Much Ado: Stratford Festival’s Much Ado About Nothing

Ben Carlson and Deborah Hay in Much Ado About Nothing at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

I usually shy away from productions of Shakespeare that transpose the original Elizabethan setting to something contemporary or even exotic. And don’t even get me started on cross-dressing versions of King Lear or Hamlet. I mean, why bother? I understand the need for relevancy. But to my mind Shakespeare doesn’t need improving. If he did, his works wouldn’t have lasted more than 500 years. They are perfect specimens of the English language, timeless works of art that are also time capsules capturing the spirit and values of Renaissance England, Shakespeare’s own epoch. And so I found myself frowning when, during a recent visit to Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I began reading director Christopher Newton’s program notes for Much Ado About Nothing which is at the Festival Theatre through to Oct. 27. In those notes, Newton (formerly of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake) happily declared his love of Brazil, circa 1889, the year the country’s last emperor, Dom Pedro II, abdicated and was forced into exile. Say what? Rhapsodizing about palm trees and sandy beaches, anti-slavery laws and samba schools, Newton went on to say that Brazil was where he had decided to place his version of Much Ado About Nothing, larding it with sexy mulatos. I thought, get me outta here. I seriously considered making a run for it, and was already contemplating how I could leap over the row of sensible shoes (a bus full of senior citizens had decamped on the Festival Theatre for the night) in which I was planted, dead in the middle, without causing alarm. But then the lights dimmed low and there I was, bound for Brazil by way of Elizabethan England, certain I would hate every minute of the bumpy ride.

But surprise, surprise. When the action began, bathed in the honey-coloured tones of Robert Thomson’s South American-inspired lighting design, I felt myself yielding to Newton’s Portuguese-inflected staging, like a corsage orchid to the sun. Also inviting was Santo Loquasto’s late 19th-century Brazilian villa set design, dominated by an interior sweeping staircase with Azulejos floor tiles, a setting that felt warm, intimate and seductive. I was already happy to be spending time there. Its sun-kissed colours were a balm on the eyes. It didn’t take long to see that the relaxed vibe of the visual design suited a play that, while bracketed by images of war, is preoccupied with finding peace. I felt myself relax in the presence of this oasis of calm. It was obviously that Newton was not as wilfully contrarian as I had first suspected. He was definitely onto something. 

New Life: Pat Metheny Unity Band

Named after a small church near his hometown in Missouri, guitarist Pat Metheny’s new recording, Pat Metheny Unity Band (Nonesuch 2012), offers jazz fans a welcome change in musical direction for one of the most popular musicians in the world today. With all new compositions and a new band to play them (Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez and Ben Williams), this quartet, whose playing time has been relatively short, the Unity Band sounds remarkably fresh, innovative and tight. (The band was formed this past winter to record this album.) The collective experience of each member has clearly lifted the whole group and while their debut album isn't particularly stellar, it captures a band that can only get better with time.

Thirty years ago Metheny released an album simply titled 80/81 (ECM, 1982) featuring veteran tenor sax man Dewey Redman, father of the very talented Joshua Redman, and the late Michael Brecker. That record explored Metheny’s interest in a traditional jazz quartet of bass, drums, guitar and saxophone. To Metheny, it was always a musical choice to play outside the traditional quartet setting. Consequently, the instrumentation of most of his groups since then has not featured a horn player on the front line. The difference this time was the addition of horn player Chris Potter. Potter has led his own bands over the years but has been particularly good with Dave Holland’s small groups for the past ten. On this record he brings everything to the music with solid playing on every cut, especially “Breakdealer,” which closes the album. But like any jazz recording that captures a moment in time, in this case February of 2012 when it was laid down, as the band tours and continues to play, the music will definitely get better. Metheny certainly knows how to pick ‘em!

A Refreshing Sample: The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

If you remember anything about high school statistics or probability, some of this book should feel familiar. Whether this familiarity is a fond nostalgia or a kind of nervous queasiness comes down a matter of individual experience. Yet whether you hunger for a greater exploration of practical math, or tend to have difficulty stomaching it, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is worth a try.

