Toil and Trouble: Wicked, Part I

Bowen Yang, Ariana Grande, and Bronwyn James in Wicked, Part I.

Unbelievably, I have seen the stage musical Wicked three times. I saw the pre-Broadway tryout in San Francisco, with Idina Menzel, Kristen Chenoweth, a young Norbert Leo Butz, and Robert Morse (replaced by Joel Grey on Broadway). At more than three hours, it was bloated and unfocused, but I liked two of composer Stephen Schwartz’s songs, “Popular,” which does everything a musical comedy song should do, and the pretty and affecting “I’m Not That Girl.” And Chenoweth was hilarious. (I didn’t much care for Menzel; of course she won the Tony.) I saw it again several years later on tour in SF, when I took a friend’s daughter to see it for her birthday. Dramaturgically (we’ll get into more about dramaturgy later), it was fascinating to see how they had tightened the show up and how solid its construction now was. It still didn’t make it a great show, but there are any number of far worse musicals out there that have become hits, The Outsiders among the latest. The third time a friend, the talented Jason Graae, played the Wizard, charmingly.

A Tale of One City: Widows

Jacki Weaver and Elizabeth Debicki in Widows.

A heist film is usually focused on the heist: who’s the mark, what’s the take, who brings what skills to the table, what goes wrong, and how do they get away with it? Steve McQueen’s Widows turns all of that on its head, giving us a heist film about a band of unskilled reluctant criminals stealing for someone else from a place they have to determine for themselves. The plan of this particular heist is pretty straightforward; it’s everything else that’s hard. And that “everything else” encompasses the very idea of the city of Chicago, where the movie is set.

The Color Purple: Voices

Cynthia Erivo in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

When Cynthia Erivo opens her mouth to sing in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple, she looks as if she’s been touched with grace, and the music that pours out is honeyed gospel. I can’t remember the last time I heard a musical-theatre performer who commanded so much unfiltered power and possessed such purity of tone. The songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray were obviously written to be delivered with this kind of full-throated intensity – singing that carries the force of the north wind behind it. (I didn’t see the original production, which starred LaChanze and opened in 2005.) The first ensemble number, “Mysterious Ways,” a hymn by a black Baptist preacher (Lawrence Clayton) in small-town Georgia and his congregation, practically rips the seats out of the theatre. It’s in the tradition of “Leavin’ Time” from Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s St. Louis Woman and “Walk Him Up the Stairs” from Gary Geld and Peter Udell’s Purlie.

Literary Remakes: Pinocchio, All Quiet on the Western Front and Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Federico Ielapi as Pinocchio and Marine Vacth as The Blue Fairy in Matteo Garrone's Pinocchio (2019).

Those with fond memories of the 1940 Walt Disney Pinocchio are likely to respond to last year’s two screen incarnations of Carlo Collodi’s story – published in serial form in 1881 and 1882, and as a novel in 1883 – with some combination of bafflement and irritation. The Disney crew softened the original and bled out the folk-fable elements, but it’s gorgeous to behold, and the writers (seven credited, two uncredited) and supervising and sequence directors (seven, including one who signs himself “T. Hee”) and animators (too many to count) modeled the humor on a combination of vaudeville and silent-film comedy. (I chuckle whenever I think about the scene in the ocean where a school of fish swarm Jiminy Cricket and try to eat his umbrella.) And the Pleasure Island sequence, where Pinocchio, led astray by a cadre of schoolboys lured by the promise of an endless holiday, turn into donkeys fated to be put on the market is one of those genuinely terrifying set piece sequences that dot the early full-length animated Disney features. I tend to be wary of Disney cartoons, but this is one of the few I genuinely like.

Year-End Movies II: The Color Purple and May December

Taraji P. Henson in one of her spectacularly ugly costumes she wear in The Color Purple.

Why are most of the recent movie musicals so ghastly? Much as I’d loved Paul King’s Paddington movies, I walked out on his Wonka, just as I’d bailed on The Greatest Showman, which looked like it had been made by people who’d never seen a musical, and Matilda, which was so grotesque it was painful to watch, like Cats. In Wonka the overproduction magnifies everything that’s wrong with the numbers – the bland, paltry songs by Neil Hannon and Joby Talbot, the uninspired choreography (by the usually inventive Christopher Gattelli) and hapless Timothée Chalamet in the title role, pretending to be a musical-comedy performer. It’s not just that he isn’t a singer; legends have built up around non-singers who gave indelible renditions of show songs, like Rex Harrison and Richard Burton and the enchanting, recently departed Glynis Johns. It’s that Chalamet has zero showmanship. There were clunky musicals in the early days of the talkies, when the studios were desperate to find ways to show off the new technology; strident musicals from 20th Century-Fox during and after the war years; misconceived musicals during the sixties and early seventies trying to chase down an audience that had been replaced by a younger, hipper one while the studios weren’t paying attention. But these contemporary out-of-sync kitschfests are way worse.

The latest fiasco is The Color Purple, set mostly in Georgia in the first half of the twentieth century and based on the Broadway musical adaptation of the Alice Walker novel that, nearly four decades ago, generated Steven Spielberg’s unfortunate early attempt to break out of the fantasy-adventure niche. I wasn’t so hot on the book, a fruitcake whipped up out of a tawdry race melodrama and a sisterhood-is-powerful fairy tale, but it was better than the Spielberg version. The director was such a wrong match with the material that I assumed that Black audiences and critics would be offended by all the Disney cuteness. Imagine my surprise when I read an interview with Blitz Bazawule, the director of the new Color Purple, in which he proclaimed that watching Spielberg’s picture had changed his life.