Viva Flamenco: Esmeralda Enrique's De La Raíz

Left to right: Alison MacDonald, Virginia Castro, & Paloma Cortés in De La Raíz. (Photo: Jennifer Watkins)

Against a backdrop of vintage photographs of flamenco artists past, Toronto’s Esmeralda Enrique Spanish Dance Company celebrated the communal origins of its tempestuous tripartite art form in De La Raíz (From the Root), a thrilling spectacle of dance, music, and song which took place at Harbourfront Centre’s Fleck Dance Theatre May 4-6. The award-winning dancer and choreographer Esmeralda Enrique used the occasion to stage a variety of Spanish dances that stepped back in time to tell (by showing) the story of flamenco’s rise from the cafés cantates of the 19th century to become a much-applauded theatrical presence on the world stage.

The Victors and the Vanquished: Thunder in the Mountains

(from left) Chief Joseph (Heinmot Tooyalakekt) and Oliver Otis Howard. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Few things are more depressing than the close examination of the history of North America. Not the ancient true history of the continent and its inhabitants over the last 20,000 years, but rather the imaginary history of the Europeans who came and invented a conceptual country superimposed over the multiple ones that already existed here since the Ice Age receded. That imaginary history of the immigrants who became both Americans and Canadians is fascinating because it was written by the victors in the blood of the vanquished. The poet Robert Duncan once remarked that blood is the ink in which human history is written, and never is that fact more clear than in a recent book by Daniel Sharfstein from WW Norton (Penguin/Random House) called Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War.

"T-under," as he translated his own name to one early visitor to his ancestral homeland, was only called Joseph because his father had been christened in November 1839 by a missionary who had recently come from New York to preach the gospel to the Nez Perce peoples. So his father was called Old Joseph and he was called Young Joseph, and eventually, just Joseph. Nez Perce, of course, was yet another misunderstood and misapplied assumption originally made by the French explorers who saw some natives making a sign for the tribe that resembled a pierced nose, so they presumptuously renamed the group The Pierced Noses. In reality, something neither the French nor any other soon-to-become “Americans” took much notice of when they saw the splendour of the continent spread before them, was that this culture was really and paradoxically called Nimi’ipuu, or the real people. Which people were real and which were not, what kind of human being qualified for equal treatment had of course been at the core of one of the central events in American history: the Civil War.

Neglected Gem: Metroland (1997)

Christian Bale and Emily Watson in Metroland. (Photo: IMDB)

Philip Savile, who died in 2016, was one of those journeymen British directors who nevertheless helmed some interesting, original projects in his career. Those included Shadey (1985), a quirky, off-kilter spy story; the poignant gay coming-of-age thriller The Fruit Machine (1988); and The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), a striking TV adaption of Fay Weldon’s inventive science-fiction novel. But perhaps his most impressive achievement was Metroland, his finely directed, acute adaptation of Julian Barnes’s novel about two best friends who come a cropper over their differing goals in life. Metroland is one of those modestly laid-out, underplayed dramas that too often go missing in action when it comes to filmgoers’ preferences. It’s also a necessary reminder that actor Christian Bale, who is the main focus of the movie, can play human-sized, recognizable protagonists rather than just over-the-top roles like his morose Batman in Christopher Nolan’s heavy-handed The Dark Knight trilogy or pull off gimmicks like losing all that weight for unduly heightened and singularly uninteresting "reality" films such as The Machinist and The Fighter.

Metroland is what the London suburb of Eastwood has been nicknamed by those who say they would never consider living there. It’s also the place where Chris (Bale) grew up and swore he’d never return to again. Now as an adult, circa 1977, he lives there with his wife Marion (Emily Watson) and their baby girl, and instead of having become a freelance photographer, as he dreamed of doing, he works in an advertising agency. Yet he doesn’t consciously question his life path or career decisions. But when his childhood buddy, Toni (Lee Ross), who's still carefree, pops up after a few years abroad, Chris is suddenly asking that age-old question: is that all there is?

The Best of Youth: In the Fullness of Time

Alessio Boni as Matteo Carati in The Best of Youth. (Photo: IMDB)

Note: This review contains spoilers for The Best of Youth.

