Robin Phillips: The Stratford Years

Robin Phillips, in 1977. (Photo via Torstar News Service)

Robin Phillips, who died on July 25 at the age of seventy-three, trained at the Bristol Old Vic and spent a decade as a young actor (he played the title role in the 1969 film of David Copperfield) before turning to directing. I own a copy of a TV movie of Strindberg’s Miss Julie that he directed in 1972 with a stunningly beautiful, sexually daring Helen Mirren playing opposite Donal McCann (a decade and a half before he played Gabriel in John Huston’s The Dead). After two years at the helm of the Greenwich Theatre in England, Phillips took the post of artistic director at Canada’s Stratford Festival and held it for six seasons, 1975 through 1980. I was in my twenties then, living in Montreal, and except for 1976, when I was traveling in Europe, I made sure to visit Stratford once or twice every summer, so I saw roughly a dozen and a half of the shows Phillips directed (or co-directed). I thought at the time that he was the most brilliant stage director I’d encountered in my young, fervent theatergoing life. It was an exciting time to be at Stratford: Phillips brought Maggie Smith, Brian Bedford, Peter Ustinov, Jessica Tandy and Margaret Tyzack to act alongside such Stratford stalwarts as Martha Henry, William Hutt, Douglas Rain, Alan Scarfe, Jack Wetherall and Domini Blythe. (Bedford ended up becoming one of those stalwarts.) Phillips claimed exhaustion when he left Stratford, and no wonder: during two or three of those seasons he staged five plays. His subsequent directing career was halting, though he worked in London and New York and around Canada; nothing evidently nothing he did after 1980 matched up to his achievements at Stratford. But those were glorious years, and I count myself fortunate to have attended so many of his dazzling shows.

Based On A True Story: Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

Rinko Kikuchi in Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter.

Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, of Babel and Pacific Rim) searches for things. The oppressively rigid structure of her Tokyo life – represented in her mind-numbing job, her condescending boss, her overbearing mother, and her tiny, stifling apartment – makes her restless, and so she goes out searching for things, perhaps in an attempt to find a purpose for herself as much as any actual buried treasure. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, written and directed by David and Nathan Zellner, opens with Kumiko’s search leading her to a shaded cove, where she uncovers a soggy VHS copy of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996). It’s unclear who left the tape there for her to find, and whose directions she’s followed to get there, but none of that matters: this first, context-free quest establishes the film’s tone of dreamy unreality, and gives Kumiko the first thing she’s had to strive for in years.

All That Jazz: Paradise Blue and The Wild Party

Kristolyn Lloyd and Blair Underwood in Paradise Blue. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Paradise Blue, a new play by Dominique Morisseau at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, is set in the African-American community of Blackbottom in Detroit in 1949, during the heyday of bop. Its protagonist, Blue (Blair Underwood), is a jazz trumpeter who owns a club, the Paradise, and headlines the combo that plays there. He’s struggling to attain the zenith of his creative powers while battling the ghosts of his childhood: he saw his father murder his mother. Morisseau intends Blue to embody the musicians in the bop movement, gifted and intellectually self-challenging, restless and haunted. It’s a great subject, but she’s also working with black archetypes that limit the play imaginatively. The quintet of hard-working actors in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s production strive to bring a vibrancy to the play but they’re stuck playing caricatures.

Remembering Theodore Bikel

Theodore Bikel on stage as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.

I once met Theodore Bikel, the esteemed singer/actor who, earlier this week, passed away at age 91. It was back in 1998, at a conference encompassing the directors of programming and others involved with the world’s various Jewish film festivals – I was Director of Programming of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival from 1996-2004 – and, for some reason, Bikel was in attendance. Better still, he sat at my table during the conference’s opening ceremony. I remember being quite thrilled to meet him and I introduced myself and we chatted a bit – he seemed nice – and I especially recall this funny joke he told, in his deep baritone voice. The joke goes: The Pope has been invited to ask the first question of the world’s greatest and smartest computer. His question: Is there a God? The answer, from the computer: THERE IS NOW! (Besides being amusing, I think the joke is pretty prescient, as it’s easier to imagine the current Pope Francis being asked to interact with the computer than his two less hip predecessors.) I mention this because Bikel, over his long distinguished career, made quite an impression in big – his theatrical, film and television work – and small – the joke – ways on those who encountered him. Whether it was his involvement with Montreal rap singer Socalled (aka Josh Dolgin) in a smart, catchy re-working of the classic Yiddish song "Belz, Mayn Shtetele Belz" (Belz, my town Belz) in 2007 as "(Rock The) Belz", available as part of the Rough Guide to Klezmer Revolution CD, his role as Rance Mohammitz in Frank Zappa's surreal 1971 film 200 Motels or his powerful turn as the esteemed Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem in his recent one man show Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears, Bikel left an indelible mark on those who heard his music or saw his work.

Death and Rebirth: The Beatles, LSD, Brian Epstein and Transcendental Meditation

The Beatles with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1967.

On March 21, 1967, the same day The Beatles were recording the chorus of "Getting Better" on Sgt. Pepper, John Lennon left the vocal session while tripping on acid. Paul McCartney decided he had better get his writing partner home safely. Since it was too far to drive to John's home in Weybridge, Paul took Lennon to his place. After arriving, McCartney was curious to see if taking LSD would bring him closer to his currently distressed friend. Most of The Beatles had taken acid by the time they finished Sgt Pepper, but McCartney had earlier held out. Late in 1966, he finally dropped it with Tara Browne, but with mixed feelings. McCartney didn't enjoy losing control, or putting himself in a position where he couldn't find his way back home. A year later, McCartney actually caused some controversy when he admitted to the press that LSD had opened his eyes to new religious experiences. On that night he tried it with Lennon, he only wished to re-establish a bond they once had as songwriters, as brothers. "[Lennon's] rough edges and fuck-all personality only underscored Paul's pretensions, sparking a contrast that would haunt Paul for the rest of his life," wrote Bob Spitz in his biography, The Beatles. From evening until dawn, the two men hallucinated together, staring into each other's eyes, looking for the firm connection they had when they wrote "I Want to Hold Your Hand." McCartney would later refer to the experience with Lennon as communing with the unknown. He saw John as the Emperor of Eternity, a deity, while they both laughed and shared stories of past glories. For five hours, they communed deeply, barely moving, except for a short excursion taken into the garden. Throughout the evening, these two fractured geniuses briefly blended together as one. But what The Beatles and their fans didn't discover, until shortly after 1967, was that LSD had more troubling ramifications. It first gave credence to religious and political ideologues. When extremists like the Manson Family and the Weather Underground used it to further their apocalyptic agendas, The Beatles became unwitting champions of this new revolution. "The sad fact was that LSD could turn its users into anything from florally-bedecked peaceniks to gun-brandishing urban guerillas," critic Ian MacDonald explained in Revolution in the Head.

