More Fair Than She: National Ballet of Canada’s Romeo and Juliet

Chelsy Meiss, first soloist for the National Ballet of Canada. (Photo: Karolina Kuras)

Last Saturday, Chelsy Meiss did the remarkable.

Dancing the lead role of Juliet in choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s 2011 reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers, the National Ballet of Canada soloist imparted that elusive thing that only rarely occurs in the theatre – a tingling sensation at the back of the neck.

It’s pretty much an invisible phenomenon. But the pleasurable shiver experienced as a result of a particularly vivid performance is a true occurrence. While not entirely proven by science, Autonomous Sensory Meridien Response, or ASMR, is backed by anecdotal evidence. When a buzz along the spine is prompted by art it generally signals that a feeling of euphoria has overwhelmed the spectator, resulting in a temporary state of awe. Except with Meiss that feeling tended to last the full three hours she was on the stage.

Neglected Gem #85: Just Before Dawn (1981)

Gregg Henry and Deborah Benson in Just Before Dawn (1981).

It’s difficult to pinpoint one thing above others that makes Just Before Dawn – a low-budget 1981 thriller about a group of campers stalked and terrorized in the Oregon mountains – uniquely memorable. It might be the unrelenting sense of height and verticality in its location setting; or its command of paradoxical tones, where stillness throbs and violence is static; or the unfailing intelligence of its artistic choices, from camerawork to acting to soundtrack. It might even be the fact that its first victim is probably the only character in movie history named Vachel – as in Vachel Lindsay, once-famed chanting poet and author of The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), the first book of film aesthetics published in America.

Dystopian Playground: Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last

Author Margaret Atwood. (Photo credit: IBL/REX Shutterstock)

Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, The Heart Goes Last, opens with spouses Stan and Charmaine living in squalor in their car following an economic collapse in the not-so-distant future. Charmaine waits tables for tips while Stan ruminates on his state of unemployment. He used to work in robotics, she used to work in a nursing home, and they used to be happy before things went horribly awry. Longing still for the illusory (North) American dream (let’s remember Atwood is Canadian), Stan and Charmaine are all too pleased to hear about the “Positron Project,” a utopian scheme where civilians spend one month living in Leave It To Beaver-style domestic bliss and the next in a neighbouring prison, alternating every 30 days for the rest of their lives. The twin cities of Positron and Consilience seem to be the answer to Stan and Charmaine’s prayers but anyone who’s ever read an Atwood novel will recognize from the get go that some things really are too good to be true.

Podcast: Interview with Judith Fitzgerald (1985)

Poet Judith Fitzgerald (1952-2015) passed away on November 25.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) 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. It was during that time that I first met and spoke with Canadian poet Judith Fitzgerald, who died last month at the age of 63.

Judith Fitzgerald did more than write verse. She was also a journalist and critic, as well as an editor and avid baseball fan. At the time I first met her in 1985 when her poetry collection, Given Names, was published, she was already a potent media critic in the Globe and Mail who had strong views on politics. When the Canadian Free Trade debate was raging, for instance, she took me to Massey Hall to attend a protest concert against the deal and I still recall her enraged voice cutting and echoing through the din of the performances from the stage.

She was dynamic, funny, razor sharp and a real beauty with a sweetness for life that was never cloying. We would talk together many times during the Eighties. But I thought I'd include our first conversation as a tribute today because besides tracing her sensibility as a writer, you can also hear the kindred spiritedness of a friendship beginning to bloom.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Judith Fitzgerald as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.
 

Tom Fulton was the host and producer of On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto for 23 years, beginning in 1975.

Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. 

Blunting the Snark: The Wiz Live!

Shanice Williams (left) and Elijah Kelley in NBC's The Wiz Live! (Photo by: Virginia Sherwood/NBC)

Over the last few years, the response to NBC’s live broadcasts of crowd-pleasing musicals has reminded the network’s executives of the power of snark in our culture. The concept, which began with 2013’s The Sound of Music Live!, is certainly one that theatre fans like me welcome: the network has, for three years running, staged productions for the holiday season, and the first one proved to be a monster hit in terms of ratings. Given the time of year when these specials air, they’re also smart in terms of how producers Craig Zedan and Neil Meron are attempting to recapture nostalgia for the TV specials of the 1950s, which featured stars like Mary Martin in shows like Peter Pan. Having a captive audience for a live event has become crucial in a time of declining ratings and delayed viewing, so even though many viewers tuned in to laugh at as much as enjoy The Sound of Music Live!, it still proved a savvy business decision for the network.

