Changing the Narrative in Canadian History: Three Recent Canadian Studies

The Scream by Kent Monkman. (2017, Acrylic on Canvas)

If you are a Canadian, you will undoubtedly know that Aboriginals have not joined in the joyful acknowledgement of Canada’s sesquicentennial. Several native men and women have articulated that this occasion that celebrates Confederation, itself a product of a colonial mentality, is shameful because the framers regarded Aboriginals with contempt. One commentator argued that the Canadian historical narrative had to change. On the evidence of two of the books under review – Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (University of Toronto Press, 2017) by Peter H. Russell and The Promise of Canada: 150 Years – People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country (Simon & Schuster Canada, 2016) by Charlotte Gray – the narrative about the relationship between the British and later Canadian governments and the Aboriginal peoples is changing. Russell (full disclosure: I personally know this distinguished political scientist) fully understands Aboriginal disenchantment with the 1867 Constitution Act – it offered them nothing – and based on the evidence in The Promise I suspect that Gray would also appreciate their refusal to participate in this event. Although Tim Cook’s Vimy: The Battle and the Legend (Allen Lane, 2017) does not address the Aboriginal issue, he does challenge a dominant narrative about Canadian identity that has emerged since the celebration of the country’s centennial in 1967.

Ad Hominem: Battles Over Broadway and the Role of Personal Identity in Criticism

 Max Gordon Moore and Adina Verson in Paula Vogel's Indecent. (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

Let’s start by accepting the premise that white men (a group which includes yours truly) have managed to make quite a hash of things over the last few centuries. One need only glance at today’s headlines to see the ways in which blithely privileged males have negatively affected our politics and culture. There’s been a strong, necessary, and long-past-due movement in the last few decades to remedy this state of affairs in the arts. However, a recent controversy in the world of theatre criticism has pointed to some concerning issues that arise when we apply this attitude to the question of whether and how the identities of critics and artists should affect the former’s responses to the latter. It stems from a series of statements on social media from playwright Paula Vogel, followed by “A Collective Call Against Critical Bias” on the theatre website HowlRound, in response to the early closings of Vogel’s Indecent and fellow playwright Lynn Nottage’s Sweat on Broadway.

Vogel and Nottage are two of the most prominent and respected playwrights in the United States at present, and yet they none of their works had ever made it to Broadway before, so it was disappointing when their respective plays announced that they would close early (although, in a surprising and virtually unprecedented development, Indecent subsequently extended its run at the last minute). In both cases, lukewarm reviews from The New York Times likely played at least some role in limiting their runs. Vogel took to Twitter to comment, “Brantley&Green, 2-0. Nottage&Vogel 0-2. Lynn, they help close us down,&gifted stra8 white guys run: ourplayswill last. B&G#footnotesinhistory.” Nottage added, “The patriarchy flexing their muscles to prove their power.” Vogel subsequently qualified her initial statements: “Btw I like well written pans of my plays (John Simon!) NYT was not a pan. Is there a manipulation of marketplace that dismisses women&POC?” and “I respect Ben Brantley. I served on a pulitzer jury w/him. He is not the enemy. hope to have more thoughtful dialogue. We need a better way.” She also took pains to emphasize that she was not disparaging Lucas Hnath or J.T. Rogers, the aforementioned “gifted [straight] white guys” whose A Doll’s House, Part 2 and Oslo continue to run on Broadway.

Neglected Gem #104: Girl with Green Eyes (1964)

Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch in The Girl with the Green Eyes

Considering how prolific the Irish writer Edna O’Brien is – and how inherently dramatic her books are – it’s surprising that so few of them have been made into movies. (She’s also the author of a marvelous play, Virginia, neglected since its original productions at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario with Maggie Smith in 1980 – which I saw and have never forgotten – and the New York premiere with Kate Nelligan in 1985.) There are TV movies of her breakthrough novel The Country Girls and Wild Decembers (she wrote the teleplays for both), but only twice has her work reached the big screen: in 1964, when she adapted the middle book in the Country Girls trilogy, The Lonely Girl, as Girl with Green Eyes, and in 1972, when she turned Zee and Company into X, Y and Zee, and which starred Elizabeth Taylor in one of her best performances, opposite Michael Caine and Susannah York. Neither film is remembered today.

Inventory Management, Vol. I.

A scene from Yoko Taro’s Nier: Automata.

"Inventory Management" is the period of rest and thoughtfulness that occurs during breaks in the action, in which we organize and clear out all the unnecessary clutter we've accumulated during our adventures. This column, like its sister column Critic's Notes & Frames, embraces this spirit of enjoyable tidying up by acting as a receptacle for all the reviews, thoughts, and musings about games and gaming culture that wouldn't fit anywhere else. -- Justin Cummings

I jumped into director Yoko Taro’s Nier: Automata without ever having played the original 2010 title Nier. I didn’t think I’d have any trouble, given the seemingly hyperbolic reaction the game had received by that point, with critics and fans often citing it as their favourite game of the year so far. I raised an single eyebrow at this – I mean, Breath of the Wild came out this year – but it was enough to warrant giving it a shot, anyway.

No East or West in Dreams: Yoko Ono, Buddhism and the Avant-Garde

Fly (1971) was Yoko Ono's second album.

Welcome to the world of transformation and transcendental art. The art in multiple media produced by the 1960’s neo-dadaist movement known as Fluxus in general, and the art of Yoko Ono in particular, in addition to being challenging and thought-provoking, is also an exceptionally suitable vehicle for the subtle transmission of sophisticated Buddhist principles which can be found in both Zen and Dzogchen teachings. In many cases the artworks themselves are embodied meanings, crystallized manifestations of certain Buddhist perspectives on the interactive nature of reality.

