The Spice of 'Fess: Hugh Laurie's Didn’t It Rain

When he was 19-years-old, Hugh Laurie, a young actor and piano player, heard Professor Longhair: Live on the Queen Mary (One Way Records, 1978), an album by one of New Orleans's great musicians. "It changed everything for me," Laurie told The Telegraph last spring in describing what for him was a profound experience. The record captures Longhair late in his life, playing that unique New Orleans gumbo of r&b, jazz, Cajun and blues. After listening to it again recently, I can understand how it would impress a young Laurie because it's everything we came to expect as “definitive” 'Fess. If history is anything to go by, Laurie is trying to capture some of that same authentic New Orleans sound on his new record, Didn't It Rain (Warner, 2013). Produced by Joe Henry, this is Hugh Laurie’s second album with his excellent group, the Copper Bottom Band. (Laurie is 53 years-of-age). As good as this record is, though, I can't get past the "actor as musician" stigma that was present on his first release, Let Them Talk (Warner, 2011), which reached No. 16 on the Billboard charts and went Gold in the UK. Is he hard to take seriously as a musician? Considering all of his work as an actor, most recently with the highly successful House, Laurie could be playing a role like any other, only this time it’s as a singer with affection for blues and cabaret music from New Orleans. From what I’ve read, Laurie does take his music seriously, but perhaps not himself.

The Maggie Hope Mysteries: A British Spy During World War Two

Whenever historical and fictional characters interact, the reader must suspend judgement about the truthfulness of the novel. Dialogue will largely be invented as novelists engage their imagination to explore beyond what is in the historical record without violating that record. The reader is looking for authenticity and plausibility. Does the novel, regardless of how compelling the plot and interesting the characters, accurately convey the spirit of the times? These musings came to mind after reading Susan Elia MacNeal’s, absorbing Maggie Hope trilogy (with at least two more in the works) especially the first, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary (Bantam Books 2012), and the second, Princess Elizabeth’s Spy (2012).

Maggie is a very engaging character: smarter than almost all the men around her, spirited, and strong willed, if a tad naïve, with a determination to succeed “in a man’s world.” She is a math prodigy and saddled with an unusual family pedigree. Believing that both of her British parents died in a car accident when she was very small, Maggie was raised in America by her aunt Edith who works as a scientist for Wellesley College where Maggie has graduated with top marks in math. She delays her doctoral studies at MIT to go to London in 1940 to sell a house that she had recently inherited. Unable to sell it, she takes in roommates to defray the expenses, a decision that will have momentous significance as the plot unfolds. Since these novels fall within the mystery genre, it should not be a surprise that her parents are very much alive, and one of the pleasures of these books is to discover with Maggie their current identity and the pivotal role they will play in her life.

Little Stabs at Happiness: The World's End & You're Next

Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Eddie Marsan star in Edgar Wright's The World's End

The first weeks of September are a dozy, uninspiring time for moviegoers. Summer’s over, but fall’s not quite here yet; for serious movie geeks, most of the excitement is generated by the news from high-profile festivals (Telluride, Toronto); in the real world, something like Don’t Tell a Soul or The Exorcism of Emily Rose suddenly has a reasonably good chance to be one of the top box-office draws of its opening weekend. Given the kind of summer it’s been at the movies, it’s perfectly appropriate that a couple of the better popcorn movies still lingering around certain multiplexes in these post-dog days offer the charm of small-scale, ironic apocalypses. 

Children of the Revolution: DCI Banks Continues to Please

It probably no longer needs to be said that Peter Robinson is one of the premier writers of detective fiction in the English language, right up there with Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, P.D. James and any other crime novelist that you might care to name. The facts speak for themselves: Children of the Revolution (McClelland & Stewart) is Robinson’s 21st novel starring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, apart from five other standalone works of fiction. His awards and prizes, in several countries, are numerous. And besides all that, there is the BBC series based on his novels (titled, unimaginatively, DCI Banks, but brilliantly cast with veteran actor Stephen Tompkinson in the title role), which Robinson aficionados will be pleased to hear has been renewed for a third season.

