Total Depravity: AMC’s Preacher

Dominic Cooper stars in Preacher, on AMC. (Photo: Lewis Jacobs)

The rise of nerd culture to a dominant position over the last decade or so has been enough to give one an inkling of what it must have been like to watch the final triumph of early Christianity over pagan Rome. A small movement with a keen sense of its own oppression has ascended to dominance, turning its beliefs and enthusiasms, once considered odd and marginal, into the norm. Whereas expressing an interest in things like comic books and science fiction would once have been an invitation for ridicule and even bullying, such things are now firmly in the mainstream. Indeed, nerd culture has managed to become so dominant that some of its fans have begun to act in the same manner as their former oppressors. For instance, film critics (especially female ones) who dare to criticize an entry in the endless parade of superhero movies often find themselves facing vicious criticism, even personal threats.

A more benign manifestation of nerd-dom’s newfound power appears in the recent wave of television adaptations of fantasy, sci-fi, and comic-book franchises, including hits such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. AMC’s new drama Preacher, which is based on a comic series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, aims to tap into the audience for those shows. It even comes complete with an aftershow, Talking Preacher, that’s dedicated to discussing the latest episode and is hosted by Chris Hardwick, whom one can always count upon to be uncritically enthusiastic about anything nerd-related. I mention all of this because, since I saw the pilot, I’ve been trying to account for the mostly positive critical response to a show that’s alternately too glib and self-important, too frantic and slow-moving, in its first episode.

Grating Expectations: ABC's The Family

Rupert Graves, Liam James, and Joan Allen in The Family on ABC.

You can usually tell when a movie is bad in about the first half-hour. But how can you be sure when a television series has suddenly turned turtle? I lasted only a few episodes into the first season of Fear the Walking Dead, the spin-off to AMC's The Walking Dead, which depicted the zombie apocalypse beginning to grip LA. It seems the writers and producers wanted us to believe that there was no news media (or social media) even covering it. As we witness the carnage and mayhem of flesh-eaters pawing for their next victim, nobody once turned on a radio, a television set, or even checked their Twitter (or Facebook) feed to find out what's going on. I decided then that the writers didn't know what was going on either and I bailed. Yet no one seemed to care if the world of Fear the Walking Dead appeared fake. It went on to become a huge hit that's just finished its second season. The lack of a believable society with coherent character development didn't seem to matter to viewers or critics – as long as we could sit happily in dread waiting out the suspense for the next bit of chomping. A terrible movie can be shaken most times minutes after you leave the theatre. But a bad television show can linger for weeks because you probably invested far more time hoping for the best. Perhaps that's why viewers often bring such lowered expectations to television. It lessens the blow if things go bad. As Bob Dylan once said, "If you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose."

Movies generally have about two hours to make their case, but a TV show has to create a narrative that holds you for weeks. To do that, a series needs to build momentum in the plotting to keep the viewer in a state of continuous anticipation. The narrative therefore doesn't grow out of the characters' motivations – it's more often the other way around. And it can come at the expense of dramatic credibility. Unlike many other viewers, I just couldn't believe the premise of Breaking Bad, where an unassuming high school chemistry teacher with the luck of Job finds out that life can be much worse when he's diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The show's solution of turning him into a meth dealer out of financial desperation seemed too self-consciously imposed on the character. To me, it did nothing more than create a running motor for a downward spiraling vortex where Walter White (Bryan Cranston) gets pulled into a life of criminality for the sake of the family (rather than convincingly demonstrating why this was his only option). In Dexter, the moralism got even thicker. The program's creators turn their detective serial killer into someone who kills only those who are worse than him so that viewers can be spared being implicated in the darkness of his psychopathy. What makes something like The Americans such a compelling series drama is that in finding a precarious balance between character drama and plot momentum (a gift that The Sopranos also shared) they came to challenge and complicate our notions of right and wrong rather than boiling things down to 'the dark side of human nature.'

