Tough Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well & Cymbeline

Ellie Piercy as Helena/Janie Dee as the Countess of Roussillon. (Photo: Nigel Norrington) 

All’s Well That Ends Well provides too many obstacles for a modern audience to be anyone’s favorite Shakespearean comedy, so it doesn’t get revived very often. But though it isn’t a sublime romantic comedy like Twelfth Night or As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Much Ado About Nothing, and though it isn’t dark enough to be as provocative as Measure for Measure, I think it’s a beautiful play, and John Dove’s version at the Globe this summer reminded me why I love it. Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s essentially a fairy tale. When the King of France (Sam Cox) is rumored to be on his deathbed, Helena (Ellie Piercy) travels to Paris from her home in Roussillon – where she’s the ward to the Countess (Janie Dee) – with the medicine bag she inherited from her father, whose medical skills were so elevated they were indistinguishable from white magic. Helena is one of those feisty Shakespearean comic heroines (like Rosalind and Viola) who, with her heart in her mouth, sets out to change her fortunes. She’s desperately in love with the Countess’s son Bertram (Sam Crane), who has gone to the court of France to serve the king, a close friend of his own late father’s. (Dead parents figure importantly in the plot, especially through their surrogates. The King, seeing Bertram’s father in him, assures him, “My son’s no dearer,” though he mostly acts as a disapproving father to him as the plot unfolds. Both the King and the Countess serve Helena in loco parentis.)When she offers to cure the King, whose doctors have pronounced his case hopeless, she stakes her life on the line, but in return she asks him to match her up with any young man in the kingdom. And since this is a fairy tale, her medicine works, and he presents all the most eligible bachelors in the court for her to survey.

In Dove’s production, she dismisses them with record speed and then indicates Bertram as her choice. And the poor bastard is thunderstruck. In many – I would guess most –  productions of All’s Well he doesn’t even know she’s alive, but here he’s quite fond of her; they grew up together, and in the scene between them before he takes off for Paris he’s playful with her before he kisses her on the forehead and asks her to watch over his mother in his absence. (Piercy makes it obvious that that’s not the kind of kiss she’s been hoping against hope from him.) But she’s the daughter of a poor doctor and his mother’s ward – he’s never thought of her as his wife. And he balks at the King’s insistence on telling him whom he should marry. But from the King’s point of view, his honor’s at stake because of the promise he’s made Helena, so he makes it crystal clear to Bertram that if he refuses to marry her he’ll regret it. So the young man makes a pretty and entirely rhetorical speech that places himself in his monarch’s hands – and then runs off on his wedding night with his friend Parolles (James Garnon) to join the army and fight in Florence, in a war that France hasn’t officially joined but that the King has permitted his young warriors to serve in if they so choose. (That Shakespeare makes it a war of no special consequence seems deliberate; it undercuts the virtues we might be moved to see in a young man whose motivation is service to his country, not adventure and escape.) Bertram leaves a letter for Helena proclaiming that he will never sleep with her until she can produce the ring on his finger, which bears the Roussillon family crest, and a child fathered by him, an impossibility on the face of it. But Helena has come so far out of love for him that she takes the next extraordinary step: she starts a rumor that she has died, disguises herself as a pilgrim and follows him to Florence, where she persuades a young woman Bertram has been courting, Diana (Naomi Cranston) to agree to bed him if he will give her his ring. What follows is the bed trick, a staple in the dramatic repertoire of Renaissance plays. In the darkness of night, he makes love to a woman he believes to be Diana but who in fact is Helena. Having obtained both his ring and his seed, she comes back from the dead in the final act carrying his child and they live happily ever after.

Rendered Beautifully: Anoushka Shankar’s Traveller

With all the political turmoil in the world today, it’s comforting to know that music continues to be such a unifying force. On her new album Traveller (Deutsche Grammophon), sitarist Anoushka Shankar brings the music and rhythms of India and Spain together in one remarkable recording.

At first glance, it may seem odd to couple the multiple beats of Indian classical music with Spanish flamenco, but that’s not the case. History tells us that flamenco music arrived with the exodus of the so-called “Untouchables” from the Punjab c. 800 AD. These gypsies, who were considered persons of low caste, traveled across Asia through what is now known as the Middle East, eventually settling in Europe. Carrying what was quite possibly all their worldly possessions, including instruments, they brought with them the music and rhythms of their culture and then connected with new sounds along the way. Traveller is an exploration of this cultural merger and Shankar and a host of exceptional Indian and Spanish musicians have beautifully rendered it.

A Storyteller in Word and Music: Jimmy Webb at Hugh’s Room, Oct.15, 2011

Jimmy Webb has written some of the most popular songs of the past fifty years. He also wrote some of the most heavily criticized songs of the past fifty years. And some of them are the same songs! When he took the corner stage at Hugh’s Room on Saturday night it was in front of a small group of fans with very few critics. The people loved him, and he returned the favour.