Inspired profoundly by the brilliant breakthroughs of two twentieth-century conceptual masters, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, the art produced by Ono and this mere decade-long assembly of experimental mixed media artists and musicians is also an ideal pivot with which to appreciate the more pronounced (and more revealing) affinity which has long existed between Buddhist philosophy (especially as transmitted to the west by D.T. Suzuki in the post-war period) and the west’s most adventurous avant-garde (especially that practiced by visionary artists and musicians such as Duchamp, Maciunas, Cage, and the Fluxus group). And Yoko Ono. Perhaps especially Yoko Ono.

Off the Shelf: John Fawcett's Ginger Snaps (2000)

Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins in Ginger Snaps

John Fawcett's horror comedy Ginger Snaps has the good sense not to take itself too seriously. This low-budget Canadian feature, with a clever screenplay by Karen Walton, is essentially a prankish menstrual joke much like Brian De Palma's Carrie. Fifteen-year-old Brigitte Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins) and her sixteen-year-old sister, Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), are both outcasts who are preoccupied by death. Their self-styled Goth lifestyle is so gloomy that the only joy they experience is collaborating on a school project where they photograph a number of mock-suicide attempts. Brigitte and Ginger are not only sisters; they're spiritual twins who loathe their placid suburban environment. Yet they are both so tied to their deep blue forebodings that neither has had her period yet. They take refuge in life's shadows as a way of hiding from the light of their own femininity. The night Ginger finally gets "the curse" she also has the misfortune of being bitten by a werewolf. This horrific attack slowly transforms her into a lycanthrope herself. The joke, of course, is that puberty has not only turned her into a hot babe who draws all this attention from the guys; it's also transformed her into a voracious beast who is out for blood. "I've got this ache," she tells Brigitte, "and I thought it was for sex, but it's to tear everything to pieces." With the help of Sam (Kris Lemche), a local pot dealer and amateur botanist, Brigitte tries to bring her demon sister back from the brink.

Williamstown Theatre Season Openers: The Model American and The Roommate

Hiram Delgado and Han Jonghoon in The Model American at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

Mandy Greenfield’s tenure as artistic director at the Williamstown Theatre Festival has been marked by a turn away from revivals of classic American (and European) plays to a focus on new work: this year, like last, Greenfield has reserved only one slot for an established play, and it’s Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, from 2004. (Last season it was Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo.) The attention to up-and-coming playwrights is theoretically exciting, but the choices for season openers in both spaces, the mainstage and the intimate Nikos Stage, are questionable, to say the least.

Je Suis Zombie: On the Third Season of iZombie

David Anders, Rose McIver, and Jason Dohring in iZombie.

 This piece contains spoilers for the third season of The CW's iZombie.

This past Tuesday, the third season of The CW's iZombie concluded with a world-shaking bang. Though the 13-episode season of Rob Thomas' zombie crime procedural also came with a significant drop in its ratings (continuing the steady decline from the heights of its freshman season), the series showed up for its third outing with all guns blazing and held that energy all the way through. If you tuned in you were treated to a more ambitious story that, while never straying from the wit and charm of its first two seasons, carefully and confidently expanded the show's themes, more than earning the right to shift the ground beneath its feet.

Ohhhh Canada: Critics At Large Celebrates Canada 150

Celebrating birthdays is complicated enough when you're discussing people, let alone when you start talking about a nation. For a few months, the idea of doing a special series of pieces reflecting the complicated and controversial history of our Confederation was kicked around. But these days there is no one person who is a driving force at Critics at Large to bring consensus and focus to these kinds of ambitious plans. So the notion languished passively and died on the vine. We ended up doing an ad hoc number of random pieces that became part of an informal Canada 150 series. Since my turn to write was coming up today, I had to ask myself if I wanted to do something – anything – about why Canada mattered. But I had too many ideas and none that jumped out as inspired. So while recently culling together some of my own Critics at Large writing for a summer project I've been working on, I began reading a number of other critics who said things in the heat of reviewing that touched on some fascinating aspects of what it meant for them being Canadian. In a matter of moments, I began lifting selections from those reviews dating back to our beginnings in 2010. In those works, Canada was a leitmotif that I had the urge to embroider into a motley quilt of cultural discourse. Not all our writers are included here, as some over the years had little to say about Canada, while others make repeat appearances because some idea of Canada predominated in their work in a way that looms larger than it might have when the piece was once a review. As I was the one to do the writing today, I throw down the first gauntlet with a selection from a book review I did back in 2010.

-- Kevin Courrier, July 1/17.    

Neglected Gems #102/#103: Two Small Comedies from 1999

Dan Hedaya, Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst in Dick (1999).

The inspired silliness of Dick emerges equally from the script by Andrew Fleming and Sheryl Longin, from Fleming’s breezy direction, and from the cast of clowns who perform it. It came out in the middle of the summer of 1999 and it’s the ideal summer comedy – though its jokes are so grounded in the culture of the Watergate era, when it’s set, that it never developed much of an audience, even among boomers when it got to the rental stores. Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, both charming, play Betsy and Arlene, a pair of D.C. teeny-boppers. The Vietnam War appears on Betsy’s radar for the first time when her druggy older brother Larry (Devon Gummersall) gets his draft notice. Generally she doesn’t seem to have anything on her mind. Arlene, who harbors a crush on the bland pop singer Bobby Sherman, is, by comparison, the intellectual of the pair: she wears glasses – though she trades them in for contacts halfway through the picture – and we can tell when she has a thought because she blinks. They’re not usually her own thoughts, but at least she can repeat the popular anti-war clichés, which is more than Betsy can manage. Betsy’s the kind of bright-faced, all-the-lights-are-on-but-nobody’s-home girl who, when her friend suggests they tell President Nixon to stop the war, flashes her prettiest smile and says, “Okay,” as if Arlene had just decided they should snack at McDonald’s. (To be truthful, McDonald’s gets a more enthusiastic reaction from Betsy: she looks almost transported as she murmurs, “Fries, fries.”)