The eponymous metaphor of The Drunkard’s Walk refers to “a mathematical term describing random motion,” covering everything from the skittish dance of subatomic particles to the jolting and jarring of unexpected career paths. This exploratory explanation of chance comes to us from Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist whose random life experiences include lecturing at Caltech, co-authoring two books with Stephen Hawking, and writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation. With the goal of conveying the influence and chaotic beauty of randomness to those of us without such backgrounds, Mlodinow samples a wide range of mathly problems and their unexpected solutions. He shows us how the laws of mathematics permeate every aspect of our lives, touching on the predictable topics (sports, stocks, and surveys) and the not-quite-so-predictable (seances, online dating, McDonald’s).  This mix of subjects keeps each chapter unique, while Mlodinow’s writing manages to flow despite the periodic awkward transition or stilted paragraph.

Film Festival Openers: It’s All About Setting the Tone

I was Director of Programming of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival from 1996-2004 and much emphasis was always placed on picking the right film to open the festival. We were unique among Jewish film festivals, and most film festivals, in fact, in that as often as not we chose a documentary instead of a feature film to launch the event. I’ve since left the TJFF, but I’m always intrigued with what films get picked to open film festivals since in many ways that choice can influence the reaction of audiences to everything that follows and, if you pick a dud, set a negative tone that could impact adversely on your event. Two recent film festival openers, while not badly chosen, exemplify the dilemma of making the best possible choice in the films available for exhibition.

Birthing Pains: Danny Boyle's Frankenstein

Back on April 4, 2011, David Churchill reviewed the National Theatre's production of Frankenstein for Critics at Large. A little over a year later, Steve Vineberg revisits the production for a second opinion.

The National Theatre’s mounting of Frankenstein, an adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel by Nick Dear and directed by filmmaker Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), was a hot ticket in London last year, and the HD transcription was popular enough for NT Live to bring it back for a second engagement a few weeks ago. There’s a casting gimmick: the two stars, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, switch off in the roles of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature – just as Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly did in the last Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s True West. In an interview that prefaces the HD screening, Boyle explains that the double casting is meant to comment on the relationship between the two characters. But that’s nonsense: creator and creation aren’t interchangeable, and Frankenstein and the Creature aren’t alter egos in the sense that the two brothers in True West (who trade places in the narrative) are. The Creature is Frankenstein’s Adam, or if you’re looking for a theatrical parallel, he’s to Frankenstein as Caliban is to Prospero in The Tempest.

When Canada Outdid Herself: Memories of Expo 67

Dedicated to the memory of Abraham Schwartzberg (1921-2007)

This summer marks 45 years since Canada and more specifically Montreal, in order to commemorate the country’s centennial, hosted the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, known to all as Expo 67. And thanks to my perspicacious father, I was privileged to be able to attend most of it. That might not seem meaningful but I was only 7 years old when the fair officially opened on April 28, 1967 (various V.I.P.s toured it a day earlier) – I turned eight on June 27, about a third of the way through Expo’s six month run – and, according to my Expo passport that my mother dug up in Montreal, the stamps indicate that I went to about 75-76 pavilions, which was most of them. There would been the odd duplication but knowing my father, he would have wanted to maximize the experience and see as much of the event as was humanely possible. Expo is on my mind this year, too, because journalist John Lownsbrough has written a book on Expo, part of The History of Canada series, entitled The Best Place to Be: Expo 67 and its Time (Allen Lane, 2012). It’s a bit dry - Lownsbrough doesn't bring Expo to vivid life as well as he could have - but it’s also comprehensive and a valuable corollary to my own admittedly limited memories of Expo, though I do recall much of what I saw that summer.

Over that eventful summer, my parents hosted about 45 houseguests, from the rest of Canada and the United States, including American relatives who came from Wisconsin, New York and New Jersey. My parents each went 35 times to Expo 67, and assumed the duties of alternately taking me along with them. Sunday was when the whole family, including my younger brother and sister went to Expo’s amusement park, La Ronde, for the rides and later on partook of hamburgers and French fries and soft ice cream, half vanilla and half chocolate, which I like to this day. It was a magical time. There was consistently good weather, or what my mother called ‘Drapeau weather’, a testament to Montreal’s indefatigable mayor Jean Drapeau (whose last name translates as flag in French). He became the friendly face of the exhibition to the rest of Canada and the outside world. 

