Covered Up: Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

Steven Page at Jack Layton's state funeral

While listening to Steven Page sing Leonard Cohen's now iconic "Hallelujah," during the largely moving televised funeral last weekend for NDP leader Jack Layton, I began to recognize just how much this song has lost its meaning and much of its sting. Sung now with a solemn reverence, as Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" often is, "Hallelujah" is about as misunderstood as Randy Newman's "Sail Away." Written in 1984, Cohen conceived the song as one that combined invective with elegiac and religious meditation. "You're not on the stand when you're praying," he told me in an interview months before the song was released. "You can't come with any excuses. You don't have a deep belief in your opinion any longer, or your own construction of how things are. That's why you pray because you haven't got a prayer." You don't hear in these famous cover versions by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, kd lang, or in Steven Page's recent rendition, any of that sense of doubt, the struggle between the profane and sacred, or even the naked fear of the singer being aware that despite being armed with prayer the world still remains the same.

Trio: The Debt, Submarine and a final comment on The Tree of Life

Despite being the locus of so much American media coverage, Israel doesn’t figure very prominently in U.S. TV and cinema. Since those productions are expected to travel abroad and make money, likely their creators, for the most part, would rather avoid dealing with the subject for fear of losing sales in anti-Israel markets or risk alienating European audiences, who don’t much like the Jewish state. If they didn’t think like that, at least one James Bond movie would have had a Tel Aviv setting. In fact, except for the regular character of ex-Mossad agent Ziva David on TV’s NCIS, and the odd Israeli reference in Alias or a few scenes in Charlie Wilson’s War – which was nonetheless careful not to identify Jerusalem as actually being part of Israel, much less its capital – the country is rarely even mentioned at all. Thus, it’s most surprising that Miramax decided to remake the 2007 Israeli film Ha-Hov (The Debt), which revolves around three Mossad agents sent to capture a key Nazi in 1965, and what happens afterwards.. But The Debt, despite its potentially juicy plot, is a rather lacklustre affair that never feels as authentic as it wants to be.

Renewal: The Fall Fashion Magazines

For most, the idea of beginning a new year involves waiting for the dropping of the ball in Times Square, flowing champagne, and finally a round of "Auld Lang Syne". Mine, however, arrives when that familiar fall coolness bookends the still warm days after a long hot summer. September, particularly the wrapping up of the Labour Day weekend, is my time to reflect on the past, hope for the future, and become overwhelmed with excitement about my fresh start.

Perhaps this all comes from attending school for too long, but this is my new year. Refreshed from summer with a new game plan, I am ready to reveal my reinvented self to the world. Among the other more introspective emotions and activities, this is usually accompanied with a fall wardrobe to match. Our style, our presentation of ourselves, is a great form of self expression. The right ensemble – carried with our natural confidence – can capture attention, demand respect, and leave lasting impressions. It has the potential to be that finishing touch that sells us.

Talking ‘bout an Evolution: When a Movie Twosome Grows Ever More Tiresome

I thought that One Day would, at the very least, provide some eye candy with footage of Edinburgh, Paris and London. The film certainly flits between those gorgeous European cities while tracking its two protagonists as they continually relocate over the course of 23 years. The conceit is that Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess), just after their 1988 university graduation in Scotland, have an unconsummated sexual encounter on July 15. According to British legend, the weather on that particular date will last for 40 more days. This annual holiday is dedicated to St. Swithin, a Saxon monk who died in 862.

You might ask what a 9th-century celibate priest would have known about romance but the characters never do. For another two decades, Emma and Dexter remain best friends separated by miles and life choices who continue dancing around the fact that they’re obviously soul mates. It’s a 108-minute cinematic tease. Exhaustion sets in. July 15, intended as some kind of mystical touchstone in their existence together and apart, keeps popping up on inter-titles that are ever more meaningless. St. Swithin, be damned. The weather is totally ignored.

