Heroes and Villains: Philip Kerr's The Lady From Zagreb, Donna Leon's Falling in Love and Steve Burrows' A Siege of Bitterns

Philip Kerr’s The Lady from Zagreb (Putnam) opens on the French Riviera, in 1956. But that’s just prologue; the story proper begins in the summer of 1942, in Berlin. Bernie Gunther, a captain in the SD (the Nazi security service, or Sicherheitdienst) has been assigned to the Berlin police, investigating homicides and other serious crimes. But Bernie, despite his barely veiled cynicism and smart mouth, has shown a useful talent for delicate inquiries and judicious solutions on behalf of his Nazi masters. Indeed, he has just returned from Prague, where he solved a murder at the villa of the late SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the German security services, even as an assassination plot unfolded against Heydrich.

Back in Berlin, Bernie finds himself under the direct command of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, also head of Germany’s gigantic UFA film studios, who has a personal assignment for him: track down the missing father of Croatian-German actress Dalia Dresner (Goebbels, a notorious womanizer, calls her “Germany’s Garbo”), neé Sofia Branković. Bernie falls hard for the beautiful Dalia, who returns his feelings, and sets off into the chaos of wartime Yugoslavia to find her missing parent. The passages set in war-torn Croatia are bone-chilling, not just because of the German SS troops, who routinely shoot first and ask questions later, but more especially because of the ultra-nationalist Ustaše militia, allies of the Nazis but unpredictably and prodigiously vicious. It is among these barely sane irregulars that Bernie finds Dalia’s father, once a priest, now a militia leader known as Colonel Dragan, famous for the speed with which he can slash Serbian necks. Goebbels and Bernie agree to lie to Dalia, telling the screen star that her father is dead.

Life Lessons - Willie Nelson (with David Ritz): It’s a Long Story (My Life)

Willie Nelson’s story has been told before, by Joe Nick Patoski in a book subtitled An Epic Life. Epic! A quick search for a definition of ‘epic’ leads you to this, in the Urban Dictionary “the most overused word ever, next to fail…use them together to form ‘epic fail…everything is epic now. epic car. epic haircut. epic movie. epic album…saying 'epic win' doesn't make you sound any better, either” and you have to agree with them. Everything is ‘epic’ these days, but in Willie’s case maybe Patoski has a point. Willie (and his co-author David Ritz) have opted for something a little simpler, not epic…but just the humble admission, It’s a Long Story. Not as long as when Patoski told it, but long nonetheless. The epic life took 576 pages, the long story only 392 and that includes the index and credits for quoting song lyrics. Willie is good at editing things to fit his own perspective of what’s important in his long life. The book sounds like Willie. It’s written in his voice. Ritz, from the look of it, organized, and provided structure but allowed Willie to be front and centre telling this story himself. You can almost feel him sitting across the room from you as you read. Some pages have the flow and poetry of his lyrics, others just sound like him, exhaling a puff of smoke and a gem of a remembrance.

“A song is a short story,” he begins, “It might have been my buddy Harlan Howard, a writer I met in Nashville in the sixties, who first said a song ain’t nothing but three chords and the truth…the truth should flow easy. Same for songs and stories…the way a mountain stream, bubbling with fresh clean water, keeps flowing…but what you’re holding in your hands is something more than a simple song or a short story. It’s a Long Story is the name of this enterprise…and I’ll need a lot more than three chords.”

The Big Picture: The Small Screen

Kevin Chapman as Det. Lionel Fusco on CBS's Person of Interest.

With the network TV season winding down, those critics who like to compile list of actors who ought to be nominated for Emmys but never are should set aside some space for Kevin Chapman. Chapman plays the New York City police detective Lionel Fusco on CBS’s Person of Interest, where he serves as sidekick to Jim Caviezel’s Reese. A former CIA assassin who broke down after he was set up for execution by his own people, Reese got a new lease on life courtesy of Finch (Michael Emerson), a computer genius who set up a comprehensive surveillance system, “The Machine,” for the U.S. government in the wake of 9/11. Finch – who, like Reese, got off the grid by bring mistaken for dead by the powers that be – now has second thoughts about building that system, and to atone for it, he has arranged for The Machine to feed him information about people who may be in danger but who are regarded as too insignificant by the government to be worthy of its concern, so that the super-capable violent operator Reese can help them out, Equalizer-style.

Imaging the Dance: Barbara Morgan Revisited

Totem Ancestor (1942).