I’ve seen Jimmy four times, in two different venues. In an intimate club like Hugh’s Room, where everyone has just feasted on the Concert Special (which includes pasta and cheesecake), he’s a more relaxed raconteur. On a big stage in a theatre he is slightly more formal, but only slightly. The show began (after the beer and pasta and cheesecake) with a besuited Webb walking onto the stage taking his place at the grand piano and placing a notebook on the piano-stand. He noodled a bit and complimented the room. It’s his favourite place to play, he says. Then he launched into “The Highwayman” the ballad which launched the country supergroup of Cash, Nelson, Jennings and Kristofferson. After the song, he told the first of his long suite of stories. Walking into the studio to find Waylon asleep on a couch, cowboy hat covering his face, Webb reported on their dialog. I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version; after a few exchanges, Jimmy told Waylon, “I’m in the Country Songwriters’ Hall of Fame,” Waylon snorted and replied “Zat right…what country?”

Look, Up in the Sky! It’s a Jurassic Park for Our Times

One friend liked to call me Bird Nerd. For another, the teasing term was Birdbrain. That was back when I first became interested in the little feathered creatures descended from dinosaurs. Though I never went on any far-flung birding adventures as the characters in The Big Year do, I bought a field guide and binoculars to spy on the chickadees, blue jays, sparrows and cardinals that visited my neighborhood. I even learned to recognize some distinctive avian songs, much like Brad Harris (Jack Black) does in the film – which takes its title from an annual competition to witness more species than anyone else. A regular among the throngs that race to every site where rare birds have been spotted, he also is a contender in this contest.

Brad’s top rivals are Stu Pleisser (Steve Martin) and Kenny Bostick (Owen Wilson), a world-renowned champion in the sport who’ll stop at nothing to win. Even though a triumph brings only bragging rights, no prize money, male egos are at stake. For the better part of 365 days, the trio traipses through all kinds of weather to the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, the Gulf of Mexico, the Carolinas and beyond.

Lost Flyboys: First Light (2010) and Battle of Britain (2010)

Sometimes you wonder why certain movies get transferred to DVD, especially projects broadcast on British TV that never ran on television here, featuring actors you've never heard of. It's not that First Light (2010) is a terrible film; it's just that it's innocuous. And considering the story it’s telling, it shouldn't be.

In 1940, 18-year-old Geoffrey Wellum (the unknown-to-me Sam Heughan – in fact, the only actor I'd heard of in this film is Gary Lewis who played Billy Elliot's dad in Billy Elliot) managed to successfully enlist in the RAF just in time to be thrust into the middle of the Battle of Britain. He was an untrained, untried Spitfire pilot taken under the wing of the unit he's assigned to. He rapidly adapts and wins the respect of his squadron by demonstrating natural talents in the air. It takes him awhile before he is permitted to fly in combat, but with the dwindling number of fliers dropping like, well, flies, they finally let this young, shy man take part in a sortie.
 

A Gifted Man: A Truly Gifted Show

Jennifer Ehle and Patrick Wilson star in A Gifted Man

Barely four weeks into the new fall TV season, and we’ve already seen our first causalities: NBC’s neither sexy nor smart The Playboy Club, ABC’s dead-on-arrival Charlie’s Angels remake, and NBC’s workplace comedy Free Agents, have all been cancelled. (Perhaps I was alone in this, but I was rather charmed by Hank Azaria and Free Agents, and I regret that it wasn’t given more time to mature). In the end, however, I expect the 2011 fall TV season will likely be remembered for highly anticipated and expensive disappointments like Terra Nova, and impressively original cable fare like Homeland. (About Terra Nova, perhaps the less said the better, but Homeland deserves a special mention, and not only for the compelling case that Susan Green recently made on this blog. Showtime’s Homeland marks the return of Damian Lewis to television, last seen when NBC’s brilliant but short-lived series Life came to an untimely end in 2009. Lewis’ talent to portray quietly dangerous men with unfathomable internal lives is on full display in Homeland, and his presence alone would make the series worth your time!)

But sometimes, if you’re lucky, you don’t have to wade through CGI Brachiosaurs and 60s-era stewardesses to find great television. Every once in a while, good TV can play by established rules, and still bring something refreshingly new, smart, and entertaining to the small screen. This season that show is CBS’s A Gifted Man, and hopefully it hasn’t gone unnoticed. A Gifted Man is a medical drama with a twist, and so far it seems to be doing almost everything right. 

Agents of Change: HBO's Enlightened & Take Shelter

Laura Dern in Enlightened.

In the early fall of 1909, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were invited to speak at a conference in the United States at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, which was then celebrating its twentieth anniversary. The unspoken hope was that maybe these two fathers of psychoanalysis could address issues of anxiety and delirium which left many in the medical profession baffled and helpless. Many fascinating guests were in attendance for the talks. Besides philosopher and psychologist William James and America's prominent psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, activist and anarchist Emma Goldman, who three years earlier began speaking out for women's rights and birth control, turned up with an entourage to disrupt the proceedings. In the five lectures that Freud would deliver during his stay, he would discuss 'the talking cure' and his work with Anna O. who suffered from a diagnosed hysteria those doctors in Vienna couldn't identify.