Critic’s Crypt: The Dark Appetites of Thirst (2009) and Raw (2016)

Song Kang-ho, Shin Ha-ky and Kim Ok-bin in Thirst (2009)

Some of the most effective horror storytelling happens in the clash between our civilized façades and the primal urges that lurk beneath. In confronting the uncivilized, the uncouth, the unspoken, and the unholy, we expose the uncomfortable truth: that we are much more like animals than we’d care to admit. We are all of us base and feral, and the fear we experience in the cinema seat is really prompted by that curtain of pretense lifting away, so that we come face to face with our true reflections. This is why horror is among the most thematically honest forms of fiction, and why films like Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009) and Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) are so brutally effective.

Go Big or Go Home: Fake Sugar by Beth Ditto

Beth Ditto performing at the Echo Music Awards in Berlin, Germany, in April, 2017. (Photo: Tobias Schwarz)

When the British vocalist Adele first graced the airwaves with her beautifully powerful voice, few music critics thought the strength of her voice and the openly personal nature of her songs could be matched. To some music fans Adele set a new standard of excellence that couldn’t be met by anybody of her caliber -- until now.

Beth Ditto's debut record Fake Sugar (Virgin) is a powerful pop/rock record that taps all the same emotional notes as Adele, without the sentimentality. Even though the album was released June 16 without much fanfare it is one of the strongest debut albums I’ve ever heard. It has a balance of intensity and emotional maturity with some mighty fine musical hooks to boot. Produced by Jenn Decilveo, Fake Sugar is virtually faultless in its execution. The mix is a marvelous collection of thumping downbeats and disco-infused pop numbers all supported by Ditto’s tough, honest and relentless attitude towards love, identity and society. And underneath all that angst she expresses is an earthy honesty that is more Patti Smith than Katy Perry. While I appreciate the performance art of Lady Gaga, who has an equally strong voice, I’m put off by her overproduced music and highly commercial sound. Her songs don’t have the depth of Beth Ditto. Fake Sugar is accessible pop, but it’s not trying to reach a musical compromise.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXIII

In the last couple of months, like many viewers, I've been watching David Lynch's return and resurrection of Twin Peaks. Without going into great detail for those who haven't yet dipped in, I can safely say there isn't anything on television anywhere that comes close to what's going on here. Of course, that said, the show has also been a source of frustration, as much as a font of devious delight and pure shock. But partly that is due to the fact that Lynch has broken the wall of serial television. That wall (in both good and bad shows) always provides the predictable dramatic arcs, climaxes and cliffhangers which in the age of streaming give us full comfort and safety, plus the freedom to binge-watch. But who could binge-watch this? Time itself becomes something close to elastic on Twin Peaks, where even stasis sometimes has to be considered a twist in the story.

New Work from London

 Paddy Considine and Genevieve O'Reilly in The Ferryman at the Royal Court. (Photo: Johan Perrson)

This article contains reviews of The Ferryman, Don Juan in Soho and La Strada in the West End and Common at the National Theatre. The review of The Ferryman contains spoilers.

Audiences leap to their feet at the end of The Ferryman, the new play by Jez Butterworth (Jerusalem) that has recently transferred to the West End after a sold-out run at the Royal Court. And why wouldn’t they? Butterworth and the director, Sam Mendes, have stockpiled enough heart-tuggers in three and a quarter hours to make the manufacturers of the nineteenth-century potboilers that used to reduce audiences to mush look like amateurs. The setting is northern Ireland in 1982, during the prison hunger strike that resulted in the deaths of Bobby Sands and others. The hero, Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), is a warm, hard-working, life-loving Irish farmer with a huge family whose brother’s body has just been discovered ten years after his disappearance. Quinn is sure that he was killed by the IRA for some unidentified offense of which he was innocent. (The play is certain of it, too, though Butterworth never even tells us what he might have been fingered for.) The ruthless IRA man, Muldoon (Stuart Graham), blackmails the Carneys’ parish priest (Gerald Horan) into revealing what he learned in confession from the dead man’s widow, Caitlin (Laura Donnelly), whom Quinn and his wife Mary (Genevieve O’Reilly) took in along with her son Oisin (Rob Malone) when her husband vanished. Caithas been in love with her brother-in-law for years; Muldoon threatens to tell Mary unless Quinn agrees to keep his suspicions about who killed his brother to himself.

Novels about the Third Reich, Part II: Jessica Shattuck’s Women in the Castle

Author Jessica Shattuck. (Photo: Grace Kwon)

Two pivotal scenes, spanning over sixty years, remain in the mind long after reading Jessica Shattuck’s character-driven, historically informed (with excellent sources acknowledged at the back), and moving Women in the Castle (William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2017). The first occurs in the prologue set in 1938 Germany, on the cusp of Kristallnacht, in a Bavarian castle during the von Lingenfels’ annual family party. Although some of the guests sport Nazi insignias, a number of others are assembled in the study of the host, Albrecht, plotting active resistance to Hitler’s zealotry – fearing that if things go wrong, their families will suffer. His wife, Marianne, interrupts and, fully cognizant of Hitler’s madness and thuggery, challenges them to take action. When her charismatic childhood friend, Connie Fledermann, appoints her the “commander of wives and children,” she accepts.