A black-and-white photograph of Merce Cunningham depicts the dancer jumping high into the sky, his feet neatly tucked underneath his wiry body. It's a portrait of a body in motion, captured by the celebrated American photographer Barbara Morgan in the blink of an eye. Totem Ancestor, as the 1942 image is called, provides an exciting early glimpse of the dancer who would go on to define modernism in dance as an expression of concentrated clarity: movement as a meditation on the sublime. In this image, Cunningham looks exuberant as he catapults towards imminent greatness. Freed from gravity, he’s a ball of fire exploding in the air. This image of the dance artist who passed away in New York City in 2009 at the age of 90 is in the collection of Toronto’s Corkin Gallery in the Distillery District. I recently got to study it up close during a private viewing arranged for me by veteran art dealer Jane Corkin who has an important collection of historic dance images from the early 20th century. As I sat in a small upstairs room of the Corkin Gallery, one by one, Corkin brought out her dance photographs to show me. The lion's share were by Morgan, a photographer who more than anyone before her or since created an iconography of modern dance that has been widely disseminated around the world. What many people know of modern dance today they know from looking at Morgan's images. She was as much a modern dance pioneer as her subjects.

Vroom Vroom, Boom Boom – Mad Max: Fury Road

Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Smoke-spewing, diesel-gulping engines spit flame into the desert air and propel the world of Mad Max into perpetual motion: so it has always been, and so it is now with director George Miller’s triumphant return to the saga he invented as an independent Australian filmmaker in the late ‘70s, his dreams dominated by dust and oil and blood. With a budget that far surpasses his original efforts (and the cast to back it up) Fury Road is the realization of that dark dream – an orgy of insanity and fun. Buckle up: it’s a wild ride.

Life Is What You Do While You’re Waiting to Die: Wolf Hall, Part I and Zorba!

Lydia Leonard (left) and Nathaniel Parker (right) in Wolf Hall. (Photo by Johan Persson)

Anticipation of a two-part, six-hour Royal Shakespeare Company spectacle based on the Hilary Mantel historical novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, set during the reign of England’s Henry VIII, evoked happy thoughts of the RSC Nicholas Nickleby. But Wolf Hall, recently imported to Broadway from the West End, isn’t that. For one thing, Mantel is hardly Dickens. I plodded through the first of the two books, but her style is gluey and, oddly enough, most of the characters aren’t especially complex or colorful. Mantel provides a handful of ideas about, say, Sir Thomas More (a sadist motivated by as rigidly doctrinal a view of scripture as a Spanish Inquisitor’s) or Anne Boleyn (spoiled, vengeful and paranoid) or even Henry himself (a savage narcissist with debilitating insecurities), but instead of developing them she just keeps repeating them. And since some poor convicted heretic gets burned every twenty-five pages or so, after a few hundred pages the narrative becomes oppressive, a gray, grim mass. The RSC adaptation, written by Mike Poulton and directed by Jeremy Herrin, tones down the violence and softens More’s character – he’s now closer to the principled protagonist of Robert Bolt’s dully respectable play and screenplay A Man for All Seasons – so it’s certainly not unpleasant to endure. And it’s perfectly proficient. But nothing about it, not the script, not the direction, not the ensemble, is memorable in any way. I liked the staging of a bit where Thomas Cromwell (Ben Miles) – the hero of the story, a lawyer who begins as the right-hand man of Cardinal Wolsey (Peter Eyre) and then (after Wolsey falls from the king’s favor and dies) becomes an adviser to both Henry (Nathaniel Parker) and the newly crowned Anne (Lydia Leonard) – rides down the Thames in the wee hours with his son and servants after the king has called on him to interpret a scary dream. Herrin manages the death of Cromwell’s beloved wife Lizzie (Olivia Darnley) from the plague cleverly and poignantly: immediately after a jocular but fond conversation between them where he promises her faithfully not to die and abandon her, he reaches out to touch her and she slips lithely beyond his grasp and disappears. (Lizzie’s demise was the one scene in the novel that touched me.) Nothing else about the way the production looks or moves, except for Christopher Oram’s impressive abstract set, stands out.

Alan Furst: The Anti-Fascist Novelist

Novelist Alan Furst. (Photo by Rainer Hosch)

"… Don't tell the world, but Stalin's just as bad as Hitler."
"Why not tell the world?"
"Because they won't believe it, dear colonel."

