tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19754160782559099532024-03-19T04:48:30.309-04:00 Critics At Large Independent reviews of television, movies, books, music, theatre, dance, culture, and the arts.Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.comBlogger3655125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-30616920353255337962024-03-18T15:30:00.000-04:002024-03-18T15:30:07.354-04:00Journalism on Stage: The Connector and Corruption<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsB4tnf996ncQTTXJp6T8fuSHxcOjSMis3Ss5zUfM9iaytEHqF7-dirI16moVltcxqbP_0bE8kQczYyHLPUHukvCePtEjUJq5J6QSYM15i7caOC1dV4bbqbpbUBUrnj3v4vEa6wyNGBrS5AB9exfObY8kw_E7aoyPPtKCnDD8dch1_sXYAOjG_LKNhLs-B/s700/Sanjit%20De%20Silva%20and%20Toby%20Stephens%20in%20Corruption.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="700" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsB4tnf996ncQTTXJp6T8fuSHxcOjSMis3Ss5zUfM9iaytEHqF7-dirI16moVltcxqbP_0bE8kQczYyHLPUHukvCePtEjUJq5J6QSYM15i7caOC1dV4bbqbpbUBUrnj3v4vEa6wyNGBrS5AB9exfObY8kw_E7aoyPPtKCnDD8dch1_sXYAOjG_LKNhLs-B/w640-h426/Sanjit%20De%20Silva%20and%20Toby%20Stephens%20in%20Corruption.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sanjit De Silva and Toby Stephens in <b>Corruption</b>. (Photo: T Charles Erickson)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>In his new play, <b>Corruption</b>, which opened last week at Lincoln Center, the excellent American political playwright <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=J.T.+Rogers" target="_blank">J.T. Rogers</a> dramatizes the scandal in Britain that brought down Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper <i>News of the World </i>when it was revealed that phone hacking and police bribery were commonplace procedures at the publication. Most of the targets were show-biz celebrities, politicians and members of the royal family, but the investigation showed that the phones of thousands of ordinary citizens had also been hacked, including those of a murdered schoolgirl and the relatives of victims of the 2005 London bombings. Rogers’s previous plays include <b>The Overwhelming </b>(about the Rwandan genocide), <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/01/spook-in-afghanistan-blood-and-gifts.html" target="_blank">Blood and Gifts</a> </b>(about the war in Afghanistan) and the Tony Award-winning <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2016/08/the-crooked-timber-of-humanity-jt.html" target="_blank"><b>Oslo </b></a>(about the Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and Palestine). <b>Corruption </b>is based on <b>Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain</b>, an account of the scandal co-written by two men who took major roles in illuminating it: Tom Watson, a Member of Parliament (and future Labour Party Deputy Leader) serving on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and Martin Hickman, a journalist for <i>The Independent.</i></p>
<p>Rogers has chosen Watson (played by Toby Stephens) as his protagonist, but he doesn’t attempt to whitewash him: as government whip during Gordon Brown’s tenure as Prime Minister, his assertiveness crossed the line into bullying and intimidation. When Watson attempts to enlist a fellow MP, Chris Bryant (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=K.%20Todd%20Freeman" target="_blank">K. Todd Freeman</a>), in the uncovering of the <i>News of the World </i>debacle, Bryant’s initial reluctance is personal: he hasn’t forgiven Tom for homophobic slurs, and when he does join the fight he insists that their collaboration isn’t an indication of friendship. Still, the lines that separate the good guys from the bad guys in this drama are very clear. It’s an intelligent, well-acted production, exciting (especially in the second act), directed by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Bartlett%20Sher" target="_blank">Bartlett Sher</a> (who staged both <b>Oslo </b>and <b>Blood and Gifts</b>) with his usual command of rhythm and tempo and his highly skillful choreographing of ensembles, and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Michael%20Yeargan" target="_blank">Michael Yeargan</a> has designed a fine set, a halo of screens playing news clips that spins over the stage. But by definition agit-prop plays aren’t subtle. The English playwright James Graham, who wrote <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2017/08/bad-behavior-treatment-gloria-ink.html" target="_blank"><b>Ink </b></a>(about Murdoch’s early career) and <b>Dear England </b>among others, tends to present rousing material in an entertaining fashion in the first act and then convince himself in the second that he’s making a profound statement; you end up feeling cheated. Rogers reaches farther in <b>Blood and Gifts </b>and certainly in <b>Oslo</b>, which is his best work; in <b>Corruption </b>he’s satisfied to let the material speak for itself. I don’t think that’s a failing; neither the play nor the production makes extravagant claims for itself, and the subject matter is undeniably compelling and infuriating. But his writing here has more punch than elegance.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Everyone in the cast shuttles among two, three, four or five parts except for Stephens and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Saffron%20Burrows" target="_blank">Saffron Burrows</a>, who plays the chief villain, <i>News of the World</i>’s editor, Rebekah Brooks. Besides them, the standout performers are Freeman, Sanjit De Silva (as Hickman and others), Spideh Moafi (whose main role is the hard-hitting, righteous lawyer Charlotte Harris), Nick Davies (as <i>The Guardian</i>’s most brilliant investigative journalist) and John Behlmann (front and center as Brooks’s cowed husband Charlie). As the counsel for <i>News of the World, </i>Tom Crone, Dylan Baker produces the kind of slippery malevolence he’s embodied in other character roles, but he’s certainly adept at it. Toward the end he spins a surprise for us, returning as the creepy private eye Glen Mulcaire, who supervised most of the dirty doings, and Baker has a field day. So does<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=%20Michael%20Siberry" target="_blank"> Michael Siberry</a> as Max Mosley, a businessman whose sordid sexual life and Nazi sympathies <i>News of the World </i>exposed and who refuses to show remorse for his behavior. (Siberry has one sensational understated moment, when he alludes to his son’s response to the revelations: he killed himself.) Unfortunately, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Seth%20Numrich" target="_blank">Seth Numrich</a>, who was so good in <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/09/horse-and-his-boy-warhorse.html" target="_blank">War Horse</a></b><i>, </i><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2022/10/leopoldstadt-jews-in-vienna.html" target="_blank"><b>Leopoldstadt</b> </a>and Sher’s revival of <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/12/golden-boy-art-vs-commerce.html" target="_blank"><b>Golden Boy</b></a><i>, </i>doesn’t make much of a mark as Rupert Murdoch’s son James, who oversees <i>News of the World. </i>Murdoch Sr. doesn’t appear in the play.<p></p>
<p>The timeliness of the material in <b>Corruption </b>is both a virtue and a weakness. When the phone hacking scandal closed down <i>News of the World </i>in 2011 and Prime Minister David Cameron opened a wide inquiry into the widespread illicit practices in Murdoch’s journalistic empire, the notion of fake news was still in its infancy. But in the age of Trump no lie is so extravagant, no conduct so nefarious that it still has the power to shock us, however much it may raise our hackles. You can see all the connections Rogers is making to the demagoguery to come: Rebekah Brooks’s pattern whenever anyone tries to make her look bad is to yell and threaten and then claim that she’s representing the working class, who are sick and tired of being lied to and ill-treated. He strikes the chord he wants to strike but, for reasons the playwright is helpless to control, it lacks the potency to knock us flat. He ends the play in uplift, just as any agit-prop writer in the Depression era would have been trained to do, and, all things considered, it’s not the worst idea he could have embraced.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFfV3B23ESYdyonTmkypinBfVPO9zhBdYPX8_hQDc34HQliDdGELuZqheyO6YU7NS_QPOTiwLuMuoS_6Fh9sk2Q8umyDif9_srwRnZqvqg_1kTmcclDZ9-rpld9xwBhJEyr4SuUW3GOs2BB-q2N4h6Oy90sGoOSw1vOaWrAH5kW5mEtOht-4buojbDbBuD/s970/Scott-Bakula-and-Ben-Levi-Ross-in-MCC-Theaters-2024-production-of-THE-CONNECTOR-Photos-by-Joan-Marcus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="546" data-original-width="970" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFfV3B23ESYdyonTmkypinBfVPO9zhBdYPX8_hQDc34HQliDdGELuZqheyO6YU7NS_QPOTiwLuMuoS_6Fh9sk2Q8umyDif9_srwRnZqvqg_1kTmcclDZ9-rpld9xwBhJEyr4SuUW3GOs2BB-q2N4h6Oy90sGoOSw1vOaWrAH5kW5mEtOht-4buojbDbBuD/w640-h360/Scott-Bakula-and-Ben-Levi-Ross-in-MCC-Theaters-2024-production-of-THE-CONNECTOR-Photos-by-Joan-Marcus.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scott Bakula and Ben Levi Ross in <b>The Connector</b>. (Photo: Joan Marcus)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The musical <b>The Connector</b> was inspired by the story of Stephen Glass, the young <i>New Republic </i>journalist in the mid-nineties who turned out to have fabricated, in part or entirely, most of his feature articles. In the play, which was conceived by the director, Daisy Prince, with a very smart book by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jonathan%20Marc%20Sherman" target="_blank">Jonathan Marc Sherman</a> and a strong score by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jason%20Robert%20Brown" target="_blank">Jason Robert Brown</a>, the magazine is called <i>The Connector. </i>The young man is a recent Princeton grad named Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) who impresses its editor, Conrad O’Brien (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Scott%20Bakula" target="_blank">Scott Bakula</a>), with a story he published in the alumni magazine and charms him with his adulation of <i>The Connector </i>and his encyclopedic knowledge of its history. Conrad hires Ethan as a fact checker and takes him under his wing, publishing his first journalistic effort and moving him with astonishing rapidity to the writing staff, praising the beauty of his sentences and encouraging him to make his stories more political, more daring. He regales Ethan with stories about his career in drinking sessions at the local bar – Conrad made his bones as a Vietnam War correspondent and his own mentor was a legendary <i>Connector </i>editor – and isn’t shy about downplaying the contributions of more seasoned writers on the staff in comparison to Ethan’s. But other <i>Connector </i>staffers see through Ethan’s flattery: first the head fact checker, Muriel (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jessica%20Molaskey" target="_blank">Jessica Molaskey</a>), and eventually Ethan’s first friend at the magazine, Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), who can’t get O’Brien to pay attention to <i>her</i> writing because he doesn’t take female writers seriously.</p>
<p>Ethan’s psychology is as mysterious as Steve Glass’s in <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/12/three-from-shelf-shattered-glass-secret.html" target="_blank"><b>Shattered Glass</b></a>, Billy Ray’s memorable movie about the <i>New Republic </i>scandal, based on Buzz Bissinger’s <i>Vanity Fair </i>article, which starred <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Hayden%20Christensen" target="_blank">Hayden Christensen</a> in the title role and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Peter%20Sarsgaard" target="_blank">Peter Sarsgaard</a> as his editor, Chuck Lane. Ethan is eerie around Conrad: he seems to be trying to memorize his boss. And he’s alternately warm to Robin and distant from her; at times they’re in the same room but he seems to be occupying a different space. When she decides to take a job at another publication because the editor (Eliseo Román) is enthusiastic about her work, Ethan’s response is remarkably mean-spirited and dismissive; he talks to her as if she were a traitor, though she’s still not even a <i>Connector </i>writer. It’s as if, for him, there’s only <i>The Connector, </i>so when she migrates to another venue in his view she’s fallen off the edge of the universe.</p>
<p>Unless you spot the parallels between Dobson and Steve Glass straight off, it may take a while to catch on that his stories are invented out of whole cloth. At first I saw the character as a relative of J. Pierrepont Finch, the climber in <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/09/musicals-in-revival-anything-goes-how.html" target="_blank">How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying</a></b>, and I assumed that what he was after was Conrad O’Brien’s job. As a writer Dobson really seems to be everything Conrad says he is; it’s just that he’s a fiction writer, not a journalist. And his articles contain ingenious twists that function as safeguards against fact checking. His first, about a Greenwich Village Scrabble champ named Waldo Pine who makes money by taking on challengers (played by Max Crumm in a terrific number, “Success”), ends with Ethan returning to his crib the next night and finding that the building has been locked down, so there’s no way Ethan can find him again. This coda extends Waldo’s quirkiness; it doesn’t strike us until later that all of Ethan’s stories are constructed so that in the end they swallow up their subjects. But when Ethan writes a piece about the mayor of a New Jersey city whose crack smoking was ostensibly caught on a video that has since vanished in mid-air (obviously Sherman was thinking about Marion Berry), Muriel protests that the magazine can’t publish a piece about an elected politician that makes claims no one can prove. O’Brien stands behind his writer, and the show loses us for a couple of scenes – it’s one thing for an editor to get so swept up in his new star writer’s dazzle that he misses a couple of beats and quite another for him to publish a scurrilous claim about a standing mayor without a shred of actual evidence. Sherman figures a way out of the corner he’s written himself into, but it’s a flaw in the book, perhaps its only flaw. (I also liked Sherman’s book for<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2020/03/bob-carol-ted-alice-too-late-for-satire.html" target="_blank"> a musical version of Paul Mazursky’s movie <b>Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice</b></a>, which The New Group produced in 2020 before the theatres shut down.)</p>
<p>Ross, a startlingly talented actor-singer who played Evan Hansen on tour, offers a fascinating (and extremely creepy) portrait of a young man who lives in an invented world and begins to fall apart when he’s finally exposed, due largely to a persnickety <i>Connector </i>fan named Mona Bland (a note-perfect performance by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Mylinda%20Hull" target="_blank">Mylinda Hull</a>) with a habit of writing letters to the magazine whenever she spots an error in print. There are no dim spots in the cast, which also showcases <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Daniel%20Jenkins" target="_blank">Daniel Jenkins</a> as the magazine’s counsel. Cruz gives a dynamic performance, though she isn’t well served by “Cassandra,” her solo about the glass ceiling, any more than Molaskey is by hers about her dedication to absolute truth in journalism (“Proof”): Brown has framed these numbers too transparently to bring down the house, and both are too on the nose. Bakula is splendid as Conrad, which is the linchpin role; the musical couldn’t work without an actor who hits the ideal combination of ego, nostalgia and moral conviction. Daisy Prince’s staging, on an appealing <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Beowulf%20Boritt" target="_blank">Beowulf Boritt </a>set, is kinetic and imaginative, as is Karla Puno Garcia’s choreography. <b>The Connector </b>was extended twice before it closed, finally, last weekend. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of it.</p><p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– </b></span><b><a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg">Steve Vineberg</a></b> is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for <i>The Threepenny Review</i> and is the author of three books: <b>Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b>; <b>No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b>; and <b>High Comedy in American Movies</b>. <p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-54571556370503667482024-03-16T14:26:00.005-04:002024-03-16T14:26:46.797-04:00Down the Rabbit Hole with the National Ballet of Canada <p><span style="font-size: small;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir-1mGCnUsioVk7JY5o00tuFkwAnkAFJb7tPMYuwgG5j6nhWbWPR6F3C_9Z3HSxNbn9oM_xPp2tZl_CL3WTunvYswTAGa6hhYtoioLXu8DIDkB77EzehwXBSr5Eeh1wJ7Tyq_la0-5pHnbtNOPXdq05xtv6HUx94TrlhkmJE2i-dYcCBsHcFut8_IxNq2h/s5718/AL103279-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3812" data-original-width="5718" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir-1mGCnUsioVk7JY5o00tuFkwAnkAFJb7tPMYuwgG5j6nhWbWPR6F3C_9Z3HSxNbn9oM_xPp2tZl_CL3WTunvYswTAGa6hhYtoioLXu8DIDkB77EzehwXBSr5Eeh1wJ7Tyq_la0-5pHnbtNOPXdq05xtv6HUx94TrlhkmJE2i-dYcCBsHcFut8_IxNq2h/w640-h426/AL103279-1.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tirion Law and Svetlana Lunkina <b>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</b>. (Photo: Karolina Kuras. Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada)</td></tr></tbody></table></span> </p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=National%20Ballet%20of%20Canada" target="_blank">National Ballet of Canada</a>'s presentation of <b>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</b> transcends mere entertainment, offering an unbridled exploration of creativity, imagination, and the human experience. <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Christopher+Wheeldon" target="_blank">Christopher Wheeldon</a>'s shape-shifting choreography, inspired by Lewis Carroll's timeless tale, serves as a poignant reflection on the power of storytelling and the journey of self-discovery. A mesmerizing use of computer-generated imagery, eye-popping colour and actual dancing in the aisles allow for a fully immersive experience, accessible to all.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">At the heart of the current production — at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre through March 17 — lies <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Tirion%20Law" target="_blank">Tirion Law</a>'s translucent portrayal of Alice, a character whose quest for identity and meaning in a topsy-turvy world resonates deeply with audiences. Supported by a stellar cast, including <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Svetlana%20Lunkina" target="_blank">Svetlana Lunkina</a> as the comically villainous Queen of Hearts, and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Donald%20Thom" target="_blank">Donald Thom</a> as the twitchy White Rabbit, Law delivers a wholly engaging performance that invites viewers in to contemplate themes of curiosity, courage, and transformation, as Alice navigates Wonderland’s fantastical landscapes.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">On stage for nearly all of the three-act ballet’s 160 minutes, the Hong Kong-born second soloist (making her debut in the titular role) maintains the energy needed to make Alice both enchanting and believable. Law possesses a charming charisma on top of a strong and malleable technique that carries her through sustained solos and intricate <i>pas de deux</i> danced with <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Naoya%20Ebe" target="_blank">Naoya Ebe</a> in the part of Jack/The Knave of Hearts, the teenage Alice’s love interest.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Yes, you read that right. Love interest. In this balletic reinterpretation of the original 1865 book <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/06/tumbling-for-alice-national-ballets.html" target="_blank">(first presented in 2011</a> as a joint production of England’s The Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada), the British-born Wheeldon takes liberties with his literary inspiration, transforming pre-pubescent Alice into an adolescent with raging hormones and a mind of her own. He plays up the subversive elements in Lewis’s text, inventively remaking classical dance into new shapes and theatrical sensations. Doing so enables him to capture the essence of Carroll's narrative with his own distinctive style and sensibility. Each dance sequence becomes a metaphorical journey, inviting viewers to explore the complexities of the human psyche and the interconnectedness of the world around us.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb6c-ALik5FhFMxILQBKDkWWduExXQ_YK1sW_wdjsTn93GsRi8hMVZ6MKnIQ510B8HVtDJSC-BifQL1yoox6Xm9gGD69hougB2aPh6OIayLiDWrhiTNLvT11JHS6FDRyaYA7cWn2dmKdIeUSwUSvBXfDKrH_f33_AmkOtD1calPWge1DA9fxHmIaic_lIn/s6884/AL106868.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4589" data-original-width="6884" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb6c-ALik5FhFMxILQBKDkWWduExXQ_YK1sW_wdjsTn93GsRi8hMVZ6MKnIQ510B8HVtDJSC-BifQL1yoox6Xm9gGD69hougB2aPh6OIayLiDWrhiTNLvT11JHS6FDRyaYA7cWn2dmKdIeUSwUSvBXfDKrH_f33_AmkOtD1calPWge1DA9fxHmIaic_lIn/w640-h426/AL106868.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Donald Thom and Tirion Law in <b>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</b>. (Photo: Karolina Kuras. Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada)</td></tr></tbody></table></span> </p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Despite being ostensibly a ballet for children, it oozes dark matter as well as themes of loneliness, lost love and the escape promised by psychotropic drugs. As Alice intrepidly imbibes, inhales, and nibbles her way down the rabbit hole, life becomes curiouser and curiouser, indeed. Her despotic mother from the opening act’s Victorian garden picnic scenes (Lunkina again) morphs figuratively into the rampaging murderous Duchess character (a deliciously demonic Josh Hall) seen later in the blood-splattered “Home Sweet Home” section, exposing an undercurrent of menace in the not-so-idyllic world of domestic relationships. In another Wonderland episode, Alice befriends a menagerie of exotic animals who are willing to accept her into their ranks until she inadvertently scares them off with the firing of a starter pistol, underscoring the fragility of the human connection to nature. But there is hope, the least being the enigmatic Cheshire Cat and the undulating hookah-smoking Caterpillar (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Peng-Fei+Jiang" target="_blank">Peng-Fei Jiang</a>), who expose new vistas in the quest for meaning.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Alice’s mind expands in the balance.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Her henpecked father of the first act is reimagined in the Wonderland sequences as the ultimately assertive King of Hearts who saves the day when he orders a stay on the execution of the Knave ordered by his ridiculously overbearing wife, paving the way for the triumph of love. Rex Harrington, the company’s former star principal dancer who now serves as its rehearsal director and principal coach, plays both roles with comedic flair and sassiness. Flipping the script has its rewards.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The biggest mind-bender? The ballet’s spectacular visual presentation. <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jon%20Driscoll%20Gemma%20Carrington" target="_blank">Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington</a>'s digital projections, Toby Olié's audacious puppetry, and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Bob%20Crowley" target="_blank">Bob Crowley</a>’s eccentric set and costume designs push the boundaries of stagecraft. Life-sized paper boats, a pink flamingo corps de ballet with beaks for hands, insolent trees spouting white roses instead of requisite red and dancers costumed as a deck of cards create a surreal backdrop for a ballet where nothing is real.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Equally captivating is <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Joby%20Talbot" target="_blank">Joby Talbot</a>'s original score, which infuses depth, wit, and emotion into the overall performance. His dynamic composition, once described as a "moving toy shop," brims with lively tones and unexpected percussion, echoing the kaleidoscopic nature of Carroll's prose. Under the baton of conductor <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=David%20Briskin" target="_blank">David Briskin</a>, the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra invigorates the blend of symphonic and cinematic elements, elevating <b>Alice</b> to a dazzling spectacle of music and dance, and ensuring its future status as a centrepiece in the National Ballet’s repertoire. </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvVZdWxqe46unpp3se3Y4-YA2Mxq9oLe_piierOn7Ww-Bd0RZn6LuKJiEKsXsPsPb-wyhEjO_s1736pRGSOv1ExhEkdcWLaYqgrWolD7ych3dWRvcw-KRjYVOW_MdQhcQ5wrZ8cPPskobdf1afW4A7QRQ-OAGwd1bWo1h-I9GUgqBwCCp51GKk0vYE4NM/s502/Deirdre%20Kelly%20bio%20(1).jpeg" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="462" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvVZdWxqe46unpp3se3Y4-YA2Mxq9oLe_piierOn7Ww-Bd0RZn6LuKJiEKsXsPsPb-wyhEjO_s1736pRGSOv1ExhEkdcWLaYqgrWolD7ych3dWRvcw-KRjYVOW_MdQhcQ5wrZ8cPPskobdf1afW4A7QRQ-OAGwd1bWo1h-I9GUgqBwCCp51GKk0vYE4NM/w184-h200/Deirdre%20Kelly%20bio%20(1).jpeg" width="184" /></a><span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span>– <b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Deirdre%2520Kelly&source=gmail&ust=1703644104057000&usg=AOvVaw18HAU9cBHPThYaaOg_rBgS" href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Deirdre%20Kelly" style="color: #a70f0f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Deirdre<span> </span><span class="il">Kelly</span></a></b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">The Globe and Mail</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Dance Magazine</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> in New York, the </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Dance Gazette</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> in London, and </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">NUVO </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the<b> </b></span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">International Dictionary of Ballet</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> and </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">. The best-selling author of </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Paris Times Eight</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> and </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">,
she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen
Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York
University as Editor of the award-winning </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">The York University Magazine </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">where </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book,<span> </span><b><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Fashioning-Beatles-Looks-Shook-World/dp/1990823327/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank">Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World</a>. </b></span></span></span><p><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-29326214836172481172024-02-21T12:00:00.001-05:002024-02-21T12:16:16.982-05:00Dressed For Success: Fashioning the Beatles, by Deirdre Kelly<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp2rfKPUmvqkZZvpy0F6sOP-XoNsudQNnXg-WOP2ppg0sOvnonldFUT0LRFrPinLeHMXQmMxRZR7Tc8wsjm7qCTkZggFmVZ6he8NSIdYCGDkLmcz0elVYa3l60sTl9PJmrHOps7F2pKatciRhAy4SEIR4MGWcbjEB3IJ9Es9irazGi91w3JIWQky_vw0Ot/s4000/Redferns.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2632" data-original-width="4000" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp2rfKPUmvqkZZvpy0F6sOP-XoNsudQNnXg-WOP2ppg0sOvnonldFUT0LRFrPinLeHMXQmMxRZR7Tc8wsjm7qCTkZggFmVZ6he8NSIdYCGDkLmcz0elVYa3l60sTl9PJmrHOps7F2pKatciRhAy4SEIR4MGWcbjEB3IJ9Es9irazGi91w3JIWQky_vw0Ot/w640-h422/Redferns.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Beatles with Little Richard, 1962 (Photo: Horst Fascher/Redferns)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><blockquote>
<p>“Now I'm stepping out of this old brown shoe<br /> Baby, I'm in love with you<br /> I'm so glad you came here, it won't be the same now<br /> I'm telling you.</p>
<p>I may appear to be imperfect<br /> My love is something you can't reject<br /> I'm changing faster than the weather”</p>
<p>– “Old Brown Shoe”, George Harrison, <b>Abbey Road</b>.</p></blockquote><p></p>
<p>Although composed and recorded in the late phase of their stellar career, a humble but lovely gem by the always underrated <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=george+harrison" target="_blank">Mr. Harrison</a> for their last masterpiece<b> Abbey Road </b>during their slow motion breakup, the tune “Old Brown Shoe” still seems to encapsulate some of the supersonic swift living the band survived through during the magnificent eight years of their astronomical rise to fame and fortune. “I’m changing faster than the weather” also seems to echo both the breathtaking musical stylistic shifts they underwent as well as to mirror the under-reported fashion styles they first embraced, then embodied and finally shared with the rest of us lesser mortals. <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Deirdre%20Kelly" target="_blank">Deirdre Kelly</a>’s masterful and insightful documenting of their dramatic clothing coolness, <b>Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks that Shook the World</b>, now finally addresses their nearly supernatural chic and how it paralleled the shockingly inspiring evolutionary leaps they took in the art of the popular song. It’s a literary gift of the highest order.</p>
<p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHiRi9O6Shisj2LH6ARd2KH1hMLR3KR84QRfqHkOtVhhw2TvTkaG10F40fSUUF8BDjY-9WbdeOcM4pHI4Z0K1WkhnAocyYdvTZSUlg6z1MSigTVKNuUYZZZACpzvUF7XYFOs_uqmFRxM-iGu05kDfWByRpEBdVO26yYTSWZo8ZjbY2_wYN5HXbmXHuU0cS/s2560/Sutherland%20House%20Books,%20Toronto.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1792" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHiRi9O6Shisj2LH6ARd2KH1hMLR3KR84QRfqHkOtVhhw2TvTkaG10F40fSUUF8BDjY-9WbdeOcM4pHI4Z0K1WkhnAocyYdvTZSUlg6z1MSigTVKNuUYZZZACpzvUF7XYFOs_uqmFRxM-iGu05kDfWByRpEBdVO26yYTSWZo8ZjbY2_wYN5HXbmXHuU0cS/w448-h640/Sutherland%20House%20Books,%20Toronto.jpg" width="448" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sutherland House Books, Toronto.</td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p>That subtitle: the looks that shook the world, is far from being mere hyperbole, even if it evoked, for me anyway, John Reed’s chronicle of revolution <b>Ten Days That Shook the World</b>, since it might also have been titled Eight Years That Shook the World. It's a fabulous and important tome, and I've read literally a ton of Beatles material over the years, but I can't remember one I've enjoyed and savored page by page quite as much as hers. Kelly’s exhaustive detailing of the band’s apparel, whether matching or intentionally mis-matched, and their various gifted designers, their looks’ custom bespoke quality and their own attitude toward their altitude is simply splendid. It's beyond solely music or their pop celebrity and importance altogether (although the reader of course automatically knows that this is a Beatles-lover's tome to be sure) but it's in a whole other league of journalistic endeavor, and beneath the surface of appreciation for who they were historically, it’s not so secretly about the politics of desire, the allure of style appetite, the compulsions of our collective fetishes and the unconscious projection of what they represented culturally.</p>
<p>I enjoyed it immensely, and appreciated it even more: it’s very well written and researched beyond in-depth, featuring a truly unique narrative lens: clothes that made the men. Others have noted how the band had a "distinctive sense of style", but none, or very few until Kelly, have explained precisely why, how come, and from what sources their own near fetishistic attraction to looking super-cool originally arose and evolved personally for them. I loved her chronicle of how style and fashion, image and persona were pivotal garnishes <i>atop</i> their musical brilliance. In that respect it reminds me somewhat of the knowing spirit of my late friend <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Kevin%20Courrier" target="_blank">Kevin Courrier</a>’s book on the Beatles, <b>Artificial Paradise</b>, in which he explored the dark side of their utopian dream together. In this tome, Kelly explores the bright and shiny side of their free wheeling way of wearing the finest and rarest of garb, while still somehow maintaining their charming working class ethos. But even before they began being outfitted in the coolest and finest limited edition Saville Row clothes in London, subsequent to their core image being altered forever by their epochal encounter with Astrid Kirchnerr in Hamburg which refashioned their hair downward and their apparel in gritty black leather, they were already held in thrall to another supercool black ethos. In addition to their rock rhythm, it was the trim and tight shiny suits worn by many of their black idols, the snappy dressing dudes who (in addition to the white interloper Mr. Presley who borrowed the rock and roll they had invented and popularized it with white audiences) virtually inspired the teenaged Liverpool lads to become musicians overnight when they first encountered the raucous new musical form on imported records from America.</p>
<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0jVMqTtSdCJF7x3EjvGdRNuYRU2iIklfXrQsjreDlDsrs6y7H6lWI_KMzV8IUjyH68IcuURK-nc3udKXxpjOTrwqVEDVEslmDJLyZnq0XOOjYemeNlI_8EczGkJTH0YhyYQfXhhX8WOjlND80PByuFlpWVKPVn8UDcp3TvrBdF8IwygDEGrPBDoOGgXVB/s816/BeatlesPeteBestPA060511-2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="816" height="470" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0jVMqTtSdCJF7x3EjvGdRNuYRU2iIklfXrQsjreDlDsrs6y7H6lWI_KMzV8IUjyH68IcuURK-nc3udKXxpjOTrwqVEDVEslmDJLyZnq0XOOjYemeNlI_8EczGkJTH0YhyYQfXhhX8WOjlND80PByuFlpWVKPVn8UDcp3TvrBdF8IwygDEGrPBDoOGgXVB/w640-h470/BeatlesPeteBestPA060511-2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hamburg 1960, before Ringo joined the band and cemented their beat forever.</td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p>When the musical revolution that would inspire the lads to begin launching their own inspiring innovations in music, and as Kelly astutely points out also allowed them free reign to launch a fashion and style revolution almost as dramatic, first found the band’s founders John and Paul in 1957, they were basically rough and ready teddy-boys. Soon enough though, as they were beginning to sweat on speed in Germany and then really begin cooking at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, their personal style began to echo and emulate their idols. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Guy and a host of other bluesy black rocking titans were always seen strutting on stage in slick suits that accentuated the raw sensuality of this new music vibe. Of special significance to their early style sensibility was the swaggering androgynous sweaty-spirit of Richard Penniman.</p>
<p><a>Paul McCartney</a> (the secret leader of the band for years and years once they really got going) was 14 years old when he first watched Little Richard performing the title song “The Girl Can’t Help It” in the 1956 film starring the multi-talented Jayne Mansfield. This may have been actually the first music video ever produced by the way. His life would never be the same, and neither would ours, once he met the official leader of the band Mr. Lennon. After seeing Richard performing “Ready Teddy”, which he took to be a personal message to him, he was mesmerized and adopted (as often as his bandmates would let him) Penniman’s raging growling throaty shriek, and soon enough he’d be attired in shiny shark suits similar to his idol. He also early on learned (with a little help from their visionary manager Brian Epstein) that visual image and fashion style was almost as important as being a genius. And this is where Kelly’s excellent book delivers its remarkable service. Prior to their avid adherence to strict codes of hand made tailored suits, usually courtesy of Dougie Millings, I was so caught up in their bright and shiny musical brilliance that I barely noticed how sophisticated and elegant these guys really were. Even today, until Deidre’s book descended and launched a day by day, year by year evolutionary document of their apparel, as well as how seriously they took their hand crafted look, I’m not sure I fully realized at all how dapper and self-confident these guys really were.</p>
<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKuj4OoY0qK9xC7Z1Z8MLdwJGIk3fjBv8xZzdreQTQBM7676u0I6C0FCvOVpCip8eLK_0tM_j2oLxp94x_nGasgVxJCoXzMpaH8H54T2BIhyphenhyphenttnrmlNLFxTvZvMFl2q5DzfbrvSLmN74gSP3AELUF7EJGM0sBTQ3wRYYTXJZVCfgLbA-gf_D0T1ZFqbNH7/s2000/1963.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="2000" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKuj4OoY0qK9xC7Z1Z8MLdwJGIk3fjBv8xZzdreQTQBM7676u0I6C0FCvOVpCip8eLK_0tM_j2oLxp94x_nGasgVxJCoXzMpaH8H54T2BIhyphenhyphenttnrmlNLFxTvZvMFl2q5DzfbrvSLmN74gSP3AELUF7EJGM0sBTQ3wRYYTXJZVCfgLbA-gf_D0T1ZFqbNH7/w640-h512/1963.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Beatles in 1963. (Photo: Andy Wright)</td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p>Nik Cohn summed it up succinctly in the epigram from <b>Today There Are No Gentlemen</b>, that opens her timely tome: “I can’t overpitch this, the Beatles changed everything. Before them, all teenage life, and therefore all fashion, existed in spasms; after them, it was an entity, a separate society.” Hence perhaps the exactitude of George’s nostalgic observation, “I’m changing faster than the weather.” He knew whereof he spoke. And so does Deirdre Kelly. As Tony Palmer, director of “All You Need Is Love” observed: “The Beatles didn’t set out to be the trend. They were innately stylish young men who, by constantly changing their appearance (mostly to please themselves), altered the look of a generation, not once but time and time again. Why? Because they were original. They did not follow fashion. They took it in new directions, becoming the leading style makers of their day. Their look permeated contemporary culture much like their music.” And Gawd they were just so damn cool that their fashion forward outfits, chosen and worn on a whim for their own personal amusement, are still just as hip over half a century later. Palmer is also right on target when he lauds Kelly’s incredibly well researched work as an unparalleled survey and analysis of the Beatles as the enduring epitome of pop style. Pop culture itself was always, of course, about things and trends that quickly go in and out of style, but not these four gents: they were so far ahead of their time that they still seem to exist in a future that is still arriving.</p>
<p>McCartney had his usual low key, almost ironic sense of their own importance to the times, “We were slightly—you could call it arrogant or confident—in our own sense of fashion.” Kelly is even more on point: “With their boldly original outfits, high-stylized hair and mustaches, the Beatles projected a radical personal appearance that made them not simply different but extraordinary. Crafting a look that spoke volumes about who you were, where you came from, the music you liked, how you viewed the world and your place in it, was what the Beatles had in common.” And her book commences its chronicle long before they were even officially known as the Beatles, while still ruffians, teddy-boys, proto-punk howlers and finally, amazingly enough, cool, calm and collected balladeers writing the soundtrack for our collective future. And once the year 1961 started, an era Kelly calls that of Cosmetic Conversion, they never looked back. “The Beatles all gladly put on suits, making the trip across the Mersey to be properly fitted once they realized the value to their career of being smartly dressed.”</p>
