Watching and Worrying – David Thomson's Television: A Biography

Television can’t be an easy thing to write a book about, given its rapid ongoing evolution into new forms – given, too, the sheer unconquerable volume of sound and image, brilliance and nonsense that have coursed from the small screen since it buzzed to something like life in the late 1930s. But David Thomson, one of our best historian-critics, is also one of our most ambitious writers. Among his more than 30 books are two major critical histories of film, one focusing on Hollywood (2004’s The Whole Equation), the other taking a more global vantage (2012’s The Big Screen). His mammoth Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in 1975, is now in its sixth edition, and he writes a detailed, eccentric, irresistible “personal introduction to 1,000 films” (2008’s “Have You Seen … ?”) with the same bell-ringing ease that Johnny B. Goode brought to playing a guitar. So it’s with a rueful smile and admiring shake of the head that we who know Thomson’s tendencies to great scale and world-encompassing thought, as well as his vast knowledge and masterly ability to combine fact and reverie, regard his latest book and say that yes, of course he has the stuff to write a critical history of television, and he will earn the right, if anyone will, to give it a title as provocatively blunt and accurate as Television: A Biography (Thames & Hudson; 412 pp.). 

See You At The Curtain Call: Twin Peaks – The Return (2017)

Despite my best efforts, there are a few unavoidable spoilers within. 

“'We are like the spider,' said the king. 'We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, "Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it.". This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world we have created.'"

– Thomas Egenes & Kamuda Reddy, Eternal Stories from the Upanishads

"We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream, but who is the dreamer?” 

– David Lynch

I think it's safe to say that there hasn't been anything on television close to what director David Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost unleashed the last few months in their 18-part serial Twin Peaks – The Return. More than being simply a sequel to the original 1990 ABC series, Twin Peaks, which focused on the murder investigation of the high school senior Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) by FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), or a mere continuation of the follow-up 1992 film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which examined the circumstances leading to that murder, Showtime's Twin Peaks – The Return was an abstract murder mystery that resisted solutions and begged even more questions. It was like finding yourself seeped in a David Lynch compendium where you experienced the full body of his work – including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive – as one long amorphous trance as plot lines vanished, dramatic moments imploded, and nightmarish visions suddenly erupted and took hold. Twin Peaks – The Return was the source of much frustration because within that Lynchian theme park of devious delight were also hours of flattened-out kitschy comedy that not only tested your patience, but drew some of his worst instincts, those that had already been on display in Wild at Heart, and parts of Lost Highway. Yet the baggy unevenness of Twin Peaks – The Return wasn't simply a case of the director's intuition taking a holiday and intermittently going wrong. Lynch, who works almost entirely from his unconscious, seemed to be refusing to make any kind of conscious judgement over the material. It was as if he'd decided instead to run the table with whatever came into his mind (bad or startlingly good) to see where it might lead him – and also, of course, the viewer. Knowing that there was an audience out there both nostalgic and fiendishly curious to return to Twin Peaks after such a long hiatus, Lynch turned this epic tale into something more than a conclusion and resolution to the story. Twin Peaks – The Return was a turbulent meditation on the past, on the nature of nostalgia, on the tropes of television serial drama, and on death itself.      

You'll Float Too: Andy Muschietti’s IT

Jeremy Ray Taylor, Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard, and Jack Dylan Grazer in IT.

I’m neither a Stephen King devotee nor a person who grew up with the 1990 TV movie based on his landmark novel It, so unlike many filmgoers who are bleating their nostalgic bias into any internet forum they can find, a new feature length film version appealed to me greatly. I love the creepy premise of a picturesque town in Maine that is besieged by an ancient evil that poses as a ghoulish clown in order to kidnap children. I generally admire the creativity and weirdness of King’s work, despite its inconsistency in quality. And as summer slowly transitions into autumn – the season of Halloween, the season of horror, my favourite season – my appetite for an entertaining horror film grows ever more fierce.

IT, I’m pleased to say, satiated that hunger. Director Andy Muschietti has made a handsome and efficient horror flick from King’s original material, adapting the long-winded 1986 novel into a solidly-structured two-hour spookfest. IT, I’m pleased to say, satiated that hunger. Director Andy Muschietti has made a handsome and efficient horror flick from King’s original material, adapting the long-winded 1986 novel into a solidly-structured two-hour spookfest. The story of IT, about a group of young teens who call themselves “The Losers Club” discovering the presence of Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård) and fighting against It, only represents the first half of the novel. The second half portrays the same group of kids almost three decades later, as the evil force in their hometown of Derry re-emerges to feed once again. Muschietti made a conscious choice to split the story into two films, with the closing credits of IT listing the film as “Chapter One”. Since the 1990 film is criticized for attempting (and failing) to cram both halves of the novel into one made-for-TV movie, Muschietti has clearly made the right decision – especially since the pacing and structure of his adaptation feel spot-on. 

