Eight Arms to Hold You: The Criterion Collection Celebrates the Fiftieth Anniversary of A Hard Day's Night

"The first rock and roll movies had little or nothing to do with rock and roll music, and everything to do with the rock and roll ethos," wrote Greil Marcus in his assessment of the genre. That ethos he describes was present in many Fifties pictures where adolescents were no longer accepting the proscribed values of the status quo. You could see it in Marlon Brando's defiance in The Wild One (1953), where when asked about what he was rebelling against, he replied, "Whaddya got?" You could recognize it in the painfully vulnerable James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), as he attempts to wake up his incognizant parents to the misunderstood youth they were alienating. The distilled essence of what would soon become rock 'n' roll was weaved into the fabric of those movies. According to Marcus, though, its power wasn't fully comprehended until Bill Haley & the Comets drove home the combined sociological screeds of The Wild One and Rebel in The Blackboard Jungle (1955), with its opening blast of "Rock Around the Clock."

After that, aspiring rock artists started lining up to see their possible future on the silver screen; and John Lennon began thinking that maybe this was a cool job. The Beatles were first turned on by The Girl Can't Help It (1956), which featured Little Richard in the opening credits singing the title song. The plot was largely superfluous, but significantly, it was about how the music business was run by the mob (giving a whole new meaning to the word hitmen). Besides grooving to Little Richard, Gene Vincent, the Platters and Eddie Cochran, youngsters also swooned as the buxom bombshell Jayne Mansfield strutting by in her tight clothes, clutching milk bottles to her heaving breasts. In 1956, having been one of those kids first stunned by Brando, Elvis Presley stepped onto the screen in the Civil War drama Love Me Tender, where two brothers fight over politics and the love of Debra Paget. His elegiac ballad, "Love Me Tender," which maybe planted the early seeds for McCartney's eventual "Yesterday." But it was his role as the violent rockabilly singer Vince Everett in 1957's Jailhouse Rock where the rock ethos fused effortlessly with the music. From there, just as the rock movie began, it seemed almost over. Except for the tabloid chic of High School Confidential (1958), which delved pruriently into a teen dope ring, it was the sanitized Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party movies and Elvis's decline in Hollywood.

Breaking Out of Genre: Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band's Landmarks

Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band (Photo by Kristian Hill)

Is it possible to create music that goes beyond category? For the editors of Downbeat Magazine, who create a separate category for such a notion in their annual polls, the answer is an unqualified "yes." For drummer and composer Brian Blade, it could be the boundary-free category that best describes his music and his band because the category of jazz is simply not the best descriptor.

Landmarks (Blue Note) is the most recent release from the superlative, Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band. It's a thoughtful exploration of "place," geographically and emotionally speaking. This blend of nostalgia and location goes a long way on Landmarks, a concept album that took years to make, but worth the patience and investment of time required. The reason is entirely based on leader Brian Blade's demanding schedule. Blade is constantly working. He's principle drummer for Daniel Lanois and he's in demand as an arranger and bandleader for special projects, including the 2013 tribute to Joni Mitchell held in Massey Hall in Toronto. He also plays for the unstoppable Wayne Shorter. So when he gets the chance to record with the Fellowship Band, it's an opportunity he rarely gives up. Brian Blade leads the group, drums, with Jon Cowherd, piano, Melvin Butler, reeds, Chris Thomas, double bass and Myron Walden, bass clarinet and saxophone. For this record, guitarists, Melvin Sewell and Jeff Parker, complement the band.

Afterlife: Abel Gance's J'Accuse & George Romero's Night of the Living Dead

In 1919, when French director Abel Gance made his anti-war drama J'Accuse, the picture was perfumed with the scent of death, and informed by endless reports he received of his friends dying at the front during WW1. But unlike many anti-war pictures, good and bad, J'Accuse wasn't designed as political agit-prop. "I'm not interested in politics," he would later remind film archivist and author Kevin Brownlow in his book on the silent film era, The Parades Gone By. "But I am against war, because war is futile. Ten or twenty years afterward, one reflects that millions have died and all for nothing. One has found friends among one's old enemies, and enemies among one's friends." Gance had good cause to skirt the expediency of political agendas and reflect more soberly on matters of life and death. He had once been drafted into the French Army Section Cinématographique, but ended up being discharged due to ill-health, which likely spared his life. He would then go on to a film career that would include the tragic drama La Roue (1923) and his landmark epic Napoleon (1927).