Pads and Claws: The Cat Vanishes

In Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), detective Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) loses his cat when he tries to feed him food he doesn't care for (worse, he tries to fool the pet by pretending it's his favourite). The cat's disappearance becomes a test of loyalty that opens up the theme of the picture. In Argentinian director Carlos Sorin's sly and deceptive The Cat Vanishes, when the pet feline Donatello flees, it becomes a test of sanity for both the characters and us. The Cat Vanishes is being compared to Hitchcock's thrillers, but the resemblance is superficial at best. Unlike Hitchcock, Sorin submerges the familiar techniques of suspense while presenting instead a chamber piece that's embroidered with chills. The story is as devious as the missing Donatello.

The Cat Vanishes opens humorously with a lengthy exposition scene that resembles a similar one that concluded Psycho. A number of psychologists are gathered to discuss Luis (Luis Luque), a history professor who has been institutionalized after having a major breakdown. This esteemed scholar had thought a colleague had stolen his life work with the aid of his wife Beatriz (Beatriz Spelzini), so his violent outburst against both of them lands him in the mental hospital. But the doctors also believe that his breakdown was temporary. Given his solid reputation, they arrive at the conclusion that maybe he should be released into the care of Beatriz. At first, Beatriz tries to make Luis comfortable and calm, but when Donatello freaks out at his arrival and soon disappears, Beatriz begins to wonder if all is well with her hubby after all. She even wonders if his appearance and the cat's departure are linked.

The Royal Shakespeare Company, At Home and Abroad: Macbeth, As You Like It & The Winter's Tale

Aislín McGuckin & Jonathan Slinger in Macbeth.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth at Stratford-on-Avon this season, staged by artistic director Michael Boyd, has something to do with the cult of Edward the Confessor and something to do with the desecration of Catholic churches during the Reformation, but you have to read the essays in the program to understand the connections, and even then they're not terribly clear. A directorial concept that you need liner notes for can't possibly work – especially in the English theater, where you have to lay out three or four pounds for a playbill. Years ago I saw a production of The Cherry Orchard at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts that filled the stage with constructivist cardboard cut-outs: I was baffled until I consulted the director's note at intermission and found that he thought the play was about the Russian Revolution and he was convinced that its tone was hopeful. This explanation didn't remove my bafflement, merely redirected it. You can do a lot with a classic text, but if your ideas don't sync up with what's on the page then perhaps you'd be better off calling it something else. And you'd be better off going all the way and changing the text. (Punchdrunk's popular haunted-house reimagining of Macbeth, an environmental piece which combines scenes from the play with images out of Hitchcock and leaves out the dialogue entirely, is appropriately titled Sleep No More.) The director's note in the Cherry Orchard program didn't mesh with the lines about the drowning of Ranevskaya's little boy or the loss of her estate, and in Boyd's Macbeth there's a large enough gap between the text and the visual links to these two historical periods for the whole production to fall into it. I'm sure hardly anyone in the audience has any idea why Ross (Scott Handy) reappears in the second act in a white priest's robe with an enormous cross around his neck or why there's a broken stained-glass window above the stage and a pile of rubble upstage.

Good-bye Gadhafi: The Fourth Estate Says Farewell

Frizz-head himself

“We’re coming for you, frizz-head!”

This derogatory threat frequently aimed at Colonel Moammar Gadhafi by the ragtag revolutionaries now conquering Tripoli is not exactly among the famous battle cries of history, such as “No guts, no glory!” or Shakespeare’s “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” The sarcastic name-calling reminds me of a (roughly translated) quote from Augusto Cesar Sandino, who fought the U.S. Marines occupying Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933: “Come, you clod of morphine addicts...I will make you eat the dust of my wild mountains!” Back then, morphine was routinely included in military first-aid kits to treat painful injuries. But our soldiers must have been using the opiate just to get high and really who can blame them, given the snakes, scorpions and swelter of Central America?

The clod of Libyan loyalists sticking with their leader after four decades of authoritarian rule have been eating the dust of the rebels’ wild deserts. And news coverage of the conflict is mesmerizing for a longtime war-correspondent wannabe like me. The most must-see-TV moments: the 36 journalists from all over the world held hostage in the Rixos, a five-star hotel that became their five-day prison.