Olive Kitteridge: Portrait of a Marriage

Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins in the HBO miniseries, Olive Kitteridge.

Note: There are spoilers ahead in this review. 

The Maine coastal town where the sensational four-part HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, directed by Lisa Cholodenko and now on DVD, is set seems blighted by disaster and grief, but the story isn’t a Gothic. Jane Anderson’s screenplay, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 novel by Elizabeth Stout, puts the lives of the women and men who inhabit this community under a microscope to reveal how difficult the path is that all of us take through life, tortuous and stone-strewn and obscure. Some of the fates that befall subordinate characters are unusual. One is shot on a hunting foray by his best friend, who mistakes him for a deer. (Perhaps Stout was thinking of the plaintive reel “Molly Bán,” where a young man shoots his fiancée because, her apron up to shield her from a rainstorm in the forest, he takes her for a swan.) Another, whom we only hear about, becomes a psychotic killer. Most of the tragedies, though, are ordinary enough. The assistant to the local pharmacist, Henry Kitteridge (Richard Jenkins), collapses of a heart attack in the street outside the store and dies. Henry himself, in the middle of Part 3 (“A Different Road”), has a stroke and hangs on for four years, unable to communicate with his wife Olive (Frances McDormand), a retired math teacher.

Tactile: Carlos Marques-Marcet's 10,000 km

In the opening moments of Carlos Marques-Marcet's remarkable film 10,000 km, Sergi (David Verdaguer) and Alexandra (Natalia Tena) are first seen making passionate love. As the camera fixes on their bodies, which are thrusting and swaying in motion to the erotic rhythms they both invent and discover, we can see how delicately intertwined their sexual and emotional lives are. They seem inseparable. But as inseparable as they might be, it's not a symbiotic partnership. Sergi and Alexandra still retain their individual selves as if sex for them wasn't about losing yourself in your partner, but about connecting at the most intimate and tactile place where you find out some great mystery about yourself. While Sergi is a music teacher in Barcelona who is seeking more secure work and Alexandra is a photographer trying to further her career, they both live together and desire a child. Before she can get pregnant, however, she gets an e-mail from Los Angeles offering her a one-year residency. Although Sergi is initially resistant to letting her go, he values her independence as much as he does his own and he relents. But the distance between them, which makes up the title of the picture, puts their relationship to the test. The ability to hold their connection close initially seems tangible because of Skype, Facebook and e-mail, but Marques-Marcet has fashioned a thoughtful and honestly probing examination of modern romance in the digital age. And it's a corker.

So Thin: Amazon’s Transparent

Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent.

It’s become an article of faith of late that pay television trumps network cable every time, mainly because of the former's gutsiness in tackling taboo subject matter and also because of its unfettered freedoms regarding the use of language and the depictions of nudity, sexual situations and violence. Obviously pay TV can be more adult than the network fare but just often it’s no better than any bad network show airing at any given hour. I long ago gave up on Mad Men, which after its promising first season, was content to stay in the shallow end of the dramatic pool. The first season of Orange is the New Black, which is the only one I’ve seen, was rife with crass characterization and pretentious, overwritten dialogue that rang false when it dripped from so many of the show’s character’s lips. Entourage, except for Jeremy Piven’s Hollywood super agent Ari Gold (and a few guest stars), was utterly unwatchable. Curb Your Enthusiasm, played out like the unfunny cousin of network TV’s Seinfeld, which was co-created by Curb’s star Larry David, but unlike Curb Your Enthusiasm, not afflicted with him in front of the camera. And I only lasted two episodes of Girls, which struck me as fake to the extreme.

Meanwhile, network TV boasts The Good Wife, still the best show on American TV (cable’s The Americans, in my estimation, is second best) and Elementary, which has the best character development of any currently running program (each episode adds another fascinating new layer to the characters of its Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.). There are also a number of new (and pleasingly renewed ) network TV shows from last season, including Gotham, Black-ish, How to Get Away with Murder and Agent Carter, which either tweaked or upended formulaic TV tropes to fresh and welcome effect. In that light, I can’t help but be baffled why Amazon Instant Video’s streamed cable show Transparent is so popular (it’s already been renewed for a third season before the second one has even aired) and getting such good press. Other than for its basic original storyline, about elderly transgender senior Morty now Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor) navigating the transition in the face of family and friends, the show doesn’t deserve the kudos. It’s the very definition of mediocre television.