Playing Politics: Reflections on the Public Theater Controversy

In retrospect, it was dangerous to put on a play that depicted the murder of the nation’s leader at such a politically unsettled time. The country was divided and facing troubling questions about how secure and long-lasting the head of state’s tenure in office might be. It was bogged down fighting an overseas insurgency, pitting its forces against followers of a religion that some argued could threaten its very existence. Indeed, there were frequent rumors that domestic members of that same faith were plotting violent attacks that could bring down the government and usher in despotic rule by foreigners.

The time was 1601, the place was England, and the drama in question was, according to later court testimony, “the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second,” likely William Shakespeare’s historical drama The Life and Death of King Richard the Second. Shakespeare’s own company staged the play at the request of some supporters of Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, who had recently returned in disgrace after failing to suppress a rebellion in Ireland. Feeling he’d been backed into a corner by his enemies after his defeat abroad, Essex launched a desperate gamble, planning to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I’s government. Some of his co-conspirators decided that, in order to gain the support of Londoners, they should commission Shakespeare’s troupe, known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to perform one of the older plays in their repertoire, which depicted the downfall and eventual death of an English king who was known for his ineffectual leadership. Given that he was working with men who were shortsighted enough to stage a play that proclaimed their intentions in advance, it’s not surprising that Essex’s coup ultimately failed. Elizabeth had him and many of his followers executed for treason. She was understandably shaken by the plot; months later, she supposedly asked the writer William Lambarde, “I am Richard II, know you not that?”

London Revivals, Part II: Rare English Comedies

Eve Best and Anthony Head in Love in Idleness at Menier Chocolate Factory. London. (Photo: Alastair Muir)

This piece contains reviews for Love in Idleness in London's West End and The Philanthropist at Trafalgar Studios.

As a result of the renewal of interest in Terence Rattigan’s plays over the last few years, no London season seems to be without one. So this playwright who lost favor after the “angry young man” playwrights revolutionized English theatre in the fifties and sixties is now very much on the boards again. (Rattigan died in 1977, four decades after French Without Tears had catapulted him to success.) Last fall Kenneth Branagh staged his 1948 Harlequinade; just closing at the Apollo Theatre is Trevor Nunn’s production of Love in Idleness, the third of Rattigan’s wartime plays, originally produced in 1944. Nunn staged the first of them, Flare Path, in 2011.

It’s a graceful production of a high comedy, first performed by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, that doesn’t quite work, though you’re right there with it for most of the ride. The title is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – love-in-idleness is the passion flower Oberon sends Puck for so he can daub its juice on the eyes of one of the Athenian lovers. The heroine is Olivia Brown (Eve Best), a middle-class widow whose affair with a Canadian baronet, Sir John Fletcher (Anthony Head, still best known as Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the important man in charge of tank production for the War Office, has lifted her into the aristocracy. They live together happily; he’d divorce his younger wife, Diana (Charlotte Spencer), were it not for his temporary exalted position in the government – and he plans to do so and to marry Olivia as soon as the war is over and he reverts to his old position as head of a company. But in the meantime Olivia’s son Michael (Edward Bluemel), not quite eighteen, returns from four years at a Montreal boarding school with a lot of romantic adolescent notions about the way the world works and more than his share of arrogance and entitlement. Sir John is, in his eyes, the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the English class system; he’s shocked when he discovers that his mother is living off what he assumes are her lover’s ill-gotten gains. He doesn’t credit her happiness with Fletcher – not even when she admits, delicately, that her marriage to his father had gone sour long before his death. Michael tries to put an end to the relationship by contacting Diana, not realizing that she knows all about her husband’s love life and has no objection to it. So his scheme collapses, but his hatred of Sir John is so marked that Olivia, feeling she has to choose one of the two men she loves over the other, moves out of Fletcher’s home anyway and back to the depressing digs she occupied when her husband was alive.

Bushido Blues: The Final Season of Samurai Jack

Samurai Jack's fifth and final season concluded on May 20.

The journey of Samurai Jack (Phil LaMarr) is a story of solitude. Loneliness marks every trudging step of Jack's quest to return from the corrupted future to his tranquil past. Like the heroes of Japanese folktale, literature, and cinema that creator Genndy Tartakovsky loves so dearly, Jack will pause along the way to aid the meek and the innocent in their own fights against injustice, but he never lingers in one place for too long. He is a ronin in the truest sense: a warrior without a master, whose goal of finding a time portal that will bring him home is simply an extension of the larger quest to bring honour and righteousness to himself and to the world. And every step along that path is a step he takes alone.

Until now, that is.

Double Solitaire: Creative Partnerships Made in Hell

William Holden and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950), written by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder, directed by Wilder.

“When two great saints meet it is a humbling experience." – Paul McCartney, 1968.

1. brackettandwilder

It was called the Golden Age of Hollywood for good reason. The early evolutionary phase of the film industry, which I personally designate as roughly being from 1929 to 1959, immediately established the stylistic devices, narrative techniques, creative content and future direction that cinema would take as both a visual art form and a commercial business enterprise. Most importantly, perhaps, the paradoxical fact that cinema could be both entertaining and profitable, as well as both philosophically challenging and emotionally comforting, was etched in celluloid almost from its beginnings at the turn of the century. Fine cinema is quite simply the best of both worlds.

Among the many screenwriters, producers and directors who blazed that ever-expanding trail, few would have quite the lasting impact on both comedy and tragedy as impressive and influential as the iconic achievements of the volatile collaborative partnership between writer-producer Charles Brackett and writer-director Billy Wilder.