Sin/Syn City: A Conscientious Objector’s View of Las Vegas

Imagine you are an alien who has just landed on earth. You learn that the occupants of the resource-abundant blue planet have built a city in a region you consider to be relatively uninhabitable: the middle of the desert. There are few natural resources in close proximity. Food, water, and electricity all have to be transported in. Here, amid constant air conditioning and an absence of clocks and windows, humans amuse themselves by essentially throwing their money away and engaging in other frivolous pursuits such as strip clubs, showgirls and huge buffets. You’re not in Venice, Rome, Paris or New York, although all these places have shrines in this city. It’s not a Circus Circus, Treasure Island or Mirage, albeit it sure feels like all of these things. It’s Las Vegas, and it’s so jam-packed with artificial splendor it’s difficult to imagine what its authentic urban scene would look like.

Mari-Beth looking for the authentic Las Vegas  

I visited the self-proclaimed entertainment capital of the world last month. Although Las Vegas was not on my to-visit list, I figure it is one of those places you must see for yourself – alien or not. Throughout my visit, the thought kept nagging me, why so fake? What's the authentic Las Vegas? Why do we feel the need to practice self-delusion so garishly? Eventually I convinced my travel companion to board a city bus and take a ride to nowhere. We passed strip malls and strip joints, trailer parks and industrial parks, sterile looking houses over sterile looking land. We rode right to the mountains on the east side of the city and it took us close to two hours round-trip. But at least I felt I got to see the ‘real’ Las Vegas.

Opening the Wrong Doors: Sarah's Key

Mélusine Mayanc (centre) in Sarah's Key

Ever since the enormous, and deserved, worldwide success of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Holocaust dramas have become a regular subject in the movies. (There had been films on the Holocaust before, but Schindler’s List appeared to open the floodgates.) With cinema's penchant for trivializing tragedies like the Holocaust, fortunately only a few such movies (Life is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) have descended into that odious category. But many others have fallen short in doing justice to the meaning and events of the Holocaust, an admittedly tall order for what is still such an incomprehensible and unprecedented act. Sarah’s Key (Elle s'appelait Sarah), the latest film release concerning the Holocaust, is one such disappointment.

Based on the popular, and critically acclaimed, novel by French author Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key unearths, to a degree, the shocking events in France, during two days in July 1942, when some 13,000 French Jews – mostly women and children – were rounded up in Paris, sent to the Vélodrome d'hiver, kept in appalling and inhumane conditions, and then soon after transported to Auschwitz where most perished. In of itself, this wasn’t unusual – the concentration camps were ultimately the destination for most of Europe’s 11 million Jews and the graveyards for six million of them – but what was unique here is that it was the French police, the gendarmes, who carried out the deportations, even before their German occupiers had ordered them to do so. Sarah’s Key begins on that fateful day when the Starzynski family (mother, father and young daughter) are compelled to hastily leave their home. They comply, but not before Sarah (Mélusine Mayanc), the Starzynski’s 10-year-old daughter, instructs her younger brother, Michel, to hide in a closet and not leave until she returns to retrieve him. She locks him in for good measure and then, still clutching the key, leaves. The rest of the film deals the ramifications of her act. And while the movie’s opening scenes are suitably powerful – you’ll curse the anti-Semitic French when you view them – the film becomes progressively more cluttered, contrived and, finally, off topic.

Death By Focus Group: Paul (2011)

When Simon Pegg and Nick Frost first burst on the North American scene as actors and, in Pegg's case, writer with their first feature film, Shaun of the Dead, I was generally impressed. What I enjoyed about the film was how they managed to capture that hard-to-handle middle ground between horror and comedy. One minute, I found myself laughing out loud (the scene where they are deciding which LPs they are willing to give up as weapons to fling at the approaching walking dead still makes me giggle), while the next gave me legitimate chills. Their next film together, Hot Fuzz (both were directed directed by Edgar Wright of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World fame), combined a buddy cop movie, like 48 Hours, with the gentile English drama, such as A Room With A View. For a variety of reasons, I never saw it, but I hear from several people who did that it is Shaun's equal. The major criticism, even from those who liked it, was that in the last act they threw out the gentility and went for straight action, in other words becoming what they were ridiculing. Perhaps that was a sign.