Freud and Jung at Clark University, 1909

But if the gathered throng had hoped for a simple solution to the emotional problems erupting in the modern age, Freud served to disappoint and anger the captive audience. Besides introducing them to his concept of infantile sexuality, where he suggested that traumatic memories stem from "the enduring, repressed wishes of childhood" which are "almost invariably of a sexual nature," he went on to claim that there was no cure from "the original animality of our natures." Author Gary Greenberg (Manufacturing Depression), who recounted this famous event in a fascinating and perceptive article ("The War on Unhappiness")  for Harpers magazine in 2010, aptly described how the tumult created by these lectures would effect American psychiatry in the years to come. "Freud had come to the land of unbridled optimism to inform its inhabitants that a fragile equipoise between repression and abandon was the best they could hope for, and perpetual uncertainty their lot," Greenberg wrote. "The dourness of this message is probably what he had in mind when, as his ship pulled into New York Harbor, he turned to Jung and said, 'Don't they know we are bringing them the plague?'"

Hanging Out with the Apple Family

Sweet and Sad at the Public Theater in New York City/Photo by Joan Marcus

Sweet and Sad is the second in a series of plays written and directed by Richard Nelson that sets a family living in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley against the political backdrop of contemporary America – specifically the Democratic north east. That Hopey Changey Thing brought together the Apples – Richard, a Manhattan lawyer; his sisters Barbara, Marian and Jane; their uncle Benjamin, who lives with the unmarried Barbara; and Jane’s actor boy friend Tim Andrews – at Barbara’s house in upstate Rhinebeck during the 2010 mid-term elections. Sweet and Sad takes place on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and ends with the same group leaving Barbara’s to attend a local memorial concert at which Benjamin, who is also an actor but who has been suffering from amnesia following a heart attack, will be reading Walt Whitman’s Civil War poem “The Wound-Dresser.” These are intimate, small-scale pieces that attempt to accomplish something that seems to be increasingly difficult in the American theatre:  to depict three-dimensional characters responding to the political realities of present-day life without preaching or striking attitudes, using their relationships as a dramatic structure for reflecting their feelings.

Subtext and Translation: Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts at Soulpepper

Nancy Palk and Joseph Ziegler in Ghosts. Photo by Sian Richards

If Henrik Ibsen's plays often seem dated for contemporary audiences, it’s because he was writing about a society that shunned anybody caught having extra-marital affairs and (even worse) contracting VD. He believed, as a playwright, that he had a duty to write about the ultra-conservative Norwegian society and expose it in a new, more dramatic way. Writing from 1850 to 1899, Ibsen is considered the first "modern" dramatist whose caustic characters and real-life subject matter paved the way for George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. He heralded the birth of realism and, much like the simultaneous changes that took place in music and art, his work made waves around the world.

So any kind of consideration of the history of modern plays usually begins with Ibsen. His work is pretty well on every drama student's reading list along with Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck and An Enemy of the People. Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company has already proven an affinity for Ibsen. In 2005, they presented an excellent version of The Wild Duck, offering audiences a chance to see and hear Ibsen’s under-recognized masterpiece.

An Espionage Masterpiece: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

Damian Lewis, Morgan Saylor, Jackson Place, and Morena Baccarin in Homeland.

The word “homeland” makes me kind of queasy, especially when used by the Bush administration in launching the Department of Homeland Security nine years ago. It’s reminiscent of the beloved Nazi “fatherland.” The less patriarchal “motherland,” preferred by the Soviet Union, sounds just as creepy. But as the title for a new series on Showtime, Homeland makes for a tantalizingly tense television drama in which creepy is a good thing. The brilliant Claire Danes plays Carrie Mathison, a crack CIA agent taking medications to mask bipolar disorder. Mandy Patinkin is a marvel as Saul Berenson, a seasoned spook who’s her mentor. As performers, they’re both at the top of their game.

In the October 2 debut, the inciting incident takes place in Iraq, where Carrie is on an unauthorized covert mission. After a jailed militant awaiting execution tells her that an American POW has been “turned” by al Qaeda, she’s busted before learning more details, put on probation, and reassigned to the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Of course, nothing can keep this obsessive woman from the work that gives her life its sole meaning.

Trying To Stop the Killing: Steve James’ The Interrupters

Good documentaries do two things well. They introduce us to stories we should know about (Watermarks, Marwencol), or go deeper behind the scenes of items on the news (Capturing the Friedmans, Inside Job) and they tell us those stories in an innovative and compelling manner often bolstered by their idiosyncratic directors. Would Cave of Forgotten Dreams be as interesting if it wasn't narrated by director Werner Herzog himself? His accented, quirky and wry delivery makes the film stand out from your run-of-the-mill narration. Other fine docs, like Project Nim, tell their tales using the best narrative techniques, including probing interviews and deft use of montage. But sometimes talented filmmakers compromise their talents to, understandably, get their story told. That's the unfortunate case with The Interrupters.