But if Breaking Bad and Dexter still got by in the compelling confines of their suspense plots, ABC's The Family devises new ways of falling to pieces in just telling a story. After missing for a decade, the young son of a mayor in Maine, Claire Warren (Joan Allen), returns home. Adam Warren (Liam James) is initially greeted with joy and relief by the clan who assumed he'd been kidnapped and murdered by a local pedophile (Andrew McCarthy). In the days after his return, however, suspicions arise about his true identity and whether forces of betrayal and corruption have placed an impostor in the family home conveniently at the moment when Claire is about to run for governor. Before the idiocies in the plot turn The Family into inadvertent camp, the notion of having a child return to his home after being presumed dead for years was novel. Often we get stories of how families cope with their enduring loss, but seldom on what the effects might be if their wishes came true and they ultimately come home. The one interesting dramatic idea gets torpedoed by a series of melodramatic plot twists that defy belief.

Cracked: Christoph Marthaler’s Une île flottante at Montreal's FTA

Christoph Marthaler’s Une île flottante opened Montreal's Festival TransAmériques on May 26. (Photo: Simon Hallström)

There’s a moment in Christoph Marthaler’s absurdist bilingual play, Une île flottante, when you wonder what came first, the chicken or the egg? The question is relevant as a way of understanding the power behind a comedic tour de force whose German title, Das Weiss vom Ei, translates as egg white, the food that binds other ingredients together. But before exploring that conundrum, let’s first establish that there are no chickens in the two-hour-plus play, presented with surtitles, that opened the ongoing avant-garde Festival TransAmériques in Montreal last Thursday.

Writing Verse for the Universe: Paul Simon’s Stranger to Stranger

Paul Simon new album, Stranger to Stranger, will be released on Friday, June 3rd. (Photo: Myrna Suarez) 

Whenever I read about the music of Paul Simon I rarely see the word “innovator," but if the word could be used to describe someone with a good pair of ears and a street-wise sense of rhythm, Simon would definitely fit the description. His catalogue is full of “innovative works” – from the Gospel feel of There Goes Rhymin Simon (1973), the African-flavoured Graceland (1986),  to the electronically embellished Surprise (2006) – which prove that Paul Simon is a composer whose sense of innovation, if not subtle, is carefully articulated. But his songs have such wide-ranging appeal even the most astute listener can forget that Simon brings an adventurous sense to all of his music by constantly changing the so-called “Paul Simon Songbook” formula he established in the sixties. Over the years he’s become a builder of songs by establishing a beat or rhythm, writing the all-important first line and telling a story. His new record is no exception. Stranger To Stranger, (Concord) which is Simon’s 13th solo recording, is another fresh and inventive album of songs that mashup metallic percussion with backward tapes, sotto voce narratives and cosmic sounds from another world all laced with his whimsical sense of humour.

Inexcusable – X-Men: Apocalypse

Jennifer Lawrence (in blue) and Oscar Isaac (in gray) in X-Men: Apocalypse.

Batman v Superman made me angry . It was an affront to my sensibilities, both as a nerd who cares about how comic book characters are portrayed, and as a conscious human being who paid real, hard-earned money for my ticket. X-Men Apocalypse, the newest entry in Bryan Singer’s comic book saga, isn’t the kind of bad superhero movie that makes you angry. It’s mostly just the kind that makes you sleepy. Consider it like free time: if you have any plans to make, or philosophical ruminations you’d like to ponder, or quiet meditation to catch up on, or any particularly interesting games to play on your phone, then your screening of X-Men Apocalypse can function as a twelve-dollar relaxation getaway (albeit with a few violent CGI explosions). I think thanks are due Bryan Singer, for giving us all a safe space in which to ignore his crappy movie, and focus on the things that really matter, like what you want to have for dinner that night. Thanks, Bryan!

I gave Singer’s last X-Men film, Days of Future Past, a glowing review. I haven’t seen it since, so perhaps the bloom will have fallen off the rose by now, but I genuinely liked the film at the time, and made a point of referencing the intelligence of its storytelling and how it treated both its source material and its audience with respect. It’s kind of amazing that in two years the situation has totally flipped with this new sequel: Singer has abandoned everything that made his franchise interesting or unique, and I’ve abandoned the franchise as a result. I’m done with this X-Men crap; I’m out. If it’s all going to be the same stuff – the same character relationships that never evolve, the same mutants using the same powers, the same tired origin story beats we’ve seen a million times before – regurgitated with less passion and engagement each time, then there’s nothing these X-Men movies have to offer anymore. I came away from Apocalpyse feeling baffled: it’s boring, bloated, familiar, and pointless.

