In a Critical Condition

An Immodest Proposal

2009-01-22T10:15:00.000-08:00

Making a quick perusal of the Academy's Oscar nomiees this morning http://www.oscars.org/awards/81academyawards/nominees.html , I cannot help but note that, once again, this American institution is in its usual delirious thrall to the what is quaintly called The Continent. Viz: Slumdog Millionaire's position as Best Picture nominee.

Others include The Duchess in the Achievement in art direction and Costume Design categories; The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) and Encounters at the End of the World under documentary; Slumdog again, for Editing, Original Song, Achievement in Sound Mixing (what?) and Adapted Screenplay; La Maison en Petits Cubes, Lavatory—Lovestory and Oktapodi for Animated Short Film; and Auf der Strecke (On the Line), Manon on the Asphalt, New Boy, The Pig and Spielzeugland (Toyland)—not an American entry among them—under Live Action Short Film.

The Academy's love affair with All Things European began fairly early in its history: under actors, see Emil Jannings (1928), George Arliss (1929) and Charles Laughton (1933). The situation normalized a bit after Oliver's win in 1948 for Hamlet, with Americans holding sway until the early 1960s. Victor McLaglen won in ’35 and Robert Donat in ‘39, but at least those were for performances in American movies. We have to wait awhile—until 1961—for another non-American actor (Maximilian Schell) to win, but by 1982 the Brits and their various progency begin to trickle in, eventually becoming a virtual cascade: Ben Kingsley, Daniel Day-Lewis (twice), Jeremy Irons, Anthony Hopkins, Geoffrey Rush and Russell Crowe, with Roberto Benigni thrown in for good (bad?) measure along the way.

Our native female actors do rather better, at least until Louise Rainer captures the crown, (twice in a row), followed by Vivien Leigh, Greer Garson, Ingrid Bergman, Leigh (again), Anna Magnani, Bergman (again), Simone Signoret, Sophia Loren (the first foreign language winner), Julie Andrews, Julie Christie, Maggie Smith (twice), Glenda Jackson (ditto), Jessica Tandy, Emma Thompson, Nicole Kidman (getting an award, solo, that should have been shared with Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore), Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren and Marion Cotillard. Clearly, we suffer in inferiority complex on the distaff side.

On the “supporting” front: Joseph Schildkraut, Donald Crisp, Charles Coburn, Barry Fitzgerald, Edmund Gwenn, George Sanders, Hugh Griffith, Peter Ustinov (twice), John Mills, John Gielgud, Haing S. Ngor, Michael Caine (twice), Sean Connery, Jim Broadbent, Javier Bardem, Katina Paxinou, Miyoshi Umeki, Wendy Hiller, Margaret Rutherford, Ingrid Bergamn (again!), Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith (again), Peggy Ashcroft, Brenda Fricker, Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Cate Blanchett.

Best Picture winners remained the provenance of Americans until Hamlet, but held on until 1963, when Tom Jones captured the brass ring—er, I mean statue. A couple of decades passed until the deluge: Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, Shakespeare in Love and The Lord of the Rings (Return of the King).

Now, I’m not suggesting that the actors cited above are necessarily unworthy; as an example, I consider Vanessa Redgrave the greatest actor in the English speaking world. Further, most of these winners were awarded for their performances in American movies. But, at the risk of being accused of xenophobia, may I make, as Uriah Heep might have said, an 'umble suggestion and request the Academy to limit the nomination of non-Americans to the Foreign Film category if their work was not done for American-made, or at least (as in the case, say, of Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and The English Patient) American-produced, movies?

The British Academy often honors Americans as well as thespians of the Isles, but might it too benefit from being a bit more parochial? I doubt very much we’d see the French acknowledge non-Gallic performers or directors—but perhaps that’s a poor example, the French despising pretty much everything that doesn’t originate inside the borders.

Personally, I dislike awards of this sort on general principles. It seems to me perverse, if not downright sadistic, to pit artists against one another. (I would say this yearly obsession with being “The Best” is a peculiarly American one, if the rest of the world didn’t seem determined to follow our lead.) And in the case of the Oscars, there’s so much pressure and publicity attendant on the ceremonies that the old canard “It’s an honor just to be nominated” is pretty much a joke. No, the honor is in winning; otherwise, you’re just a sad, pathetic loser. Not only that, but a loser being photographed as you lose.