Together Apart: Four Strong Winds, by John Einarson with Ian Tyson & Sylvia Tyson

Four strong winds that blow lonely,

Seven seas that run high,

All those things that don’t change come what may

But our good times are all gone,

And I’m bound for moving on,

I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way…

John Einarson has done something remarkable. He has managed to bring Ian Tyson and Sylvia Tyson to the table at the same time. The alert reader will note that they are not referred to as “Ian and Sylvia Tyson” but as individuals who share a last name. Nevertheless they both talked to Einarson about their careers (together and apart) for a fascinating glimpse into the folk music world in this new book Four Strong Winds (McClelland & Stewart, 2011).

Their presences stand like two Colossi of Rhodes straddling the ‘60s and today. I’m not sure they will ever receive the credit they are due. They had the same manager as Bob Dylan, they played the same clubs as Peter, Paul & Mary, the top-flight musicians who played with them all went on to success (David Rea and David Wilcox among them) … but somehow their biggest hits were scored by other performers. Neil Young’s version of Ian’s “Four Strong Winds” and We Five’s top ten rendition of Sylvia’s “You Were On My Mind” are the performances we remember.

The King of Sad Bastard Songs All Grown Up: Ryan Adams’ Ashes & Fire

The ever prolific king of sad bastard songs, Ryan Adams, has emerged from his “retirement” with new material. Since announcing his hiatus from music in 2009, little was heard from the artist. By 2010, we saw Orion, a metal endeavor, released only on vinyl. That same year also marked the release of III/IV, the shelved sessions from the 2007 Easy Tiger recording with the Cardinals. While I respected Adams’ genre-bending talents, I found the latter album just too loud. (Yes, I’m 70-years-old and can’t stand those kids and their guitars.)

That being said, I didn’t know what to expect when I was forwarded an NPR First Listen of Ashes and Fire (PAX-AM/Capitol). About thirty seconds in, however, I was hooked. Adams makes a full come back with this signature country, Americana mix. Ashes and Fire is Adams’ presenting himself stripped down and soulful. Probably the most refined album of his career. The title track and especially the opener, “Dirty Rain,” contains that slow, familiar, twang evident in Adams’ earlier albums. Ashes and Fire is a solid autumnal delivery that perfectly matches the timing of the album’s release.

Neglected Gems #7: Childhood's End (1997)

It’s a funny thing about movies. They may get critical acclaim, even score some box office success and years later they’re barely mentioned by anyone or even remembered. And there’s often no discernible reason for their fates. I really can’t tell why Neil Jordan’s terrific and accessible heist movie The Good Thief, which got good reviews when it came out in 2002, has pretty much vanished into the ether. Or why Steve Jordan’s powerful documentary Stevie (2002) failed to match the impact of his earlier 1994 doc Hoop Dreams. Or even why The Lord of the Rings’s Peter Jackson’s mock 1995 documentary Forgotten Silver didn’t become the cult hit it should have been. In any case, here is the latest entry in a series of disparate movies you really ought to see.

A memorable debut from Jeff Lipsky, co-founder of distributor October Films (Life is Sweet, Breaking the Waves) turned filmmaker, Childhood's End has more in common with frank, uncompromising European cinema than its softer American model. Following a group of Minneapolis teenagers, all on the cusp of adult responsibilities and challenges, Childhood's End sets out to paint a dark but still optimistic portrait of contemporary American youth. 

It's loosely plotted, picking up and dropping its characters in turn, but it never feels underwritten or sloppy. The film, which features Edie Falco (Nurse Jackie) in a small role, concentrates on two main strands: the love affair between Greg (Sam Trammell, True Blood), a hotshot young photo editor, and Evelyn (Cameron Foord), a forthright older woman; and the budding relationship between Evelyn's cynical daughter Denise (Colleen Werthmann) and the painfully shy Rebecca (Heather Gottlieb). Childhood's End is a strongly presented, sexually explicit drama, strikingly well acted and often startling in its intensity. It should have marked Lipsky as a talent to watch but the film barely made a ripple and his subsequent movies, Flannel Pajamas (2006), Once More with Feeling (2009) and Twelve Thirty (2010), none of which have played in my neck of the woods, were similarly neglected.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto . He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute, and in September will be teaching a course on the work of Steven Spielberg. Also in the fall, he'll be teaching Genre Movies at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in Toronto .

Legendary Failures: Candide & Follies

Geoff Packard as Candide with the ensemble

The Leonard Bernstein musical based on Voltaire’s savage 1759 satire Candide has undergone so many alterations since it opened on Broadway in 1956 that it’s practically a work in progress. That’s because the original production, which had a libretto by Lillian Hellman, wasn’t a hit, and no one thought highly enough of it to revive it until Harold Prince, working from a revised book by Hugh Wheeler, staged it in the seventies. Most of the lyrics are by Richard Wilbur but a number of hands have contributed to them over the years, including Hellman, John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein himself. (James Agee, at the end of his life, wrote some lyrics, too, but they were never used.) The latest version, directed by Mary Zimmerman for Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, also lists her as adapter.