<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwUjdAnB7p7X7XhGUHMyxfB9lzl3ar81aELAiEksS6hGqe-P-GzUh3dpgET3_m8Yl0wTUSp4EANVy6293X_gHMVS454wHSpeYSkuLQW4S2PQSLxZo6H3S6CRey673EVVcmwpf6dEyTyqSRmaYqPhjxZrB1rKQFAcUI0qzq4afUb3gtqziqongRrKcz1qh6/s2048/The%20legendary%20Fats%20Domino%20accepts%20the%20well%20earned%20adulation%20of%20the%20Beatles%20during%20their%20ascent.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1359" data-original-width="2048" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwUjdAnB7p7X7XhGUHMyxfB9lzl3ar81aELAiEksS6hGqe-P-GzUh3dpgET3_m8Yl0wTUSp4EANVy6293X_gHMVS454wHSpeYSkuLQW4S2PQSLxZo6H3S6CRey673EVVcmwpf6dEyTyqSRmaYqPhjxZrB1rKQFAcUI0qzq4afUb3gtqziqongRrKcz1qh6/w640-h424/The%20legendary%20Fats%20Domino%20accepts%20the%20well%20earned%20adulation%20of%20the%20Beatles%20during%20their%20ascent.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The legendary Fats Domino accepts the well earned adulation of the Beatles during their ascent, 1964.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>Thence commenced their whirlwind merry-go-round public and private life that swept all the rest of us, gob-smacked and gazing in awe at these chameleon-like geniuses who seemed to take it all in their very lengthy strides, along with them for the ride of a century. One of the (many) pleasures of this book is the fact that, being smartly chronological in presentation, it simultaneously takes us on the roller coaster ride of the swift and stunning musical evolution while also bringing us behind the scenes into the tailor’s fitting rooms where their ever changing clothing choices were literally embodying the quirky personalities behind how they dressed for this or that event in public, and also in private. Thus, the chapters tumble across our breathless memories in a robust cascade of the essential Beatle calendar. 1960: tough leather; 1961: cosmetic conversion; 1962: gold-coloured cufflinks; 1963: uncollared; 1964: well hello mop-tops; 1965: kings of corduroy; 1966: from mod to god; 1967: raging retro; 1968: who’s minding the shop (their insanely utopian and disastrous foray in their own private/public Apple fashion empire); 1969: unraveling the threads; 1970 and beyond: slouching towards immortality, which is the almost mystical address where they and we all currently reside, otherwise known as history.</p>
<p>The author’s tone is a consistent combination of cheeky style maven and amazingly knowledgeable band-fan, with this brief except being a perfect example of how detailed a study it is and how expertly she shares it with the rest of us. Epstein was canny enough to bring his wards to the attention of the hippest designers of the time, to make their looks and images come to life in the most memorable way imaginable: “Dougie Millings had been making bespoke clothing for pop groups since 1958. Sealing his reputation as the ‘tailor to the stars’. The clothes might have been a bit flashy but they were beautifully crafted and well made. Epstein made the appointment for them to arrive at 63 Old Compton Street. He encouraged them to arrive with their own thoughts. Judging by the estimated 500 suits Millings would make for the Beatles in the next several years, they had no shortage of ideas. The group asked Millings to make something smart but not ostentatious. They wanted to look ‘a little bit different’ than the other groups. ‘We don’t want to look like The Shadows’, Millings recalled John saying that day.</p>
<p>The result of their first encounter was chic and elegant: a three piece chocolate-brown suit with a velvet collar that had been inaugurated by the Teds. The Beatles wore the hand-stitched garment with pink and white gingham penny-collar shirts with Portofino cuffs adorned with gold-coloured cufflinks. They completed the look with inch-thick black ties and their leather Cuban heel boots. The rush to sophistication was noticeable, and perhaps not unexpected with them spending increasing amounts of time in the capital, meeting the press, making the scene.” Well, to put it mildly, they didn’t just make the scene, they <i>made</i> the scene: they <i>were </i>the scene, until they stopped being a group, and even for decades afterward. To this day in fact, having the two living Beatles still with us, Paul and Ringo, and continuing to perform and stun us, by not simply following any wayward trends in our jaded 21rst Century but rather being seemingly beyond all trends. Even when only half the group is still alive kicking, they aren’t just dapper elderly dudes, they are, in fact, still Beatles. And they always will be. And Kelly’s book will be an opulent archive of their amazing era, within them or without them.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA8YmVoZ_BwIfCfeL9pIkdmYsa7H-VshulslkoG_e_L5v7xPr4mctWjlTeUsnUc0yNerLEzXthLC33KJLjj9zZRfOcjDKyjSk87m6kid-op_8qYoU4N6Cf3173qAqQkuNMTzhMcV0u8HAHlYvZWiZtWpulhQjhaywNmT2TIHaQopWIxXunahmdJbA-Xlz_/s1495/1965.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1124" data-original-width="1495" height="482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA8YmVoZ_BwIfCfeL9pIkdmYsa7H-VshulslkoG_e_L5v7xPr4mctWjlTeUsnUc0yNerLEzXthLC33KJLjj9zZRfOcjDKyjSk87m6kid-op_8qYoU4N6Cf3173qAqQkuNMTzhMcV0u8HAHlYvZWiZtWpulhQjhaywNmT2TIHaQopWIxXunahmdJbA-Xlz_/w640-h482/1965.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">1965.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTPjT1c_XL6BevAZQC9VSVCQqIX9fIiFzHwOx79EDvtMo5-gVhpJ0P5n5NyMn6TY-VdorOleK7kn1GRFSxnTHv1Qy73rXUP3nhmiTcyeB7AvtEXrGS4Ft6gpJBFVgKSoTMj-wpP_5P_BdU1JGhPkmOM0WoAtXSbENx2DjBmuO_YI9FJORZqRTjC45exArm/s900/1966.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="900" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTPjT1c_XL6BevAZQC9VSVCQqIX9fIiFzHwOx79EDvtMo5-gVhpJ0P5n5NyMn6TY-VdorOleK7kn1GRFSxnTHv1Qy73rXUP3nhmiTcyeB7AvtEXrGS4Ft6gpJBFVgKSoTMj-wpP_5P_BdU1JGhPkmOM0WoAtXSbENx2DjBmuO_YI9FJORZqRTjC45exArm/w640-h426/1966.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">1966.</td></tr></tbody></table></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjXDUYWZLO-KsHvzhgKErjOhj1mRYVo2vF-_x3g5QRLqESUrlROSmNhi0bilUE-NXdbac9_OARZu9x_RgSmqwJPYYzen5hq5l_yWjewlfrAlnV7FW4eHUSEyEkZ9iufEpsuykCa0Y5J12U6dLDaWVaA5bfyYyLwbI5LobyPwKmAEvAn-gYVJdq9YPElEmo/s604/1968.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="554" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjXDUYWZLO-KsHvzhgKErjOhj1mRYVo2vF-_x3g5QRLqESUrlROSmNhi0bilUE-NXdbac9_OARZu9x_RgSmqwJPYYzen5hq5l_yWjewlfrAlnV7FW4eHUSEyEkZ9iufEpsuykCa0Y5J12U6dLDaWVaA5bfyYyLwbI5LobyPwKmAEvAn-gYVJdq9YPElEmo/w588-h640/1968.jpg" width="588" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">1968.</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIqZamAY3m2ZnPmpnQRCpzUfvYDMufpB-27dztyifgFFhT6IhUpPCw1d0abKilfrsdXfO6x-VIt8ZO71x2lNkUZGBbx2uGDHpmhUWEjft6D8TtvkrpGz7_p7jnYQs5-AD5VgMrzu47kOShfZCHVxUHpAFle0Vkecu8_Gjiy3OlWoovw-I5KpSkWL9IvU5c/s1024/1969.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="949" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIqZamAY3m2ZnPmpnQRCpzUfvYDMufpB-27dztyifgFFhT6IhUpPCw1d0abKilfrsdXfO6x-VIt8ZO71x2lNkUZGBbx2uGDHpmhUWEjft6D8TtvkrpGz7_p7jnYQs5-AD5VgMrzu47kOShfZCHVxUHpAFle0Vkecu8_Gjiy3OlWoovw-I5KpSkWL9IvU5c/w594-h640/1969.jpg" width="594" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">1969.</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Deirdre Kelly has written on dance and pop culture since 1985, starting as the Dance Critic and Pop Music Columnist for the <i>Globe and Mail</i> and continuing through today as the dance correspondent for the <i>Dance Gazette</i> in London England. For years, she has been our resident dance critic here at <i>Critics At Large</i>, where she also writes on fashion and the Beatles. Kudos to Sutherland House Books for bringing us her fabulously vertiginous saga of what made the visual style image of the greatest pop band in history so emblematic. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="color: #a70f0f;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JvLWZYVrJmM/YZW9oolo99I/AAAAAAAAtXo/RCgpS5PxmQMGAzA9bo6f0v-g2zyXYMjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/s160/Donald%2BBrackett.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #8c0b0b; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" data-original-height="160" data-original-width="160" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JvLWZYVrJmM/YZW9oolo99I/AAAAAAAAtXo/RCgpS5PxmQMGAzA9bo6f0v-g2zyXYMjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/s16000/Donald%2BBrackett.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;">–<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b> </b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b style="color: #a70f0f;"><span class="il">Donald</span> Brackett</b> i</span></span>s
a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes
about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both
the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario
Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book <span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.halleonardbooks.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid%3D148361%26lid%3D0%26keywords%3Dwinehouse%2520brackett%26menuid%3D10283%26subsiteid%3D168%26&source=gmail&ust=1631815979013000&usg=AFQjCNEzLbGBq-5BqOqwt-uy63xjNuS7MA" href="http://www.halleonardbooks.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid=148361&lid=0&keywords=winehouse%20brackett&menuid=10283&subsiteid=168&" style="color: #a70f0f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece</a></b></span></span></span></span> (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and
radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative
collaboration in pop music: <span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Fleetwood-Mac-Years-Creative-Chaos/dp/0275993388" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>F</b><b>leetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos</b></a>,</span></span></span></span><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> 2007, and </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Dark-Mirror-Singer-Songwriter-Donald-Brackett/dp/0275998983" style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial; color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter</b></a><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;">, 2008,</span><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"> as well as the biographies <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Long-Slow-Train-Sharon-Dap-Kings/dp/1617136913" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings</b></a></span></span></span></span></span>, 2018, and <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Tumult-Incredible-Life-Music-Turner/dp/1493055062" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner</a></b><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;">, </span></span>2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, <b><a href="https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/product/9781989555583-item.html" target="_blank">Yoko Ono: An Artful Life</a></b>, released
in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family
relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder,<b> <a href="https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/double-solitaire-the-films-of-charles-brackett-and-billy-wilder/9781493076062.html" target="_blank">Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder</a></b>, published in January 2024.<br /></span></span></div>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-78273699078676961602024-02-12T19:20:00.004-05:002024-02-12T19:20:25.557-05:00German Imports: The Teachers’ Lounge and Afire<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBI7JyhWICsN__0R3Vsx-dob3b_W9czJKbS59RIFYEJTtbO2edW36iG7T0Ma7rzg46TxkPhz6Gd1BVzVAvI69Kkat2-ZVQQRzM_VSLbFpIVehEl-tOaJSLs3qV2hgpAG_25x9hF1h-GNqMHbNauaHPOO8iBjQBdbEz1HVb97jk8-7lTPDZWIwsVAO2Hkkc/s1200/Leonie%20Benesch%20and%20Leonard%20Stettnisch%20in%20The%20Teachers'%20%20Lounge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBI7JyhWICsN__0R3Vsx-dob3b_W9czJKbS59RIFYEJTtbO2edW36iG7T0Ma7rzg46TxkPhz6Gd1BVzVAvI69Kkat2-ZVQQRzM_VSLbFpIVehEl-tOaJSLs3qV2hgpAG_25x9hF1h-GNqMHbNauaHPOO8iBjQBdbEz1HVb97jk8-7lTPDZWIwsVAO2Hkkc/w640-h480/Leonie%20Benesch%20and%20Leonard%20Stettnisch%20in%20The%20Teachers'%20%20Lounge.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leonie Benesch and Leonard Stettnisch in <b>The Teachers' Lounge</b>.</td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>In the unnerving German drama <b>The Teachers’ Lounge, </b>a theft in the faculty lounge of a secondary school and a young teacher’s protest against the suspicion that one of her students was responsible lead to chaos. The set-up is complicated. When someone steals money from the wallet of a teacher, Thomas Liebenwerda (Michael Klammer), the principal, Dr. Böhm (Anne-Kathrin Gummich), and the vice-principal, Milosz Dudek (Rafael Stachowiak), cross-examine the two sixth-grade student representatives to the class council in front of the other teachers, asking them to identify classmates who may have been acting strangely or walking around with an unusual amount of cash. This approach makes the students’ math teacher, Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), markedly uncomfortable. Then the administrators interrupt her class and demand that the boys produce their wallets. The only one carrying a lot of money turns out to be a Middle Eastern student, Ali (Can Rodenbostel), and though they accept his explanation, his interrogation brings his angry parents to the school. (No one uses the phrase “racial profiling”; no one has to.) Upset by the administration’s assumption that the thief must have been one of the kids, Carla decides to conduct her own clandestine investigation. She leaves her jacket on a chair in the lounge with her wallet inside, and sets her laptop to film what happens after she slips out of the room. Indeed, someone lifts money from the wallet, and though the video doesn’t reveal a face, she recognizes the thief’s blouse. But when she confronts its owner, the school secretary, Friederike Kuhn (Eva Löbau), hoping she’ll simply own up to the act and return the money, instead Friederike denies it vehemently, so Carla brings in Dr. Böhm and produces the video. The secretary’s response is tears and outrage, and Carla, struggling to be fair-minded, loses confidence in her allegation. By then, however, it’s too late. Böhm has no choice but to proceed with the accusation, and Dudek points out that Carla had no legal right to film the people in the lounge without their permission. When Friederike makes a scene at a regularly scheduled meeting between Carla and the parents of her math students, insisting on censuring her accuser publicly and threatening to take her to court, inevitably the kids hear about it and rumors fly. Friedriche’s son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), who is Carla’s most talented pupil, is not only confused and unsettled by the assumption that his mother is guilty but finds himself targeted by classmates who assume that he must be a thief too: “like mother, like son.”</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Technically <b>The Teachers’ Lounge </b>is a social problem movie, but even the good examples of that genre we sometimes see, especially in the U.S., tend to be unambiguous. This one isn’t; it’s unresolved because the director, Ilker Catak, and his co-writer, Johannes Duncker, realize that it’s unresolvable. It’s a snowball with a mine inside rolling unimpeded down a jagged hill, letting off explosions as it goes. Everyone we meet fumbles and stumbles, even the best-intentioned characters, Carla and the guidance counselor (Kathrin Wehlisch), and both Carla’s classroom and the teachers’ lounge escalate into battlegrounds. In one session her students refuse to listen to do anything she asks of them until she agrees to answer (some of) their questions. She seems to regain control of the group, leading them into the gym and introducing a trust exercise; she intuiting that Oskar, the little math genius, will be the only one who can devise a way to keep six students cramped together on a box from falling off, and for a moment it looks as if his solution has restored unity to the class. But then he turns it around, taking his revenge against another boy who has spoken against him and shoving him to the ground, and Carla has to pull them apart. Meanwhile her colleagues are angry with her for refusing to discuss the situation with them because of its impact on the children. After Oskar breaks into her office and steals her laptop with the alleged evidence against his mother on it and hurts Carla in the process she continues to try to protect him. Liebenwerda can’t understand he behavior, or why she’s only communicating with the students, agreeing to be interviewed for the school newspaper. The article the newspaper staff publishes excoriates her in print, drawing on the words of the accused secretary and claiming that all they’re seeking is the truth. There is no “truth” in this story, of course – Catak and Duncker don’t confirm Carla’s evidence because in the final analysis it doesn’t make any difference; there are only consequences. The harm to the community by the end seems irreversible, and the harm to the kids, especially Oskar, incalculable.<p></p>
<p>The movie stays in Carla’s point of view, and Benesch gives an emotionally transparent performance in the role of an idealistic young woman whose fragility becomes clearest in the only (startling) non-realist sequence. The entire ensemble is strong. But aside from Benesch the most impressive acting comes from the young performers, in particular Leonard Stettnisch as Oskar and Vincent Stachowiak as the boy he shoves off the box, a struggling math student named Tom who begins the film by getting caught cheating on a test and later arouses the ire of his classmates by putting his anxiety over his grades ahead of their collective efforts to sabotage the lesson. I was a high school teacher for five years when I was about Carla Nowak’s age and I’ve been a university professor for most of my life, so <b>The Teachers’ Lounge </b>certainly spoke to me. (My experience may also have made me a little bewildered at some of the ancillary details, like the fact that Carla is a math instructor who apparently sees only one group of students and the way the investigation into Liebenwerda’s lost money focuses exclusively on the sixth-graders.) But most viewers, I would think, will find this a tough picture to put aside when it’s finished. You feel you’ve been watching the very fabric of society rip apart.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-HqB1RvDtTsymLjSfF04YcZKLwiEAZUHFcWoG6vyapWaV53OWPxz5lxhB2O-axAu_e7W3V7-bwxvxZIuQgqnfbkbQCCVJbtevSmRAxs7WFE7kwyClnqU54n2CVdFzWiL6O1kVS7H6FlGaYzqdGYnSLPPVFThHeGDMW1mqnoi4vpfhoz5aQVcQ6cujiPTN/s1500/Thomas%20Schubert%20and%20Langston%20Uibel%20in%20Afire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="844" data-original-width="1500" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-HqB1RvDtTsymLjSfF04YcZKLwiEAZUHFcWoG6vyapWaV53OWPxz5lxhB2O-axAu_e7W3V7-bwxvxZIuQgqnfbkbQCCVJbtevSmRAxs7WFE7kwyClnqU54n2CVdFzWiL6O1kVS7H6FlGaYzqdGYnSLPPVFThHeGDMW1mqnoi4vpfhoz5aQVcQ6cujiPTN/w640-h360/Thomas%20Schubert%20and%20Langston%20Uibel%20in%20Afire.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Langston Uibel and Thomas Schubert in <b>Afire</b>.</td></tr></tbody></table><p>I just caught up with <b>Afire, </b>the latest release by the German writer-director <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Christian+Petzold" target="_blank">Christian Petzold</a>, which I’d missed in theatres last year. In it, two friends in their twenties, Leon (Thomas Schubert), an aspiring novelist, and Felix (Langston Uibel), take a vacation on the Baltic Sea, where Felix’s family has a house. They have to share it with a young woman named Nadja (Paula Beer), who’s working at a nearby hotel and who seems at first, before the boys actually meet her, to be an inconvenience: she entertains Devid (Enno Trebs), a local lifeguard, in her room at night and their lovemaking keeps Leon awake. But when he meets her the next morning he’s smitten. Like <b>The Teachers’ Lounge </b>this movie is entirely in the emotional point of view of the protagonist. Leon is a thorny, complicated character – moody, hypersensitive, and so self-absorbed that he misses just about everything. He doesn’t pick up on the romantic vibes between Felix and Devid (Enno Trebs), who joins them for supper; he’s still thinking of Devid as the guy who slept with Nadja. And he blinks at clues that might sharpen his responses to both her and his agent, Helmut (Matthias Brandt), who drives out to meet with him and discuss the manuscript he’s just submitted. This coming-of-age story about a young man who can’t get out of his own way is anchored by Schubert’s finely tuned performance. Working with Petzold, a superb director of actors whose instinct for exploring the psychology of his characters is the rich vein that runs through his best pictures – he made <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2013/01/another-brick-in-wall-christian.html" target="_blank"><b>Barbara</b></a>, <b>Undine</b> and most memorably <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Christian+Petzold+Phoenix" target="_blank"><b>Phoenix</b></a>, a haunting, imaginative take on Hitchcock’s <b>Vertigo </b>– Schubert manages to make Leon’s short-sightedness and irascibility and blindness to social cues compelling and keep us sympathetic to him. The title of the film is a metaphor but not just that. When Leon and Felix arrive, they learn there are forest fires in the area – far enough away at first so that they don’t worry the characters, but they come perilously close in the second hour. You walk out of the movie with both kinds of fire in your head.</p><p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. </span><p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-14636305464737794332024-02-05T20:00:00.028-05:002024-02-05T20:29:09.492-05:00In Court and at Dinner: Anatomy of a Fall and Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX9k-EHxnSJX8cZc6Bt9bspLrZdWGDRyqynqKGq_MBlmkWjMBJBb13jqaZ6UkALtuI26ZRtBD1rs-uzXx4ZvtI5SlbO-wloYulopw4c0ENHleChfRowkglc9v-YbwW-VBEeeJpnUWMkDZxmtmKweYx3uJFjFtSgFU2KiHsXdyB2_9JL1Ta6jTHRvKqPxcs/s1280/Milo%20Machado%20Graner%20in%20Anatomy%20of%20a%20Fall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="690" data-original-width="1280" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX9k-EHxnSJX8cZc6Bt9bspLrZdWGDRyqynqKGq_MBlmkWjMBJBb13jqaZ6UkALtuI26ZRtBD1rs-uzXx4ZvtI5SlbO-wloYulopw4c0ENHleChfRowkglc9v-YbwW-VBEeeJpnUWMkDZxmtmKweYx3uJFjFtSgFU2KiHsXdyB2_9JL1Ta6jTHRvKqPxcs/w640-h346/Milo%20Machado%20Graner%20in%20Anatomy%20of%20a%20Fall.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Milo Machado Graner in <b>Anatomy of a Fall</b>.</td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>The gripping French film <b>Anatomy of a Fall </b>may be the most unconventional courtroom thriller I’ve ever seen. When Samuel Maleski is found dead beneath the attic window of his chalet in the French Alps, his wife, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Müller) is charged with murder. The case put together by her legal team – Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud), who is an old friend, and Nour Boudaoud (Saadia Bentaïeb) – is that he jumped, and Sandra claims that his behavior since their eleven-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) was hit by a motorcycle, seriously damaging his optic nerve, has veered into depression and that one incident where he passed out drunk may well have been a suicide attempt. (She wondered if the white spots she saw in his vomit could have been undigested pills.) But the case of the prosecution challenges this theory because of the position of the blood spatter on the snow where he fell and a tape the police found of an argument between husband and wife, which he recorded the day before he died.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>In the exciting 1998 social problem melodrama <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2017/06/neglected-gem-101-civil-action-1998.html" target="_blank">A Civil Action</a></b>, based on Jonathan Harr’s non-fiction bestseller, the judge (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=John+Lithgow" target="_blank">John Lithgow</a>) in a class action suit against a pair of chemical companies devises a strategy for litigating the case that draws on a manufactured narrative as a metaphor for the facts. His infuriating substitution is a particularly weird case of the way in which, in a criminal proceeding, the truth is often irrelevant. <b>A Civil Action</b> is an entertainment that treats this idea as a clever plot point, but <b>Anatomy of a Fall</b> is a serious dramatic – and, I would say, philosophical – investigation of the distance between a quest for the truth and the actual aim of a trial. There’s even a scene where the young woman (Jehnny Beth) appointed by the court to live with Sandra and Daniel until the verdict – to ensure that his testimony won’t be compromised by his proximity to the defendant – fumbles as she tries to suggest to the baffled boy how to work through his confusion about all that he’s hearing every day in court.<p></p>
<p><b>Anatomy of a Fall </b>focuses on the incompatibility of the complexity of human relationships and the substance of a trial where the agenda of the prosecution is winning a case. It’s not just that the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) refuses to acknowledge the possibility that the behavior of both the defendant and the dead man could be interpreted in any way that doesn’t point to her guilt, but that his arguments are sometimes unreasonable – in the ways that popular opinion tends to fall for even though the official representative of the legal system should and probably does know better. Sandra is a successful novelist whose books play with the overlap of fact and fiction, and in one brief section in her most recent one she built on an idea that Samuel, also a writer but one who struggled with writer’s block, had discarded. Though he gave her permission to use it and she took it in quite a different direction, he threw it back in her face during the recorded argument and accused her of plundering his work. The prosecutor eagerly takes the dead man at his word, as if everything people say in the heat of anger is indisputable evidence. Moreover, he uses the violence of a character in Sandra’s novel to incriminate <i>her, </i>as if there were no distinction between a writer and a character she created. And it isn’t just the prosecutor: Samuel’s psychoanalyst reports the accusations he made against Sandra in his sessions as if <i>they </i>were the pure truth, and the cop who found the tape is so biased against her that his testimony damages her case in unfair ways that evidently are permitted by the French judicial system. (The movie’s depiction of the quirks in that system, which are at least as unsettling as the quirks in our own, should intrigue an American audience.) Because the defendant is allowed to interact with prosecution witnesses, Sandra protests against the shrink’s testimony, arguing that his presentation of what he insists are facts about his patient’s relationship with his wife is really the magnification, intensified by strong emotion, of one small part of that relationship, and her protest is eloquent. But she’s in an impossible bind here: on trial for murdering the man whose psychiatrist insists, based on that small part that is the only part he knows, on demonizing her. </p>
<p>The style of <b>Anatomy of a Fall</b> is cinéma vérité, and at first the director, Justin Triet (who co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur Harari), seems to take a cooled-out approach to the material. But her refusal to melodramatize it ends up being not only more authentic but also more powerful, as it places the difficulties of the couple’s relationship and the way in which the process skews the truth front and center. The film is exasperating in a good way – in a way that movies (and certainly courtroom movies) seldom are because it refuses to downplay the way a justice system militates against the possibility of getting justice. And often it’s heartbreaking, especially during the flashback occasioned by the playing of the tape in court and, increasingly as the movie goes on, in the scenes where Triet focuses on Daniel as he listens to the testimony against his mother and revelations of their private life that no eleven-year-old should have to be exposed to. The movie is impeccably acted, and Müller deserves all the praise she has received for her starring performance, but the work Triet does with the young actor Milo Graner is remarkable.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEvpHTiBKW13RSLMC6pu63446tXPW1EQd8Y0depPCJS4yC0afhePRBU9MlhlnvV01_Cj-dHDoXfRpqvc5GeBNRYB98IvO_it8JVzzwjKQKcanYHTmdSKTEkx1EwvXqcyAhUx4O3aT0dRY-d3J5KbtZkOf4MqZeYc4op987wsmcoVMT4M3pLrSzmXjElOyk/s1200/menusplaisirslestroisgros_03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEvpHTiBKW13RSLMC6pu63446tXPW1EQd8Y0depPCJS4yC0afhePRBU9MlhlnvV01_Cj-dHDoXfRpqvc5GeBNRYB98IvO_it8JVzzwjKQKcanYHTmdSKTEkx1EwvXqcyAhUx4O3aT0dRY-d3J5KbtZkOf4MqZeYc4op987wsmcoVMT4M3pLrSzmXjElOyk/w640-h320/menusplaisirslestroisgros_03.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The kitchen of La Maison Troisgros from <b>Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros</b>.</td></tr></tbody></table><p>The most sheerly enjoyable experience I’ve had at any movie released in the last year was at <b>Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros</b>, Fred Wiseman’s four-hour documentary about a legendary restaurant, recipient of three Michelin stars, situated in a hotel on the Loire River about an hour outside Lyon, France. César Troisgros, who runs the kitchen, represents the fourth generation of the culinary family; his great-grandfather opened it and his father, Michel, still operates as the host, wandering from table to table to greet old friends, and as the final arbiter on matters of taste. In one scene Michel instructs a novice chef on which volumes in the kitchen library to consult when determining how to cook a tricky lamb dish; in another, he passes judgment on the mystery of how to balance sweetness and spiciness in a kidney dish made with passion fruit. (The day I saw the picture, the audience laughed merrily when Michel devoured an entire plate in order to decide whether his initial impression of the kidney dish, based on just a mouthful, could be trusted.)</p>
<p>Wiseman never uses voice-over narration or explanatory text on the screen; he’s always trusted the principle that if you bring the audience deep enough into the inner workings of a place, whether it’s the Kansas City Police Force or Central Park, they’ll wind up with a profound and precise understanding of it. In <b>Menus-Plaisirs </b>we do get a history of Les Troisgros, close to the end, by chance, because Michel, who loves to talk, sketches it for one of the tables he pauses at on his promenade through the restaurant. It’s a bonus – in more than one way, since he’s such a wonderful, vivid screen presence.</p>
<p>The restaurant isn’t in crisis and the Troisgros men aren’t self-destructive (like the subject of <b>Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter</b>, the last memorable food documentary I saw). There’s certainly less conflict in <b>Menus-Plaisirs</b> than in any other of Wiseman’s explorations of institutions. (He’s released about fifty since 1967.) In a way, <b>Menus-Plaisirs </b>is as unconventional a Wiseman documentary as <b>Anatomy of a Fall </b>is as a courtroom drama. It has an air of serenity, emerging from the gorgeous rural setting on the other side of the enormous glass windows, from the unrushed, convivial atmosphere, and of course from the magnificent food, which, like the landscape, is sensuously captured by the cinematographer, James Bishop. Anyone who is interested in restaurants and the preparation of food – that is, pretty much everyone I hang out with – is likely to be as enthralled as I was with the details of how one of the greatest restaurants in the world is run, for example how it satisfies the complicated individual needs and restrictions of its guests.</p>
<p>So many people have acknowledged through the years that Fred Wiseman, who turned ninety-four last month, is an enduring American treasure that I’m almost embarrassed to repeat it. But I don’t think it’s possible to say enough good things about him. In <b>Menus-Plaisirs </b>we see a side of him that he doesn’t usually share. The movie glows with good feeling – not just his trademark generosity toward his subjects but a joy in the environment he’s chosen, this time, to trek through with his camera. I know Wiseman a little, through mutual friends and because we once lived in neighboring towns. I haven’t seen him in years but about a decade ago I sent him an enthusiastic review I’d written of one of his movies and I got a reply from Paris, where, he explained, he was now living. “Do you ever get to Paris?” he asked me. “I have a great restaurant list!” Making <b>Menus-Plaisirs </b>must have blissed him out. Watching the movie, you don’t doubt it.</p><p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. </span><p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-58731538152137445382024-01-29T21:00:00.014-05:002024-01-29T21:41:01.012-05:00Moby Dick for Puppets<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFezbwBdZ7_9ljUPXXOyiuzZsia7kHppJb8gB2PmQN7cub5Jwo2JZhaR_-rTGnHW8nafYxb2ZUAXhBIHV5nhn69AwkNsCeldl_H9CE7QD9petRcQwyZufdpJ3Oaw5fhhVWWDrQzMBZ-cbeyXeeUisv5RaRqqOWtZywSno29AcesqqO4KH7jUjPvWpTosHx/s1855/Moby%20Dick.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1227" data-original-width="1855" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFezbwBdZ7_9ljUPXXOyiuzZsia7kHppJb8gB2PmQN7cub5Jwo2JZhaR_-rTGnHW8nafYxb2ZUAXhBIHV5nhn69AwkNsCeldl_H9CE7QD9petRcQwyZufdpJ3Oaw5fhhVWWDrQzMBZ-cbeyXeeUisv5RaRqqOWtZywSno29AcesqqO4KH7jUjPvWpTosHx/w640-h424/Moby%20Dick.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Christophe Raynaud deLage.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>In a six-day run at Boston’s Paramount Theater under the auspices of<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=+Arts+Emerson" target="_blank"> Arts Emerson</a>, the Norwegian company Plexus Polaire staged Herman Melville’s <b>Moby Dick </b>in eighty-five brisk minutes with a cast of seven actor-puppeteers and three musicians. But though some of the effects were nifty and imaginative and the production held one’s attention, I’m not entirely sure what I saw. The show, directed by Yngvild Aspeli, is narrated, like the novel, by Ishmael, the only member of the crew who survives Captain Ahab’s single-minded pursuit of the immense sea beast that chewed off his leg in a previous whaling expedition, and it takes care to introduce us to all the members of the crew of the <i>Pequod. </i>But aside from Ishmael only a couple, the harpooner Queequeg (who becomes Ishmael’s closet friend) and the cabin boy Pip, are allowed to make much of an impression, and when the puppets are in close proximity on the shadowy stage it’s difficult to tell them apart. Aspeli – or the company in collaboration (the program doesn’t offer a writing credit) – hasn’t necessarily chosen the excerpts from the book to clarify the plot, so even if you know it pretty well you might have trouble following the story line.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>What also isn’t clear is specifically how this version wants to read the novel. A note in the program alludes to “the enigmatic relationship between Captain Ahab and Fedallah, one of the five clandestine passengers secretly invited aboard by Ahab . . . There is a rumor between the sailors on board that he may be the Devil and that Ahab has sold his soul to him . . . Although Ahab is the free master and Fedallah only his slave, it seems that Ahab sees his own shadow in Fedallah who sees his substances abandoned in the captain.” This is interesting, but I certainly couldn’t have worked it out from what I saw. The ghostly presences on the ship might just as well be the spirits of other sailors lost on the ocean; if Ahab interacted with them during the show, I missed it. But then, the stage action often isn’t coherent.<p></p>
<p>Among the show’s high points is the way it uses a miniature of the ship to alter perspective – most potently, of course, when Moby Dick makes his much-anticipated appearance at the climax. The ocean creatures floating across the stage are both charming and visually appealing, and one, a large, transparent milky-white fish with illuminated contours, is particularly arresting and may be intended to suggest the way Ahab’s obsession and the image he has placed in the minds of his crew have transformed Moby Dick into a supernatural figure. There’s a fine sequence where Pip, having fallen overboard, calls for the help of his shipmates: the puppet of the cabin boy struggles against white cloth clinging to the two-tiered structure that provides the abstract set designed by Elisabeth Holager Lund. The interplay of lighting (by Marine David) and video (David Lejard-Ruffet) creates some striking images. And the folk music provided by a trio, Emil Storkløkken Åse, Georgia Wartel Collins and Lou Renaud-Bailly, is a welcome element. In one memorable moment Pip leads the crew in a plaintive melody about hunting the whale.</p>
<p>Overall, though, this <b>Moby Dick </b>lacks grandeur and elegance, and the vocal presentation of the text is short on poetry. The images repeat themselves and the staging sometimes feels random. You might walk away from the performance with admiration for the hard work of the company more than the sense of having been transported into Melville’s dark, ineffable world, where human folly – ambition, obsession and hubris – morph into legend.</p><p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. </span><p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-83246745839828157092024-01-25T11:30:00.000-05:002024-01-25T11:55:56.024-05:00Year-End Movies IV: Monster and All of Us Strangers<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfuOuXS9TdD-IVC_QIM25YxcMyCMpmpYQLcZFxv_BXq6b8I3i4sTESxryq1I8pwrcvchklCByhBtMKIQDqFFu6_-0EEvt5assvuAoWHnSRK1aoLSNTOd-nZWllwaLrm3vH6U2n1T9-laGxad-uIdd2NAaQ-yNc2ErbZkDAU_xamzFgtnJ9ovuOa1wVNpXW/s1536/Hinata%20Hiiragi%20and%20Soya%20Kurokawa%20in%20Monster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="864" data-original-width="1536" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfuOuXS9TdD-IVC_QIM25YxcMyCMpmpYQLcZFxv_BXq6b8I3i4sTESxryq1I8pwrcvchklCByhBtMKIQDqFFu6_-0EEvt5assvuAoWHnSRK1aoLSNTOd-nZWllwaLrm3vH6U2n1T9-laGxad-uIdd2NAaQ-yNc2ErbZkDAU_xamzFgtnJ9ovuOa1wVNpXW/w640-h360/Hinata%20Hiiragi%20and%20Soya%20Kurokawa%20in%20Monster.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hinata Hiiragi and Soya Kurokawa in <b>Monster</b>.</td></tr></tbody></table><p>The movies of the Japanese director <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=kore-eda" target="_blank">Hirokazu Kore-eda</a> are not just different from those of other filmmakers; they’re also often unlike each other. He seems to trod a new path each time out, and his narrative strategies are always fresh. His pictures aren’t even always in Japanese: his last, <b>Broker</b>, which was one of the best films of 2022, was shot in South Korea with Korean actors, and its predecessor, <b>The Truth</b>, was set in Paris and featured Isabelle Huppert and Juliette Binoche as mother and daughter and Ethan Hawke as Binoche’s American husband. The common denominator is a focus on unconventional family units, usually involving small children. The two fifth-grade boys at the heart of his latest, <b>Monster</b>, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), the protagonist, and the smaller and younger-appearing Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), have each lost one parent and are being raised by the other – Yori by a hard-drinking father (Akihiro Kakuta) and Minato by his mother, Saori (Sakura Ando), who is still mourning the death of her husband and struggles to balance caring for her son with a tiring job in a laundry. </p>
<p>The starting-off point of this remarkable film is Saori’s suspicion that the boys’ teacher, Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), who looks to be barely out of university, has been bullying her son, both verbally and physically. She goes to see Fushimi, the principal (Yûko Tanaka), who meets her with Hori and a committee of teachers, but she keeps checking her notes and avoiding Saori’s eyes, and her responses to the mother’s concerns are so generalized that Saori finds them infuriating. Fushimi assures her, “We accept your opinion with seriousness” and promises that in the future the teacher will “provide appropriate instruction.” “Am I talking to human beings?” Saori demands. Furthermore, Hori insists that the incident was merely a misunderstanding and Saori is being overprotective. He also protests that Minato is the bully and that he has been victimizing Yori. The more Saori investigates, the more confusing the story becomes. She visits Yori at his home and sees that his arm has been burned, but the boy denies that her son is the cause and confirms that the teacher has been beating up on Minato. And that behavior seems to have continued even after Saori’s complaint – Minato falls down some stairs at school while, according to the other children, he was running away from his teacher.</p>
<p>For a long time we think the themes of <b>Monster </b>are rumors and lies, but these turn out to be secondary. There are plenty of puzzle pictures in which the plot elements don’t come together until very late in the running time, but I can’t think of another movie in which the <i>theme</i> doesn’t emerge until the last third. And I can’t reveal it here without ruining the experience, except to say that its treatment by Kore-eda and the screenwriter Yûji Sakamoto is both daring and deeply affecting. (Sakamoto’s script is a thing of rare beauty.) The structure imitates that of one of the most famous of all Japanese films, Kurosawa’s <b>Rashomon</b>, where the tale of a rape and murder in the forest is told in four versions that contradict each other, though at the end we still don’t know which one, if any, is accurate; the movie’s <i>subject</i> is the unknowability of the truth. Kore-eda presents us with three perspectives on the events of a few days – Saori’s, Hiro’s and Minato’s – presented consecutively. We know he’s returning to the beginning of the narrative each time he replays a fire that takes down a “hostess bar” (a club that caters to male customers), lighting up the night in the neighborhood where all of the characters live. Each time through he sifts in new, revelatory details. At the end, unlike in <b>Rashomon</b>, we have the entire story. (<b>Rashomon </b>isn’t the only Kurosawa reference; I’m indebted to my observant friend Mark Dellelo for pointing out Kore-eda’s allusions to perhaps the most unusual and one of the least known of his masterpieces, the 1970 <b>Dodes’ka-den</b>.)</p>