Alban Berg's Lulu and Modernism

Johan Reuter (as Dr. Schön) and Marlis Petersen (as Lulu) in Alban Berg's Lulu. (Photo: Ken Howard)

Alban Berg wrote his opera Lulu in the late twenties and early thirties, though because he died (in 1935) before he could complete the orchestrations for the third act, only acts one and two were included at its premiere in 1937, in Zurich. Of course it couldn’t have opened in Berg’s native Vienna, because of the Nazi ban on “decadent” art: Berg, a student of Schönberg (already a black mark against him since Schönberg was Jewish), adapted the scandalous fin-de-siècle Frank Wedekind plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, that Pabst had made into his landmark Expressionist silent Pandora’s Box in 1929. And because Berg’s widow blocked all efforts to finish his work, it wasn’t performed in its entirety until after her death, in 1979, when the Paris Opera mounted a celebrated production by Patrice Chéreau with Pierre Boulez conducting and the great Teresa Stratas in the title role. I was lucky enough to see a tape of it and it wasn’t like anything I’d ever encountered: the twelve-tone scale added a jagged, unstable quality to music that still somehow carried the whiff of nineteenth-century Viennese elegance. I hadn’t seen another Lulu until, last week, I caught the new production by the South African artist and director William Kentridge in the Met Live in HD series. Since three and a half decades have intervened, I couldn’t possibly trust my memory of Stratas and Chéreau’s staging well enough to compare the two versions, but I found both utterly thrilling.

Marvel's Jessica Jones: AKA Saviour Complex

Krysten Ritters stars in Marvel's Jessica Jones, current streaming on Netflix.

Welcome back to Hell's Kitchen. Our last glimpse into this especially dark corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was several months ago when Netflix launched Daredevil, the first of five projected Marvel television series. At the time, Daredevil was the most adult chapter of the narrative juggernaut that Marvel has been unfolding since the 2008 release of Iron Man. Daredevil told a surprisingly gritty and human story, a weighty and morally ambiguous entry that left behind the big screen world of alien invasions, laser-wielding raccoons, killer robots, and colourful, bantering superheroes. With the recent release of Jessica Jones, Netflix and Marvel return us to the grimy streets of New York City's Hell's Kitchen, but where Daredevil ends, Jessica Jones only begins – and the result is the darkest and most compelling story that Marvel has yet told.

Podcast: Interview with Paul Auster (1989)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) 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.

One of those interviews was with author Paul Auster. Over the course of his prolific career, Auster has written novels (The New York Trilogy, 1985-86), screenplays (The Music of Chance, 1993, Smoke, 1995), poetry, and memoirs (most recently, 2013's Report from the Interior). When I sat down with Auster in 1989, his novel Moon Palace had just been published.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Paul Auster as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1989.

Tom Fulton was the host and producer of On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto for 23 years, beginning in 1975.

Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. 

When Being Petty Makes You Big: Ross Petty's Final Boo

Ross Petty as Captain Hook in Peter Pan in Wonderland, Toronto's Elgin Theatre. (Photo: Racheal McCaig Photography)

Ross Petty, the Canadian actor who has helped make sick mean something awesome, takes his final bow as the creator of a Canadianized version of the traditional English Christmas pantomime he has produced for 20 years. This season's "fractured family musical" is Peter Pan in Wonderland and it's at Toronto's Elgin Theatre until Jan. 3. Tracey Flye directs Canadian playwright Chris Earle's pop culture-inspired script with a cast that includes panto stalwarts Dan Chameroy and Eddie Glen along with Jessica Holmes and Anthony MacPherson in the lead role. Petty plays the villain, as he does every year. Captain Hook will be his final stage role, he announced earlier in the summer, adding that he will continue to produce. Petty is nearing his 70th birthday and keeping up with the high-kicking dancers and fellow high-vamping actors is proving to be too much. I for one will miss him.

Watching Couples Watch Couples: Angelina Jolie Pitt’s By the Sea

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Pitt in By the Sea.