But pretty much everything else, in addition to the weather, fell perfectly into place in 1967, for a remarkable, record setting event (over 50 million visitors, a record that stands to the day for exhibition attendance) that really did change the way Canada saw herself and how outsiders, particularly our American neighbours, viewed this relatively new country. In fact, so comprehensive and inventive was Expo that I remember, less than a decade later, watching the U.S. bicentennial celebrations, which were nice, on TV and thinking to myself that we did it so much better in our celebratory year. One upping the U.S. isn’t something that happens very often but Expo 67 trumped anything they came up with in 1976.

Hey Hey: Neil Young’s Wanderings Can Never Disappoint

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, director Jonathan Demme explained why he’s been inspired to shoot three documentaries about a certain iconic rocker: “His music was my companion for decades before I even met him.” Amen to that. The Toronto concert footage at the center of Neil Young Journeys includes a rendition of “Ohio,” his wrenching song about four people killed 42 years ago by the National Guard during an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University. This was a defining moment in an era that tore America to shreds. Young’s May 2011 performances deliver a gritty reminder, enhanced by a visual display with the names and photos of the May 1970 victims.

Three months later, “Ohio” was also the tune emanating from the sound system of a drug store on the Champs Elysee in Paris, where my husband and I – newlyweds – had landed in an attempt to flee the madness of the United States. “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/ We’re finally on our own/ This summer I hear the drumming/ Four dead in Ohio...” I froze. There is no exit from man-made hell, as Sartre suggested. Wherever we went on a trip through Europe that was more escape hatch than honeymoon, the turmoil back home found a way to haunt us.

English Canadian Cinema’s Failures Continue: Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz

Luke Kirby and Michelle Williams in Take This Waltz.

I’ve long since given up on English Canadian cinema. Unlike its consistently fine French Canadian counterpart (Les invasions barbares, Incendies, Monsieur Lazhar), movies from English Canada rarely register in terms of quality. Be it the stilted, tone-deaf movies of Atom Egoyan (Exotica, Ararat, Chloe), the one-note (of late) silent film inflected movies of Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World), or the run of the mill, unimpressive films of any number of forgettable filmmakers (too many to list), most English Canadian movies are simply awful. They’re dull, underpopulated (as only Canadian movies made outside of Quebec can be), devoid of personality and rarely believable in terms of plotting or dialogue. In fact, with the exception of the spot-on work of Don McKellar (Last Night, TV’s Twitch City) and Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, This Movie is Broken), and the occasional realistic film (Sabah; Love, Sex and Eating the Bones), most films from Anglo Canada are utterly dispensable. The latest example of our disposable cinema is Sarah Polley’s second feature film, Take This Waltz.

I must admit, I expected better from her since her credits include one superb short (I Shout Love, 2001) and a decent feature debut (Away From Her, 2006), which was marred only by Julie Christie’s mannered, unsubtle performance as an Alzheimer-afflicted woman. Take This Waltz, however, is an utter failure on every level.

Bloody Nora That's Good: Oz & James Big Wine Adventure: California

James May & Oz Clarke

Growing up lower middle class in small town Ontario, I never had any exposure to fine wines, or for that matter, wine at all (except for the occasional bottle of Mateus or Baby Duck my parents would buy). Beer and whisky were the preferred beverages around my home for the adults in my life. How it came about that I now make my living writing and talking about wine would have made my 14- or 15-year-old self laugh his arse off. But that's what I do. In 1990, I was working in a wine and spirits retail store. The manager, for some reason, asked if I wanted to set up a fine wine corner in the store. I knew nothing about the beverage, so why he asked me I have no idea. But, since I was bored doing little more than stocking shelves with Bacardi Rum and working cash, I said sure.