The Best of Youth (La meglio gioventù) was shot as a miniseries for Italian television, broadcast in 2003 and released in North America two years later in two parts, each a little over three hours in length. That’s the way to see it – if you can’t watch it all in a single sitting – because you want to be able to keep all the details in your head, as you can when you’ve got a novel going. And that’s what The Best of Youth is really like: a long novel that expands in your mind as you move through it and that wraps itself around you so that by the end you feel you know the characters the way you know the members of your own family and your closest friends. The material is an epic: the setting is Italy from 1966 to 2003, and the characters interact against the turbulent social and political landscape of one-third of a century. Yet the writers, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, and the director, Marco Tullio Giordana, approach it with extraordinary intimacy. Considering the length of the picture and of the period it portrays, it has a surprisingly compact cast of characters, and though the narrative sometimes leaps ahead several years, and regularly stretches back and forth across the country (even occasionally stepping outside it), when you look for literary comparisons you’re more likely to come up with Chekhov than with Tolstoy.

Podcast: Interview with Paul Schrader on Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

A scene from Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).

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 1985, I sat down with film director Paul Schrader.

At the time of our conversation, Paul Schrader, the screenwriter behind Taxi Driver (1976) and writer/director of American Gigolo (1980), had just completed work on Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, his biopic of Japanese author, playwright and filmmaker Yukio Mishima, who had famously committed public seppuku in 1970. The film, which combines stories of Mishima's life with adaptations of some of his fictional works, was recently remastered and released by the Criterion Collection.

– Kevin Courrier

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

The Iceman Cometh: Whose Play is This?

The cast of George C. Wolfe's The Iceman Cometh with Denzel Washington (seated, centre) as Hickey. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Initially I’d planned on skipping George C. Wolfe’s Broadway revival of The Iceman Cometh because Denzel Washington had been cast as Hickey, Eugene O’Neill’s archetypal salesman, and in my view the stage tends to bring out Washington’s showboating side – even when he’s not playing the lead in a four-hour play that climaxes with a roughly half-hour-long confession scene. But Washington did perhaps the finest work of his career in Dan Gilroy’s movie Roman J. Israel, Esq. last fall, so eventually I broke down and opted to check out what he was up to as Hickey. And I must say that he works very hard in the role and doesn’t succumb to the usual temptations – the ones that made him exasperating when he played Brutus in Julius Caesar and in both the recent stage and screen versions of August Wilson’s Fences. The problem turns out to be one I hadn’t anticipated: he’s simply miscast. You have to believe that Hickey – who shows up at Harry Hope’s saloon for an annual blow-out with his hopeless alcoholic pals (in honor of Hope’s birthday) but this time with the mission of saving them from their pipe dreams – could sell you water rights to a desert. As Washington plays him he seems more like a derailed executive.

The Auto-Immune Imagination: Moving On from Dr. Hans Asperger

Dr. Hans Asperger in Vienna circa 1934-44. (Photo: Booksfeat)

A review of the new book by Edith Sheffer, Asperger’s Children: The Origin of Autism in Nazi Vienna.

Dear fellow oddballs: this man is not your friend, and never was.

One day recently I was minding my own business and planning to write either a long article or a short book about how many of our seismic shifts in art, science, or culture were brought about by people who could charitably be called "not exactly normal." It was not only obvious but even well known that figures ranging from Einstein to Tesla were, to say the least, operating off the beaten path, and also equally obvious that it was because they marched to a different drummer that they came up with such simple but earth-shattering notions such as alternating current engines and wireless data transmission, long before any normals dreamed they were possible.

It was going to be called "The Outsiders Club: How Visionary Eccentrics Transformed Our World and Why We Need Them to Do It Again." I even had a great epigram planned to start the ball rolling, one that originated with the somewhat quirky inventor of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, when he cheekily remarked, “There is no solution to the problem because there is no problem.” The basic premise was that there is a popular old adage that people who behave themselves rarely make history. We might add that people who don’t always play well with others sometimes come up with startling insights that help the rest of us while they’re in the midst of their secluded solitude.