Faith and Fury: The Strange Saga of Al Green

Soul Survivor: A Biography of Al Green by Jimmy McDonough was published by Da Capo Press on August 29th.

“Beware of men who speak well of you, my brother.” – Al Green

Music critic Jimmy McDonough seems to have taken that sage advice from Green to heart. Few people who personally encountered the great soul singer Al Green would be in danger of speaking very well of either him or their meeting. For the rest of us, safely at a distance and accessing his soul strictly through the remarkable records he created, he remains a towering figure in music for over the last five decades. From his first album, Back Up Train, in 1967 to his twenty-ninth release, Lay It Down, in 2008, he has traveled far from his gospel roots through the soul vibe, then suddenly back to gospel in the late '70s, and then just as suddenly back to soul again. All along the way, he’s been feverishly running away from something and passionately running towards something, and often those two were the same something.

The dichotomies that link gospel, blues, soul and funk are never-ending. They are the living proof that coal becomes crystal under pressure. They are also, in their cores, different names for the same thing: a head-on collision course between faith and fury. And no one ever exemplified the paradox at the heart of these great African-American musical traditions quite as forcefully as the Reverend, revered and feared Al Green. He was both a gifted genius and a tortured psychopath who personified both the heights and depths of what it means to be a human being. Brilliant and besotted, he was, in the end, almost beyond the ability to grasp it with any real sense of clarity, since his mercurial personality shifted in and out of focus from moment to moment. And few books can qualify for the term “warts and all” quite as much as Jimmy McDonough’s new, breathtaking life of Green.

Neglected Gem # 107: They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)

Sally Gray and Trevor Howard in They Made Me a Fugitive (1947).

Sometimes serendipity allows you to come across a movie you might otherwise never have known about. That was what happened earlier this year when I was doing some research for a class I was teaching on American film noir. One article I read mentioned significant noirs from other countries, including a 1947 British film I was utterly unfamiliar with entitled They Made Me a Fugitive. I didn’t use that movie for my lecture but shortly afterwards I came across a DVD of it at my local library and snapped it up, believing I was meant to see it. Good thing I did, because even among the generally high quality of the genre, They Made Me a Fugitive stands out.

Master Acting Classes: The Fisher King (1991)

Few would remember now, but the 1991 summer movie season was dominated by movies about thoughtless, self-absorbed yuppies who find redemption: Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry, William Hurt in The Doctor. The only one of the these pictures that wasn’t fatuous, trite and infuriating was The Fisher King. In it, Jeff Bridges plays Jack Lucas, a smug, cynical New York talk-radio host with a habit of mocking his callers. When he lectures one of his regulars (Christian Clemenson) on the worthlessness of the yuppie scum who frequent a watering hole called Babbitt’s – the name is an allusion to Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel, a satirical portrait of a Yankee bourgeois – proclaiming that they deserve to be wiped out, the caller takes him at his word and unloads a rifle on the crowd at the bar before shooting himself. One of his victims is the wife of a Hunter College humanities prof named Henry Sagan (Robin Williams), who dies in his arms. The tragedy triggers a psychotic break in Sagan: after a year of catatonia, he holes up in a boiler room in his old apartment building, calling himself Parry and identifying himself as a knight in search of the Holy Grail (“Parry” for “Parsifal”). When Jack, whose role in the Babbitt’s slaughter shook him up so badly that he has been hiding out at his girl friend’s and mostly inside a bottle of Jack Daniels, is set upon by violent youths in Central Park on what used to be called a wilding spree, it’s Parry who rescues him. Jack finds out Parry’s history from the super in his building and decides that it can’t be a coincidence – that trying to help Parry is the only way he can get his own life back, “pay the fine and go home,” as he puts it to his girl friend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl). At first he thinks a few bucks will do the trick, but all Parry does with the money he proffers is to hand it off to another homeless man. Then, with Anne’s help, Jack arranges for Parry to have a date with Lydia (Amanda Plummer), a publishing-company employee whom Parry worships from afar. Bizarrely, the evening is a triumph: Parry and Lydia, a peerlessly awkward waif who inhabits her own universe, turn out to be a match made in romantic-comedy heaven. But the thought that he might find love again stirs up Parry’s repressed memories of the night he lost his wife, and his old enemy, the Red Knight, a personification of all his demons of guilt and grief that only he can see, intervenes. Parry winds up in a psychiatric ward, once again imprisoned in a catatonic state – and Jack still hasn’t earned his own redemption. So he does the only thing remaining to him: dressing up in Parry’s ragtag-knight outfit, he carries out the task Parry set him earlier in their acquaintance. He scales the wall of the Medieval castle-like Fifth Avenue residence of a wealthy recluse, swings through the window like a parody of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, and lifts a trophy Parry saw in a photo that he’s convinced is the Holy Grail.