Several months later, I was invited to an event to herald the launch of a new red Bordeaux wine called 1725 from the French company Barton & Guestier (B&G). Most Bordeaux red wines are made by blending together Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot (and occasionally other grapes). The tasting allowed us to try not just the finished wine, but also the three grapes on their own to see what the components tasted like outside of the blend. Despite knowing nothing about wine, it was still intriguing to try Cabernet Sauvignon on its own, and then taste it combined with the other two grapes. I thought 1725 was pretty good.

Neglected Gem #19: In America (2003)

Contains Spoilers

The main character in In America (2003), by the Irish writer-director Jim Sheridan, is Johnny (Paddy Considine), an actor from Dublin who brings his family – his wife Sarah (Samantha Morton) and his daughters Christy (Sarah Bolger – The Tudors) and Ariel (Emma Bolger) – to Manhattan after his son Frankie dies of a brain tumor caused by a fall down the stairs. The screenplay, which Sheridan wrote with his own daughters Naomi and Kirsten, is a sort of autobiographical collage. Sheridan and his wife Fran emigrated to New York, put in their time in a tough neighborhood like Hell’s Kitchen – where Johnny and Sarah bring their girls in In America – and Fran gave birth prematurely, just as Sarah does late in the film. But the lost child in real like, Frankie Sheridan, was Jim Sheridan’s kid brother and not his son, and the Sheridan character in the movie is really Christy, the older daughter, who tells the story in voice-over and who walks around with a Camcorder, preserving her family and her impressions of her new environment on videotape. No doubt the fact that so many of the incidents in the film are inspired by Sheridan’s own experiences enhances its authenticity, but his movies are almost unfailingly genuine, and he doesn’t seem capable of a banal impulse. In America is as wondrously unconventional for a coming-to-America movie as My Left Foot was for a triumph-of-the-spirit drama or In the Name of the Father for a prison picture. Not a single sequence in it looks like anything else you’ve ever seen.

Rummaging Through the Dustbin: Greil Marcus's The Dustbin of History (1996)

For all the value we assign to history, both as a field of study in school and for understanding the ways of the world, it's also dead meat. Our best friend's marriage ends and we say it's history. Sports commentators, eager to create an air of finality, always remark: "With that goal in overtime, the playoff series becomes history." One goal and everything that came before it is now superfluous. The winning team moves on; the losing team is history. History might even be worse than dead meat because (to paraphrase Johnny Rotten) it's got nooooo future. It's history.

In high school, we often treated the subject as a function of correcting mistakes. The teacher told us that if we studied what took place back then, then maybe we could prevent it from happening again. Know it and you can control it. History was something you could beat by simply having all the right facts. With certain truths on your side, you could stop time itself in order to properly dissect it. But why should history's dustbin become such a convenient dumping ground for facts left behind like last week's garbage? This is the central question in Greil Marcus's uneven, yet fascinating book The Dustbin of History (Harvard University Press, 1996), which sets out to provide a road map to find some answers.

Young Twits: Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles

In Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles, playing an extended run at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, a young man named Leo (Gabriel Ebert) lands on the Manhattan doorstep of his eighty-something grandmother Vera (Mary Louise Wilson) in the middle of the night after biking across the country. He’s a hippie, she’s an old-style Jewish leftist, and they’ve always had a companionable relationship. At this juncture she’s trying to cope with the ravages of age and he’s hiding out, avoiding his parents in St. Paul, avoiding dealing with the death of his best friend Micah on the trip, and attempting to pretend that nothing’s changed in his romantic relationship with Bec (Zoë Winters), who’s furious at him for not showing up at Micah’s funeral.

Herzog wrote one of the few compelling new plays of the 2010-2011 season, After the Revolution, which was lucky enough to receive a fine production at the Williamstown Theater Festival that was repeated in New York at Playwrights Horizons. After the Revolution made good on a terrific idea. Set at the end of the millennium, it was about a young woman, a third-generation Jewish leftist, who graduates from law school and starts a foundation dedicated to defending members of marginalized groups. (Her first cause is an attempt to get a new trial for an incarcerated Black Panther.) She names the foundation after her late grandfather, a cult hero among American Communists, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Then a new history of the period comes out that furnishes evidence that he was actually a Soviet spy. Herzog examines the issue from the point of view of the young woman, whose idealism is shattered, and from the point of view of her father, her uncle and her grandfather’s widow, who stick to the loyalties they’ve grown up with – and she refuses to resolve it. The play ends with the widow telling her step-granddaughter that, in taking an ethical stand against her grandfather, she’s no different from the American right-wingers who oppressed liberals and leftists in the fifties, and Herzog refuses to hold out hope that these two women can ever reconcile.