For their next mash up, 2011's Paul (with Frost now on board as co-writer), just released on DVD, they clapped together the alien-amongst-us film with the gross-out buddy comedy. I was looking forward to it, because the premise seemed to be ripe for sending up. And yet, except for Kristen Wiig's winning performance as the daughter of a religious nutcase, Paul is an almost complete failure. The finished film, the first one wholly funded by a US studio (the others had been British imports), not only feels like it was focused-grouped to death, it feels like the script had the same treatment. Every laugh is calculated, every 'beat' in the script seems completely programmed. The spontaneity that seemed to permeate Shaun is long gone. The basic premise of Paul is that Graeme Wily (Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Frost) are two life-long SF-loving geek friends who come from England to attend the huge Comic Con in San Diego, and then head out on a road trip across America visiting all the sites made famous in UFO lore or movies (Devil's Mountain, Area 51, etc.). Along the way, they encounter an alien. 

Personal, Yet Universal: Guy Clark's Songs and Stories (Dualtone Records, 2011)

I have seen Guy Clark in concert a couple of times. Each time he has been accompanied by his friend and co-writer Verlon Thompson. There is a warmth and familiarity between these two men which spreads throughout the concert hall. Clark and Thompson standing at the mics, guitars in hand, singing their fine songs of life, love and liberty – there’s nothing like it. And they take requests. They also come out afterwards to sign CDs and chat to fans, if, they always say, people are interested! I’ve never heard anyone offer to come out to sign, and give the audience a choice before. His new Songs and Stories CD captures perfectly the feel of a Guy Clark concert.

It should. It was recorded live at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee. The date isn’t given, but it could be yesterday. The recording is just as warm and intimate as a chat with an old friend after a long absence. The format is a bit different than I’m used to. The band is expanded to include, beyond Clark and Thompson, a bass player (Bryn Davies), a percussionist (Kenny Malone) and another guitarist/mandolinist/singer (Shawn Camp). And then Clark announces, during the introduction, that they will sit down to play. This is something new for Clark. Perhaps it worked so well during the guitar pulls and in the recording studio that they just decided to bring the format to the stage. It works a charm.

Produced and Abandoned: The Lost Son (1999)

This question has always nagged me: Why are there so few good directors among great cameramen/women? For instance, when the enormously talented Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) turned to directing movies in the eighties, he came out with the undistinguished All the Right Moves (1983) and the ridiculous Clan of the Cave Bear (1986). You'd be hard-pressed to find anything in those pictures that comes close to the fever dream he conjured up in Taxi Driver.

But then there is Chris Menges, the British cinematographer behind such strikingly diverse work as Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields (1984) and Neil Jordan's The Good Thief (2002). When he turned to directing, his work was not only as distinguishable as the movie-makers he'd worked for, sometimes he even surpassed them. The trouble is: Nobody knows this since his films have been largely produced and abandoned. After being rightly celebrated at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival with his directorial debut A World Apart, about a young girl coming to terms with her political activist parents during the apartheid years in South Africa, his subsequent pictures have gone MIA.