Amazon's The Tick: Bigger, Bluer, Darker

Peter Serafinowicz and Griffin Newman in The Tick.

“Evil wears every possible mitten.” – The Tick

Ben Edlund’s “big blue bug” is back. Last seen in the very short-lived Fox live-action series back in 2001, The Tick is currently enjoying its third small-screen adaptation, proving the old adage that like Sherlock Holmes and Pride and Prejudice, every decade gets a Tick to call its own. The new series, created by Edlund, premiered on Amazon Video on August 25 with half of the 12-episode first season With a darker vision, bigger budget, and richer narrative canvas, Amazon’s The Tick fits more comfortably into our current television universe than either the still-classic 1994 Fox animated series or the ill-fated Patrick Warburton-helmed 2001 sitcom, but it also comes with enough of its signature energy to be a welcome new arrival.

Fizzling Out: Burn All Night at Club Oberon

As I walked out of Burn All Night, a new musical running at the American Repertory Theater’s Club Oberon, I found myself feeling oddly upbeat about the fact that I’d just seen a thoroughly average piece of immersive mainstream theatre. As I’ve written before with regards to the ART’s production of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, this increasingly popular style of staging plays in such a way as to draw the audience into the dramatic action offers at least one potential answer to the question of how theatre can distinguish itself as it competes with a myriad of entertainment options for audiences’ attention. Contrary to the title, this latest offering won’t set the world on fire, but there are elements of its music and staging that partially counteract its glaring weaknesses as a play.

Burn All Night ultimately tries to make a statement about the impending global cataclysm that, thanks to our poisonous politics and abuse of the environment, seems at times almost inevitable. However, the real disaster here is Andy Mientus’s book, which follows the romantic entanglements and personal conflicts of four young people. The main character, Bobby (Lincoln Clauss), is a stereotype, the wide-eyed naif who ditches the stifling atmosphere of Real America for the boundless possibilities of New York City. The backward, provincial hellhole from which he escapes? Pittsburgh. I’m no Steelers fan, but I’m still not clear on what’s so awful about this metropolis of western Pennsylvania, and Mientus doesn’t help matters by giving Bobby a series of phone conversations with his widowed mother that mostly make you feel bad for the poor woman, who’s stuck worrying about her absent son while the world ends.

The Agony and the Artistry: Mary V. Dearborn’s Ernest Hemingway

Photo: Robert Capa/Magnum.

“At some point in the unfolding of his brilliant career, a tragedy began to take shape”: so begins Mary V. Dearborn’s Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (Knopf; 738 pp.). What follows is the history of that tragedy. More, perhaps, than any previous Hemingway biography – save Paul Hendrickson’s harrowing Hemingway’s Boat (2011), which is more a psycho-factual exploration of selected themes than biography per se – Dearborn’s is a chronicle of physical and mental agonies, some fateful, others self-inflicted. In this telling, as tragedy takes its shape, it misshapes the life. It’s a more than valid view of this particular figure. Even in his prime, when he was kicking ass and taking names, beaming out from front pages and basking in celebrity, Hemingway was moving toward a violent end almost too easy to see, with hindsight, as predestined. The end seemed foretold in family dysfunction – suicidal father, mother whose outsize presence and personal ambition both inspired and infuriated her son. It was encouraged by ego, money, and acclaim after the first stunning short stories and history-making novels. It was urged from the 1930s onward by alcoholism, physical self-abuse, and a tendency to disastrous accidents. It burgeoned in the lengthening depressions, cognitive degeneration, and inferior work of his last decade. And it came, finally, in the early hours of July 2, 1961, when Hemingway took his life with a shotgun in an isolated house in the mountains of Idaho, three weeks short of his sixty-second birthday.

Inventory Management, Vol III: Indie Darlings

Sonic Mania was released by Sega on August 15.