Theatre Round-Up: The Berkshires, London, New York

Kate Baldwin and Graham Rowat in Berkshire Theatre Group's Bells Are Ringing. (Photo by Michelle McGrady)

If Kate Baldwin had started her career during the golden age of Broadway musicals, composers and lyricists would have competed to write vehicles for her. That’s the first thought that crossed my mind after I left the Berkshire Theatre Group’s production of Bells Are Ringing, in which she takes up the role Judy Holliday created in 1956 (and played subsequently in the charming 1960 Vincente Minnelli movie, opposite Dean Martin). The show, with its Jule Styne melodies – two of which, “Just in Time” and “The Party’s Over,” belong in the show music pantheon – and the effervescent Betty Comden-Adolph Green book and lyrics, was a vehicle from the get-go. Holliday had won an Academy Award for bringing her star-making portrait of Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday from Broadway to the screen, but her subsequent movie roles played up her stridency rather than the quality that made her unique, a dazed canniness. The joke at the heart of Born Yesterday is that Billie, the mistress of a junk tycoon who takes her to Washington and hires a journalist to give her a little cultivation, is a ditz who isn’t as dumb as she looks and sounds. Holliday’s other movies didn’t capitalize on that appealing contradiction, and they didn’t take advantage of all the other things she could do, like put over a number and knock a comedy routine out of the park (she and Comden and Green had started off in a nightclub act called The Revuers) and play the plaintiveness hiding underneath the humor. Bells Are Ringing allowed her to do all of it. She played Ella Peterson, who works for her cousin Sue’s phone service, where she’s made herself indispensable to the lives of customers she knows only by voice and for each of whom she’s developed a different personality. One of her clients is a hard-drinking playwright named Jeff Moss, one-half of a hit duo who’s operating solo for the first time and so terrified that he’s going to bomb that he’s paralyzed by writer’s block. Jeff knows Ella as Mom, the little old lady at the switchboard who hands out advice and encouragement; he has no idea that she’s a young woman who’s been fantasizing about him. When he gets drunk the night before a last-ditch meeting with his producer and unplugs his phone, Ella gets so desperate about saving his career that she sneaks into his apartment to wake him up. Improvising a new character for herself, Melisande Scott, she gets him writing again and he falls for her. But his faith in her (he tells her she’s the first honest person he’s ever known) makes her feel guilty for all the play-acting she’s been doing, and she doesn’t feel she can face him as Ella.

Lady Blue: What Happened, Miss Simone?

There's no question that it's been a pretty good period for music documentaries. Just when you thought that they were becoming more often than not tributes in granite, featuring little about the music and more about the artist's tenacity in surviving substance abuse and failure, a number of pictures have come along lately with real temperament and a sharp critical perspective on the work. Early on in the year, there was the engaging and informative The Wrecking Crew which may not have been strikingly innovative in its technique, but was touching in its generosity towards a group of musicians who had never really been publicly recognized before. Alex Gibney, who had already parted the curtain on the sinister machinations behind the Church of Scientology in his compelling and absorbing Going Clear, came up with two radically different musical portraits of James Brown (Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown) and Frank Sinatra (Sinatra: All or Nothing at All). In Mr. Dynamite, Gibney captured not only the thrilling showmanship in James Brown's music and the vibrant electricity of his live concerts, but in speaking to his band, the JB's, he was also able to plumb the strains and fragile bonds within the comradeship that fueled his meteoric rise to fame. By going to the roots of Brown's version of soul music, which combined funk with the ecstatic heights reached in the churches of black gospel, Gibney also made sense of Brown's complex connection to the black community. (Although he was a spiritual Godfather to dispossessed blacks, who felt even more disenfranchised after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he was also a self-made entrepreneur and an exponent of black capitalism that would lead him to later support Richard Nixon.)

Neglected Gem #79: Loss of Innocence (1961)

Loss of Innocence is an almost unknown coming-of-age picture made in England in 1961, when American moviegoers were rushing to see the latest British releases because they were starved for intelligent films that didn’t infantilize them. But unlike some of the imports from that period that attracted the attention of critics and art-house audiences, such as Room at the Top and The Entertainer and A Taste of Honey, this one never caught on. The screenwriter was an American, Howard Koch, who was most famous for co-writing Casablanca but who sometimes displayed a surprising European sensibility: he did the adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Letter for William Wyler in 1940, and in 1948 he collaborated with the Austrian émigré Max Ophüls on the delicate high comedy Letter from an Unknown Woman, with Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan. In Loss of Innocence Koch adapted a novel by Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer (the movie was released in England under that subtler title), about a sixteen-year-old English girl who grows up when she and her three younger siblings travel to the French countryside for a summer vacation with their mother but have to go on to the hotel by themselves after their mother falls seriously ill on the train and is hospitalized.

The Power of Art in Fear and the Muse Kept Watch

In the introduction of Fear and the Muse Kept Watch: The Russian Masters – from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein – Under Stalin (The New Press, 2015), journalist Andy McSmith, reminds us that the purpose of George Orwell’s classic 1984 was to demonstrate how the creative life was crushed out of the people, leaving them incapable of free thought and acting like robots. By contrast, McSmith argues that Soviet citizens, who absorbed great drama, music, film, novels and poetry, could not be turned into robots even under the machinery of Stalin’s terror. They would outwardly conform but they remained sentient beings who needed and appreciated great art. As a result of the Revolution, a vast more number of Soviet citizens were exposed to the arts, especially theatre, because of that hunger. This is an intriguing thesis, one that I agree with, though I am not certain that the author has proven it. At times he does provide convincing evidence, but he leaves it to the reader to make the connections.

I do not want to suggest that Fear and the Muse is devoid of intellectual pleasures. On the contrary, one of its great strengths is that it comfortably shoehorns these artists and their art into one book. Too often, cultural life is relegated to a single chapter in Soviet histories, confined to biographies or specialized monographs on one of the arts. Instead, McSmith combines astute biographical profiles with perceptive insights into their art and how both were related to the larger cultural and political climate of the time, especially given that Stalin paid considerable attention to the arts. There is not much that is new here, and he ignores the role of the visual arts, but McSmith’s major accomplishment has been to synthesize in lucid prose a great amount of material from secondary sources and translated Russian correspondence. One bonus is that he is self-taught in Russian, and some of his more memorable quotations occur when he quotes from untranslated Russian correspondence.

Recent Cinema – Wild Tales, Leviathan, Félix et Meira and Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

A scene from Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales.

Non-American films might not show up as often on Toronto movie screens as I would like. but when they do, they usually offer an adult, different point of view, whether the subjects they raise are unique to their country or share affinities with my own. Here are four recent examples; none of them masterpieces but all well worth your time.

Truer Detective: Revisiting Miami Blues (1990)

Alec Baldwin in Miami Blues.