Origin Story: The Legacy of King Solomon's Mines

Author H. Rider Haggard, often credited as a pioneer of the "lost world" fiction genre. (Photo: Getty)

A group of men take off on a quest into the unknown, seeking a potentially mythical MacGuffin and using their unique skills to get into and out of scrapes, with a few good-natured comic interludes thrown in along the way. That’s a setup of many popular films, and that’s part of why I found my recent experience reading H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines so interesting. Combined with a rediscovery of George Stevens’s 1939 film Gunga Din, which I hadn’t seen since childhood, catching up with Haggard’s classic adventure novel has provided some perspective on the origins of tropes that have begun to feel overly familiar after appearing in one franchise film after another.

Lean on Pete: A Boy and a Horse

Charley (Charlie Plummer) with his titular companion in Lean on Pete. (Photo: Scott Patrick Green)

Note: This review contains spoilers.

Lean on Pete belongs to a genre you wouldn’t expect Andrew Haigh, the gifted English writer-director of 45 Years and Looking, to be drawn to: that subcategory of coming-of-age movies in which the protagonist forms a strong emotional relationship with a special animal. Clarence Brown made the two classic Hollywood exemplars in the mid-forties, National Velvet and The Yearling, and Carroll Ballard directed the greatest of all of them, The Black Stallion, in 1979 (all three were adapted from beloved children’s volumes), using both National Velvet and the French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse’s incandescent short film White Mane (1953) for inspiration. Ballard made other splendid movies of this type – Fly Away Home in 1996 and Duma in 2005 – but The Black Stallion, with its dialogue-free desert-island second act and its horse-racing third act, its vibrant, painterly use of color (the film critic Pauline Kael wisely evoked the work of the American abstract expressionist Morris Louis by way of comparison), its juxtaposition of the archetypal and the elemental to explore the experience of an eight-year-old boy far beyond his ability to find verbal expression for, is indisputably the masterpiece of the genre. (Melissa Mathison, who wrote the script, also collaborated with Steven Spielberg on E.T., which substitutes a creature from another planet for the magical animal.)

Prose, Poem, & Power: Sony Santa Monica's God of War

Kratos (left) and his son Atreus (right) in Sony Santa Monica's God of War. (Photo: Sony)

Until this year, Sony Santa Monica’s God of War series was the 300 of popular games, like Clash of the Titans as envisioned by a drunk Michael Bay. Its focus on hyper-violent setpieces, which grew increasingly epic in scale as the series wore on, was appropriate for the time in which it was released, and for the audience that eagerly lapped it up. But in 2018, that kind of brainless uber-masculine power fantasy doesn’t really fly anymore. Despite its tendency to constantly shoot itself in the foot in terms of meaningful progress, the industry has indeed grown up a little bit, and so have the people who play – and who make – this sort of triple-A action-adventure fare. If it had any ambitions about competing critically and financially with the best we now have to offer, a new entry in the God of War series would be forced to grow up as well.

World Mash-Ups: Valeria Matzner and Molly Tigre

South American songwriter Valeria Matzner. (Photo: valeriamatzner.com)

Two new releases have brought me great joy over the past couple of weeks for their excellent production values and spirited performances. Valeria Matzner’s album called Anima (Triplet) offers up some enthusiastic tracks with an eclectic music mix. New York’s Molly Tigre is an instrumental band with a difference: no guitar player. The band’s self-titled record on the VSR label is inspired by the desert blues entrails of Mali mixed with the street rhythms of New York City. While these two new releases won’t shatter the earth upon their release, they do inspire hope for the continual fusion of world music mashed-up with regional sounds.

Podcast: Don Shebib on Margot Kidder and Heartaches (1981)

Margot Kidder in Heartaches (1981)

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 film director Donald Shebib.

At the time of our conversation, Don Shebib, director of the Canadian classic Goin' Down the Road (1970), had just completed work on Heartaches (1981), written by playwright Terence Heffernan and starring Margot Kidder, Annie Potts and Robert Carradine. In this interview, Shebib speaks about his new film and what it was like to work with Kidder, at the time most famous for her work on the Superman movies and 1979's The Amityville Horror. Margot Kidder passed away on Monday, May 13, at the age of 69.