Nor am I arguing that the Oscars have any particular merit as a yardstick to artistic accomplishment. As Billy Wilder once quipped, “How can you take them seriously? After all, Louise Rainer won two!” The list of jaw-droppers and utter outrages is a long and glorious one, and you can add your own personal favorite ignominities to it. (Did they really give Best Picture to Rocky? It took how long for Martin Scorsese and Sean Penn to get theirs? Why did Jake Gyllenhaal rate a “supporting” nomination when he was in just as much of Brokeback Mountain as Heath Ledger? And will I be able to bear it if Mickey Rourke wins this year, or should I stick my head in the oven now and avoid the rush?)

I don’t know precisely why I let this idiot ceremony get under my skin. Actually, I do know: because the rest of the world cares so damn much about it. So why can’t the rest of the world give its actors their own awards? I’ve never been an America Firster, but just occasionally a line ought to be drawn somewhere.

The calla lillies are in bloom again...

2007-05-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, I don't know whether they really are or not. But even if not, they should be, just for today. Because this is Katharine Hepburn's 100th birthday. (And the old dame damn near made it to 100 herself.)

There is much about Miss H. to raise one's eyebrows over, her public persona being, as she herself admitted, a "thing" she invented. (See William Mann's new biography for more details.) She wasn't "Kate" to her family and close friends — she was "Kathy" or "Katie" — and the whole Tracy-Hepburn symbiosis is largely myth (again, see Mann) but when you're as gifted as she was, does it really matter? Could we imagine anyone else as Alice Adams? As Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, exhorting James Stewart with that irresistible phrase "Put me in your pocket, Mike" — which we all did, willingly? As Pat in Pat and Mike (occasioning Tracy's immotal observation "Not much meat on her, but what's there is cherce") or Amanda in Adam's Rib? Would we want to see any other woman coaxing and cajoling Bogie to take the African Queen down the river? Could anyone else have chilled us as much, or broken our hearts so thoroughly, as Mary Tyrone, smashing a plate while all but screaming "I — hate — DOCTORS!" in Long Day's Journey into Night? Who but The Great Kate could so incomparably have limned all of the slippery contours of that other great lady, Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter? Or have simultaneously twitted and buoyed up poor old Hank Fonda On Golden Pond? What a career! What glories!

The other Hepburn was, arguably, the most wonderful movie star, but this damn Yankee was the best of the lot. A prickly soul, not warm or cozy perhaps, but non pariel. As James Stewart so memorably observed in The Philadelphia Story, she — no less than Tracy Lord — had "hearth-fires and holocausts banked down inside" her.

So carry a single calla lily in your heart today for Katie, the greatest actress in American movie history.

On Completing "Bleak House"

2007-04-25T07:17:00.000-07:00

This morning over coffee I finished reading Bleak House, Charles Dickens’ great, dark satire on the Court of Chancery. What a truly satisfying experience it’s been, reading this novel: seldom have nearly 1,000 pages of narrative prose passed through my eager fingers with such ease and enjoyment. The book places neatly with titles like The Magnificent Ambersons, East of Eden, The Eighth Day and The Dark Tower series among the great readings of my life. I have seldom encountered a novel I loved in quite this way; I am completely sated, as opposed to completing Nicholas Nickleby and feeling, however emotionally moved, rather over-fed.

Dark, sometimes brooding, often wonderfully comic, and shot through with a feeling for people and their essential humanity, so that even such a redoubtable figure as the ornately and foolishly pompous, stern, dragon-like Lord Dedlock winds up surprising us, and himself, with real and unexpected compassion... awoken too late, alas, to stop the dire fate of Lady Dedlock, who (I presume) thinks she knows him so well that she can never find forgiveness in him, which shows—again I think—that he has hidden his true feelings so well that even his wife cannot guess at them. And then there is poor Richard Carstone, driven to a kind of hopeful madness by that dread legal joke of the Chancery court, the case of “Jarndyce & Jarndyce,” and utterly defeated when, at its close, there is only a void, legal costs having eaten the principle to nothing. The harried Mr. Snagsby, decent and kind-hearted but weighted down by his harridan of a wife. And poor Jo, the young crossing-sweeper, so ill-used by society and so unwittingly the cause of Esther Sommerson’s facial disfigurement. And of course, Lady Dedlock, shutting away all lightness and feeling to hide her guilt. Mr. Krook, whom one never quite gets the measure of and who is done in at last though Spontaneous Combustion(!) And Mr. Gridley and Miss Flite, each driven insane by the court of Chancery, Mr. Gridley to the extreme of breaking down entirely, Miss Flite to a genteel, kindly (yet all-too-knowing) madness.