Being consumed by thoughts of the dead, especially the war dead, is not unusual for a film director – especially a pioneer like Gance who would along with D.W. Griffith invent a cinematic language that would change the course of dramatic narrative. With this awareness of an emerging art also came the knowledge that moving pictures could provide houses for lingering ghosts who would haunt us for decades. The photograph froze a moment in time, but a movie depicted time in motion, and breathed air into and gave life to the people who were part of the picture. In the years to follow, as actors would become movie stars, their iconic selves – from James Dean in his rebellious red jacket to Marilyn Monroe in her billowing white dress – would fix themselves in the collective unconscious, unchanged by time, and even untainted by their own early, tragic deaths. Where in life, mortality claims everyone; in film, you can live forever and remain fully intact. Somewhere today streaming in cyberspace, James Dean still pleads to be understood by a revolving cast of indifferent adults in what is perhaps another afterlife.

Bigger Than Life: I Am Divine

I Am Divine, Jeffrey Schwarz’s affectionate, scrapbook-style documentary about the actor Glenn Milstead, who achieved fame as his drag persona Divine, opens in early 1988, when John Waters’ Hairspray had its première in Waters’ and Milstead’s home town of Baltimore. It’s the logical high point of Divine’s career. Hairspray was the eighth feature film Divine appeared in, all but two of which were John Waters productions. (Before their 16-mm first feature, 1969’s Mondo Trasho, they also made three shorts together, including The Diane Linkletter Story, with Divine in the title role, and Eat Your Makeup, which included a re-enactment of the assassination of President Kennedy, with Divine, in a black wig and pillbox hat, as Jackie.)

Hairspray was a breakthrough for the two collaborators; a low-rent nostalgic musical comedy set in the early 1960s, the movie managed to satirize message movies while wholeheartedly embodying the all-accepting, liberating spirit that drives people to push past the boundaries of racial separation and repressive sexual identities. It’s a movie in which white and black kids don’t think in racist terms, because they enjoy dancing with each other too much, and are too turned on by each other, to accept social segregation. It was also the first of the Waters-Divine movies in which Divine wasn’t the leading lady; that role fell to the 19-year-old Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad the chubby star of a local TV dance show, whose celebrity challenges conventional standards of beauty.

Childhood's End: Revisting Coraline, Pleasantville and Watchmen

When I was a kid, I used to love those pop-up books where, when you turned each page, the characters (and their peculiar characteristics) would jump out at you. In Henry Selick’s animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s SF fantasy novel Coraline (2009), he elegantly employs 3-D to essentially invoke the same effect (as Martin Scorsese would later do with wondrous aplomb in his 2011 Hugo). Yet you don’t find yourself thinking about how Selick (A Nightmare Before Christmas) achieves the kind of macabre splendour he does here, but rather, you become saturated by the tempest of a young girl’s runaway imagination. Coraline Jones (voice of Dakota Fanning) has just moved into Palace Apartments with her socially-conscious parents, Mel (voice of Teri Hatcher) and Charlie (voice of John Hodgman), who are so busy working on their new gardening book they don’t notice that their precocious daughter could care less about foliage and dirt. Due to her parents’ neglect, she becomes curious about a tiny door in their living room wall. Although she initially fails to find out what’s inside, one night, a small mouse leads her behind the door where she encounters a replica of her family – except these parents are “perfect” and cater to her every whim and desire. What Coraline soon realizes, though, when she sees that her “other” parents have buttons for eyes, is that things aren’t as perfect as they seem.

Morality Play: The Emergence of Ethics in Video Games

Dialogue choice, from Bethesda’s Fallout

Video games, perhaps more than any art form, have the ability to engage their audience personally. This makes them an ideal forum for grappling with the difficult questions art has always sought to identify and answer. Games are not a passive experience; you have a direct effect on the outcome, so you are involved personally in how you arrive there. Nobody would question your willingness to tap a button and zap the alien aggressors in a Space Invaders arcade cabinet – but the more “realistic” that video games become, the more pertinent these questions become. If the invading aliens were depicted with a unique culture or societal structure, distinct from our own, with a religious system that drives them to invade, or a fanatical government which forces them to subjugate us – if, in other words, you came to understand them as beings, and not just pixels on a screen – would you hesitate before pushing that button? As we have been able to render fictional settings with greater and greater detail and verisimilitude in games, the question changed from “What can the player do in our game?” to “How should the player feel about what they can do in our game?” Morality and ethics are a part of the postmodern video gaming experience, whether it’s recognizable or not, and their effect can be drastic and potent.