Chekhov and Ibsen at the National Theatre

I understand the need to find translations of Chekhov and Ibsen that don’t provide obstacle courses for contemporary actors; one of the reasons André Gregory was able to do the phenomenal work he did with the cast of Vanya on 42nd Street was that David Mamet made the language so limpid and close to the natural rhythms of American actors. But the rage for new versions of the plays, often mired in contemporary clichés, is infuriating. In Pam Gems’s rewrite of A Doll’s House, Krogstad warns Christine, “Goes around, comes around,” and I’ve heard a student actor perform a scene in Uncle Vanya in which Astrov uses the expletive “fucking.” That can’t be a reasonable solution. In Andrew Upton’s version of The Cherry Orchard performed by Britain’s National Theatre (and widely seen abroad in HD), Gaev (James Laurenson) calls Lopakhin (Conleth Hill) a “crap artist” and Lyubov Ranevskaya (Zoë Wanamaker), rather than just excoriating the eternal student Trofimov (Mark Bonnar) for having no mistress at his age, grabs at his crotch and wonders out loud if he’s got anything at all down there. But the real offense in Upton’s Cherry Orchard is his lengthy addenda, which seem to have two purposes – to overemphasize the political subtext (the second-act debate between Trofimov and Lopakhin is about one and a half times longer than the one Chekhov wrote) and to make sure the audience doesn’t miss the point. That must be why Yasha (Gerald Kyd), Lyubov's manservant, takes three times as many lines as Chekhov wrote for him to persuade her to take him along when she returns to Paris. (Yasha, born a peasant but determined to rise in the world, is more or less a comic variation on the self-educated valet Jean in Strindberg's Miss Julie.)  Does Upton really think he can improve on Chekhov?

A Change is Gonna Come: The Help Offers Flawed Hope

As an aspiring journalist fresh out of college in the 1960s, I found a job with a weekly newspaper in Brookline, Massachusetts. I wrote a column called Around the Town with Babs, a nom de plume that various reporters before me had assumed over the years. The task was to ferret out mundane local gossip, such as: “Stanley Lager of Richardson Terrace has been promoted to general manager at Filene's Department Store.” Or “Elm Street residents Jane and Bruce Ganz are heading to Florida for the winter.” (Attention: thieves!)

As an aspiring journalist fresh out of college in the 1960s, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan finds a job with a weekly newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. She writes a column called Ask Miss Myrna, a nom de plume that various reporters before her had assumed over the years. The task is to ferret out mundane local housekeeping advice, such as how to avoid tears while chopping onions.

The Walking Wounded Looking For the Walking Dead: Judith Thompson's White Biting Dog

In the late 90s, my acting coach, the exuberant David Switzer, described the characters in modern plays as "the walking wounded looking for the walking dead." It's not the perfect description of modern playwriting that he favoured in our Scene Study class, but it was often the best description he had for difficult plays. White Biting Dog, by the extraordinary Canadian playwright Judith Thompson, which debuted in 1984, was one of those plays that, after careful study, fit the Switzer definition.

A new production opened Thursday at the Soulpepper Theatre Company in Toronto and it was quite the emotional rollercoaster ride. It's the story of Cape Race, played very well by Mike Ross, a young lawyer tending to his sick father at home. Stressed out by his work and his broken marriage, Cape decides to end it all by jumping off a bridge. But just before he falls, the voice of a small, white dog is heard telling him to stop and that his mission to re-unite his divorced parents must be fulfilled. This throws Cape into a spiral of frustrated angst as he struggles with his own feelings surrounding his mother, gagging on the word itself, and reconciling with his ill father whose fears of dying and his regressive memories have driven him crazy. In the mix is the character of Pony, beautifully played by the engaging Micheala Washburn. Pony is an ex-ambulance driver looking for salvation in the big city. At first glance she is the Ying to Cape’s Yang, a happy yet doubtful young woman who comes looking for her dog. (Cape assumes it’s the white one.) But Cape is soon to discover that Pony is not the good omen he thought she was.

The Afflictions of Time: Criterion's DVD Release of The Music Room & The Makioka Sisters

In the opening scenes of Satyajit Ray's flawed, yet intimately haunting, The Music Room (1958), an aging Bengali feudal landlord (zamindar), Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas), sits with his back to us in a large chair on the roof of his dilapidated mansion. He puffs away on his hookah, lost in time, while time is clearly running out on his era of wealth and power. Set in the late 1920s, the zamindar's only connection to the comforts and pleasures of his class privilege is the music concerts he presents in his home. The music room, which holds within it the fleeting power of nostalgia, transports Roy from the afflictions of time to the more nobler moments in his past, while his present life decays around him. (It is perhaps a rich irony, not lost here, that it was the feudal classes, so influenced by the West, that actually kept Indian classical music alive.)