- Alan Furst, Spies of Warsaw (2008) 

In 1984, Alan Furst, a journalist and author of four novels, travelled to the Soviet Union and it changed his life. As he noted later, he saw fear in the eyes of the people he met, and it shocked him. He decided that he would never again write a novel set in contemporary times, but that the threat posed by every expression of fascism between 1934 and 1945 would be his subject. To gain a greater grasp for the historical and geographical milieus, he and his wife relocated to Paris – the setting, at least in part, for almost all his subsequent novels. He purchased old books and maps to ensure greater verisimilitude. As a result, readers can be confident that the streets, restaurants and nightclubs are accurately depicted and that they are not likely to find anachronisms; any book or film that a character or the narrator cites could have been read or seen at the time of the novel’s setting. Influenced by espionage writers Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, the social novelist Anthony Powell, and perhaps by films such as Casablanca (1942) and the noirish, The Third Man (1947), Furst set out to create his own niche in the espionage literary domain and published the first of thirteen historical thrillers, Night Soldiers (1988), a set of novels that became known as the Night Soldiers Series.

Apart from his mastery of historical detail, the debut of Night Soldiers is an anomaly. It is the only panoramic entry which starts in Bulgaria in 1934 and ends on the West Side of Manhattan eleven years later. It, along with his next novel Dark Star (1991), is much longer than his later novels. By the time he published his fourth, The World at Night (1996), Furst had found his writing métier, a leaner style that produced tautly-written novels of just over two hundred and fifty pages that combine historical erudition with genuine humanity amidst terrifying inhumanity. He had also compressed his historical time span: his narratives covered the late 1930s before the war and ended with 1942-43 when the outcome of the war was much in doubt. Night Soldiers also does not contain the sustained erotic love interest that is prominent in the later novels where their protagonists are fortyish, male, single, and with few exceptions, civilians who are reluctantly drawn into the shadowy, gray world of espionage, not because of any natural inclination but because they feel that they have no choice given the monumental evil of Nazism. Nonetheless, the author’s signature trademarks are introduced in Night Soldiers. Some of his characters will reappear in later novels and his protagonists always manage to survive. More importantly, the author reveals his ability to deftly capture the historical ambience, a result of prodigious research that he has internalized. There is inevitably exposition, yet it rarely feels clunky because Furst’s priority is the subjective experience of individuals in the countries that were occupied, attacked or threatened by Hitler and Stalin. The global perspective that he provides is gracefully interwoven into the storylines that frequently detail the insidious effect of how war or the fear of war can disfigure, and sometimes ennoble, the lives of people who would rather pursue their quotidian activities.

Parting Clouds: Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria.

Now that he's reached the age of sixty, French director Olivier Assayas's work thankfully hasn't settled into austerity, but instead continues to give off a youthful inquisitiveness that remains quietly passionate and quirkily insightful. Rather than becoming reserved and pedantic in his observations, Assayas continues to sparkle with a wry and active curiousity. He rejects easy irony for a more open-ended bemusement that belies the affliction of time and collapses the gap that often exists between generations. In Irma Vep (1996), Assayas presented a middle-aged film director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who tried to capture a past classic by remaking Louis Feuillade's silent serial Les vampires (1915-16) only to discover his flailing efforts had more to say about the state of the present. In his richly meditative Summer Hours (2008), a group of siblings begin to dread the disappearance of their childhood memories, along with their summer home, after their mother dies, only to soon recognize that those memories can be transformed by the generation that follows. Something in the Air (2012), which didn't get half the audience it deserved, looks back at the political and cultural turmoil of the early Seventies and examines a young activist who can't reconcile the rigidity of fixed ideologies with the fluid sensuality of the pop culture he loves. Assayas's films are almost always about the flux of life where meanings don't get imposed but are drawn from an expansive embrace of experience.

Israel’s Cinematic Ambassador: Eran Riklis' Dancing Arabs

Director Eran Riklis.

Toronto and Canadian audiences may not know it but Canada is the only country, to date, outside of its home country Israel, that will get to see Eran Riklis’ new film under its original title of Dancing Arabs. Mildly contentious, I suppose, but it seems to be a no-no for foreign distributors, says the genial, relaxed Riklis, in Toronto for the film’s opening of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. “I’m very happy that in Canada they kept it because the French changed it to Mon fils (My Sons), the Spanish to Mis Hijos (My Sons), the Germans changed it to My Heart Dances, the U.S. to A Borrowed Identity. I’m thinking I’m holding the world record [for film titles].” So what he does mean by the title, which chronicles the experience of Eyad (Tawfeek Barhom), an Israeli-Arab boy from a small town who is accepted into a prestigious Israeli arts academy in Jerusalem where he is the only Arab in attendance? “It’s very complex," says Riklis, “it’s a variety of things, the fact, this notion, you’re part of the minority, you kind of dance to please the majority in life, [as in] normal classic dance [which is] two steps forward, one backwards. If you want to take it really a little bit more extreme, it’s almost like being the jester in a way, [who] has to dance for the master. It’s a complex relationship.”