The Tempest: A.R.T.’s Magic Show

Nate Dendy, Tom Nelis, and Charlotte Graham in The Tempest  (Photo: The Smith Center/Geri Kodey)

The American Repertory Theater’s new mounting of The Tempest is part nineteenth-century-style theatrical spectacle, part magic show – overlapping entities). The adaptors and co-directors are Aaron Posner and Teller (of Penn and Teller), and the magic, which includes card tricks, cheeky bits of business like a kinetic hankie with a will of its own, and real stage sorcery (Prospero levitates a sleeping Miranda in act two), is witty, ticklish and occasionally dazzling. The idea of Teller working on a production of this particular Shakespearean romance, with its sorcerer protagonist, struck me as irresistible, and I was high on him after seeing his documentary Tim’s Vermeer, in which an inventor deconstructs and then reproduces the Dutch master’s particular brand of magic – his process for developing his distinctive approach to realism. So I had high hopes going in. But this Tempest is more than I could have wished for.

Call and Response: Springsteen & I

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To Know an Author: The Salinger Perplex

J.D. Salinger in 1952. (Photo: Hulton Archive/Antony Di Gesu/San Diego Historical Society)

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Back in the late 1970s, after I’d first read The Catcher in the Rye and was getting seriously infatuated with the novel and its author, there was scant information to be found on the life and doings of J.D. Salinger. All that existed in the way of biographical sources on the “famously reclusive author” who lived on a New Hampshire hilltop and had once dispatched his long, Zen-drenched stories to The New Yorker from a paramilitary bunker were a few pieces from old news magazines – combinations of celebrity profile and journalistic stakeout that were tantalizing but at that time close to 20 years out of date. A few books of Salinger criticism existed; but criticism is structured opinion, and the new fan’s first hunger is for fact. (Even rumor will do, for rumor, as we know, is nothing but fact waiting for confirmation to catch up.)

Things have changed. Now there are more biographies, biographical studies, memoirs, parts of memoirs, and long and short magazine profile-stakeouts devoted to Salinger than there are to many authors who have not studiously repelled publicity and litigiously opposed the public’s right to know everything about them. I count, previous to last year, three biographies; two memoirs, one by Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, the other by his ex-lover, Joyce Maynard; and more magazine and newspaper articles than can be collected by any person not paid to do so full-time. Now there are two recent and important additions to the catalog. Salinger (Simon and Schuster; 698 pp.), by Shane Salerno and David Shields – textual companion to last fall’s documentary of that title, which was directed by Salerno and televised by American Masters – has major flaws, but is in every sense a major biography. Following it at a respectful distance is Thomas Beller’s upcoming J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist (Amazon; 192 pp.), an entry in Amazon Publishing’s new “Icons” series of short biographies.

Off the Chain: Jim Mickle's Cold in July

Michael C. Hall and Sam Shepard in Jim Mickle's Cold in July

The young neo-grindhouse filmmaker Jim Mickle attracted some underground attention with his first film, Mulberry Street (2006), which got away with using a virus that turns people into murderous humanoid rat creatures as a metaphor for gentrification, then attracted some more with his post-apocalyptic vampire film Stake Land (2010). (Last year, he released a “re-imagining” of the nifty Mexican cannibal-family movie We Are What We Are, which, while not in the same league as Let Me In, Matt Reeves’ remake of Let the Right One In, or David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is not half bad for a movie that would not exist were it not for American film distributors’ tender sensitivity toward the plight of those who would rather miss a good flick rather than attempt to read subtitles.)

X-Ceptional – X-Men: Days of Future Past

In my review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I made a point of mentioning I was a fan of the X-Men series, and it should also be noted that I’ve enjoyed the X-Men film franchise since its fresh-faced beginnings in 2000. It’s a series that seems to be improving with age, recovering from severe stumbles like X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) to finally hit its stride only, what – six, seven films in? Except for the excellent X-Men: First Class (2011), I think the strongest of the franchise were the original two films, both directed by Bryan Singer. Singer returns to the helm for the latest installment, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and I think with all this bearing in mind, it’s safe to say that on entirely its own merits, X-Men: DoFP is a fine superhero action film, and in the context of its own series, it’s nothing short of brilliant.