Three Musicals: My Paris, Anastasia, Presto Change-O

Mara Davi and Bobby Steggert in My Paris, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre.. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The music in My Paris is breezy but it gives off the unmistakable whiff of melancholy and regret. It’s on the cusp of light jazz, honky-tonk and folk; it’s reminiscent of the sort of thing Django Reinhardt used to play in Paris in the twenties and thirties, but most of the time it sounds like the music chanteurs like Charles Aznavour and Charles Trenet are famous for. That’s no surprise, since Aznavour himself wrote the score, and even though Jason Robert Brown’s translations saddle it with banalities, sometimes of the self-help brand (one second-act number is called “You Do It for You”), the music is a good enough reason to check out this new musical about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. (It was workshopped at the Goodspeed Opera House last summer.)

The Human Cost of Policing and Security in the Novels of Robert Wilson

Novelist Robert Wilson. (Photo: Gabriel Pecot)

“He felt empty and immensely distressed. Police work did this to him. When it was all over, there was nothing left but disappointment. Mystery gone, quest terminated. All that was left was an overwhelming sense of loss and pointlessness.”

– Robert Wilson, The Ignorance of Blood, 2009.

“You can’t kill someone, even if it is in the heat of the battle and remain the same. Once you’ve felt that kind of savagery and done that kind of damage to a fellow human you can never re-enter the world of men. You are always going to be separate, an outsider. Some can live with it, others can’t.”

– Robert Wilson, You Will Never Find Me, 2015. 

I suspect that most readers of Critics at Large are not familiar with the British novelist, Robert Wilson. My goal in this review is to change that condition by sharing my own excitement for this unique voice. Wilson occupies a space somewhere between writing police procedurals and thrillers. In his early novels written in the first person, he sounds a little like Raymond Chandler but as he progresses, the best work of Alan Furst comes to mind. Whether his novels are set in West Africa (the Bruce Medway quartet), in Portugal (where he lived for a time), in Seville Spain, or in London UK, Wilson writes with authority, offering both shrewd political and social commentary and astute psychological insights. Moreover, he writes well – spicing his narratives with lovely images that regularly invite a re-read.

Love, Fire and Misty: Ratmansky at the Met

Misty Copeland in Alexei Ratmansky’s Firebird, at New York's Metropolitan Opera House. (Photo: Andrea Mohin)

Misty Copeland, the most popular ballerina in the land right now, and one of only a handful to have become a household name even among non-balletomanes, reprised her lead role in Firebird at The Metropolitan Opera House in New York last week. True to her billing, she burned up the stage. Dressed in a cherry bomb red unitard and a plumed headdress of different coloured feathers, Copeland attacked Alexei Ratmansky’s incisive choreography with an incendiary technique that propelled the dancer forward through a series of searing shapes that electrified the imagination. Partnered by the wonderfully assured and attentive Marcelo Gomes, Copeland’s explosive performance flew upwards on air-borne jumps and galvanic leaps that seemed as supernatural as the magical bird at the heart of this most vivid retelling of the Russian fairy tale. Her percussive pointe work pecked and pawed and her expressive porte de bras fluttered and unfurled in an amazing display of bodily acting that brought the mythical creature to life.

Off the Shelf: Bruce Cockburn's Inner City Front (1981)

Bruce Cockburn, 1972. (Photo: Ron Bull)

In 1970, Bruce Cockburn had launched his first solo album. On it, he happily celebrated the virtues of rural life. In the years to follow, as his records evolved, he even began to introduce jazz (Night Vision) and reggae rhythms (Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws). On his album covers, Cockburn was occasionally seen perched under a tree with his acoustic guitar and surrounded by a gentle sprinkling of snow, or maybe next to a warm fireplace, as he was on his third album, Sunwheel Dance. His songs were both poetic and spiritual – at times, even mystical – as he discovered Christianity, yet they were continuously evocative and sly glimmers of quiet intelligence sparkled through the lyrics. Until 1980, Bruce Cockburn seemed happy to continue personifying the quiet comforts of Canada’s untamed landscape. But then, one day…. he moved to Toronto. After some personal changes in his life, including a divorce, Bruce Cockburn came to the city and his music was transformed dramatically with a record called Inner City Front – the first album he’d produce himself. It was a full-out electric record featuring a full band rather than just some guest musicians. The music within the grooves of Inner City Front was also a hybrid of rock, jazz, electronica and reggae. There was only one ballad – and it was right at the end of the record. Inner City Front had signalled a shift in the life and art of one of Canada’s most original and gifted performers. And the album would provide the groundwork for many of the sophisticated pop songs that Bruce Cockburn would record during the Eighties.