<p>In some way each of the major characters stumbles badly. But Kore-eda has no interest in villains; the only person on screen whose behavior is difficult to forgive isn’t a major figure at all, though his influence is profound. Based on Saori’s view of events, we are put off at first by both Hori and Fushimi, both of whom we come to appreciate as we discover their reserves of kindness and sensitivity; what seems at first to be, among other things, a broad critique of the Japanese educational system ends up exposing the good intentions of these two people who are laboring in it and coming up against its twenty-first-century limitations. Fushimi is haunted by a family tragedy that, we learn, is thornier than we thought. Hori is a lonely heart with a tendency to fall in love with women who end up dumping him and whose weddings he attends; we get the feeling that his current romantic involvement is unlikely to reverse the trend. Both these characters have moments when they are apparently considering suicide, but it’s clear that they don’t carry through on their impulses; the ending of the movie is more ambiguous. Tanaka’s and Nagayama’s performances are superb, as are those of Ando and the two perfectly natural yet astonishingly expressive child actors. Among Kore-eda’s staggering array of gifts, his ability to work with children is perhaps the most impressive.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoTFw7pJg-Dbq8L8G0OXkxwqwD2FDJvAhnXFjZfpP3ic6PrI1aMvZi1mIySxtD47mqTBRN3cao0lEGc79g3XNIz_Tp5C0YhvA0vXNmiJWtgJhbJTHHS2FmXv-3wEnvutv3CaqXRlL05e8UCI8QKxfwT-pzUMstjeGz1ZM0WbwuWtQu0wJGTx9o3Y50hXTq/s1682/Claire%20Foy%20and%20Andrew%20Scott%20in%20All%20of%20Us%20Strangers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1682" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoTFw7pJg-Dbq8L8G0OXkxwqwD2FDJvAhnXFjZfpP3ic6PrI1aMvZi1mIySxtD47mqTBRN3cao0lEGc79g3XNIz_Tp5C0YhvA0vXNmiJWtgJhbJTHHS2FmXv-3wEnvutv3CaqXRlL05e8UCI8QKxfwT-pzUMstjeGz1ZM0WbwuWtQu0wJGTx9o3Y50hXTq/w640-h302/Claire%20Foy%20and%20Andrew%20Scott%20in%20All%20of%20Us%20Strangers.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claire Foy and Andrew Scott in <b>All of Us Strangers</b>.</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Initially <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Andrew%20Haigh" target="_blank">Andrew Haigh</a>’s <b>All of Us Strangers </b>builds on his 2011 film <b>Weekend</b>, where a one-night stand between two men unexpectedly turns into the beginning of a genuine relationship. In <b>All of Us Strangers</b>, Adam (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Andrew%20Scott" target="_blank">Andrew Scott</a>), a screenwriter in his mid-forties, makes an unspoken connection with Harry (Paul Mezcal), who lives in the same building, when a fire alarm draws them both into the courtyard. Immediately afterwards Harry, who is maybe fifteen years Adam’s junior, shows up outside his apartment and comes on to him, and Adam politely turns him down. The next time they see each other, in the lobby, Harry is sober and apologizes for his behavior; Adam, a shy loner, wants to suggest they have a drink but he isn’t fast enough – the elevator doors divide them and the opportunity vanishes. The third time they lock eyes, Adam is at the window in his apartment and Harry is outside, and this time Adam overcomes his reticence and beckons him to come up. They wind up in bed, and in the weeks that follow they keep seeing each other and growing closer.</p>
<p>Haigh’s work often deals with gay sexuality, but unlike <b>Weekend </b>and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2016/09/notes-on-gay-life-looking-movie.html" target="_blank"><b>Looking</b></a>, Haigh’s HBO series about four friends living in San Francisco, and its first-rate movie sequel, <b>All of Us Strangers </b>isn’t in the realm of realism. There are strange undercurrents from the outset. The two men are among a smattering of neighbors in a brutalist high-rise somewhere in London. The building looks fairly expensive but it’s creepy: it isn’t completely finished and there’s no security. If this were a realist narrative we’d wonder who would move in here under those conditions, or how Harry knows which apartment door to knock at, or how it happens that these two men keep running into each other. The movie feels like a ghost story, which it turns out to be. The script Adam is working on is set in 1987 and about his parents, who died that year, shortly before Adam turned twelve, in a car accident after attending a Christmas party. He has a photograph of the house in Dorking, a town in Surrey about twenty miles outside London where he lived with them before the accident, and he trains out of the city to look at it and refresh his memory. What he finds is that his parents (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jamie%20Bell" target="_blank">Jamie Bell</a> and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Claire%20Foy" target="_blank">Claire Foy</a>) still live there, and they haven’t aged. They recognize him, and they even seem to be prepared for the encounter, though they can’t explain how it’s come about; Haigh omits the usual sci-fi appurtenances, like time portals. And as his parents get to know him as an adult, older now than they were when he lost them, Adam begins to take comfort in being around them and keeps returning to visit them. (The transitions between the present and the past become more fantastical as the movie goes on; Haigh includes some surrealistic touches.) He even brings Harry there, but the house is in darkness and no one comes to the door, though Adam can see his parents in the shadows – and, as he learns later, so can Harry.</p>
<p>Haigh is a marvelous director and <b>All of Us Strangers </b>is beautifully made. It’s very compelling, and often powerful and moving, largely because of the quality of the acting in what is essentially a four-hander. Only Mezcal isn’t convincing; he’s the only one of the quartet who behaves as if he were in a Pinter play. The other three are completely naturalistic, and the tension between their approach and the absurdist style is a key element in the way the movie works on us. That’s most potently the case with Bell and Foy, who are so intensely present that their ghostliness is the essential mystery of the film. When I was in my early twenties I saw a friend, a graduate acting student, give a sublimely tender portrayal of Jocasta in <b>Oedipus the King</b>, and when I questioned her about it afterwards she told me that the character doesn’t make sense unless her instincts with Oedipus are maternal as well as romantic. I thought of what she said all those years ago while I was watching Foy in <b>All of Us Strangers</b>, not because we’re meant to imagine a sexual undercurrent in her relationship with her grown son but because the trick to her performance is that, though she meets up with Adam again some three and a half decades later, what she sees when she looks at him is the little boy she left when she died. She understands all the information he passes onto her about his life through that motherly connection. Of course that’s true of all mothers, but the unique detail that colors her interaction with him is that she has had to leap into the future, so to speak – to calculate in just a few meetings the distance he’s traveled without her in his life. The same is true of his father, but he has his gruff working-class masculinity to fall back on, at least at first. What’s remarkable about Bell’s depiction of Adam’s father is that the fact of his son’s homosexuality brings out a sensitivity in him he may not have known was there. In a wrenching moment, Adam remembers coming home from being bullied at school for being too soft, too feminine, and shutting himself up in his room to cry; now he asks his father why he never came in to comfort him. His father confesses that he didn’t want to think about what Adam might be going through because he knew that as a boy he would have been one of the tormentors. Foy and Bell are both spectacular actors. (Foy’s bitter sensuality in the role of the Duchess of Argyll in last year’s <b>A Very British Scandal</b>, along with Paul Bettany’s layered cruelty in the role of her husband, made the otherwise mediocre, repetitive limited series worth looking at.) Here they do something very unusual: suggest what the parents’ feelings might be like if they suddenly appeared from beyond the grave exactly as they were when they were still alive. It requires a balance, shall we say, between familiarity and fervency. Was there any better acting on the screen in 2023?</p>
<p>Andrew Scott is a more complicated case. He’s a wonderful actor, and he shows a warmth as Adam that isn’t usually in his wheelhouse, though it was when he played Hamlet in Robert Icke’s production in the West End in 2017. I kept thinking of his Hamlet, which was marked by a muted emotional alertness in the silences that you see again in <b>All of Us Strangers</b>. Scott did a masterful job with Shakespeare’s language, but I haven’t seen anyone in this role do more with the silences, at least not since Laurence Olivier. (The disappointment about his Hamlet was that he ran out of ideas in the second half and started to repeat himself – a general issue with the show.) Scott’s Adam is an introvert who is always feeling much, much more than he can find words for. It’s a performance of exquisite gentleness, but the problem is the idea to which the characteris tied as if to a sinking stone. It’s ingenious to dramatize gayness in this way: to imagine a fantasy scenario in which a man meets up with his long-dead parents and has to come out to them in his middle age. But the conversations that ensue between Adam and his parents – especially his mother, who recalls how afraid he was of everything as a little boy and who is immediately concerned that his queerness might make him lonely – as well as the ones between him and Harry are too carefully framed to make points about the essential nature of homosexuality. (It’s their shared feeling of alienation that draws the two men together emotionally.)</p>
<p>The movie I kept thinking of while I was watching <b>All of Us Strangers </b>was the 1991 <b>Truly Madly Deeply</b>, in which Juliet Stevenson plays a woman who is so paralyzed by the death of her lover that he has to return as a ghost (played by Alan Rickman) to kick her into moving on. That film, which Anthony Minghella wrote and directed, was a fantasy presented, weirdly and often comically, as realism; technically it’s a piece of magic realism, but it doesn’t feel like any other magic realist movies or literature I know. <b>Truly Madly Deeply </b>worked for me in a way that Haigh’s movie doesn’t because though Minghella’s story is a kind of fable with a moral (you can’t stop living when the person you love most in the world dies), it doesn’t feel didactic. It has a lightness that Haigh, much as I like and admire his work, seems temperamentally detached from. It’s not that I mind the fact that <b>All of Us Strangers </b>is downbeat; its melancholy is partly what makes it distinctive and memorable. But the more it stresses its agenda, the less effective it becomes.</p><p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. </span><p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-79506607201628742362024-01-18T15:00:00.006-05:002024-01-18T15:00:39.504-05:00Inner Sanctum: The Star-Crossed Music of George Crumb and Yoshiko Shimizu<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT0aQ6kirC8Sv1hc16-cLBATHdVrxhxWkJ538JqyuhS727ivXGrJKSh27RRiYXy_zFvgQHi4OUGTpHYcVitFZftV-zm7ZE9Oi6ZUNIK0bO5AJmahSMRthvAwrKvFPwhPKwxaJqlhL_qLqWXZQuj7P2Yc8PDN1D1FWQ04BnmpU1zmdiu_KZo8WaLLsiigX_/s500/1695601756_yoshiko-shimizu-george-crumb-works-for-amplified-pianos-2023.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT0aQ6kirC8Sv1hc16-cLBATHdVrxhxWkJ538JqyuhS727ivXGrJKSh27RRiYXy_zFvgQHi4OUGTpHYcVitFZftV-zm7ZE9Oi6ZUNIK0bO5AJmahSMRthvAwrKvFPwhPKwxaJqlhL_qLqWXZQuj7P2Yc8PDN1D1FWQ04BnmpU1zmdiu_KZo8WaLLsiigX_/w640-h640/1695601756_yoshiko-shimizu-george-crumb-works-for-amplified-pianos-2023.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">KAIROS Records, 2023.</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><blockquote>“Whatever you think can’t be done, someone will come along and do.” – Thelonious Monk <br /> <br />“Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that, and don’t listen to me: I’m supposed to be accompanying you.” – Thelonious Monk</blockquote><p></p><table><tbody><tr><td><p>This new KAIROS recording of works by the esteemed American composer George Crumb, played by the stellar Japanese pianist Yoshiko Shimizu, is a poetic work of the highest order. In addition to being an intensely uplifting collaborative love letter between a composer and his primary performing interpreter, it also contains one of my favourite musical titles ever, <b>Celestial Mechanics</b>, composed by Crumb in 1979, which might be a pinnacle in the annals of works for piano in the four-hands format. It is not a stretch in this case to claim that Crumb’s challenging but rewarding works constitute a unique domain: astrophysics for piano achieved via contemporary recording technology. If that sounds somewhat scientific, allow me to return to my preferred poetic license: these are diagnostic investigations into the human heart. Even friends or readers familiar with my reasoning may pause and ponder: astrophysics for piano? How does this work? Well, it works exactly the way it sounds. The movements of interstellar masses in space through time usually refers to large objects such as planets in their elliptical guided tours of various galaxies; however, it also occurs within an inner sanctum of silence where microscopic movements of sub-atomic particles collide with each other in a kind of unexpected resonance. And they all dance to a sacred tune, one Crumb calls “Cosmic Dances for Amplified Pianos.”</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Instead of the massively huge trajectory of the stars, this composer and pianist take us along for a road trip through the domain of the infinitely tiny murmurs of mountains so infinitesimal that they might be considered invisible. Yet they are nonetheless real, just as real as the palpitations in the hearts of listeners attuned to their particular vibrations. As an aesthetic notion, celestial mechanics originated in a faraway time and place, with Johannes Kepler in 1619 when the very beginnings of the Baroque epoch were just stirring, via his influential studies called “Celestial Harmonies of the Planets” and “Harmony of the World.” Later studies by Isaac Newton confirmed Kepler’s reveries via his own revelations of gravitational forces about 1786, while Einstein was still trying to adequately explain the paradoxes of the immensely large and the immensely tiny, back in 1916, followed by Bohr and Heisenberg’s delving into the metaphysics of uncertainty. But along with physics and astronomy, the art of music too underwent dramatic and radical shifts in the borderlines of harmony and dissonance, revealing the whereabouts of certain tonal transgressions that are nonetheless uplifting to our ears, once we get used to their sonic accents and dialects. Tonality is still king, even in its apparent absence, while in the presence of a furious splendour such as this. <br /><p></p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUAD1rMXQqkJP7WU369ICGJu_uvmq10TlHb-YC88_8GGYeqEFaGGzQNT9zqWUp-NuX18daLzS66no8sPzLIIlQf3jO2hv78Qsmcsw5265NMtZZv4xdN9bFabhyaX1jMyA5iYwofEQawW8wAORjU7xWyDfA4GF3_ZSKOjtwA-az5xC5ea8oqZ2HVeWCpfk2/s391/Picture2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="344" data-original-width="391" height="564" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUAD1rMXQqkJP7WU369ICGJu_uvmq10TlHb-YC88_8GGYeqEFaGGzQNT9zqWUp-NuX18daLzS66no8sPzLIIlQf3jO2hv78Qsmcsw5265NMtZZv4xdN9bFabhyaX1jMyA5iYwofEQawW8wAORjU7xWyDfA4GF3_ZSKOjtwA-az5xC5ea8oqZ2HVeWCpfk2/w640-h564/Picture2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The pianist conferring with the composer (Photo: <a href="https://www.yoshikoshimizu.com/" target="_blank">Natsumi Shimiz</a>u)</td></tr></tbody></table><p>With this new album, Yoshiko Shimizu not only presents her second recording of works for amplified pianos by Crumb (I wrote about her first one previously in my article on an earlier collaboration called<b> American Maestro</b>), but she also becomes the only pianist who has created <i>solo</i> realizations of his compelling compositions <b>Celestial Mechanics: Makrokosmos IV: Cosmic Dances for Four Hands</b>,” <b>Zeitgeist: Six Tableaux for Two Amplified Pianos</b> (1988), and <b>Otherworldly Resonances: For Two Amplified Pianos</b> (2005). And it is a remarkable achievement indeed. Mr. Crumb agrees wholeheartedly: “I consider her to be one of my very finest interpreters. Bravissima!” Recently the culture critic Mattilda Sycamore asked a pertinent yet perplexing question that is applicable here: “Is the purpose of art to bring us into ourselves or to bring us out of ourselves?” Although unrelated to the present subject, and being beyond all medium borders in fact, it nonetheless brings us to the crux of what the purpose of such sterling new experimental music as this is actually <i>about</i>. The answer, of course, is that art’s purpose, and perhaps especially music’s chief function, is to do both of these things for us, and in the best of cases, such as this one, to do both at the same time. This is the case simply because the farther we plunge into own inner spaces the farther we enter into outer space. What we encounter in both places, as per the mesmerizing conclusions of quantum thinking, is pretty much identical: the evaporation of all walls dividing us from everything <i>else</i> around us.</p>
<p>Not being a composer, a musician or a performer myself but rather merely an avid new music listener with a seeming way with words, I availed myself of a thought or two about Crumb from a distant but close friend, Larry Delinger, a composer, musician, performer, and most importantly perhaps, a teacher. “I love his music. <b>Eine Kleine mitternachtmusik</b> is a special favorite because he used Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” as the spine for the piece and even throws in Debussy’s “Golliwog Cakewalk” in an original way. Crumb was also a fan of Bartok, who I admire greatly. Thus he made Makrokosmos with an ensemble of two pianos and percussion which echoes Bartok’s sonata for two pianos and percussion. I like Crumb’s use of echoes and clusters of notes that smear tonality this way and that. For me, Crumb gave me the courage to use whatever I needed to make the music I wanted to make.” Needless to say, this got my combination tumblers rolling in the proverbial search for evidence of a pattern behind such cogent and clear musical intimations as Crumb. Indeed, a certain synchronicity almost immediately emerged from my deep immersion into his powerful and evocative work: we are in the presence of a Neo-Baroque epoch. Quite different from the outward shapes of the earlier era, to be sure, but nonetheless still fueled by an appetite for sensory and spiritual overload. The sound of stars bumping into each other.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqVFEbbCnHqnXhoiKp52pA5gF2j3imjiVXO8Lq9fQt9_mL3ul_huM9_HDzM9sV62H5mwJBaz-oWsgNNjFrW5GQU00qZDl9MnFZ0U3J6OeXi7dFEDfPYSll56itHhyEN2_lx_zQWBxHU0fa71ruOCBCOOagSSsUoxZACgcEM9KxulfKfdNeJ-JBCvRPTWyM/s413/Picture3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="413" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqVFEbbCnHqnXhoiKp52pA5gF2j3imjiVXO8Lq9fQt9_mL3ul_huM9_HDzM9sV62H5mwJBaz-oWsgNNjFrW5GQU00qZDl9MnFZ0U3J6OeXi7dFEDfPYSll56itHhyEN2_lx_zQWBxHU0fa71ruOCBCOOagSSsUoxZACgcEM9KxulfKfdNeJ-JBCvRPTWyM/w640-h424/Picture3.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poetry in motion (Photo: Natsumi Shimizu)</td></tr></tbody></table><p>“Echoes and clusters of notes that smear tonality this way and that”: with that basic observation of the pleasures to be found in sonically losing our bearings and setting out on a brand-new ocean of sounds waiting to be discovered as if they were never before seen continents, Delinger touches the foundational nerve pulsating in Crumb’s poetic but challenging composing style. His works, especially muscular ones such as <b>Otherworldly Resonances</b> and <b>Zeitgeist</b>, that pianist Shimizu explores with such deft doubling (providing all four hands herself) on their new album are celebrations of temporal drift passing through a shimmering veil of sizzling silences, punctuated with eruptions of a kind of quantum lava flow. Shimizu’s revelatory self-accompaniment in carrying such compositions forward is a mutual tribute to the intimacy with which they both approach their task: the sounds they make together, so to speak, <i>abide</i> where they <i>reside </i>momentarily, before vanishing back into the quietude from which they emerged. As such they cherish the similar revelations of a Neo-Baroque in reverse, commencing perhaps with the great and gifted Yank Charles Ives, and progressing through the DNA of Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Bela Bartok, Harry Partch, John Cage and moving ever forward through Terry Riley, Steve Reich and culminating in the operas of Philips Glass. This is the trajectory within which George Crumb elegantly orbits elliptically.</p>
<p>All very different, to be sure, but all equally immersive. And it’s useful to remember that that continuum also extends to another musical vibe shared between Crumb/Shimizu and the old school tag team innovators in the jazz piano idiom, Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk (he who, unbeknownst, provided us with the ideal descriptor for that fabulous Shimizu dexterity: “Don’t listen to me, I’m supposed to be accompanying you”). Of these esteemed composers, I feel sure that both Crumb and Shimizu might agree with my assertion that Bartok and Cowell are the premiere touchstones of their startlingly brave new KAIROS recording. Crumb composes with and Shimizu performs and records with an innate awareness of precursors, in the best possible way, making ample and satisfying use of two of Cowell’s seminal innovations, first the tone cluster technique, which requires the performer to produce gangs of notes with either their fists or whole forearm à la Cowell’s <b>Adventures in Harmony</b> (1913). And this Crumb/Shimizu menu also features another equally startling and brilliant Cowell innovation as well: what is termed the “string piano,” where in addition to using the keys, whether singly or in clusters, the performer also reaches directly in/on to the interior strings of the instrument. The results are magical in their intensity and immersion into what I’ve somewhat flamboyantly called both the <i>inner sanctum</i> and the <i>neo-baroque</i>.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4_9uuPKNAwlrIDlOOHD4TMVHx98-xHbhIh3Ok1BLfV_Likurfn_O7si5C9mL9tSjgLeRz_hYdUvlp-WrFv-3oWo6vtMk0zRUvO55NI5fXFMfGD6lHU9cl4UrKcn4FRtXpnKPkIcsSV-POuI8aWlxqsHhXWRroCtzttpUv2yS5BN9OEqLJopEyn6n2EMeA/s416/Picture4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="416" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4_9uuPKNAwlrIDlOOHD4TMVHx98-xHbhIh3Ok1BLfV_Likurfn_O7si5C9mL9tSjgLeRz_hYdUvlp-WrFv-3oWo6vtMk0zRUvO55NI5fXFMfGD6lHU9cl4UrKcn4FRtXpnKPkIcsSV-POuI8aWlxqsHhXWRroCtzttpUv2yS5BN9OEqLJopEyn6n2EMeA/w640-h424/Picture4.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> In the presence of mutual greatness (Photo: Natsumi Shimizu)</td></tr></tbody></table><p>As <a href=" In the presence of mutual greatness (Natsumi Shimizu)" target="_blank">Bob Pollack has commented </a>in<i> In The Muse </i>blog of the Library of Congress Performing Arts: “There is a story that both Henry Cowell and Béla Bartók were in England for some event and were both staying at the same house. There was a piano and Bartók heard Cowell playing and using his tone clusters. Bartok, the ultimate gentleman, sometime later recalled hearing this innovative sound and wrote to Cowell asking for his permission to use that technique in a piano piece he was composing.” My response is that the ghost of Bela would undoubtedly have bestowed the same gift on the gentlemanly Crumb, equally proud of his ongoing pianistic encounters with the gifted Shimizu. Thus this recording is the living document of a star-crossed musical synchronicity in action, and the journey from Mikrokosmos to Makrokosmos is an exhilarating one, since the four hands of the talented Shimizu are seemingly capable of producing arpeggiated clusters, decorative colourings, aggressive pluckings, strummed string caresses and vibrantly smoldering glissandi. One senses palpably, in quite a haptic manner, the inspiring links between Bartók making the small become very big and Crumb making the incomprehensibly huge become almost infinitesimally tiny.</p>
<p>His silence intervals, telegrams from the origin of all sounds, operate, it seems to me, in the manner of a Macroscope. That item of near-science fiction, as you might imagine, is the exact opposite of a microscope. A macroscope, if it existed, would bring to us the entire big picture, or at least the big soundtrack of the big picture. Bartok looked outward toward the future, but Crumb looks inward to the only place the future could ever exist: inside of us all. In fact, his music reminds me a favourite French poet, Paul Eluard: “There <i>is </i>another world, but it is inside of his one.” This new recording of Crumb for four hands and amplified pianos is such an ambitious shared project, but then again, the gutsy Shimizu is a force of nature, apparently a secret storm with a sonic twin sister to accompany her playing here, and our treasured Crumb, of course, is his own metaphysical weather pattern. And both share a kind of murmuration effect, that way that flocks of birds have of all shifting direction in a totally synchronized and almost unconscious aerial pattern at the same time. I suppose we could attribute that touching feature to the true intimacy which must exist between a composer and his musician interpreter, as if they were<i> both</i> the parents of something being born.</p>
<p>The musical constellations, or flocks both ascending and descending, have been embodied in a most propitious manner indeed here, and their orbital trajectory through silence having been consummated with alacrity and elegance on their way to the sanctus sanctorum, their liminal echo seems to go on forever. As Shimizu evocatively reminded us of Crumb’s original notation on his score, a chromatic line in the middle register was added to the concluding bars of <b>Celestial Mechanics</b>: “The chromatic line (with pizzicato) is marked ‘quasi subliminal, like a breath’.” That poetic notation describing the desired impact for a piece is music is haunting in both its brevity and profundity. It reminds us of the place where all great music actually originates: in the beating heart of a music lover. The finale of the four-part <b><i>Celestial</i></b> work, “Delta Orionis,” proceeds in a stately fashion towards a dirge-like breathlessness. <b>Zeitgeist</b>, considerably more volatile in tone, ends with its sixth part, “Reverberations,” wafting into the waiting arms of we know not what realm. Perhaps it’s what, pace Delinger, Crumb has referred to as the ‘echoing phenomenon, that most ancient of musical devices.’ And the third part of <b>Otherworldly Resonances</b>, “Palimpsest,” does somehow evoke the layered sonic effects of writing, upon writing, upon writing. Another kind of echo.</p>
<p>As Crumb expressed his approach, “I had long been tempted to try my hand at the four hand medium, perhaps because I myself have been a passionate four-hand player over the years. The best of the original four-hand music occupies a very special niche in the literature of music . . . The majestic movement of the stars does indeed suggest the image of a <i>cosmic choreography</i>.” If Crumb is a choreographer of dancing stars, and I believe he is, then that makes Shimizu’s breathtaking piano skill his principal dancer. And <b>Zeitgeist</b>, the name of one of the three major constellations featured on this record, also has another more literal meaning than the customary ‘spirit of the time,’, and one which I personally prefer. Like poltergeist (<i>noise-ghost</i>), I enjoy the reverie of considering zeitgeist to be a <i>time-ghost</i>. And that, in the end, is the sort of ballet-oriented concept being celebrated on this record, ‘a dance to the music of time,’ to borrow from the novelist Anthony Powell. The meaning of the term <i>inner sanctum</i>, often used figuratively but more impressive when taken literally as I do, is a <i>very private room or place, a space where one is never interrupted</i>. That is the place this music composed by Crumb and shared by Shimizu takes us to. What you do while you’re there is, of course, up to you.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaReq0ComUo8z79sN5wudEa4-eGhAme7WdILh96Pb-nwgPa2ducr0sukbdAfIpC7qmeKsq_c12dDA68HM4F2J2IvBiqXPWjjuszsnH1yCS2Vto4FkF74mjtsz1ciXp1jxzEbDnmtwItSBKvPA5OPKzedlyQPbZpGRK0obzlOVtKpvRMXSiumusZFduuMxb/s750/5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="587" data-original-width="750" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaReq0ComUo8z79sN5wudEa4-eGhAme7WdILh96Pb-nwgPa2ducr0sukbdAfIpC7qmeKsq_c12dDA68HM4F2J2IvBiqXPWjjuszsnH1yCS2Vto4FkF74mjtsz1ciXp1jxzEbDnmtwItSBKvPA5OPKzedlyQPbZpGRK0obzlOVtKpvRMXSiumusZFduuMxb/w640-h500/5.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yoshiko Shimizu, the pianist with four hands, and sometimes six (Photo: Natsumi Shimizu)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table> <br /> <div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="color: #a70f0f;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JvLWZYVrJmM/YZW9oolo99I/AAAAAAAAtXo/RCgpS5PxmQMGAzA9bo6f0v-g2zyXYMjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/s160/Donald%2BBrackett.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #8c0b0b; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" data-original-height="160" data-original-width="160" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JvLWZYVrJmM/YZW9oolo99I/AAAAAAAAtXo/RCgpS5PxmQMGAzA9bo6f0v-g2zyXYMjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/s16000/Donald%2BBrackett.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;">–<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b> </b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b style="color: #a70f0f;"><span class="il">Donald</span> Brackett</b> i</span></span>s
a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes
about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both
the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario
Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book <span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.halleonardbooks.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid%3D148361%26lid%3D0%26keywords%3Dwinehouse%2520brackett%26menuid%3D10283%26subsiteid%3D168%26&source=gmail&ust=1631815979013000&usg=AFQjCNEzLbGBq-5BqOqwt-uy63xjNuS7MA" href="http://www.halleonardbooks.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid=148361&lid=0&keywords=winehouse%20brackett&menuid=10283&subsiteid=168&" style="color: #a70f0f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece</a></b></span></span></span></span> (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and
radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative
collaboration in pop music: <span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Fleetwood-Mac-Years-Creative-Chaos/dp/0275993388" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>F</b><b>leetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos</b></a>,</span></span></span></span><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> 2007, and </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Dark-Mirror-Singer-Songwriter-Donald-Brackett/dp/0275998983" style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial; color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter</b></a><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;">, 2008,</span><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"> as well as the biographies <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Long-Slow-Train-Sharon-Dap-Kings/dp/1617136913" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings</b></a></span></span></span></span></span>, 2018, and <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Tumult-Incredible-Life-Music-Turner/dp/1493055062" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner</a></b><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;">, </span></span>2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, <b><a href="https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/product/9781989555583-item.html" target="_blank">Yoko Ono: An Artful Life</a></b>, released
in April 2022. His latest work in progress is a new book on family
relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder,<b> Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder</b>.</span></span></div><p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-23718616707472483612024-01-15T21:54:00.002-05:002024-01-15T21:54:16.845-05:00Year-End Movies III: The Boy and the Heron and The Boys in the Boat<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii1uxU1VpKylWRm_4xJWBkI0RkKa_IB06q6gFeM99NDMmTkwL35Wvr8zh5x4tQWEDRfmGNhF9BOHlG4Lx1Gm8VagXsAOfabiuOMYnBcO0HqOMW2tbzPpFLiCgdAe2sd7dzON5hOeszeJVthJhhtc5klrCKF1_sCFMU5AxEw8eCgjRGTEiXRdI8MKPHt82s/s1278/heron%20(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1278" height="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii1uxU1VpKylWRm_4xJWBkI0RkKa_IB06q6gFeM99NDMmTkwL35Wvr8zh5x4tQWEDRfmGNhF9BOHlG4Lx1Gm8VagXsAOfabiuOMYnBcO0HqOMW2tbzPpFLiCgdAe2sd7dzON5hOeszeJVthJhhtc5klrCKF1_sCFMU5AxEw8eCgjRGTEiXRdI8MKPHt82s/w640-h450/heron%20(1).jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The heron in Hayao Miyazaki's <b>The Boy and the Heron</b>. </td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>One of the cinematic high points of 2023 was surely the great Japanese animator <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Hayao+Miyazaki" target="_blank">Hayao Miyazaki</a>’s return from retirement with <b>The Boy and the Heron</b>. (His last feature was <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2014/03/beauty-and-barbarism-hayao-miyazakis.html" target="_blank">The Wind Rises</a> </b>in 2013, though imdb.com lists a 2018 short, unknown to me, called <b>Boro the Caterpillar</b>.) Conceived and written by Miyazaki, <b>The Boy and the Heron </b>is a gorgeous fairy tale set, like <b>The Wind Rises</b>, during the Second World War. The young hero, Mahito (voiced in the dubbed version by Luca Padovan), loses his mother during the bombing of Tokyo; a year later his father, Shoichi (Christian Bale), moves them into the countryside, where he has opened a new factory. He is now romantically involved with Natsuko (Gemma Chan), who is carrying his child. This will be Mahito’s new home, but it’s alienating to him. Aside from the sudden news that a woman he has never met before, whom he addresses politely as “ma’am,” is about to become his new stepmother, there’s little actual education going on in his new school. The children spend more time working the land for the war effort than in the classroom, and as soon as he arrives he’s bullied by his classmates; his response is to bash himself in the head with a rock, claiming a fall, so he doesn’t have to go back the next day. Yet in unexpected ways this unfamiliar environment links up with the boy’s identity. Natsuko, it turns out, is his aunt and looks eerily like her, and this is the place where the two sisters grew up; the strange, Medieval tower that is the most striking landmark was created by their great-uncle. And a talking grey heron (Robert Pattinson) who gloms onto Mahito insists that he’s an emissary sent to take him to his mother, who isn’t dead at all. The boy’s adventures begin when Natsuko, whom he has seen, from his bedroom window, entering the woods, vanishes, and his quest, at the heron’s invitation, to find his mother becomes, in the mysterious transformative manner of a dream, a search for Natsuko. It takes him into the tower and out again into an island world where pelicans and parakeets are omnivorous creatures the size of human adults (the main pelican is voiced by Willem Dafoe, the main parakeet by Dan Stevens) and where the bent-backed, protective domestics from Mahito’s world are echoed by small wooden dolls that reside on shelves and around beds and operate as totems.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>The themes of <b>The Boy and the Heron </b>are those of the coming-of-age fairy tales in any culture: loss, danger and the harnessing of personal resources for the purpose of achieving maturity. The motifs are doubling and transformation, often seen in tandem. Natsuko has another sister, Lady Himi (Karen Fukuhara), a fire spirit who, like Natsuko herself, sometimes stands in for Mahiko’s mother; her ability to withstand flame is seen in contrast to his mother’s death by fire. (He has had nightmares in which she calls out to him to save her before she disappears like a ghost behind tongues of fire.) Himi is a nurturer who protects him from the hungry birds and intervenes when the pelicans try to feed on the wara wara, diminutive white babies with tiny ears and feet that drift and float and fly in hordes. Their nourishment comes in the form of huge fish caught by the brusque young boatman, Kiriko, who looks like a pirate and whose name is the same as that of the maid (Florence Pugh) who followed Mahito into the tower, clinging to his coattail, and then dropped out of sight. (Her reappearance at the end of the movie is a transformation the viewer might be able to anticipate.) Kiriko the boatman adopts Mahito during the first part of his journey, enlisting his services to help fish and feed the wara wara. The island is a difficult place where food resources are in short supply; Miyazaki seems to portray it as an extreme version of rural wartime Japan, where the maids in Shoichi’s house are thrilled by the tinned goods that he and his affluent family have brought with them from Tokyo, and where tobacco is so hard to come by that one maid is willing to barter information to the boy in exchange for cigarettes. The heron is a magician-trickster whom Mahito initially sees as evil and shoots with Natsuko’s bow and an arrow he’s fashioned himself from one of the bird’s feathers. When he pierces the heron’s beak, it recedes like a mask, revealing a wizened old man who recalls the unpredictable, unsettling figures in many Western fairy stories functioning as guides for the hero. The heron in this movie is actually a force for good, but it takes Mahito – and us – a while to work that out.<p></p>
<p>“This world is full of the dead,” the boatman explains to the boy. The water is dotted with magnificent phantom ships of many muted colors; the silent buyers who purchase his fish, rowing their canoes toward the horizon, have shadowed faces. And the island world is in constant threat of extinction; the wizard master (Mark Hamill) who controls the tower – that is, the sisters’ grand-uncle – has to balance a collection of stone blocks every day to extend its life. He wants to turn over the tower to Mahito (it has to be passed on to someone of the master’s bloodline) in the hopes that his purity can calm the anger of the stone tower, which sometimes takes the form of a striated rock with fire raging inside that hangs in the air over the master’s head. But there is, of course, no entirely pure soul: Mahito confesses to his own strain of malice – the rock he battered himself with to escape school, leaving a scar at his temple. (The link between these two malicious stones is, of course, another example of doubling.)</p>