Harlan Ellison at 80: A Primer

Writer Harlan Ellison poses with his typewriter

"The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [...] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally."

– Harlan Ellison

My favourite writer Harlan Ellison turns 80 today, a milestone for anyone but, in light of his health issues – serious heart problems, necessitating an angioplasty, and recently diagnosed clinical depression – and his general tumultuous existence, perhaps more of an unexpected one for him. He’s not nearly as well known as he should be, despite writing the single best episode of the original Star Trek TV series ("The City on the Edge of Forever"), but of late he seems to have crept into the mainstream. The Big Bang Theory referenced him recently as the writer ripped off by director James Cameron, who stole the idea for The Terminator from Ellison's script for the Outer Limits episode "Soldier." And, earlier this season, he showed up as his own cranky (animated) self on The Simpsons, dissing the younger generation while in line for a new comic book release. He also wrote a graphic novel last year, Harlan Ellison’s 7 Against Chaos, which generated some buzz and made it to The New York Times bestseller list. And he’s embraced the internet in a way he hasn’t before – he’s famously known for typing out his stories – announcing new projects, including previously unpublished teleplays, on HarlanEllisonBooks.com. He’s also a regular on YouTube and the like, offering his strong opinions on any number of subjects, all smartly and wittily addressed. But if you’re not familiar with his stuff, it’s difficult to know where to start since his output is so tremendous and diverse, totaling some 1,700+ published stories, screenplays, reviews and essays, and nearly three dozen collections and novels in varied genres. So here are my picks for Harlan Ellison’s must-reads, in fiction, non-fiction and the two groundbreaking anthologies he edited. If you just want a generous overview of his career, check out The Essential Ellison (1987/2001), either the 35th or 50th anniversary editions. (They’re likely not in print but can be found in used bookstores, I’m sure.) Otherwise, you’ll want a more concentrated dose of the man in the following works. Note: Ellison has a habit of tinkering with his short story collections, removing some tales from subsequent editions of his works, when they’ve appeared elsewhere in print in the interim, and often adding new works as recompense. (He’s nothing if not considerate of his readers and their pocketbooks.) I’ll try to indicate where possible which edition you should look for, but realistically the later editions are the ones you’re more likely to stumble across. (Most of Ellison's books are also available in e-book format, through Open Road Integrated Media.)

Bob Hoskins: The Thrill of Acting

Bob Hoskins (1942-2014)

Bob Hoskins, who died at the end of April at the age of seventy-one, was known as The Cockney Cagney, and it’s easy to see why. He’s compact like Cagney, a little man with a loud voice, but both men aren’t merely flamboyant: their front-and-centre, pop-up quality reveals an alertness to the world and an intensely emotional interaction with it. They leap out of the gate like champion racehorses because their characters are bursting at the seams. Like Cagney’s, Hoskins’s trademark performances are about class, though in a more explicit and more complex way. Cagney’s characters didn’t generally talk about their working-class roots but they didn’t have to – the proletarian essence was in his somewhat stylized New York accent, his hoofer’s nimbleness, as assertively masculine as Gene Kelly’s, his take-no-prisoners aggressiveness, and in the fact that the actor’s home studio was Warner Brothers, which catered to the working-class neighborhoods that housed many of the theatres Warners owned. Hoskins’s characters have the same qualities (Cockney subbing for New Yorkese), but they address the issue of class all the time. Well, that’s the Brit in them; they’re fighting the battle of the classes that’s at the heart of English drama from the middle of the twentieth century onward. There’s more overlap, too, between these two marvelous actors. Both men’s acting is centered as much in their eyes as in their tight, dukes-up, punching-the-air bodies, though whereas Cagney famously had soft bedroom eyes – Olivier eyes – Hoskins’s eyes had the quality of blazing neon or exploding firecrackers. Both had a depth of feeling that, set against their missile-force immediacy, had the ability to poeticize their acting. And they both acted as if they thought it was the most thrilling job in the world. They got gloriously, extravagantly drunk on it.