Then, too, the unsavory (or at least, questionable) characters: Horace Skimpole, who does so much damage to others in his studied “infancy,” proclaiming he is wholly a child yet blithely taking as much from anyone as he can get; Mr. Vholes, ever with his “shoulder to the wheel,” grinding someone into dust; Mr. Guppy, who has no compunction against attempting an advantageous marriage or even blackmail as it suits him; Mr. Turveytop, so wholly concerned with his legendary (in his own mind) “Deportment” that the world must owe him a living (or at least, his poor wife, done to death by work, and his poor son Prince and daughter-in-law Caddy, equally yoked to his dancing school and the perpetual upkeep of his noxious self); Hortense, the haughty French maid—is there any other kind? —whose hatred undoes so many; Mrs. Snagsby, so determined to be injured by something her husband has done she becomes convinced he deceives her at every turn; Mr. Chadband the orating minister (whom the reader may be forgiven for wishing to strangle every time he speaks); Caddy’s mother Mrs. Jellyby, concerned only with her endless correspondence on Africa, to the complete ignoring of her distracted husband and house full of children perpetually falling down stairs; the miserly, decrepit Mr. Smallweed, who bounces pillows off the head of his senile old wife and whose grasping claws are into any and everything that can give him even a little profit; and finally the serpentine Mr. Tulkinghorn, who is responsible in one way or another everything that occurs and for whom no one weeps when he is found murdered.

And yet it is a book of lightness, too: Mrs. Rouncewell, the Dedlock housekeeper, who adds up to a great deal more than simple devotion to her employers; Mr. Bucket, the indefatigable police Inspector, who one begins with liking, moves to distrusting, and ends by appreciating enormously, despite his unwitting hand in the eventual death of poor little Jo; Mr. George, never worthy in his own eyes yet a fountain of solace to others; the wonderful Bagnets—“The Old Girl” who always sees the right path, and her husband, who declaims her worth behind her back but swears he never tells her to her face because “Discipline must be maintained!” and yet is constantly doing exactly that because he can’t help it (and asking the Old Girl to give out with “his” opinion on every matter); the occasionally apoplectic Mr. Boythorn, ever ready either to laugh or to damn; Charly, the orphan girl who takes on monstrous amounts of work without complaining and finally comes into grace; Mr. Woodcourt, the gentle doctor who quietly dispenses a healing balm of dignity and affection to everyone he touches; Esther, who loves without restraint and yet is wholly unable to see how much love she inspires in others; and dear, kind John Jarndyce, master of Bleak House—a misnomer if ever there was one—ready to flee at the first sign of a sign of thanks for any of the (multitudinous) good deeds he dispenses without a thought.

An incredibly rich gallery of characters, painted in marvelous hues of complexity and, occasionally, sheer giddy delight. I almost wish I had held off reading it, because there are so many other Dickens novels I hope to crack, and it would have been a lovely benediction to have beheld this one at the last.

Hello, Mr. Chips

2006-05-10T20:26:00.002-07:00

Film Score Monthly, which releases a pair of remastered movie soundtracks on CD every month, recently issued a three-disc set of the 1969 Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Presumably this is due to its Leslie Bricusse score having been arranged and conducted by John Williams and, although I questioned devoting three platters to such an odd (and not terribly well-regarded) movie musical I dutifully plunked down the $35 and waited …

The discs arrived last weekend and, somewhat indifferently, I put them on while I puttered on my computer. What I heard was astonishing, and caused me to re-evaluate a movie I saw once, on television, in the early 1970s.