<p>One image of Lady Himi enclosed in a glass coffin is cribbed from <b>Snow White</b>, but the main Western influence on <b>The Boy and the Heron </b>is Jean Cocteau, especially in the early scenes in the tower, which recall <b>The Blood of a Poet </b>and <b>Orpheus.</b> The images – no surprise to anyone who has seen Miyazaki’s other work – are beautiful though often creepy, and the metamorphoses are startling. Himi takes Mahito to Natsuko, who has been confined to a delivery room; over her head white pennants that seem to be made of paper swing benignly. But he’s not supposed to enter, and when he does, waking her and begging her to come back with him to their world, the pennants grow furious, whipping through the air, slashing at his face (and leaving marks) and clinging to him so he looks like a mummy. Visually that may be my favorite moment in the movie, though the marching military parakeets and the parakeets working in the kitchens to produce a feast around Mahito when they’ve captured him and the wara wara, colliding harmlessly with each other like miniature balloons, also stay in the memory. (When they gather to ingest the boatman’s fish a few of them carry plates and forks.) Miyazaki vows to return to retirement after this movie. Maybe we’ll be lucky and he’ll change his mind again.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCLF_XnWvWcfCbMiG8hXpw0xuvLIxkHU6PbvSS-nB6JSzat3wgjmjfHI3hBqVP3ItyfhLekW7aaZpnxZCMtLSlhGwr4uOyOBqlSWYK62h-zAOJydQYjyfeNuvlkVaihqK3MpLHOpr8hWFoThlGYjbtjkLI0Jci04a-GMW1ak0uOHkWPLWl39j4BfAYwmJM/s1847/boys%20in%20the%20boat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1232" data-original-width="1847" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCLF_XnWvWcfCbMiG8hXpw0xuvLIxkHU6PbvSS-nB6JSzat3wgjmjfHI3hBqVP3ItyfhLekW7aaZpnxZCMtLSlhGwr4uOyOBqlSWYK62h-zAOJydQYjyfeNuvlkVaihqK3MpLHOpr8hWFoThlGYjbtjkLI0Jci04a-GMW1ak0uOHkWPLWl39j4BfAYwmJM/w640-h426/boys%20in%20the%20boat.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bruce Herbelin-Earle, Callum Turner and Jack Mulhern in <b>The Boys in the Boat</b>. (Photo: Laurie Sparham/Amazon MGM Studios)</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Working from a script by Mark L. Smith, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=George%20Clooney" target="_blank">George Clooney</a> has turned <b>The Boys in the Boat</b>, based on Daniel James Brown’s bestseller about the journey of the 1936 University of Washington varsity rowing team to the Berlin Olympics and their victory there, into a conventional entertainment. It lacks the narrative depth of Brown’s wonderful account, especially in the Berlin section, where Hitler and the Nazis are mostly a backdrop to the story of the Washington Huskies’ triumph. Still, in its limited way the film is very satisfying, especially during the exciting rowing competition scenes. <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Joel%20Edgerton" target="_blank">Joel Edgerton</a>, whose acting has become relaxed and genuine, is the coach, Al Ulbrickson. <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Callum%20Turner" target="_blank">Callum Turner</a>, the actor with the laughing eyes who gave an understated, finely etched performance as Eddie Redmayne’s brother in the last two <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Fantastic%20Beasts" target="_blank">Fantastic Beasts </a></b>movies, plays Joe Rantz, the destitute working-class kid who gets himself into an engineering program at U.W. and tries out for the elite row squad because it pays and he’s about to be bounced out of school if he doesn’t make up his tuition shortfall. Turner keeps doing splendid work under the radar: he was the lead in <b>Queen & Country</b>, John Boorman’s barely-seen sequel to <b>Hope and Glory</b>, and Kuragin in the fabulous 2016 <b>War and Peace </b>limited series on British TV. One of the highlights of <b>The Boys on the Boat </b>is a tough little scene between Joe and the father (Alec Newman) who left him to his own devices at the height of the Depression. The movie can’t resist sentimentalizing this subplot later on, but the introduction of this character stays in our minds.</p>
<p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. </span><p></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-73400744447554519612024-01-08T15:22:00.009-05:002024-01-08T15:22:51.534-05:00Year-End Movies II: The Color Purple and May December<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWlzodvZsN4cQlP60rNIuIDYsvPF2XCjXa7WrLpzz1bPPc5r_2gpyV8OE_up5BgvxqGgkRlckKNeF22VTvKMMxRF2q1HI_PqbtgvcOFPEmGTJ2rT4V3EhouBGrGGa3TOlJTA72kTgM8ZDhJo-wAHPMgdRaZilxjeSr0tDcNC8U3nQOJgYHlmk8os_628we/s1100/taraji-1--bddb570758138a81abaa338c353e8dbebc611df2-s1100-c50.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="825" data-original-width="1100" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWlzodvZsN4cQlP60rNIuIDYsvPF2XCjXa7WrLpzz1bPPc5r_2gpyV8OE_up5BgvxqGgkRlckKNeF22VTvKMMxRF2q1HI_PqbtgvcOFPEmGTJ2rT4V3EhouBGrGGa3TOlJTA72kTgM8ZDhJo-wAHPMgdRaZilxjeSr0tDcNC8U3nQOJgYHlmk8os_628we/w640-h480/taraji-1--bddb570758138a81abaa338c353e8dbebc611df2-s1100-c50.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taraji P. Henson in one of her spectacularly ugly costumes she wear in <b>The Color Purple</b>. </td></tr></tbody></table><p>Why are most of the recent movie musicals so ghastly? Much as I’d loved <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Paul+King+Paddington" target="_blank">Paul King’s <b>Paddington</b> movies</a>, I walked out on his <b>Wonka</b>, just as I’d bailed on <b>The Greatest Showman</b>, which looked like it had been made by people who’d never <i>seen </i>a musical, and <b>Matilda</b>, which was so grotesque it was painful to watch, like <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2019/12/kitty-litter-cats.html" target="_blank"><b>Cats</b></a>. In <b>Wonka </b>the overproduction magnifies everything that’s wrong with the numbers – the bland, paltry songs by Neil Hannon and Joby Talbot, the uninspired choreography (by the usually inventive Christopher Gattelli) and hapless Timothée Chalamet in the title role, pretending to be a musical-comedy performer. It’s not just that he isn’t a singer; legends have built up around non-singers who gave indelible renditions of show songs, like Rex Harrison and Richard Burton and the enchanting, recently departed Glynis Johns. It’s that Chalamet has zero showmanship. There were clunky musicals in the early days of the talkies, when the studios were desperate to find ways to show off the new technology; strident musicals from 20th Century-Fox during and after the war years; misconceived musicals during the sixties and early seventies trying to chase down an audience that had been replaced by a younger, hipper one while the studios weren’t paying attention. But these contemporary out-of-sync kitschfests are way worse.</p>
<p>The latest fiasco is <b>The Color Purple</b>, set mostly in Georgia in the first half of the twentieth century and based on <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2016/03/the-color-purple-voices.html" target="_blank">the Broadway musical adaptation</a> of the Alice Walker novel that, nearly four decades ago, generated Steven Spielberg’s unfortunate early attempt to break out of the fantasy-adventure niche. I wasn’t so hot on the book, a fruitcake whipped up out of a tawdry race melodrama and a sisterhood-is-powerful fairy tale, but it was better than the Spielberg version. The director was such a wrong match with the material that I assumed that Black audiences and critics would be offended by all the Disney cuteness. Imagine my surprise when I read an interview with Blitz Bazawule, the director of the new <b>Color Purple</b>, in which he proclaimed that watching Spielberg’s picture had changed his life.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>I didn’t see the 2005 Broadway musical, which had a book by Marsha Norman and songs by Brenda Russell, Allee <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2016/03/the-color-purple-voices.html" target="_blank">Willis and Stephen Bray, but I caught </a>the 2015 revival with the talented Cynthia Erivo in the leading role, and it was more fun than I’d anticipated. The songs were sung with a gospel brio, the choreography was lively, and the director, John Doyle, did a wizardly job of bringing together the elements. It would be a stretch to say that I was having too good a time to <i>notice</i> the insane plot: Celie, raped by her father and beaten by her husband, learns from his bisexual mistress, the cabaret singer Shug Avery, how to love and stand up for herself and goes on to make the store she inherits into not only a winning business proposition but a stylish one before she’s reconciled with the sister who, unbeknownst to her, has been raising Celie’s incest children in Africa. But the show was so rousing that the crazy narrative settled down to becoming just one of the factors in the entertainment.<p></p>
<p>However, Doyle, even when he missteps, is a director; Bazawule is not, even if that’s what his union card says. His film doesn’t have a concept, just a checklist of disparate ideas about how to stage and shoot numbers. They don’t fit together, so it’s like watching a compilation of numbers from a dozen or more different movies. It’s anyone’s guess what was on his mind (or on the mind of the choreographer, Fatima Robinson) when one of Celie’s numbers takes her wandering through a prison gang working in the cotton fields or why a number set in the 1940s like “Miss Celie’s Pants” interpolates dance styles that would be better suited for a rave. Now and then you catch a visual quote from another movie musical, but Bazawule doesn’t follow through, so you wonder if he might have found it by chance while thumbing through a pictorial history of musicals. If I had to name Bazawule’s approach, I’d call it inadvertent collage – he throws in whatever comes to his head, like a junior <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Baz%20Luhrmann" target="_blank">Baz Luhrmann</a>. He doesn’t understand the rhythm of a show number so he’s utterly at sea about how to shoot and edit one.</p>
<p>And God, he’s an appalling director of actors. Fantasia Barrino, who plays Celie, can certainly sing the part, but her acting is all oversized gestures and playing emotions, which results in a generalized wash. As Mister, Celie’s brute of a husband – who, however, turns around and redeems himself by selling his land to bring her sister Nettie (Ciara) back from Africa after he’s spent literally decades hiding her letters to Celie – Colman Domingo scowls for most of the two hours and twenty minutes. Bazawule doesn’t give Danielle Brooks much help with transferring her stage performance as upfront, jocular Sofia, who’s pregnant by Mister’s son Harpo when we first meet her. Even Taraji P. Henson, whom I usually love, isn’t much good as Shug, though she manages to put over her final song. The only person in the cast who seems remotely grounded is Corey Hawkins as Harpo. Henson isn’t even lit or dressed to make her look good, though her costumes are only the most conspicuous of the atrocities designed by Rashad Corey and Francine Jamison-Tanchuck. The cinematography is by Dan Laustsen, who has done fine work with Guillermo del Toro, but his contribution here is baffling. Why would you <i>underlight </i>numbers in a big, boisterous self-actualization musical?</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAR3xeIYMMESPmA3wprz4dkxYwuWOtdOg8Nld5pVgqyTVILIGoJoQtZnXvxBjc0wL3qhaGQM_cAGkPlqP91Fg4t66PsGxUI9ujmHr9Ig6ptdlJ4_oD_ojGQekCDyQCZpJl2LnjeqHVTbxjHWM3H5ZaAjIa_8kYxjlII4HVC8Qj7hidTva4NpthiOLWDMtA/s3000/Natalie%20Portman%20and%20Julianne%20Moore%20in%20May%20December.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1688" data-original-width="3000" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAR3xeIYMMESPmA3wprz4dkxYwuWOtdOg8Nld5pVgqyTVILIGoJoQtZnXvxBjc0wL3qhaGQM_cAGkPlqP91Fg4t66PsGxUI9ujmHr9Ig6ptdlJ4_oD_ojGQekCDyQCZpJl2LnjeqHVTbxjHWM3H5ZaAjIa_8kYxjlII4HVC8Qj7hidTva4NpthiOLWDMtA/w640-h360/Natalie%20Portman%20and%20Julianne%20Moore%20in%20May%20December.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in <b>May December</b>.</td></tr></tbody></table><p>The premise of <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Todd%20Haynes" target="_blank">Todd Haynes</a>’s <b>May December </b>is that, twenty years after a teacher has gone to jail for sleeping with a thirteen-year-old middle-school kid, married him and raised a family with him, the actress who has been cast in a movie version of her story comes to spend time with her to research the role. Haynes and the screenwriter, Samy Burch, have added a meta-layer to the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, but instead of adding complexity it slows the movie down and makes it hopelessly self-conscious. Everyone on screen seems to be sleepwalking. <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Julianne%20Moore" target="_blank">Julianne Moore </a>is miscast as the childlike Gracie (the character based on Letourneau), but then I’ve never thought she was at her best in her collaborations with Haynes; here, as in <b>Safe </b>and <b>Far from Heaven</b>, she’s playing an idea he hasn’t turned into a flesh-and-blood woman, and she responds with a mannered performance. As the actress, Elizabeth, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Natalie%20Portman" target="_blank">Natalie Portman</a> comes across as so amateurish that you can’t help thinking that was a deliberate choice to force a comment about acting and reality. If so, it is, to put it lightly, misguided. In one scene Elizabeth attends an acting class in which Gracie’s daughter is enrolled at the local high school, where the teacher introduces her as a Juilliard-trained actor. That intro pulled me straight out of the movie; I wondered if somewhere along the way someone had made a clerical error.</p><p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. </span><p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-45665527885359829292024-01-03T10:15:00.007-05:002024-01-06T14:52:11.663-05:00Year-End Movies I: The Holdovers and Ferrari <p><b><i></i></b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO9lJ_2Oo-LfCYNHjENtFU-fOW3oaK3ev6a9m0OTdA0igf4J7L9TezVyy24dIza1vt-UPFQ_pywC1tEPhL9DlN1QHUsrrAWuqcyQP-TMQ2mplFhVrTeRjGXcj_itrtw3zzfQqRHiGYIUJOaI_y41SGclK-6TW02UYkU6cEfbF5JAGfVjWKIZWe2owes2uO/s4500/Dominic%20Sessa%20and%20Paul%20Giamatti%20in%20The%20Holdovers.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3000" data-original-width="4500" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO9lJ_2Oo-LfCYNHjENtFU-fOW3oaK3ev6a9m0OTdA0igf4J7L9TezVyy24dIza1vt-UPFQ_pywC1tEPhL9DlN1QHUsrrAWuqcyQP-TMQ2mplFhVrTeRjGXcj_itrtw3zzfQqRHiGYIUJOaI_y41SGclK-6TW02UYkU6cEfbF5JAGfVjWKIZWe2owes2uO/w640-h426/Dominic%20Sessa%20and%20Paul%20Giamatti%20in%20The%20Holdovers.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dominic Sessa and Paul Giamatti in <b>The Holdovers</b>.</td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p><b><i>The review of The Holdovers contains spoilers.</i></b></p>
<p>In <b>The Holdovers</b> a prodigiously bright but desperately unhappy teenager with a checkered academic history and the sour, supercilious Ancient Civilizations teacher at his boarding school are stuck with each other’s company over Christmas week of 1970, when the campus, a few hours’ drive from Boston, is deserted except for these two, the cook and the caretaker. Initially there are four other “holdovers” but the screenwriter, David Hemingson, employs a wobbly plot twist to scatter them so that he and the director, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Alexander%20Payne" target="_blank">Alexander Payne</a>, can home in on the teacher, Paul Hunham (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Paul%20Giamatti" target="_blank">Paul Giamatti</a>), the boy, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), and the cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Hemingson is a TV writer who’s just graduated to features, but he must have chalked up thousands of hours watching shamelessly manipulative coming-of-age movies and movies about damaged middle-aged men who finally come in out of the emotional cold. Not a scene in it feels like it emerged from anyone’s authentic experience, yet Hemingson is an expert at strong-arming the audience. Mary, an African American widow from Roxbury, Mass., took the job at this elite prep school so that her son could get a good education; unlike many of his peers the boy made good on his educational opportunities but wound up a Vietnam casualty. Angus lies to his classmates about his happy home, then admits that he lives with his mother and her new second husband, who went off on their delayed honeymoon instead of the family Christmas he was counting on. He tells Hunham that his real father is dead and later reveals <i>that’s </i>a lie – that he’s in a psychiatric ward in Boston. Hunham is an alumnus of the school and has been teaching there for decades; it turns out that his old headmaster gave him the job out of kindness after Hunham was thrown out of Harvard for copying another boy’s exam sheet. It was a frame-up: the other boy was the perpetrator but came from a wealthy family so the dean believed his story. The culmination of all this heartstring-tugging is a trip to Boston that Angus implausibly convinces Hunham to supervise when, out of the blue, he stops treating the kid like his enemy and starts being nice to him. I guess you don’t need character logic when you’ve effectively aimed a gun at the audience’s head. Naturally we get a big scene in the psychiatric hospital. Naturally the kid gets in trouble with his uninsightful mother and asshole stepfather and Hunham throws himself under the bus to save him from being thrown out of yet another boarding school.<p></p>
<p>What’s weird about the general enthusiasm over <b>The Holdovers</b> isn’t that it’s so sloppy, with narrative details that seem glaringly wrong – like an upper-middle-class high school kid and a teacher in a 1970 setting who curse freely at each other, and an elite prep school’s making not the slightest effort to provide a comfortable environment for the holdovers – but that it feels like it was beamed in from another planet. Alexander Payne is too much of a misanthrope to pull off a movie like this. Except for <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/07/troubling-nature-of-love-before-sunset.html" target="_blank"><b>Sideways</b></a><i>, </i>he’s made his career directing (and often co-writing) movies about characters we can’t believe he feels anything for. That wasn’t a problem in his debut picture,<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2013/03/two-neglected-gems-36-37-citizen-ruth.html" target="_blank"> <b>Citizen Ruth</b></a><i>, </i>which was a satire (and a clever one), or even in his follow-up, <b>Election</b>, where, adapting Tom Perrotta’s novel, he tried to make a comedy about high school life the way Preston Sturges might have done. It was smug, but it didn’t demand that we connect emotionally to the characters. But Payne’s other movies, like <b>About Schmidt</b> and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/11/paradise-almost-lost-george-clooney.html" target="_blank"><b>The Descendants</b></a><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/11/paradise-almost-lost-george-clooney.html" target="_blank"> </a>and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2013/12/further-on-down-road-alexander-paynes.html" target="_blank"><b>Nebraska</b></a>, come across as phony, and you can’t figure out why he made them or why you should be sitting through them. When you revisit <b>Sideways, </b>which came out in 2004, between <b>About Schmidt </b>and <b>The Descendants</b>, it seems unlikely to the point of being bizarre. Once upon a time Payne managed to direct a film with full-hearted characters; even the overgrown frat boy played by Thomas Haden Church whose behavior is so outrageous is somehow likable. There’s a patina of intelligence in those other Payne pictures, and the leading actors (Jack Nicholson, George Clooney, Bruce Dern) lend the films an aura of seriousness. But the material in <b>The Holdovers </b>is so contemptible that the disjunction between it and Payne’s usual unspoken claim that he’s engaged in a project of presumed merit is jarring.</p>
<p>Maybe I should have said that the film seems to have been beamed in from three different planets, since Giamatti, Sessa and Randolph don’t appear to be acting in the same movie. Sessa and Randolph are bad, and Sessa is also distinctly unpleasant to watch, though it’s impossible to say whether that’s a case of unfortunate miscasting or negligent direction. Giamatti’s problem isn’t his acting; it’s that the writing is so inconsistent that you come away from the movie still not understanding his character – why he’s so mean to his pupils while also evidently dedicated to turning them into scholars. It’s clear enough in Terence Rattigan’s play <b>The Browning Version </b>and the two movie adaptations, with first Michael Redgrave and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/08/neglected-gem-browning-version-1994.html" target="_blank">then Albert Finney</a> as the classics teacher for whom the passing of the years and a miserable marriage and the way he’s been marginalized by the administration have driven a wider and wider wedge between his love of his subject and his ability to convey it to his students. But in <b>The Holdovers</b> you can’t even see Hunham’s love of his subject, nor is there any evidence that he ever reached out to the boys in his classes. I’d say that David Hemingson saw <b>The Browning Version </b>and didn’t get it, but I suspect I’m giving him too much credit.</p>
<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV4K5P69AM1FYi2PIzxpeRGa3NzlRiyhNqv98HvLq3FaXom3OsxshWHzr82S3FyvGwbxAuVcZgXQMmiE-ry-ZlXBTXgvEKihueX7cH2grrdSmqqDP8x94dRjbztRgE_pdejzaW1u3NbtIXY1qBUj55z_sMFjyOH8pRCQEQkpZSX34rijhyphenhyphenckgZ5sJSoJFS/s660/ferrari-174760.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="440" data-original-width="660" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV4K5P69AM1FYi2PIzxpeRGa3NzlRiyhNqv98HvLq3FaXom3OsxshWHzr82S3FyvGwbxAuVcZgXQMmiE-ry-ZlXBTXgvEKihueX7cH2grrdSmqqDP8x94dRjbztRgE_pdejzaW1u3NbtIXY1qBUj55z_sMFjyOH8pRCQEQkpZSX34rijhyphenhyphenckgZ5sJSoJFS/w640-h426/ferrari-174760.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Penélope Cruz in <b>Ferrari</b>.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p>Michael Mann’s <b>Ferrari</b> is set in 1957, when the celebrated automobile manufacturer Enzo Ferrari (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Adam%20Driver" target="_blank">Adam Driver</a>) is beset by challenges to his company’s financial well-being, his marriage and his image and reputation. His wife Laura (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Pen%C3%A9lope%20Cruz" target="_blank">Penélope Cruz</a>) finds out that he has had, since the war, a mistress, Lina Lardi (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Shailene%20Woodley" target="_blank">Shailene Woodley</a>), with whom he fathered a son now positioned to be his heir, his legitimate son having died of muscular dystrophy a year earlier. All of this turmoil coincides with the Mille Miglia race, which culminates in a tragic accident when Ferrari’s most gifted young driver, Alfonso De Portago (Gabriel Leone), hits an obstacle on the road that the press is more than willing to interpret as a defect in the car’s tires.</p>
<p>The accident sequence is an astonishing piece of filmmaking: it feels like the worst nightmare you’ve ever had, but the style is realist. The problem is that the movie is so glum overall that this scene isn’t in sufficient tonal contrast to the rest of. Enzo talks about the terrible joy of racing, but Mann never lets <i>us</i> in on it. There’s plenty of adrenaline in the racing scenes but the thrills are saturated with dread; Mann fails to provide a sense of the freedom the drivers must feel, and because he shoots everything in close-up and medium shot we don’t even get to enjoy the magnificent Italian scenery. This must be the most claustrophobic racing picture ever made; there are so few long shots in the two hours and forty minutes that I could count them. And according to my watch it took an hour and twenty minutes for Driver to break into a smile. His acting is competent but dull; I couldn’t get myself to care about this relentlessly solemn protagonist. The women walk off with the picture – Cruz contributes a fierce portrait of the wounded, grieving wife and Woodley is sensitive and grounded as the mistress. </p>
<p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. </span><p></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-49296227688281864562023-12-29T15:26:00.001-05:002024-01-04T10:45:25.634-05:00Out of the Darkness: Opera Atelier’s Orpheus and Eurydice <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtfljfyIcaYy3W6oFhy4cS3cSW1yieP0epChbTw5_t9QO6g2ARCY1fw35A2FyRBbFWohiflJRNDgZ6PJYEoztdj2PXsp9MGpOKmMKKT7Jn3-AJV13WxiQ3aa93YtDSCMkM9z-VehuONwr-yWijjCb82GvCl909yWZ2sAkcPFFuE_yJVEaJwvrDaa-2YUu7/s2400/Mireille%20Asselin%20as%20Eurydice,%20Artist%20of%20Atelier%20Ballet%20Xi%20Yi%20Photo%20by%20Bruce%20Zinger.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1531" data-original-width="2400" height="408" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtfljfyIcaYy3W6oFhy4cS3cSW1yieP0epChbTw5_t9QO6g2ARCY1fw35A2FyRBbFWohiflJRNDgZ6PJYEoztdj2PXsp9MGpOKmMKKT7Jn3-AJV13WxiQ3aa93YtDSCMkM9z-VehuONwr-yWijjCb82GvCl909yWZ2sAkcPFFuE_yJVEaJwvrDaa-2YUu7/w640-h408/Mireille%20Asselin%20as%20Eurydice,%20Artist%20of%20Atelier%20Ballet%20Xi%20Yi%20Photo%20by%20Bruce%20Zinger.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mireille Asselin as Eurydice, with Artist of Atelier Ballet Xi Yi, in<b> Orpheus and Eurydice</b>. (Photo: Bruce Zinger)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Life after death? The question is purely rhetorical in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s plucky retelling of the ancient <b>Orpheus and Eurydice</b> story. His 1774 French opera ends not – as in the original Ovid myth – in tragedy but in a triumph of love conquering all. As outlined in Ranieri de' Calzabigi’s 18th-century libretto, boy gets girl and lives happily ever after, uplifted by melodious music, song and ballet. Canada’s acclaimed Opera Atelier company, known for its historically accurate stagings of Baroque opera, amplifies the joy in Gluck’s dramatically divergent ending in an energetic production recently presented at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Assembling an all-star cast of Canadian singers for their season opener, Opera Atelier co-founders Marshall Pynkoski and Jeanette Lajeunesse Zingg successfully transform Gluck’s <b>Orpheus and Eurydice</b> into a celebration of not just life but also the power of art to exist for eternity as a testament to the best of human achievement.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Canadian tenor Colin Ainsworth gloriously hits all the high-register notes in Gluck’s demanding contra-tenor Orpheus. Though they have fewer arias to sing, sopranos Mireille Asselin as Eurydice and Anna-Julia David as Amour also beguile with their bright and heartfelt performances. Conductor David Fallis leads the Tafelmusik orchestra and chamber choir. Rounding out the cast are the 17 members of the Opera Atelier dance ensemble, led by Zingg, who both choreographed and performs the Baroque ballet sequences.</span><p></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Gluck’s reform opera, so-called because it replaced Baroque courtly conventions with complex scene development and emotionally expressive music, came about at the request of Marie Antoinette, who reportedly asked the Bavarian composer to modify the Italian version of the opera he had first presented in Vienna in 1762 to satisfy Parisian tastes by adding more dance music and substituting the lead castrato vocal part with a countertenor. Jean-Philippe Rameau was then all the rage in the French capital and while aiming to better Rameau’s grandly elegant operatic productions, Gluck added a psychological dimension, creating characters who pop out of the elaborate scenery to strike a chord with the viewer.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Orpheus, the poet-musician who braves a journey into the Underworld to rescue his beloved from the clutches of Pluto, is, in Gluck’s hands, a tortured soul who frequently breaks into plangent song to give vent to his sorrow. Eurydice, his betrothed, who dies just before their wedding day, sings responsively, probing her lover’s vulnerabilities and stirring him to defiant action after accusing him of cold indifference to her adoration. <br /></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">In the original story, Orpheus is permitted by the gods to retrieve his beloved from Hades with the condition that he does not look upon her until he has freed her from her shadowy subterranean dungeon— here evoked with heaps of smoking dry ice. Orpheus will lose Eurydice forever should he disobey these orders. And disobey he does, becoming an enduring symbol of the dangers of reckless curiosity. In the original myth, his one mistake leads to all sorts of unpleasantness, including decapitation by the frenzied maenads, followers of Dionysus. But in Gluck’s optimistic pre-French Revolution version, divine intervention ensures that Eurydice is resurrected under the guidance of Amour, a new god of love character for female voice introduced by Gluck to ensure the opera ends with a felicitous reunion. The unusual happy ending does surprise. But Pynkoski’s seamless direction saves it from feeling tagged on, as is sometimes the case with other productions.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">An exuberant ballet, featuring fleet low-to-the ground footwork and crowning arms, lends the finale an air of giddy abandonment. Dressed in Michael Legouffe’s <span style="font-style: normal !msorm;"><i>macaron</i></span>-hued costumes, the dancers file back on stage at the conclusion, holding lettered signs that playfully spell out love’s triumph. That sense of victory extends to Opera Atelier itself.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">In recognition of their ongoing preservation and revitalization of French cultural heritage, in 2021 Pynkoski and Zingg were invested as officers of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. This year, as soon as <b>Orpheus and Eurydice </b>closed its week-long run on November 1, they were back in France to stage Mozart’s <b>Don Giovanni </b>at the Royal Opera of Versailles. They are constantly raising the bar.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvVZdWxqe46unpp3se3Y4-YA2Mxq9oLe_piierOn7Ww-Bd0RZn6LuKJiEKsXsPsPb-wyhEjO_s1736pRGSOv1ExhEkdcWLaYqgrWolD7ych3dWRvcw-KRjYVOW_MdQhcQ5wrZ8cPPskobdf1afW4A7QRQ-OAGwd1bWo1h-I9GUgqBwCCp51GKk0vYE4NM/s502/Deirdre%20Kelly%20bio%20(1).jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="462" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvVZdWxqe46unpp3se3Y4-YA2Mxq9oLe_piierOn7Ww-Bd0RZn6LuKJiEKsXsPsPb-wyhEjO_s1736pRGSOv1ExhEkdcWLaYqgrWolD7ych3dWRvcw-KRjYVOW_MdQhcQ5wrZ8cPPskobdf1afW4A7QRQ-OAGwd1bWo1h-I9GUgqBwCCp51GKk0vYE4NM/w184-h200/Deirdre%20Kelly%20bio%20(1).jpeg" width="184" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvVZdWxqe46unpp3se3Y4-YA2Mxq9oLe_piierOn7Ww-Bd0RZn6LuKJiEKsXsPsPb-wyhEjO_s1736pRGSOv1ExhEkdcWLaYqgrWolD7ych3dWRvcw-KRjYVOW_MdQhcQ5wrZ8cPPskobdf1afW4A7QRQ-OAGwd1bWo1h-I9GUgqBwCCp51GKk0vYE4NM/s502/Deirdre%20Kelly%20bio%20(1).jpeg"></a></span></div><span style="font-size: small;">– <b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Deirdre%2520Kelly&source=gmail&ust=1703644104057000&usg=AOvVaw18HAU9cBHPThYaaOg_rBgS" href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Deirdre%20Kelly" style="color: #a70f0f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Deirdre<span> </span><span class="il">Kelly</span></a></b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">The Globe and Mail</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Dance Magazine</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> in New York, the </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Dance Gazette</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> in London, and </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">NUVO </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">International Dictionary of Ballet</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> and </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">. The best-selling author of </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Paris Times Eight</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> and </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">The York University Magazine </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">where </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book,<span> </span><b><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Fashioning-Beatles-Looks-Shook-World/dp/1990823327/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank">Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World</a>. </b></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br /></span><p></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-5327679041752298392023-12-27T21:35:00.003-05:002023-12-28T08:22:53.197-05:00A Guilty Pleasure Without the Pleasure: Fair Play<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFD5bb01VXe-K7VWYzZAp6i3KtELugCE5Ksbr-oGoZNoP6FOtG8swqCSRtmgD4PnwTFot3E9-mJx7qAXM1917HplQ87qKsnA3lEi2eGOkr9nw-XdxoYBcOnbCqci3RcRqZ0RFfU9ifHjy67T9SOLfNncXP15pij4LEuvcUU1X6u_ZIkBV4tHiURzg_DGRs/s1898/Phoebe%20Dynevor%20and%20Alden%20Ehrenreich.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1048" data-original-width="1898" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFD5bb01VXe-K7VWYzZAp6i3KtELugCE5Ksbr-oGoZNoP6FOtG8swqCSRtmgD4PnwTFot3E9-mJx7qAXM1917HplQ87qKsnA3lEi2eGOkr9nw-XdxoYBcOnbCqci3RcRqZ0RFfU9ifHjy67T9SOLfNncXP15pij4LEuvcUU1X6u_ZIkBV4tHiURzg_DGRs/w640-h354/Phoebe%20Dynevor%20and%20Alden%20Ehrenreich.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in <b>Fair Play</b>. </td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>There’s nothing wrong with the kind of movie <b>Fair Play</b> purports to be, but there’s everything wrong with what it is. Written and directed by Chloe Domont, this thriller (which premiered at Sundance last January) came up in the media feed as a Netflix attention-getter, “guilty pleasure,” “nail-biter.” A few clicks revealed decent notices, one or two from critics who are not completely negligible, and the synopsis – two Manhattan stockbrokers, lovers and coworkers, enter into an escalating war of wills – sounded okay. Most of us are game occasionally for something flashy, sexy, dopey. Lifetime Network used to have an assembly line devoted to movies about trusting, open-hearted women terrorized by charming, hunky psychopaths; like any type of genre movie, they were enjoyable if you didn’t expect or need them to be other than what they were. Each new plot was a chewed-over regurgitation of the last, with every shift from romance to red flag, sex to psychosis blatantly telegraphed. Yet they were made cleanly and proficiently, without pretense of depth, but with the right degree of actorly exertion. They were televisual junk food of the kind abjured by only the most ascetic or snobbish of consumers, and Netflix has stepped into the breach: any time of year you can stream something on the order of <b>Deadly Illusions</b>, <b>Dangerous Lies</b>, or <b>Secret Obsession</b>.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>So we punched up <b>Fair Play – </b>fresh title – and stared at it for twenty minutes in silence. The tension was inches thick. But that had nothing to do with the quality of the moviemaking, except inversely. It was generated by one badly written, badly acted scene after another – a badness not modest but aggressive, hyped-up, a desperate overinvestment in a delusional return. The first sequence establishes the dynamic between Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Alden%20Ehrenreich" target="_blank">Alden Ehrenreich</a>), partners in a two-year love affair which they’ve somehow kept secret from their colleagues at a stratospherically successful Manhattan brokerage. After several minutes’ worth of kissy-facing and cringey banter in a public bathroom, he hauls her onto the sink for some panting, convulsive oral sex – which ends in anticlimax when they discover smears of menstrual blood on their faces and clothes. “This movie had better get a lot less annoying very quickly,” I recall saying.<p></p>
<p><b>Fair Play</b> is a Lifetime movie, I guess, for this moment in cultural time. Which is to say that it recycles several familiarities, not just one. Per Lifetime, it’s about a pathological affair, with a woman threatened by a man whose fear of failure meshes dangerously with his latent facility as a scheming sociopath. As others have pointed out, <b>Fair Play</b> is also evocative, probably intentionally, of eighties and nineties big-screen thrillers like <b>Jagged Edge,</b> <b>Fatal Attraction</b>, and <b>Basic Instinct</b>. It has that combination of soap and psycho, that slathering fixation on sex and the knife, that absence of subtlety and wit. Domont does Joe Eszterhas proud. The milieu is the upper reach of Manhattan’s professional class, mannequins who fancy themselves masters, drones in an open-plan office whose walls are made of glass so that a character can look up in time to notice another’s revealing expression a football field away. The basic insight into male insecurity and its nearness to psychopathy is more than valid; with better dialogue and better acting, this same plot could have (and probably has) formed the basis of an unnerving dual character study. As it is, <b>Fair Play</b> builds momentum once the plot pistons engage, but it never becomes fun, and never stops being laughable – a guilty pleasure without the pleasure, or even the guilt.</p>
<p>To the Lifetime template and Eszterhas design, Domont adds the contemporary element of hyper-profanity. You needn’t be at all censorious of your own or others’ language to find the cursing in <b>Fair Play</b> excessive. Introduced as a form of dumb love patter (“I fuckin’ love you so fuckin’ much”), with the tightening of the plot “fuck” becomes a mindless noise thrown willy-nilly into every third sentence. (Sometimes, it is the sentence: “Fuck! Fuck!! Fuuuuuuuckkkkk!!!”) A screenplay should treat profanity judiciously, as it would any other component of speech; but here the four-letter mantra, delivered incessantly by actors who have difficulty transmitting ordinary emotion convincingly, let alone blinding rage and frustration, signifies only a dearth of idea or resource. But it is, as I said, a contemporary tendency. A normalized ease with profanity is more and more today leaned on by people of small talent and limited imagination – from the published critics and social-media hot-takers who communicate their depth of feeling by typing in “I fucking love this movie” (or “I fucking hate this movie”), to the recent Prime Video miniseries based on <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Harlan%20Coben" target="_blank">Harlan Coben</a>’s <b>Shelter</b>, full of youngish pod-person actors impersonating high schoolers whose level of conversational cursing suggested they’d all gone to Tony Montana Elementary. </p>
<p>Anything else? As Luke, Ehrenreich is not bad. As Emily, Dynevor is. From her swearing to her smoking, she’s never less than conscious of putting on a tough show, of being an orchid imitating a weed. Her Emily lacks the look, sound, or presence of a woman who’s taken a punch or two from life – beginning with a mother who is mostly a hectoring voice on the phone, flinging “fucks” with the best of them. The secondary characters, and the actors who play them, are a lineup of goons and garbage people whose horribleness always serves some niggling plot necessity, but who together add up to a ripe stench filling the air behind the pretty leads. As the brokerage’s second in command,<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=%20Rich%20Sommer" target="_blank"> Rich Sommer </a>(<b>Mad Men </b>and elsewhere) mainly pulls in his lips and raises his eyebrows to signal testy impatience with someone else’s lack of efficiency. The most visible of the secondaries is the troll-like president of the firm, played by the troll-like Englishman<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=%20Eddie%20Marsan" target="_blank"> Eddie Marsan</a>. I’ve seen Marsan only as the drunken, corrupt Yorkshire reporter of the <b>Red Riding</b> trilogy, where his phlegmy mumble, beady eyes, and oddly-shaped head fit right into the atmosphere of general depravity. Here he attempts one of those mishmash accents that are unknown outside the realm of mid-Atlantic acting: a voice without a country. On the plus side, his eyes are beadier than ever, and his head, which we see from every possible angle, just as oddly shaped.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-51eb3hjK2tU/WtnstfLQrCI/AAAAAAAAomo/mcGgWC3HrS0kfZUhHEWbUACOslkd78WAwCLcBGAs/s1600/Devin%2BMcKinney.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="170" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-51eb3hjK2tU/WtnstfLQrCI/AAAAAAAAomo/mcGgWC3HrS0kfZUhHEWbUACOslkd78WAwCLcBGAs/s1600/Devin%2BMcKinney.jpg" /></a></div>
– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Devin%20McKinney"><b>Devin McKinney</b></a> is the author of <a href="http://www.devinmckinney.com/mckinney-magic-circles-beatles"><b>Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History</b></a> (2003), <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/12/american-actor-interview-with-devin.html"><b>The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda</b></a> (2012), and <a href="http://bookstore.gettysburg.edu/shop_product_detail.asp?catalog_group_id=Mg&catalog_group_name=R2VuZXJhbCBCb29rcw&catalog_id=460&catalog_name=SmVzdXNtYW5pYSE&pf_id=5946&product_name=SmVzdXNtYW5pYSE&type=3&target=shop_product_list.asp"><b>Jesusmania! The Bootleg Superstar of Gettysburg College</b></a> (2016). Formerly a music columnist (<a href="http://prospect.org/authors/devin-mckinney"><i>The American Prospect</i></a>), blogger (<a href="http://www.heydullblog.blogspot.com/"><i>Hey Dullblog</i></a>), and TV writer (The Food Network), he has appeared in numerous publications and contributes regularly to <i>Critics At Large </i>and the pop culture site <a href="http://hilobrow.com/author/dmckinney/"><i>HiLobrow</i></a>.