Neglected Gem #75: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)

Stanley Tucci and Rupert Everett in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999).

I’ve seen so many productions – professional and amateur – of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that, much as I love the play, for some time I’ve been fairly sure I could live my life happily without seeing another. But Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film of it is so fresh and so supremely acted that my first impulse on leaving the theatre was a desire to come back again with other friends to show it off to them. Hoffman has turned Shakespeare’s Athens (which doesn’t even try to pass for ancient Greece) into turn-of-the-century Italy (“Monte Athena”). That turns out to be an inspired choice, right from the opening sequence where the feast is being prepared for the wedding of the duke, Theseus (David Strathairn), and his bride, the stranger queen Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau, whose French accent makes a suitable division from Strathairn’s American-ness). Italians would, of course, of course, focus on the sensuality of the food; the glimpses we get of the duke’s kitchen are lush. Those aren’t the very first images. As we hear the famous Mendelssohn music drift in, we see the fairies –beams of light dancing over a violet dawn that turn into butterflies as the morning light takes over the sky. There’s a tendency (unfortunate, I think) in modern productions of Midsummer to de-emphasize the ethereal quality of the supernatural elements and make them not only carnal – which they certainly are – but earthy, even brutal. Some of the directors who have gone in that direction may have taken their cue from Jan Kott’s essay “Titania and the Ass’s Head” in Shakespeare Our Contemporary. But it would be a waste to put the play on screen and ignore the resources that enable filmmakers to make the kind of magic you can’t conjure on the stage.

Peeling Away: This is a Costume Drama at the Fleck Dance Theatre

What is revealed by what is concealed? That’s the question posed by This Is a Costume Drama, a brave new work by Toronto’s DA Hoskins that goes below the surfaces to expose some pretty uncompromising truths about the world in which we live today. It’s a strip show, both literally and figuratively, and it’s a powerful accomplishment: defiant, irreverent, hugely comedic, inventively choreographed and staged. Clothes are put on and discarded in pursuit of carnal knowledge as well as knowledge of the self. Skin becomes its own form of drama, its own form of artifice; images of nudity are permeated by sex but not shame. Morality is M.I.A. This Is a Costume Drama, a world premiere that opened at Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre on April 29, goes beyond the Biblical dilemma of nakedness as a loss of innocence, examining the human condition after the expulsion from Eden. Post-paradise, identity is a social and political construct, molded by individual taste and desire more than anything resembling faith or belief in a higher order. Everything of substance has been peeled away, exposing a loss of human dignity.

Bleeps and Bloops No More – 33 1/3: Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack

Andrew Schartmann’s extensive, thoughtful treatise on Japanese composer Koji Kondo and his work on the soundtrack to the original Super Mario Bros game is probably the most unusual entry in the 33 1/3 music chapbook series. Most commonly, a passionate critic will defend an album of their choosing, as our own Kevin Courrier has in his 33 1/3 entry on Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. But the soundtrack to a 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System game, even one so popular that it spawned an entire home console empire, can’t really be called an “album” – it’s more a collection of simple 8-bit melodies and sound effects. This also marks the first time the book series has considered video games as a medium with music worth exploring and celebrating. As Schartmann demonstrates, Kondo’s work on this seminal game – and the legacy of industry influence that followed – is much more than the primitive bleeps and bloops we all remember.

Goodspeed’s Guys and Dolls: Half a Loaf

Nancy Anderson as Miss Adelaide and Mark Price as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. (All photos by Cloe Poisson)