Mate or Die: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster

Jessica Barden and Colin Farrell in The Lobster.

LOBSTER: A clawed crustacean of the order Decapoda and family Nephropidae. Characterized by muscular tails and large front claws, lobsters have been known to live upwards of 70 years due to their unusual expression of the DNA-repairing enzyme, telomerase, into their adult lives. Widely consumed as seafood.

THE LOBSTER: Not to be confused with an actual lobster (although they share some similarities, namely their astonishing longevity), The Lobster is the English-language feature debut of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps). The dystopian dark comedy was filmed in Ireland and co-produced by companies in Ireland, Greece, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. With an incredible score borrowed from the likes of Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich, it is consumed selectively by small audiences with a taste for absurdity and cultural criticism.

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XVIII

Looking as androgynous and funky as Little Richard in Jimi Hendrix's duds, Prince wrote music that was sexually charged, playfully lewd and enthusiastically impudent. In other words, he was precisely the tonic the Eighties needed. "Prince is bad," Johnny 'Guitar' Watson once remarked. "It's like seeing Sly [Stone], James Brown and Jimi Hendrix all at once." Right at a time when sex was again becoming a mortal sin, Prince turned sex into a quest for salvation. His album, Dirty Mind (1980), was a blissfully torrid celebration of eroticism. His band, both racially and sexually integrated, was supercharged, just as Sly & the Family Stone had been before them. Also like Sly, Prince mixed musical genres which caused mass confusion at radio stations that couldn't decide whether he was R&B or rock. By the time his third album, 1999, came out in 1982, however, it didn't seem to matter. The infectiously coy "Little Red Corvette" shot into the American Top 10. Thanks to MTV and the video culture it bred, Prince became the first black crossover artist (along with Michael Jackson) to help broaden the network's musical palette.

At the height of his success in 1984, Prince made his movie debut in the R-rated Purple Rain. James Dean had made his astonishing debut in East of Eden almost thirty years earlier, playing a misunderstood loner. Prince (calling himself 'the Kid'), followed the same pattern, portraying a moody, struggling artist. Purple Rain mythologized his status in the pop world, and one song from its soundtrack ("Darling Nikki") generated the type of controversy that captured the attention of Mary Elizabeth 'Tipper' Gore. She was so horrified when her young daughter bought the record with a song about a guy who meets a woman masturbating with a magazine that she helped launch the PMRC in order to toilet train pop performers. So in both memory and tribute to the artist known as Prince, it seems fitting to send him off with one of what Gore would call the "Filthy Fifteen" songs which launched the censorious body that Frank Zappa, Dee Snyder and John Denver stood before Congress to fight.

On Finishing Last: Shane Black’s The Nice Guys

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys.

Shane Black has been operating, to use the gaming term, on "god mode" for most of his career. He's one of those filmmakers whose most dismal failures (see: 1987’s The Monster Squad) are still sharper, funnier, and cleverer than anything else on the marquee. This isn't to say he's immune to failure, far from it; even when his films are as smart and compelling as The Long Kiss Goodnight, for example, they're likely to do just as well at the box office as that one did (which is to say, not at all). In lieu of significant financial returns, Black has carved out a nonetheless comfortable niche as a purveyor of genius-level shlock, a peddler of pulp with aspirations of grandeur that, like the characters in his noir-tinted screenplays, never gets the riches and recognition he (probably, mostly) deserves.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is one of my favourite films, and it’s hard not to see The Nice Guys as a spiritual successor. They’re similar on the surface: a washed-up detective takes a rough-and-tumble type under his wing to help uncover a mystery lurking at the edge of civilized society, set against the glitz, glamour, and hidden agendas of the City of Angels. Everyone has a secret. And everyone has a price. It’s a noir potboiler setup so familiar that, were it not for Black’s talent at executing this kind of stuff (and the relative lack of noir mysteries in cinemas, especially at this time of year), it would be downright boring. Thankfully, a tight script, a great cast, and a consistently charming sense of humour save it from the same fate that Black’s other works have suffered.