When I initially saw the trailer for By the Sea, Angelina Jolie’s latest foray into directing, I admit to being intrigued. I had questions: What was happening in this pretty but rather vague series of images? Why don’t they speak? Is that glamorous Angelina lying murdered on a luxurious carpet?! At the behest of logic and reason, I shelved these thoughts for a while until the synopsis caught me by surprise while I was browsing the local movie listings. It was something murky about “an American couple in the 1970s” retreating to a quiet seaside town to focus on their troubled marriage. It was maybe a line or two, and it told me nothing. Immediately, I fell for it. I was confident that I’d be sitting down to some weird, hushed noir film, a tale of love gone wrong culminating in a crime of passion. Readers, I was wrong.

Fast Forward: Joe Jackson, Then and Now

Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff.

Joe Jackson wears his heart on his sleeve. The Brit-Pop artist, who first came into public eye on the music scene in 1978, caught the attention of the world for his razor sharp wit and his no-nonsense rock music. He was on the wave, or I should say New Wave of British pop, which included Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and Ian Dury. Jackson’s articulate music stood out among the crowd of angry young men with attitude because his songs were much more sophisticated than the three-chord rock Costello et al brought to radio at the time.

Born in 1954, Jackson a piano player and alto sax player was influenced by Big Band jazz and classical repertoire while growing up. Jackson’s enriched and learned background in music had a lot of appeal considering the success of his debut album Look Sharp! (A&M) in 1979. He got regular airplay, toured the world and had a major label backing his every step. Clearly somebody at A&M believed Jackson made great music and they were right. He released eleven albums for the label until 1989, including two soundtracks Mike’s Murder and Tucker which showcased his talent as a composer. He fared quite well compared to Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe but Jackson wasn’t often mentioned in the same breath by fans or critics, perhaps because his punk attitude at the beginning of his career merely opened a door to higher achievement.

Creed: Going the Distance

Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone in Creed.

Creed is a film about legacy: the legacy of legendary fighter Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), whose shadow perpetually looms over the life of his son Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), and in a more meta sense, the legacy of the Rocky series, which has endured (despite several pitfalls) as one of cinema’s best and most inspiring character stories. Adonis – or Donnie, as he prefers to be called – must forge his own legacy, by both accepting his connection to his famous father and by earning his own place in the ring. So must director Ryan Coogler, in finding a way for his spinoff film to honour its pedigree while still standing tall on its own merit.

Literary Theatre: A Confederacy of Dunces and Thérèse Raquin

Nick Offerman, Talene Monahon, and Anita Gillette in A Confederacy of Dunces. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

John Kennedy Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces, published in 1980, more than a decade after Toole’s suicide, and awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, has a reputation as one of the great Southern novels (its setting is New Orleans in the early 1960s). But I confess to being a non-believer; for me, a little of Toole’s self-conscious wit and literary braggadocio goes a long way. I might find it less of a slog with a different protagonist, but Ignatius J. Reilly, the overfed misanthrope who lives off his indulgent mama until he’s thirty and then, landing a position at a pants company that he turns, through a combination of deviousness and perverseness and the stupidity of his supervisor, Mr. Gonzalez, into little more than a sinecure and an excuse for undermining his employer, doesn’t strike me as either especially clever or even slightly sympathetic. The book’s point of view seems to be that the world around Reilly is so infested with dunces that it deserves what it gets; the title is from Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him,” and Toole may also intend some link to Pope’s literary-satirical Dunciad. The novel has a happy ending because, try as he may, Reilly can’t do any real damage in a community of idiots. For this sort of idea, I much prefer Kaufman and Hart’s great 1930 hard-boiled comedy Once in a Lifetime, where the target is Hollywood at the dawn of sound and the hero who keeps landing on his feet, George, is a blissful dope himself. Reilly’s high-flown pronouncements about the decline of the western world (some of them delivered as he sits through the fare at his local movie house) didn’t make me laugh; they put me in a sour mood.

Life in the Shadows Never Ends: Simon Mawer's Marian Sutro Novels

Author Simon Mawer. (Photo: David Levenson)

Simon Mawer’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (Little, Brown 2012) – the American edition is Trapeze (Other Press, 2012) – and its sequel Tightrope (Little, Brown, 2015) is like reading two parts of the same novel. The more ambitious Tightrope can be read independently, but I think readers can derive more pleasure if they begins with the first. Reminiscent of Sebastian Faulkes’ Charlotte Gray, The Girl chronicles the war efforts of a young English woman with a Catholic francophone childhood who is recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the spy network, to become a secret agent. In the Scottish Highlands, Marian Sutro attends a school for spies where she undergoes commando training and learns among other skills how to survive interrogation. She is ultimately parachuted from an RAF bomber into the South-West of France to join the Resistance, along with a young irreverent Frenchman, Benoit. Although the work she knows will be dangerous and fraught with risk, Marian “felt only a great rush of excitement.” Throughout, she displays her bravery and when the occasion calls for it, she becomes a ruthless killer.