Still, it would be a mistake to call the show a noble failure. It’s literate and ingenious, and the Bernstein music is glorious, prodigiously varied in style and rich in melodic invention – far more so (if I may venture a sacrilegious observation) than the much more famous score he wrote for West Side Story. But the musical has a history of overproduced and overstated productions. (Prince’s 1973 revival – he staged a subsequent one in 1997 that I didn’t catch – was heavy-handed and tedious in a way that played hide and seek with the virtues of the libretto.) The only time I’ve ever seen it work was when Lonny Price mounted a fairly elaborate staged reading in 2004 at the New York Philharmonic with Paul Groves as the fate-buffeted naïf Candide, Kristen Chenoweth as his beloved Cunegonde, an aristocrat whom the ravages of war and tyranny reduce to a whore, and Patti LuPone as the inscrutable Old Lady, who claims a past even more brutal and fabled than either of theirs. (The production was televised and is available on DVD.) Price and his company took a cheeky, light-handed approach to the material; it suggested something conceived by gifted undergraduates and performed by pros – though the choruses were actually splendid amateurs, from the Westminster Choir College and Juilliard. Voltaire’s hilarious misanthropy was presented in the form not of a high-caloric banquet with an excess of dishes on the table but of a movable feast of delectable hors d’oeuvres. Rather than aiming a cannon at the timeless vices of humankind, the show leveled them by sneak attack.

R.I.P.: Steve Jobs and R.E.M.

“Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.”

– Post on YouTube below the video for R.E.M.'s “Losing My Religion.”

I knew neither Steve Jobs nor any members of the band R.E.M. (who announced their break up about a month ago), so why does it feel I've lost people I know? Only one of these passings is truly tragic – the ridiculously unfair early death of Steve Jobs at 56 – and yet it is as if with his passing (and to a lesser extent, the breakup of R.E.M.) that an important part of my past has now, well, passed.

My first computer in 1989 was a Mac Plus. At the time, I was terrified of computers, but a friend had convinced me that Apple's products were the perfect vehicle for someone with my limited computer skills. I took her advice. I pulled the machine out of the box, followed the clear instructions, hooked up the wires, flicked the switch and it started up (okay, I had one brief panic call to the very helpful Apple Help Desk, but that was all). I managed again without any trouble to configure the machine and get it ready to accept programs. That, too, was painless. Within an hour of pulling the computer out of it's box, I was working in Microsoft Word on a device that, to me, was blisteringly fast (I know, don't laugh too hard). At that time, it was the culmination of work begun in 1977 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Within You, Without You: George Harrison Living in the Material World

The late John Lennon probably characterized his friend and band mate George Harrison best in 1968 when he told a journalist that, while George himself was no mystery, the mystery inside George was immense. "It's watching him uncover it all little by little that's so damn interesting," Lennon remarked. You get some sense of that slow peeling away of paradoxical mystery while watching Martin Scorsese's two-part HBO documentary, George Harrison Living in the Material World, which examines Harrison's life both as one of The Beatles and his search for spiritual solace in the aftermath of Beatlemania. Scorsese has described his film, in fact, as an exploration into Harrison's endless quest for serenity. "We don't know," he said while making the picture. "We're just feeling our way through." That unfortunately is also a pretty accurate assessment of the movie. George Harrison Living in the Material World is filled with fleeting bits of revelation and insight but it seldom finds its focus. At times, the jagged storytelling and impressionistic glimpses seem arbitrary and puzzling rather than revealing. You may be inside the immense mystery that makes up George Harrison, but Scorsese can't seem to tell us why we're there.

All the Maybe-President’s Men: A Trek on the Campaign Trail

“I’m all goosbumpy about this guy,” admits Ryan Gosling as Stephen Myers, an idealistic press secretary working for an inspirational candidate.

“He will let you down sooner or later,” predicts Ida Horowicz, a crafty New York Times reporter played by Marisa Tomei. This comment is reminiscent of what Shakespeare had a soothsayer tell Julius Caesar about the danger inherent in a certain date. The Ides of March, a new film that borrows its title from the mystical line written by the Bard in 1599, suggests that we should beware politicians of every stripe and their minions.

A Search For Honest Reflection: Feist's Metals (2011)

Metals (Arts&Crafts) by Feist is one of the most interesting releases of 2011. It’s an album that reveals a maturing artist with a willingness to take uncompromising risks.

Metals starts with the heavy beat of a drum kit who’s heart is alive and well in Feist's world, as we're carried into the finer points of a relationship on the opening cut, "The Bad In Each Other." It's a song in 6/8 that immediately grabs your attention because of its pulse and a horn section supplemented by a string quartet. It's a big sound because it's a big album that wants to be noticed.

The Rodney Dangerfield of Film Directors: Why Can’t Steven Spielberg Get Any Respect?