– Kevin Courrier

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

New Broadway Musicals: SpongeBob SquarePants & Mean Girls

Lilli Cooper, Ethan Slater, and Danny Skinner in SpongeBob SquarePants on Broadway. (Photo: Youtube)

The output of musicals in the current Broadway season seems leaner than it is coming after the unusually hefty 2016-17 roster. The reason last season was so heavy was that many companies had elected to delay for a year to avoid coming up against Hamilton in the 2016 Tony Awards race. And even with more shows to choose from, I would hardly call 2016-2017 a banner year for musicals: I loved Bandstand and Come from Away, and there were several reasons to see Dear Evan Hansen if you could ignore the nonsensical book, but that was about all. This season brought the transfer of The Band’s Visit, one of the best new musical shows of recent years, from its downtown venue at the Atlantic Stage Company to a Broadway house. Having opted to skip the two new jukebox musicals, Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville and Summer (a bio of Donna Summer), I checked out the only other offerings, SpongeBob SquarePants and Mean Girls, shortly after their official openings.

Moles in American & Russian Intelligence in Jason Matthews's The Kremlin's Candidate

Author and former CIA agent Jason Matthews. (Photo: Booktopia)

"The world would know that the secret services of Russia were omniscient apex predators that could penetrate the governments of his enemies, discover their secrets, and exert their will over them . . . His active measures were creating lasting discord in the West, at minimal cost, and if he wanted to unseat an American politician, he had only to release an embarrassing, unencrypted email through WikiLeaks run by the languid dupe hiding in that exiguous Latin embassy in London. Partisan political hysteria now gripping American society would do the rest."  – Jason Matthews, The Kremlin's Candidate

The Kremlin's Candidate (Scribner, 2018) is the third and most compelling novel in Jason Matthews's Red Sparrow trilogy, concluding the series that began with Red Sparrow and continued with Palace of Treason. The final novel picks up with a prologue set in 2005, in which Audrey Rowland, an American naval officer and a scientist on a brief assignment to Moscow, is lured into a honey trap for the purpose of blackmail by Dominika Egorova, a Russian spy. The former ballerina began her career as a trained seductress in Red Sparrow, in which her first major assignment was to seduce CIA spy Nate Nash, the handler for a Soviet mole, and secure his identity. Instead, she was turned by Nash into a CIA mole in the Kremlin and he became her handler and lover. Fortunately, she had the protective advantage of being a synesthete, able to judge the intentions of others by the colours she saw emanating from them.

Everything's Cheaper Than It Looks – Neil Young's ROXY: Tonight's the Night Live

Neil Young perfoming Tonight's the Night at the Roxy. (Photo: Getty Images)

Any worthy art stands on its own, as a formalized and unitary capture of experience, apart from the facts of how it was created or released into the world. To be overwhelmed by Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, for instance, you needn’t know a thing about the conditions of its making, its first release, its mutilation, or its eventual rediscovery in a janitor’s closet in an Oslo mental hospital. You needn’t have read a single book about Joan herself, or be aware of Dreyer’s other films. But some works – like, in fact, The Passion of Joan of Arc – are so informed by circumstance and so infused with the extraordinary that to regard them in isolation from their histories seems perverse, and not in the fun way. That applies to Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night as much as it does to any rock album. One loved it before ever knowing much about the deaths behind it, or the story of how it came to be; but over time, as that knowing accumulated, the album inevitably took on whole new dimensions, haunted thoughts that are now inseparable from one’s experience of the music itself.

Neglected Gem: The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)

The white colt in Davaa and Falorni's The Story of the Weeping Camel. (Photo: Getty) 

The utterly disarming film The Story of the Weeping Camel is a collaboration between Byambarsuren Davaa, who was trained in Mongolian television, and Luigi Falorni, a cinematographer turned filmmaker, each directing for only the second time. Adopting the celebrated working methods of the first documentary filmmaker, Robert Flaherty, they put a family who live in the Gobi Desert on camera and have them enact their own story. Soft-faced Ikhee (Ikhbayar Amgaabazar) and his wife Ogdoo (Odgerel Ayusch) live in one yurt with their children – Dude (Enkhbulgan Ikhbayar), who is perhaps fourteen; Ugna (Uuganbaatar Ikhbayar), a little boy of six or seven; and a girl, Guntee (Guntbaatar Ikhbayar), a toddler. The two sets of grandparents live in adjacent yurts and help with the housekeeping, the children, and the animals – the family raises sheep and camels. Part of what marks the arc of the year for them is the births of the camel colts; the movie focuses on the consequences when a beautiful, rust-colored camel gives birth to a white colt after a hard two-day labor, and then rejects her baby.

