sheriff (Rod Steiger) solve the crime.

Truth in Consequences: Anna Karenina Mesmerizes at the National Ballet of Canada

Heather Ogden and Ben Rudisin in Anna Karenina. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

Christian Spuck’s Anna Karenina made its North American debut with the National Ballet of Canada on June 13, launching a sold-out week-long run at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre and marking a major addition to the company’s repertoire. First staged in Zürich in 2014, Spuck’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1878 novel distills its epic sweep into a series of charged encounters, shaped by choreography that fuses classical line with contemporary weight and dramatic urgency. Spuck, now artistic director of Staatsballett Berlin, brings a focus on the psychological to choreography that is both fluid and inherently dramatic.

Berlin Alexanderplatz: Döblin Meets Fassbinder Meets Lewis

“It’s only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.”
                        --Franz Kafka (to Max Brod)

Not so long ago I was discussing the compelling and distressing works of four Japanese novelists in terms of a special category I rashly called the scariest narratives ever written. And while it’s true that Kenzaburo Oe, Osamu Dazai, Kobo Abe and Yukio Mishima are right up there in terms of writing seemingly elegant and restrained tales while secretly scraping off the thin psychological veneer of civilization to reveal the throbbing savagery beneath, now I might have to retract my assessment in light of recent re-readings of two novelists who are even more pertinent and sadly applicable to these harrowing times we’re all trying to live through. They were written historically close to each other, one by a German author, Alfred Döblin in 1929, when his country was witnessing the demise of the wistful Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, while the other was an American novelist in 1935, Sinclair Lewis, who was witnessing a threat to his own country’s democratic principles under the paranoid banner of white nationalism.

Good Education: Whisper of the Heart

Studio Ghibli’s 1995 Whisper of the Heart (Mimi o Sumaseba / 耳をすませば) is one of those films about nothing in particular that end up being incredibly moving. The major directorial effort by Kondō Yoshifumi before his sudden early death, adapted by Miyazaki Hayao from the one-volume manga by Hiiragi Aoi, Whisper portrays the free-range childhood – vanishingly rare today outside of a major metropolitan area with ubiquitous public transport (such as Tokyo) – of outspoken fourteen-year-old girl Shizuku (Honna Yōko). Like most other Studio Ghibli entries, it’s a fantasy, but mostly because it’s such an ideal childhood.

More on the Broadway Musical Season: Dead Outlaw, Buena Vista Social Club and Just in Time

Andrew Durand (left) and Company in Dead Outlaw. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.)

The general complaint about Broadway musicals in the twenty-first century is that too many of them recycle the plots of old movies. But ever since the advent of the sophisticated book musical with Show Boat in 1927, composers and librettists have looked to other media for source material, though during the golden age of American musicals they more often began as straight plays or novels. Did critics and aficionados bemoan the fact that My Fair Lady adapted Pygmalion, Guys and Dolls was derived from a pair of Damon Runyon stories and Kiss Me, Kate was based on The Taming of the Shrew? The proof, as always, is in the pudding. The recent history of the musical would be significantly poorer without Hairspray, The Band’s Visit and, God knows, The Light in the Piazza. Anyway, the evidence suggests that musicals are becoming more imaginative, not less so. This season’s crop included a Korean import about two robots in love, a nineteenth-century whaling tale that ended in shipwreck and cannibalism, and, weirdest of all, the new Dead Outlaw, a rock musical conceived by David Yazbek, who also penned the music and lyrics along with Erik Della Penna.  

Guillaume Côté’s Adieu: A Daring Farewell at the National Ballet of Canada

Guillaume Côté in Grand Mirage. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

After 26 years at the National Ballet of Canada, Guillaume Côté could have chosen the easy road: a swan song in a signature classical role, a nostalgic backward glance. Instead, the Québec-born, Toronto-trained principal - whose artistry has shaped the company for a generation - delivers a bold, forward-looking program, Adieu, which opened Friday at the Four Seasons Centre and continues through the week. The evening featured three premieres and a reprise of Côté’s slow-burning Bolero, first created in 2012, making for a heady mix.

