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.

Stratford and the Shaw Festival II: Shaw

Gabriella Sundar Singh as Barbara Undershaft in the Shaw Festival's current production of Major Barbara. (Photo: David Cooper.)

Is Major Barbara Shaw’s masterpiece? The main contenders would be Heartbreak House and Man and Superman, but when I saw Joseph Ziegler’s centennial revival of Major Barbara twenty years ago – with Diana Donnelly as Barbara, the young Salvation Army major, and Benedict Campbell as her estranged father, Andrew Undershaft, co-head of an armaments empire given the complexly ironic name of Lazarus and Undershaft – I was staggered. Ziegler’s gorgeous, immense production – it unfolded in three hours and twenty minutes and was riveting throughout – was a luminous rendering of Shaw’s brilliant, endlessly surprising dramatic argument that you can’t save the soul without feeding the stomach. (That sly thief Brecht rephrased it for the second-act finale of his Threepenny Opera: “First feed the face / And then talk right and wrong.”) In Major Barbara, Undershaft first proves to his daughter that her beloved Sally Ann is as dependent on the generosity of the warmongers and liquor salesmen as any other institution; then he seduces away her fiancé, the Greek scholar Adolphus Cusins, to become the heir to his business; and finally he sells Barbara herself on his factory, a model socialist community whose workers are beaming with health and pride. In Shaw’s witty and perverse social comedy, Lazarus and Undershaft, purveyors of death and destruction, are the heroes. No wonder Cusins calls his father-in-law-to-be Machiavelli and the Prince of Darkness.

Stratford and the Shaw Festival I: Shakespeare

From left: André Sills as Polixenes, Sara Topham as Hermione, and Graham Abbey as Leontes with members of the company of The Winter's Tale. (Photo: David House.)

Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale is one of the three or four plays I cherish most, and the Canada’s Stratford Festival hits a high mark with Antoni Cimolino’s production at the Tom Patterson Theatre. Cimolino has announced that he will step down from the artistic directorship of the company after one more season, and his Winter’s Tale is so beautiful from start to finish that you can’t help thinking this is the show he would like to be remembered for. He’s staged it on a simple set that the designer, Douglas Paraschuk, has enriched, scene to scene, with lyrical details and Michael Walton has lit exquisitely. One of the most poignant examples is the famous final scene. Paulina (Yanna McIntosh) leads the King of Sicilia, Leontes (Graham Abbey), who has been reunited with his childhood friend Polixenes (André Sills), his former ambassador Camillo (Tom Rooney) and his long-lost daughter Perdita (Marissa Orjalo) into a secret room. There, she tells them all, she has had a sculptor create an astonishingly lifelike statue of Leontes’s queen Hermione (Sara Topham), supposedly dead these sixteen years while Leontes, under Paulina’s guidance, has done penance for the grievous wrongs he committed against her, Polixenes and Perdita (then just an infant). The stage is unilluminated except for three handheld lanterns, so the statue is revealed suddenly, the lantern light painting the darkness. When Paulina works her magic and Hermione moves, the effect is so subtle that at first you wonder if you really saw what you think you saw.

Soluble Thoughts: Late André Breton

André Breton claimed with these glasses he could see the future. He was right. (Photo: InLibris.)

“How very hard to run a movement and be oneself. Tristan Tzara somehow managed it with Dada, as long as he did, but then Dada died. As for Surrealism’s André Breton, something about his personality and everything about his style permits the singular endurance of his self and his strong selving.”

--Mary Ann Caws, Dalkey Archive

Neglected Gem: Mike’s Murder (1984)

Debra Winger in James Brooks' Mike's Murder. (Ladd Company/Warner Bros.)

James Bridges directed Debra Winger’s breakthrough performance in Urban Cowboy (1980), but almost no one saw her in Mike’s Murder, which he wrote for her subsequently. It got mostly terrible reviews and no support from Warner Brothers, the studio that released it, even after Bridges had made the changes they’d asked for. But it’s a tense, compelling little movie on a subject other filmmakers hadn’t ventured toward, at least not in quite the same way. And Winger’s unheralded performance is one of the best she’s ever given. She plays Betty Parrish, a Los Angeles bank teller who has a casual sexual relationship with the title character (Mark Keyloun), her tennis instructor. She has no expectations that it will turn serious, and he doesn’t lead her on, but she falls hard for him. He approaches their fling the same way he seems to approach everything else – impulsively and without a great deal of afterthought. He doesn’t make much money (and he doesn’t hold onto the tennis pro job) so he sells a little dope and sometimes makes himself available to gay men when he needs some cash. He has an appealing youthful, athletic look, no more striking than that of many other kids in their twenties wandering through L.A., but there’s something sincere about him; the fact that he doesn’t lead her on is part of what makes him likable, and his aimlessness is sexy. (He has one friend, a photographer played by Robert Crosson, who used to shoot him on the tennis court from his balcony, like a voyeur.) Mike is naïve and careless, and his buddy Pete (Darrell Larson) is an idiot who keeps getting them both in trouble. They manage to get away with peddling drugs on someone else’s territory (though just barely), but when Pete gets them hired as coke couriers and then persuades Mike they should steal a small baggie, they become targets for the dangerous people they’re working for, who have Mike killed. When Betty finds out she becomes almost obsessed with finding out what happened to him; she questions some of his friends and even shows up at the crime scene, unseen by the forensics cops. She had no idea how perilous a life he was leading; she can hardly recognize him in the stories she hears about him, and when she sees the quantity of blood in the apartment where he was murdered she’s horrified. It’s as if she’d stepped into a nightmare.

Pirates of the Mississippi

David Hyde Pierce and the cast of Pirates! The Penzance Musical. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

At sixty-six, David Hyde Pierce is so slender and light of foot that he can slip on and off a stage like a wraith. As Major-General Stanley in Pirates!: The Penzance Musical, Roundabout Theatre’s reimagined version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, nearing the finish of its Broadway run, Hyde Pierce always appears ungrounded, off-balance, but you don’t worry that he might fall over; he seems far more likely to float away. He plays the character, written for the popular D’Oyly Carte comedian George Grossmith – whose 1879 performance parodied the mannerisms of the well-known Sir Garnet Wolseley – as a sly boots hiding behind the façade of a dotard, and he’s so funny that you continue to giggle over him after he’s vanished. He’s like a master vaudevillian who can hold an audience in the palm of his hand with the smallest shift in intonation or the subtlest double take.

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.)