Sizzling Syncopation: Natasha Powell's Floor'd

The Holla Jazz ensemble performing Floor'd at Winchester Street Theatre (Photo: Tamara Romanchuk)

The stage is bare save for seven wooden chairs lining a back wall in addition to a makeshift bar to the left and an assemblage of musical instruments, including a large stand-up bass, to the right. James Kendal’s spare set design is meant to invoke a jook joint, originally a place where blacks in the American South would go to unwind after laboring all day in a cotton field. Over time, the jook joint evolved into a hotbed of drink, conversation and jazz. With the music came an improvisatory dance that moved in step with the syncopated rhythms. Jazz dance has since stag-leaped its way into Broadway and Hollywood musicals, Disney spectacles and cruise ships, dance schools and cheerleading squads across the continent. Today, it is a legitimate dance style with its own kick-ball-change vocabulary and formalized systems of technique. But at its essence it is a social dance rising like smoke from an unfiltered cigarette in the jook joints of popular song, a heritage choreographer Natasha Powell takes pains to honour in the aptly named Floor’d, her knock-out show of jazz music and dance which debuted at Toronto’s intimate Winchester Street Theatre with four sold-out performances, April 25 to 28.

Music as Primal Therapy: The Loud Memories of Chris Stamey

left: Chris Stamey. (Photo: Daniel Coston)

A Spy in the House of Loud is great title for Chris Stamey's personal memoir, as much about his times as his own role in them, and by way of two other great titles, one from the Anais Nin novel in 1954 and one from the Doors song in 1970. The book is Chris Stamey’s recollections of the cultural period during which music became louder, meaner and funnier: a wild ride by a wild child. After all, Stamey was the force behind the dB’s (both deciBels and decibel breakers, with a superfluous apostrophe) and he definitely knows whereof he speaks, or perhaps he screams.

In addition to borrowing from Anais and referencing Jim Morrison, the title of Stamey’s boldly maniacal yet quietly elegant stroll down memory lane also evokes one of his own songs with the dB’s “A Spy in the House of Love,” from their 1984 album Like This. It doesn’t actually contain any echo of either one, and it doesn’t need to, but what it does do is remind us of a time of phenomenal exuberance in the pop-rock music scene, a time when disco went to hell, at top speed and top volume. The new scene was in fact post-pop writ large. Hence, Stamey’s sonic notion of the "house of loud."

Neglected Gem: Stormy Monday (1988)

Melanie Griffith and Sean Bean in Stormy Monday (1988).

Set in Newcastle, Stormy Monday is a cool, clean crime drama with an emotional authority that builds quietly and finally takes control. It begins like an Altman picture, but in lower key and smaller scale, with disorienting cuts between characters who don’t realize their fates are about to converge. Kate (Melanie Griffith) is an American woman kept in luxury by a crooked real estate developer who makes both private and public use of her; miserable with herself, she keeps a side job waiting tables, apparently so she can feel halfway honest. The developer, Frank Cosmo (Tommy Lee Jones), a Texas Machiavelli, is sweeping into Newcastle in advance of “America Week,” a flag-festooned public-relations boondoggle meant to camouflage a fast, cheap buy-out of local businesses. The spanner in the works is Finney (Sting), a well-off but dissolute club owner smart enough to see what Cosmo is up to, and intransigent enough to resist selling. The relative innocent in this land of moral compromise is Brendan (Sean Bean), a rootless apartment sitter who answers a newspaper ad, orders a steak, and finds himself at the center of everyone else’s messes – all of which come to a head at the end of the movie’s three days and nights.

Musical Comedy Revivals: My Fair Lady and The Will Rogers Follies

Harry Haddon-Paton, Lauren Ambrose, and Allan Corduner in Bartlett Sher's My Fair Lady. (Photo: WNYC)

In Bartlett Sher’s lush, rewarding revival of My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center, Lauren Ambrose gives the best portrayal I’ve ever seen of Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower seller transformed into an Edwardian lady. Ambrose, best known as one of the co-stars of TV’s Six Feet Under, has only a smattering of theatrical experience (which includes a fine performance in Sher’s production of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! in 2006) and no background at all in musicals, but she turns out to have a pellucid lyric soprano voice and an unerring sense of musical-comedy style.