A Taste of Sicily: Italian Television's Inspector Montalbano

Luca Zingaretti as Salvo Montalbano in Inspector Montalbano

For any fan of crime fiction, finding a new detective series is an exciting experience. I recently discovered Salvo Montalbano, a police detective in the fictional island town of Vigàta, Sicily. Inspector Montalbano is the creation of Italian novelist Andrea Camilleri, whose first Montalbano novel was published in Italian in 1994. While Camilleri has enjoyed success with other books, his twenty-one Montalbano novels (the most recent was published in 2013) have earned him and his irascible protagonist a special place in the hearts of Italian readers, making Salvo Montalbano easily Italy's most famous fictional crime-fighter. (So famous in fact that Camilleri's hometown of Porto Empedocle, which was the basis for the fictional setting of the novels, officially changed its name to Porto Empedocle Vigàta in 2003!) Since 2002 the novels have been steadily making their way into English – translator Stephen Sartarelli's version of the 17th novel Angelica's Smile will be available later this June – but for the telephiles out there, there is also an alternative way to enjoy Montalbano’s grumpy charm.  In 1999, Italy's RAI television network began airing Il commissario Montalbano, feature-length television adaptations of Camilleri's Montalbano stories. The series, which is still in production, now boasts 9 seasons and 26 individual episodes – some with original teleplays but most using scripts adapted directly from the novels and short stories. An English-subtitled version appeared in 2012 for British audience on BBC as Inspector Montalbano, and the same episodes aired on the MHz WorldView network in the U.S., under the title Detective Montalbano. The show deserves a wider North American viewership, and fortunately, all 26 existing episodes are available on DVD. If you are a fan of crime dramas, and detective fiction in particular, you should seek them out.

The Body-Based Vernacular: BBoyizm Company's Music Creates Opportunity

Yvon "B-Boy Crazy Smooth" Soglo

Crazy Smooth’s dancers fling themselves into the air. They spin on their heels and caterpillar their spines before spinning, dervish-like, on the tops of their heads. Their hard-body athleticism is married to an artistry so dazzling in its intricacy and speed that watching them is itself a kinetic rush, a lightning bolt to the brain. There are six of them altogether – actually seven when you include Yvon “B-Boy Crazy Smooth” Soglo, the Benin-born, Aylmer, Que-raised, Ottawa-based street dancer and choreographer who founded his BBoyizm company in Canada’s capital in 2004. And they bring down the house at Toronto’s Enwave Theatre where the ensemble performed at the end of April as part of the Danceworks series of contemporary dance, presenting an hour-long show called Music Creates Opportunity.

Don’t fret if you haven’t heard of them. BBoyizm started as a studio project, with the now 34-year old Smooth, Bboyizm’s energetic and easygoing artistic director, teaching others the street dance styles witnessed, absorbed and mastered on travels to urban centres around the world where hip hop flourishes as an art form of today. The troupe only started performing in theatres as of 2009, says Smooth during a post-performance chat in Toronto, citing his company’s motto: “Dance to express, not to impress.” Commercial success appears beside the point. “If you love to dance,” adds Smooth, smilingly, “just do it.” It’s a genuine stance born of hip hop culture where the rapper is a rebel artist, an outsider hero. The accompanying dance form is no less rule-bending, as BBoyizm makes clear.

Neglected Gem #57: The Deadly Affair (1966)

James Mason in The Deadly Affair (1966)

Of all the movies derived from John Le Carré’s spy novels, The Deadly Affair – based on Call for the Dead – may be the least known, but it’s one of the best. Sidney Lumet directed it in 1967, from a literate, intelligent screenplay by Paul Dehn. It begins with an unusual credits sequence, a series of black-and-white stills, filtered through a range of colors, from the movie we’re about to see, which turns out to be just as unusual: harsh, occasionally brutal, yet suffused with melancholy and with a more delicate texture than one normally associates with Lumet. The picture feels both freshly minted and a little tentative in style, as if he were stepping out into unfamiliar territory; not all the parts match up perfectly. (The lovely Quincy Jones score, for instance, seems to belong to some other film.) And somehow that fact adds to the film’s appeal, perhaps because the world it ventures into is mercurial and cobwebbed with deception and the relationships it depicts are prickly, unsatisfying, incapable of resolution.