You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman: Alain Ducasse's New Cookbook

I love food – thinking about it, talking about it, preparing it, eating it, and even cleaning up after it’s all gone. I also love trying new recipes. Food is such a compelling metaphor for the way we live; we constantly use phrases like “sugar coat it,” “trim the fat,” and “half-baked idea.” The very way ingredients interact is relational, just like people. There’s something magical about combining and modifying raw ingredients to create a delicious finished dish.

Of all the world’s cultures and stereotypes, no one worships food like the French, which is perhaps why I’ve always felt an affinity with them. However, typical French cuisine tends to be too rich, too bready, too meaty and creamy for my palate and sensitive tummy. This is exactly why I was thrilled to hear about Alain Ducasse’s new cookbook Nature: Simple, Healthy, and Good on the site Q by Equinox. Reviewer Eimear Lynch sums it up perfectly: “co-written with nutritionist Paule Neyrat, the book is filled with nutrient-rich, veggie-based recipes that, while healthy, are still decidedly fancy and French.”

Nature is not a 30-minute weeknight dinner cookbook. To use this book effectively, you need to let go of the North American stuff-your-face mindset and move towards the Provençal savor-the-moment mentality. This cookbook demands that you immerse yourself. Each recipe is laid out not as a series of ingredients and instructions, but as a story – beginning, middle and end. Although there are many tempting recipes, it’s difficult to pick one and make it spontaneously. You need to set aside a few weeks to cook only things from the pages of Nature.

A Face with a View: Sean Penn and This Must Be the Place

While visiting Paris last August, a particular movie poster kept catching my eye. Nestled incongruously among the myriad of CGI images of Tintin, Snowy, and Captain Haddock (damn the French were excited about that Tintin movie!) was the strikingly large and dour face of Sean Penn. With teased hair, pale skin, lipstick and eyeliner reminiscent of an 80s-era glam rocker, Penn’s heartbreaking countenance was almost impossible to ignore. I was intrigued. I wrote down the movie’s title, This Must Be the Place (suggestively in English even in this French context), and vowed to find out more about it. The thumbnail description that I soon found left me all the more fascinated: Penn, it seemed, was playing an ageing 80s rock star who, upon the death of his father, ends up on a road trip across America in search of a Nazi war criminal. All that, plus an unapologetic nod to perhaps my favourite Talking Heads’ song, and I was hooked. I returned to Toronto soon after, and waited patiently for the film’s North American release. Months passed, and nothing. By the New Year, I’d forgotten about it completely.

That is, until a few weeks ago, when I finally had the chance to see it – and I’ve been talking it up ever since. This Must Be the Place turns out to be either the strangest road movie ever made or the single quirkiest Holocaust-themed movie since Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (although I should stress that Nazis notwithstanding the two films have absolutely nothing else in common). The only reason I'd hesitate to call This Must Be the Place a Neglected Gem is that I’m hoping there's still time it will find the wider audience it deserves. (The film has played widely in France, Italy and the U.K., but as far as I can tell it hasn’t yet had any theatrical play in the U.S. or Canada. As of today, it certainly hasn’t screened in Toronto.) With the visual punch of Down by Law, and the quirky dialogue, characters and situations of Mystery Train, the movie looks and feels like a lost early Jim Jarmusch project – and no doubt the director intended it to be just that. Written and directed by Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino – most famous for The Consequences of Love (2004) and Il Divo (2008) – This Must Be the Place (though it is a Italian/French co-production) is Sorrentino’s first English-language feature, and apparently he wrote the screenplay with Sean Penn specifically in mind. And it is Penn’s film: he’s in practically every scene and his stunning performance carries the whole movie.