In this novel, DCI Banks is called out to a cold, damp death, a man broken and battered on an abandoned railway line 30 metres below an isolated footbridge. He could be a suicide or he could have been pushed over the wall of the overpass, or he could have been beaten and thrown off the bridge. The victim, named Gavin Miller, is a local man, down on his luck and a bit of a loner, though not altogether unfriendly. There is, however, one highly unusual thing about Miller’s death: He was carrying an envelope with £5,000 in new £50 notes in it. As Detective Sergeant Winsome Jackman says, “Not something you’d need for a walk in the woods.” (page 9)

A Cultural Hodgepodge: The Attack, People Who Eat Darkness, The Mindy Project and Robyn Hitchcock In Concert

Mindy Kaling and Chris Messina on Fox's The Mindy Project, which returns for its second season on Sept 17

Choices, choices. These days there’s so much to watch, read and listen to that it’s pretty difficult to keep up with everything you’re interested in. There are eight network TV shows slated to begin their new seasons in the next couple of weeks which I will be watching, as well as a couple of television series either winding down (Under the Dome, Ray Donovan) or having just begun their new season (Copper). And that’s not including the new TV shows which I have yet to sample. Then there are three alternate history science fiction novels I am currently reading and one more which will be published in October, which will be the subject of a future post. Some new movies, by filmmakers I like – including Ron Howard (Rush), Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity), Stephen Frears (Philomena) and Claire Denis (Bastards) – are coming out later in the year and there are still many CDs that I’ve purchased this summer which I have yet to listen to. Here is a small sample of what I’ve been into recently.

Posing: Lady Windermere’s Fan

Peter Hinton’s production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan at the Shaw Festival is magnificent to look at. Working with set designer Teresa Przyblyski, costume designer William Schmuck and lighting designer Louise Guinand, Hinton creates a series of images that suggest the work of a variety of painters, mostly but not exclusively impressionists. In the first act, Lady Windermere (Marla McLean) entertains the Duchess of Berwick (Corrine Koslo) and her daughter Agatha (Kate Besworth) stage right – each of the two scenes in this act takes up half of the stage, each room carved into the black scrim – while a curtain blows in the breeze behind them, revealing a terrace with a Monet-like drop in the background. The fourth act, with Lady Windermere seated next to a cradle, quotes Mary Cassatt. The second scene in act one, of Lord Windermere’s study, is in black and white; the single touch of color is provided by a large red ball on the desk that punctures the naturalist detail like the absurdist detail in one of Magritte’s surrealist paintings, while the lighting creates an expressionist chiaroscuro.

The Jazz of Melancholy: Alan Zweig's When Jews Were Funny

Norm Crosby and Alan Zweig in When Jews Were Funny

In his book The Haunted Smile, Lawrence J. Epstein talks about Jewish comedy as if it were perched at the edge of an abyss. "Their stage style is tinged with sadness," Epstein writes. "It is haunted by the Jewish past, by the deep strains in American Jewish life to be strained – the desire to be accepted and the concern for a culture disappearing – by the centuries of Jewish life too frequently interrupted by hate, and by the knowledge that too often for Jewish audiences a laugh masked a shudder." In the new documentary When Jews Were Funny, director Alan Zweig gets caught up in his own personal quest for the comic sources of that shudder. By turning to an older generation of Jewish comedians – including Shelley Berman, Norm Crosby, Jack Carter and Sheckey Greene – Zweig seeks to identify what makes their work particularly Jewish in nature.

Eloquence: Othello and The Merchant of Venice at Stratford

Othello at Stratford

It might not be the most important thing about the Stratford Festival’s Othello, but it must be said: It’s a beautiful production. Designer Julie Fox and lighting designer Michael Walton – and, of course, director Chris Abraham – have collaborated on a visually stunning set, an apparently simple arrangement of large, blood-red vertical panels, enclosing a raked, diamond-shaped rotating and tilting stage. The three elements – stage, panels and lighting – prove remarkably flexible and evocative.