America Thinks and Goes Home: The 50th Anniversary of Frank Zappa's Absolutely Free

While much of the pop music world today is celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, a few months before that landmark album made its way onto our turntables, Frank Zappa's second album, the rock oratorio Absolutely Free, was already sending up the culture wars with the irreverent verve and zeal of Spike Jones. Of course, it didn't draw anywhere near the attention of Pepper and no one is celebrating its 50th anniversary despite its daring and ribaldry. If Freak Out! (1966) announced the arrival of The Mothers of Invention and their subversive intentions (as well as influencing Sgt. Pepper), Absolutely Free was the fulfillment of those ambitions. On the inside cover of Freak Out!, Frank Zappa listed all those who had an impact on his work. But it’s on Absolutely Free that you can actually hear the presence of Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Lenny Bruce, and Edgard Varèse. Freak Out! was a beautifully designed map for The Mothers’ music, while Absolutely Free actually takes you places. Critic Greil Marcus wrote, in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, that “on this early effort the wit was liberating, the noise of the band not merely Absurdist but actually absurd. . . .”

Absolutely Free was indeed an oratorio of ridiculous extremes – performed at breakneck speed – with a tangy political satire woven into a musical embroidery. The history of 20th century music, from Stravinsky to The Supremes, happily plays bumper cars and lives up to the title of the record. No genre gets excluded – or not satirized. “We play the new free music – music as absolutely free, unencumbered by American cultural suppression,” Zappa announced. “We are systematically trying to do away with the creative roadblocks that our helpful American educational system has installed to make sure nothing creative leaks through to mass audiences. . . . The same patriotic feeling expressed in songs like ‘The Green Beret’ and ‘Day of Decision’ are embodied in our every performance, only on a more abstract level. . . .We represent the only true patriotism left.” This abstract example of true patriotism barely leaves you time to catch your breath, and the musical quotes just go whizzing past. And the album’s title turns out to be more than apt. All of Zappa’s musical ideas happily and freely collide in the rush hour traffic.

London Revivals, Part I: Political Morality Plays

Andrew Garfield and Nathan Stewart-Jarre in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. (Photo: Helen Maybanks)

This piece contains reviews for the National Theatre's Angels in America, Donmar Warehouse's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and Young Vic's Life of Galileo.

The hottest ticket in London this summer – aside from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, just beginning its second year in the West End – is the National Theatre revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, directed by Marianne Elliott (War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and starring Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield. I couldn’t get up much enthusiasm about it, but then I’m the stubborn cuss who doesn’t like Angels in America. No one could say that I haven’t done due diligence with the play. I saw Part I: Millennium Approaches, in its original National Theatre production in 1992 (with Henry Goodman as Roy Cohn), and both Part I and Part II: Perestroika, on Broadway in 1993 (with Ron Liebman as Cohn, Stephen Spinella as Prior Walter, Marcia Gay Harden as Harper Pitt and Jeffrey Wright as Belize). I’ve also seen Mike Nichols’s 2003 HBO film version (with a cast including Al Pacino, Mary-Louise Parker, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Patrick Wilson, and James Cromwell).

Kushner subtitled the work, which runs for seven hours and forty minutes in its complete form at the National, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and clearly one of the elements that critics and prize-winning committees and the vast number of theatre professors who regularly include it on the syllabi of modern drama classes respond to is the enormity of its ambitions. It’s intended to be a chronicle of the AIDS crisis from the point of view of the gay community; a coming-out play; an excoriation of the repressive spirit of Republican politics targeted specifically at Roy Cohn (played by Lane in this latest production), Joe McCarthy’s counsel and a Department of Justice prosecutor at the Rosenberg trial, and a closeted gay man who died of AIDS in 1986; and a comparative exploration of Mormonism, Protestantism and Judaism focusing on politics and sexuality at the end of the twentieth century, with a disquisition on race in America. Three of the characters are Mormon, three are Jewish, one is white Protestant and one is African American, and there are many others, the roles divided among a small cast whose efforts, in any production of the play, are equivalent in physical endurance alone to running a pair of marathons. In style Angels in America is alternately realist, surrealist and Brechtian, with interludes of satirical caricature.

Very Well Put: Watching Barney Miller in 2017

Jack Soo, Abe Vigoda and Hal Linden Barney Miller.

Det. Sgt. Yemana: No, I don't watch shows like that. I can't enjoy them because, being a cop myself, I spot the mistakes and inaccuracies and the fantastic things that in real life never happen.
Victim: On the show they caught him!
Yemana: Good example!

– Barney Miller ("Copy Cat," Season 4)

Barney Miller was in prime time and syndication throughout my childhood and, while I've long had strong memories of the show, until recently I hadn't watched a full episode in decades. But a few weeks ago, prompted by my reading of Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz's TV (The Book), my wife and I sat down to watch the series from the beginning. The groundbreaking sitcom – a multi-ethnic ensemble comedy set in New York City's fictional 12th Precinct – ran on ABC from 1975 to 1982, starring Tony-award winning Broadway actor Hal Linden as the eponymous Captain Miller. Running from the last days of the Ford administration to the early days of Reagan, Barney Miller offers a current viewer a sustained window into a turbulent decade, even though nearly every scene is set within the crumbling four walls of a second-floor Lower Manhattan squad room. The show has had its successors (most notably Fox's Brooklyn Nine-Nine), but it holds up brilliantly on its own terms. As a social document of its time, it is unquestionably relevant, but as a comedy Barney Miller is just plain delightful, notably of and ahead of its time: well-crafted and hilarious, pointed and sensitive, as often literate as it is slapstick.

Embracing the Banal: Two Celebrity Bios by Gene Wilder and Goldie Hawn

Gene Wilder

If you are a huge admirer of the diverse talents of the gifted comic actors the late Gene Wilder and Goldie Hawn, you won't find much evidence of those qualities in their digressive and disappointing memoirs: Wilder's Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art and Hawn's A Lotus Grows in the Mud (both released in 2005). One of the biggest ironies of popular celebrity autobiographies is that whenever the authors go to great lengths in telling us how they struggled through personal trials and tribulations, very little of what makes them appealing as artists comes across. They are out to prove that, deep down, they are really ordinary folks just like us. They, too, face insecurities, damaged relationships and death.