TIME Magazine: Sticking to the Old Ways, Fortunately

TIME magazine’s recent announcement that it has hired film critic Stephanie Zacharek to replace the late Richard Corliss, its longtime reviewer who passed away early this year, is welcome news for those of us who still buy magazines, value their continuity, and don’t want to see film critics thrown overboard in some misguided attempt to keep up with the times. When publications as diverse as Newsweek, Variety and The Village Voice canned their longtime critics, in recent years, including such stalwarts as David Ansen, Todd McCarthy and J. Hoberman , the future of film criticism, wobbly as it was in terms of overall quality, seemed even more dire. With the ascent of newer reviewers who don’t actually want to bring a real critical eye to their work (they don’t really deserve to be called film critics as they don’t/can’t criticize films but only praise them) and so many amateurs blogging their misguided, superficial and uninformed opinions on movies, there did not seem to be a place for the talented likes of Ms. Zacharek, who has toiled for the Boston Phoenix and The Village Voice, among others. Yet, here comes TIME which could have opted for a rotating slate of film critics, or no critics at all, attempting to keep the old ways going, allowing a prickly, original voice to carry the torch previously held aloft by TIME film critics, including Corliss, Richard Schickel (now retired), Jay Cocks and James Agee. Not only that, instead of routinely directing the readers of the print edition to go online to read most of the magazine’s critical reviews, as they used to recently do, they’ve of late opted to put most of those reviews in print instead and ceased tub-thumping for exclusively online content in the print publication, They still have separate online content, of course, but I no longer get the impression that it is paramount nor perceived by TIME’s editors, as more important to them then the weekly sent out to subscribers or sold on the newsstand. TIME’s decision to hire Zacharek comes on the heels of the startling announcement that Playboy magazine plans to phase out its nude pictorials, the ones that gave it cultural cachet when it was launched by Hugh Hefner in 1953. No doubt, those pictorials aren’t seen as nor are they as racy anymore in an age when mainstream pornography is aired regularly on (pay) TV (in Canada, at least), but it’s the exact opposite of what TIME has done, in terms of honouring its traditions. Playboy is turning itself into Esquire or GQ – profile pieces, interviews and lifestyle concepts geared towards an upwardly mobile male readership – while TIME tries to maintain important aspects of what it has traditionally done for decades. I think the latter has more merit and should be commended for not bending to the internet’s seemingly implacable Borg-like will.

Bridge of Spies: Phony Baloney

Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies.

The opening sequence of Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, where, in 1957, the slippery British-born Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) manages to elude the FBI for the last time before he’s caught, is both excitingly and wittily filmed. Rylance, a much-lauded stage and recently TV star (he played Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall) who hasn’t been tapped by the movies until now, turns the tension between Abel’s hyperawareness and his calm, almost languid air into a sort of music-hall routine with a whiff of melancholy. But as soon as Abel is sent to prison to await trial for espionage and James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is urged by his law firm to act as his defense attorney, the movie flattens out. How did Spielberg and the writers, Joel and Ethan Coen and Matt Charman, manage to turn the fascinating, twisty story of Abel – the Cold War spy who ended up being traded to the Soviets for both the captured pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), an American economics student in Berlin arrested for suspicion of espionage – into a civics lesson? Somehow, instead of releasing the storytelling master in Spielberg – the director who could make the three-hour Munich so gripping – Bridge of Spies brings out his earnest, big-studio-era, socio-sentimental side. Janusz Kaminski’s period cinematography is gorgeous and vivifying, but the movie behind it is as glazed as Always, his 1989 remake of A Guy Named Joe, with Richard Dreyfuss in the Spencer Tracy part. And this time around he’s got Tom Hanks, who plays Jim Donovan as if he were Tracy.