Why are so many popular film noirs and hard-boiled TV dramas these days so fucking solemn? In the HBO series True Detective, which is about as brooding and humourless as television gets, there's enough lugubrious dialogue to sink David Fincher's Se7en. (Maybe True Detective is supposed be a straight-faced parody of James Ellroy's or James.M.Cain's pulpy prose. But I doubt it.) The writing is actually literary in the worst way – self-conscious neurosis always reflecting back on itself even as it wallows in its existential darkness.When Vince Vaughn's Frank remarked a couple of episodes ago that “there’s a certain stridency at work here,” I howled at the TV screen. He could be speaking for the series itself. True Detective strives for importance by layering on the dread and critics and viewers seem enthralled by all the tortured somnambulism. Could it be the tough-guy dialogue that tries to be smart, or is it possibly the story which affirms some knowing cynicism about the nature of corruption and our acquiescence towards it? Who knows? It could make for perfectly viable dramatic material if it were done without this ennui-on-the-sleeve pretension – in fact, Netflix's Bloodline does do corruption well, but nobody's writing about it. So despite the strong presence of a lot of good actors on True Detective, to paraphrase critic Paul Coates, they all end up moving like the drowned under water.

Born Again: Catastrophe

Sharon Hogan and Rob Delaney in Catastrophe, originally on UK's Channel 4 and now on Amazon Prime Instant Video.

Since Cheers set the standard for romantic comedy on TV, the most popular template for the form has been the Sam-and-Diane-style “will they are won’t they?” set-up: viewers are introduced to two characters who have good reason to be attracted to each other but also have reasons to resist acting on that attraction, and the audience is expected, like kids in science class observing a pair of caged hamsters, to hang on their every twitch and hot look and wait to see if they’ll get it on. The new series Catastrophe (which aired on Britain’s Channel 4 earlier this year and is now available for streaming at Amazon Prime Instant Video) announces from the start that it is following a different path. Sharon (Sharon Hogan), a forty-one-year-old London schoolteacher and aspiring writer, meets Rob (Rob Delaney), a thirty-eight-year-old visiting American, in a bar; after exchanging a few pleasantries, the two fall into bed together and proceed to have a series of hookups and marathon sex for the rest of the week, until he returns to America.

Old Habits Die Hard: Red Dead Redemption

I don’t know or care when summer actually begins proper. To me, it isn’t summer until several things happen: I pop on my shorts for the first time, I listen to N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton all the way through, I crack the season’s first icy smooth Arizona Green Tea, and – a more recent addition to the ever-growing list – I dust off the Xbox 360, slip in Red Dead Redemption, and dive into the frontier life, free and easy on the open plains of the Wild West.There are far too many games across far too many platforms from far too wide a spectrum of years, genres, and styles for me to choose a favourite, or even approach a Top Ten. But I know this: Red Dead would be a strong contender for that lofty first place podium.

Williamstown Season Openers: Off the Main Road and Legacy

Kyra Sedgwick and Howard W. Overshown in Off the Main Road. (All photos by T .Charles Erickson)

William Inge had four Broadway hits in the 1950s and won an Academy Award for his 1961 screenplay Splendor in the Grass. But then his star faded, and when he killed himself in 1973 his contributions to the American theatre had been relegated to second-tier status. Over the past decade, though, there has been a renewal of interest in his work. Picnic, Bus Stop and Come Back, Little Sheba are now revived with relative regularity, and one of his last plays, Natural Affection, got a fine production off Broadway a couple of seasons ago. And now the Williamstown Theatre Festival has chosen for its mainstage season opener a previously unproduced Inge drama called Off the Main Road from the early sixties. (Reconfigured for television in 1964 under the title Out on the Outskirts of Town, it co-starred Anne Bancroft and Jack Warden.)

When Fiction Fails Badly: Dan Simmons' The Fifth Heart

I am not sure I have ever heard of a more brilliant idea for a book than Dan Simmons' The Fifth Heart (Little, Brown and Company), the latest Sherlock Holmes pastiche to reach the bookshelves. In a nutshell, Simmons has the writer Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady) meet up with The Great Detective while contemplating suicide in Paris and then getting involved with Holmes’ latest case. The twist: an increasingly distraught Holmes has deduced that there is a strong likelihood that he is actually a fictional character. But let’s stop here. The Fifth Heart is essentially a complete botch, a sloppily written; indifferently (for the most part) characterized and not especially interesting adventure that pretty much drops the ball concerning its initial conceit. It’s almost as if Simmons had mostly forgotten his idea of Holmes’ possibly not being real – it’s barely alluded to – or even that when he decided upon writing the novel that the concept wasn’t that compelling after all. In any case, the follow through on the original idea is so thinly realized as to be almost non-existent.

Salvation: Love & Mercy

"The Beach Boys propagated their own variant on the American dream, painting a dazzling picture of beaches, parties and endless summers, a paradise of escape into private as often as shared pleasures...Yet by the late Sixties, the band was articulating, with less success, a disenchantment with that suburban ethos, and a search for transcendence."

–  Jim Miller in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (Random House, 1980).

Is it any wonder that Los Angeles is known as "the City of Lost Angels"? It's the place where sellouts go to bask in the sun, and shady deals get made under palm trees. Never mind that L.A. was the corruptible home of Raymond Chandler's incorruptible detective Philip Marlowe, it was also where Annie Hall was seduced away from Alvy Singer in Woody Allen's hit comedy. Los Angeles may be a tinsel town, a superficial jewel and pleasure palace, but its endless summers hold out a paradoxical promise. Songwriter Brian Wilson successfully depicted the seductive charms of that promise in The Beach Boys' best early music ("I Get Around," "Fun, Fun, Fun," "California Girls"), but when he tried to grow past the adolescent whims of what Jim Miller called that "paradise of escape," even calling it into question in the aching "Don't Worry Baby," Wilson was unable to take the band successfully into adulthood. The hedonistic thrill of The Beach Boys would, by the end of the Sixties, ironically become associated with the apocalyptic horrors of Charles Manson.