Why doesn’t filmmaker Steven Spielberg get the acclaim he deserves? Arguably, he’s the best known director in Hollywood, one whom the average, casual film-goer can identify by name and face. And while he’s doesn't yet have a word in the English language that encapsulates his work (like Hitchcockian, denoting a certain type of horror/suspense movie; or Felliniesque, describing a specific hyper-realistic style of film), Spielberg has, perhaps, influenced more directors than anyone else in the history of the movies, including as a producer of  Spielberg-like movies such as Cowboys & Aliens and Real Steel. From Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) to Joe Dante (Gremlins), James Cameron (Avatar) to JJ Abrams (Super 8), there is no shortage of filmmakers whose style, content and tone have been borrowed, to one degree or another, from Spielberg’s oeuvre and not always in a good way. James Cameron’s movies, by comparison, lack the appealing warmth of Spielberg’s best work, while Super 8, which Spielberg produced, played out more like an ersatz Spielberg flick, a pale copy of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind without any original personality of its own. (Not coincidentally, I think, he also produced most of Zemeckis's and Dante's films including such standouts as Used Cars and Gremlins 2.)

Yet even when Spielberg departs from his familiar fantasy films to tackle decidedly realistic endeavours (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich ), there are those who carp about the supposed softness of the material, or decry its sentimentality. While admittedly some sentimentality does indeed run through his work, he's rarely given any credit for the sheer talent on display, or for the sheer brilliance with which he animates his movies. This is something I will be examining in my forthcoming course, The Paradox of Steven Spielberg, at the LIFE Institute – Ryerson University. The simple truth is that, like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, he can’t get any respect.

Talking Out of Turn #23: David Horowitz on Henry Ford (1988)

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

Tom Fulton of CJRT-FM's On the Arts

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

David Horowitz

In the chapter Icons Revisited, I included a number of writers who re-examined past iconic figures whose personalities still continued to overshadow the decade. Some of the writers included Barbara Branden on Ayn Rand, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Kennedy family, John Malcolm Brinnin on Truman Capote, Heather Robertson's fictionalized biographies on former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, and former leftist activist (now neo-conservative) David Horowitz who, along with Peter Collier, wrote a riveting and complex study of the Ford family empire called The Fords: An American Epic. Horowitz, the founder of the online FrontPage magazine, had already previously written a fascinating and highly readable biography of the Kennedys, but the Ford family posed a whole different challenge for two men who once stormed the barricades against the kind represented by Henry Ford and his automobile empire. This interview in 1988 took place three years after Horowitz, a former editor of the San Francisco leftist magazine Ramparts, had turned his back on the left and began his career as a social conservative.

Personal Soundtrack: Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap Stories (Viking Canada, 2011)

On January 30, 2010, Randy Bachman (formerly of Guess Who and BTO) offered a live, on-stage version of Randy’s Vinyl Tap, the weekly show he does for CBC Radio. On the show, called Guitarology, he talked about the use of guitar in the history of rock’n’roll, playing tracks by the appropriate artists. Then for three consecutive nights in the intimate Glenn Gould Theatre in downtown Toronto, Bachman and his band played live, simulating the original recordings by using the same guitars the original artists used.

This year, Randy has published a collection of stories from the radio show in book form. He has included some of the Guitarology material, as well as other tales gleaned from a lifetime on the road, and in studios.

At the concert, he kicked things off with the Fender Telecaster: playing authentic renditions of Dale Hawkins’ “Susie Q” and Buck Owens’ “Buckaroo”. On “Message in a Bottle” from The Police, Randy said, “this is Andy Summers’ hardest song.  [This riff is comprised of] stacked 5ths. Try doing that for 4 minutes!”  Well, he managed to do it, and then, even more impressive, Bachman managed to take on “We’ve Ended As Lovers” and sound just like Jeff Beck!

Bachman's guitars at Glenn Gould Theatre

On paper you don’t get to hear the songs, but you do get the authentic voice of someone who has been there (and back) telling the stories. The chapter entitled “Randy’s Guitar Shopp” features many of the tales from the concert.  As a teenager in Winnipeg, he met Lenny Breau who gave Bachman some guitar lessons. This led to his interest in jazz guitar. In his autobiography (2000’s Takin’ Care of Business) he mentioned the debt he owed to Breau. His lessons with Breau, and run-ins with Neil Young, are recounted in a chapter called “Lenny, Neil and Me.” His familiarity with the axes, chops and hot licks of players from Chuck Berry to Eric Clapton, comes through in fascinating yarns he spins on the pages of Vinyl Tap Stories.

Writers in Charge: John A: Birth of a Country and Camelot

In the 1970s and 1980s, I went to see movies once, sometimes twice a week. After I quit film criticism in 1989, I found my movie attendance drop off to the point that, in this calendar year, I've gone to the cinema exactly twice – and once was to see a live broadcast of a play put on by the London's National Theatre Company broadcast by satellite to the theatre (Danny Boyle's Frankenstein); the other was to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. It's not that I've stopped watching movies – I continue to build my extensive DVD collection, though that avenue, as I outlined here, may have reached the end of the line – it's just that most of the movies I pick up aren't necessarily new. (I recently bought Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1974) and John Boorman's The Tailor of Panama (2001) for less than $5 each.) With the demise of the 'director as god' in film-making, the creative energies that excited me so much in the movie theatres of the '70s and '80s are, with a few exceptions each year, gone.

