Imagine!: Jeff Greenfield’s If Kennedy Lived

Photo by Walt Cisco/Dallas Morning News

I was only four years old when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, fifty years ago today, also on Friday. Though I don’t remember that event I've always admired the man, despite the later revelations of his philandering before and during his years at the White House. I’m Canadian but like so many people I felt that JFK symbolized a promise for a better future for his country and by extension the rest of the planet, which also took to his fresh, youthful vigour. His was a promise, of course, cut tragically short when he was still in his prime. And I, too, have wondered what a two term John F. Kennedy presidency would have meant, in light of America’s continuing presence in Vietnam and its challenges surrounding race relations. In that vein, Jeff Greenfield’s new speculative book, If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History (Putnam) is a welcome imaginative journey into a world that so many of us wish had come to be and a timely reminder that one man can make a huge difference in the world.

Greenfield, a veteran journalist who has already made a previous, effective foray into presidential alternate history with his book Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, keeps to a modest tone throughout. He never overstates his points, but emphasizes that a continuing Kennedy presidency would have been significantly at odds with the Lyndon B. Johnson one we actually lived through.

Vicious Circles: The JFK Conspiracy Films

Immersing oneself in the conspiracy mythology that has grown up around the assassination of President Kennedy means hearing, again and again, confident assertions of things that have been repeatedly shown to be untrue. Oswald couldn’t shoot straight, they say, and no one could get off the number of shots he supposed fired in the space of time he had using the weapon he would have used. There's also exhaustive, detailed arguments that completely unravel upon close inspection (such as all the mocking elaborations on the impossible trajectory of the bullet that passed through the bodies of Kennedy and John Connally that fail to take into account the fact that, as you guess just from looking at photos of the two men riding in the presidential limousine, Kennedy’s seat was a few key inches higher than Connally’s).

There was never any valid intellectual reason for doubting that Lee Harvey Oswald was the president’s killer, just as there’s never been any valid intellectual reason for doubting that the plays and poetry credited to William Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare. Arguments that somebody else wrote Shakespeare’s work always come down to snobbery; they’re emotionally necessary for people who can’t deal with the fact that the greatest English writer was a mutt. The belief that Kennedy must have been the victim of a conspiracy must be very reassuring to people who can’t wrap their minds around the idea that some mutt with a mail-order rifle changed the course of history. That helps to explain why high-profile conspiracy proponents – people who claim to think that powerful forces, maybe even the government itself, murdered the president and got off scott free, never seem to be as furiously angry and despairing as you’d expect them to be. Given the chance to spout off, an Oliver Stone or Mark Lane is more likely to come across as remarkably at peace, even smug. Unlike the rest of us, they don’t live in a world where chaos reigns and things are out of man’s control. They know something you don’t know.

From Historian to Novelist: The Work of Dan Vyleta

Working toward the Fuhrer. It’s the watchword of the age…Who’s to say the [arrested man] isn’t guilty? A little time with us, and I’m sure he will confess.”

—Detective Franz Teuben in The Quiet Twin

As the first part of this epigraph suggests, Dan Vyleta has deftly incorporated into his second novel one of the most important insights of Sir Ian Kershaw’s definitive biography of Hitler. Orders do not have to be explicitly given: citizens should instinctually be able to interpret the wishes of the Fuhrer. If it is not in the best interest of individuals to act in this spirit – or if historical circumstances have radically altered – they must learn to dissemble and wear a mask to protect their secrets. To varying degrees, this aperçu could apply to the characters in the three Vyleta novels.

As a novelist, Vyleta carries his historical research lightly since he is primarily interested in creating a world. He has accomplished that goal for the most part exceptionally well in his novels: the frigid winter of Berlin 1946-47 in Pavel and I (2009), the early months of 1939 wartime Vienna in The Quiet Twin (2011), and 1948 post-war Vienna in The Crooked Maid (HarperCollins, 2013). He has also peopled his novels with a bevy of idiosyncratic characters that appear to be inspired by his historical research and Dickens, Greene, Dostoevsky and Kafka underlining his European origins: his parents were Czechoslovakian refugees living in Berlin where he was born and he did his doctorate in history at Cambridge before coming to Canada. Perhaps he owes his greatest debt, though he does not mention it, to the 1949 film, The Third Man, written by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed. The black and white film noir quality of that film is an avatar to the atmosphere and plot of his novels.

Still Going Strong: James Kudelka's Swan Lake, Christopher House's Eleven Accords and Margie Gillis' The Light Between

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Blunt: Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave

During an interview with American composer Randy Newman on the National Public Radio show Morning Edition in the fall of 2003, host Bob Edwards questioned Newman's motivation for composing "Sail Away," a sweeping and majestic track about the slave trade told from the point of view of the slave trader. In the song, Newman not only steps inside the skin of this flesh merchant, he introduces his African captives to an idea of freedom which turns out to hold the fruits of every horror they will later face as black Americans. But the orchestral arrangement is so majestic, it arouses an eagerness to jump on board in spite of the words you're hearing. Shocked that Newman could write such a beautiful song about such a shocking subject, Edwards pressed on. "What am I supposed to say," Newman replied, "'Slavery is bad?' It's like falling out of an airplane and hitting the ground. It's just too easy. And it has no effect."