The Music Room, which Ray made between the second and third films of his justly acclaimed The Apu Trilogy, may (as critic Pauline Kael once suggested) reflect the same themes of cultural futility as Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. But if that's so, The Music Room is The Cherry Orchard seen through the gothic sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." The Music Room (which Criterion has just released this summer in both regular and Blu-ray) is about how a once powerful aristocrat stubbornly clings to the past through his opulent staging of musicales. But, in doing so, he destroys his family and his life.

Chhabi Biswas as Roy

Since Ray is one of the great humanists among major film directors, he doesn't take a churlish view towards this innocently infantile lord. Rather, as he would later do in Devi (1960) and The Home and The World (1984), Ray brings a sophisticated understanding of the psychological dynamics at work in the story. As with any great dramatist, Satyajit Ray skillfully illuminates the folly of the zamindar rather than examining him objectively, or simply condemning him on our behalf. He achieves something empathetic and similar to what Visconti did with the ageing, much more noble Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) in The Leopard (1963).

Absurdly Real: Eugène Ionesco's Exit the King at Soulpepper

Oliver Dennis & Karen Rae

In 1962, at the age of 53, playwright Eugène Ionesco thought he may be dying. In an attempt to come to terms with these feelings of mortality, he crafted the play Exit the King. The play centres around King Berenger the First, who, at 400, is dying, but he just doesn't know it yet. His retinue is divided into two groups. The first, his Doctor and Queen Marguerite (his first wife), are the rationalists. In a calm, logical manner they are determined to let him know that, “you are going to die in one and a half hours. You are going to die at the end of the play.” In the other camp, are his kind Nurse and his second (trophy) wife, Queen Marie. She is determined to not tell him. Queen Marie is his favoured wife (he sees Marguerite, and all he can say with a sneer is, “oh, you're still here.”) and has over the years coddled him and told him whatever he wanted to hear.

It is not just the King who is dying, so is his kingdom. In his vigorous youth, he lorded over millions of people, successfully battled thousands of enemies, did everything from single-handedly splitting the atom to inventing the car and computer, and he could even control the weather. It would not rain unless he said so. Now, as he is dying, his kingdom is literally vanishing. The people are all gone, his achievements are forgotten, and the land itself is shrinking and shrinking. His castle is a slanted ruin and a gigantic crack is splitting it in half. The irony here? Ionesco was far from dying. He recovered and lived until 1994.

Talking Out of Turn #22: Allen Ginsberg (1982)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Neglected Gems #5: The Good Thief (2002)

It’s a funny thing about movies. They may get critical acclaim, even score some box office success and years later they’re barely mentioned by anyone or even remembered. And there’s often no discernible reason for their fates. I really can’t tell why Neil Jordan’s terrific and accessible heist movie The Good Thief, which got good reviews when it came out in 2002, has pretty much vanished into the ether. Or why Steve Jordan’s powerful documentary Stevie (2002) failed to match the impact of his earlier 1994 doc Hoop Dreams. Or even why impressive debuts like Jeff Lipsky’s Childhood’s End (1997) didn’t get half the buzz that considerably lesser movies (Another Earth, Ballast) acquired upon their subsequent release. In any case, here is the latest entry in a series of disparate movies you really ought to see.

The Marriage Musical: Stephen Sondheim's Company

For Stephen Sondheim aficionados, Company is beloved as the watershed musical that established him as a musical-theatre innovator. In a number of his early musicals he supplied the lyrics for the music of older, established composers (Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story, Jule Styne on Gypsy, Richard Rodgers on Do I Hear a Waltz?). His professional debut as a composer-lyricist was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962, but that was an old-fashioned vaudeville along the lines of Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse – and bizarrely, though the score was ingenious, Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove’s libretto received all the attention. (His other solo effort, a strained, distinctly sixties satirical farce called Anyone Can Whistle, closed after 11 performances. The Encores! series of concert-style musical revivals at New York’s City Center staged it two seasons ago with a superlative cast, but engaging as the production was you could see exactly why the show had bombed in 1964.)