The Urban Made Poetic: In Conversation With Artist Marco Sassone

Underpass, by Marco Sassone (2011 watercolor on paper, 22 x 30.5 inches)

I work in downtown Toronto, practically next door to the CN Tower which looms just outside my office window. I have grown up with this urban icon and it is now so familiar to me that I barely take notice of it. And yet one day, four years ago, when an artist’s rendering of this upside down exclamation mark in the sky passed across my desk I couldn’t help but stare.

This was the CN Tower as I had not seen it before – presented boldly, in a kaleidoscopic range of colour, which lent it a majesty that I, on my own, would never have discerned in this everyday object in my midst. The image graced the cover of a catalogue for a new exhibition of work by an artist I had never heard of before: Marco Sassone.

The Artist and The Technician: Philippe Petit and Nik Wallenda – Wire Walkers

Nik Wallenda over Niagara Falls (June 15, 2012)

“What is the purpose of your visit?”

                                    –Canadian Border Guard

“To inspire the world.” 

                                    –Nik Wallenda, Niagara Falls, June 15, 2012

“When we inspire ourselves, we inspire others. And when you see mountains, remember mountains can be moved.”

                                    –Philippe Petit, TED.com, March 2012

On Friday night, June 15, 2012, I watched in complete awe as wire walker Nik Wallenda (the seventh generation of his family to take up the craft) walked on a 5-centimetre-wide wire across the 550-metre expanse of Niagara Falls' Horseshoe Falls. Although a lot of the tension was lessened by sponsor ABC-TV insisting he wear a tether (he said during the crossing that he felt like a “jackass” wearing it), his walk was still an incredible human achievement. Facing whipping winds, cold, a hammering mist off the Falls, and intense moisture everywhere, Wallenda made the walk look, if not easy, at least something he clearly was born to do. As his late grandfather, Karl Wallenda, said years ago, “Being on a tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.”

Music to Dream By: Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

Recently submissions were being welcomed by the publishers of this excellent collection of books about music sub-titled 33 1/3 (Continuum Press). The series was simple: take an entire album from the pop genre and write about it in any style you like. One of the best was by our own Kevin Courrier called Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (2007). I was enamored by the series and its love of music and good story telling. As I read more of them, I knew that I could write one too; and so, when the opportunity presented itself, I submitted a proposal for Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in April, only to be turned down in May. The next logical place for publication was here in Critics at Large. Below is the draft introduction to my book proposal. 

Magical Retreat: Sgt. Pepper After 45 Years

The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released in June 1967, is a lovely confection, a beautifully self-conscious neon sign that celebrated with ample imagination the romantic ideal, where the possibility of true love could transcend all of our problems. (If only.) And in that summer, which came to be termed 'The Summer of Love,' Sgt. Pepper's seamless and mellifluous tone made it appear as if that possibility was indeed well within our grasp. However, the idea for the record, following up on their concept single “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” (two radically different renderings of childhood and originally destined for the album) came out of the opposite sentiment, a 'Summer of Hate' that took place the previous year.

That particular summer, American cities (as they had almost every summer in the mid-Sixties) were burning in reaction to the continued racial unrest. The escalation of the war in Vietnam had also all but diminished President Johnson's War on Poverty. In short, the tenor of violence was becoming exactly as black activist H. Rap Brown had described it then – as American as apple pie. Amidst this chaos, with the mounting frustration over the dashed ideals of the New Frontier of the early Sixties, The Beatles became easy targets for the angry and the disillusioned. You could say they were even, to a large degree, at the apex of those very ideals being dashed. So their 1966 tour, filled with torpor and turmoil, reached its bottom end with record burnings in the Deep South after John Lennon had remarked that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. In that summer, The Beatles found themselves no longer in control of their meteoric success. When they first chose to engage their audience in 1962, with their first single “Love Me Do,” the goal wasn't simply to become entertainers, but to put new demands on the pop audience. They set out to take popular music and their fans to another place. And in the coming years they did just that – and more.