Newman could just as easily be describing Steve McQueen's new and highly acclaimed film 12 Years a Slave. If McQueen's first picture, Hunger (2008), boiled a complex situation down to a blunt portrait of one man starving himself to death out of political principle; and his second, Shame (2011), reduced a character's sexual obsession to a prurient judgment of his pathology, 12 Years a Slave, a true story about a free Northern black man, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) sold into slavery, repeatedly tells us – with the impact of a blunt instrument – that 'slavery is bad.' This approach may be too easy, but (judging by the enthusiastic reviews and huge box office) it has apparently been highly effective. McQueen achieves this acclaim by opting for endless scenes of pictorial abasement to whip up the audience's outrage rather than dramatically engaging us in Northup's fate. McQueen's glacial temperament and his freeze-dried painterly style (literally, with its nods here to Goya) treats melodrama as a formal exercise.

Fascism and Folly: The Donmar Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse

Phyllida Lloyd’s Julius Caesar, imported from London’s Donmar Warehouse for a five-week run at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, is the second version this year of Shakespeare’s tragedy with a prison setting. The first was Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s film Caesar Must Die, an account of an actual performance of the play by male inmates at a high-security Italian lock-up. In Lloyd’s production it’s enacted by the inhabitants of a woman’s prison. The audience gathers outside the heavy metal warehouse door for unsmiling uniformed guards to let them in, and then waits again, in their seats, for the actors to march in.

This Caesar, like Orson Welles’s famous 1937 brown-shirt adaptation, is about fascism, an idea that’s underscored by the setting but even more, intriguingly, by the all-female cast, which throws the boys’ club machismo and thuggery of Caesar and his associates into relief. Caesar (the terrific Frances Barber) is charismatic, a crowd pleaser, who’s playful with his friends. But the playfulness has an edge, his sense of irony a scary unpredictability. “Let me have men around me who are fat,” he declares as he opens a box of doughnuts, and the audience laughs appreciatively at this contemporary variation on a familiar line. But then he grabs Cassius (Jenny Jules), whose “lean and hungry look” has occasioned this declaration, pins him to a chair, shoves a doughnut in his maw, takes a bite out of it himself, and then wets his finger delicately and uses it to wipe Cassius’s mouth. The act is simultaneously a humiliation and a threat. Caesar’s men pay tribute to him by wearing cardboard masks of his face; when Cassius, Brutus (Harriet Walter) and Casca (Susan Brown) meet for a secret conference – they sit together at a table pretending to read magazines while they murmur rushed remarks – Casca reports that some men they know have been put to silence for taking down Caesar’s images.

Fall Slump: When Good Comedies Stumble

Jake Johnson and Zooey Deschanel in New Girl, now airing its third season on Fox

Many television shows drag on far too long, but there is something especially unsettling about watching it happen to a sitcom. While no less upsetting when a favourite drama goes awry, (see: Battlestar Galactica, circa Season 3), the best of dramatic television often succeeds and fails in taking the story in new directions, which means a viewer can easily parse where and how it goes wrong. With ever-growing regularity, TV dramas have enthusiastically embraced television's rich storytelling potential, working in shifting themes, character growth and evolving situations into their long stories. To single out just one current series: FX's Justified has had four strong seasons – even if one or two stand out more than the rest – and it has done this by allowing its main characters to go in and out of new situations, interacting with different and often stand out amazing new actors who come on board for a single season's story alone, leading (for example) to Margo Martindale's Emmy-winning turn in Season 2. As a result, Justified can not only survive the death of main characters and the moral decline of others, it can thrive because of it. But mainstream situation comedy is, well, still largely dependent on its situation – even the best and most accomplished among them are often by necessity static. Static doesn't mean stagnant however. (Bart and Lisa Simpson's perennial and perhaps even purgatorial childhood is still the exception and not the rule.) Having established its fundamental tone, central characters, and key relationships, there are innumerable and endlessly creative situations to work within. ABC's Modern Family, now its fifth season, is perhaps the best example of how strong writing and acting can do amazing stuff within clear and largely preset parameters. 

I tend to return weekly to many of my favourite network comedies as much for feelings of comfort and familiarity as anything else. But when you begin to suspect that the show itself isn't living up to its side of the contract, that trust can often only stretch so far. And this puts even their biggest fans in a particular bind – a feeling not unlike when a close friend has overstayed their welcome on your couch. While some returning shows have been having exceptional fall seasons – CBS's Elementary is simply rocking its sophomore season – some returning comedies are making me eye the door for the first time: How I Met Your Mother, in its ninth (!) and final season; New Girl, in its third year; and most disappointingly, The Mindy Project, growing tired only in its second season.

Warming Up With Canadian Bluegrass: The High Bar Gang and The Barn Katz

What could possibly warm the heart (as well as the hands) on a brisk Canadian autumn day like a dose of bluegrass? That’s right…bluegrass! The American roots music that Wikipedia describes as a “sub-genre of country music” blahblahblah. Sure, it’s true, bluegrass was “inspired by the music of Appalachia…has mixed roots in Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English traditional music” and all the rest but the last part of Wikipedia’s definition is the important part. Bluegrass was “later influenced by the music of African-Americans through incorporation of jazz elements.” Huh? “Jazz elements”? Thassright folks, jazz! Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, cutting sessions, musicians who were master of their instruments trading off with each other, blowing free. Using the song structure as a foundation for wherever their imagination and talent would let them go. You can feel the heat rising from the guitar strings and mandolin strings, the banjos, the stand-up bass as each member of the band takes a shot at transforming the melody into something new and exciting. If you don’t warm up at a bluegrass show then you’re probably already dead.

I was invited one evening to attend a recording session at Grant Avenue Studios in central Hamilton. Grant Avenue is a residential street, the studio building an old brick house. Inside, it’s magic. The recording booth to the left, the playing room straight ahead. Up the stairs there’s an instrument room with so many guitars on the wall it makes your head spin. Joe Clark was going to record with his old buddy Don Rigsby. There were only a handful of family members and friends invited. It was extraordinary, the high lonesome sound of harmonies and virtuosity. It’s a night I’ll never forget. Only trouble is, it’s over, I carry the memory but I wish I could hear it again, and again.