Life is a Game of Go: The Enigmatic Literature of Yoko Tawada

(New Directions.)

“It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.”

--Kenzaburo Oe

Yoko Tawada’s beautiful and strange literary work is totally saturated with mythology, both the public and the private sort, mixed together through a frantic postmodern blender to shake up a truly startling smoothie of poetic insights about the odd sensations that accompany our situation as human beings in a weary century. True, Tawada’s novels, often written in both German and Japanese before being deftly translated into the only language I can access, are what we might quaintly refer to as an acquired taste. But then, so is sake. But sake, once tasted, and whether hot, chilled or room temperature, alters our senses forever after. And so it is with Tawada’s marvelous and marvel-filled stories. They have the capacity to inalterably change the open-minded reader, in the way that only great literature can, and after reading her surreal, dreamlike reveries about our relationship to words and language, most other literary beverages feel slightly bland by comparison. So we won’t compare them, any more than we would compare sake to tapwater.

The Extraordinary Adam Guettel: The Light in the Piazza at The Huntington and Floyd Collins on Broadway

Emily Skinner in The Huntington Theatre's The Light in the Piazza. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes.)

The new Huntington Theatre mounting of The Light in the Piazza is the fourth production I’ve seen of this show, and except for Bartlett Sher’s spectacular original staging, at Lincoln Center in 2005, it’s the best. I think that Piazza, with its first-rate Craig Lucas book derived from Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel and its soaring impressionistic score by Adam Guettel, is the greatest musical written in the twenty-first century. (Yes, I love Hamilton.) It’s an unconventional romantic musical in which the leap of faith made by the wife of a North Carolina tobacco executive named Margaret Johnson, who brings her daughter Clara to Florence on vacation in 1953, is a symbol for all of our attempts to find happiness in love, even though we know that the effort is reckless because as often as not it ends in shambles. One of the elements that make the play unusual is that though the lovers are Clara and a young Florentine named Fabrizio Naccarelli, the son of a shopkeeper, who fall in love at first sight. Margaret is the protagonist, and it’s finally she who has to overcome personal obstacles, not her daughter. She has been Clara’s protector since, at twelve, the girl was kicked in the head by a pony, apparently halting her emotional development. So when she and Fabrizio become entranced with each other, Margaret – encouraged via long distance by her husband Roy back home in Winston-Salem – attempts to stop it before the humiliating moment when the Naccarellis figure out something is wrong. But no one in the Naccarelli family is put off by Clara’s childlike nature, or even by her explosion when Fabrizio’s flirtatious sister-in-law, Franca, gets too close to him at a family get-together. The Naccarellis find her refreshingly old-fashioned; even Franca, whose attention-getting behavior is a response to her husband’s sexual duplicitousness, defends her; she thinks that Clara is right to fight for her man she loves and even wishes she had done so. Margaret has to confront the fact that the greater block to her approving Clara’s union with Fabrizio is the fact that her own marriage has been a disappointment, that she long ago ceased to believe in love.

Confusion of Purpose: Branden Jacob-Jenkins' Pulitzer Prize-Winning New Play

Jon Michael Hill and Harry Lennix in Purpose. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

I’m a fan of the African-American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, but he strikes out with his latest work to hit Broadway, Purpose. It’s another dysfunctional family play, like his last-season hit Appropriate. That one was about a nutty white family coming to terms with apparent evidence that the recently deceased patriarch was an especially baroque brand of racist: he collected photographs of lynchings. In Purpose the family is Black, and not just Black – they belong to an aristocracy distinguished by political celebrity. Solomon (known as Sonny) Jasper (played by Harry Lennix) is a minister and Civil Rights activist who was a close confederate of Martin Luther King, whose portrait hangs on the living-room wall, and Jacobs-Jenkins borrows some of King’s personal details for the character. Sonny’s wife Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) is a lawyer, fiercely protective of her family and its legacy. Their elder brother Junior (Glenn Davis), a politician, has just finished a two-year prison stint for the misuse of campaign funds and other white-collar crimes, and his wife Morgan (Alana Arenas), is about to follow him into jail as an accomplice, though she claims that she had no idea what she was signing her name to, and possibly she’s telling the truth. These consecutive sentences are the result of a negotiation with the justice system, so that their kids wouldn’t be left without a parent to take care of them. Junior’s kid brother Naz (Jon Michael Hill) has kept himself distanced from the family: he lives in Harlem while they’re in another state (the playwright doesn’t tell us where the Jaspers live, but Chicago is a good guess), and he hasn’t even kept them apprised of his career as a photographer. The occasion for the family gathering is a delayed birthday celebration for Claudine. The unexpected guest is Naz’s friend Aziza (Kara Young), a single gay woman for whom Naz has offered to serve as a sperm donor. He’s carefully hidden his family background from her, so when she stumbles into the lush Jasper home she’s stunned to discover that he’s the progeny of one of the most famous Black families in the country.