More important? The excellent performances of the three leads, Bethany Jillard as Desdemona, Graham Abbey as Iago and, especially, Dion Johnstone in the title role. These are not easy parts, for a variety of reasons, but the Stratford cast carries them off with skill and panache.

Shorthand History: Lee Daniels' The Butler

Robin Williams & Forest Whitaker in The Butler

In The Butler, screenwriter Danny Strong and director Lee Daniels use the life of a White House butler, relayed in flashback, to reflect the history of race politics in America from the days of Jim Crow through the election of Barack Obama. It’s such an ingenious idea – and the film is such a moving depiction of the struggle for civil rights – that even when the narrative information feels shoehorned in the movie it still works. Forest Whitaker gives a performance of tremendous warmth and feeling as Cecil Gaines, who leaves the Georgia cotton plantation where he grew up to live in the North. The picture begins in 1926 but for a black family living in the South it might as well be pre-Civil War: as a boy Cecil (played at this point by Michael Rainey Jr.) sees the vicious son (Alex Pettyfer) of the plantation owner, Miss Annabeth (Vanessa Redgrave), shoot down his father (David Banner) after dragging his mother (Mariah Carey) off to be raped. Out of pity, Miss Annabel takes the boy out of the fields and trains him to be a “house nigger,” inculcating him with the virtues of the perfect servant, who must move with such stealth and grace that the white folks he serves can’t hear him breathe. But he grows up under the menacing gaze of his father’s killer and at fifteen (now played by Aml Ameen) he departs for his own safety. And he lucks out: desperate for food, he breaks into a hotel restaurant, but the man (Clarence Williams III) who finds him is a waiter who takes him under his wing. By the time Whitaker moves into the role, Cecil is working at a high-end D.C. hotel, where his skills attract the notice of R.D. Warner (Jim Gleason), who hires the domestic staff for Eisenhower’s White House.

40 More Years: "Our Nixon," and Everybody's

A scene from Penny Lane's Our Nixon

I’m not the best person to pass critical judgment on the virtues and defects of Penny Lane’s documentary Our Nixon, which was largely cobbled together out of hundreds of reels of home-movie footage shot during the Nixon presidency by H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Nixon’s special assistant, Dwight Chapin. (Haldeman was especially renowned as an amateur movie historian during his time as part of Nixon’s inner circle; a handful of his home movie footage was included in the 1995 CD-ROM edition of his published White House diaries.) Lane’s intention seems to be to invite audiences to re-examine their preconceived image of Nixon by seeing him, in unguarded, “personal” moments, as a human being, while including just enough of the larger context – in the form of TV interviews with Nixon’s abettors and enablers and snippets of the Watergate tapes – to remind us just who it is we’re watching. It’s not easy to get a clear emotional read on how the director feels about any of what she presents, but I’m guessing that, when she chose her title, she didn’t intend to remind anyone of the title that was given to Hans-Jurgen Sybergerg’s epic experimental film when it opened in the U. S. in 1980: Our Hitler.

A Touch of Cloth Cleans Up the Brit Crime Scene

John Hannah and Suranne Jones star in A Touch of Cloth II: Undercover Cloth on Sky1

Last year around this time – as the summer was beginning to wane, and the promise/threat of the new fall television season loomed – two new series premiered which called me back to the very beginning of my life as a TV devotee. Ask my 15-year-old self what my favourite comedy shows were and I would have quickly answered Sledge Hammer and Police Squad! Neither series lasted long on the air, but both have lived long in my memory. Last August, my inner TV child got two televisual treats: Bullet in the Face, a new series by Sledge Hammer creator Alan Spenser, and A Touch of Cloth. I’ve already written about the hallucinogenic zaniness of Spenser’s show, but with A Touch of Cloth II: Undercover Cloth, the second installment of the planned A Touch of Cloth trilogy, airing in the UK this past two Sundays, the time has come to write on the latter.