Sonic Mania is the ultimate exercise in nostalgia. Sonic the Hedgehog never escaped the 1990s the way his rival Mario did, so it only makes sense that he should give up his decades-long struggle to invent a new identity and just return to his roots instead. Sega – Sonic’s irresponsible, absentee parent – made this happen this year in such an unusual, unlikely way that it would have been an interesting story even if the result weren’t an absolute delight.

The name Sonic Mania hints at more than just the excitement of Sonic fans' seeing their favourite gaming mascot back in the limelight (in a positive way for once). One of those very fans, developer Christian “Taxman” Whitehead, took it upon himself to design and program a Sonic game that both recreated and expanded upon the original Sega Genesis titles from his childhood. Whitehead was given the extraordinary chance to present his prototype to Sonic series producer Takashi Iizuka, who reworked Whitehead’s proposed title “Sonic Discovery” into something that reflected the singular nature of this passion project, something that was “by the mania, for the mania.” With help from indie developers Headcannon and PagodaWest Games, and with the blessing and bankroll of both Iizuka and Sega, Whitehead’s dream of creating a Sonic game that was worthy of the original series actually came true.

Criss-crossing Abbey Road: Dreaming The Beatles by Rob Sheffield

When John Lennon released his solo album Plastic Ono Band in 1970, he concluded the record with a tune called “God.” The song laments everything he no longer believed in, including “Beatles,” which he stutters out at the end of a long list of disenchantments. “The dream is over,” sings Lennon, and while that may have been true for him at the time, months after the break-up of his band, it wasn’t the case for the millions of fans who adored The Beatles and believed in them. The current crop of believers can be easily found on YouTube as they compile so-called Beatles albums from the Lennon, McCartney-Harrison-Starr solo years in the early seventies. The notion isn’t without merit, as many of the songs on the early solo records were being written in the final months of the band’s career. One such compiler, in a nod to the red and blue Beatles compilations issued by Apple in 1975, has created his own “orange” and “green” albums. Another fan by the name of Marc Bridson has created The Beatles fantasy albums featuring the Fab Four’s solo tracks, collected in an effort to preserve the band in ways they never expected. Strangely, it works . . . but only for dreamers.

Fifty years after the release of Sgt. Pepper and another forty-plus years after the break-up of the world’s most popular rock band, Rob Sheffield’s timing couldn’t be better. In his recently released memoir, Dreaming The Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World (Dey St.), Sheffield turns the story of the Beatles on its cultural head. Rather than write another chronological history of the band, leaving that task to scholars such as Mark Lewisohn, Sheffield tells the story of the group from his unique perspective. He literally begins at the end when Paul McCartney says, “Thanks, Mo” at the conclusion of “Get Back” on Let It Be. For Sheffield it’s a great place to start because it captures a “quintessential Beatle moment” when the band calls it a day and the fans get to enjoy the meaning of their musical and cultural impact. Looking back as a fan, Sheffield says, “The Beatles’ second career has lasted several times longer than the first one . . . The world keeps dreaming the Beatles, long after the Beatles themselves figured the dream was over.” Clearly, timing is everything.

Podcast: Elspeth Cameron on Hugh MacLennan (1981)

Author  Hugh MacLennan in 1984.

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1981, I sat down with Canadian biographer and poet Elspeth Cameron, whose biography of author Hugh MacLennan had just been published.

Cameron would go on to make a career of writing about Canadian literary figures, and Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Life was her first book. (The biography was nominated for a Governor General's Award that same year.) She followed it up with, among others, biographies of Irving Layton (1985), Robertson Davies (1991), and Earle Birney (1994). In 1997, her memoir No Previous Experience: A Memoir of Love and Change won a W. O. Mitchell Literary Prize.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Elspeth Cameron as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1981.

Poetic Absurdity: The Genius of Beatrice Lillie

Beatrice Lillie (aka Lady Peel) in Exit Smiling (1926).