He is employed as an archivist at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and their three cats. His
website is <a href="http://devinmckinney.com/">devinmckinney.com</a>.
<p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-34113716950115378182023-12-26T16:49:00.000-05:002023-12-26T16:49:09.234-05:00Interstitial Music: The Space Between the Notes<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLjluH5B7jbajD0G9J4HllLtkyc01j5yvABFEPL8niyu_7kacXiVuRMwXZmEoRr-Y4XNySoeudiB6d9aJCRBVikztmFgPMG2BS2ItQ5gVPRNhKPZf4XyWxs_Tm1PgyOQyudJNjvuszghVcOAys5GsIznZispm05Px_M0hhoQhDsujIQU6kGgdpiiVCTZX8/s576/Picture1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="435" data-original-width="576" height="484" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLjluH5B7jbajD0G9J4HllLtkyc01j5yvABFEPL8niyu_7kacXiVuRMwXZmEoRr-Y4XNySoeudiB6d9aJCRBVikztmFgPMG2BS2ItQ5gVPRNhKPZf4XyWxs_Tm1PgyOQyudJNjvuszghVcOAys5GsIznZispm05Px_M0hhoQhDsujIQU6kGgdpiiVCTZX8/w640-h484/Picture1.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Arnold Schoenberg, MS 96.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><blockquote>“It’s all about starting in the middle of a musical sentence and then moving in both directions at once.” – John Coltrane</blockquote><p></p>
<p>Man, we are a long, long way here from the dreamy and wistful harp pieces of the classical age, and it’s a fine thing too. In the hands of a masterfully gifted contemporary jazz composer and improviser such as Maria-Christina Harper, this historically tinged musical instrument acquires a whole new meaning. And the muscular heft to go along with it, as she pulls it further and deeper into the postmodern age, while still remaining true to the roots of its inception in a subtle way that honours her harp precursors, Dorothy Ashby in 1957-58, and Alice Coltrane in 1967-68. The blessing here is that on the new album release <b>Passing By</b> from Little Yellow Man Records, Harper (yes, in a delightfully charming piece of synchronicity, this edgy harpist’s name is actually Harper) is accompanied by the recently formed eponymously named Trio and joined by the restrained brilliance of Evan Jenkins on percussion and the fluid elegance of Josephine Davies on saxes. The results are stunning, in both their aggressive reach into a sonic future and their respectful evocation of a circuitous past. Together, they slam it.</p>
<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTe0HzjjRYz2Hwjy61iSOIkcF4IJSe0bpBtIPp7GApz8ffTaacw3hVk6NU7Svgy9WQqbJDTwtkgdDyGVVwzKEkijzVcnU8kYhQZNBDkIJ9-JQsV5jFmdtPGGOiNp4j9H23eD3UZPrnaEzTakJQ-qA7eRxedkaXPXYZbtGYVN3J6_lY4EJ_yKvSm3Db2DCR/s906/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="906" data-original-width="722" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTe0HzjjRYz2Hwjy61iSOIkcF4IJSe0bpBtIPp7GApz8ffTaacw3hVk6NU7Svgy9WQqbJDTwtkgdDyGVVwzKEkijzVcnU8kYhQZNBDkIJ9-JQsV5jFmdtPGGOiNp4j9H23eD3UZPrnaEzTakJQ-qA7eRxedkaXPXYZbtGYVN3J6_lY4EJ_yKvSm3Db2DCR/w510-h640/1.jpg" width="510" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bygone days of the gilded age.</td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>An instrument which sounded and felt so sweetly gentle in the hands of the younger son of Sebastian Bach in his Sonata for Harp in G Major, or enigmatic in Beethoven’s Six Variations on a Swiss Song, had even evolved eventually into a 20th-century modernist experiment in atonality in the visionary fingertips of Luciano Berio or Elliott Carter. But it was in the jazz canon that the harp suddenly assumed a truly startling arrival into Nowness, first in the still wistful but advanced Dorothy Ashby, followed by the cosmic vibrations of the great Alice Coltrane a decade later. And now we are permitted an even deeper dive into the Now, with Harper’s trio of ideally matched musical partners. Their debut release as a trio (which follows on the heels of her solo album <b>Gluten Free</b> and a duet album with lute player Yiagos Hairetis called <b>Draft</b>) features her uniquely tuned electric harp in tandem with her subtle sonic effects and bowing. I thought there was a bass player until I realized Harper was supplying it in her spare time. <br /></p>
<p>The composer is here sharing space and time in an exemplary fused fashion with Jenkins and Davies. Far from this accomplished sax player and versatile drummer accompanying the harpist, however, here they are all engaged in a three-way conversation taking place in the space between their notes. Their jointly created music is perpetually beginning and ending at the same time, in keeping with that majestic insight expressed so well by Trane: the notion that sounds can be free enough to erupt from a shared centre (with the right partners) and then swiftly, or slowly, shift in either direction, towards a commencement or a conclusion, or both. This is interstitial music indeed, co-created according to what Trane also once referred to as “natural laws,” a sense of liberty within the form whereby content assumes its own austere gravitas, and I’m also reminded of his other amazing admonition, “Listen, you can play a shoestring if you do it with enough authenticity.”</p>
<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTOZu8dOG5RCcnPbetHksMWp7u2rMF2TSEElCx1cvF8fYNbiV6-qAP7vUOvmk1C-UspumkK1pEdn4OOFKYKEACTcvsjbP1VnGC5j2GHLOkLN3r9IVBxstyOpUIFa0Cau2RLUZKXMaGQ3zyYrKY8CYSXViSb8q0MFZM0VnbQzUGmL7UmDPMyJQHzLNsFws_/s1050/Dorothy-Ashby-header%20(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="1050" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTOZu8dOG5RCcnPbetHksMWp7u2rMF2TSEElCx1cvF8fYNbiV6-qAP7vUOvmk1C-UspumkK1pEdn4OOFKYKEACTcvsjbP1VnGC5j2GHLOkLN3r9IVBxstyOpUIFa0Cau2RLUZKXMaGQ3zyYrKY8CYSXViSb8q0MFZM0VnbQzUGmL7UmDPMyJQHzLNsFws_/w640-h426/Dorothy-Ashby-header%20(1).jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dorothy Ashby, 1958.</td></tr></tbody></table></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk_KAH7CxLfg9I0Nt-ELSmbpvexOsHAWtJ8QG6iCPu899VjwGM3Uk3hrcgNxBK6m7C6h9A7CuaTSMYy8ZjvlisEi7X18rKytLLJTyCQKkPwYdP5WmOYn0St4mPs6FdcDW1WhJevjrWzYE-obFh3emrS8220iHAa9-ZXxNKO1nNHqBNKvPMqllH0Cgr9B0C/s699/coltrane.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="699" data-original-width="697" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk_KAH7CxLfg9I0Nt-ELSmbpvexOsHAWtJ8QG6iCPu899VjwGM3Uk3hrcgNxBK6m7C6h9A7CuaTSMYy8ZjvlisEi7X18rKytLLJTyCQKkPwYdP5WmOYn0St4mPs6FdcDW1WhJevjrWzYE-obFh3emrS8220iHAa9-ZXxNKO1nNHqBNKvPMqllH0Cgr9B0C/w638-h640/coltrane.jpg" width="638" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alice Coltrane, 1968.</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrOJGck6LgQ802yPfDQ_yYibisFp2x-CR_w5oxS9VGl3rtoPpUdj1TIkIp571mR0bTEKzMzXgiY96MdHql3XloTs_ZFVrBO5iaTaOtvodmtOpwKf96bHT9DXqtQ6B_Mzd_ipJpkkyZIAf99mKyswV8pLtvGrJ2kgQtHYRV6q-E9fkMCP_2Uj5N9T7djzfq/s422/Picture6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="238" data-original-width="422" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrOJGck6LgQ802yPfDQ_yYibisFp2x-CR_w5oxS9VGl3rtoPpUdj1TIkIp571mR0bTEKzMzXgiY96MdHql3XloTs_ZFVrBO5iaTaOtvodmtOpwKf96bHT9DXqtQ6B_Mzd_ipJpkkyZIAf99mKyswV8pLtvGrJ2kgQtHYRV6q-E9fkMCP_2Uj5N9T7djzfq/w640-h360/Picture6.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maria-Christina Harper, Stavros Centre. </td></tr></tbody></table><p> The Harper Trio’s shared expedition into an exotic domain of <i>melting away </i>the sonorous time in between their notes, a constantly shifting sonic plateau that occasionally evokes the ambient poetry of Harold Budd or Jon Hassell, while still remaining embedded in a raw free jazz neighbourhood, is punctuated with emotive renderings that occur at the very edges of each instrumentalist’s impressive capabilities. Perhaps for that reason, I was struck by a visual depiction by the revolutionary composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose untitled ‘drawing’ on music composition paper features dramatic cut-out shapes periodically interrupting the flow of notes. Which is a virtual emblem for the music birthed by this talented combo (three musicians, seven pedals). These spaces, or silences physically removed from his notations, seem like a kind of echo in reverse of the Harper Trio’s interest in the subtle aural action taking placed <i>in between </i>the shared notes they are playing. This is music where the makers are <i>leaning towards</i> each other as performers. <br />
</p><p>Another of Trane’s characterizations, that of permission to play absolutely anything as along as it is also found in nature, is marvelously illustrated by the trio’s video for the title track, “Passing By,” performed together in a farm field somewhere, with spaces between the players mirroring the spaces between them in the album’s cover image, and, once again, of the spaces between the notes they emit together. Although I myself am personally at two with nature I do understand the fact that those who are at one with it find a symphony of sounds emerging from the lurking silences hovering around them when they sit in fields, or riverbanks or forests. There is clearly a pristine order in the disorder of sounds populating the natural environment, where simultaneous songs chirped by birds or insects all merge into one wavelength. Here, it’s almost a sonic storm of sorts, with notes, riffs, solos and melodies replacing the bird flock.</p>
<p>And so it is with the Harper Trio’s new album. The title piece in particular seems to embody that flight pattern between the performers, as do “Castle Hill Road” and especially “East Hill Meditation,” which feels to the bloodstream of the listener precisely like what its title suggests. In each case, the three players, each of whom is actually in the <i>middle </i>of their structural unit, all move in both directions at once (pace Trane)<i> towards </i>the other two members of the trio. The resulting shared murmur, a cluster of notes touching each other, a constellation of flickering sounds coming and going, is a veritable reverie for the ears. Sometimes, as in “Standing Alone,” there are big bonfires of silence embedded in the player’s interactions. While in “In Cairo/Grandma’s Coat,” the languid piece unfolds like a still smoldering campfire after the sitters have all gone to sleep. And “A Greek in Spain” spins a mesmerizing web of fine translucent threads as it slowly engages the trio in a subtle dance of instrumental intimacy of a sort one rarely encounters.</p>
<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXg91W1gHKWXaJqVp5xAItG_oDhzuEqcbqO5MCE4CherlP6pa9i9KM3liPmyexVPkF_A_3uH1DlGA-2nC_bnpuhdpyQY_Qo9qEb2gK_EqQpzVsvaoePV9Nvr27ZzOWJ-NR5QHzytiy8dNlOk-4HydQTH9ZU_ga-TGwoEvrecNLXH_j2toWFdFCbQgX_HAA/s432/Harper%20Trio,%202023%20Evan%20Jenkins,%20Maria-Christina%20Harper,%20Josephine%20Davies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="432" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXg91W1gHKWXaJqVp5xAItG_oDhzuEqcbqO5MCE4CherlP6pa9i9KM3liPmyexVPkF_A_3uH1DlGA-2nC_bnpuhdpyQY_Qo9qEb2gK_EqQpzVsvaoePV9Nvr27ZzOWJ-NR5QHzytiy8dNlOk-4HydQTH9ZU_ga-TGwoEvrecNLXH_j2toWFdFCbQgX_HAA/w640-h384/Harper%20Trio,%202023%20Evan%20Jenkins,%20Maria-Christina%20Harper,%20Josephine%20Davies.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Harper Trio, 2023: Evan Jenkins, Maria-Christina Harper, Josephine Davies.</td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>“A Greek in Spain” is also a piece that really breaks through to the other side. I don’t know how, but it’s as if a three-way love affair had been arranged between a flaming flamenco playing guitar and harp alternately, a tripping vagabond Art Pepper taking mystic runs and a lovely Max Roach stampede culminating back in the same quiet place everything inexplicably emerged from. While Ashby was lyrically daring in her tight combo setting, using only either her harp, a drummer and a bassist, or her harp and a flutist with no percussion at all; and while Coltrane was exuberantly insistent, propelled forward by the rhythm section of her late husband’s band, Garrison and Ali, Harper’s compositions and her deft, almost clairvoyant interplay with her fellow players plunge us headlong into the arms of what those two visionaries may have been pointing toward on the horizon. <br /></p>
<p>Indeed, with this new triumvirate departure, which can accurately be called a selection of ‘cinematic soundscapes’, Harper and her fellow musicians take us to an entirely new place, even within the borders of what we customarily call the new music idiom. She has asked sincerely, “Why shouldn’t the harp have its own Jimi Hendrix?” and the resounding answer is, no reason at all. Time for lift-off. Also accurate is the assessment that their music combines Greek and Eastern scales with Western advanced jazz, creating a fresh sound for which she expresses the hope that it isn’t “too harpy” (don’t worry, it isn’t). Based in London, the trio first encountered each other in the seaside town of Hastings, where a quieter lifestyle pace enabled an unrushed exploration of the edges they could travel together musically. <br /></p>
<p>“We knew we were onto something special from our very first rehearsal. It was an exciting and special moment,” Harper has observed, expressing some of the combined gratitude for the synchronicity of their first creative voyage. When you listen to The Harper Trio’s new ideally titled album <b>Passing By</b>, you too will be invited into the unique space and time they concoct together. Somewhere, Alice Coltrane is smiling. This group has picked up her mantle and carried it forward into a new and compelling territory: far from monastic in tone, they are a quantum-level trio, conversing in an interstitial language of subtle thresholds, as they recursively pass by our world.</p>
<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilo5UQ5ovSlhi233d6z1mqW7N0iT20rjf9ibwLdAW9fQF25nIy8M_tgDIqvbcEIbOhI2epRZdTzgWrt3XEmMZ8ssQnwKSC9m0Cli301cNvuNODd1ZpDKS1O-hArCyW48PPCl5g6nB_3A0o4dzZSrVxfVLtRDlFH1NTboXvexkNReDEijDYp-E-eOfUaU7y/s405/Little%20Yellow%20Man%20Records.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="405" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilo5UQ5ovSlhi233d6z1mqW7N0iT20rjf9ibwLdAW9fQF25nIy8M_tgDIqvbcEIbOhI2epRZdTzgWrt3XEmMZ8ssQnwKSC9m0Cli301cNvuNODd1ZpDKS1O-hArCyW48PPCl5g6nB_3A0o4dzZSrVxfVLtRDlFH1NTboXvexkNReDEijDYp-E-eOfUaU7y/w640-h640/Little%20Yellow%20Man%20Records.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Little Yellow Man Records</i></td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>Harper Trio is:</p><p>Maria-Christina Harper, an award-winning, Hastings-based, jazz, avant-garde harpist, composer and songwriter. She is the first prize winner of the Wales International Harp Competition (2010), performing her own compositions on the electric harp. She studied the harp with an entrance scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music and released her solo album <b>Gluten Free</b> as MC & the 7 Pedals with Valentine Records. She was also part of the avant-garde folk duet Hairetis Harper, who released their album, <b>Draft</b> (Same Difference Music, 2020), which received exceptional reviews. Maria-Christina has toured or collaborated with many artists, including Katie Melua, Soft Cell, Anni Hogan, Alani, Jeremy Reed, Ala.ni, Richard Strange, Pete Long, Georgina Jackson, and Psarantonis, <br /></p>
<p>Josephine Davis, winner of the 2019 Parliamentary Award Jazz Instrumentalist of the year, is a musical artist at the forefront of the UK contemporary music scene, pushing the boundaries of jazz with an emphasis on extended and collaborative improvisation. As a saxophonist she is known for her melodic focus, versatility and unique style, which has been described as “consistently inventive” (<i>Jazzwise Magazine</i>), “strong and authoritative” (<i>The JazzMann</i>) and “with winning immediacy” (<i>MOJO Magazine</i>). Now becoming equally known as a composer, her unique voice is a blend of classical, jazz and folk music, creating an intensely dynamic sound infused with the Nordic quality of her Shetland roots. Deeply influenced by the American composer Maria Schneider, Josephine was resident composer and tenor player for the London Jazz Orchestra from 2011-2016, and now has her own big band The Enso Ensemble.</p>
<p>New Zealand-born Evan Jenkins studied jazz at the Western Australia Academy for Performing Arts and soon after was named Drummer of the Year at the West Australian Music Industry Awards. During this time, he played with the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra, and toured the country with the late, great Ronnie Scott. He has been a resident of the UK (now based in Hastings) for over 30 years becoming a much in-demand drummer. An original member of The Neil Cowley Trio, Evan’s recording/live credits also include performances with Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Robben Ford, Tom Jones, Bert Jansch, and Ben Watt.</p>
<div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="color: #a70f0f;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JvLWZYVrJmM/YZW9oolo99I/AAAAAAAAtXo/RCgpS5PxmQMGAzA9bo6f0v-g2zyXYMjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/s160/Donald%2BBrackett.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #8c0b0b; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" data-original-height="160" data-original-width="160" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JvLWZYVrJmM/YZW9oolo99I/AAAAAAAAtXo/RCgpS5PxmQMGAzA9bo6f0v-g2zyXYMjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/s16000/Donald%2BBrackett.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;">–<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b> </b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b style="color: #a70f0f;"><span class="il">Donald</span> Brackett</b> i</span></span>s
a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes
about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both
the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario
Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book <span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.halleonardbooks.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid%3D148361%26lid%3D0%26keywords%3Dwinehouse%2520brackett%26menuid%3D10283%26subsiteid%3D168%26&source=gmail&ust=1631815979013000&usg=AFQjCNEzLbGBq-5BqOqwt-uy63xjNuS7MA" href="http://www.halleonardbooks.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid=148361&lid=0&keywords=winehouse%20brackett&menuid=10283&subsiteid=168&" style="color: #a70f0f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece</a></b></span></span></span></span> (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and
radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative
collaboration in pop music: <span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Fleetwood-Mac-Years-Creative-Chaos/dp/0275993388" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>F</b><b>leetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos</b></a>,</span></span></span></span><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> 2007, and </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Dark-Mirror-Singer-Songwriter-Donald-Brackett/dp/0275998983" style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial; color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter</b></a><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;">, 2008,</span><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"> as well as the biographies <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Long-Slow-Train-Sharon-Dap-Kings/dp/1617136913" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings</b></a></span></span></span></span></span>, 2018, and <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Tumult-Incredible-Life-Music-Turner/dp/1493055062" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner</a></b><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;">, </span></span>2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, <b><a href="https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/product/9781989555583-item.html" target="_blank">Yoko Ono: An Artful Life</a></b>, released
in April 2022. His latest work in progress is a new book on family
relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder,<b> Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder</b>.</span></span></div>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-77237145556974592132023-12-25T21:00:00.037-05:002023-12-25T21:42:56.949-05:00Appropriate: The Chaotic American Family<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnXLP6C_L0FfyAEKyfDcIVQ6xKxEPudQJU-tSru4pFgeORSPLg3rH-KH3giV2HeVvlNBrXdVm872NDND7xrfUiE0yaFk4dDxF-P8CXgZOLhN6npB0nIZG9CmMZrUInNOukwEJzrs6RjdQ2tsNL0zUzFhkodmACbfOu75dQtcJAtDobZQ17y23JdSLc69Ww/s1500/Natalie%20Gold,%20Alyssa%20Emily%20Marvin,%20Michael%20Esper,%20Sarah%20Paulson%20and%20Corey%20Stoll%20in%20%20Appropriate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1120" data-original-width="1500" height="478" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnXLP6C_L0FfyAEKyfDcIVQ6xKxEPudQJU-tSru4pFgeORSPLg3rH-KH3giV2HeVvlNBrXdVm872NDND7xrfUiE0yaFk4dDxF-P8CXgZOLhN6npB0nIZG9CmMZrUInNOukwEJzrs6RjdQ2tsNL0zUzFhkodmACbfOu75dQtcJAtDobZQ17y23JdSLc69Ww/w640-h478/Natalie%20Gold,%20Alyssa%20Emily%20Marvin,%20Michael%20Esper,%20Sarah%20Paulson%20and%20Corey%20Stoll%20in%20%20Appropriate.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin, Michael Esper, Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll in <b>Appropriate</b>. (Photo: Joan Marcus) </td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;">A magnificent cast under <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Lila+Neugebauer" target="_blank">Lila Neugebauer</a>’s direction brings <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Branden%20Jacobs-Jenkins" target="_blank">Branden Jacobs-Jenkins</a>’s <b>Appropriate </b>to fierce, scrapping life in its Broadway premiere, produced by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=2ndStage" target="_blank">2ndStage Theater</a>. The play is the latest entry in the postmodern American family saga sweepstakes, following in the footsteps of such works as <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Sam%20Shepard" target="_blank">Sam Shepard</a>’s <b>Buried Child </b>(1978), Christopher Durang’s <b>The Marriage of Bette and Boo </b>(1985) and Tracy Letts’s <b>August Osage County </b>(2007). These plays scramble the conventions of classic American family plays – and there are dozens of those, all circling around <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Eugene%20O%E2%80%99Neill" target="_blank">Eugene O’Neill</a>’s <b>Long Day’s Journey into Night </b>– adding elements of satire, parody and knockabout humor as well as anti-realist styles like theatre of the absurd (present in both <b>Buried Child </b>and <b>Bette and Boo</b>) and surrealism. Like <b>Buried Child</b>, <b>Appropriate </b>catapults into surrealism in its final moments, though it also folds in a generous dollop of Southern Gothic. Jacobs-Jenkins has set it on a dilapidated Arkansas plantation after the death of the Lafayette family patriarch, whose three children have gathered on the day of the estate auction. And like Shepard’s play, which it alludes to repeatedly, and also like <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Bruce%20Norris" target="_blank">Bruce Norris</a>’s great <b>Clybourne Park</b>, <b>Appropriate </b>circles around a family secret. The secret isn’t buried in the garden like the corpse of the incest baby in <b>Buried Child </b>or under a tree like the chest belonging to the Korean War vet in <b>Clybourne Park</b>; the Lafayette siblings discover it among their father’s mementos when they clean out the plantation house. It’s a scrapbook of photographs of lynchings that complicates further the legacy of a man who was already difficult in life – irascible, sometimes cruel but also full of contradictions. And at the end of the play we still don’t have a clear picture of him, not just because his children had very different opinions about him but also because the playwright refuses to provide a reliable explanation for the photographs.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>The eldest of the trio of Lafayette siblings is Toni (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Sarah%20Paulson" target="_blank">Sarah Paulson</a>), a fifty-ish divorcee with a teenage son, Rhys (Graham Campbell), who got himself in trouble at school for dealing dope. Toni is self-righteous and self-pitying; she sees herself as the family martyr, the only one who bothered to look in on her dad at regular intervals. She carries a load of anger and resentment that she drops on everyone else except for Rhys, who accepts her affection with resignation and whose recent decision to live with his father nettles and unsettles her. Toni’s most potent offense is her wit, which she offers as proof not just of intellectual superiority to everyone but her brother Bo (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Corey%20Stoll" target="_blank">Corey Stoll</a>) but also of stronger reasoning power. She tries to bully and guilt the people around her into submission with a linguistic battery of tools: insult, sarcasm, ridicule and the sheer volume of her voice.<p></p>
<p>Bo is a year or two younger, and his method of dealing with the challenges of his family has been to lay as low as possible. He’s acquired some skill at navigating his sister’s unrelenting storminess, but his Jewish wife Rachael (Natalie Gold), who is more highly strung than he is, hasn’t. She sees her sister-in-law as a harpy incapable of restraint or sensitivity. Rachael is incredulous when Toni refuses to read the photographs as proof that her father was racist, and when Toni makes light of her claim that he was also anti-Semitic she becomes furious. Of course, since opposition of any kind immediately puts Toni on attack and she flies immediately into flamboyant overstatement, it’s impossible to know what she really believes. (Bo’s preference is for understatement.) Bo and Rachael have arrived accompanied by their kids, Cassidy (Alyssa Emily Marvin), who’s about fourteen, and a little boy named Ainsley (Everett Sobers, alternating with Lincoln Cohen).</p>
<p>Frank (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Michael%20Esper" target="_blank">Michael Esper</a>), the youngest Lafayette by about a decade, has brought along his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend River (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Elle%20Fanning" target="_blank">Elle Fanning</a>), whose air of entitlement is masked, not very effectively, by a New Age vibe. Frank, who now calls himself Franz though no one except loyal River follows suit, has good reasons to reinvent himself. He has a seriously checkered past – drugs, sexual misconduct – and neither his sister nor his brother has seen him in years, though his father, we learn, kept him afloat financially all this time. Frank is hapless and not overly bright, but he’s managed to use self-help strategies as a way of extending what his siblings recognize as an essential selfishness. And since he was still young when his father returned from the northeast to reclaim the old family home and is the only Lafayette offspring who ever lived alone with him, he’s tailored a version of his father that dovetails conveniently into his own disastrous personal history: an abusive parent who bears much of the responsibility for the way Frank turned out. Frank and River are a clever variation on Vince, the prodigal son in <b>Buried Child</b>, and his girlfriend Shelly. </p>
<p>Jacobs-Jenkins, who wrote <b>An Octoroon </b>and the sharp-witted workplace comedy <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2017/08/bad-behavior-treatment-gloria-ink.html" target="_blank"><b>Gloria</b></a>, is perhaps the most talented and funniest dialogue writer of the current generation of American playwrights. The actors have a field day with their wonderful lines, and everyone in the cast gets to shine, including Marvin as Cassidy, who’s sweet but nobody’s fool and whose interaction with Campbell as her cousin Rhys, the object of her crush, is very touching. What drew me to the play, besides the playwright, was the chance to see Paulson and Stoll, both of whom I’ve been lucky enough to catch live on other occasions, and the freakishly gifted Fanning, who is often off the charts in movies but who has no previous stage credits. All three are terrific, but my favorite performance is Esper’s. He shows the greatest range and his handling of a long monologue in the second act is breathtaking. Esper wasn’t unfamiliar to me: I saw him as Linda Lavin’s gay son in <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/05/lyons-lavin-great.html" target="_blank">The Lyons</a> </b>and I particularly admired him as the exasperated business partner of the temperamental chef in the Williamstown Theatre Festival production of <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2018/08/something-new-something-old-seared.html" target="_blank"><b>Seared</b></a>. His acting is more impressive every time I watch him work.</p>
<p><b>Appropriate </b>is very entertaining, but I don’t think it’s a great piece of writing. Though it’s the only wild-card American family play I’ve seen by an African American playwright, and though Jacobs-Jenkins made his bones with <b>An Octoroon</b>, a twenty-first-century rewriting of a race play by Dion Boucicault, a nineteenth-century Irish writer of popular melodramas, he’s too sophisticated and his dramatic instincts are too good to make <b>Appropriate</b> just about race. But much as I respect Jacobs-Jenkins for broadening the play’s thematic focus, once he introduces those photographs they inevitably skew the balance. <b>Appropriate</b> never stops giving the audience a good, juicy time, but it stops short of being profound. And it goes on too long: Jacobs-Jenkins comes up with a sensational image for a final curtain but the play continues for another fifteen or twenty minutes, and the finale mostly shows off the stagecraft. (The exceptional stage and lighting design are by, respectively, a multi-disciplinary collective called dots and Jane Cox.) Robert Altman did something similar but far more interesting in his movie of Ed Grazyk’s play <b>Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean</b>. But I would like my response to register as a critical stipulation and not a complaint. Everyone who’s close enough should go out to see this show.</p><p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. </span><p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-1827797862636349572023-12-19T08:59:00.006-05:002023-12-19T08:59:53.828-05:00Fellow Travelers: Sex and Politics<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHYwWF6D2biqV0vIgAUmgujNd1X0Hs94PdgXBZvQw9QSXgwjBp_GVo6PTYq-PcjTUj9kzepQWhGOPiMyaZuFjNEFLak3zuzMEA8aP9iM56AvHQn0N0F0UHf_jor4l5iCkqMjxhMvh_vAOoty3OOW6p8cn9B5_tthyM1MHGRRgj3Sg_-5YWHPqaY0nt3MKA/s1490/Matt%20Bomer%20and%20Jonathan%20Bailey%20in%20Fellow%20Travelers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="830" data-original-width="1490" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHYwWF6D2biqV0vIgAUmgujNd1X0Hs94PdgXBZvQw9QSXgwjBp_GVo6PTYq-PcjTUj9kzepQWhGOPiMyaZuFjNEFLak3zuzMEA8aP9iM56AvHQn0N0F0UHf_jor4l5iCkqMjxhMvh_vAOoty3OOW6p8cn9B5_tthyM1MHGRRgj3Sg_-5YWHPqaY0nt3MKA/w640-h356/Matt%20Bomer%20and%20Jonathan%20Bailey%20in%20Fellow%20Travelers.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in <b>Fellow Travelers</b>. (Photo: Ben Mark Holzberg)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Matt%20Bomer" target="_blank">Matt Bomer</a> has a personal triumph in the role of Hawk Fuller, a State Department official whose concealment of his gay identity turns into a devastating coup of deception in the Showtime limited series <b>Fellow Travelers</b>. Created by Ron Nyswaner, who wrote two of the eight episodes and the stories for two others and adapted from Thomas Mallon’s 2008 novel, it follows Hawk’s erratic love affair with Tim Laughlin (<b>Bridgerton</b>’s <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jonathan+Bailey" target="_blank">Jonathan Bailey</a>), beginning in 1953. Tim arrives in D.C. straight out of college, still bound to his Catholic upbringing and his hero worship of Joe McCarthy. Hawk is cynical about both God and Tail-Gunner Joe, but he helps Tim land a job in the senator’s office while he pursues this somewhat younger man. Their complicated relationship, which they drop in and out of over the years, is intercut with its inevitable finale, when Tim, now a gay activist, is in San Francisco in the mid-eighties dying of AIDS.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>In an era when the FBI is almost as ruthless about rooting out “deviants” as Communists, Hawk has managed to mask his sexuality behind a Korean war-hero background, jock looks and a flawless veneer of charm. He courts Lucy Smith (Allison Williams), the daughter of his political mentor, a do-gooding senator (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Linus%20Roache" target="_blank">Linus Roache</a>), and when his bachelor status begins to look suspicious, he marries her and starts a family. But, like his friend Marcus Gaines (Jelani Alladin), a Black journalist struggling to cross the color line, he frequents an underground gay club and is familiar with all of Washington’s cruising spots. Both men – as Marcus warns Tim when he starts sleeping with Hawk – are resolute about keeping emotional involvement out of their sexual activities. Marcus violates his own principle first, when he initiates an affair with a dancer named Frankie (Noah J. Ricketts), though it terrifies him that Frankie is just as quick to push back against homophobia as against racial discrimination. Hawk is a far cooler customer – at least, that’s the role he plays to perfection. He wants Tim in his bed but he insists on complete control over the frequency of their liaisons, and the moment he sniffs out threats to his political career he distances himself, and his self-protecting behavior can be brutal. As Bomer plays Hawk, his gamesmanship has an ironic edge, like that of a master jewel thief in a heist picture, and it’s very seductive. The trick to the performance, though, is what’s going on underneath: the warmth and affection that take increasing hold on him even when he steadfastly refuses to call it love. Tim is the one to call it by its name. Bomer gives a beautiful performance, masterfully layered and more moving with every episode.<p></p>
<p>The series’ compilation of historical footnotes about the treatment of homosexuals during the 1950s is compelling and even shocking for those of us who may assume we have a general sense of what it might have been like to be gay in that era but haven’t made a study of it. (In one jaw-dropping scene a pair of lesbians masquerading as friendly roommates, one of whom works in the State Department alongside Hawk, are questioned by agents who go so far as to check out the mattress in the master bedroom to see if the dent looks too broad to suggest only one occupant.) But the parts about right-wing politics in the Eisenhower years aren’t any better than they are in Hollywood movies about the blacklist like <b>Guilty by Suspicion </b>and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2016/04/tensions-between-history-and-film-trumbo.html" target="_blank"><b>Trumbo</b></a>. We know that Joe McCarthy was a clown, albeit a dangerous one, but <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Chris%20Bauer" target="_blank">Chris Bauer</a> plays him too broadly, and Will Brill gets Roy Cohn’s repulsiveness but not the brilliance that undergirds his bravado.</p>
<p>I liked Jonathan Bailey as the young reporter Olly Stevens on <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2013/05/broadchurch-itvs-answer-to-killing.html" target="_blank"><b>Broadchurch</b></a>, but he’s not quite right for the role of Tim; you can’t see why Hawk falls for him. The show needs an actor who can make earnestness and naiveté sexy – someone like the young Tony Perkins. Still, the scenes between these two men contain the boldest and most interesting writing in <b>Fellow Travelers </b>– especially, I think, the explicit sexual encounters. Structurally, the series is a historical social-problem piece that proves its thesis about the psychological effect of political suppression of sexual identity. But its portrayal of the relationship between its two main characters has an undeniable cumulative power. In the last two episodes (especially the finale), the emotional authenticity finally transcends melodrama.</p><p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><div style="text-align: left;"><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is
Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. <br /></span></div><p> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-84730356558464897392023-11-27T21:23:00.002-05:002023-11-28T16:37:45.800-05:00The Turbulent Thirties: I Can Get It for You Wholesale and Spain<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVi0TXGxkuJHfo_rFy3kDHm_F46YmTko08wvYghcm34zHTL-UXJ8m_KFaVB8oLcHiHEKbPyvIVsbzxSzuUtqI0ylf_ZG_YTpUDjpRaCfdmoHAJwA1hsP8b9ehTTW5nomHGWP8uE83NVKjFc9wyLVXfAa1bQOrshaskVEX07UiyJ8gez_v9Nb2yZ_AQ474/s1540/Judy%20Kuhn%20and%20Santino%20Fontana%20in%20I%20Can%20Get%20It%20for%20You%20Wholesale.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1013" data-original-width="1540" height="420" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVi0TXGxkuJHfo_rFy3kDHm_F46YmTko08wvYghcm34zHTL-UXJ8m_KFaVB8oLcHiHEKbPyvIVsbzxSzuUtqI0ylf_ZG_YTpUDjpRaCfdmoHAJwA1hsP8b9ehTTW5nomHGWP8uE83NVKjFc9wyLVXfAa1bQOrshaskVEX07UiyJ8gez_v9Nb2yZ_AQ474/w640-h420/Judy%20Kuhn%20and%20Santino%20Fontana%20in%20I%20Can%20Get%20It%20for%20You%20Wholesale.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Judy Kuhn and Santino Fontana in<b> I Can Get It for You Wholesale</b>. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)</td></tr></tbody></table><p>The composer-lyricist Harold Rome, who died in 1993, has been more or less
forgotten, but he was one of the few Broadway songwriters who wore his
leftist politics on his sleeve. He broke through in a 1937 revue called
<strong>Pins and Needles </strong>that focused on the uneasy relationship
between management and labor and was produced by the International Ladies’
Garment Workers’ Union, whose members performed the sketches and musical
numbers. How it managed to move from a tiny studio above the Labor Stage
(the former Princess Theatre) to a Broadway house is something of a
mystery, but counting all three editions, it ran for more than three years
and made Rome’s reputation. His career spanned more than three more decades.