A timely spoof of the recently reinvented British crime procedural, A Touch of Cloth reinvents the parody genre for our era’s much more media savvy audiences. The series brings the energy and style of the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker 80s classics Airplane! and Police Squad! not only to the UK, but to the 21st century. Though it takes its title from a play on ITV’s long-running procedural A Touch of Frost, A Touch of Cloth casts its satirical net far wider, taking on bleak and bloody detective dramas like Luther and Wire in the Blood, and even groundbreaking classics like Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker.

Saying Goodbye: The Civil Wars

Joy Williams & John Paul White of The Civil Wars

Nothing reveals the volatility of the music business more than the early break up of a band. In the case of the duo known as The Civil Wars made up of John Paul White and Joy Williams, their recent split is also a loss to the music world. The duo started out with great promise in 2009, but has quickly come to an end after four years of considerable success that included two Grammy awards in 2012. When I reviewed Barton Hollow, the band's debut album in 2011, I thought it was one of the strongest independent releases of the year. Ironically, one of the best songs on that album, "Forget Me Not," offered up the hope "Let's write a song for us and sing until we're old and gray." Alas, those hopes were dashed when the group cancelled a European tour last winter citing "internal discord and irreconcilable differences of ambition."

Obscure Plays at the Shaw

Jeff Irving & Benedict Campbell in Trifles

Probably the earliest feminist work by an American playwright, Susan Glaspell's 1916 one-act Trifles is often anthologized but seldom produced. The Shaw Festival is correcting that error of omission this season with a stark, potent revival in the lunchtime slot at the Court House Theatre, where it's double-billed with an even more obscure piece, A Wife for a Life, the first play by Eugene O'Neill; both are directed by Meg Rose. Glaspell and O'Neill were friends and colleagues: he was first produced by the Provincetown Players, the outgrowth of a literary circle of which Glaspell and her husband (and sometime collaborator) George Cram Cook were prominent members.

Trifles has a lot in common with Machinal, Sophie Treadwell's 1928 expressionist play. Each was inspired by a scandalous court case in which a woman was convicted of murdering her husband, and each presents the murderess in an entirely sympathetic light. The key difference aside from style – Glaspell is a realist – is that in Trifles we never meet the woman, Mrs. Wright, whose model is the Iowa farm wife, Margaret Hossack, sent to prison for life in 1900 for hatcheting her husband while he slept beside her. The play takes place in the Wright homestead after Mrs. Wright has been apprehended and is awaiting trial. The county attorney (Jeff Irving) and the sheriff (Graeme Somerville) have brought Lewis Hale (Benedict Campbell), who found the body, back to the house to depose him. Accompanying this trio of men are the sheriff's wife, Mrs. Peters (Kaylee Harwood), a relative newcomer to the area, and Mrs. Hale (Julain Molnar, in the role Glaspell played in the original production), who have volunteered to gather a few items to cheer Mrs. Wright in her jail cell. Their conversation while the men are in another room is the dramatic centrepiece. Reading "trifles" on which the men place no value, Mrs. Hale, who has known the accused killer since they were girls together, reconstructs her lonely, oppressed life, and the two women collaborate to suppress the single piece of evidence that would provide the motive the attorney is seeking for his case – and that confirms their empathy for the plight of a kindred soul, her spirit broken by a difficult, isolated life and a joyless, sadistic husband. The item is a broken-necked bird; the symbolism is both overstated and borrowed (from Strindberg's Miss Julie), but the play is undeniably effective. So are the ensemble cast and Camellia Koo's simple wooden set. Molnar's portrayal of Mrs. Hale, whose compassion bleeds through a gruff rural exterior, is a standout.