All Wet: J.C. Chandor's All is Lost

Scale in movies can be a funny thing. The writer-director J. C. Chandor’s first feature, the 2011 Margin Call, was mostly set in Manhattan, featured a lot of good actors, and had an important, charged subject: the amoral, cutthroat capitalist culture that set the stage for the global economic meltdown. It felt like a small, intimate movie, though, probably because it was mostly talk and lacked serious star power. Chandor’s new movie, All Is Lost, has a single, nameless character, who, after a brief introductory voice-over that sets a solemn, doomy tone, speaks only a very few words in the course of the film, words like “Help!” and “Fuuuuck!!”. But because this character – “Our Man,” he’s called in the closing credits – is out on the high seas and is played by the iconic movie star Robert Redford (at whose Sundance Film Festival Margin Call premiered), All Is Lost has an epic feel to it. For 100 minutes, you’re focused on Redford’s efforts to stay alive after his sailboat is damaged, and after he’s finally forced to abandon it in favor of an inflatable life raft. The movie tells you nothing about “Our Man;” even his voice-over reveals only that he tried “to be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right,” and that he believes he failed, though he would appreciate being awarded points for the effort. Most of the reviews of this phenomenally well-reviewed picture take the position that it doesn’t matter who this man is, though it must help a lot of people to care about him that he’s the 77-year-old Sundance Kid.

Neglected Gem #48: Roger Spottiswoode's The Best of Times (1986)

Robin Williams and Kurt Russell in The Best of Times 

The Best of Times is a wonderful little movie – a small-town comedy inspired by the great Preston Sturges send-ups of the forties (Hail the Conquering Hero, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek) but sweeter and less manic, as if Jonathan Demme had lent his humanity to the enterprise. But when it opened in 1986, backed by a half-hearted advertising campaign by Universal that made it sound like a teen farce, this daffy romantic comedy about grown-ups obsessed with the glories and errors of their youth – the rare movie that wasn’t aimed at adolescents – of course it sank.

The filmmakers, Roger Spottiswoode (director) and Ron Shelton (screenwriter), had already proven themselves; their previous collaboration, with Clayton Frohman as co-writer, had been the political drama Under Fire in 1983. Except for the prevailing intelligence, the sureness of tone and style, and the canny attention to character that the two pictures share, you wouldn’t have been likely to guess they came from the same collaborators. The Best of Times is set in a mythical SoCal town called Taft that has withered in the shadow of next-door Bakersfield; the symbol of its degeneration is the 1972 football game between the rival high schools, the one match in all these years that Taft had a chance at winning because of its star quarterback, Reno Hightower, but lost at the hands of Jack Dundee, who fumbled Reno’s last-minute pass. More than a decade later, Jack (Robin Williams) still lives in a perpetual flashback, reliving that fumble. Vice-president of a local bank, he takes furtive breaks in a back room to run Super 8 footage of his moment of shame; it’s his favorite topic at home, to the endless consternation of his wife Ellie (Holly Palance), and he talks about it incessantly in bed with the amiable town prostitute, Darla (Margaret Whitton), who practices a highly individual form of psychosexual therapy in a trailer on the outskirts of Taft. (Darla and Jack’s scenes play like a warm-up for the sexual encounters between Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins in Bull Durham, which Shelton wrote and directed two years later.) But the disastrous game isn’t just Jack’s private obsession: the town hasn’t let him forget it, and his boorish, honking father-in-law (Donald Moffat, perfectly cast), who runs the Bakersfield bank that employs him, never lets a visit go by without slipping in some mocking reference to that fateful day in ’72. So, at Darla’s urging, Jack decides to provide a context for a possible reprieve – for himself and for Taft. He sets up a rematch.

Sweet Irony: The Reconciliation? by My Darling Clementine

Lou Dalgleish and Michael Weston King of My Darling Clementine

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then the country group known as My Darling Clementine has made it a means to an end. On their new release The Reconciliation? [Five Head], an exceptional band with relish and love plays every possible musical hook in traditional country music. But on closer inspection, a respectful tribute to a particular country sound is revealed.

My Darling Clementine is made up of principals Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish, a husband and wife duo named after the classic song of 1884. But they aren’t from rural America; they're from Derbyshire, England. Yet you'd never know their British roots listening to this superb release. Inspired by the works of Townes Van Zandt and the classic male-female duets of American country music as best performed by George Jones and Tammy Wynette, King set out to write and record a series of songs about relationships. The result is a concept album that asks the question "the reconciliation?" and answers it 12 different ways.

Two New Musicals: Big Fish and The Landing

Norbert Leo Butz and Kate Baldwin in Big Fish

The new musical adaptation of Big Fish has a deluxe, hyper-bright look and some of the niftiest stagecraft I’ve seen on a Broadway stage. The characters who will pop up later in the stories spun by the hero, Edward Bloom (Norbert Leo Butz), are projected onto witches’ cloaks; a field of daisies – Edward’s gift to the girl of his dreams, Sandra (Kate Baldwin) – is transformed into a 3D backdrop; the set designer (Julian Crouch), the costume designer (William Ivey Long) and the projection designer ( Benjamin Pearcy) assemble witty trompe l’oeil collages. The director-choreographer, Susan Stroman, comes up with fresh ideas for one number after another; her work is a compendium of dance styles. The problem is the uninspired musical at the center of all this visual magic.