Where it has reappeared is on television, and the power is usually in the hands of writers. Over the past few years, I've been enthralled by a remarkable string of  writer-run shows: Mad Men, Battlestar Galatica, The Walking Dead, The Republic of Doyle, Flashpoint, Invasion, Boomtown, Deadwood, The Tudors, The Borgias, Rescue Me, Game of Thrones, Endgame, Damages and, from what everybody tells me though I've yet to catch up to it, Breaking Bad. There have also been miniseries, such as John Adams, Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon that have floated my boat. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. So, it was with great anticipation that I awaited the start of this season. One American show, Pan Am, showed a great deal of promise in its debut episode last Sunday, but two Canadian productions, one a made-for-TV movie, John A: Birth of a Country, and the other a new series from the people behind The Tudors, Camelot, have mostly got the season off to a great start.

Broken Gates: Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment at the Berkshire Theatre Festival

Rebecca Brooksher and Paul Fitzgerald in Period of Adjustment (Photo: Christy Wright)

Like Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams wrote only one full-length comedy, but the comic efforts of America’s two greatest playwrights stand in different relationships to the rest of their output. O’Neill’s 1933 Ah, Wilderness! is a wish-fulfillment fantasy version of his own family; it’s the flip side of his autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night, with every tragic detail neutralized or reimagined to produce the benign, affectionate all-American family life he could only dream of. The best productions of the play air traces of the melancholy that the play deftly represses; the worst are situation comedies.  By contrast Williams’s Period of Adjustment (1960) isn’t at a far remove from his dramas.  In the two awkward, disappointed couples Williams juxtaposes on a snowy Memphis Christmas Eve, we recognize the playwright’s ongoing portrait of a fumbling humanity out of step with its own worn dreams but still on its feet.  A rare and sensitive production of the play by David Auburn at the end of the Berkshire Theatre Festival season highlighted the lovely qualities of this forgotten work. (A broad, frantic movie adaptation in 1962 with Jane Fonda, Anthony Franciosa, Jim Hutton and Lois Nettleton didn’t do much to bolster the play’s reputation.)

A Tale of Two Series: Science Fiction in Different Dimensions

The cast of Alphas and the New York City skyline

Bye-bye, Alphas. Your season finale left me looking forward to seeing you again in 2012. Hello, Terra Nova. Have I already seen enough in your recent debut to know you’re no substitute for Alphas?

For discerning fans, the current human condition filtered through the lens of forward-thinking ideas is far more interesting than futuristic spectacle. But Hollywood is Hollywood, a place in the thrall of explosions and CGI. The creators of Alphas, on the SyFy channel, set their contemporary drama in New York City (but shoot it in Ontario, as per usual). The always formidable David Strathairn appears as a psychiatrist who guides a clandestine team of crime-fighters with special powers. Don’t label these quasi-federal agents who frequently clash with the bureaucratic U.S. government as superheroes just yet, though. Their limitations are derived from serious personality issues. They’re too normal-looking to qualify as mutants in an X-Men scenario, despite the fact that Alphas co-creator Zak Penn wrote the 2006 sequel of that movie franchise, The Last Stand.

On the Fox network, Terra Nova – like Falling Skies, executive-produced by Steven Spielberg – ricochets from a smog-choked and repressive 2149 back to pristine prehistoric days of yore (as imagined by production designers in rural Australia). It follows one particularly photogenic nuclear family that wins a lottery to join the Tenth Pilgrimage of pioneers willing to slip through a “fracture” in the space-time continuum. They leave behind an Orwellian nightmare for the potential paradise of an unruined Earth, albeit one with necessary supplies sent via the magic portal. But this is one-way-only travel to a new frontier that harbors dinosaurs and more mundane dangers galore. As Jean-Paul Sartre so helpfully pointed out, hell is other people. 

The House that Tina Fey Built: Women Take Charge of the New Fall Sitcoms of 2011

Tina Fey

We are now firmly in the second week of the new fall TV season, and so far one thing seems clear: quirky and complicated women seem to be taking over our airwaves. Beginning in mid-October, ABC will offer two new comedies with a male perspective, Last Man Standing and Man Up – both promising to look at the modern beleaguered man. But for now, September is awash with new sitcoms boasting an array of strong, funny women: Zooey Deschanel in New Girl on Fox; Kathryn Hahn in Free Agents, and Whitney Cummings in Whitney on NBC; and Kat Dennings in 2 Broke Girls on CBS.  