At the time of its release, it was invariably lumped with the many over-produced and ill-conceived movie musicals of the period and criticized as a minor “re-make” of the beloved 1939 Robert Donat-Greer Garson edition. (The story is, of course, an adaptation of James Hilton’s sentimental portrait of a rather unexceptional public school master.) Actually Bricusse did something with this Chips that I’m not aware was attempted on any previous musical—and none after it until Barbra Streisand’s lovely Yentl many years later: the musical numbers, with rare and pointed exceptions, were presented as interior monologues. This was no Hello, Dolly! with grandiose parades and elaborate song-and-dance routines, but a simple story told with a delicacy and restraint rare for the time.

After listening to these discs for the second or third time, I went to Pauline Kael for her review. It was, as I supposed, negative, but I was surprised that even she, so attuned to these things, didn’t see what the filmmakers were trying to do. It may be a small revolution as these things go, but a musical that eschews musical numbers is surely worth commenting upon. (Kael did love Peter O’Toole’s performance, which she regarded as the finest of its year.)

As to the cherished musical-comedy conventions: Yes, the producers (and the screenwriter, Sir Terrence Rattigan) altered Chip’s wife Katherine from a leftist nanny to a musical-comedy star and the time-frame was moved up, from the late 1800s through the 1930s to the 1920s through the 1960s. But, unlike say a Julie Andrews extravaganza of the time (no inherent criticism of Andrews, whom I adore—that’s simply what happened) this didn’t mean Katherine performed a variety of show-biz numbers. She had exactly one, as an introduction to us—and to Chips—plus a raucous but gently mocking school parody she performed with the boys at the Brookfield school. Okay, so some of Petula Clark's melismas are rooted in ‘60s pop. But it’s a voice I love; her rendition of “Old Devil Moon” in the movie of Finian’s Rainbow is one of the vocals I most cherish.

And yes, the filmmakers signed yet another non-singing star—in this case, Peter O'Toole—as their lead. But O’Toole wasn’t called upon to perform endless big numbers, and Bricusse (a past-master of the form, having written Rex Harrison’s Doctor Dolittle songs) composed them with an ear to Sprechstimme, and O’Toole’s vocals are lovely within their limited range, and quietly moving.

What’s especially striking now, at a 37-year remove, is the superb Williams orchestrations. The liner notes—and indeed Bricusse himself in quotation—regard this score as the first of Williams’ career to reflect his highly individual voice. And it’s quite true: you can hear Johnny Williams, the comedy composer, becoming John Williams, the master of orchestral color and dramatic intensity. Bricusse felt his score was not exceptional and that if it seemed so, it was Williams’ accomplishment and not his own.

I think Bricusse—and his legion of critics—are wrong, or at least under-appreciative. This really is a remarkable score. Deliberately pitched (with the exceptions noted above) to no particular time period, it doesn’t date or owe anything to that rather canned “Broadway” sound so prevalent in those days, and which Bricusse himself indulged in his Dolittle songs. (Although recently I was struck by how exquisite his partly-cut Anthony Newley-Samantha Eggar duet “Beautiful Things” is). It's a gentle, introspective set of songs, more like a collection of poems set to music than a big, roistering musical-comedy score. The recurring thematic motif of Chips is the Brookfield anthem, “Fill the World with Love,” and it is this song which has dogged and obsessed me since first hearing these discs a few scant days ago.

At first blush, it seems an odd choice of words for a public school emblem. I mean, fill the world with what?? But in context (as O’Toole explains in one of the on-location interviews included in the FSM package) that expression is used in its old-fashioned, humanistic sense: to do good in the world. The composition has a rangy, ecclesiastical sound that perfectly mimics such things, and the lyric is both simple and eloquent, building a progression from the word “ask” (The blessing I shall ask/Only God can grant me becomes The blessing I shall ask/Will remain unchanging and, finally, And the question I will ask/Only I can answer), one slight variation on the phrase “And to fill the world with love” (Did I fill the world with love?) and from childhood (When the world is new) to adult life (When the sky is blue) to old age (When the night is due).

It’s beautifully, hauntingly done, and it evokes such a strong emotional response it seems almost too profound for even this movie, which I think may well be eminently richer than it was given credit for, and than my own memory of it would indicate. It also strikes me as far less sentimental that the vaunted “original,” in which Greer Garson gives her only really charming, effortless performance but Robert Donat hams it up shamelessly when Chips is an old man, shuffling and nodding like a doddering fool. (And for this Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler lost the Oscar?) I can barely wait to see the DVD, reportedly now in production.