Now You See Her, Now You Don't: Dancer Claudia Moore

Claudia Moore (photo by David Hou)

By calling her latest show Escape Artist, Claudia Moore conjures an intriguing picture of herself as a kind of Houdini of the dance. Technically an illusionist, the death-defying escape artist alluded to in the title strives to be free of restraints, be they handcuffs, straitjackets or cages in a sea of sharks to name some of the claustrophobic situations these suspenseful performers have been employing since their arrival on the pop culture scene at the end of the 19th century. Moore, a seasoned dancer who is artistic director of her own MOonhORsE Dance Theatre company, obviously loves the concept. But her solo show of four commissioned works which played at Toronto’s Dancemakers Studio in the Distillery District during the last weeks of October (including a Hallowe’en performance where the audience was invited to come in costume) did not take the shackle and bust theme literally. In other words, no real chains only imagined ones.

Method Acting: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period

Joni Mitchell is fond of describing songwriting and performing in theatrical terms. “Ella Fitzgerald was mostly just a singer; Billie Holiday was more than a singer; Frank Sinatra was more than a singer,” she told Michelle Mercer, author of Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period. “There were a lot that were Method actor singers. Etta James, you can’t beat her read on ‘At Last.’” Will You Take Me As I Am, which was released in paperback last year, looks at the series of magnificent albums Joni Mitchell made between 1971 and 1976 – Blue, For the Roses, Court and Spark, Miles of Aisles, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and Hejira, all of them masterpieces in the American popular music canon. The “Blue Period,” as Mercer calls it, brought a new subjectivity to pop music, all in the spirit of avant-garde experimentation that blended the musical, the literary and the visual. (The name “Blue Period” conjures up the synesthesia of the nineteenth century French poets, composers and artists like Mallarmé, Debussy and Bonnard.)

Kids at Risk: Short Term 12

The title Short Term 12 identifies the setting of Destin Daniel Cretton’s movie, his first full-length picture. It’s a short-term facility for troubled teenagers (most stay for less than a year, some longer, until the county can figure out what to do with them). The handful of young women and men who work there as counselors are responsible for creating a safe environment for the kids, not for policing them or acting as their therapists, though, caring and committed as they are, they inevitably go beyond their job description. And sometimes they don’t agree with the judgment of the professionals, who aren’t in the trenches with the kids the way they are. When his therapist determines that one of the boys, Sammy (Alex Calloway), should learn to let go of the collection of dolls he keeps in his room for comfort and takes them away from him, the counselors are upset because they’re sure he isn’t ready. And they’re right; Sammy becomes listless and can’t get off his bed. Nate (Rami Malek), the newest member of the staff, violates the therapist’s order and sneaks a small doll to Sammy. Nate is very green when he arrives, and he makes some basic (and rather stunning) errors of judgment, but in the movie’s terms this small act of rebellion marks his coming of age as a counselor at Short Term 12. Grace (Brie Larson) goes much farther. When a complicated fifteen-year-old named Jaden (Kaitlyn Dever) with a history of cutting and suicide attempts is sent home with her father, Grace, who has intuited from Jaden’s hints that he’s been abusing her, blows up at her supervisor and goes out to Jaden’s house in the middle of the night. Grace and Jaden end up smashing up her father’s car before Grace brings Jaden back to the facility, prepared at last to make the allegations against her father that will remove him permanently from her care.

Lonely Outcasts: The Death of Lou Reed and Velvet Goldmine

The news that Lou Reed had died sent me back to his records – to his work with the Velvet Underground, which redefined the subject matter and artistic possibilities of rock music, and to personal favorites among his solo albums, from Berlin to Street Hassle to Ecstasy. But it also sent me back to the most memorable and affecting things written about Reed, especially the grappling that Lester Bangs did with him in the early seventies when Bangs was the marquee star and aesthetic and moral compass of the Detroit-based rock magazine Creem. (For the buoyant details, see Bangs’ posthumously assembled best-of collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.) Rock criticism was never more many-hued and exciting than in the late sixties and seventies that became Bangs’ heyday; it had the thrill of a field populated by young hotshot writers excited about something that was going through a metamorphosis and that hadn’t yet been written about to death.

Someone like Lou Reed, with his tear-it-down-and-start-again approach to the music and his combination of grand literary ambitions and simple diaristic writing style – what Bangs once referred to “the Lou Reed ‘I walked to the chair/ Then I sat in in’ school of lyrics”– made rock criticism necessary. It’s not just that someone needed to try to make sense of this work, but that someone needed to get the word out about it, and keep it alive until it could be properly discovered; in the case of the Velvets, the traditional ways of making sure that excellent work in popular music, such as the radio, weren’t doing their jobs. Reed, who started out as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records, seems to have had, at best, mixed feelings about being written about by people who, as he scornfully put it, were “analyzing rock and roll!”

Get Back: Paul McCartney's New

Considering all that he's accomplished in his long career, Paul McCartney's only competitor is himself. On New [Hear Music], his 16th solo album, Macca proves that he can still write the perfect pop song with lyrics and hooks that are irresistible. His volume of work can now be classified as a style, "McCartney" if you like, with compositions that are just sophisticated enough to keep our ears engaged while accessible enough to appeal to listeners of all ages. His style has proven strongly influential, too, as heard on the recent Mojo magazine CD release, Songs in the Key of Paul, that comes with the November 2013 issue. It is a really good mix of old and new songs featuring a variety of old and new artists. The CD features a collection of songs that best represents the "McCartney Sound", rich in vocal harmonies, interesting chord changes and song structures not far removed from Tin Pan Alley or Motown.