The Beat Goes On: The Yardbirds Chart the Course

“1966 was the high point of British pop art, and with hits like The Yardbirds’ 'Shapes of Things,' there was an incredible compression of ideas and emotions about mass media, consumption, perception and gender, all poured into those three-minutes-long forty-five r.p.m. records.”

                        --Jon Savage, Faber Book of Pop

Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press.

A Baroque Drama of Biblical Proportions: Opera Atelier’s David and Jonathan

The artists of Atelier Ballet in Opera Atelier's production of Charpentier's David and Jonathan. (Photo: Bruce Zinger.)

Opera Atelier’s 40th anniversary staging of Charpentier’s David and Jonathan at Koerner Hall is not just a local milestone but an international event, rooted in the Canadian company’s acclaimed presentation at Versailles’ Opéra Royal—a version that returns to Versailles this May, underscoring its global prestige and resonance.

Doppelgänger: Barry Levinson's The Alto Knights

Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Witty, gripping and grandly entertaining, Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights centers on the complicated relationship of two legendary Mafiosi, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who were both recruited to work for bootlegger Giuseppe Masseria in the 1920s alongside Lucky Luciano. After the murders of Masseria and his successor, Salvatore Maranzano, Genovese became Luciano’s second in command with Costello, who claimed to have abjured violence at the end of the First World War and stopped carrying a gun, as his consigliere. Genovese took over in 1936 when Luciano went to prison and expanded the operations of the organization Luciano had reconfigured as the Commission into narcotics. But he had to flee the U.S. to avoid a murder charge and took sanctuary in Italy. (Both men had been born there: Costello in Naples, Genovese in Calabria.) Costello took over, trading drugs for gambling. When Genovese returned to the States after the war – neatly bypassing conviction for that old killing when two key witnesses against him turned up dead – he didn’t take well to being his former colleague’s underboss. All of this narrative is background, much of it unstated or understated, to Levinson’s picture, which takes place in 1957, the year Costello appeared before the Senate Committee investigating the Mafia, and the year Genovese engineered the assassination of the former head of Murder Inc., Albert Anastasia, and attempted unsuccessfully to eliminate Costello.

Form and Legacy: Jane Corkin’s Vision of Photography as Fine Art

A display wall from Between Life and Light at the Jane Corkin Gallery.

The Jane Corkin Gallery’s 45th-anniversary exhibition, Between Life and Light, begins with the space itself: a historic tank house in Toronto’s Distillery District. The oak floors and wooden beams, reimagined in 2003 by architects Shim-Sutcliffe, create a gallery of light and levels that feels both expansive and intimate. This architectural transformation mirrors the exhibition’s premise—photography as a continuum of history and innovation, spanning nearly two centuries from 1857 to 2024.

Two Visionaries Walk Into a Bar: Huysmans and Huxley

(Both titles: Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“This was the attraction of the abyss over which one is leaning, that of a life lived at white heat. It was a deliberate abdication of day to day struggles, the removal of the difficulties of existence.”