Misery Loves Company: Shalom Auslander's Happyish

Steve Coogan in Showtime's Happyish.

"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."

– Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794)

"Damn it Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!"

– James T. Kirk, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

Last winter, Shalom Auslander's dark comedy Happyish had its tragic 15 minutes, as a minor footnote to the shocking death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Just two weeks earlier, the Hoffman-starring Happyish had been picked up by Showtime for its 2015 season. Without its star, the new comedy's future was in question. Eight months later, it was announced that Steve Coogan (The Trip, the Oscar-nominated Philomena, and of course the BBC's "Alan Partridge") would replace Hoffman in the show's central role, and the series would be retooled around the British actor. On April 5th, the series premiered – with a rewritten and reshot first episode – to a decidedly lacklustre critical reception. I don't know how Hoffman would have inhabited the role, but Coogan is perfectly cast as the recently 44-year-old Thom Paine, a Manhattan ad man suffering overlapping midlife and existential crises, and depression. The first episode of the series also introduces us to the show's ensemble of unhappy and variably unlikeable characters, including Paine's equally depressed but more explosively angry wife Lee (Kathryn Hahn, Crossing Jordan, Parks and Recreation), Paine's resigned-yet-philosophical friend Dani (Ellen Barkin, The Big Easy), and his broken, alcoholic boss and best friend, Jonathan (Bradley Whitford, The West Wing).

If you are familiar with Auslander from his radio appearances on NPR's This American Life and CBC Radio's Wiretap, or his 2007 memoir Foreskin's Lament, you will not be surprised by the tone or content of Happyish. (If you haven't heard of Auslander, a brief peak at the landing page of his personal website will probably tell you all you need to know about his outlook.) Early episodes of the season were rather heavy on the "-ish" and rather short on the "Happy," and it is easy to appreciate the response they generated. In all truth, even with such a strong cast and with recurring appearances of persecuted Keebler elves in Paine's externalized unconscious, Happyish is not groundbreaking television, and its premiere episode had all of its failings on full display. But those charmed by Auslander's uniquely bitter voice (he penned all 10 of the season's episodes) and who survived until the season finale two weeks ago will have experienced an oftentimes poignant, always pointed, and regularly thoughtful reflection on modern malaise.

Simply Chronicling: The History of Canadian Rock by Bob Mersereau

Bob Mersereau is a producer with the CBC. Alongside thousands of reviews for various newspapers and magazines he has authored two of the most entertaining and informative books on Canadian Rock and Roll. The Top 100 Canadian Albums and The Top 100 Canadian Singles are must have volumes for the maple leaf music lover. They are smart, well designed, and just plain fun. Open either of them to any page and you’re drawn immediately into an argument about which single didn’t make the cut, which should have, why is Neil Young so heavily represented, where is Pagliaro in all this. I regularly return to these volumes to remind myself of albums or singles I bought, lost, traded, hated and loved. Unfortunately Mersereau’s new book, The History of Canadian Rock (Backbeat Books), is not the sequel I’d hoped it would be. It’s not his fault, though. It’s incredibly difficult to maintain that level of sport when you’re just chronologically reporting on act after act, single after single. The same is true of The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll. It was called Rock of Ages and had three authors (Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker). It dealt with the whole international history of rock & roll (well, essentially American, including the British Invasion[s]), but suffered because you just can’t include everybody.

Misty Copeland's Swan Lake

Misty Copeland performing in Swan Lake (photo courtesy of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre)

When the curtain rose on Misty Copeland’s recent performance of Swan Lake in New York on the afternoon of June 24 it was my intention that the first sentence of my review would contain the word historic because, besides the fact that the dancer was in command of her technique and had the capacity crowd of 4,000 cheering fans believing unreservedly in her ability to appear white swan vulnerable as much as black swan strong, that epoch-defining adjective would just about sum up the importance of the occasion. But in the two weeks since the 32-year old ballerina became the first dancer of colour to perform the dual role of Odette-Odile at the Metropolitan Opera House, more groundbreaking events have happened to the point that I will now need to be repeating myself. Call it a welcome burden.

Tyme Crysis – Terminator: Genisys

With Terminator: Genisys, the summer of 2015 continues its elongated nostalgia trip into the early ‘90s, hell-bent on reincarnating a series of lumbering CGI dinosaurs: first the battle-scarred T-Rex of Jurassic World, and now Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role that made him a superstar. The Terminator franchise has become as tortured as its time-jumping heroes, thanks to decades of convoluted plot rewrites and its inevitable failure at the impossible high-wire act of keeping multiple timelines and casts juggled in the air. Like Jurassic World, Genisys ignores its predecessors so it can curry favour with the more popular installments in the franchise, James Cameron’s original The Terminator (1984) and its sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). But its frequent callbacks to these much stronger films only serve to show how diluted and messy it is by comparison.

Hard Problems: Temple and The Hard Problem

Simon Russell Beale and Shereen Martin in Temple, at London's Donmar Warehouse. (Photo: Johan Persson)

American political plays tend to simplify the issues to the level of a high-school social studies class and rarely bother to dramatize them. (There are exceptions, of course, like Clybourne Park and Smart People, both satirical takes on race.) Steve Waters’ Temple, at London’s Donmar Warehouse, is the kind of political drama we go to the Brits for: a work of penetrating intelligence, sound dramatic structure and verbal wit that engages equally with ideas and characters. Temple is set in the Chapter House of St. Paul’s Cathedral during the 2011 Occupy protests, on the morning after the Chapter has voted – after a late, contentious meeting – to reopen the cathedral for the noon Eucharist service. The Dean (Simon Russell Beale) elected to close it after the protesters were routed from the London Stock Exchange into the courtyard of St. Paul’s two weeks earlier and decided to pitch their tents there. He was offended by their presence but felt there was no alternative but to close the doors, a decision he now regrets. His choice to reopen has provoked his younger, left-leaning Canon Chancellor (Paul Higgins) to resign. He sees Occupy as an invigorating populist impulse akin to that of the early Christians and anticipates violence by the police against the protesters (as there has been in other cities) once the City of London has taken out an injunction against them, as it now seems inevitable they will. Moreover, he’s skeptical about the Chapter’s motives; after all, St. Paul’s, with an obviously expensive upkeep, is losing thousands of dollars in revenues every day it remains shut. (Anyone who’s visited the cathedral knows admission isn’t cheap.) The Dean receives a second resignation from his Virger (Anna Calder-Marshall), a woman in her sixties who’s been at her job through the tenure of two previous deans and whose devotion to St. Paul’s – she believes that Sir Christopher Wren shares with only Winston Churchill the distinction of being the greatest of all Englishmen – is a matter of family tradition: her father was in the Night Watch that protected it during the Blitz. Occupy has unseated her; St. Paul’s, she feels, has become a place she no longer recognizes.