Strong female characters are of course nothing new in the history of the American sitcom: Gertrude Berg (The Goldbergs) and Lucille Ball (I Love Lucy) basically invented the situation comedy in the early 1950s, playing women who were brazen, funny, and regularly willing to make themselves the joke. But as the TV mother and wife evolved through the decades, fallible and funny women characters were generally replaced by the long-suffering and inordinately pretty wives of fallible and funny men – roles like Mary Richards, Maude Finlay, and Roseanne Conner became the exception instead of the rule. No doubt emboldened by the critical and ratings successes of Tina Fey (30 Rock) and Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation), executives have clearly decided that perhaps it is time to return to their roots. And generally speaking, the viewers are all the better for it – though as usual, not all the new shows are equally worth our time.

Of Politics, Publishing and the People: City Lights Book Store Shines

Even the name is evocative and meaningful: first a Chaplin film, then the title of a literary magazine, finally the name of the iconic San Francisco bookstore and independent press which straddles Chinatown and North Beach. But City Lights is on the cusp of more than just urban divisions; it’s a place that doesn't shy away from protests or avoid the political. And as I walk through the door, I sense that this is not to be a typical book buying experience. Staff members are infinitively knowledgeable about not only what City Lights sells, but also what they publish. And it is their published monographs, not bargain books, which take a place of prominence here. From icons like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to lesser known but equally smart authors like Toronto-based Hal Niedzviecki, this press publishes a range of titles. As the name suggests, City Lights is a beacon of truth in the books they make available.

The Macho Imperative: The Enigma of Straw Dogs

Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs (1971).

In Sam Peckinpah's beautifully spacious and thematically rich western Ride the High Country (1962), two aging former lawmen Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) and Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), both old friends, are hired to guard a gold shipment as it is delivered down from a mountain mining camp to a town below. During the trip, the men reminisce about their many years together as friends and contemplate how the times are changing (and not for the better). While Gil considers stealing the gold as one last stab at glory, he looks to Steve and inquires, "Is that what you want, Steve?" Without a moment to reflect, Steve replies, "All I want is to enter my house justified." That moral conflict with its Biblical sense of justice and retribution would come to define much of Peckinpah's work in the coming years, such as in The Wild Bunch (1969) and Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), where he continually sought that elusive house to feel justified in. By the time he made Straw Dogs in 1971, however, that home became much more literal and the conflict much less complex.

Classic American Musicals: Porgy & Bess and Show Boat

Porgy and Bess

Diane Paulus’s production of Porgy and Bess, which is running at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge (where she’s artistic director) before heading for Broadway, came encumbered with controversy. Shortly before it opened Paulus, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (who revised the DuBose Heyward script), and star Audra McDonald gave interviews to The New York Times and The Boston Globe trumpeting their mission to render the classic 1935 American opera accessible to twenty-first-century audiences and made a lot of other fatuous comments in addition.

Stephen Sondheim answered with a furious and brilliantly argued editorial in The Times that took apart their remarks one by one. Evidently Sondheim’s objections had some effect on the production – Paulus, Parks and the composer Diedre L. Murray, who had reworked the final scene of the show to make it more uplifting, restored the original ending. Sondheim was careful to separate out the hype from the work itself, expressing the hope that Paulus’s Porgy would turn out to be as exciting as the cast promised – in addition to McDonald, it stars Norm Lewis as Porgy and David Alan Grier as Sportin’ Life – while reiterating the importance of acknowledging the magnificence of the opera that George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward had fashioned from Heyward’s 1925 novella. Among other corrections, he pointed out the iniquity of renaming the show The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, when Heyward and not Ira Gershwin made the most substantial contribution to the libretto – a fact that anyone familiar with Ira Gershwin’s lyrics can spot ample evidence of, whatever he or she may think of them. (Sondheim is not an Ira Gershwin enthusiast; I am.) 

Beautifully Rendered Fragments: Lindsay Buckingham’s Seeds We Sow

It must have been weird being in one of the world’s biggest groups, on the cover of Rolling Stone, writing a few top ten hits, and then settling in to a low key solo career.  Lindsey Buckingham describes it in recent interviews as the difference between being part of a giant machine, or a small business.  In Fleetwood Mac, he was responsible for creating the hits.  Even when he was taking songs written by Stevie Nicks or Christine McVie, he often added his own quirky touches to make the sonic sheen unique.  On his solo records he has tended to focus inward, to play all (or most) of the instruments, to harmonize with himself, and make music that is at once sonically superior, yet still maintaining a punky edge.  When I saw him in concert during a 2008 tour promoting Gift of Screws he played to a half empty theatre, but still gave one of the most exhilarating, rocking shows I’ve ever seen.

Seeds We Sow is a step back from Gift of Screws to a more low key, personal, folksy sound.  More like Under the Skin, the record that predated Screws. While he utilizes backup musicians sparingly on his solo releases, they are for the most part solo performances with Buckingham playing guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion and vocals.  In this way he builds a temple of audio that echoes his hero Brian Wilson.  The addition of a stray drummer or bass player, whether it is Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, or touring partners Wilfredo Reyes and John Pierce, does little to change the personality of the music.