French Dance in French Film: A Direct Translation

Vers Mathilde (2005), directed by Claire Denis

Vers Mathilde, the 2005 dance documentary by French filmmaker Claire Denis, is a stunning achievement. It takes as its subject Mathilde Monnier, the director of France’s Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon in Montpellier. She is the Mathilde in a title whose only other word translates as towards. There is no verb connecting the two words. The action is all in the film, an intimate look at how Monnier creates a dance quite literally out of thin air, propelled forward by her own winnowing body and the ideas that come swirling out and around it.

Denis, the subject of an ongoing retrospective of her films at TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto, is clearly a fan. She allows Monnier to move unfettered by her roving camera which follows her unobtrusively even as it sometimes closes tightly in on her striking and chiseled fiftysomething face to capture the intelligence of the mind lying within. It is obvious that Denis has asked some questions about process, because Monnier speaks out loud to an invisible listener, describing, for instance, what warming up for one of her dances means to her (a heightened sense of being in the moment) and what it is she is trying to achieve (a theatrical creation where the unexpected is the only rule).

Director Claire Denis

The film screens tonight (Tuesday, November 5) at 6:30, and is a must-see both for lovers of Denis’s work and French avant-garde dance. Monnier's choreography is abstract, that is, not tied to narrative or an inspiring piece of music. One of the works seen in the film is a case in point. Originally created in 2002 and called Déroutes, a military term meaning total collapse, it is more influenced by concepts in visual art (the presence of absence) and by the collective assembled to perform it. The dancers are male and female, white and black, athletically built as well as plump and round. As part of the creation process, Monnier has asked each to interpret, in their own way, the idea of not walking. The results are sometimes explosive such as when one of her Asian dancers thumps the floor of the stage with an angry fist, and collapses in frustration after again and again pulling herself back up to her feet to march. Monnier’s whispered observations, heard as a voice-over, provide a running commentary. It is the whole of the Korean army. It is magnifique.

Obscure Inge, Mid-Range Rattigan: Natural Affection and The Winslow Boy

Alec Beard and Kathryn Erbe in Natural Affection

The Actors Company Theatre (TACT), in residence at Theater Row on 42nd Street, is one of several off-Broadway companies that make it a practice to resurrect forgotten American plays. Last season it produced a post-war Anita Loos play called Happy Birthday set in a New Jersey bar that contained a strange interlude in which the audience was put literally in the point of view of the protagonist, who is drunk for the first time in her life. When she burrowed under one of the tables, hiding from her fearful father, a piece of canvas flew out over the audience and there we were, camped out under the tablecloth alongside her. Happy Birthday isn’t much of a play, but this scene is a fascinating piece of homegrown Yankee expressionism, and I was grateful to TACT for offering a rare glimpse of it. And I was grateful again last month when it mounted a strikingly well-acted production of William Inge’s Natural Affection, which had the bad luck to open in 1973 during a newspaper strike, closed in a month, and hadn't been unearthed since. (It was the last Inge play produced in his lifetime; he killed himself late that year, days before his final work, The Last Pad, opened in Los Angeles.)

Of Musical Divides and Exciting Television: Yemen Blues, Lou Reed, The Good Wife and Copper

Yemen Blues

One of the problems of the myriad choices in entertainment available to the public is that, increasingly, demographic divisions and attitudes divide us in our ability to share communally in the enjoyment of specific types of music, films or TV shows. (Novels have, for the most part, or at least for a few decades, always functioned that way, with the odd exceptions like the Stieg Larsson mysteries which people of all ages seemed to be reading. ) That was the unfortunate experience I recently had when I went to see a double bill of Israeli music at Toronto’s Koerner Hall.

Neglected Gem #48: Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981)

Amanda Plummer, John Savage and Diane Lane in Cattle Annie and Little Britches

Hollywood made a brief, lyrical attempt at resurrecting the western in the early 1980s with The Long Riders, Cattle Annie and Little Britches and Barbarosa, but unhappily none of them was a hit and they’ve all been largely forgotten. Cattle Annie, directed by Lamont Johnson, was released in 1981 and remains the most obscure. It had a brief life on VHS but it’s never come out on DVD, and you’d be hard put to find it on television. I was lucky enough to catch a print – faded but not enough to cancel out the pleasures of Larry Pizer’s pastoral cinematography – in a centennial tribute to Burt Lancaster at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square over the summer.

Sleepy Hollow: Who Knew An Apocalypse Could Be So Fun?

Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison star in Fox's Sleepy Hollow

On Monday night, Sleepy Hollow will return from the brief hiatus it took after it aired its fifth episode. With the shadow of Halloween still briefly upon us, this seems as good a time as any to explain why perhaps you should already have been watching Fox's new supernatural thriller. Sleepy Hollow's delightful unpretentious recipe of fantasy, horror, over-the-top melodrama, alternate history and police procedural stands out among the new dramas this fall season. And the light touch the show brings to its subject matter is a welcome respite from our post-Homeland universe of unending, and ever-ramping up, intensity (see: CBS's Hostages) – reminding television viewers that sometimes TV can actually be fun.

The series is ostensibly – but not really – a "modern-day re-telling" of Washington Irving's classic short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Using the name of the 'hero' of "Sleepy Hollow", and some of the setting and the one single memorable detail from Irving's "Rip Van Winkle", Sleepy Hollow takes off from there with gleeful abandon – throwing in some unambiguously apocalyptic overtones just for good measure. Imagine if Grimm and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter had a illegitimate child, and you may have a taste of what Sleepy Hollow often feels like.