--J .K. Huysmans

“We live together, we act on and react to one another but always we are by ourselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

--Aldous Huxley

As T.A. Brown pointed out in the article “The Technology That Actually Runs The World” last December in The Atlantic Monthly, the most dominant algorithms aren’t necessarily the ones choosing what songs Spotify serves up to you supposedly based on your personal tastes, but rather the ones that control everything you see, hear or read by controlling all the art the even gets made before it’s made, as a result of prevailing consumer taste mechanisms that it can interpret more efficiently than the most canny culture critics ever could. The article suggested that these algorithms dictate everything, from which books are published and what art gets seen, in a revolutionary paradigm shift that has become entrenched in the arts and media. The essential premise was that in 2024 culture became boring and stale due to these thuggish algorithms’ calling the shots on what gets first produced, and then gets praised. The idea is that Big Tech has flattened culture into a facsimile of its former self, and that algorithmic recommendation engines have created what amounts to a lack of all forward momentum. But long before computers ever existed, except in the minds of visionary science fiction authors such as Yevgeny Zamyatin (author of the mindblowing 1922 novel WE) and Aldous Huxley (author of the book Zamyatin inspired, Brave New World in 1931), concerns were already beginning to float to the surface of our consciousness. Or at least to the consciousness of a few heroic prescients.

Potpourri: Love Life, Don’t Eat the Mangos and Beckett Briefs

Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell in Love Life. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The review of Don’t Eat the Mangos contains spoilers.

The great Jewish Weimar composer Kurt Weill fled Berlin for New York in the early thirties. Nothing he wrote for Broadway earned him the fame he’d garnered as Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator in Germany, but he produced the music for eight shows between 1936 and 1949 (he died in 1950 at the age of fifty while he was working on a musical based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) with a fascinating range of librettists including Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perelman, Ogden Nash and Maxwell Anderson. And though the shows were a mixed bag, his music was usually glorious. The 1947 opera he and the poet Langston Hughes fashioned from Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene, set in a Manhattan tenement, may be the most exquisite score anyone has written for Broadway besides Porgy and Bess.

Lost and Found: Christine Byl’s Lookout

(Deep Vellum/A Strange Object.)

A few weeks ago, somewhat bored by what I was currently reading, I rummaged through my pile of unread books, and picked up a novel called Lookout, by Christine Byl. It was a signed copy, but I have no idea how I acquired it. I think it might have been in a swag bag handed to me at a literary gala. In other words, by pure chance. The book was published in 2023 by a small, independent Texan press called Deep Vellum, under their A Strange Object imprint. I thought I’d read a few pages and see if it was any good. 273 pages later, I was in tears, moved and entranced by this tale of the loving but precariously dysfunctional Kinzler family living in rural Montana. The book spans the years from 1985 to 2009, mainly focusing on their younger of two daughters, Cody.

You Wouldn't Want to Live There: Chaos: The Manson Murders

Errol Morris’s Chaos: The Manson Murders is a shallow dip in a deep pool of conspiracy and weirdness. The book it’s based on—CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), by Tom O'Neill, with Dan Piepenbring—is only one of many in the last thirty years or so whose title promised “secret history”; unlike others, it delivered. O'Neill found a multitude of buried facts and forgotten documents. He highlighted existing holes in the standard version of the Manson murders, and punched many new ones. What he didn’t do was offer a unified-field theory, with all questions answered, all contradictions squared; and that, aside from the evidence he delivered, was O’Neill’s edge over other conspiracists. The sum of his unearthing, as he readily admitted, was a mound of irreducible mystery, uncanny remains forming no definitive shape. CHAOS was both enormous fun and disturbing to the point of nightmare.

Haunted: Ibsen's Ghosts at Lincoln Center

Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke in Ghosts. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

When she reviewed Shoot the Moon in 1982, the film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m a little afraid to say how good I think [it] is – I don’t want to set up the kind of bad magic that might cause people to say they were led to expect so much that they were disappointed.” Every critic who has been at the job for a long time recognizes this dilemma, though God knows it doesn’t come around very often. Kael’s next sentence is “But I’m even more afraid that I can’t come near doing this picture justice.” That’s my mood as I sit down to compose my thoughts on Jack O’Brien’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts, from a new adaptation by Mark O’Rowe, which will be playing upstairs in Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through April 13. O’Brien, who served as artistic director at the Old Globe in San Diego for four and a half decades, has helmed dozens of plays, many of them high-profile, and I have loved some of them, like Hairspray and the 2016 Broadway revival of The Front Page and the two runs he took at All My Sons, on TV in 1987 and in New York in 2019. (The earlier version, which was released on DVD, is unforgettable.) But his work with a quintet of actors in Ghosts is one of the most staggering evenings I’ve ever spent in the theatre.