Neglected Gem #78: Conrack (1974)

Most movies about the process of education tend to be fatuous, but there have been some notable exceptions. The subject has produced three masterpieces – Padre Padrone, Aparajito and The Wild Child – as well as The Miracle Worker, The Corn Is Green, the documentaries High School and To Be and to Have, and in recent years The History Boys, The Class and Monsieur Lazhar. Martin Ritt made two wonderful ones back to back: Sounder (1972), adapted from William H. Armstrong’s children’s book set among black sharecroppers in Depression-era Louisiana, and Conrack, which came out two years later. Sounder was acclaimed and Oscar-nominated, but not many people paid attention to Conrack, perhaps because Ritt and the screenwriters, his frequent collaborators Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch Jr., took such a leisurely approach to the material, Pat Conroy’s vivifying memoir The Water Is Wide, about the months he spent teaching elementary-school black kids on an island off the coast of South Carolina. The picture feels almost meandering, pleasantly so, because it borrows its rhythms from the pace of island life and from Conroy’s unruffled, experimental methodology when he discovers that the boys and girls in his class, criminally neglected by previous teachers who presumably substituted busy work for actual instruction, know virtually nothing. When he asks someone to identify the name of their country, not one hand goes up. The movie’s title comes from the name the students give Conroy because it’s the closest they can come to pronouncing his real one – an error that he bows to philosophically, gets used to, and finally is charmed by (as are we).

Crossing Moral Boundaries in the Historical Mysteries of Joseph Kanon

Novelist Joseph Kanon. (Photo by Axel Dupeux)

Joseph Kanon, the former publishing executive, has demonstrated two great strengths in his novels: his capacity for providing a textured atmospheric backdrop to his murder mysteries populated by both historical and fictional characters, and his ability to convey to readers the pressing moral questions of the moment. In his seven novels, the setting for at least part of each novel has been between 1945 and 1950 where the unresolved issues of World War II are played out.

Vehicles: I’ll See You in My Dreams and Bessie

Blythe Danner in I'll See You in My Dreams.

If Blythe Danner had come into movies in the thirties instead of the seventies, she would have been a star. In Lovin’ Molly (1974) and Hearts of the West (1975), she was as elegant as Claudette Colbert, as funny-sexy as Jean Arthur (and with something like Arthur’s cracked alto) , as quicksilver as Margaret Sullavan, and a transcendent beauty. And, as her performances on the PBS series Theater in America, as Nina in The Sea Gull and Alma in Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, demonstrated, she had the talent of a young Katharine Hepburn. But though she’s had – and continues to have – a triumphant career as a stage actress, and though, early on, she played leading roles in some TV movies (she was remarkable in A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story and especially Too Far to Go, based on some John Updike stories), this summer’s I’ll See You in My Dreams is her first starring role since Lovin’ Molly. She’s shown up in a lot of films in between, sometimes giving performances of glowing intelligence in bum roles (Brighton Beach Memoirs), sometimes lighting up a whole picture in a supporting part (The Last Kiss, where she played the role of the middle-aged woman terrified of growing older that Stefania Sandrelli had created in the Italian version). But only now, at seventy-two – and still a stunning camera subject – has she landed a film role that really seems to acknowledge what she is: America’s greatest living actress.

Last Days at All Saints': Nurse Jackie

Edie Falco and Tony Shalhoub, in the final season of Showtime's Nurse Jackie.

Tony Shalhoub is a great actor, with an easy mastery of his craft and an ability to instantly connect with an audience that enables him to perform miracles. As the star of the detective series Monk, Shalhoub played a broken man trying to put himself back together, a quiet, recessive man whose grief over the unsolved murder of his wife asserted itself in the form of a steady flood of tics, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. If Adrian Monk had been played by a different actor, it’s likely that he would have worn out his welcome with the audience, but Shalhoub made him funny and touching, and kept doing it, week after week, for an eight-year run. It was a remarkable feat, but before the show had run its course, even a fan could wish that Shalhoub had the chance to take a break from making a potentially annoying character seem charming and instead take a chance on playing one with a presence as big as his talent. In the seventh, concluding season of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie, Shalhoub plays Dr. Bernard Prince, who takes over as chief doctor in the ER of Manhattan’s All Saints’ Hospital after the departure of the dim but sweetly well-intentioned Dr. Cooper (Peter Facinelli) and immediately establishes himself as the star of the show.

Pulling Off a Miracle: The Sleeping Beauty at Toronto's Four Season Centre for the Performing Arts

The Sleeping Beauty (Photo by Sian Richards)

A ballet based on a fairy tale, The Sleeping Beauty celebrates the victory of order over chaos, a theme the National Ballet of Canada expressed with particular exuberance during the week of performances that opened at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on June 10. The company was down 18 dancers as a result of injuries, a number representing almost a quarter of its artistic staff, and so the necessity of transforming a situation of adversity into one of triumph wasn't just a fiction. It was a matter of artistic survival. The wounded ran the gamut from seasoned performer to newcomer: principal dancers and soloists right down to members of the corps de ballets. It is unusual for so many dancers to be sidelined at once, and in the days leading up to opening night the situation looked dire. The classical repertoire's most famous ballet is also its most opulent, typically requiring legions of dancers to do it justice. Rudolf Nureyev's lavish version, which the National Ballet has been dancing since 1972, is no exception. Only a large classical dance company – and with 66 dancers the National Ballet is the biggest in the land – can pull it off. So what do you do when suddenly your numbers are down? You panic. Or, if you are Karen Kain, you think on your feet and pull off a miracle.