Two-Faced: Jesse Eisenberg in The Double

Jesse Eisenberg in The Double

As a rule, boyish young actors who achieve stardom in lead roles that call for them to be brainy, neurotic (or at least social maladjusted), physically unimposing, and foot-shuffling awkward with women either toughen up and acquire some grit as they get older (like Dustin Hoffman) or shift into supporting and character roles (like Anthony Perkins and Matthew Broderick). What’s fascinating about Jesse Eisenberg, aside from the fact that he’s a fine actor, is the way he updates the bookish-male-virgin roles of yesteryear, in a way that makes them strikingly contemporary. Eisenberg was pretty much in the conventional Brandon DeWilde mold, albeit smarter and hornier, in his first picture, Roger Dodger (2002), where the suspense hook was whether his ill-chosen mentor, a misogynistic skirt-chaser played by Campbell Scott, would in succeed in infecting the sweet kid with his demons and turn him into a heartless, lying serial humper, like himself. But since then, Eisenberg’s characters have largely continued to be clumsily innocent about romantic and sexual relationships, while being wised up about everything else.

The Book Will Go On: Carl Wilson's Let’s Talk About Love v2.0

When I received an e-mail asking if I’d like to review a book about Céline Dion, I responded, “I should tell you that I’m not a big fan of Céline Dion.” I thought that would be the end of it. I had no idea of what the book was actually like, just that it was one of those 33 1/3 chapbooks about an album (Let's Talk About Love), a few of which I had enjoyed in the past. But Céline Dion, I thought, you’ve got to be kidding me. The book arrived with no more fanfare within the week. Apparently, the publisher didn’t care whether I was a fan or not. I didn’t pay much attention to it and slipped it under the pile of things I was planning to read over the next little while. Then I had a follow-up e-mail enquiring as to whether I wanted an interview with Carl Wilson, the author of the book. I don’t particularly like doing interviews with people whose work I’m going to negatively review, so I avoided the question. Then I pulled out the book and noticed that it wasn’t in the standard 33 1/3 format. It was nearly twice as big, and much thicker. I saw the new subtitle “Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste” and a list of “New Essays By…” people like James Franco, Krist Novoselic and Nick Hornby among others. “What the heck is going on here?” Clearly, I asked myself, I have to start paying more attention to things!

Seismic Cinema: Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla

Hollywood loves a mulligan. Spider-Man was only given five years to settle in our collective consciousness before his series was rebooted – but Godzilla, dormant for sixteen long years, has had more than enough time to gestate. Roland Emmerich’s regrettable 1998 bomb is long (and mercifully) forgotten. The time is ripe for the Japanese icon to stomp through cinemas once more. But what kind of beast will emerge this time? I can tell you first-hand: a frightening one.

Casa Valentina: Editorializing

Patrick Page, Reed Birney and Nick Westrate in Harvey Fierstein's Casa Valentina (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

Harvey Fierstein’s new play, Casa Valentina, currently playing on Broadway under the auspices of the Manhattan Theatre Club, has an irresistible starting point: it’s set in a summer resort in the Catskills in 1962 that caters to straight men who like to dress as women. (The getaway is based on a real locale.) And as the host, George, a.k.a. Valentina (Patrick Page), and the guests begin to arrive in drag, wittily costumed by Rita Ryack and coiffed by Jason P. Hayes in outfits and wigs that slyly release the characters’ mischievously hedonistic inner selves, you expect an evening of delirious fun. The cast could hardly be improved upon. Besides Page and the indispensable Mare Winningham as his broad-minded wife and co-proprietor Rita, we have Tom McGowan as the wisecracking Bessie; Larry Pine as “the Judge” (Amy), George’s long-time friend and legal adviser; John Cullum as Terry, the elder statesman of the crew; Reed Birney as Charlotte, who has turned cross-dressing into a political cause; Nick Westrate as clear-eyed Gloria. And, perhaps a trifle too fey, Gabriel Ebert is Jonathon (Miranda), the newbie whom Gloria has persuaded – with some difficulty – to come for a trial weekend. Scott Pask’s cleverly compartmentalized set, suggestively lit by Justin Townsend, allows for the cross-dressers to transform in front of multiple mirrors, a wonderfully theatrical conceit. (Joe Mantello directed it.)