Rarely Revisited: Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love

Vincent Randazzo and Avanthika Srinivasan in The Triumph of Love. (Photo: Liza Voll.)

Pierre de Marivaux was the most important French playwright of the eighteenth century – that is, of the second half of the Neoclassical period; Molière and Racine ruled the French theatre of the first half. Yet whereas Molière has never been out of fashion and Racine’s Phaedra has been kept alive (though more in the form of revisions and adaptations than through productions of the actual text), theatre companies stopped performing Marivaux almost entirely for many years. Rare as productions of English Restoration comedies are, until perhaps thirty years ago they were more frequent than revivals of The Triumph of Love and The Game of Love and Chance, Marivaux’s most famous plays. (He was, in fact, extremely prolific.) The translators and directors who rediscovered him were struck by how modern these hybrids of high and romantic comedy are, as was the marvelous English filmmaker Clare Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci’s wife, who made a magical movie version of The Triumph of Love with postmodern touches in 2001 starring Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw. But that doesn’t mean that Marivaux has exactly returned to the repertory. It’s still unusual to find a theatre with the courage to attempt his explorations of the tension between love and reason, which play with ideas from both Shakespeare and the Restoration masters Congreve and Wycherley and are witty, cerebral and demanding in their use of language. The movie of The Triumph of Love is the only version of the play I’ve ever seen, so I was sure not to miss the one that just opened at Boston’s Huntington Theatre. (It closes April 6.)

Stoner by John Williams: The Most Famous Unknown Novel in the World

NYRBooks Classics.                University of Texas Press.     

“But first, are you experienced? Or have you ever been experienced?”

--Jimi Hendrix

Like most folks who read books and watch films as a professional activity, it can sometimes feel as if we’re expected to pass cogent judgment on all books or films (or in my case also on music, visual art and buildings) to discern and share whether something is worth reading or watching. To me, however, life is too short to advise people on what to avoid, what didn’t work, succeed or achieve its creative aims, and what the artistic flaws were that made it a failure. There are plenty of good critics who do that to some degree, and I too enjoy reading their opinions, but I’d much rather talk about films, music or in this case books, that are so marvelous that they can or might actually alter the course of your life in some significant way if you read them. Stoner, released by John Williams in 1965, is just such a book. So is the book about his book, written by Charles Shields in 2018. In fact, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel might even be that rare case of a work that will really help readers to appreciate the whereof and what-for of the book it examines, in such micro-detail and macro-fondness, that it could even benefit from being consumed prior to Stoner itself.

Crash Landing: Karen Kain’s Swan Lake Stumbles Again

Genevieve Penn Nabity and National Ballet of Canada artists in Swan Lake. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

The National Ballet of Canada’s revival of Karen Kain’s Swan Lake is back, and two years later, it remains an exercise in frustration. What should have been a triumphant reimagining of one of ballet’s most iconic works is instead a muddled mess—a lavish production that fails to soar and instead flounders in its own contradictions.

Neglected Gem: Backbeat (1994)

From left: Scot Williams as Pete Best, Gary Bakewell as Paul McCartney, Ian Hart as John Lennon, and Chris O'Neill as George Harrison. (Photo: Channel Four Films.)

Backbeat covers a great period, 1960-62, when The Beatles, still teenagers and still unknown at home in England, played in cruddy Hamburg clubs (where the sailors used to ogle them) before the young avant-garde art crowd took them up. It’s about the friendship between John Lennon (Ian Hart) and Stu Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff), an abstract expressionist painter he met at art school in Liverpool who dropped out to put together a band with John and travel to Germany; and about the uneasy, ambiguous triangle created when Sutcliffe fell in love with the German photographer Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee). The story is a fascinating one. But the film, directed by Iain Softley from a script he wrote with Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward, never caught on and has long been forgotten, though I love to teach it (my students always greet it enthusiastically) and, more than thirty years on, I think it deserves some attention.