Complications: Lucy Prebble's The Effect

Susannah Flood and Carter Hudson in The Effect, at New York City's Barrow Street Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

In The Effect by the young British playwright Lucy Prebble, a woman and a man in their twenties who have volunteered to take part in a six-week clinical trial for a new anti-depressant fall in love and start breaking the rules governing the procedure: first they wander out of bounds and then they have sex. The play, which is being given a fine production under David Cromer’s direction at the Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village, is intriguing and enjoyable, though – at least at a first viewing – a bit elusive. The first act takes the form of an unorthodox romantic comedy in which Connie (Susannah Flood) and Tristan (Carter Hudson) struggle to interpret their feelings, and each other’s feelings, when they’re aware that their emotional and sexual responses may be the consequence of the drug they’re being fed every morning, the dosage of which is being increased gradually. That is, the drug they may be taking, or only one of them may be ingesting, because some of the volunteers are in fact being given placebos. Dr. Lorna James (Kati Brazda), who is administering the trial for Dr. Toby Sealey (Steve Key), is also aware of these variables, though not, as it turns out, of all of them. She and Toby debate the other possibility – that it’s sexual attraction that is altering Connie and Tris, not the drug, and if that’s the case their incipient relationship may be corrupting the data. Love is so complicated and unpredictable to begin with that the idea of a play where drugs may be adding another layer of lunacy to romantic chemistry is irresistibly playful. There are more complications too. Lorna and Toby once had an affair, at a moment when her life was falling apart. And – unlike the subjects of the trial – she has a history of depression.

Cold War, Warming Up: FX’s The Americans

Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell in FX's The Americans.

One of the unique aspects of television as a popular medium is its ability to foster and deepen longstanding relationships between a given program’s audience and characters. Whereas a movie generally has to establish a connection within a two to three-hour time frame, TV shows can build on our emotional ties to characters and the situations in which they find themselves over years. Done properly, this sustained engagement can lead to especially satisfying – or devastating – payoffs to long-running plot or character dynamics, as well as an increasing sense of connection to shows that might initially come off as a bit distant and chilly. This has especially been the case for me with FX’s superb The Americans.
 

Coming of (a New) Age: The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Bel Powley and Alexander Skarsgård in The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015).

In 2003, the movie Thirteen, written by fledgling actress Nikki Reed (Twilight) and Catherine Hardwicke garnered critical acclaim for its bold, provocative portrayal of the seedy secret lives of early teens experimenting with drugs, sex, and alcohol. While films like American Pie (1999) offered a frank but socially acceptable look at the first sexual forays of young men, Thirteen followed the trajectory for exploring budding sexuality in young girls set by a long history of grim, moralizing tales from Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel, Clarissa, to Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013). Although still largely regarded as one of the more honest and realistic glimpses into what teens are up to behind closed doors, Thirteen did nothing new for women’s sexuality or autonomy – it reminded us, as stories have told us since time immemorial, that young women who give in to sexual desire, who dare to experiment with sex or drugs, are opening the door to a world of victimhood, shame, and regret.

Tackling almost exactly the same subject matter as Harwicke’s Thirteen, Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl differs only in setting, critical buzz, and, most importantly, tone. Adapted from a semi-autobiographical graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, the 2015 film offers a candid and refreshing story of a teen girl’s incredibly messy first sexual experiences growing up in 1970s San Francisco. Minnie Goetz (newcomer Bel Powley) is a 15-year-old who likes drawing (the film is embellished with 70s-inspired, Monty Python-esque comic drawings from Minnie’s imagination), doesn’t love school, and lives in a cozy, liberal household with her free spirit mother (Kristen Wiig), gawky but adorable little sister, Gretel (Abby Wait), and any number of mom’s party friends who’ve come to crash for the night. After he accidentally grazes her boob with his hand, mom’s handsome underachiever boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård, complete with bell-bottoms and porn-star mustache) becomes the object of Minnie’s overwhelming teenage lust. The two embark on an ill-advised affair behind her mother’s back which Minnie chronicles in an audio diary comprised of a series of unmarked cassette tapes carelessly strewn about her bedroom. Naturally, Minnie’s sexual awakening via Monroe leads her to satisfy her curiosity about a slew of other taboo subjects which she also records for posterity, alongside her musings about standard 15-year-old topics like whether or not losing her virginity makes her look different, if paramour Monroe masturbates thinking about her, and, less directly, about the complex and often confusing overlap between a good lay and actual love. The diaries, like Minnie, are unreserved and unashamed; her voice is clear, direct, and distinct while being unmistakably teenage.