Over The Hill: Aging Action Stars and the Culture of Tolerance

Harrison Ford in Ender's Game (2013).

When is the right time to give up the craft? How much does age affect your ability to execute your art? With artisans or musicians, it’s when your body fails, when your fingers can no longer keep up with your mind, or when you’ve exhausted your contribution to the medium and you feel that there’s nothing more you can add. Perhaps it’s both, or more. But for actors – especially stars of action cinema – it’s a different story. Money and special effects can go a long way to help Hollywood’s ever-sagging elite stave off the rigours of time, and artificially extend their influence over pop culture.

Peter Pan: An Awfully Big Adventure

David-Birrell as Hook, and-the-Lost-Boys, in Peter Pan, at London's Regent Park. (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

When you attend a play in the Open Air Theatre in London’s Regent’s Park for the first time, your expectations for the actual dramatic experience may be diminished by the beauty of the space itself: it seems that a theatre company wouldn’t have to do much to make an audience happy on a lovely summer’s night. And though I’ve encountered exceptions to this rule, outdoor theatre is typically restrained in its ambitions and certainly in its production values. But Regent’s Park Theatre Ltd. turns out to be a venue for imaginative directors and designers with outsize dreams, artists who clearly think of working in outdoor theatre as an opportunity to try out ideas that are too crazy for the West End and too extravagant for the fringe theatres. Four years ago I saw a wonderful production there of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera with stagecraft so elaborate that watching the stage hands negotiate it added a daredevil circus element to the proceedings. (That was especially true the night I saw the show: it was the first preview, and not all the mechanical problems had been worked out.)

Early this month I saw Peter Pan at Regent’s Park in a version, directed by Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel, that was conceptually brilliant, visually breathtaking and deeply moving – the most thrilling evening I spent at the theatre in a month of seeing plays in London. James Barrie wrote Peter Pan in 1904, but Sheader and Steel have set it a decade later, during the Great War. Jon Bausor’s set looks initially liked a bombed-out factory framed by scaffolding and derricks, on one of which hangs a tattered Union Jack; beneath is a trench erected from torn sides of metal and random lumber. A bomb explodes and the factory turns into a military infirmary where a handful of nurses tend to the wounded: to one young man whose eyes are bandaged, to another who cries out in agony for his mother, to a captain who is fitted for a hook to replace his blown-off hand. One of the nurses (Kae Alexander) retrieves a copy of Peter Pan from under the pillow of the bandaged soldier (Patrick Osborne) and begins to read it aloud to the entire ward, and the play within the play begins. The nurse turns into Wendy Darling, the bandaged soldier (who knows the text off by heart and recites some of it along with her) becomes her brother John, and the rest of the soldiers and nurses in the ward take the other roles. Other uniformed men are stage hands, scaling the heights of the set to manipulate the harnesses that hold Peter Pan (played by Hiran Abeysekera, he’s the only actor on stage who appears only as a fantasy figure) and the Darling children (Thomas Dennis is Michael) as they fly through the air. Naturally, the captain who has lost his hand (David Birrell) shows up again as Hook.

Send Lawyers, Guns & Money: A Live Concert Tribute to Warren Zevon at Hugh's Room (June 19)

As always, the night begins with a quick trip home, jump in the car and head for the huge traffic jam that is the QEW. Tonight it’s not so bad, and I have my old friend Wayne to keep me entertained with tales of his recent trip to Nashville. Wayne’s a songwriter and he makes a regular pilgrimage to Tennessee to sell songs. He meets all sorts of interesting people down there. This time my favourite is the Vince Gill story! But enough about the car ride. We arrive at Hugh’s Room for a concert tribute to Warren Zevon (curated by A Man Called Wrycraft) and are led to our table. The menu hasn’t changed although they disappoint me by telling me that they’re not serving the chicken pan pesto tonight. OK, the penne with rapini then. There are no bad seats in Hugh’s Room (well…the café tables are not comfortable, but you can still see and hear everything) and we’re up close to the stage in front of the PA board. Perfect. Michael Wrycraft is not in the house tonight. It’s been over a year since he went in to hospital for a foot infection and has been recovering. Hopefully he’ll be back hosting his shows in September. The shows lose something without Michael’s presence, his passion and his stories about the songwriter being celebrated. Tonight Bob Reid is hosting. He reads from a biography of Mr. Zevon written by his ex-wife. He chooses segments which relate to the songs about to be performed. Interesting and sometimes quite funny.

French Delights: Late August, Early September, The Lady and the Duke, 5 X 2, and The Taste of Others

While checking out some foreign films I needed for a course I was teaching, I realized once again how many movies that may have come and gone too quickly in the cinemas or did not play commercially there at all – can find a second life streaming, or on DVD. Despite downloading and streaming, however, I still prefer to find my movies the old fashioned way, on screen, or in the video store’s stacks. Here are four French films you ought to check out.

Tabula Rasa: SyFy's Dark Matter

Melissa O'Neil and Marc Bendavid in Dark Matter, on SyFy and Space.

Over the past two weeks, the SyFy channel has premiered two new original scripted shows, Dark Matter (on June 12) and Killjoys (on June 19). Both series are also Canadian in origin, screening simultaneously on Canada's Space Channel. Dark Matter and Killjoys join a growing roster of homegrown Canadian SF television, a list which includes two of the strongest SF shows currently running: SyFy's Continuum (which will air its 6-episode fourth and final season this fall) and BBC America's Orphan Black (which aired its third season this winter). Also, like those two shows, both Dark Matter and Killjoys come with strong female lead characters. All of this speaks well for the current state of genre television. But as strong as it is, among all the time travel, werewolves, zombies, and super-evil biotech operatives, there has been something missing in recent TV: where have all the space operas gone? I like a dark global pharma-conspiracy story as much as the next geek, but sometimes I want a few spaceships with my science fiction. And so when Dark Matter opened to a sweeping starscape and slowly honed in a derelict-looking vessel hanging in space, I have to confess that something long slumbering awakened inside me. To paraphrase Captain Kirk (paraphrasing poet John Masefield), sometimes all I want from my science fiction television is a few ragtag crewmembers, a spaceship, and "a star to steer her by."