Incandescent Visions: George Stamos’ "Sister Nightlight" Debuts in Toronto

George Stamos. (Photo: Susan Moss.)

George Stamos’ Sister Nightlight, which opened Thursday at Toronto’s Citadel and closed March 8, was a daring fusion of performance art, dance improvisation, and narrative storytelling. The piece began in darkness with Stamos—a Montreal-based artist and performer renowned for his inventive explorations of memory and identity—speaking into a microphone. His voice was unpretentious and intimate, drawing the audience into a fireside-style monologue that recounted a joyful childhood beachside campout with family and friends. Among the vivid details was a stumble into the bushes for a long, relaxing piss at night—a moment both mundane and evocative.

Primal Screen Therapy: The Optical Unconscious Writ Large

“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can ever hope to tackle."

--Stanley Kubrick

“Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there still and meditate in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen. One should go to the cinema with the innocence of a fetus.”

          --Federico Fellini​​​​​​​

Culture critic Walter Benjamin once remarked that the invention of the camera introduced us to unconscious optics, just as Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis did for unconscious impulses, and he knew whereof he spoke. That insight reveals the same prescience that Freud’s chief acolyte and primary competitor Carl Jung also sensed, in a somewhat more refined and spiritual manner: that cinema is the artful language of dreams we speak while we’re still awake. Two insightful books, American Avant-Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-Between by Rebecca Sheehan and Screening Fears: On Protective Media by Francesco Casetti, share an equally insightful exploration of the archetypal and collective mythologies that define classic cinema regardless of its genre. Looking at films through a psychological lens provides us with a valuable map and a discursive language which we can use to orient ourselves within the imaginal landscape of the motion picture art form. These two books, with a kind of cogent synchronicity, also definitely offer a deep dive into cinema as the quintessential art form of the 20th century. They deftly penetrate our shared psychic myths as revealed through the language of films and thus help us to more deeply understand our own hopes and fears while doing so, and as such they supply a kind of primal screen therapy which assists the audience in conversing with our own optical unconscious.

Cycles of Transformation at The National Ballet of Canada

Genevieve Penn Nabity and Christopher Gerty in The Four Seasons. Gerty was injured and replaced by Larkin Miller in the performance our critic attended. (Photo: Carolina Kuras.)

Dancers in leaf-green unitards slip into a line at the rear of the stage, their arms raised overhead, wrists connected, fingers fanned into a vessel-like shape—a motif in David Dawson’s The Four Seasons. Subtle yet striking, the gesture suggests an offering, a quiet acknowledgment of something greater than oneself. Dawson, a British choreographer with a distinguished European pedigree, has built his career on crafting works that channel this sense of humility and connection into movement, transforming classical ballet into a language of both physical and spiritual exploration. His choreography demands not only technical precision but also an ability to embody its emotional weight, asking dancers to balance control with a sense of surrender—to the music, to the movement, and to the larger themes it seeks to express.

Meeting the Moment: September 5

Peter Sarsgaard (left) and cast in September 5. (Photo: Paramount.)

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Nick Braccia, to Critics at Large.

Like many movie lovers, I have grown so cynical about contemporary releases that when I stumble upon something great, I’m left staggered. That was exactly my reaction after watching September 5, Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s docudrama thriller about the Israeli hostage crisis and the murder of eleven athletes and coaches by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Despite award noms, nobody’s talking about it—certainly not Paramount, which released it – and that’s a terrible shame, because September 5 is a masterfully calibrated newsroom pressure cooker, engineered with the same craftsmanship the ABC Sports team applied on the movie’s titular day, when seasoned pros accustomed to lower stakes were suddenly called to a higher purpose, broadcasting the unfolding catastrophe to 900 million.

Alone with David Lynch: Notes from a Séance

David Lynch in the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (2016).

A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.