When White & Black Turns to Grey: Danger Mouse's The Grey Album

It's probably not surprising that Charles Manson, despite his psychopathy, heard the beginnings of a race war on The Beatles' 1968 White Album, especially since the album owes as much to black music as With the Beatles did in 1963. In fact, the music heard here, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, does emulate black discontent rather than the romantic hopes heard in the Beatle cover versions of "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" or "Please Mr. Postman." The anger buried within the black sound tapped on The White Album would ultimately find its own distinct voice in 2004. A DJ named Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) had taken samples from The White Album and mixed them with the work of rap artist Jay-Z's The Black Album (2003). Jay-Z was born Shawn Corey Carter in the New York projects a year after The White Album was first released. Besides being one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists, Jay-Z was also the former CEO of DefJam Recordings and Roc-A-Fella Records. He went on the co-own The 40/40 Club and the New Jersey Nets NBA basketball team. Yet even though he was one of the most successful rap artists in America, after his acclaimed 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z decided that he'd had enough of the business in 2003 and wished to retire. 

The Unrepentant Leni Riefenstahl

“The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O.K.”

– George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”

In 1974 Susan Sontag wrote a two-part widely read and controversial essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” that was prompted by the publication of Leni Riefenstahl’s photographic book about the Nubian people in the Sudan. Although acknowledging that the images were “ravishing,” Sontag was disturbed about the “disquieting lies” Riefenstahl was peddling about her life – some were included in the book’s dust jacket – at a time when her cinematic output was being de-contextualized at film festivals and museum retrospectives. The former Nazi propagandist was celebrated by some feminists – especially problematic since Riefenstahl had never been concerned about the condition of women, only her own career – and celebrities from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol who admired her creativity. Sontag set out to rebuke Riefenstahl’s rewriting of her personal history, and to define and condemn what she called “fascist aesthetics” arguing that her early mountain films, her documentaries made during the Third Reich, which Sontag acknowledged as “superb films,” and the Nuba photographs constituted a “triptych of fascist visuals.” My purpose is to critique what Sontag got right and to demonstrate that Ray Müller’s highly praised 1993 documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, rather than clarifying Riefenstahl’s misrepresentations, ends up largely affirming them.

If Dreams Were Wishes: The Young Rascals' Once Upon a Dream

The Young Rascals? I never would have dreamed it.  So how in the world did this happen?  These guys weren’t even speaking to one another for years, decades even. Felix Cavaliere played a short set of familiar tunes in front of a band of hired guns at last year’s Hippie-Fest.  Five or six songs was all, and he sounded in great voice.  YouTube videos showed Eddie Brigati re-tuning his vocal cords; and Dino Danelli together with Gene Cornish was on tour with The New Rascals. But this was the four guys together on one stage, like a real band, playing the hits (and the not-quite-hits) from fifty years ago. Felix, Eddie, Dino and Gene on stage at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.  How in the world did this dream come true?

Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam: A Masterly Conclusion to her Trilogy

Margaret Atwood's new novel MaddAddam has just been published (Photo by Chris Young)

You may remember that Oryx and Crake, the first novel in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, is narrated by Snowman, a survivor – he thinks he may be the only human survivor – of the gruesome plague that has recently swept the Earth, leaving it deserted and ruined, inhabited by giant pigoons and wolvogs.

Snowman, who in the pre-Flood days was named Jimmy, tells the stories of Oryx, his great love, and Crake, his best friend. He interacts with the Children of Crake, bio-engineered, peaceable humanoids who lead simplified lives, don’t eat meat and have never felt greed (or clothing). He also recounts the events leading up to the pandemic, when the world was ruled by corporations and the population was divided into the privileged elite, corporate employees (and managers and scientists) who lived in strong-walled Compounds, and everyone else, the inhabitants of the pleeblands, the slums and suburbs outside the Compounds. The Corporate Security Corps, or CorpSeCorps, was the all-purpose police force, army and intelligence service. 