Rachel & Alice & Obama

Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married (2008).

In a campaign year which has been filled with anger, violence and rancor, there hasn't been a spirit of hope that many drew from Obama's first ascension to the Presidency. What we have been witnessing in the primaries so far is an ugly reaction to it. Donald Trump, a demagogue Paul Bunyan, lumbers across the land promising walls – both real and figurative – to keep out Muslim and Mexican immigrants and restore America to a greatness he perceives as a land that never had Barack Obama as President. (Trump is the paranoid Truther who first began assailing the presidency by challenging the legitimacy of Obama's citizenship.) The Republican Presidential hopeful isn't stoking the ideals in his country but playing instead to its discontent. Stirring and seeking anger wherever he finds it, especially in the white working-class, he isn't interested in salving the sources of their wounds, but marshaling the power of their rage to vote him in. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton talks and conducts herself as the power broker politician. If Trump speaks to the ugly underside of American exceptionalism, Clinton addresses the unidentifiable masses that make up the country. Given that she comes across like a high-powered CEO who has a demographic sense of her own constituents, it's understandable that she hasn't convinced many disenchanted younger voters to hop on board. They've chosen instead the populist caboose of socialist Bernie Sanders who reaches out to their despair like a crotchety Woody Guthrie and invokes a Promised Land that will build bridges rather than Donald Trump's walls. But his own campaign has been lately doing its own share of erecting walls especially in the face of Clinton's ascending victory as the Democratic choice for President. Unless these two sides truly make peace, a Trump victory is not only highly possible, it will most certainly be a reality. And we'll have as the new President, the anti-Obama.

Cuban Missiles of the Human Kind: The Ballet Nacional de Cuba's Don Quixote

Photo by Nancy Reyes, courtesy of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal & Ballet Nacional de Cuba.

The castanets heard clicking through Don Quixote, the ballet that opened at Place des Arts on May 4 for a three-night run, echoed the rat-a-tat-tat of heartbeats thrilling at the return of Ballet Nacional de Cuba to Montreal following a five-year absence. The Ludwig Minkus score might have been canned, but the pulse of the Iberian rhythms felt vivid enough for the capacity audience to stand on its feet and clap along, simulating the passions of the fiery fiesta erupting on stage.

Prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso – and rare is the dancer in the history of ballet who owns that superlative title – created her version of the 19th century classic to restore the ballet to its Latin origins. While based on the Spanish novel that Miguel de Cervantes first published in 1605, Don Quixote has been in foreign hands since first appearing as a ballet in 1869. Transplanted Parisian Marius Petipa adapted Cervantes' story for the Imperial Ballet of Russia, working closely with composer Minkus to produce a four-act Spanish-accented extravaganza that many companies around the globe have since included in their repertoires. Alexander Gorsky updated the Petipa ballet for Moscow in 1900, and this is the version Alonso relied on when creating her version of Don Quixote in 1998. She likely learned it growing up, instructed by Russian teachers.

Barron and Charlap: The Art of the Jazz Trio

In 1961, at 19 years of age, a young pianist named Kenny Barron broke into the heart of the jazz scene just as it was peaking in popularity and innovation. Barron (born in Philadelphia, the city of John Coltrane) moved to New York and free-lanced with the young lions Roy Haynes, Lee Morgan and James Moody, three different and yet distinct voices in American music. As the jazz form stretched out, he enriched his musical vocabulary and became a working sideman. Barron proved himself worthy of such stellar company by cutting his first record in 1962 with James Moody. Moody recommended the young piano-player to Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was infatuated with the Afro-Cuban sounds in those days and his influence on Barron was profound. Between 1962 and 1968, Barron had steady work with either Gillespie or Moody in a rich repertoire of standards, be-bop and Afro-Cuban music. By 1971 he joined the truly adventurous reed-player Yusef Lateef for six albums released on Atlantic Records. Barron’s talent lie in his ability to fuse all these musical styles (be-bop, Latin, Avant-Garde) while building his own voice, making him one of the most versatile pianists in jazz. As the decades followed, Barron quietly made his mark as a soloist and bandleader. Over the years, he’s cut some memorable records with Stan Getz and Charlie Haden. His splendid 2014 release with bassist Dave Holland, called The Art of Conversation (Impulse), was marvelous recording.