 — “Opening Statement” of “The Archivist,” from The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016), by Mark Frost

Only a few times have I ever felt that being in an audience enhanced my experience of a film. For me art has always been a private thing: “just me and a mirror and my brain,” as The Bee Gees once put it. The obvious benefit of solitary viewing is that you needn’t filter out your neighbors’ responses—contagions of fidgeting whenever action slows or logic separates, gales of laughter at aggressively unfunny jokes. Freed from the bullying influence of consensus, you watch differently; you don’t expect a film to perform for you in the same way. Instead of saying, “Here I am, entertain me,” you adopt the less adversarial, more absorptive role of the engaged bystander. You let the thing develop on its own terms, taking whatever risks it chooses to become whatever it wants to be. Then you judge how well, or if, it did that.

The Brain Doctor: William Burroughs (1914-1997)

Portrait of William S. Burroughs by Lance Austin Olsen.

“Language is a virus.”

W. B.

William S. Burroughs’ supernal and subterranean Beat influence on Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac alone would secure him a stable place in the modernist canon of American letters, as would Norman Mailer’s prescient early acclamation, “Burroughs might be the only American writer of sheer genius.” For me, Alexander Kafka penned what I’ve long felt was an ideal characterization of this experimental literary legend: “Burroughs was an ethereal intermediary between the here and the fiery beyond, pausing to give us the purgatorial skinny.” That skinny was transmitted in haunting and disturbing novels such as Junky (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962), among many others. However, it was through his influence on every other aspect of 20th-century culture in all media that his spectral presence as a testifier was most perhaps most long-lasting.

Intoxicating: People, Places and Things at Coal Mine Theatre

Kwaku Okyere, Louise Lambert, Sarah Murphy-Dyson and Nickeshia Garrick in People, Places and Things (Photo: Elana Emer)

Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things has landed at Toronto’s Coal Mine Theatre in a production that is as intimate as it is harrowing. Directed by Diana Bentley, this Canadian English-language debut transforms the celebrated 2015 play into an immersive experience, leveraging the theatre’s compact, square stage to pull the audience into Emma’s chaotic journey through addiction and recovery.

A Regal Triumph: La Reine-Garçon Shines at the Four Seasons Centre

Kirsten McKinnon as Christine (played by Kirsten Leblanc at the performance our critic saw) in La Reine-Garçon. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

At a time when Canada’s cultural sovereignty faces external pressures, the Canadian Opera Company, in collaboration with Opéra de Montréal, has delivered a resounding artistic statement with La Reine-Garçon. This polished production, currently at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre until Feb. 15, exemplifies the heights of Canadian operatic achievement.

Two Servos, With Love: Broadway's Maybe Happy Ending and Gypsy

Helen J Shen and Darren Criss in Maybe Happy Ending.

The musical Maybe Happy Ending is first surprising, then charming, and finally touching. It’s a romantic musical about robots written by Will Aronson (who composed the music) and Hue Park (who collaborated with Aronson on the book and lyrics), that comes to Broadway by way of Korea. The two protagonists, Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen), live across the hall from each other in apartments in the Helperbot Yards in Seoul, where they were left after their owners “retired” them – though Oliver is under the impression that his, James (played by Marcus Choi in flashbacks), will be coming by any day to pick him up and ferry him to his home on Jeju Island. It’s been twelve years, but Oliver continues to live in happy expectation, watching the movies James taught him to love and listening to the classic jazz that is his special legacy from James. (James continued Oliver’s subscription to Jazz Monthly when he departed.) Oliver’s only companion is a plant he’s named HwaBoon – another gift from James – until one day Claire knocks on his door and asks him to let her use his recharger. At first, true to the conventional romantic-comedy set-up, they don’t like each other, but they warm up and eventually realize that, in defiance of the way their manufacturer created them, they have begun to have feelings for each other. And since Claire’s owner left her with her old car, the bots are able to embark on the archetypal romantic-comedy journey, to Jeju Island to find the long-gone James.

So Long, Marianne (1946-2025): What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Marianne Faithfull. (Photo: Peter Seeger.)

“The men and women who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the most extensive, but rather those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their own personality into a sort of mirror.”