A few of his shows were successful: the 1946 revue
<strong>
Call Me Mister,
</strong>
about returning servicemen; <strong>Wish You Were Here </strong>(1952), an
adaptation of the Arthur Kober play <strong>Having Wonderful Time</strong>,
set at an adult summer camp in the Catskills; <strong>Fanny </strong>(1954),
based on a trilogy of French romantic dramas by Marcel Pagnol; and
<strong>
Destry Rides Again
</strong>
(1959), with Andy Griffith and Dolores Gray taking the roles played
famously by Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich in the 1939 picture, a
hybrid western-romantic comedy. (<strong>Destry Rides Again</strong> was
the first show I saw on Broadway, when I was eight.) Until this season the
only one that has been revived in New York, to my knowledge, is
<strong>
Fanny</strong>, which made it onto an <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Encores%21" target="_blank">Encores!</a> slate in 2010 and proved to be just as
bland and unmemorable as the original cast album indicated. It would be fun
for someone to mount <strong>Wish You Were Here</strong>, which contains
some lovely songs; Eddie Fisher made the hit parade with his recording of
the title song. But don’t get your hopes up: in the original version the
director, Joshua Logan, and the designer, Jo Mielziner, flooded the
orchestra pit to create a swimming pool, which made even a pre-Broadway
tryout tour impossible.</p>
<p>
After the one-of-a-kind <strong>Pins and Needles</strong>, Rome’s most
interesting musical was <strong>I Can Get It for You
Wholesale </strong>(1962), which Jerome Weidman culled from his 1939 novel
about life in Manhattan’s garment district. If musical theatre mavens know
it at all, it’s for introducing <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Barbra+Streisand" target="_blank">Barbra Streisand</a>, who played the
indispensable secretary of the show’s protagonist, Harry Bogen, and brought
down the house with her big number, “Miss Marmelstein.” (Bogen was played
by Elliott Gould, nearly a decade before Robert Altman made him a movie
star in <strong><a href="Elliott Gould" target="_blank">M*A*S*H</a></strong>; Gould became Streisand’s first husband.
And Streisand was among the singers who made the only recording of the
score for <strong>Pins and Needles</strong> the same year, to honor the
twenty-fifth anniversary of its premiere.) Perhaps <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Trip%20Cullman" target="_blank">Trip Cullman</a>’s
sharp-edged, sharp-witted production of <strong>Wholesale</strong> for
<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Classic%20Stage%20Company" target="_blank">Classic Stage Company</a>, which closes December 17, will have the effect of
bringing a woefully neglected musical to light. Weidman’s son John, who
wrote the books for three of <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Stephen+Sondheim" target="_blank">Stephen Sondheim</a>’s shows – including, in this
critic’s opinion, his finest, the 1975 <strong>Pacific Overtures </strong>–
has reworked the original book, and never having read the original I can’t
say how much he’s altered it. One change I could deduce by looking at the
1962 playbill online: he’s added an opening episode with real punch that
dramatizes Harry’s first bitter experience of the tough (and anti-Semitic)
New York streets, which, at about thirteen years of age, he has to navigate
while delivering goods for garment manufacturers. Weidman, Cullman and the
inventive choreographer, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Ellenore%20Scott" target="_blank">Ellenore Scott</a>, have initiated this section with a
dance number featuring the talented young dancer Victor de Paula Rocha as
the young Harry and ended it with <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Judy%20Kuhn" target="_blank">Judy Kuhn</a> as Mrs. Bogen introducing the
song “Eat a Little Something,” which didn’t appear until late in the second
act in the original production. In this iteration that version of the song
is a reprise, sung to <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Santino%20Fontana" target="_blank">Santino Fontana</a> as the grown-up Harry.
</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p>Both the late Jerome Weidman (he died twenty-five years ago) and his son
John are in line for kudos for what I saw at CSC.
<strong>
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
</strong>
is warm-blooded <em>and </em>hard-boiled, and its portrait of an ambitious
young man who has figured out how to ride the choppy tides of the
Depression and prizes the sometimes ill-gotten gains of business above love
and friendship is uncompromising. (It reminds me of two other downbeat
sixties musicals, both from 1964, that have been sidelined over the years,
though both are marvelous and both were successful in their time:
<strong>
What Makes Sammy Run?
</strong>
and <strong>Golden Boy</strong>.) The only person in his life that <strong>
Wholesale</strong>’s anti-hero isn’t willing to sacrifice – including his
girlfriend, Ruthie Rivkin (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Rebecca%20Naomi%20Jones" target="_blank">Rebecca Naomi Jones</a>), and his partners, Meyer
Bushkin (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Adam%20Chanler-Berat" target="_blank">Adam Chanler-Berat</a>) and Teddy Asch (Greg Hildreth) – is his
mother, a strong woman and a good woman who is, however, somewhat
implicated in his curdled view of the world. In any case she’s acutely
aware of his moral shortcomings: in one of the ballads in Rome’s excellent
score, she warns Ruthie not to give him her whole heart “Too Soon.”</p>
<p>
The entire nineteen-member ensemble deserves praise, but the five principal
performers are superb. Fontana, the multi-award-winning actor last seen on
stage as Michael Dorsey in the musical <strong><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2019/05/tootsie-in-name-only.html" target="_blank">Tootsie</a></strong>, does the
best sustained and most emotionally varied work I’ve seen from him, though
I’ve always been in his corner. Fontana makes Harry’s charisma and
conviviality powerfully likable, and he’s buttoned the desperation
underneath so that we can scarcely see it, only detect it in the
character’s increasingly <em>un</em>likable actions (and of course in his
mother’s warnings to Ruthie). The performance is an expert trick of balance:
we have to be swept up by him and wary of him at the same time. Of our
current musical-theatre stars, Fontana is perhaps most equipped to pull it
off. I first saw him reveal the darker tones in a protagonist in a
non-musical, James Lapine’s adaptation of <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2014/04/funny-men-act-one-beyond-therapy.html" target="_blank"><strong>Act One</strong> at
Lincoln Center in 2014</a>, where Fontana’s portrayal of Moss Hart as an
aspiring young playwright was more complicated – less innocent – than the
way Hart presented himself in the famous memoir the play was based on. The
role of Bogen demands, of course, that he go much farther and much darker.
</p>
<p>
The two leading women, Judy Kuhn (whose work I know well) and Rebecca Naomi
Jones, are admirable in different ways. Kuhn is a dramatic singer-actress
essaying what turns out to be one of the few complex musical-theatre roles
this side of <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=gypsy+rose" target="_blank">Mama Rose in </a><strong><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=gypsy+rose" target="_blank">Gypsy</a> </strong>that are written for older
performers. Her singing is, as always, beyond reproach, but it’s completely
subservient to her masterful shaping of the character. The first things you
notice about Jones are the sweetness of her voice and the warmth of her
presence; she’s an ideal ingénue. These elements are so striking that it
takes longer to recognize the subtleties of her performance; her other
qualities, including her beauty, may place her in danger of being underrated
as an actress. I was very happy to see Adam Chanler-Berat’s name in the
program because I loved him as Peter in <strong><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/07/peter-and-starcatcher-handmade.html" target="_blank">Peter and the Starcatcher</a><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/07/peter-and-starcatcher-handmade.html" target="_blank"> </a></strong>and, in Boston, the Huntington Theatre mounting of
<strong><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2016/09/the-art-of-making-art-sunday-in-park.html" target="_blank">Sunday in the Park with George</a></strong>. He has the tragic victim
role here, the naïve, credulous partner whom Harry throws to the wolves
when their company goes to court on charges of tax fraud, and he’s very
affecting, as is Sarah Steele as his wife Blanche. Greg Hildreth, who was also in the company of <b>Peter and the Starcatcher</b>, is impressive: a vaudevillian with depth. In smaller roles the
veteran <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Adam%20Grupper" target="_blank">Adam Grupper</a> as Harry’s first contact in the garment world as an
adult and Julia Lester as Miss Marmelstein are both first-rate. Lester does
full justice to Streisand’s 1962 showstopper.
</p>
<p><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Mark+Wedekind" target="_blank">Mark Wedekind</a> has designed an ingeniously pared-down set for intimate
three-quarters seating that consists solely of tables and chairs (except
for a sort of three-dimensional collage against the upstage wall of
emblematic dress-shop items). And Cullman and Scott employ it not just
skillfully but wittily to sketch in a variety of environments. This is the
most intriguing and potent direction I’ve seen from Cullman, and his
collaboration with the actors is distinguished.<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Ann%20Hould-Ward" target="_blank"> Ann Hould-Ward</a>, whose
outstanding work in costume design goes back to the first Broadway
production of <strong>Sunday in the Park with George</strong>, gives the
actors wonderful clothes, and Adam Honoré has lit the show with both bold
and muted strokes. All the musical experts involved in the show – David
Chase, who adapted and arranged the score; the associate music director,
Reagan Casteel; the music coordinator, Michael Aarons; the conductor
(doubling on keys), Jacinth Greywoode, and the five other members of the
band – enhance the show immeasurably.
<strong>
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
</strong>
is definitely one of the highlights of the New York musical theatre since
its post-COVID return.
</p>
<p>
Jen Silverman’s <strong>Spain </strong>at <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=2ndStage" target="_blank">2ndStage </a>has a promising subject,
the filming of the 1937 documentary <strong>The Spanish Earth</strong>, a
propaganda piece promoting the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War that
Joris Ivens directed and that John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway received
credit for writing, though Lillian Hellman, Archibald MacLeish and Jean
Renoir (in the French version) apparently all worked on it. And the play
begins promisingly, too, with <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Andrew%20Burnap" target="_blank">Andrew Burnap</a> – last seen as King Arthur in
the revival of <strong><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2023/04/musical-revivals-ii-sweeney-todd-and.html" target="_blank">Camelot</a> </strong>– as Ivens, setting up the plot in a
wry comic monologue to the audience. But the wit and humor run out and the
tone shifts to deadly serious. The genre shifts too, to paranoid political
thriller, as Ivens’ girlfriend Helen (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Marin%20Ireland" target="_blank">Marin Ireland</a>) begins to realize how
much danger they’re both in from Stalinist forces, even in their little
Greenwich Village apartment. These shifts aren’t beneficial to the play,
which grows worse and worse. Burnap is quite good; so is Erik Lochtefeld as
Dos Passos (Dos to his friends). As Papa Hemingway,<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Danny%20Wolohan" target="_blank"> Danny Wolohan </a>(who also
appeared in <strong>Camelot</strong>), the only remnant of the play’s
initial gesture toward comedy, is about as authentic as <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Corey%20Stoll" target="_blank">Corey Stoll</a> in the
same role in Woody Allen’s <strong><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/06/little-daylight-woody-allens-midnight.html" target="_blank">Midnight in Paris</a></strong> and far less
entertaining. As for Ireland, who has demonstrated her talent on other
occasions, she acts so ferociously that she wears you down after about half
an hour. (The running time is ninety minutes.)
</p><p><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #d21e00; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></i></i></p><div style="text-align: left;"><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;">Steve Vineberg</a></b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">The Threepenny Review</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> and is the author of three books: </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">; and </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;">High Comedy in American Movies</b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">. </span></div><p></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-41698818477844855522023-11-21T09:00:00.077-05:002023-11-21T09:00:00.143-05:00 Feeling Her Pain: Emma Bovary at the National Ballet of Canada<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyctkC6rCnuqf6jUT2MiDVVLjeYUwWTJqFqlK0IIHd4ZlobQa7aMo-r4n6QRiEXEWaUyLa0KvaDmyUrYo8i8RUSDLWMavlZloSu7YSrcr6hNVuWoEFbx5O-m-fSzWwY7dRf72wAm1zjj5cSnAlmSCmwFi_mzeCIsCD5pmNEcdJ69nXijKXdQUvhshDevxp/s6130/AL105085.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4087" data-original-width="6130" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyctkC6rCnuqf6jUT2MiDVVLjeYUwWTJqFqlK0IIHd4ZlobQa7aMo-r4n6QRiEXEWaUyLa0KvaDmyUrYo8i8RUSDLWMavlZloSu7YSrcr6hNVuWoEFbx5O-m-fSzWwY7dRf72wAm1zjj5cSnAlmSCmwFi_mzeCIsCD5pmNEcdJ69nXijKXdQUvhshDevxp/w640-h426/AL105085.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hannah Galway and Siphesihle November in <b>Emma Bovary</b>. (Photo: Karolina Kuras/Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada)</td></tr></tbody></table><p><b><i>Emma Bovary</i> ran at Toronto’s Four Season’s Centre from November 11-18.</b><br /></p><p>In the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv8uXVNabk8" target="_blank">promo video</a> the National Ballet of Canada put out in advance of the world premiere of <b>Emma Bovary,</b> choreographer Helen Pickett says that her intention was to get the audience to understand what the titular character – one of the greatest female creations in all of literature – is feeling. That undersells it.</p>
<p>A triumph of dance-theatre where every gesture is loaded with narrative meaning, <b>Emma Bovary</b> has more to do with how <i>we </i>feel while watching it. Much like Gustave Flaubert’s original mid-19th-century realist novel, the experience is vividly complex. We are riveted, repulsed, seduced, astonished, amused, horrified and ultimately sympathetic. Gratification is also part of the emotional mix. Together with her collaborator, the English theatre and opera director James Bonas, the California-born Pickett – a former Ballet Frankfurt dancer who has choreographed more than 60 works – has created an ultra-physical narrative ballet so potent it grabs you at your core.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>The new 65-minute production opened at Toronto’s Four Season’s Centre on November 11, kicking off the company’s 2023/24 season. Artistic director <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Hope%20Muir" target="_blank">Hope Muir</a> commissioned the adaptation, having earlier worked with Pickett while at the helm of the Scottish Ballet. She picked a winner.<p></p>
<p>Pickett’s choreography is richly articulate, featuring talking hands, shoulders, eyes, mouths, legs and feet that drive the story forward. An exaggerated pantomime, so expressionistic as to seem ghoulish, loads the ballet with a high degree of artifice even as it tells a tale about a true-to-life woman’s folly and fall from grace. The dancing bodies speak in other words. They bring Flaubert’s words alive in ballet’s crucible of the flesh.</p>
<p>Augmenting the ballet’s richly physical aspect are stunning sets and costumes by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Michael%20Gianfrancesco" target="_blank">Michael Gianfrancesco</a>, an emotive lighting design by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Bonnie%20Beecher" target="_blank">Bonnie Beecher</a>, poetic animation by Grégoire Pont and additional atmospheric projections by Anouar Brissel. Peter Salem’s original score is almost a character itself, whispering and thundering through a seamless series of mise-en-scènes to establish a strong rapport with the storyline and by extension the audience, listening enthralled in the dark.</p>
<p>A psychological study, <b>Emma Bovary</b> is danced by an ensemble with key roles performed by soloists and principal dancers. Commanding the stage for almost the entirety is the dancer who performed the central role of Emma, the bored-to-tears chatelaine in a middle-class existence who seeks pleasure where she can find it, even at her peril. On opening night, she was fully inhabited by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Hannah%20Galway" target="_blank">Hannah Galway</a>, a 23-year-old second soloist (just one rank above corps de ballet) from British Columbia whose first breakout role (small but notable) was in <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2020/03/danse-macabre-three-works-by-national.html" target="_blank">Crystal Pite’s <b>Angel’s Atlas</b></a> back in 2020. Galway has obviously deepened her artistry, despite having had few other opportunities to shine since then. In <b>Emma Bovary</b> she exhibits a fearlessness rare in a ballerina her age, a prized quality that enriches and enlivens her dancing, making it consistently absorbing.</p>
<p>While attuned to the emotional resonance of the choreography and to the shifts and nuances of plot, Galway interprets the role in ways that exceed expectations. With lascivious backbends, coital contortions, and slicing arabesques, she gives off hints of a nascent nymphomania nibbling at the edges of Emma’s chronic dissatisfaction, which makes her performance also so intriguing.</p>
<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxFmOwiiQRRuCr2hz_jpwJceRlEMDZZkZKP8Ej8OkPfYVD0ZmwEVLiWNa3aZLRdyt9VOcveyhUuNsGFsoQKewIE5i8qWn2hpEJipMF7hZ87S0MH8297Wen8zo4gLYMFGNK05lI6nfORJnQysZlAqEYiGGi_cu7nnnXmw7DN5zfx02fz09Pv-IluZeC2VMb/s6411/AL102718.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4274" data-original-width="6411" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxFmOwiiQRRuCr2hz_jpwJceRlEMDZZkZKP8Ej8OkPfYVD0ZmwEVLiWNa3aZLRdyt9VOcveyhUuNsGFsoQKewIE5i8qWn2hpEJipMF7hZ87S0MH8297Wen8zo4gLYMFGNK05lI6nfORJnQysZlAqEYiGGi_cu7nnnXmw7DN5zfx02fz09Pv-IluZeC2VMb/w640-h426/AL102718.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hannah Galway and Donald Thom. in <b>Emma Bovary</b>. (Photo: Karolina Kuras/Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada)</td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>Sex serves as a central escape, involving not just her decent but dull husband Charles Bovary (an empathetic <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Donald%20Thom" target="_blank">Donald Thom</a>) but also her extramarital lover Rodolphe Boulanger (a sensually charismatic Sipheshile November). There are other distractions, namely an over-indulgence (to the point of personal bankruptcy) in costly clothes and home furnishings sold to Emma by the oleaginous fine goods salesman, Monsieur Lheureux (a mesmerizing <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Spencer%20Hack" target="_blank">Spencer Hack</a>).</p><p> </p><p>These extravagances are frowned upon by Emma’s oppressively censorious mother-in-law (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jordana%20Daumec" target="_blank">Jordana Daumec</a>) and undermined by the frisky goings-on of the house maid Felicité (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Tirion Law" target="_blank">Tirion Law</a>) and her fellow servant Justin (Alexander Skinner), who copulate in one of those precious cupboards, disrespecting their value.</p>
<p>Emma can’t see it; she is blind to everything but her own image in the mirror. She can’t discern how ugly she is when she displays brutal indifference to her only child (here rendered as a faceless knee-high puppet animated by dancers on hands and knees) – batting it to the floor when its own needs interfere with her own.</p>
<p>Mired in debt and rejected by her erstwhile lover (who refuses to pay her bills), Emma eventually does see herself as demeaned along with her possessions. The image of a sparkling society – what she aspired to through her reading of romances and frequent forays to the opera – also becomes debased to her eyes. Her fellow citizens’ apathy strips them of civility. The men now appear to her increasingly unbalanced mind as beasts, wearing pig masks and manhandling her beyond decency. The women in their jewel-toned gowns swish away in an opposite direction, wanting nothing more to do with her. There can be no salvation in a world as cold as this.</p><p>Like the novel, the ballet ends in tragedy and yet a strange sense of apotheosis hangs over the dramatic proceedings. There’s been a transformation, for sure – flesh into spirit and book into ballet, one solid, the other ethereal, but both contributing to – how did Pickett put it? – an understanding of feelings. Yes, a real change has taken place. By pushing through the constraints and sophistication of classical dance, Pickett and Bonas have together pushed the story-ballet – a centuries-old form – into fresh territory. Stylistically bold and compellingly dramatic, <b>Emma Bovary</b> captures the dread of an existential crisis, linking it to emotions that all of us can relate to, deep in the soul.</p>
<p><b>Emma Bovary</b> shared the program with the Canadian premiere of <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=James%20Kudelka" target="_blank">James Kudelka</a>’s <b>Passion,</b> a 30-minute non-narrative ballet (originally created for Houston Ballet in 2014) that combines classical and contemporary dance elements in a multi-layered and unified whole. Set to the first movement of Beethoven's <b>Concerto for Piano in D, Op. 61a, </b>the choreography is unusual in having two distinct dance styles cross paths on the same stage, each seemingly oblivious to the other. The technical purity of the classical elements (embodied by a corps de ballet and central dance couple in romantic tutu and tights) contrasts with the elasticity and emotional exuberance of the central contemporary section, forming a dialectic where old and new, light and shadow, male and female dance roles and energies. These opposites create visual texture and drama in a ballet that is essentially abstract.</p>
<p>Principal dancer<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=%20Piotr%20Stanczyk" target="_blank"> Piotr Stanczyk</a> requested that the NBOC acquire <b>Passion </b>as the ballet with which to end his 25-year career with the National Ballet, saying that, working again with Kudelka, the Canadian choreographer who mentored him when he first joined the company in 1998, it would allow him to come full circle. Wish granted: on the night of November 11, Stanczyk danced the contemporary pas de deux with <a href="u" target="_blank">Svetlana Lunkina</a>, demonstrating the attentive partnering skills and magnetic dramatic presence that have made him a company star for a quarter of a century. <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Harrison%20James" target="_blank">Harrison James</a> and Calley Skalnick performed the classical pas de deux which served as a muted and tasteful foil to the slow-burning devotion glimpsed in the other. Intimate and soulful, <b>Passion</b> delivered what Stanczyk wanted – a vehicle with which to exit the stage on a personal high.</p><p><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4rb4ra8tiv8/WnSmjK1GiwI/AAAAAAAAn2k/BaJu7Xj3JxELRilwIegYpKlrv9tL-gHJQCLcBGAs/s320/Deirdre-Kelly.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="212" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4rb4ra8tiv8/WnSmjK1GiwI/AAAAAAAAn2k/BaJu7Xj3JxELRilwIegYpKlrv9tL-gHJQCLcBGAs/s200/Deirdre-Kelly.jpg" width="131" /></a></p><p>– <b><a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Deirdre%20Kelly" target="_blank">Deirdre Kelly</a></b> is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at <i>The Globe and Mail</i> newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for <i>Dance Magazine</i> in New York, the <i>Dance Gazette</i> in London, and <i>NUVO </i>in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the <b>International Dictionary of Ballet</b> and <b>AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds</b>. The best-selling author of <b>Paris Times Eight</b> and <b>Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection</b>,
she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen
Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York
University as Editor of the award-winning <i>The York University Magazine</i> where she is also the publication’s principal writer.</p><p></p>
Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-4626738083254348972023-11-15T00:07:00.002-05:002023-11-15T00:07:18.811-05:00 Steve: Merrily We Roll Along and Here We Are<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdbvjQLQQVOzLqteqoOYT82upZYPhnZhjGApz6KIvi__L9CIApj-cSgl83VVPLRR8rx_lHA1giJGWrEbbPsq4bbs-l7IaQh2BAICFcZ42PlU1kcjr7_iHHx4KFbE6vljB6USrFqGI7l4uxucONGv-XNHBPfcTp_5-rAZROlslnEKsjNuVfm_SojXu4nLA6/s750/Daniel%20Radcliffe,%20Jonathan%20Groff,%20and%20Lindsay%20Mendez%20in%20'Merrily%20We%20Roll%20Along'.%20Matthew%20Murphy.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="750" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdbvjQLQQVOzLqteqoOYT82upZYPhnZhjGApz6KIvi__L9CIApj-cSgl83VVPLRR8rx_lHA1giJGWrEbbPsq4bbs-l7IaQh2BAICFcZ42PlU1kcjr7_iHHx4KFbE6vljB6USrFqGI7l4uxucONGv-XNHBPfcTp_5-rAZROlslnEKsjNuVfm_SojXu4nLA6/w640-h426/Daniel%20Radcliffe,%20Jonathan%20Groff,%20and%20Lindsay%20Mendez%20in%20'Merrily%20We%20Roll%20Along'.%20Matthew%20Murphy.webp" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez in <b>Merrily We Roll Along</b>. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)</td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>Every time there’s a new edition of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical <b>Merrily We Roll Along</b> critics proclaim that this notorious 1981 failure has finally been fixed or that it was misunderstood in its time but now we can see clearly the gem that was always hiding under the unjust hype. I didn’t like the show from the first and none of the productions I’ve seen has changed my mind. But <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Merrily+We+Roll+Along" target="_blank">since I’ve written about two of them </a>on <i>Critics At Large</i>, I’ll be brief here about my objections. I think that, like its source material, a 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, it’s disastrously misconceived: a play about a messed-up three-way friendship that begins when the three main characters – a composer and playwright-lyricist who were once collaborators and a novelist-turned-drama critic – are already middle-aged and moves backwards to their hopeful youth, by which time we dislike them so much that we have no sympathy left for the people they used to be. Furth’s book is as thin as rice paper and as phony as plastic, and only a few of the songs are worth much (mainly the two ballads, “Not a Day Goes By” and “Good Thing Going”). Ironically, the 2016 documentary <b>Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, </b>directed by the original Charlie, Lonny Price, in which (among other things) he listens to the resurfaced interview tape Harold Prince had him make when he auditioned for the part, works in precisely the way the musical doesn’t: it truly is about a man in middle age looking back on the naïve, hopeful kid he once was. It made me cry as <b>Merrily We Roll Along </b>had never come close to doing.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>But who could resist a revival of the show with <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jonathan%20Groff" target="_blank">Jonathan Groff</a> as Frank Shepard, who trades his musical gifts for money and celebrity;<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=%20Daniel%20Radcliffe" target="_blank"> Daniel Radcliffe</a> as Charlie Kringas, who gets so exasperated with his friend’s screwed-up priorities that he excoriates him on a live TV interview; and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Lindsay%20Mendez" target="_blank">Lindsay Mendez</a> as Mary Flynn, the alcoholic has-been who has been longing for oblivious Frank since the night she met him? News from the front: the three leads are superb, and though they can’t turn <b>Merrily We Roll Along </b>into a good musical, they provide more than enough reasons for even those of us to see it who aren’t convinced that it’s the great lost American musical. Mendez sharpens Mary’s bitter putdowns until they gleam; the dialogue is dross but she makes the character sound like some inspired middle ground between Dorothy Parker and Carol Burnett. Radcliffe gives Charlie the loopy comic energy of a befuddled werewolf under a full moon. And Groff, with the toughest part, finds an emotional authenticity that – at least, after the first couple of scenes – make us reluctant to give up on him even when we know the game is long over.<p></p>
<p>These three are so playful on stage together that we can see how much they love each other and how much they love working together – and we extrapolate from their closeness and appreciation for each other the bond that the three friends in the musical share. Colin Donnell, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Celia Keenan-Bolger were terrific in these roles in the 2012 Encores! production but they didn’t get at anything like the Groff-Mendez-Radcliffe synergy. I expected that Radcliffe, such a musical-theatre boomerang in<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/09/musicals-in-revival-anything-goes-how.html" target="_blank"> <b>How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying</b></a>, would knock the “Franklin Shepard Inc.” number out of the park, and God knows he does. But I didn’t anticipate how much bounce and humor and pathos they would wring out of second-rate Sondheim tunes like “Old Friends,” “Opening Doors” and “Our Time,” or that, with that underrated spark plug Reg Rogers as Charlie and Frank’s producer Joe Josephson and Katie Rose Clarke as Frank’s first wife, Beth, they would turn a dud like “It’s a Hit!” or a bland novelty number like “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” into gleeful entertainment.</p>
<p>Director <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Maria%20Friedman" target="_blank">Maria Friedman</a> has been retooling this production since <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2013/10/music-music-music-most-happy-fella.html" target="_blank">she opened it in London a decade ago</a>. It’s not a handsome one: Soutra Gilmour’s set is airless and bland and her costumes aren’t especially appealing. This version makes the play about Frank, who is confronting his unhappy (though highly successful) life and reviewing the choices he made along the way, which lends the ending some emotional grounding – though I’m not sure anyone but Groff, with his mixture of boyish tentativeness and unabashed feeling, could carry it off. The only member of the cast I didn’t like at all was <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Krystal%20Joy%20Brown" target="_blank">Krystal Joy Brown</a>, who was such a lightning bolt in the short-lived 2012 musical<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/05/untimely-demise-of-leap-of-faith.html" target="_blank"> </a><b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/05/untimely-demise-of-leap-of-faith.html" target="_blank">Leap of Faith</a>,</b> as Joe’s wife, the Broadway musical star Gussie Carnegie, who steals him away from Beth. It’s a stinker of a role – you can’t figure out why Frank would prefer Gussie to Beth, whose sweetness and sincerity would wrap any straight man up like a down comforter – but it <i>can </i>be played. (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Elizabeth%20Stanley" target="_blank">Elizabeth Stanley</a> was very fine in it <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/02/soured-lives-merrily-we-roll-along.html" target="_blank">when Encores! produced it</a>.)</p>
<p>The night I saw the show, the three stars stayed on stage after the curtain call to auction off a minor prop to raise money for Broadway Cares. They were hilarious, like vaudevillians who are having such a grand time working together they just can’t get themselves to leave the stage. But their camaraderie was also very touching. It seemed to link up with their performance of “Our Time,” the last song in the musical. I drove away afterwards with their faces and their reading of the song in my head. My view of <b>Merrily We Roll Along </b>aside, I wouldn’t have missed the experience of seeing Radcliffe and Groff and Mendez in these roles for anything. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7VKeUpjEC6T6Wdumc-MnfaaNZMt02R_0dVxwjJ_1KfAzqZi8MLJLBm0833aildsGIYuh9p97m-_TluzVTmA5ltLSEnzJwnHTNFy91QPrFJ3owHMUrL6amWyO_AvC1FrXpVmdVduy-ki9TqfPrsctuCi6wW5ZJ04bmrqcWibX102crtalpxamrhRoD-wJK/s4063/David%20Hyde%20Pierce%20with%20Jeremy%20Shamos,%20Amber%20Gray,%20Bobby%20Cannavale%20and%20Steven%20Pasquale%20in%20Here%20We%20Are.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2710" data-original-width="4063" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7VKeUpjEC6T6Wdumc-MnfaaNZMt02R_0dVxwjJ_1KfAzqZi8MLJLBm0833aildsGIYuh9p97m-_TluzVTmA5ltLSEnzJwnHTNFy91QPrFJ3owHMUrL6amWyO_AvC1FrXpVmdVduy-ki9TqfPrsctuCi6wW5ZJ04bmrqcWibX102crtalpxamrhRoD-wJK/w640-h426/David%20Hyde%20Pierce%20with%20Jeremy%20Shamos,%20Amber%20Gray,%20Bobby%20Cannavale%20and%20Steven%20Pasquale%20in%20Here%20We%20Are.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">David Hyde Pierce with Jeremy Shamos, Amber Gray, Bobby Cannavale and Steven Pasquale in <b>Here We Are</b>. (Photo: Emilio Madrid)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Stephen%20Sondheim" target="_blank">Stephen Sondheim</a> struggled for years to turn out a musical based on two of Luis Buñuel’s surrealist movies, <b>The Exterminating Angel</b>, which he put out in 1962, and <b>The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie</b>, which arrived a decade later. The result, <b>Here We Are</b>, is his final show. Since the later film is about a group of chic, self-involved <i>nouveaux riches</i> who wander from restaurant to restaurant but aren’t able to get a meal and the earlier picture focuses on a similar crew who attend a dinner party and find they are unable to leave, it’s easy to imagine how the narratives could be stitched together, as the book writer, David Ives, does in <b>Here We Are;</b> though even given Sondheim’s predilection for unusual projects, it’s puzzling that he and Ives would have thought this one was worthwhile. <b>The Exterminating Angel </b>is one of those pretentious art-house classics of the late fifties and sixties (<b>Hiroshima Mon Amour</b>, <b>Last Year at Marienbad</b>, <b>Red Desert</b> and <b>Blow-Up</b> are others) that never deserved their reputation. <b>The Discreet Charm </b>is witty and ingenious, even charming. But neither of them, shall we say, sings.</p>