Although some readers might find comfort in recognizing some of their own traits in these stars, the fact is that celebrities don't abide like average people. Artists make their living doing work that springs largely from their passions and abilities; the general public earns its living by having a job. Celebrities appearing ordinary, though, is part of what makes this genre so popular. Like most TV talk shows, these books contain an abundance of familiar anecdotes about learning life's important lessons, rather than revealing what makes them so compelling in their craft. Wilder and Hawn aren't negligible talents. Yet A Lotus Grows in the Mud and (to a lesser degree) Kiss Me Like a Stranger fall into the same category of celebrity bios as those written by much lesser talents. The memoirs share a dogged impulse to strip away the appealing ingredients of their own distinctive gifts and embrace the banal.

Wonder Woman: Myth and Man

Chris Pine and Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman. (Photo: Clay Enos/Warner Bros)

Chris Pine has so much unfussy charm and is at home in so many different kinds of movies (and periods) that it’s easy to underrate him – to assume that he merely coasts on his good looks and camera savvy. He’s certainly got plenty of both, but he’s like a young Joel McCrea: his humor is in his natural responses to the untoward situations his characters find themselves in (even when he’s playing Cinderella’s prince in Into the Woods) and his sexiness derives from his unwavering presentness – his ability to be all there, physically and emotionally, in every scene. The only time I didn’t buy what he was doing on screen was in Hell or High Water, and there the fault was with Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay, not with Pine. Some of his best work has gone virtually unseen – in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, where he was the best of all the movie Jack Ryans, and in The Finest Hours, where he played a Coast Guard sailor on a dramatically against-the-odds rescue mission, and especially in the gentle post-apocalyptic three-hander Z for Zachariah, where he shared the screen with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Margot Robbie.

Podcast: Interview with Director Denys Arcand (1986)

Rémy Girard in Denys Arcand's Le déclin de l'empire américain (1986).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1983, one of those people was French-Canadian film director Denys Arcand.

At the time of our conversation, his film Le déclin de l'empire Américain (The Decline of the American Empire) had just been released. The movie would go on to win nine Genie Awards (including Best Motion Picture) and become the first Canadian film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Arcand also wrote and filmed two sequels, 2003's Les invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) and 2007's L'age des ténèbres (Days of Darkness). Both movies would also be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with Les Invasions winning – and becoming the first Canadian film ever so honoured. 

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Denys Arcand as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1986.

Time Waits for No One

Coming back to Ryerson University to teach a film course for the first time since being diagnosed with cancer over a year ago, I decided to start with a class about the nature of time. Even though I had had the idea shortly before I became sick, it had acquired some poignancy during the months of treatment. Time wasn't just the philosophical exercise I first considered, but a tangible entity that I was growing quite intimate with. I came to see that you can't beat time because – to paraphrase George Harrison – time flows on within you and without you. We may try to organize time through our calendars and appointment books to construct a linear path of going forward through the weeks, months and years. But we can run out of time despite what our daytimer tells us. When we are awake, we are conscious of time passing. Yet we sleep for eight hours a night and it never seems like eight hours when we open our eyes to the morning.

Time is independent of our existence whether we are conscious of it or not. It may be one reason why some of us fear going to sleep at night because it's then that our futile control over time slips out of our grasp. As we enter the world of dreams, time shifts into realms of abstract reality. It's movies that allow us to experience time in that abstract reality, as if we were to find ourselves in a waking dream. Perhaps that's why some people fear movies and choose to attend only some pictures, while avoiding others that may disturb their sense of order. Unlike in the other arts such as literature, theatre, opera and the visual arts, where we can experience a work in linear time – giving us full control of what we read, watch and hear – movies are about surrendering our control to the eye of the camera and the sensibility of the person behind the lens.

Kicking Up The Dirt: New Albums by Andrew Combs & Paul Weller

With a voice that is a cross between Don McLean and Ray LaMontagne, Andrew Combs's effervescent sound is impossible to resist. His new album Canyons On My Mind (New West) is a charmer, to say the least. But behind all that charm is a lot of gold, as we learn how serious this young songwriter from Texas reveals himself to be. The first track is an edgy rock song called “Heart of Wonder” with its Andy MacKay (Roxy Music) sax solo, but it’s a bit of a ruse. Combs is a country artist, after all, so I don't think he’s going to fool anyone with his fondness for glam-rock. So he mixes it up on this record with a variety of 11 songs that sound fresh to my ears. For instance, “Rose Colored Blues” could have been recorded in the mid-sixties with its simple string arrangement and up-tempo, “countrypolitan” feel. It’s really nice to hear a new generation proudly wearing their Glen Campbell t-shirts in the studio. On each track he sounds focused and committed. There's nothing worse than hearing a singer who isn’t fully committed to his or her own songs.

Shakespeare on Love: Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Antony & Cleopatra

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Novels about the Third Reich, Part I: Philip Kerr’s Prussian Blue

Novelist Philip Kerr. (Photo: Alberto Estevez)

A new release of a Philip Kerr novel is always a welcome addition to an oeuvre of more than thirty books, including his highly received Bernie Gunther novels. From the 1989 publication of March Violets to Prussian Blue (Marian Wood Books/Bantam, 2017), Kerr has now churned out twelve novels about the acerbic-tongued German detective who has led a checkered life in the trenches of World War One, as a homicide Berlin cop working for Kripo (the criminal division of the German police), as a private detective, as a reluctant member of the SS during World War II, as a Soviet POW, and as a fugitive living under aliases in places such as Argentina and France. Throughout, Kerr’s historical research is impeccable, enabling him to convey vividly the atmospherics of the times and delineate adroitly the historical actors. Because his focus is on character and hard-boiled Chandlerian dialogue – the cynical wise-cracking Gunther rarely abstains from verbal jousts with often powerful personalities – Kerr astutely avoids providing unnecessary expository information unless it is revealed through the characters and is vital to our understanding of the period.