Marcel Proust

If there is a sadder singer-songwriter on earth, I’m not sure who it might be. The late Marianne Faithfull was sadder than Neil Young, sadder than Leonard Cohen, sadder than sad. She even exceeds the sorrow and bleakness quotient of one of the great lamenters of all time, Nico, the chanteuse of pain who originally performed with The Velvet Underground but who left them, probably because they were too happy for her. She might be sadder that Amy Winehouse, although she was fortunate enough to live a full half-century longer than the poor lamentable Amy. Marianne Faithfull was the dark side of Joni Mitchell: while it’s true that Mitchell had her own dark side, Faithfull was the dark side of Joni’s dark side. She was an exile who lived in a dream world for so long that her reports from its frontier took on the status of legend. She was also, apart from being a consummate risk-taker, an empath of the highest order, with a remarkable ability for turning sheer survival practically into an authentic religion.

A Smattering of Recent Releases

Tye Sheridan and Jude Law in The Order.

The Order (available on Apple+), based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s book The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground, is taut and gripping. It tells the true story of a secret white supremacist organization housed in the Pacific Northwest – the brainchild of a young man named Bob Mathews who splintered off from the Aryan Nation because he found them too weak-minded, all talk and no action – which the FBI uncovered and busted in 1985. Like other violent self-proclaimed revolutionaries (Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, for one), Mathews uses William Luther Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, as a guidebook. He prepares to declare war on the U.S. government by staging, with a small cohort, a series of robberies and bombings and the murder of Alan Berg (played in the film by Marc Maron), a confrontational Jewish radio talk-show host in Denver who has been taking on rabidly anti-Semitic callers.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig: A Way Must Be Made

Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani in Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Part political chronicle, part thriller and part family drama, the Iranian film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, is complex and terrifying. Like Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, released last summer, it captures an ongoing situation so disturbing that we can’t shake it off when we leave the theatre. Its focus is on Iman (Missagh Zareh), who works in the justice system, and on his family: his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and their two teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), who is at university, and Sana (Setareh Maleki), still in high school. Iman has just been promoted to interrogator, which puts him on track to become a judge, a distinction that brings with it not just a more enviable salary but also a larger house. But as his colleague, Ghaderi (Reza Akhlaghirad), cautions him, the job is dangerous because those who believe they have been charged unjustly may seek revenge on him and his family. It carries moral perils as well: Iman, who has behaved with strict rectitude during a twenty-year career, is immediately asked to sign off on a wiretapping without having a chance to read the file; when he hesitates, his supervisor overrides him. And things get worse. Tehran has been swept up in protests over the arrest of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab improperly, and her suspicious death in custody, he is pressured to confirm death indictments against other young people, one a boy the same age as Rezvan.

Echoes of a Vanishing World: Last Landscape at Buddies in Bad Times

The cast of Last Landscape. (Photo by Fran Chudnoff.)

A droning litany of environmental crises emanates from a laptop in a cramped, cardboard-walled apartment. Outside, a dog’s incessant barking punctuates the claustrophobic atmosphere. This unsettling opening of Last Landscape at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre thrusts us into a world teetering on the brink of ecological collapse, as envisioned by Toronto-based theatre artist Adam Paolozza, the show’s creator and director.

Short Cuts

Flow. (Courtesy of Janus Films.)

Flow: This gorgeous-looking animated film from Latvia, written by Gints Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza and directed by Zilbalodis, is one of the few treasures of a disappointing holiday season. Set in a jungle in the wake of a tsunami, it seems to take place at the end of the world – there are no human beings in it, and the animals who populate it travel on a deserted sailboat. Its subject is the surprising harmony of living creatures who need to look to each other to survive. Flow has an obvious underlying melancholy, but it’s sweet and playful. The protagonist is a cat, a natural loner who is befriended by a secretary bird, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur and a Labrador. The most striking relationship is between the cat and the secretary bird, whose attempt to reach out with an offering of freshly caught fish is met with hostility from his pack, who ostracize him and step on his wings so he can’t fly away with them. On the boat with the others, the cat reciprocates; he also figures out how to navigate the bird’s regal pride. This coming together of two solitary creatures in a strange, almost mystical friendship is the most touching element of the film but far from the only one.