<p>The musical has been given a deluxe treatment by the director,<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=%20Joe%20Mantello" target="_blank"> Joe Mantello</a>, and the scenic and costume designer, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=David%20Zinn" target="_blank">David Zinn</a>. The cast includes a number of talented, experienced performers including <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Bobby%20Cannavale" target="_blank">Bobby Cannavale</a>, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Micaela%20Diamond" target="_blank">Micaela Diamond</a>, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Rachel%20Bay%20Jones" target="_blank">Rachel Bay Jones</a>, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Denis%20O%E2%80%99Hare" target="_blank">Denis O’Hare</a>, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Steven%20Pasquale" target="_blank">Steven Pasquale</a>, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Tracie%20Bennett" target="_blank">Tracie Bennett</a>, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jeremy%20Shamos" target="_blank">Jeremy Shamos</a> and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=David%20Hyde%20Pierce" target="_blank">David Hyde Pierce</a>. They’re all in there pitching, and except for Cannavale, badly miscast as a businessman-monster whose only virtue is his love for his wife (Jones), they’re all highly proficient. But the material they’re all serving is hopelessly heavy-handed. When Hyde Pierce arrives toward the end of act one as a priest, he’s so graceful and light-fingered that you feel grateful, but he has nothing to do in the second act. Act one is depressingly hip-ironic; when the lights came up for intermission I asked my theatergoing companion if he thought the show was going to run out of quotation marks. In fact, it does: act two is deadly serious, and at the end these characters who seemed carefully crafted not to mean anything all learn lessons. I’m not sure which tone is worse. The numbers sound like a patchwork of other Sondheim songs, but only of the bits that replicate recitative. It’s as though he were paying back those detractors who complained that he couldn’t write a melody by putting together a score without a single one. <b>Here We Are </b>is a dispiriting experience. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.</p><p><i><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" /></a></b></i></i><b>– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg">Steve Vineberg</a></b>
is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for <i>The Threepenny Review</i> and is the author of
three books: <b>Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b>; <b>No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b>; and <b>High Comedy in American Movies</b>. <br /></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-13141510955158479182023-11-08T12:00:00.035-05:002023-11-08T17:00:47.242-05:00Mickey and Joey: Sabbath’s Theater and Pal Joey<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZgRAmzN2StXeOu8JtFEiC4iVp8e_3Q0xtZvacjyWMEZM5zqOm8cbm5AvSmwwhMdq2Wwe7E7TnuF3weDcSJlgWip8rqzxjW7Rb-qAT19DATQzuTTGM8lfiGtgywwuWZIG8stanP4Ph8LGlu2eUDAkQXaH6FxIqMgJezBJS3KXRh5J4HtyfwUCkoOCQ_YkB/s1525/Jeenah%20Moon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1012" data-original-width="1525" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZgRAmzN2StXeOu8JtFEiC4iVp8e_3Q0xtZvacjyWMEZM5zqOm8cbm5AvSmwwhMdq2Wwe7E7TnuF3weDcSJlgWip8rqzxjW7Rb-qAT19DATQzuTTGM8lfiGtgywwuWZIG8stanP4Ph8LGlu2eUDAkQXaH6FxIqMgJezBJS3KXRh5J4HtyfwUCkoOCQ_YkB/w640-h424/Jeenah%20Moon.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Elizabeth Marvel and John Turturro in <b>Sabbath's Theater</b>. (Photo: Jeenah Moon)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>Devoted as I am to<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=+Philip+Roth" target="_blank"> Philip Roth</a>’s novels, I had trouble with his National Book Award winner <b>Sabbath’s Theater</b>, which he released in 1995. Its stylistic excesses in the service of underlining the sexual indulgences of its sixty-four-year-old protagonist, the one-time puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, whose career was sidelined by arthritis, defeated me; I put it down after a couple of hundred pages. It’s the only one of Roth’s many books I couldn’t finish. But maybe I should give it another try. Ariel Levy and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=John%20Turturro" target="_blank">John Turturro</a>’s stage adaptation, produced by The New Group at the Signature Theatre with Turturro as Sabbath, is a majestic piece of theatre, notwithstanding the modesty of Jo Bonney’s production: three actors, two of whom, Elizabeth Marvel and Jason Kravits, play several parts; a small space containing a few props and an upstage screen for projecting a handful of evocative images (and in one scene Kravits’s silhouette); Roth’s 451 pages trimmed down to an hour and forty minutes of text without intermission.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>It’s a play about raging against the dying of the light. In the course of its non-linear narrative, Mickey, who is in a miserable marriage, watches his happily wed Croatian mistress, Drenka, succumb to cancer, attends the funeral of his old producer, converses with the persistent ghost of his long-dead mother, and weeps over a box of mementos of his older brother Morty, killed in the Second World War. Sabbath almost drowns himself, but he’s too consumed by life, throbbing with it, to extinguish his own; even in the depths of mourning for his dead he’s revivified by anger and hatred and a glorious, voracious sexual appetite. He memorializes the transgressive sexual episodes of his past, like the phone sex scandal that lost him a university teaching job and his attempts to bed the periodontist wife of his friend Norman Cowan while coveting their daughter’s underwear and especially his wildly adventurous long-term affair with Drenka. (The play, like the novel, begins with a symbolic death – Drenka’s refusal to continue sleeping with him unless he gives up all his other liaisons.)<p></p>
<p>As the uncensored, unstoppable satyr-scoundrel Sabbath, Turturro gives an immense, bardic performance. As an actor Turturro has always been hard to pin down. More than anything else I’d say he’s a Method performer of the old school, like the Group Theatre actors of the 1930s whose commitment to Stanislavskian principles was filtered through the legacy and love of theatricality and who knew not just how to fill a stage or screen but how to expand it. And he’s a raconteur, a satirist, a master of gab. Watching him in <b>Sabbath’s Theater</b>, I thought of actors as wide-ranging as Walter Huston, George C. Scott and Larry Pine, whom I once saw command a stage single-handedly in an adaptation of Tolstoy’s short story “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Turturro’s cohorts here are superlative, both of them slipping deftly in and out of a variety of characters. When Marvel plays Drenka, she matches Turturro’s breadth and depth: they’re a pair of world-size souls. But she’s also splendid as Mickey’s alcoholic wife Roseanna and Dr. Cowan. Kravits plays, among others, Norman Cowan, Drenka’s faithful husband Matija, and a stranger Sabbath sits next to on the subway and with whom he is drawn into a funny, robust tête-à-tête. But Kravits is most memorable as Sabbath’s centenarian cousin Fish, in whose home he finds Morty’s mementos. Beyond the extraordinary quality and range of their work, this trio demonstrates a profound and inspiriting love of acting; their exuberance echoes that of the material. You can’t imagine that Roth wouldn’t have cheered along with the rest of us during the curtain calls.</p>
<p>The play, like Mickey, pulsates with life. It’s uproarious and hilarious, but also poetic and moving. And it arrives like a kind of redemption at a time when our culture, particularly in the theatre, has become moralistic and puritanical and punitive, and preoccupied with placing restrictions on the ways in which artists are permitted personal expression. Walking out of the Signature Theatre, you feel as if Turturro and Levy and the irrepressible ghost of Philip Roth have marched us gleefully out of re-education camp.</p>
<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzMNszQ_5qKLzuKf9Zde1d-WoCq2zP1-iKTfynkmE-4lZCaD99HAjVmVFyCCaFLX7fAfH4g7Ip3MEV9JlgiJnaW2zOBTkNasgZlHJ9JU6TwzPAB_wehnRrQ3p9QSr86GukaF9Kx-pO1Lw8TZr8ugRnGK_YMzvOPWKxpT7F3ATxsbTke4egSzKUiWyue0k3/s1263/Sara%20Krulwich.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="839" data-original-width="1263" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzMNszQ_5qKLzuKf9Zde1d-WoCq2zP1-iKTfynkmE-4lZCaD99HAjVmVFyCCaFLX7fAfH4g7Ip3MEV9JlgiJnaW2zOBTkNasgZlHJ9JU6TwzPAB_wehnRrQ3p9QSr86GukaF9Kx-pO1Lw8TZr8ugRnGK_YMzvOPWKxpT7F3ATxsbTke4egSzKUiWyue0k3/w640-h426/Sara%20Krulwich.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ephraim Sykes and Elizabeth Stanley in <b>Pal Joey</b>. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>Every time someone mounts a revival of the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical <b>Pal Joey</b> the John O’Hara book is red-penned, either because of its perceived structural flaws or because it’s deemed to be behind the times. No one cares anymore that it’s almost the only adaptation of any of O’Hara’s novels or stories that captures his hard-boiled style and the tang of his language (a 1987 TV adaptation of his story “Natica Jackson” with Michelle Pfeiffer did quite a good job in that arena), or that the no musical besides <b>Gypsy </b>has conveyed the seedier side of show business with such vitality or economy. The book does ramble in the second act, but the enjoyable productions I’ve seen at Boston’s <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Huntington%20Theatre%20Company" target="_blank">Huntington Theatre Company</a> (with Donna Murphy) and the <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Goodspeed%20Opera%20House" target="_blank">Goodspeed Opera House</a> and the <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=shaw%20festival" target="_blank">Shaw Festival</a> didn’t exactly feel as if they were struggling to make the material work. The latest <b>Pal Joey</b>, in the autumn slot in the <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=encores!" target="_blank">Encores! series at City Center</a>, was rewritten by Richard LaGravenese and Daniel “Koa” Beaty, who have updated the Chicago setting from the late thirties to the late forties. Joey is now an African American singer and dancer (played by Ephraim Sykes) who talks his way into headlining a revue at a Black South Side club and becomes the lover of its tough-minded white owner, Vera (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Elizabeth%20Stanley" target="_blank">Elizabeth Stanley</a>). She inherited it from her wealthy husband, whose business wasn’t always on the up-and-up. As in the original, Joey is also involved with a good girl, Linda (Aisha Jackson), in this version not a naïf but a talented jazz singer.</p>
<p>For the first act the show more or less replicates O’Hara’s plot, though some of the new details don’t make a lot of sense. Linda’s reticent about singing in front of live audiences because she’s had trouble getting hired at white clubs. She claims she wants people to hear her voice without putting a Black face in front of it, as if her blackness weren’t stunningly embodied in her vocal style. Later she says she couldn’t get jobs at Black clubs either, which not only is a contradiction but, once we’ve heard Jackson sing, we simply don’t believe it. This and other glitches don’t get in the way too much, once you resign yourself to the fact that what you’re watching isn’t so much <b>Pal Joey </b>as a gloss on it. But after intermission the script goes nutty, piling one implausible complication on top of another as if the adaptors had run a contest for new plot ideas and opted to try them all out at the same time. Vera bankrolls Joey’s dream of renovating the club under the name Chez Joey but persuades him to tamp down the elements that she knows well-heeled white audiences – the people she runs with – won’t go for (specifically the radically bop musical stylings) and he’s torn between her dream of making him a star and his loyalty to his own musical vision. She falls in love with him but behind his back arranges to burn the club down after opening night for the insurance after she’s sunk all her money into it, figuring that the cops will assume it was the work of racists who have been sending her threatening letters. Joey fired Linda at Vera’s insistence but Lucille (Loretta Devine), an ex-vocalist who has been managing the club, begs her to come back, if not to perform then to remind Joey of his roots. Lucille doesn’t show much remorse when the club burns because Tony (Jeb Brown), Vera’s (white) fixer, who arranged the arson for her, turns out to be a long-time fan who buys her a mink and spirits her off to Canada to enjoy retirement in the countryside.</p>
<p>This <b>Pal Joey </b>was choreographed by Savion Glover (also listed as co-director with Tony Goldwyn), whose trademark contribution is a series of percussive dances, mostly of them confined to the shadows (the attractive, if obtrusive, lighting is by Jon Goldman). They’re awful, especially the ones with symbolic dancers swirling around Joey, at one point brushing him off and picking him up off the ground after his racial identity crisis literally forces him to his knees. And whenever Glover has to stage conventional musical-theatre numbers, they’re so insipid and repetitive that your attention keeps going off the hard-working showgirls. Daryl Waters has crafted new arrangements of the Rodgers and Hart songs; early on they’re in big band style, which works very well, but they become increasingly bop and, even on the rare occasions when they operate as standard expression-of-emotion show numbers, like Stanley’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” the musical embellishments get in the way of the song. Rodgers and Hart made fun of jazz arrangements that distort the melody in their song “I Like to Recognize the Tune” from the 1939 <b>Too Many Girls</b>; they might not have enjoyed the joke that here it’s the <i>lyrics </i>you can’t decipher.</p>
<p>The new book writers have turned <b>Pal Joey </b>into a Rodgers and Hart jukebox musical, retaining only seven of the original songs and piling on fifteen others. What’s more, the interpolations sometimes don’t fit the situation. Did it occur to the people who put together the revamped score that you can’t use “Ev’rything I’ve Got” from <b>By Jupiter </b>as a love song? It’s a duet sung by two people who can’t stand each other: “I’ve got eyes for you that give you dirty looks / I’ve got words that do not come from children’s books.” And though, as a reporter pal of Vera’s, Brooks Ashmanskas shows off his style as well as a hoofer’s grace and confidence on “Zip,” as LaGravenese and Beaty have redone the scene (an interview with Joey for a puff piece on the occasion of the Chez Joey opening), it’s puzzling that he would be singing a song that was written as a parody of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s attempt to present herself as an intellectual.</p>
<p>Sykes can certainly dance, but he comes across as strangely bland, though the fault may lie in the confused writing of his character. The Joey John O’Hara wrote was a cad, a shameless player who lies fluently and has such awful taste that, when he gets the chance to run his own club, he throws in an elaborate production number called “In the Flower Garden of My Heart” where the chorus girls dress as flowers. (It’s his idea of a <b>Ziegfeld Follies </b>showstopper.) This Joey is ambitious but the music he wants to perform is on the cutting edge of jazz and he’s only a part-time bastard; down deep he’s a sweetie. I doubt anyone could play this part as it’s been retooled. The idea of linking Joey with the bop movement is a steal from Martin Scorsese’s <b>New York, New York </b>movie, and there are glancing lifts from <b>Follies </b>and <b>Chicago </b>and a rather obvious one from <b>Dreamgirls. </b></p>
<p>The women are the ones to watch in this show. Stanley (who played Claire De Loone in the wonderful <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2013/07/new-york-musicals-on-town-and-hello.html" target="_blank">2013 Broadway revival of <b>On the Town</b></a>) is so sexy and savvy as Vera that the contradictions in the rewrite somehow don’t taint her performance, and no one I’ve seen in the role has ever been better on “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” despite the issues with the second half of the arrangement. She gives this knockout of a wised-up ballad a diamond-cutter reading with tiny waves of emotion just under the surface. Jackson is a warm, generous Linda, and her satiny mezzo voice is a revelation. Devine gets only one number (a medley of “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and “My Heart Stood Still,” both interpolations from other musicals), but the writers were smart enough to give her all the best wisecracks. These ladies keep you in your seat whenever the Loony Tunes book and Savion Glover’s pretentious choreography make you itchy to head for the exit.</p><p><i><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" /></a></b></i></i><b>– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg">Steve Vineberg</a></b>
is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for <i>The Threepenny Review</i> and is the author of
three books: <b>Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b>; <b>No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b>; and <b>High Comedy in American Movies</b>. <br /></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-23992902754255033892023-10-30T15:27:00.005-04:002023-10-30T15:27:25.759-04:00Killers of the Flower Moon: Martin Scorsese’s Hobbled Epic<p><b><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9FyKjwMW8cKgT0TU-G1HmSR-sQOK4CvEO76STUg_-MhRq1jpsf0rm1xUs4AMjzV1dT5jVvYHL3O_qbJdd0RWSSdNLhWJNMreeHgaZIHkJa1XW7Tw3ojLgE56xCk-R4rvtsBvTTKSC8VFKi5MsJvuBylN7dN7Xxkdoqkvc-do75xe33pmT9DWTEDQ_A057/s960/Robert%20De%20Niro%20and%20Leonardo%20DiCaprio%20in%20Killers%20of%20the%20Flower%20Moon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9FyKjwMW8cKgT0TU-G1HmSR-sQOK4CvEO76STUg_-MhRq1jpsf0rm1xUs4AMjzV1dT5jVvYHL3O_qbJdd0RWSSdNLhWJNMreeHgaZIHkJa1XW7Tw3ojLgE56xCk-R4rvtsBvTTKSC8VFKi5MsJvuBylN7dN7Xxkdoqkvc-do75xe33pmT9DWTEDQ_A057/w640-h360/Robert%20De%20Niro%20and%20Leonardo%20DiCaprio%20in%20Killers%20of%20the%20Flower%20Moon.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in <b>Killers of the Flower Moon.</b></td></tr></tbody></table></b> </p><p><b>Killers of the Flower Moon </b>is great around the edges. <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Martin+Scorsese" target="_blank">Martin Scorsese</a>’s movie, adapted from David Grann’s jaw-dropping 2017 account of the serial murders of Osage Indians in Oklahoma in the 1920s that enabled white men to secure their “headrights” – the legacy, shared equally among the community, of land rich in oil – is three and a half hours long and cost $200 million, and God knows you can see the money on the screen. The film, shot by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Rodrigo%20Prieto" target="_blank">Rodrigo Prieto</a>, with production design by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jack%20Fisk" target="_blank">Jack Fisk</a> and costumes by Jacqueline West, looks magnificent. The period reconstructions are dazzling and capture a cross-hatched culture, rich in visual irony, where natives, professing a faith that mixes Catholicism with the religion of their ancestors, dress in a combination of traditional garb and the flamboyant style of wealthy white men while they tool around in chauffeured Pierce Arrow roadsters and fly private airplanes. The opening scenes are lively and exciting, a circus-like montage of oil strikes and auctions and raucous general celebration that spills out of barrooms and restaurants into the streets of Fairfax, the Osage reservation town that has grown out of the oil boom. This is some of Scorsese’s best filmmaking – visually dense, outré, darkly funny. We barely have a chance to process the omnipresence of white men who have intermarried with the Osage women before it all turns sinister. The natives are dying in staggering numbers, some the victims in unsolved murders, others expiring from suspicious illnesses.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>The story Grann unfolds in his book is as bizarre as anything in the annals of the nutty twenties, but it’s so far-reaching that as you page through the history you can scarcely fathom it. And even among the chronicles of the abused hurled on native Americans, it’s stupefying. A conspiracy of white men not merely to cheat the Osage out of their oil money by marrying into the tribe but to shoot and poison and blow them up, one by one – it’s like a horror tale conceived by lunatics. And the mastermind, William Hale popularly known as the King of the Osage Hills (played in the movie by <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Robert+De+Niro" target="_blank">Robert De Niro</a>), is the man the Osage think of their best friend and biggest ally, a former cattleman who bankrolled their schools and hospital before they ever struck oil. Scorsese and his co-screenwriter, Eric Roth, put Hale and his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Leonardo%20DiCaprio" target="_blank">Leonardo DiCaprio</a>), an infantry cook in the Great War who returns home to drive a cab but who discharges random offices for his uncle, at the center of the narrative. When Ernest becomes romantically involved with Mollie (Lily Gladstone), the most beautiful and the most charismatic of four Osage sisters, Hale encourages him to marry her so that he can be in line to inherit her headright. And then he puts Ernest and his brother Byron (Scott Shepard to the task of killing off her sisters Anna (Cora Jade Myers) and Rita (Janae Collins) and probably her widowed mother, Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) and sister Minnie (Jillian Dion), whose official cause of death is the “wasting disease.” Hale, whose friends and relatives call him King, also brings in a couple of doctors, brothers, on his payroll to prescribe insulin – newly on the market and very expensive – to treat Mollie’s diabetes, obsessively reminding Ernest to administer it to his wife even as it makes her sicker and sicker. (In Grann’s book Mollie’s diabetes is almost definitely a fabrication on the part of the Shoun brothers.) Hale’s one busy bee: he engineers a series of ancillary murders, many of other white men, to cover up the Osage killings and he manages to find time to demand payment for a loan he made to one of his victims as well as to torch his own house after taking out an exorbitant insurance policy on it.<p></p>
<p>It’s the center of the picture that breaks down – partly because of a script that never comes together and largely, I’m afraid, because of the two leading actors. I’m not sure what DiCaprio thinks he’s doing as Ernest. He affects a ridiculous Oklahoma accent that sounds like dialect comedy from the age of vaudeville; he works his upper lip as if he had a wad of tobacco permanently stuck there and puffs up his cheeks. As fine an actor as he is, DiCaprio is certainly not immune to chewing the scenery (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2016/02/endurance-alejandro-g-inarritus-revenant.html" target="_blank"><b>The Revenant</b>)</a>, but what he does in <b>Killers of the Flower Moon </b>is really shameful. It doesn’t help that the script can’t make up its mind about Ernest’s relationship with Mollie. They seem to love each other, and I guess we’re meant to think that his bouts of remorse or doubt about the people whose demise he arranges are linked to his feelings for Mollie. Though he proclaims more than once that he loves money, and he’s under his uncle’s thumb, it’s difficult to believe that he willingly poisons his wife yet it’s equally hard to buy the idea that he’s too dunderheaded not to figure out there’s something wrong with the medicine he’s shooting her up with. In one perplexing scene, while, pasty-faced and feverish, she lies asleep on her sickbed, he pours himself some of her insulin in a shot glass and drinks it down, then passes out. The scene has no follow-up, so afterwards you might think you’d dreamed it.</p>
<p>De Niro’s brand of hamminess isn’t as aggressive as DiCaprio’s, and it’s only fair to put half of the blame for his performance on the way Roth and Scorsese have conceived the role, but he’s fairly ridiculous, rushing through the streets of Fairfax, leaning out the window of his car to beckon his minions over and give them their latest homicidal instructions. Maybe the writers were thinking of him as a version of Melville’s Confidence-Man, more symbol than character, or the evil old man in a fairy tale, but this is a realist movie. He might as well be wearing a sign around his neck announcing his intentions; how could the Osage, who aren’t supposed to be idiots, still believe he’s their friend? <b>Killers </b>isn’t paralytic, like Scoreses’s last three-and-a-half-hour epic, <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2020/01/irishman-marriage-story-1917-review.html" target="_blank">The Irishman</a></b>, but every time these two men share a scene, it grinds to a halt – and they have at least half a dozen. These interludes are sometimes morbidly funny, but I never had the urge to laugh because they kept throwing me out of the movie.</p>
<p>For me, the biggest letdown in the movie is the way it uses Lily Gladstone, a superlative performer (<b>Certain Women</b>) who’s also a glorious camera subject. When she comes onto the screen she’s mesmerizing: commanding and mysterious yet sly and sexy, all instinct, all warmth. (This is an actress you could envision as Cleopatra.) You expect her to take over the movie but all she gets to do after the first half hour is weep and keen as various of her family members die off, and then grow weaker and weaker. I can see the limitations of her role in the plot, but couldn’t Roth and Scorsese have written her one compelling sickbed scene? Even her final exchange with Ernest, when she confronts him about his part in her misfortunes after she’s been rescued from Hale’s machinations and has recovered her health, puts all the focus onto DiCaprio.</p>
<p>As Tom White, the FBI man who uncovers the conspiracy, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Jesse%20Plemons" target="_blank">Jesse Plemons</a> gives a subtle, grounded, straight-ahead performance. And there are character actors throughout the picture, many of whom I didn’t recognize, who bring a vividness to their brief time on camera, like William Bellean as Mollie’s childhood friend Henry Roan (to whom she was married when they were teenagers), a drunk and a melancholic; and Ty Mitchell and Tommy Schultz as two of the reprobates, John Ramsay and Blackie Thompson. Cora Jade Myers gives Anna, Mollie’s troubled, hard-drinking sister, so much color and range that her early death is even more shocking than the bomb that blows up their sister Rita and Rita’s husband Bill Smith (played by the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell). Yancey Red Corn has a potent presence as Chief Bonnicastle; his speech to the Osage Advisory Council, which he heads, is one of the movie’s indisputable high points. The only actor in a small role who does terrible work is Brendan Fraser as the head of the legal team that defends King Hale when he finally goes on trial; he also gives the film’s loudest performance.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Robbie%20Robertson" target="_blank">Robbie Robertson</a>’s score – the last thing he wrote – is beautiful: plaintive and soaring. Almost every time Scorsese gets actors together for a crowd sequence, the results are splendid. And there are times in the movie when a scene is just perfect, when the tones mix so surprisingly and the effect is so sharp that you think, Nobody else could have pulled this off. In one, Louis Cancelmi as Kelsie Morrison, one of Hale’s confederates, drags the two little children of his recently deceased Osage wife before a lawyer to inquire whether, should he adopt them legally, he would stand to inherit their headright if they should die. The incredulous lawyer demands to know if Morrison is declaring that he plans to kill the kids so he can get their headrights, and Morrison replies that obviously he wouldn’t want to adopt them otherwise. The scene is outrageous, stunning. But the movie is mostly slow and somber, and it suffers from baffling choices in the writing and a narrative self-indulgence that keeps hobbling it. Three and a half hours? Seriously?</p><p><i><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" /></a></b></i></i><b>– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg">Steve Vineberg</a></b>
is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for <i>The Threepenny Review</i> and is the author of
three books: <b>Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b>; <b>No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b>; and <b>High Comedy in American Movies</b>. <br /></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-75372130154498591102023-10-26T09:00:00.073-04:002023-10-26T09:00:00.149-04:00In the Labyrinth: Picasso’s Graphic Work<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV_Oxa_Tlq5oDWLJ46qGSAPO-Jn9J8WuhrjH0dSqzl71azsX6BPiqKhAmnxkJYAeqc7grSjlWs2x893E_cWnEvLh3cznIhwsMx5E05IQkwkuPMO0d7vC30TMz8myKneIA4fLlnPmsrVqXuvnq3DWKzwi3y376PL4T0cIIUfzibaqqK82j02qYadwohV_Y0/s613/Picture1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="613" data-original-width="466" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV_Oxa_Tlq5oDWLJ46qGSAPO-Jn9J8WuhrjH0dSqzl71azsX6BPiqKhAmnxkJYAeqc7grSjlWs2x893E_cWnEvLh3cznIhwsMx5E05IQkwkuPMO0d7vC30TMz8myKneIA4fLlnPmsrVqXuvnq3DWKzwi3y376PL4T0cIIUfzibaqqK82j02qYadwohV_Y0/w486-h640/Picture1.jpg" width="486" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lucien Clergue, <b>Portrait </b>(1956).<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: right;">“Mystery is the essential ingredient of every work of art.” – Luis Buñuel </p><p>Who and what do we see when we study the splendid photographic portrait of Pablo Ruiz Picasso captured by the esteemed Lucien Clergue in1956, when the Spanish artist was at the height of his powers? Having been adopted as a global cultural citizen beyond all mere geographical borders, the words <i>who</i> and<i> what</i> are both applicable in his unique case, as someone who was as vital and revolutionary in painting as his countryman Cervantes was in literature three hundred years earlier. So when Clergue memorialized that dramatic face, some four decades after the artist first reinvented the history of art at the turn of the last century, recasting it in his own image by collaborating with Georges Braque in the revelation of Cubism, and with roughly another two tumultuous decades still remaining in his titanic aesthetic mission, what sort of portrait telegram did the photographer manage to send us all in the future, and yet further into the future of the future? His portrait seems to whisper: behold, a living archetype.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Picasso’s elusive and mercurial character, a persona he appeared to perform as if he lived on a stage, still has the capacity to allure and amaze us. With good reason, and these powerful works on paper assembled here are an accurate indication of exactly why. He was a towering figure who looms large in both the art world <i>and</i> the world of popular culture, a gargantuan artist beyond most limits and even any definitions. Gazing at the overwhelming confidence in the awesome face of the man behind these prints, I am often reminded of the words of a favourite Brazilian author, Clarice Lispector: “He had the elongated skull of a born rebel.” I do hope so, Clarice, but all the landforms of his skull grew <i>inward</i>, like stalagmites, rather than upward and out. His <b>Guernica</b> painting from 1937 was one such interior landform, but then, so are his many masterful prints: each one is a mountain peak in reverse on paper, a spritely graphic Everest.</p><p>
<span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Firstly, and most obviously, Clergue’s portrait was the image of a man of supreme confidence, but it was also the picture of an artist of such self-assurance that he somehow <i>knew</i> that his place in the history of art would certainly align him with past giants in this procession of powerful agents of change: Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso. And like them, he is quite rightly just as acclaimed as a maker of art prints in multiple media as his forbearers also were, and for creating a seemingly endless supply of new ways to transfer images from a template onto another surface, usually paper or fabric. With a singular matrix fabricated out of wood, metal, glass or stone, and using ancient tools and chemicals to carve and bend the inert surface to his will, like his predecessors a printmaker such as Picasso dazzled us in a medium parallel to (but not beneath) painting itself, out of which he incised primal visual reveries in woodcuts, engravings, intaglio, etchings, linocuts, lithographs and beyond. Of his peers, only Dali created as many graphic images, but with considerably less artistic acumen. <br /><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">This alchemical process also incidentally produces a ghost of its own creation, enabling the artist to make more than one image of his mark-making, although usually limiting the imprints to a significant and rare edition number. The duplication of multiple images, sometimes with either minute or major alterations made to their depth, colour and tonality, immediately threw down a gauntlet to the one-of-a-kind and aura-laden ritual nature of painting as a romanticized form of iconic transmutation, a singularity. Picasso changed all that forever, just as Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya had done, especially his fellow Spaniard Goya in his late black works. Like them, this superlative painter was so ambitious in his aims that perfecting his radical experiments solely in paint was not nearly enough to satisfy him. He had to branch out, first into multiple print imagery in two dimensions, and then eventually into the realm of three dimensions, using ceramics and sculpture. Gaze at and into enough Picasso prints and they eventually take on the significance of spiritual icons, but often evoking the most carnal of churches.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil5TMTQ4apZ9VxO9YJ10wgLNvx5e7NPuawn58UcixKnYu2Uy0y05u2pWtBXYQey_0VslbiLFU9m2qzDL6FA3v3GXZRrFJ9llDNaiLvaQzINoI2pLW2j9JNMOMB59SRiZ_68awfTb3qiquLAmKsFN-l9IiHMkcnDy4AAiu6smhQLBblYU2TjrH_3GbAKRmL/s504/Picture2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="504" height="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil5TMTQ4apZ9VxO9YJ10wgLNvx5e7NPuawn58UcixKnYu2Uy0y05u2pWtBXYQey_0VslbiLFU9m2qzDL6FA3v3GXZRrFJ9llDNaiLvaQzINoI2pLW2j9JNMOMB59SRiZ_68awfTb3qiquLAmKsFN-l9IiHMkcnDy4AAiu6smhQLBblYU2TjrH_3GbAKRmL/w640-h450/Picture2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Minotaure </b>(1933).</td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p style="text-align: left;">In fact, his immense passion was such that these graphic works remain as fresh today as the day they were fabricated: thus his work really does provide a way of fixing the memory in place, not always securely, perhaps, but always surely. It was in his magical prints, so deceptively simple that often viewers mistake them for mere drawings (another medium in which he not only excelled by transformed the rules of the game forever) that he proved himself to be the godfather of the three other most important and influential artists of the 20th century: Duchamp, Pollock and Warhol (another master of multiple prints, in his silkscreens of both allure and audacity). Now, yes, as a historian, I hasten to point out that there were a host of<i> other</i> important artists in the last century, and yes, many of them women. However, it was these four who occupied a special place of honour, reserved for those who alter a terrain so decisively that all who came afterward had to contend with and comment upon their influence. This is exactly the disconcerting sensation that critic Harold Bloom astutely referred to as “the anxiety of influence<i>.</i>” And nobody provoked it more severely, and for a longer duration of celebrity, than Picasso, not only in his brilliant paintings over a succession of periods, styles and eras (including even the pop art era) but perhaps especially in his non-painterly extensions of drawings and graphic prints.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">How he managed to accomplish this feat still remains something of a mystery, although we can find solace in his fellow Spaniard, the innovative filmmaker Luis Buñuel, when he reassures us that this nebulous quality, the ineffable writ large, as it were, is precisely what most attracts us to worship at the aesthetic altar of certain sublime works of art. And although it took time for him to accomplish, just as it took time for the radical Impressionists (his only historical counterparts apart from those more ancient artistic relatives) to be recognized as what they truly were: the future, embodied right in front of a trembling past and present, Picasso did so<i> during</i> his own lifetime. For an art historian and obsessive lover of painting, the opportunity to write about Picasso is almost as exciting as the chance to have seen so many of his creations across the dizzying decades of the modernist era. In fact, as art historian David Sylvester has cannily reminded us, evocations of previous art, including his own, is a constantly conspicuous feature of Picasso’s ongoing oeuvre. Indeed, Sylvester once ironically quipped: Picasso might almost have been aiming to ensure full employment for his posterity’s art historians, all of <i>us </i>scriveners in other words.