Kenny Barron’s new release is called Book of Intuition (Impulse) and it’s everything one would expect from this veteran musician: passion, joy and sensitivity. Kiyoshi Kitagawa, bass, and Johnathan Blake, drums, round out the trio on this occasion.

One Last Adventure – Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

A Thief's End is the fourth and final game in Naughty Dog's Uncharted series.

I’ve never reviewed an Uncharted game, because I’ve found it to be a mostly disposable series. Nathan Drake (Nolan North) going off on his light, fun, Indiana Jones-style adventures resulted in some eye-catching setpieces but few lasting memories for me (and, in hindsight, it may have been that same resemblance to Indiana Jones which failed to charm me; you have to work real hard to beat Indy at his own game). The high level of visual polish and cinematic flair of Drake’s globetrotting quests provided some temporary “wow moments,” and the characterization and mo-cap performance of Drake and his companions were definite touchstones in turn of the century storytelling in games, but these elements were hamstrung by lackluster combat sections, which interrupted the smooth linear flow of story and gameplay (mostly revolving around traversing the lush environments and solving ancient puzzles). The Uncharted series always struck me as a series of impressive, if slightly forgettable games – until the fourth iteration, that is. Drake’s adventures came to an end, and it was there at the edge of the map that Uncharted and I finally made communion.

Do I Hear a Waltz?: An Encores! Misstep

Melissa Errico and Richard Troxell in Do I Hear a Waltz? (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

Stephen Sondheim’s only collaboration with Richard Rodgers was the 1965 musical Do I Hear a Waltz?, adapted by Arthur Laurents from his 1952 Broadway success The Time of the Cuckoo. Shirley Booth had starred in the play, as a lonely Midwesterner who comes to Venice on vacation in the hopes of enjoying a romantic fling, and Katharine Hepburn took over the role in David Lean’s 1955 film version, Summertime. Though Sondheim’s early musicals were partnerships with other composers – West Side Story with Leonard Bernstein and Gypsy with Jule Styne – he had established himself as a composer-lyricist with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Anyone Can Whistle at the beginning of the sixties. But Rodgers was, of course, the fabled writing partner of Sondheim’s adolescent mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, and Laurents was the man who wrote the book for Gypsy, so he agreed to the collaboration. But these two men of strikingly different sensibilities didn’t get along, and though the musical had a modest run it didn’t make much of an impression. (Neither did the leading lady, Elizabeth Allen.) And Sondheim has never thought much of it; in interviews and in his book Finishing the Hat he’s referred to it, quoting his friend, Rodgers’ daughter Mary a “why?” musical – as in “Why bother turning this material into a musical?”

Last weekend’s revival by Encores! marks the first time Do I Hear a Waltz? has been produced in New York since the original production. I saw the show as a teenager and know the cast album well, and I’ve always thought that the material was interesting and the score had considerable charm. Except for a couple of songs in No Strings, it’s the only late Rodgers score worth listening to; the ballads are especially lovely. Leona, the protagonist, thinks of herself as independent and resilient, but she’s febrile, with an all-or-nothing romantic fervor and fragile sensibilities; “Why is it I get so easily hurt?” she asks herself in one lyric, and the answer seems to be that she alternates between asking too much and not having the flexibility or the courage to accept what she’s offered if it’s not perfect. “Throw the dream away,” the Venetian shopkeeper Renato Di Rossi, who courts her, pleads in another song; he’s married, but in a union that has long since passed from passion into a state of mutual respect, and he doesn’t have money. The musical pits Leona’s Yankee puritanism with a more relaxed European attitude toward sex, embodied not only in Renato but also in Signora Fioria, the middle-aged proprietor of the pensione where Leona stays with two American couples. Signora Fioria seduces the younger of the two men, a painter named Eddie Yeager, whose marriage to the naïve, trusting Jennifer has begun to fray at the edges. When Leona spots Eddie going off in a gondola with the hotelkeeper, her moral shock is piled on top of her difficulties in taking Renato as he is, for good and for ill. The second act is overloaded: Laurents introduces one too many plot strands and the climactic scene teeters on the edge of melodrama, or perhaps goes over that edge, depending on your point of view and, I would think, the quality of the production.