There’s a tradition of eccentric English actresses who made improbably triumphant careers for themselves in the twentieth century. One was the great high-comic technician Gertrude Lawrence, who couldn’t sing a note without quavering yet became a musical-comedy star, performing songs by Noël Coward, Cole Porter, the Gershwins and Rodgers & Hammerstein. Another was Margaret Rutherford, who embodied a kind of British dottiness – an unassailable uprightness and forthrightness, like that of a nanny shepherding her charges through the park – even when she was playing Agatha Christie’s sleuth Miss Marple. But my favorite was Beatrice Lillie, who was born in Toronto in 1894 but became a star in the West End twenty years later and performed on stage and occasionally in movies and on television for just over half a century. (Her final appearance was in the ill-advised 1967 musical film Thoroughly Modern Millie, in the role of the white-slaving villainess Mrs. Meers. It was hardly a worthy valedictory, though she did get to wear chopsticks in her beehive hairdo and execute a modest tap dance to get a stubborn elevator moving.) Canadian she may have been by birth, but no one could have captured so acutely a specifically English brand of silliness, though possibly the fact that she was officially an import from elsewhere in the Dominion may partly explain the fact that her portrayal of English aristocratic hauteur was always parodic – even though in real life she married a baronet (she was Lady Peel) and lost a son, a naval officer, in World War II.

Stripping Away the Cobwebs from Castle Bran

Bran Castle is situated on the border between  Transylvania and Wallachia.

Castle Bran, purportedly the inspiration for Castle Dracula in Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula, is less than 200 kilometers from Bucharest. On a major holiday weekend in August, our tour bus set out from the capital to drive us through Transylvania to this magnificent thirteenth-century edifice, whose foundation seems an extension of the rocky ground with a palace emerging from it. Unfortunately, Romanians gathering from near and far blanketed the mainly two-lane highway, preventing us from reaching our destination until early evening. Nonetheless, I was excited to visit this historic site that has spawned so many misconceptions. While our guide – one of the best during the tour – rightly acknowledged that Stoker never visited Transylvania, then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and that the connections between Bran Castle and Stoker were tenuous at best, he did think that the fortress Poenari, 200 kilometers away in Wallachia, the domicile of Vlad Tepes, the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler, was associated with Stoker’s novel. While he was right about the one-time owner of Poenari, he was wrong about its link with Dracula. His mistake is understandable given the plethora of disinformation about the subject.

Man of a Thousand Faces: Eric Clapton Crossroads (1988)

Back in 1970, when Eric Clapton ducked for cover under the name Derek and the Dominos, he actually revealed more of himself than he had earlier in his best music with The Yardbirds, John Mayall and Cream. On the album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, the passion that drove his voice and his playing also had the element of losing control – as he did playing "Crossroads" with Cream on Wheels of Fire – where the music took hold and pulled him kicking and screaming into its tumult. Since Clapton's addictions, I believe, emerged from that plunge into desperate pleasure, it didn't surprise me that as he tackled the substances, the substance of his music became more careful and craftsman lite. While there may indeed be legitimate reasons for not touching the flames that ignite both your follies and your genius (after all, Derek and the Dominos were decimated by drugs and self-destruction), it may be that Clapton never really had a fully defined personality, a self that might have carried him through his addictions without letting him lose his spark.

Neglected Gem #106: Bad Timing (1980)

Art Garfunkel and Harvey Keitel in Bad Timing (1980).

The feeble pun of its title is the least of several apparent strikes against Bad Timing, the once-controversial psychological thriller directed by Nicolas Roeg. (At one point it carried the subtitle A Sensual Obsession, which didn’t help.) Among its other off-putting elements are dialogue that often evokes bad New Yorker fiction; a soundtrack which, while wide-ranging (Pachelbel, Tom Waits, Billie Holiday, Keith Jarrett, The Who, Harry Partch), is intrusively, even obnoxiously, employed; and a star, Art Garfunkel, whose presence places a question mark at the center of the movie. But for all that, Bad Timing is gripping and lasting, a steel trap whose fingers close slowly but surely. Roeg’s choices, though they often jar against the unwritten rules of psychological thrillers, dramatic realism, or simply agreeable narrative, never feel confused or hedged. The movie knows what it is doing; you may take it, leave it, or, like me, come back every few years to look again.

Partners in Quick-Time – Uncharted: Lost Legacy

Nadine (Laura Bailey) and Chloe (Claudia Black) in Uncharted: Lost Legacy.

Uncharted: Lost Legacy is the result of developer Naughty Dog's making a ton of money on Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and deciding to keep that money train a-rollin’, despite the fact that they had publicly declared it to be the final game in the series. You can’t argue with clear market demand, and though the curtain had fallen on Nathan Drake’s personal saga, it was fairly unsurprising to learn this past June that a fifth Uncharted title was in development – this time centering around Chloe Frazer (Claudia Black), treasure hunter and erstwhile Drake love interest. Lost Legacy is a fully stand-alone side story about Frazer teaming up with mercenary Nadine Ross (Laura Bailey) to find an artifact called the Tusk of Ganesh in wildest India and prevent a political fanatic from sparking civil war. It makes determined efforts to function as its own game, whose success doesn’t depend on the famous series protagonist – and at that, at least, it succeeds.