</p><p style="text-align: left;">In his finest work, Sylvester suggested, there is always a dialogue with all art history itself, and a charming complicity between him and himself, between himself as both artist and as audience. I would go even further and claim that his conversation was not only with all the artists in past history, with Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya, let’s say, but even with all the artists in the future whom he was boldly spooking into daring to make art after his passing in 1973. By this I mean to say, quite literally, that Picasso was <i>answering </i>history while also simultaneously <i>asking </i>posterity. What was his question for the future? I’d wager it was something along the lines of: “I did THIS! Now, you do SOMETHING ELSE.” His targets? Some known to him, like fellow epoch-carving contemporaries such as Duchamp (who, like Picasso, eventually turned his own life into a work of art); Pollock (who, like Pablo, was out there enough to declare that he WAS nature itself); and Andy, perhaps my favourite of all futurologists (who forced even the cleverest among us to go back and reread all the works of Walter Benjamin, for instance). Others he only admired from a temporal distance, such as Goya (whose exemplary grasp of the vagaries of the human heart echoed his own).</p><p style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLM08bQp3bFn8tfM3CX4fC64cL__dNw8HWMS8wJ4rfrJhCcZqqfUQHkkRNQziJY3zlEW_TGFL64hUvSTfhSwVpBY54TMdnMnh3sFT8tALvcFrKHyKWIhoxXnDABvMC9Pk1h2GkQy9B5mYt0PT995pVawVx1ryMbcd5-8dZWUcc4iMhZQ6h2DMSC5B5ayJl/s571/Picture3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="571" height="502" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLM08bQp3bFn8tfM3CX4fC64cL__dNw8HWMS8wJ4rfrJhCcZqqfUQHkkRNQziJY3zlEW_TGFL64hUvSTfhSwVpBY54TMdnMnh3sFT8tALvcFrKHyKWIhoxXnDABvMC9Pk1h2GkQy9B5mYt0PT995pVawVx1ryMbcd5-8dZWUcc4iMhZQ6h2DMSC5B5ayJl/w640-h502/Picture3.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Minotaure </b>(1933).</td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p style="text-align: left;">Picasso consistently re-examines and re-explains the human gaze like no one else before or since. And what still keeps contemporary artists up at night, when not experiencing nightmares about the Spaniard’s apparently effortless virtuosity in child-like print dreams forced onto paper by his own worker’s hands? He was that rare artistic genius who actually thought with his hands. And his narrative is still just as startling today as it was after his earliest Neoclassical bathers-motif constellations, as it surged forward with the <b>Vollard Suite</b> of images in the 30’s. The true shock to our retinas was his rebellious return to the human figure again, after having dreamed up Cubism and proto-abstraction with his peer Braque about twenty-five years earlier. He then triumphantly managed to make over 1,000 prints for us to decipher at our leisure, a leisure he never allowed himself to have.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Some of them are included in the carefully curated selection provided by the Odon Wager Gallery. Onward he soldiered and ever more boldly he experimented: through the eroticism of the <b>Le Viol</b> series<i>, </i>with its abrupt retrospective of the most severe of all classical and mythological motifs, that of romantic love as an exotic kind of combat; and his <b>Rembrandt</b> series, a feedback loop embodying some of his wildest projections. He then took time off from the tempest to recharge his batteries via his tender <b>Sculpture Studio</b> series. His brutally simple bullring escapades, however, peel back his subconscious for all the world to behold; and his harrowingly Freudian <b>Minotaur</b> series<i>, </i>especially the dying minotaur theme mashing bullfighting and mythology together, still deserves to be called his finest work in the multiple domain of printmaking.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">We savour his love-drenched portraits of various favourite lovers and models such as Dora Maar in the 30’s, which shared the aura of romance in his lived life, no matter how self-centred it often became. Then my personal choice as his best era, decade, and epoch, the 40’s, during which he laid bare the full geometry of his desires, all of them, with his enigmatic nudes in raw space (seated or with knee raised). It was ten years before Clergue’s mesmerizing portrait of the artist that Picasso created what I have long believed was one of the greatest prints ever produced by anyone anytime, <b>Portrait of Fran</b><b>çoise Gilot</b>, in 1946, now enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art. That period is also represented well here by the equally mesmerizing <b>Femme au Fauteuil</b> of ’48, yet another glistening and recursive evocation of the divine muse motif that perpetually haunted this artist. <b>La R</b><b>ép</b><b>étition</b>, printed decades later, still commands our rapt attention for its tacit acknowledgement that we are all of us wearing masks in a communal play, and none more dynamically than Mr. P, whose every single work was literally a frothing meditation on <i>persona</i>.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAZD4w4LwRtU90gZ8oXZKXGgmo5_orjZvS6ROsSou0LxnWXwwV293alcrzhqDLsaGEwME44sakFMJUKd2CoIAE_Bk0FJ3HbZYyexntFo3FqZfvnAC7PK05zPjB-6LGbNdGAtpExatI7FPfZkIOd3hSIXvRnQz-0ttIC0iIezY1J4a3IwFWVqI_p__cd9iB/s372/Picture4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="254" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAZD4w4LwRtU90gZ8oXZKXGgmo5_orjZvS6ROsSou0LxnWXwwV293alcrzhqDLsaGEwME44sakFMJUKd2CoIAE_Bk0FJ3HbZYyexntFo3FqZfvnAC7PK05zPjB-6LGbNdGAtpExatI7FPfZkIOd3hSIXvRnQz-0ttIC0iIezY1J4a3IwFWVqI_p__cd9iB/w436-h640/Picture4.jpg" width="436" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Picasso at play, a crucial part of everyday life.</td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p style="text-align: left;">Closer to our own time, <b>Banderilles</b> (1960) somehow manages to relieve the bullring of some of its sublimated and stylized brutality by rendering reality as a defiant dance of <i>thanatos</i> with its tango partner, <i>eros</i>, a stunning example of the stark boldness of his black and white sensibilities. While <b>Profil d’Homer Barbu</b> (1963) shares some of the cartoon qualities of both the then emerging Warhol and Lichtenstein, at first, until we remember that the <i>kartone</i> was a medieval drawn depiction of a preliminary design for a later finished artwork, used most notably by Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael. And it was used with equal impact by Pablo, Andy and Roy, with the important distinction that, for them, it <i>was</i> the finished work. <b>Revolutionary Cart in Motion</b> (1968) is an ideal example of that other personal perspective of his: celebrating <i>relocation</i> writ large, as if it was Picasso himself who was repositioning the modernist agenda according to his own creative whims. And yes, he was.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Restless and protean, a force of both nature and culture: these are the most accurate descriptors for the poetic visual genius of Picasso, a figure who revolutionized the art of painting to the same degree that Caravaggio did at the outset of the Baroque era. To some of us, Picasso’s works, partially pictorial, partially abstract, and totally expressionistic in their private compulsions shared publicly, were in fact almost a harbinger of the Neo-Baroque. His works share the same overwhelming immersive and multi-sensorial aspects of that style, albeit generated and delivered in quite a different visual wavelength, that embodied what the poet Octavio Paz once called <b>The Labyrinth of Solitude</b>. While Paz was referring to the creative friction between two cultures, in Picasso, and especially in his alluring prints, we witness the creative friction between two times: the past and the future. Both a mythical presence and a real person at the same time, he was not just Theseus himself, forever searching for a thread to lead him out of the labyrinth, or the raunchy Minotaur itself, keeping himself pleasured in a playground of his own making; he was also the Labyrinth itself, with all of us wandering through the twists and turns of his own shared dreams. Luckily for us, he himself was<i> also </i>the aesthetic thread leading us all out of that amazing maze. Perhaps the Maestro himself summed it up most succinctly: “<i>If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur.”</i><br /> </p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihi3IWaYYSRrmEsVfxbyUQEA583aD9ugG3ZPxlFrxdKqcVF8aredTnds5uOnkaf78Rtm-EQa9Hivy9JGL2axru_ismZgCcA0l2SpYjTymJl0Jpx85ScVduecu327b4rnT37E2zPCDkGZbsxTtOO0rw6fn68a2RqjTfEtpS4XwomRZbeh57OuFXm8UwrCLC/s319/Picture5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="319" data-original-width="269" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihi3IWaYYSRrmEsVfxbyUQEA583aD9ugG3ZPxlFrxdKqcVF8aredTnds5uOnkaf78Rtm-EQa9Hivy9JGL2axru_ismZgCcA0l2SpYjTymJl0Jpx85ScVduecu327b4rnT37E2zPCDkGZbsxTtOO0rw6fn68a2RqjTfEtpS4XwomRZbeh57OuFXm8UwrCLC/s16000/Picture5.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Picasso drawing a Minotaur with light.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b style="color: #a70f0f;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JvLWZYVrJmM/YZW9oolo99I/AAAAAAAAtXo/RCgpS5PxmQMGAzA9bo6f0v-g2zyXYMjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/s160/Donald%2BBrackett.jpg" style="clear: left; color: #8c0b0b; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" data-original-height="160" data-original-width="160" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JvLWZYVrJmM/YZW9oolo99I/AAAAAAAAtXo/RCgpS5PxmQMGAzA9bo6f0v-g2zyXYMjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/s16000/Donald%2BBrackett.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" /></a></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;">–<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b> </b><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b style="color: #a70f0f;"><span class="il">Donald</span> Brackett</b> i</span></span>s
a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes
about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both
the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario
Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book <span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.halleonardbooks.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid%3D148361%26lid%3D0%26keywords%3Dwinehouse%2520brackett%26menuid%3D10283%26subsiteid%3D168%26&source=gmail&ust=1631815979013000&usg=AFQjCNEzLbGBq-5BqOqwt-uy63xjNuS7MA" href="http://www.halleonardbooks.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid=148361&lid=0&keywords=winehouse%20brackett&menuid=10283&subsiteid=168&" style="color: #a70f0f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece</a></b></span></span></span></span> (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and
radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative
collaboration in pop music: <span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Fleetwood-Mac-Years-Creative-Chaos/dp/0275993388" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>F</b><b>leetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos</b></a>,</span></span></span></span><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> 2007, and </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"><span style="color: #222222;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Dark-Mirror-Singer-Songwriter-Donald-Brackett/dp/0275998983" style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial; color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter</b></a><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;">, 2008,</span><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"> as well as the biographies <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Long-Slow-Train-Sharon-Dap-Kings/dp/1617136913" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><b>Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings</b></a></span></span></span></span></span>, 2018, and <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;"><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Tumult-Incredible-Life-Music-Turner/dp/1493055062" style="color: #8c0b0b; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner</a></b><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial;">, </span></span>2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, <b><a href="https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/product/9781989555583-item.html" target="_blank">Yoko Ono: An Artful Life</a></b>, released
in April 2022. His latest work in progress is a new book on family
relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder,<b> Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder</b>.</span></span></div><p style="text-align: left;"></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: left;"> </p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-5362810839662519152023-10-25T09:54:00.007-04:002024-01-31T15:22:55.989-05:00The Child Is Father to the Man: Nowhere Special <p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgroiPXCgtExl3Y82B85S5MAYgNURkghONmza2UhN0Q5wCni44Q-Cgey8XOLcSsz93wkQfzrasTJ5h-WqRJBYZq59lOPCURTgNkufzmTq-CLh7G29G7x_vXDwjMKlwh6n8fCoi5x-CaQipmVjB_zqGSHRKtzGiLd7XeW0_jBAdBPIQh4kIwRfxs5Kr52woP/s970/Daniel%20Lamont%20and%20James%20Norton%20in%20Nowhere%20Special.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="647" data-original-width="970" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgroiPXCgtExl3Y82B85S5MAYgNURkghONmza2UhN0Q5wCni44Q-Cgey8XOLcSsz93wkQfzrasTJ5h-WqRJBYZq59lOPCURTgNkufzmTq-CLh7G29G7x_vXDwjMKlwh6n8fCoi5x-CaQipmVjB_zqGSHRKtzGiLd7XeW0_jBAdBPIQh4kIwRfxs5Kr52woP/w640-h426/Daniel%20Lamont%20and%20James%20Norton%20in%20Nowhere%20Special.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Daniel Lamont and James Norton in <b>Nowhere Special</b>.</td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p>The Irish movie <b>Nowhere Special</b> came out in 2020 but never made it to these shores. A friend put me on to it, and I saw it in the only form currently available to North Americans – on an imported disc that you can only access if you have an all-regions DVD player. It’s a small, intimate picture about a working-class man named John (played by<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=James%20Norton" target="_blank"> James Norton</a>) who has been raising his three-year-old, Michael (Daniel Lamont), by himself since his partner abandoned them and moved back to her native Russia. Now John is dying of cancer. The film is about his struggle, through the services of an adoption agency, to find foster parents for Michael while he tries to figure out a way to prepare the boy for his departure. In some ways <b>Nowhere Special </b>reminded me of another recent small-scale Irish film I liked, <b>The Quiet Girl</b>, about a shy little girl whose parents send her to live for a few months with her aunt and uncle in the country before the birth of their fourth child, and who finds more love there than she’s ever been shown by her immediate family. The director of <b>The Quiet Girl</b>, Colm Bairad, has a more sophisticated technique than Pasolini, and the movie counts visual splendor among its virtues. <b>Nowhere Special </b>is closer to many TV movies that used to pop up in the seventies and eighties, but the writer-director, Uberto Pasolini, who based his script on a true story, barely takes a false step. His understatement suggests to me a kind of honor – a refusal to sentimentalize or otherwise falsify the difficult subject matter.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>When one of the couples John and Michael visit ask him, out of the child’s earshot, how he would like to be remembered, what they should tell him about his natural father as Michael grows older, John answers, “I’m a window washer.” His response is a mixture of self-effacement and worker’s pride. When a belligerent, condescending first-time client rides him and complains without cause about his work, John returns later when the man is away, and gets some satisfaction from egging a couple of his windows in revenge. John grew up in tough circumstances: he was fostered himself after his dad sent him away at four, and he learned how to keep his feelings to himself – a habit that he now discovers, as he confesses to Shona (Eileen O’Higgins), one of the two women handling his case at the agency, he can no longer fall back on as he watches other kids with their parents. Norton shows us the tenderness of a man accustomed to taking care of himself in a rough world whose life is now irrevocably built around a little boy for whom, of course, he wants all the things he didn’t get. His interaction with the man who bitches about the job John does on his windows is a glimpse into his origins, but it isn’t typical. In fact, he gets along with everyone he has regular contact with, and he’s grateful for their acts of kindness. He enjoys a warm relationship with one of his long-time clients, who talks to him about the loss of her husband, and the women from the agency (Shona’s boss, Mrs. Parkes, is played by Laura Hughes) are empathetic to the unusual nature of his situation and they break rules for him, allowing him more visits to prospective fosters than they’re supposed to.<p></p>
<p>The movie has its own unstressed naturalistic rhythms, but the key structural element is the five visits John and Michael, along with Shona, make to four couples and one single woman he’s considering leaving the boy with. One is a well-off couple who live in the country and want to give Michael the best education they can; they’re generous and well-meaning, but we can see John chafe against their posh lifestyle. One couple has amassed a pile of kids, only some of them adopted; the atmosphere in their home feels tense and competitive. One is a gruff postman and his wife; the man complains about the dogs on his route – and Michael loves dogs. The single woman, Ella (Valerie O’Connor, in a deeply felt small performance) got pregnant at fifteen and was pressured her to give up the baby against her wishes; later she found out she couldn’t have another, and her husband didn’t want an adopted child. Now on her own, she’s anxious to have what she’s always wanted. I said earlier that Pasolini takes hardly a false step. There is, perhaps, only one – a scene where John and Michael meet a fussy, uptight couple who rub him, and us, the wrong way. In the other visits Pasolini presents the characters and lays out the circumstances, and lets us draw our own conclusions based as much on John’s predilections as on his instincts, but here the couple’s behavior sends up danger signals.</p>
<p>In between, in a series of delicately affecting two-handed scenes, we see John, initially reluctant to tell his son about his illness at all and cause him distress, come to the inevitable conclusion that he has no choice. Michael finds a dead beetle on a tree and John has to explain what death is – and Michael, who is curious and sensitive, extrapolates from the encounter. So we see John reading to his son from the children’s book <b>When Dinosaurs Die</b>, and toward the end he does what Mrs. Parkes urged early in the picture but he resisted: he puts together a memory box to leave behind for Michael.</p>
<p>James Norton is one of England’s less celebrated acting treasures, but fans of British television (a category that includes practically everyone I know) would recognize him from <b>Grantchester </b>and from his terrifying portrait of a sociopath on <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2014/09/happy-valley-do-you-know-where-your.html" target="_blank"><b>Happy Valley</b></a>. He was Andrei in the marvelous 2016 <b>War and Peace </b>miniseries (opposite Paul Dano as Pierre and Lily James as Natasha), and he deserved far more kudos than he received for his performance in Agneszka Holland’s <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2021/10/moral-poetry-mr-jones.html" target="_blank">Mr. Jones</a> </b>in 2019 as Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who uncovered the story of Stalin’s man-made famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s. (The movie deserved more attention too.) The strikingly handsome Norton, with his piercing blue eyes, his pensive gaze and hushed charisma, would seem to be too distinctive to be thought of as a chameleon, but he doesn’t repeat himself, and the range of character he can summon from those qualities is wondrous. For a lesson in how a gifted actor stretches, just compare his scenes with two young actors, Daniel Lamont in <b>Nowhere Special </b>and Rhys Connah in <b>Happy Valley</b>. Upon seeing his work in <b>Happy Valley </b>and <b>Mr. Jones </b>and <b>War and Peace </b>I realized that it would be a mistake not to let anything he did pass me by. That’s why I hunted down <b>Nowhere Special.</b></p><p><i><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" /></a></b></i></i><b>– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg">Steve Vineberg</a></b>
is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for <i>The Threepenny Review</i> and is the author of
three books: <b>Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b>; <b>No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b>; and <b>High Comedy in American Movies</b>. <b><br /></b></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-12446591340403350762023-10-16T20:00:00.039-04:002023-10-17T01:09:49.542-04:00“The Great Gambon”: A Tribute to Michael Gambon<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiisl4-U16a4UOxfnyjOC6psI2UXNoSXaVW-u4GyNM3UEqFWYVRBxzV7mVqVqQsjd3K-XozzZsmKtdNssK8FaLKZCztLaOBVDSgulxcSosGQ5BNTEMWUHZPvETkZx7UU06Gh6-MSZoR37QMJC0rBjqnrmFuCQho9NNMAhUu-KMu5eTl5EWEz1cdTbmVbDfM/s714/Michael%20Gambon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="401" data-original-width="714" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiisl4-U16a4UOxfnyjOC6psI2UXNoSXaVW-u4GyNM3UEqFWYVRBxzV7mVqVqQsjd3K-XozzZsmKtdNssK8FaLKZCztLaOBVDSgulxcSosGQ5BNTEMWUHZPvETkZx7UU06Gh6-MSZoR37QMJC0rBjqnrmFuCQho9NNMAhUu-KMu5eTl5EWEz1cdTbmVbDfM/w640-h360/Michael%20Gambon.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Michael Gambon as the ailing writer in <b>The Singing Detective </b>(1986).<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Michael Gambon, the towering English actor who died on September 27 at the age of eighty-two, had such a distinctive, jowly appearance that if he’d been born American and looked for work in Hollywood he certainly would have been typecast in gangster roles. He was lumpy and broad-shouldered and he had the long, rectangular face of a weary pugilist, with tiny eyes peeking out from beneath heavy, outsize lids and from above cheeks like thick pillows. Yet he had universes in him. He was born in Ireland but his family moved to London and then to Kent, where he apprenticed as a toolmaker. He caught the acting bug when, laboring on set crew for an amateur dramatic society, he was asked to play some small roles. Eventually he joined the Gate Theatre in Dublin under Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards and the Royal National Theater under Laurence Olivier, who was his role model – Olivier, whose physical and vocal transformations were legend, who could bury himself in a character. No one who looked like <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Michael+Gambon" target="_blank">Gambon </a>could help being recognized in part after part, yet his range was as staggering as that of any British performer of his astonishing generation, and <i>his </i>metamorphoses could be so miraculous that they seemed to trick the eye. In the role with which most moviegoers identify him, the Hogwarts schoolmaster Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series, which he took over in <b>Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban </b>in 2004 following the death of Richard Harris, he has the paradoxical look of a giant elf. Harris’s Dumbledore is other-worldly and wrapped in wonder; Gambon’s is Zen and self-amused – Yoda reborn as a lordly English eccentric whose white hair and beard complete him.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>It was Ralph Richardson, one of the luminaries of Olivier’s generation, who gave him the soubriquet “The Great Gambon” after he starred in Bertolt Brecht’s <b>Life of Galileo </b>in 1980 under John Dexter’s direction. It was his breakthrough performance. I discovered him, as many north Americans did, when PBS imported Dennis Potter’s six-part, seven-hour Brechtian musical <b>The Singing Detective </b>in 1988. It was and is the damnedest series, still, perhaps, the most extraordinary thing ever shown on television. Potter was a Brechtian of the oddest stripe: whereas Brecht employed distancing devices to prevent his audience from getting caught up emotionally with his characters, Potter uses them to <i>comment on</i> the repressed feelings of his. <b>The Singing Detective </b>is his most personal work: Gambon’s protagonist, Philip Marlow, is a writer whose acutely painful bout of psoriatic arthritis, which Potter himself suffered from, has landed him in the hospital. That’s Marlow without the final “e,” which would have given him exactly the same name as Raymond Chandler’s famous hard-boiled shamus, an icon of 1940s pop culture both on the page and on the screen, where Humphrey Bogart played him most famously in <b>The Big Sleep</b>. Potter’s Marlow thinks it was his fate to write detective novels, and under the influence of the fever that accompanies his disease he’s rewriting his best one, <b>The Singing Detective</b>, where the hero is a private eye who moonlights as a Big Band singer. We get to see the mystery played out as Marlow reimagines it. Gambon plays not only the ailing writer, whose skin is horribly disfigured by peeling sores and who can’t move his body without help or loosen his knotted fists, but also the narrator-hero of his book, who wears a white dinner jacket or a pinstripe suit and a boater, carries a cane under his arm and sports a pencil-thin mustache. But the real mystery is the one the hospital shrink, Dr. Gibbon (Bill Paterson), prods the reluctant Marlow to unearth, through a series of agonizing childhood memories he’s buried deep in his psyche that explain his untrammeled rage at his estranged wife Nicola (Janet Suzman), whom he left after she cheated on him, and his complicated responses to sex. As he gets closer to the source, the reconstructed novel in his head incorporates Nicola, his long-dead mother (Alison Steadman), and a shadowy figure alternately called Binney and Finney and Raymond (Patrick Malahide) whose original identity we only learn after we’ve spent considerable time in flashbacks to Philip’s childhood among the coal fields of the Forest of Dean.<p></p>
<p>Brecht would certainly have hated the idea of applying the style he made famous to illuminate Freudian material. But <b>The Singing Detective </b>is as great as anything Brecht wrote, and Gambon is formidable. Under the anguish of his disease, Marlow is so bitter that it’s as if the poison oozing out of his skin has lacerated his soul. He’s insulting and sarcastic, leveling a withering wit on anyone he considers his intellectual inferior, like the doctors and nurses who he feels treat him with callous indifference, lecture condescendingly to him and exacerbate the indignities that his physical helplessness already imposes on him. Only one nurse (Joanne Whalley), who is kind and patient, escapes his venom (most of the time). Most of the representatives of the medical profession who cross paths with him deserve his ire, and Potter renders them satirically, with a razor sharpness. Of course, in the Brechtian fantasy numbers we’re seeing these figures through Marlow’s curdled point of view. When we’re not, we perceive that some, at least, are struggling to find ways to help him, like the Registrar (Thomas Wheatley), who has to fight through Philip’s biting superciliousness to press the suggestion that he talk to Gibbon. Unlike the Registrar or anyone else on the ward, Gibbon is at least as smart as Philip is, as articulate and as fond of verbal games, and Philip can’t outwit him. Gibbon isn’t sentimental; his compassion is expressed entirely in therapeutic action. It’s clear that no one else can save him from himself – by leading him <i>into </i>himself. The tête-à-têtes between Gambon’s Marlow and Paterson’s Gibbon are sensational, especially a word-association exercise where Marlow, who insists on viewing it as a competition, races to keep (he thinks) ahead of his therapist and prove that the game has no diagnostic value, while his answers show precisely the opposite. “I mean, it’s words, just words,” Marlow concludes, but then he adds quietly, “I don’t think I’ll come here again” – and we know Gibbon has pierced his armor. And Marlow does come back.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYZBRSzyKAAqtEip1oYbbrPhyeKgcPTUsyK6WoIrAnOcWB5udZeGB3rsU3NQ9UdNUmsfBri1d1lbpm5r2grzEbir9QSYhecULDG1nyg8ofrvUNkt896nqa5hHO3M1IbkNR65q2Y6gPNRah7b3H3qeztwxZvcZ9wPzuwnwP0FATjTwsjppodlFrXCG76Dja/s1200/As%20Sir%20William%20McCordle%20in%20Gosford%20Park.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="844" data-original-width="1200" height="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYZBRSzyKAAqtEip1oYbbrPhyeKgcPTUsyK6WoIrAnOcWB5udZeGB3rsU3NQ9UdNUmsfBri1d1lbpm5r2grzEbir9QSYhecULDG1nyg8ofrvUNkt896nqa5hHO3M1IbkNR65q2Y6gPNRah7b3H3qeztwxZvcZ9wPzuwnwP0FATjTwsjppodlFrXCG76Dja/w640-h450/As%20Sir%20William%20McCordle%20in%20Gosford%20Park.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michael Gambon as Sir William McCordle in <b>Gosford Park</b> (2001).<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> </p><p>Gambon is a man of a thousand voices here: ferociously deprecatory (he sometimes appears to channel Richard Burton in John Osborne’s <b>Look Back in Anger</b>) and masochistically self-deprecating, self-pitying and authentically agonized, terrorizing and terrified, the mocking jester and the walking wounded. His performance is a sort of vaudeville in which he skates – flamboyantly or furiously – from mood to mood, tone to tone, layer to layer. In one unforgettable scene, Potter and the director, Jon Amiel, place his adult self with his moulting face and shapeless mound of hair and sickbed pajamas, in a nightmare version of one of his own memories, sitting at the back of a pub watching his woebegone father (Jim Carter) sing to the crowd. Then Gambon opens his mouth and what comes out isn’t the posh accent he learned after his mother left his dad and took him to live with her parents in London but the Gloucestershire brogue of his childhood.</p><p>I saw Gambon on stage only once, in David Hare’s <b>Skylight </b>in 1996, in a magnificent portrait of a widowed restauranteur who tries to reconcile with the younger woman (Lia Williams) with whom he once had a potent love affair. (Bill Nighy was very good in a 2014 revival, but Gambon was heartbreaking.) How I wish I’d been able to see him as Falstaff or Volpone or in Alan Ayckbourn’s <b>The Norman Conquests</b>. He stopped acting on the stage in 2013 because he was experiencing panic attacks. But his work on the large and small screens was phenomenal, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him give even a mediocre performance in either a starring role or a supporting one. He played more than one memorable tyrant. He’s mean-minded Sir William McCordle in <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Robert%20Altman" target="_blank">Robert Altman</a>’s Agatha Christie-meets-Jean Renoir mystery/high comedy <b>Gosford Park</b> (2001) – the self-indulgent, unfiltered, tantrum-throwing host who approaches his guests as if they were manikins in a Whack a Mole game. Sir William is the object of hatred of almost everyone gathered on his country estate for a shooting weekend, so naturally he gets murdered halfway through the movie – and lively and star-studded as it is, you can’t help missing his entertaining boorishness. In <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/12/style-and-substance-kings-speech.html" target="_blank">The King’s Speech</a> </b>(2010) he’s King George V, who intimidates his stuttering younger son Bertie (<a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Colin%20Firth" target="_blank">Colin Firth</a>) when he tries to coach him in speech-making. First we hear him muting his impressive presence and vocal prowess during a recording of his own speech; his notion of teaching by example is actually a display of his own unmatchable style and self-possession. When he’s done, he comments to Bertie, “It’s easy if you know how,” and demands that he face the microphone square in the eye “like any decent Englishman,” implying that Bertie’s failure to do so would be an act of cowardice, even disloyalty. He speaks of the machine as if it were an enemy to be subdued; Gambon’s reading tells us that the king feels he’s done just that without breaking a sweat, in the genteel definitive manner that bespeaks British finesse and unquestionable domination. Bertie is defeated before he’s begun. In <b>Churchill’s Secret</b> (2016), which begins with the 1953 stroke that almost killed the great man and then nearly finished his political career, he gets at both the Prime Minister’s blustery willfulness and his sudden physical vulnerability, occasionally at the same moment, as when, stammering as he lies on his back on his sickbed, even when he has to push a word out he manages to give it a certain hauteur, a magisterial curl. He’s one of the great modern Churchills, alongside <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=John%20Lithgow" target="_blank">John Lithgow</a> on <b><a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2018/01/a-marriage-of-drama-and-history-crown.html" target="_blank">The Crown</a> </b>and <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search?q=Gary%20Oldman" target="_blank">Gary Oldman </a>in <b>Darkest Hour</b>. <br /></p>
<p>His sampling of the classics came mostly during his stage career, but he did get to play Hamm (opposite David Thewlis as Clov) in a film, directed by Conor McPherson, of <b>Endgame</b>, part of the noble project around the millennium that filmed all of Samuel Beckett’s plays. Gambon’s superb, and his vocal choice is fascinating: he sounds like a cross between an old-school Irish campaigner and a wasted aristocrat, using his Irish burr to convey both the grittiness of a barfly and the pretentiousness of a peasant pretending he’s a lord. He suggests both Captain Boyle in Sean O’Casey’s <b>Juno and the Paycock</b> in one of his high-and-mighty fits and Con Melody, the barkeep who carries on like a nobleman in Eugene O’Neill’s <b>A Touch of the Poet</b>. He’s the undisputed high-water mark in a 1978 BBC production of Chekhov’s <b>The Sea Gull</b>, where he discovers ways to dramatize Trigorin’s sexual charisma and elegantly disguised self-involvement that I’ve never seen anyone else attempt. (You can find this performance in the BBC Chekhov box set.) And his impersonation, in the marvelous 2009 miniseries based on Jane Austen’s <b>Emma</b>, of Mr. Woodhouse as a befuddled, narcissistic worry-wart whose face falls apart like a disturbed jigsaw puzzle when he feels any threat to his comfort and custom is a grand comic accomplishment. He also got to play a classic detective, Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, for two seasons in the early nineties. I think he’s more interesting than Jean Gabin in the Maigret movies – more intellectual, more emotionally stirred.</p>
<p>But if you want to salute the great Gambon by watching one performance, let it be <b>The Singing Detective</b>. It’s masterful and it’s sui generis.</p><p><i><i><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ka6sHoc95mg/WEMLYuwG3rI/AAAAAAAAir8/XLN5gmGA7Xw7s0QWytcnEfo9wAGE_gy3ACLcB/s1600/Steve%2BVineberg.jpg" /></a></b></i></i><b>– <a href="http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Steve%20Vineberg">Steve Vineberg</a></b>
is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and
film. He also writes for <i>The Threepenny Review</i> and is the author of
three books: <b>Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style</b>; <b>No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade</b>; and <b>High Comedy in American Movies</b>. <br /></p>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1975416078255909953.post-9469449454889969372023-10-12T20:00:00.004-04:002023-10-13T00:26:15.985-04:00Kevin Courrier: Five Years Gone<p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS38N5j_rFObGs3d8IIUQUb8-dHEomCKInXZ4osmow-c7bnSGGurfOc-rJqvBjLq7CmVt7KlcQSXZt8MXNsSQz3NYY14OAK4j6oCSl_NA-qrGRQHGBJDjUcL4YA2VZBFBCx-x-kXf6KAvczyZ98zzNaza0n0Op37rnC-29EjRVgy4BbObMK4KvBVutXdXu/s500/Kevin%20Courrier.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="500" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS38N5j_rFObGs3d8IIUQUb8-dHEomCKInXZ4osmow-c7bnSGGurfOc-rJqvBjLq7CmVt7KlcQSXZt8MXNsSQz3NYY14OAK4j6oCSl_NA-qrGRQHGBJDjUcL4YA2VZBFBCx-x-kXf6KAvczyZ98zzNaza0n0Op37rnC-29EjRVgy4BbObMK4KvBVutXdXu/w640-h480/Kevin%20Courrier.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kevin Courrier (1954-2018)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table> <p></p><p>Five years ago today, on October 12, 2018, <i>Critics At Large</i> lost one of its leading voices, <a href="https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/search/label/Kevin%20Courrier" target="_blank">Kevin Courrier</a>. Kevin was a writer, a critic, a teacher, a friend, a mentor, a prod and an inspiration. He led our site as a community of fellow travellers, his only goal to help each of us, in whatever way he could, in our respective journeys, not only as writers but as human beings. Kevin was a lover and a fan of all products of human creativity, with a special love of music, film, and television – and he approached all of it with wit, insight, humility, heart, and a uniquely critical eye. His expansive writing (articles, essays, books, and reviews) made his readers want to experience it all through his singular point of view. When he passed away, the world – my world – lost a light that has never been replaced. </p><p>On this day, I thought I would share something from decades before I had met him, from his time as radio producer and host for CJRT-FM in Toronto. Here, in this interview with Leonard Cohen from 1984, we not only get a deep sense of Kevin’s sensitivity and intelligence, but one thing perhaps I miss the most: the gentle strength and presence of the man. And, most importantly, here we get a record of Kevin’s voice – a voice I would give anything to hear once again, in person, across a table, for one of our always far-too-long dinner conversations. </p><p>Mark Clamen </p><p>Editor-in-Chief<br />Critics at Large</p>
<iframe frameborder="0" height="120" src="https://player-widget.mixcloud.com/widget/iframe/?hide_cover=1&feed=%2FCriticsAtLarge%2Fleonard-cohen-interviewed-in-1984%2F" width="100%"></iframe>Critics at Largehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18073851963852030361noreply@blogger.com0