One look at the show's pedigree, and none of this would come as any surprise. The résumés of Sleepy Hollow's co-creators, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, reads like a "best of" list of television at its most entertaining, unselfconscious, and downright giddy. Kurtzman and Orci first worked together back in the 1990s on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, and even on Jack of All Trades, Bruce Campbell's delightfully irreverent turn as a turn-of-the-19th-century American spy. But the two hit their zenith with Fringe, the Fox series they co-created with J.J. Abrams (before the two joined him on his big-screen Star Trek adventure), and oversaw for 5 remarkable seasons. In many ways, Sleepy Hollow has more in common with those unapologetically B-television Sam Raimi/Rob Tapert shows of the 90s than Fringe – and it is all the better for it.

Graham Nash: Wild Tales, A Rock and Roll Life

The photographs on the front and back of Wild Tales: A Rock and Roll Life, Graham Nash’s autobiography, were taken by Nash himself, in mirrors. The front cover shows him circa 1972; the back is more current. In between the two photos is another self-portrait, in words. The story begins with him leaving the place of his birth, walking away from his wife, his band (The Hollies), and his bank account and discovering a new world of music with David Crosby and Stephen Stills, new love (Joni Mitchell) and a new bank account in the USA. The text which tells his story is bracketed by two sentences. He begins “It always comes down to the music,” and concludes, some 345 pages later, “it all comes down to the music.” And that is pretty much Graham Nash’s philosophy.

Detente: The Iran Job and Zaytoun

Kevin Sheppard and members of A.S. Shiraz in The Iran Job (2012)

Till Schauder's 2012 picture The Iran Job garnered the award for best documentary entry at this past weekend's Arlington International Film Festival in Massachusetts, and when you watch it you can see why. Schauder gains a rare and privileged look at Iranian life and culture through the most unlikely of perspectives: an American basketball player contracted to play one season for a new team in the country's Super League. The player would be Kevin Sheppard, a gregarious point-guard from St. Croix with an outsized personality and infectious reserve of energy. Having failed to make the NBA out of college, Sheppard followed the route of other athletes in the same position and played professionally in various points abroad. Then, in the fall of 2008, comes an offer from Iran, which (as the movie reminds us with a clip of George W. Bush's “Axis of Evil” speech) is just one of America's most strident opponents on the geopolitical landscape. But, unfazed by the two nations' frozen relationship, Kevin's soon on a plane from the Virgin Islands. The filmmakers follow him to his new digs in the city of Shiraz, where he's to play for the hometown heroes, A.S. Shiraz. And not just play for, but lead to success: he's been brought in (and paid double his Iranian teammates) to take the team out of the cellar where it sits and into the playoffs—something no new team in the league's ever done.

He's got his work cut out for him: his Iranian teammates got no game. They stink up the court so badly during the first scrimmage that a dumbfounded Kevin judges it the worst basketball he's ever participated in. He resolves to turn the team around, but that entails more than improving the Iranians' dribbling and shooting. It means changing their mindset from one that slavishly follows their coach's commands and nothing more, to the open-minded kind that allows for the quick-thinking, free-flowing, improvised play required of exciting basketball. So it is that this narrow narrative focus aptly contains the broader cultural conflict between Western secularization and Iranian theocratic Islam. For the movie's real story is off the court, where Sheppard navigates his way through the unfamiliar terrain of his host country.

The Wild Side: Lou Reed vs Frank Zappa

Lou Reed and Frank Zappa (illustration by Chris Grayson) 

It's curious how we recall certain moments only when death intervenes and creates a rent in our day. The sad passing of Lou Reed this past Sunday, at the age of 71, took me immediately to a typical party I attended as a teenager on a Saturday night back in the early Seventies. There's no significant reason to remember this party and I hadn't even thought about it since the night it happened. But that's what death does. It brings dormant moments back to life. On that evening, it was the first time I became aware of Lou Reed and his band, The Velvet Underground. Their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, just happened to be playing on the turntable and I remember most the nursery rhyme beauty of the opening track, "Sunday Morning," the slashing guitar that droned under the driving beat of "I'm Waiting for the Man," and the pulsating intensity of "Heroin," where John Cale's shrieking violin seemed to create an electric blanket to surround Reed's determined voice and speaking for his heightened nervous system; the sensations brought on by milk-blood flowing in the veins (all of which made Steppenwolf's popular song "The Pusher" seem even sillier and more self-conscious by comparison). I also loved the Celtic melody that underscored "Venus in Furs" while the flattened out timbre of Nico's voice on "All Tomorrow's Parties" made me momentarily forget the party I was attending.

Music, Music, Music: The Most Happy Fella, Merrily We Roll Along and Baritones Unbound

Marnie Parris & Bill Nolte in The Most Happy Fella

Six years passed between Frank Loesser’s hugely successful Guys and Dolls and his next Broadway show, The Most Happy Fella, and the two projects couldn’t have been more different. Guys and Dolls was an effort to find a musical-comedy equivalent for the quirky idiom of Damon Runyon’s stories, where gamblers and gangsters are interchangeable (and basically benign), wear fedoras and pin-stripe suits, and speak without contractions. Loesser’s score is lyrical, but it’s comprised mostly of comic numbers – solos (“Adelaide’s Lament”) duets (“Sue Me,” “Marry the Man Today”) the title song, call-and-response numbers  (“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” and the two Hot Box showgirl tunes), even a counterpoint trio (“Fugue for Tinhorns”). The Most Happy Fella has a lush romantic score, and there’s so much of it that the original cast recording was released in two versions, a single LP of highlights and a complete three-LP set, in the style of opera recordings. Technically the show is an operetta, since it does contain dialogue sections (which were also written by Loesser). And though it may not be up to Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, the two Broadway musicals that are not only extensive enough but also complex enough musically to qualify as operas, it’s extremely ambitious – and surpassingly beautiful. (In fact, the New York City Opera used to keep it in their repertory.) Loesser based it on a 1924 play by Sidney Howard called They Knew What They Wanted – a hit despite that unwieldy title – that starred Richard Bennett and the legendary stage actress Pauline Lord and was filmed three times over the next decade and a half.