Neglected Gem #18: Blue Sky (1994)

Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones star in Blue Sky

Whenever Jessica Lange tackles Tennessee Williams directly – on TV in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, on Broadway and TV in A Streetcar Named Desire – she seems cowed; she falls back on stagy acting-class clichés no one knew she was even capable of.  But she creates a great Williams character – part Blanche, part Maggie the Cat, part Amanda Wingfield – in Carly Marshall, the glamorous southern belle chafing against her role as an army role and suffering from bi-polar disorder, in the 1994 Blue Sky. Blue Sky was completed in 1991, when Orion was on the verge of bankruptcy, so the movie, like several others, was held back; the director, Tony Richardson, whose final picture it was, didn’t live to see it in release.  It’s not his most consistent work; there are two movies rolling around in it, and unfortunately in the second half the lesser of the two takes over.  But he had every right to be proud of the texture he got in the domestic scenes, and the way he coached his cast, especially Jessica Lange and, as her husband, Major Hank Marshall, Tommy Lee Jones.

The good movie locked inside Blue Sky has some of the sizzle and emotional engagement of From Here to Eternity and The Long Hot Summer.  It’s the story of Carly, who’s miserable about leaving Hawaii, Hank’s last posting, for airless, remote Nevada.  (The time is the early sixties.) Carly wears her hair in a Marilyn Monroe bob and tosses her head like Monroe; she even gets the rhythm of Monroe’s champagne laughter.  She’s hot stuff; her movie-star affectations (at the end she switches to Liz Taylor) and her flamboyant sexuality are her way of expressing what’s inside her – everything army conduct is supposed to tamp down.  Carly’s a beautiful woman, but she’s terrified of losing her looks.  She stares at herself in the mirror and swears she sees the ghost of the old hag she’s fated to become.  She thinks she’s going to disappear, and – both spooked and fascinated – she seems to be peering for evidence that the process has already begun to happen.  Mirrors mesmerize her, and Lange mesmerizes us.  She climbs inside her mirror and peers around – the psychic equivalent of Cocteau’s Orpheus breaking through to the underworld behind the glass.  At her best, Carly has esprit and a southern graciousness; that’s when her daughters, Alex (Amy Locaine) and Becky (Anna Klempt), can’t resist her.  At her worst, she throws tantrums or loses her self-control and takes on other men.  On the Marshalls’ first day in Nevada, she paces their unattractive new house like a caged cat, then goes wild, screaming and crying, smashing up the car, talking to herself in a local store.

No Skeletons in the Closet?: Wayward Daughter: An Official Biography of Eliza Carthy and Even More Rock Family Trees

Wayward Daughter is subtitled An Official Biography of Eliza Carthy. We all know what “official” means. You’re not going to get the dirt. Unless it’s an “as told to” book, or credited to the artist “with” a co-author, it’s just the facts, ma’am. And yet, Wayward Daughter sounds like Sophie Parkes is willing to spill the beans, don’t you think? It sounds, from the title alone, that we’ll hear all about Eliza’s shocking teenaged years, the love affairs, drug abuse, debauchery, and all the rest. Trouble is, Eliza was really not that wayward a child. From the beginning, she simply wanted to go into the family trade. If her parents were plumbers or bakers, doctors, or even audio-visual technicians, you’d think that would make for proud moms and dads! Eliza’s parents, however, are England’s leading folk-guitarist Martin Carthy, and his wife the legendary Norma Waterson. Both Norma and Martin have been on the forefront of the British folk music scene for decades. ‘Twas Martin Carthy whose arrangement of “Scarborough Fair” made Paul Simon famous.

In concert with Mom and Dad, and one-time beau Saul Rose, Eliza is a dervish, playing her fiddle with a joy and verve that was contagious. In 1999, I was lucky to have caught them at the Brantford Folk Club, at the Holiday Inn. Waterson:Carthy they called themselves, and still do when they combine to play together. It was an extraordinary night, made more-so by the fact that, during the break, we tipped a pint with Sam Rose, and after the show everyone stuck around to chat and sign CDs. The chatting was the surprise. Norma spoke of her arthritis, Martin of guitar lore, and Eliza … well, Eliza teased her Dad (during the concert, when Martin backed into a table holding a pitcher of water, Eliza joked about her Dad’s “wet bum” for quite a while), made jokes, and generally charmed us all.