Love Affairs: The History of Sound and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal in The History of Sound. (Photo: MUBI.)

In The History of Sound Lionel Worthing and David White fall in love over a song. Drinking in a bar on a Saturday evening in 1917, Lionel (Paul Mescal) hears David (Josh O’Connor), a fellow student at the New England Conservatory of Music, play a plaintive folk ballad Lionel grew up with and drifts to the piano. David, an orphan who grew up in privilege in Newport, Rhode Island, is a competent musician whose passion for American folk obsesses him. Lionel is a singer whose gifts have taken him off the Kentucky farm where he grew up and all the way to Boston, and he knows at first hand most of the tunes David has been collecting in his brain. The night they meet, they play and sing until the bar closes; then Lionel walks David back to his apartment and they become lovers. After they graduate, David goes off to Europe to fight in the Great War while Lionel returns home to the farm and his family. When the war is over David takes a job as a music professor in Maine. He reaches out to Lionel, inviting him to join him on a trip through the forests and islands of the state recording music on wax cylinders to preserve it for posterity, and the two men pick up their relationship where they left off. But David is now prone to spells of melancholy, and after they leave each other at the end of their journey Lionel stops hearing from him. He continues to write monthly letters to him until he finally gives up trying, in 1921. It isn’t for years, after Lionel has become first a singer in a world-famous Italian choir and then, driven by his own unsettled nature, a choir director back in the States, that he finds out what happened to the man he fell in love with in that Boston bar.

Memory in Motion: Laurence Lemieux’s Anne

Laurence Lemieux in Anne: "...lives linger and ripple forward." (Photo: Jeremy Mimnagh.)

Laurence Lemieux’s Anne is a work of elemental courage and restraint, a memory piece where ancestry comes alive in the present and takes shape in the body. The world premiere, which opened at Toronto’s The Citadel on Oct. 1, begins in near-silence. Lemieux stands motionless on a reflective Marley floor, upright in wide trousers and a pleated peplum shirt, a costume that bridges eras. Then, almost imperceptibly, her spine creases and her form dips. The veteran dancer-choreographer seems to age before our eyes, centuries carried in a body overtaken by the past.

It’s Elementary: Gaston Bachelard, An Intellectual Biography

(Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press.)

“An element, we take it, is a body into which other bodies may be analyzed, present in them potentially or in actuality, and is not itself divisible into bodies different in form. That, or something like it, is what all men in every case mean by element.”

--Aristotle, “On the Heavens,” 350 BCE.

Perhaps the most famous of the horde of books by the prolific French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) was his marvelous tome from 1957, The Poetics of Space. It was so popular that it almost accidentally became a bestseller, at least by the standards of rarefied French philosophers, so that Bachelard nearly achieved the same stature as the pop media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. It’s certainly the one that had the most lifelong impact on me personally, since I first encountered it many years ago on the nightstand bookcase of a youthful chum who was an architecture student at the time. He kept it in pride of place in a charming little shelf-like display that contained only about three or four books. I borrowed The Poetics of Space from his shelf (possibly without his permission) during one visit, and I didn’t return it for thirty years.

Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford and The Way We Were

I opted to listen to Barbra Streisand’s 2023 memoir, My Name Is Barbra, rather than reading it in hard copy so that I could hear her inimitable phrasing – the quality that made me a diehard fan of her albums when I started collecting them in 1964, at the age of thirteen. (The first one I owned, a gift from my aunt and uncle, was the original cast album of Funny Girl, which had recently opened on Broadway; I played “Don’t Rain on My Parade” through so many times that it’s a miracle I didn’t wear down the vinyl.) I was lucky: Streisand’s movie career began the week I started university, when she opened in the film version of Funny Girl, and I saw each of those great early performances – in Hello, Dolly!, The Owl and the Pussycat, Up the Sandbox and The Way We Were – as they came out, on the big screen. What I mostly desired from the memoir was information about, and her personal response to, her early triumphs on stage (her scene-stealing supporting performance in I Can Get It for You Wholesale led to Funny Girl), television (where she, Joe Layton and Dwight Hemion reconceived the variety special with the explosively inventive My Name Is Barbra in 1965), LP and film. My usual experience with the memoirs of performers I love is that they’re fun as long as they chronicle the origins of a career but run out of steam once the writer has made the leap into stardom. And this one comes in at a shade under a thousand pages! Plus I haven’t cared much for Streisand’s pop albums and found only a few of her later pictures interesting – though, notably, I’ve never missed one. (Her film career had pretty much faded by the early nineties.)