The recipe is simple: a small crew of charismatic characters, ideally fugitives from "justice" (or whatever passes for it in the deep, far future), working through their personal issues, making new friends and enemies, and kicking a little space-ass along the way. It's a format that has generated some of my favourite shows, each of varying tone and depth: from the surreal, over-the-top absurdity of Rockne O'Bannon's Farscape, to the nuanced allegorism of Joss Whedon's Firefly, to the unapologetic serialized fun of Andromeda. Ask me again come August, but by the time its first season closes, I am hoping to add Dark Matter to that list.

Pixar’s Inside Out: Freud Would Have Loved This!

Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong in Pixar's latest animated feature, Inside Out.

Pixar, all is forgiven. The last time I reviewed a Pixar film for Critics at Large, Toy Story 3 (2010), I speculated, that after Up (2009), which I found too mechanical and programmed and the unnecessary, disappointing third in the Toy Story series (a fourth, alas, is on the way), as to whether Pixar Animation Studios, after the near consistent high quality of their movies – Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Finding Nemo (2003), Ratatouille (2007) and Wall*E (2008) – had lost its mojo. I did not get to Brave (2012), which I heard good things about and did not feel much need to go see, Cars 2 (2011) – Cars (2006) was bad enough – nor Monsters University (2013), the sequel to Monsters, Inc. (2001), one of Pixar’s lesser (but still good) films. In any case, Pixar’s latest movie, Inside Out (2015) is one of the studio’s very best animated concoctions, a psychologically astute and highly inventive movie that Sigmund Freud himself would have loved.

Sibling Rivalry - Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan

Johnny Rogan has written about Ray Davies before. He did a biography of The Kinks back in 1984 (The Kinks: the Sound and the Fury), and then in 1998 one of those CD sized anthologies of record reviews, The Complete Guide to the Music of The Kinks. Rogan is nothing if not thorough. His biography of Van Morrison (No Surrender) is the most in-depth study of the Irish songster available. So much so that it was criticized by Kevin Courtney in The Irish Times, who observed: "For fans of Van Morrison's music, No Surrender might seem somewhat blasphemous, focusing not so much on Van the artist, but on Van the not-very-nice man.” One might say that Rogan has taken the same approach in this vast study of Ray Davies.

He calls it “a complicated life” but in fact it’s two complicated lives Rogan is laying bare here. Ray Davies, rhythm guitarist, songwriter, lead singer of The Kinks and his younger brother Dave, lead guitarist, songwriter, back-up singer of The Kinks. You can’t tell one story without the other. Ray, famously tells a story of his life growing up as the only boy in a family of six sisters. On his solo album The Storyteller he recounts how happy he was, until his mother gave birth to a younger child, another boy, and Ray had to share affections with someone else. “When Dave was born, I felt like a little child of two whose parents suddenly go out and buy a dog,” Ray Davies explains, “Of course a kid gets jealous.” Usually a kid grows out of it but this sibling rivalry grew and grew until today the brothers can barely stand to be in the same city. When asked if there will ever be a Kinks reunion they reply, “It could happen, if people behave,” and “It’s time reality took over!” The first response is Ray, the second Dave. It’s unlikely to happen. Long-time drummer Mick Avory wants it to happen, but he definitely wants to be included, and brother Dave stated recently “I don’t want to see the legacy of The Kinks soured by two miserable old men doing it for the money.” No-one does.

Changing the World: The Unique Phenomenon of Game Modding

Only mods can make a fearsome foe look as dapper as this monocle-sporting mud crab from Skyrim.

Mods, or modifications, are one of the many ways that gaming, as a hobby and as an art form, is unique. There’s no convenient parallel to draw from film, or literature, or traditional art – they’re a phenomenon that’s utterly exclusive to their medium, and that makes them a fascinating anomaly.

Anybody can make a mod, be they an official developer or armchair enthusiast. Modding ranges from making small changes to a game’s functionality, appearance, or sound, to creating entirely new games in themselves. They can include new items or weapons, characters or enemies, models, textures, levels, story lines – you name it. Sometimes a modded version of a game will have changed so drastically from its original version as to be almost unrecognizable, whether by increasing the quality of the game’s visuals or radically altering them, sometimes in ways that increase a player’s immersion and sometimes in ways that purposely shatter it (such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s famous – or, perhaps infamous – mod that places top hats and monocles on wild mud crabs). Mods can devolve a modern game into a classic, and make a decades-old game feel fresh.

Strange Journeys: Kafka on the Shore and Shining City

Kafka on the Shore is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel. (Photo: Takahiro Watanabe)

Yukio Ninagawa’s Kafka on the Shore, which I caught during its brief stop in London at the Barbican (it will perform at the Lincoln Center Festival in July), is an unconventional example of East-West translation. Frank Galati adapted Haruki Murakami’s 2002 magic-realist novel for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company seven years ago; the Ninagawa Company has returned it to the Japanese (Shunsuke Hiratsuka did the translation). If this cultural back-and-forth is a little disorienting, that effect seems perfectly appropriate to a stage version of Murakami’s haunting, dreamlike work. Fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura (played in the Ninagawa production by Nino Furuhata), who is under an Oedipal curse, runs away from his father, a famous artist, and winds up working at a small private library in Takamatsu. The head librarian, a reclusive figure named Miss Saeki (Rie Miyazawa) still lost in mourning over the long-ago death of her lover, may or may not be Kafka’s long-absent mother. (Since Murakami is working on an ambiguous, oneiric level, the question of Miss Saeki’s relationship to Kafka doesn’t have a realist answer.)