Fleetwood Mac, the Time Ghost: Rumours Turns 40

Fleetwood Mac (circa 1968): John McVie, Danny Kirwan, Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green Jeremy Spencer.

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” – William Faulkner

“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.” – Christine McVie

The recent release of a new duo album by Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie is a good opportunity to re-examine the long strange trip of the phenomenal pop band they belong to. Fleetwood Mac was originally formed in 1967 by Peter Green, but Christine Perfect-McVie had already been on the scene in her own remarkable British blues band, Chicken Shack, even before her talented husband became the stellar bass player for one of the most successful rock outfits in music history. 

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been ten years since I published my book on the weird evolutionary leaps of Fleetwood Mac from gritty British blues to shiny Californian pop and yet, incredibly, it’s true. Back then, in 2007, it was the band’s 40th anniversary, hence my title 40 Years of Creative Chaos, and now suddenly I’m having to try and convince my publisher that they definitely deserve a 50th-anniversary update to their twisted saga. I suspect my editor can barely believe that they’re still together, despite the fact that Stevie Nicks has made one of her frequent departures to pursue her solo muse (herself) and Lindsey Buckingham has released an eponymous duet with the other sultry blonde in the group, my far-more-favourite British blues chick turned pop-diva, Christine McVie.

Even more incredibly, or at least ironically, Fleetwood Mac is being given a special award next year which cements their acclaim in even more glowing terms: the Recording Academy’s 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year, an honour that will be extended to the veteran rockers in conjunction with the 60th Grammy Awards. Amazingly, the Grammys themselves are only ten years older than this stalwart but grizzled crew of pop wizards. The award singles out musicians both for their artistry and for their frequent philanthropic contributions, with previous recipients including Dylan, McCartney and Stevie Wonder.

Hitting the Jackpot: Guys and Dolls at the Stratford Festival

Evan Buliung (centre) with members of the company, in Guys and Dolls at the Stratford Festival. (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

Let there be no confusion. In Guys and Dolls, the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning musical at Canada's Stratford Festival until the end of October, men are men and women are, well, the dolls in the musical comedy Jo Swerling, Abe Burrows and composer-lyricist Frank Loesser created almost 70 years ago when gender identity, sexual orientation and gender expression were a whole lot less complicated than they are today. Based on newspaper man Damon Runyon's 1930s collection of short stories about the denizens of New York's Depression-era underworld, the show is a throwback. But a rollicking one that makes no apologies for wanting to revel in stereotypical portraits of gangsters, gamblers and showgirls with seam-stockinged gams.

Prince of Broadway: Overstuffed and Undernourished

 Karen Ziemba, Emily Skinner, Chuck Cooper and Tony Yazbeck in Prince of Broadway. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The new revue Prince of Broadway, built around the career of Harold Prince, is like an all-you-can-eat buffet at a mediocre restaurant. It runs just over two and a half hours and contains thirty-five songs from sixteen musicals (plus a finale, “Do the Work,” written especially for the show by Jason Robert Brown, who also contributed arrangements and orchestrations), presented in mostly tepid reproductions intended to conjure up the feel of their sources, one after another. (Susan Stroman, who co-directed with Prince and choreographed, has barely left her mark on them.) The entire project is misconceived. It makes sense to plan an evening around the work of a theatrical artist whose work is distinctive and unified; that’s what the joyous 1999 Fosse! did, and Ain’t Misbehavin’ and several Stephen Sondheim revues. But you can’t get a sense of the shows Prince has directed by restaging numbers from them: a pair of singers in working-class Victorian costumes standing in front of a flat don’t suggest the spectacle of Sweeney Todd (1979) and eight actors in shtetl garb dancing briefly across the stage of the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre are more like a parody of Fiddler on the Roof (1964) than an evocation of it. You’d need the original set designs and, more importantly, the original performers to provide any indication of what these musicals meant. Prince of Broadway doesn’t even distinguish between the shows Prince directed and the ones he only produced, like Damn Yankees (1955), West Side Story (1957) and Fiddler – as if there were no difference between what directors and producers do. In a lengthy program note, Prince credits dozens of collaborators, yet the revue implicitly tells us that he was the creative force behind every one of these shows, even when other people devised their staging and helmed their rehearsals. This is a vanity production that verges on the delusional.