Stratford and the Shaw Festival: New and Old

The company of Forgiveness. (Photo: David House.)

Stratford’s production of Forgiveness (at the Tom Patterson Theatre), Hiro Kanagawa’s adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s book Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, marks the Canadian play’s eastern premiere. (It has been staged in Vancouver and Calgary.) The play’s dual protagonists are Mitsue Sakamoto (played by Yoshie Bancroft), and Ralph MacLean (Jeff Lillico), whose lives were shaped irrevocably by their World War II experiences. Ralph grew up on the Magdalen Islands in Quebec and lied about his age to get away from his abusive alcoholic father and join the first Canadian unit stationed in Japan, before Canada and the U.S. declared war in the wake of Pearl Harbor. He was captured and spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. Mitsue and her Japanese family were deprived of their citizenship rights and forced to leave their home in British Columbia in 1942, first for an internment camp and then to harvest sugar beets on a farm in the Prairies, laboring long hours for a pittance; their initial “home” was a converted chicken coop. The ban wasn’t lifted until four years after the end of the war. What links these two stories together is the romance that flared up in Calgary, where the two main characters wound up, between Mitsue’s son Stan (Leon Quin at the performance I attended, standing in for Douglas Oyama) and Ralph’s daughter Diane (Allison Lynch). The author, Sakamoto, is their shared grandson.

Summer Musicals

Mary Antonini as Reno Sweeney and the cast of Anything Goes. (Photo: David Cooper.)

This article includes reviews of musicals at the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as well as at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine.

Anything Goes opened on Broadway in 1934 and proved to be Cole Porter’s biggest hit until Kiss Me, Kate nearly a decade and a half later; it ran for 420 performances, hefty for the time. But it just escaped turning into a fiasco because the book Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, writing from different cities, cobbled together was so scattershot that the producer, Vinton Freedley, asked the director, Howard Lindsay, to rewrite it. With the collaboration of Russel Crouse he did so in three weeks, while the show was in tryouts out of town, and that’s the version audiences saw whenever it was produced over the next half-century. Lewis Milestone made a sweet movie of it in 1936 with Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman, (the leading lady of the Broadway production), though I suspect even many Porter devotees don’t know it. (The 1956 M-G-M movie with Crosby, Donald O’Connor and Mitzi Gaynor, has nothing in common with the show except the title and, in the opening section, a shipboard setting.) There was only one major revival, off-Broadway in 1962, which cut a few of the songs and interpolated others from the Porter archive, like “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue (which has become a permanent addition) and “Take Me Back to Manhattan” from The New Yorkers. When it finally returned to Broadway in 1987, with Patti LuPone in the Merman role, Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman rewrote it, staying faithful to the spirit of the original but making their own emendations to the score. This is the Anything Goes that Kathleen Marshall directed triumphantly in a 2011 Broadway revival starring Sutton Foster and Joel Grey, and it’s the one graced by an ebullient production at the Shaw Festival this season (in their Festival Theatre) directed and choreographed by Kimberley Rampersad.

Reductio ad Absurdum—Omniscient Reader

Lee Min-ho (center) as Yoo Joonghyuk in Omniscient Reader: The Prophet. (All accompanying photos are stills from the movie's trailer.)

No film adaptation can replicate a story entirely, and some tradeoffs have to be made. Adaptation screenwriters need to seek out what they believe to be the core themes and plotline of the story and find a way to mesh them with cinematic grammar, maybe sprinkling in some Easter eggs if they can. But what if that story is really freaking long and has multiple core themes? What if it’s currently being serialized into another medium so successfully that the latter is considered equally as canonical as the original?

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (Jeonjijeong dokja sijeom / 2025, aka Omniscient Reader: The Prophet) is based on the best-selling Korean serialized webnovel of all time, Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (2018–2020), by the married duo singNsong. The main story has 551 chapters (you read that right), with a handful of one-shot side stories and an ongoing sequel which, as of this writing, has added another 358 chapters. The main story was later revised and released on paper in 20 volumes. Charles Dickens could never. ORV is also currently being adapted into what’s called a webtoon, basically a manga that imitates the scroll of a website rather than the turning of pages.