Rewriting History: Edith Wharton’s The Shadow of a Doubt

Author and playwright Edith Wharton 

The discovery of a neglected work by Edith Wharton has understandably made headlines in a number of high-profile publications, in particular The New Yorker. However, the story behind Wharton's play, The Shadow of a Doubt, and its reemergence into the public consciousness is more complicated than the oversimplified narrative of a “lost” play being plucked from oblivion by intrepid scholars, and it points to the messy way in which we build and organize our ostensibly tidy literary and theatrical canons. The Shadow of a Doubt has made the news thanks to the efforts of Dr. Mary Chinery and Dr. Laura Rattray, two scholars from Georgian Court University and the University of Glasgow, respectively, who began discussing the little-known work at a conference and subsequently examined a manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. They’ve reproduced the manuscript, typos and all, and it’s available to read in The Edith Wharton Review. It’s free at the time of this writing, but will eventually disappear behind a paywall; you can find it here, along with the accompanying article by Drs. Chinery and Rattray. (They also spoke with me on the Theatre History Podcast to explain the play’s significance.)

The Shadow of a Doubt primarily offers a starring vehicle for the actress playing its heroine, Kate Derwent. Kate, a former nurse, has married her late patient’s husband John, who grew close to her during his wife’s final days. Given the circumstances of their meeting, as well as Kate’s lowlier background, it’s not surprising that their union occasions some tension within John’s wider family and social circles. His father-in-law, Lord Osterleigh, is particularly skeptical, his granddaughter Sylvia’s evident affection notwithstanding. (She keeps calling Kate “Mamma,” even though her stepmother, fearful of being seen to supplant Sylvia’s late mother Agnes too completely, encourages the girl to call her by her first name.) The arrival of a disgraced doctor, Carruthers, throws this uneasy situation into turmoil; he’s threatening, in a plot device that’s clearly taken from the well-made-play tradition of Ibsen and his predecessors, to ruin Kate’s reputation by revealing information about how the first Mrs. Derwent met her end.

The Wizard of Lies: The Con Man as Misanthrope

Nathan Darrow, Robert De Niro, and Alessandro Nivola in HBO's The Wizard of Lies.

The American con man first shows up in nineteenth-century American literature in the inventions of Herman Melville (The Confidence-Man, 1857) and Mark Twain (the Duke and the King in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884). The two archetypal con men in American drama are Hickey, the salesman and son of a preacher man in Eugene O’Neill’s 1947 play The Iceman Cometh, and “Professor” Harold Hill in Meredith Willson’s 1957 musical The Music Man – characters immortalized by two great American actors, Jason Robards in Sidney Lumet’s 1960 TV transcription of Iceman and Robert Preston in the 1962 movie of Willson’s musical (both recreating legendary performances they had originally given on the stage). Hickey has sold himself on his own con, though in the play, it turns out, what he’s peddling is death of the spirit: he tricks his barroom buddies into losing faith in their own illusions (“pipe dreams” is O’Neill’s phrase) but doing so hollows them out. Only the eleventh-hour realization that he’s been cherishing his own delusion restores them to their happy drunken selves, safe in their pipe dreams once again. Hill manages to convince the citizens of an insulated early-twentieth-century Iowa town that a boys’ marching band will solve problems they never had in the first place. Hill is operating on the principle Hickey sets out in O’Neill’s play for the success of any sale: figure out what the customer wants and then convince him that only you can supply it. River City doesn’t need a boys’ band, but, though Willson presents them comically, Hill plays on small-town Midwestern prejudices – small-mindedness, corseted sexuality, a suspicion of liberalism in any of its forms – and then presents his product, musical instruments, as a way to guard against the things the citizens fear will corrupt their youth. Like The Iceman Cometh, The Music Man has a twist: as it turns out, River City does need that band and Harold Hill (softened by the love of a good woman, Marian the librarian) winds up a hero. But what puts the sale over  long before that reversal is a commodity that Hill and Hickey both have plenty of: charm. It’s the con artist’s ace in the hole.

In the HBO movie The Wizard of Lies, Robert De Niro as Bernie Madoff explores a different sort of con man – one that is, I think, an archetypal American character for the twenty-first century.  Under Barry Levinson’s focused, probing direction, De Niro gives his finest performance in years. It’s the De Niro we recognize: charismatic, authoritative, but ill at ease in the world as the result of an essential misanthropy. The casting is perfect, because in the movie’s view – the screenplay by Samuel Baum, Sam Levinson and John Burnham Schwartz is based on Diana Henriques’s 2011 book The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust – Madoff’s ability to manipulate the men and women he defrauded out of an estimated $64.8 billion in the most extensive Ponzi scheme ever perpetrated is based not on charm but on a combination of charisma and an aura of unassailable authority. Madoff, the one-time non-executive chairman of NASDAQ, presented himself to his clients – many of them long-time friends, some of them family members, and one, Elie Wiesel, the image of integrity and an icon in modern Jewish history – as the undisputed expert, the sole man who could navigate the treacherous waters of finance even in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn. Madoff, as we see in the film, shifts in and out of the roles of trusted family friend and adviser, father figure, rabbi and noodge, alternately lecturing and consoling, bullying and reassuring. His aura of immovable certainty is his client’s bulwark. The fact that he isn’t charming is, for these (mostly) Jews who pride themselves on their tough-mindedness and skepticism, part and parcel of what makes him so trustworthy. How can such an irascible, street-smart, no-bullshit guy be, in fact, sitting on a fortune made of paper and feathers?  His refusal to kiss his clients’ asses, in tandem with his unchallengeable air of authority, is the ultimate con. When Bernie Madoff turns out to be a fraud, trust really is dead.