He's Not Dead Yet!: Harlan Ellison's 7 Against Chaos

Writer Harlan Ellison’s not dead yet. In a piece I wrote about Ellison last year in Critics at Large, and in reference to his statement in September 2010 that he was dying, I speculated, only half jokingly, that he was still alive because the Angel of Death was scared to try and take him. The truth, as indicated in a recent interview on the cultural Vulture web site, entitled "Harlan Ellison Isn't Dead Yet," turns out to be somewhat more prosaic. Harlan, who is now 79, has been suffering from some physical ailments and emotional ones, too, which had laid him low for a long while, with only the odd short story (the Nebula ward winning "How Interesting: A Tiny Man") to his credit. But fans of the man and his work can rejoice. His first full length work since his fine short story collection Slippage (1997) has surfaced, in the form of a graphic novel. Harlan Ellison’s 7 Against Chaos (DC Comics) is an often riveting tribute, in many ways, to his formative influences as a writer.

Artist as Apostate: Bob Dylan in 1966

The burning of Beatles records and magazines in the American South in 1966.

Back in 1966, John Lennon was worried about whether he'd be killed as The Beatles criss-crossed America in a summer filled with race riots and a heated controversy over a comment he made about the group being more popular than Jesus Christ. But there was another performer, one who was confused with being a prophet, having similar qualms that summer: Bob Dylan. Not only did the events in that season of hate alter the path of Dylan's career, it dramatically transformed the artist himself. He went from being a man making history to one who feared becoming its pawn. That summer determined not only his retreat from pop stardom, where a reluctant avatar suddenly saw the possibilities of betrayal, it also changed the game. With Dylan's Another Self Portrait, which contains unreleased sessions of music that make up two albums (Self Portrait, New Morning) during his retreat from his audience between 1969 and 1971, and on sale in stores today, you can hear in many of its songs the desire for solace. But the quiet in their sound, the soft beauty of "Pretty Saro," the contemplative quest in "Went to See the Gypsy," is deceptive. Another Self Portrait also has room for the tragic seduction of "House Carpenter," and the plaintive account of brutal murder in the traditional "Little Sadie." What all these songs have in common is that they portray a man seeking refuge in the more subtle confinements of the chamber room. But he couldn't hide from a world he helped create.

Shaw Musicals 2013: Guys and Dolls & The Light in the Piazza

Everyone knows that Guys and Dolls is a great American musical, but more often than not productions of it are disappointing – cartoonishly overstated, terminally cute, or generally misguided (which is the word I’d use to describe Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1955 movie version). The 1992 Broadway revival was a popular and critical hit, but I didn’t derive much pleasure from it: the cast, headed by Nathan Lane and Faith Prince, seemed to be working way too hard, the staging was uninventive, and the tempo of Frank Loesser’s songs was slowed down, as if on the assumption that the audience couldn’t otherwise keep up with the witty lyrics. Oddly, amateur mountings of the show often locate its vaudevillian spirit and its robust style – phantasmagorical (the Damon Runyonland milieu) but with a strong underpinning of romantic feeling – better than professional ones, which tend to substitute slickness for charm. But Tadeusz Bradecki’s production at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, is expertly staged and choreographed (by Parker Esse) and vastly entertaining. It gets the balance right: it’s raffish without pandering, open-hearted but not sentimental.

The show takes a little while to kick in. “Runyonland,” the instrumental ensemble number that Loesser supplied in place of an overture, begins intriguingly with silhouettes behind the scrim, but when that scrim flies up to reveal Peter Hartwell’s set, a semi-abstract black-and-white cityscape of midtown Manhattan, your heart sinks – not because it’s monochromatic (Sue LePage’s colorful costumes play vibrantly against it) but because it’s ugly. And, as usual, the company isn’t large enough to fill the huge Festival stage, so the number doesn’t do what it was written to do, set the mood and style of Runyon’s bustling, eccentric world of gamblers and minor-league show-biz pros and street hustlers (as adapted by book writers Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows) – even with Shaw veteran Guy Bannerman exiting as a gesticulating blind man and then reappearing a moment later as a pretzel vendor. In the first dialogue exchange, among the goofball gamblers Nicely-Nicely Johnson (Thom Allison) and Benny Southstreet (Billy Lake) and the vigilant cop Lieutenant Brannigan (Bannerman again), the actors seem to have been directed to act like Loony Tunes figures.