When I reviewed the Shaw Festival’s fine production of Guys and Dolls two years ago I observed that this 1950 Frank Loesser-Jo Swerling-Abe Burrows show is the rare musical in which act two is even better than act one. (Most musicals, even terrific ones, are saddled with second-act troubles.) That distinction is abundantly clear in the production currently playing at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, where it opens the new season. For the first half, the Goodspeed Guys and Dolls – directed by Don Stephenson, with musical direction by Goodspeed veteran Michael O’Flaherty – is disappointing. The staging feels cramped, especially during the “Runyonland” opening. Tracy Christensen’s costumes are mix-and-match, with a lot of glaringly bad choices: the hot pants on the Hot Box Girls in the farmyard number “A Bushel and a Peck” don’t flatter their bodies, and what the hell is Benny Southstreet (Noah Plomgren) doing in a zoot suit? Much of the acting is overly broad, especially Mark Price’s as Nathan Detroit, and – in roles that are normally understated – John Jellison as Arvide Abernathy and Karen Murphy as General Cartwright, both on the Salvation Army side of the cast of characters. And O’Flaherty must be using the arrangements from the 1992 Broadway revival, which speed up the tempo (at least on some of the numbers). I thought that was a lousy idea then and I still think so. It seems doubtful that the audiences at the Goodspeed would get bored if “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” were played at the tempo Loesser envisioned. This is, after all, one of the great musical-theatre scores, and familiarity hasn’t worn it down.

Unsentimental History: Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall

David Ben-Gurion (left) and Golda Meir as she shakes hands with Moshe Sharett (right) after signing Israel's Declaration of Independence, in Tel Aviv, on May 14, 1948. (Photo: Frank Scherschel)

The trouble with unilateral action is that it holds out no hope of real or lasting peace because of its denial of justice to the other party.

– Avi Shlaim, Epilogue to the 2014 edition of The Iron Wall

I should begin this review with a disclaimer: I am a news junkie. I was raised by journalists, and the first thing I do in the morning is check my top three news sources. In the last decade, I’ve also begun to do a quick check of Twitter and whatever is dominating my Facebook feed (for actual news, not of the Kardashian-related variety). So I like to think that I am relatively well-informed about what is going on in the world, and fairly up-to-date on major developing stories. Nevertheless, there are moments in every news junkie's life when you open up the paper/webpage/link and have what can only be described as a “WTF moment.” I had one about a year ago when I opened up the New York Times app and saw that Russia had invaded Ukraine – that WTF moment led me down the rabbit hole of books on Russian foreign policy. This is the only appropriate response I have ever been able to formulate for my WTF moments: to recognize that my surprise and shock is largely a result of my own ignorance, and attempt to repair that particular problem. For the most part, what happens in the world – in various countries and between them – is only shocking if we don’t know the history that has led up to it. Knowing some of the history behind a place, people, or policy usually reveals that however crazy certain developments look on the surface they are in fact a reasonable (though not necessarily positive) evolution of what has come before.

Where Law Meets Reality: Daredevil

Charlie Cox and Rosario Dawson in Marvel's Daredevil on Netflix.

Matt: I can't see, not like everyone else, but I can feel. […] All of the fragments form a sort of…  impressionistic painting.
Claire: Okay, but what does that look like? Like, what do you... actually see?
Matt: A world on fire.

When Netflix launched Marvel's Daredevil last month, the series entered a crowded field. Superheroes are everywhere on television right now. Against the proliferating DC-televison universe (Gotham on Fox; Arrow and The Flash on The CW, with another Arrow spinoff, Legends of Tomorrow just announced today, and CBS's Supergirl currently in production), Marvel seems intent on conquering the small screen all on its own. Daredevil joins Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which will air its second season finale this Tuesday) and Marvel's Agent Carter, whose brief run (also on ABC) will be followed by a second season next year. Moreover, Daredevil marks the first of four projected Netflix/Marvel team-ups, the next one being A.K.A. Jessica Jones (starring Krysten Ritter and David Tennant), currently in production and set to air sometime later in 2015. At some point in the future, Daredevil and Jessica Jones will team up with the stars of the as-yet-unproduced shows Iron Fist and Luke Cage for a multi-cast miniseries, The Defenders. On paper, all of this sounds overwhelmingly ambitious, and for this viewer it is, maybe dizzyingly so – but if the first step of that journey of a thousand miles is Daredevil, Marvel might just pull it off.

A Parting Glance of War: HBO’s Band of Brothers

Today marks the seventieth anniversary of V-E Day, the official surrender of the German government that brought the Second World War to a close in Europe. Such a round number of decades, bursting rather rudely into the centennial memorial of the Great War, reminds us yet again of the inextricable links that bound the two conflicts together. In their causes, personalities, strategies, and consequences, the world wars were two shoes that dropped from the same nationalistic European corpus. And they landed on the globe with catastrophic impact. Walt Whitman famously said of the American Civil War that the real war would never make it into the books. That declaration would apply even more fittingly for World War II. Over 60 million human beings died in the conflict, one person every three seconds for six years. The proportions of the war’s scope, chaos, brutality, and moral stakes seem to exceed all categories of meaningful expression.