You Say You Wanna Revolution?

It's not too hard to take apart comedian Russell Brand's idea of an egalitarian revolution, which he happily endorsed this week on BBC Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman. There are no ideas there; only vague cereal box pronouncements that would make Karl Marx blush. Since Brand had already guest-edited The New Statesman on that very subject of revolution, he was brought on to the show to explain himself. Besides saying that voting only "legitimizes a corrupt system," Brand's dissent was all sound-bite with nothing at stake. But why Brand received so much play on social media isn't so negligible. As Elizabeth Renzetti pointed out in a column in The Globe and Mail yesterday, the political system has so broken faith with its constituents that it has allowed the bromide of a Russell Brand to take hold. "[W]hen the political system looks increasingly absurd – and you need only look to the kindergarten-style scrapping in Canada’s Senate or the tumbleweeds that recently rolled past the monuments in Washington – the absurdists look rational," she writes. "In his interview, Mr. Brand pointed to the fact that the British government is suing the European Union to remove a cap on bankers’ bonuses on the fifth anniversary of the financial crisis – if that isn’t head-spinning farce, what is?" What Brand spoke to is the void left when, as Renzetti puts it, "the web of trust and civic engagement meant to bind a society is fraying." When only 19 per cent of Americans trust their government compared to 75 per cent fifty years ago, Brand comes across as prophetic.   

Forty-five years ago, though, the thought of revolution was something of a fact rather than a whimsical idea. In the early days of 1968, everywhere you looked, real ideals were being put to the test. The Soviet Union had brought a totalitarian chill to the Prague Spring after they invaded Czechoslovakia. The assassination of Martin Luther King in April was followed two months later by the shooting death of Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. Student upheavals in Paris against the Gaulist government were matched by riots in the United States over the escalation of the Vietnam War. During their various world tours, John Lennon had wanted The Beatles to have more freedom to comment on the political tumult surrounding the group, but Brian Epstein, fearing public reaction, steered Lennon against it. But with Epstein dead by 1968, Lennon knew that there was now no one around to stop him. He immediately went to work on completing a song he first started composing in India. "Revolution" was written in response to the various left-wing organizations that were vying for The Beatles' support for violent revolution. But instead of throwing his hat into the ring, he composed a stern riposte against violence that would create a huge backlash against the group from certain anti-war activists who had counted on The Beatles for support.

What’s Left Untasted: The Criterion Collection's DVD release of Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet

Jane Horrocks and Claire Skinner in Life is Sweet

The irrepressible couple at the center of Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet (1990) – released on Blu-ray and regular DVD this year by the Criterion Collection in an impeccably restored digital print – are Wendy (Alison Steadman) and Andy (Jim Broadbent), working class parents whose good-natured pleasure in daily life is laced with melancholy. Faithful to family life, they have no illusions about the compromises they’ve had to accept to raise their twin daughters, Nicola (Jane Horrocks) and Natalie (Claire Skinner), who at twenty-two are a solid four years older than their parents were when they were born. Humor and hope keep them tethered. Andy is susceptible to grand schemes for the future, as in the rusted junkyard lunch wagon he buys for a marked-up fee with the fantasy of striking out in his own business; Wendy accepts his foibles with her infectious laugh, a programmed response to life’s little absurdities. But their best qualities blinker them, too. Wendy, with all her girlishness and her resolute positivity, doesn’t know what to do with Natalie’s ambiguous sexuality – she wears men’s clothes and works as a plumber – or Nicola’s bulimic, depressive stupors which, in spite of living under her family’s roof, haven’t improved. And Andy often can’t see what’s right in front of him: it’s the price he pays for clinging to impossible aspirations. Food is the film’s theme and its central metaphor: life may be sweet, but so much of it goes untasted.

A Future Nostalgia: The Crucible of Paul McCartney

At the age of 71, Paul McCartney continues to build his legacy, never content to coast on the sizeable reputation he built as part of one of popular music's most significant groups. But as he goes forward, with a new album – called New – which John Corcelli will be reviewing in Critics at Large in a couple of weeks, it's curious how much McCartney draws from his past in order to move forward with a more contemporary sound. He performs as a man who knows full well that he can't out-jump his own shadow so by embracing it he casts his reflection forward. Yet just as he dabbles in keeping current, there is still a relentless quest in his music to get back, to seek a place of refuge while continually defining his musical future. (The latest album has four producers on it to help him do so.) Once was a way to get back homeward, he once sang confidently in 1969 on "Golden Slumbers." But for Paul McCartney, all his life, getting back homeward became an illusive task. As his career scaled musical heights not imagined, McCartney always looked to the past for some point of reference, or maybe for some profound meaning to make sense of how far he'd come as an artist. Who could blame him? With The Beatles, he not only was living out a dream, but the dream took on a life that made him feel larger than he truly was. His songs once had a power that they couldn't attain now that he was on his own. Writing in The Beatles was about more than just honing his craft. It fulfilled McCartney's ambitions and gave full shape to his creative impulses; it completed him. With the band gone after 1970, looking back could have seemed futile. But without a burning sense of the past, McCartney couldn't see a future in front of him.