Revisiting The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

What is a Witcher? With the roaring success of this year’s medieval fantasy The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, most gamers know all about Geralt of Rivia and his flair for demon hunting, but it wasn’t too long ago that we were asking ourselves this question. In 2011, Polish video game developers CD Projekt RED released their first crack at a console game, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Assassins of Kings took a relatively unknown story from a relatively unplayed PC game (simply titled, The Witcher) and ran with it. Obviously, CD Projekt RED had a lot of narrative gaps to fill in for their rapidly growing fanbase.

Acclimatizing the Pontar Valley’s sudden influx of Xbox 360 gamers to The Witcher 2‘s environment was no easy task but CD Projekt RED delivered. With the help of gorgeous cinematics (my favourite, an introductory one titled “What is a Witcher?”), a detailed inventory menu, and the expansive journal entries favoured by the best lore-heavy RPGS, Projekt RED rendered playing The Witcher 1 almost entirely unnecessary. For newcomers looking to immerse themselves in The Witcher 3’s award-winning open world, however, Witcher 2 is a crucial starting point –  not just for the backstory it offers but also because it’s a really phenomenal game in its own right.

The Winter's Tale: A Riveting Reinterpretation

Piotr Stanczyk and Hannah Fischer in Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter's Tale. (Photo: Karolina Kuras)

In choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s riveting reinterpretation of The Winter’s Tale, a new full-length ballet which the National Ballet of Canada presented this past week at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre, the dancer portraying King Leontes, the troubled and troubling monarch at the heart of Shakespeare’s brilliantly convoluted story, collapses the palm of his hand and ripples the fingers in imitation of a spider. It’s not a move typically associated with ballet but on this occasion it serves as a fluent example of the art form’s ability to communicate powerful emotions and universal themes without the use of words.

The expressionistic gesture renders in physical terms the metaphor of the spider conjured by Leontes in the play when describing an onslaught of jealousy. Suspecting that his good wife, Hermione, is having an affair with his best friend, Polixenes, King of Bohemia, the suddenly sick-at-heart King of Sicilia says he feels as though he has drunk a cup “with a spider steep’d” and this has cracked “his gorge, his sides,/With violent hefts.”

Leontes’ deluded belief that an infidelity has indeed occurred is the pivot on which the rest of the play turns, veering sharply from a scene of domestic bliss to one of tragedy. Shakespeare’s late career problem play will later shift back to comedy mode once the King, in a sense, kills the spider gnawing at his sanity. The antidote will be love and forgiveness whose powers of redemption Leontes rediscovers in due time. These are large ideas, fundamentally Christian in nature, and the wonder of The Winter’s Tale is that they endure even when translated into the mute art of dance.

Falling for Dance, Canadian Style

DanceBrazil performed Jelon Vierira’s Malungos at Toronto's Fall for Dance North festival. (Photo: Andrea Mohin)

Toronto fell big time for the inaugural Fall for Dance North festival that took over the city’s Sony Centre earlier in the autumn. An initiative of artistic director Ilter Ibrahimof and executive director Madeleine Skoggard, the two-part program showcased exciting new dance creation from across Canada, and other points around the world including New York where the Fall for Dance franchise launched in 2004. Like the original, Fall for Dance North (so-called because of the event’s revamped presence north of the 49th parallel) offered up a variety of dance styles at a cost of $10 a ticket. The Sony Centre, which seats approximately 3,200, was sold-out for each of the three performances that took place from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 – proof that if you make dance affordable the people will come. But that wasn’t the only reason the festival packed them in.

Steve Jobs: Turn It Off

Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs in Steve Jobs.

In Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, released a couple of months ago, you can feel the documentarian Alex Gibney struggling to find a shape for the story of this icon – a way of bridging the gap between his narcissism and callousness and the heroic status he occupies in the minds of millions of people. And the impossibility of building that bridge becomes the focus; the tone of the doc is as quizzical as it is critical and astonished. I found the movie’s ambling approach a little frustrating, but mostly I admired its refusal to pretend to have worked out a finished portrait of Jobs, and the material Gibney comes up with is fascinating. By contrast, the dramatic feature Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin (based on Walter Isaacson’s biography) and directed by Danny Boyle, exudes an air of gleaming confidence and it has a carefully groomed look – I’d say vellum-bound. (The production design is by Guy Hendrix Dyas and the cinematography is by Alwin Küchler; Elliot Graham edited it.) But these two A-list filmmakers and their A-list star, Michael Fassbender, don’t even get close to creating a convincing portrait of Jobs or of the empire he created, was exiled from, and eventually returned to as its reigning monarch.