Still, dozens of movies have taken the war as their subject, many made right in the midst of the conflagration. HBO’s miniseries Band of Brothers aired almost fourteen years ago now, and the decade and a half since has solidified its standing as one of the finest World War II films around. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced the show, deciding to adapt historian Steven E. Ambrose’s book of the same title after the critical and commercial success of their movie Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Ryan and Ambrose lay at the center of the nostalgic wave for the war that swept the nation in the Nineties, as the country reckoned with the rapid disappearance of the generation that served at home and abroad. Ambrose placed an emphasis on oral histories in his methodology, underscoring the experience of the common soldiers, sailors, and airmen in his writing. In Band of Brothers, he follows a small group of infantrymen, E Company of the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, from their training at the war’s outset through their fighting in Europe until the war’s close.

One Hundred Years On...: Erik Larson's Dead Wake and Greg King and Penny Wilson’s Lusitania

RMS Lusitania coming into port (1907-13).

It may never have attained the fame of the Titanic but the Lusitania, the massive British cruise ship sunk by a German U-boat one hundred years ago today, on May 7, 1915, still had the makings of a terrible, lasting tragedy. Two new books, Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (Crown) and Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age by Greg King and Penny Wilson (St. Martin’s Press), both delve into the sinking. But neither is a fully satisfying read.

This Freberg You Will Not Change: Stan Freberg (1926-2015)

(Photo Courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Stan Freberg, who died last month at the age of 88, was the first American show business figure I ever saw referred to as a “satirist,” by people who clearly meant to convey that his stuff was on a sharper, smarter level than the comedy of mere funnymen. When someone like Bob Hope did a sketch about Bonanza or Batman on one of his TV specials, the subject of the sketch didn’t really matter, and there was nothing that could be called a point of view: the dumb topical jokes about politicians and other celebrities could go just as well with any backdrop, and the targets of the spoofs were probably chosen on the basis of which funny costumes Hope and his guest stars preferred to wear.

Freberg’s musical parodies and takeoffs on TV and radio shows had precision: he would zero in on something about a performer that struck him as especially inane and go to town on it. And they had bite: unlike the comedians who want to make it clear that it’s all in good fun when they crack wise about one of their esteemed colleagues, Freberg, like some of the later performers who made their names on Saturday Night Live and other post-rock generation revues, was out to draw blood. He had the smart-adolescent’s deeply personal resentment of inanity and mediocrity, as if Johnny Ray  had made a million dollars singing like that just to piss him off. All in good fun, his ass; Freberg was out for revenge.

Fighting for Fun – Avengers: Age of Ultron

Note: This review contains spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron.

During the climactic battle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America (Chris Evans) tells his team, “If you’re hurt, hurt them back. If you’re killed… walk it off.” It’s a snarky quip that encapsulates the whole film: gone is the comic energy that glowed at the heart of The Avengers (2012), but that doesn’t stop director/geek deity Joss Whedon from doing his damnedest to keep the franchise limping along, and fighting to be fun through to its last overstuffed, brooding gasp. Whether or not it’s a fight that he and his ever-inflating cast actually win… is a matter of opinion.

Something Old, Something New: The King and I & Something Rotten!

Ken Watanabe and Kelli O'Hara in The King and I, at the Lincoln Center. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The first five or ten minutes of Bartlett Sher’s new production of The King and I are spectacular. The ship carrying Anna Leonowens (Kelli O’Hara) and her son Louis (Jake Lucas) to Siam, where she has been contracted to teach the royal children, glides across the stage of the Vivian Beaumont (at Lincoln Center), then makes a slow right-angled turn and moves toward the audience, shrouded in steam, while representatives of the court march down the aisles to meet it. The thirty-piece orchestra underneath the thrust renders the Richard Rodgers music with the robustness that can only be nostalgic for New York theatregoers who are middle-aged or older. And you feel blanketed by the sumptuousness of Michael Yeargan’s sets, Catherine Zuber’s costumes and Donald Holder’s lighting. Seeing the show at a Wednesday matinee late in previews, I thought to myself, “Is it possible that Sher is going to make me care about The King and I the way he made me care about South Pacific?” (His South Pacific, which opened at the Beaumont in 2008, is the best production of a musical I’ve ever seen.)