Indifference: Randy Moore's Escape From Tomorrow

After Randy Moore’s Escape from Tomorrow played at the Sundance Film Festival, it received a ton of adulatory press, most of it focused on the audacity of Moore’s stunt: he shot his film, about a man coming unglued during a family vacation to Disney World, at Disney World and Disneyland, using small cameras and digital recorders to surreptitiously shoot inside the parks without permission. Given how touchy Disney is about threats to its image, most of the people who raved about the movie in Colorado last January seem to have assumed that it would never get any kind of general release. (The idea that their readers would be unlikely to ever check out the movie for themselves must have made them feel free to really let fly in their praise of its outrageousness and richness.) One online writer, Erik Davis, reported that “many are calling [it] the ultimate guerrilla film.’” Maybe so, but it’s also one of the ultimate examples of a movie that’s more fun to fantasize about than it is to sit through.

Concentric Circles in Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski novels

“No other female crime writer has so powerfully and effectively combined a well-crafted detective story with the novel of social realism and protest.”

– P. D. James, Talking about Crime Fiction

Anyone primarily interested in a whodunit crime novel may not find it in the writer Sara Paretsky. In her long-standing series that made its debut in 1982 with Indemnity Only introducing the female protagonist V. I. Warshawski, dead bodies do appear regularly but the identity of the perpetrator is rarely the novels’ most compelling feature. When a murder does occur early, for example in Body Work (2010) and the accused is an Iraqi veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress after the rest of his unit was killed in a firefight, Warshawski is also hired by the young man’s parents to prove his innocence. The tough, sharp-tongued but compassionate private sleuth is frequently engaged by clients to investigate a person’s disappearance.  

The impression from reading these novels is that the resolution of the mystery constitutes the most inner circle, one that is surrounded by a series of other circles including Warshawski’s personal life and her commitment to address social injustices. Finally, and, most interestingly, is the historical circle in which she connects the present to the past, which is found in a number of Paretsky’s later novels, especially her most recent, Critical Mass (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013). The historical arc, which provides greater depth and resonance, should not surprise since she has a PhD in history from the University of Chicago.

David Bowie Is X 3

Pop icon David Bowie is the subject of the David Bowie is exhibit currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Three of our critics, Deirdre Kelly, John Corcelli and Kevin Courrier, attended the show and each of them contribute their thoughts to this review.

It was the summer of my 15th year and my mother, to get me out of the house, and perhaps also to make me realize there was a wonderful world waiting for me outside it, sent me to London, England, where she had some friends who would put me up for a few hot weeks. I already knew the British capital to be the crux of all things cool. I was a Beatles fan, and, well, pretty much a fan of everything else with an English accent. But The Beatles were long over by 1975, and I was on to the next big thing which, to my constantly changing teenage self, meant glitter rock in the form of Marc Bolan of T. Rex, David Essex, Elton John (before he became respectable), Queen and – of course – David Bowie. Bowie was the pin-up in my bedroom, and I choose the word deliberately because he was, at the beginning of his career, not a boy, not a girl, but a deliciously subversive blend of both.

How to Be a King: The BBC Series The Hollow Crown

The magnificent BBC series The Hollow Crown, which PBS’s Great Performances ran over four weeks, is an epic undertaking: productions of all four of the histories that constitute what scholars call Shakespeare’s Henriad, shepherded by major English directors. The Henriad begins with Richard II, in which King Richard’s cousin Bolingbroke, exiled for half a dozen years, returns with an army when Richard confiscates his lands after Bolingbroke’s father’s death and pillages his estate to fund a war against Ireland. Bolingbroke claims that all he wants is what is rightfully his, his father’s legacy, but his army overruns the kingdom and his cause gathers allies who were formerly Richard’s friends, and Richard knows that the only logical consequence of a successful insurrection against his throne is the loss of the crown to his rival. Bolingbroke becomes King Henry IV, the title character of Shakespeare’s two-part sequel. But Henry IV is about the end of the king’s life and reign, and its protagonist is his heir, Prince Hal. At the end of Part I Hal comes of age on the battlefield; at the end of Part II he leaves behind the wastrel’s life among the London taverns and whorehouses to succeed his father on the throne of England. In the final play of the tetralogy, Henry V, his kingship is tested, once again in battle, as he leads his country against France, emerging in triumph and with the hand of the French princess, Katherine.

Greek Tragedy - Canadian Style: Soulpepper's Farther West

Soulpepper's production of Farther West (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

John Murrell has a long-established and fully justified reputation as a playwright who creates good roles for women and places them in well constructed works based on historical Canadian subjects. So it makes perfect sense that he would create a play about Canadian prostitutes in the 19th century. Farther West, first produced in 1982 (directed by Robin Phillips and starring Martha Henry) and now running at Soulpepper’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts until Nov. 9, won Murrell a second Chalmers Award, the first coming for 1977’s Waiting for the Parade. It is the story of May Buchanan, a prostitute who worked her way from small-town Ontario westward across Canada in the 1870s and ’80s. She started at 14, on the advice of her father, who had just found her having sex with a much older neighbour: “You can’t carry on like that here, girl. You better move on. Better start moving, farther west.”

Director Diana Leblanc’s production is striking, starting even before the opening: a naked couple is entwined on-stage as the audience takes its seats. No question, nudity is powerful, and the tableau leads convincingly and appropriately into the play proper. Astrid Janson’s set, though simple – a painted scrim backdrop, a sloped platform – is made striking by Graeme Thomson’s lighting, and it should be noted that a river, or rather a creek, runs through it. Janson’s costumes are grittily realistic, nicely matching the tone of the first act, at least. The scenes in Vancouver switch to a sort of nasty melodrama that takes us into a somewhat over-the-top ending.