Unsquare Dance: Baby Driver

Ansel Elgort, Jamie Foxx, Eiza González and Jon Hamm in Edgar Wright's Baby Driver.

Baby Driver sings. Its protagonist doesn’t (he’s tight-lipped, only speaking when it’s absolutely necessary), but the film hums and taps and grooves with such reckless energy that it spills out of the screen and washes over you. If Edgar Wright’s latest film – possibly his most pure and bombastic expression yet – doesn’t get your toes tapping and your heart racing, then I suspect that hot red human blood doesn’t run through your veins. Even the inhumanly criminal are still painfully, hilariously human in Baby Driver. It’s an absolute blast.

Integral: The Ambient Paintings of Bruno Kurz

Northern Light, Red by Bruno Kurz. (Acrylic & oil on metal, 2017)

“We must not stare at our mortal world’s kaleidoscope in fascination or despair; we must watch it closely for the advent of new meanings.”  – Maurice Merleau-Ponty

For reasons so mysterious that I prefer not to fully examine their origins, once again Bruno Kurz has produced elegant and restrained visual works, often in pigment or resin on metal, which seem to me to convey the immaterial aura of living music. They vibrate on some subliminal wavelength which, once found, never subsides, and instead continues to build itself into a silent roar which is not deafening at all but rather is mind expanding. Can paintings ever be like a kind of homeopathic medicine? These appear to be. They take aspects or elements of nature, such as those of the landscape, of light, of horizons, of ice, of fields, of fog, of water, but rather than representing them they use their raw materials to construct spiritual experiences of transcendence. Ambient painting is not aggressive but that doesn’t mean it’s passive. On the contrary, an ambient painting is so quietly powerful that it waits patiently for us to be strong enough to share its company.

When Suggestion Becomes Statement: John Neumeier's A Streetcar Named Desire

Sonia Rodriguez and Guillaume Côté in the National Ballet of Canada’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
(Photo: Karolina Kuras)

Ballets there are many. But few have the equivalent of a PG-13 rating. Tickets to the student matinee of the National Ballet of Canada's production of A Streetcar Named Desire, at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts through June 10, come with a warning that the "mature subject matter" – often a euphemism for pornography – is suitable for grades 10 and up only.

But relax. While the depictions of suicide, prostitution and rape are graphic, they are not corrupting. Neither are they sordid or morbid or at risk of getting anyone arrested. John Neumeier's ballet, based on the Tennessee Williams play of the same name, shines a light on life's underbelly, its dark perversions, while also making room for a fantastical dreamer like Blanche DuBois. It's a stunning achievement, despite a few bumps encountered along Streetcar's fabled route. To wit: the first act threatens to be boring while the second pokes you in the eye with a prolonged act of forcible violation as repellent as it is artistically risqué. Subtlety takes a backseat to psychology, the result of a need to know about underlying causes, blunting the overall impact.

Woyzeck, Salomé, Horror: A Panoply of Theatrical Styles

John Boyega and Sarah Greene in Woyzeck at London's Old Vic. (Photo: Manuel Harlan)

Modernism in the theatre is dated from 1879, the year Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House, so Woyzeck, discovered, unfinished, after its author Georg Büchner’s death in 1837 (at twenty-three, from typhus), is a startling anomaly that theatre historians have never been able to account for. Inspired by newspaper accounts of a Leipzig wigmaker who was executed for murdering his lover, Woyzeck is the brutal, unadorned tragedy of the social oppression of an ordinary man. The soldier Woyzeck, desperate for money to support his girlfriend Marie and their child, performs menial jobs for his captain and signs up for medical experiments that eat away at his brain; when Marie cheats on him with a handsome drum major, he stabs her to death. Büchner’s point of view is that his protagonist, used by the Captain and the Doctor and treated like dirt, is the victim of society and particularly of the military life that enslaves and dehumanizes the common recruit. (The Catholic Church, too, which condemns them for having a child out of wedlock, ranks among Woyzeck’s oppressors; spiritually as well as economically he is on society’s bottom rung.) Büchner wrote during the age of romanticism. (The earliest of his three plays, Danton’s Death, set during the French Revolution, is certainly a romantic drama.) Romanticism in both drama and literature celebrated the misfit, the rebel, the outcast, like Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, but Woyzeck, spat upon and abandoned to an ignominious fate, is as much a modernist creation as the slum dwellers in Gorky’s turn-of-the-century The Lower Depths. Moreover, as world theatre was moving closer and closer to realism, Woyzeck anticipated expressionism, the first of the anti-realist movements. In the second half of the play Büchner employs distortion to suggest how his protagonist’s encroaching madness alters his perception.

Who's Next: BBC's Class

Sophie Hopkins, Jordan Renzo, Fady Elsayed, Vivian Oparah, and Greg Austin in Class.

This review contains some general spoilers for the first season of Class.  

For the past eight weeks, Doctor Who's tenth season has had a new companion on Saturday evenings over at BBC America: Class, a teen-centred spin-off of the BBC's flagship science-fiction series that was broadcast on BBC3 in the UK in late 2016. Last night, alongside the gut-wrenching conclusion of Doctor Who's midseason three-parter, the eighth and final episode of Class's first season also aired – and so it seems a perfect time to reflect on the latest entry into the still-expanding Doctor Who universe.