Ray Dooley as Cyrano

2006-04-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

PlayMakers Repertory Company Review

Ray Dooley Gives PRC Patrons a Cyrano for the Ages

By Scott Ross
Triangle Theater Review

The critic John Simon once wrote that “Cyrano de Bergerac, is not a great play, merely a perfect one.” Simon’s reticence to giving Edmond Rostand’s self-named “Heroic Comedy” of 1897 that final push into the Pantheon stems from his feeling that the playwright does not address the most important themes of life, at least not in a manner that might leave us to grapple with his concerns. It is true, I suppose, that Cyrano is perhaps too pat and a shade too neatly constructed—but what construction! Each of its five acts adds a layer of irony, each ends on a high note that encapsulates (and comments on) the scene just played, and each leads us into the next with a precision and deftness of tone that few of Rostand’s descendants could, or can, achieve.

As for the question of its relation to the great human feelings, I think Simon may be too harsh. Rostand was surely no Shakespeare, and if Cyrano has a flaw it may lie in a certain sentimental indulgence. I use these qualifiers because, for me, Cyrano de Bergerac is a five-hanky exercise. I love few plays the way I love this one (in modern drama Uncle Vanya, Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, Waiting for Godot, and Fifth of July come closest); and with a good production, I have enough tears for every act. Despite a few reservations about his English translation, it seems to me that Joseph Haj’s current edition written for PlayMakers Repertory Company, and playing April 18-23 and 25-30 and May 2-7 in the Paul Green Theater in the Center for Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is precisely that production.

I could not disagree more strongly, however, with Haj’s statement that “the success or failure of the play lies in the excellence of the ensemble.” Not discounting the need for strength of casting all around, Cyrano rises or falls on its central actor. A de Bergerac who excels in the physical qualities of the role but is less certain with the text (Gérard Depardieu comes to mind here) robs the role of its grace and poetry. Similarly, a Cyrano who acts, as Kenneth Tynan once said of John Gielgud, from the neck up, fails to make the character as dashing as he must be for his essential élan—what the character calls his “panache”—to astound. Only two such world performers of memory—Christopher Plummer here and Derek Jacobi in Britain—have been especially noted for nailing both prerequisites in their portrayals of the poetic cavalier with the outsized nose. Locally, Michael Cumpsty cut a fine, if rather youngish, swath at PRC 20 years or so ago; in Ray Dooley, now, we have a Cyrano for the ages.

Here are athleticism and erudition combined: the heights of poetry and rhetorical flourish matched by the requisite agility and relentless accuracy of swordsmanship. We no more doubt this Cyrano’s ability to extemporize those skeins of rhapsodic verse with which he makes love, in proxy, to the word-drunk Roxane on behalf of the tongue-tied Christian than we question whether he could indeed face a hundred assassins alone and triumph utterly. Dooley’s exquisitely proportioned performance makes us share every contour of the man’s eloquence: We smile at his wit when not laughing outright. We float on clouds of exhilaration at his every gesture and jocular aside. We wince at Roxane’s unwitting, simultaneous rejection of his face and joyous acceptance of the words she does not know are his. And we weep at his anguished torment—so near to Roxane and yet so unutterably far—both at its most ironically naked, as in a balcony scene second in fame only to Shakespeare’s and on the battlements at Arras, and at its most guardedly cloaked, particularly at Rostand’s bittersweet, duct-tickling finale.

“My elegance is draped across my soul,” Cyrano declares in Haj’s translation, and Dooley’s performance is shot-through with this elemental grace, even at its most heroic. (There is swagger to his de Bergerac, but you feel it’s honestly come by.) I have long believed that Ray Dooley is the most magnificently accomplished actor in the Triangle, perhaps in the state; and when I consider the theatrical moments I most treasure over the past few years, a lion’s share are his. Dooley’s Cyrano encompasses, and distills, everything this great and gifted performer can do, and do better than anyone.

Kate Gleason’s Roxane is ideal, as fetching in her person as she is winning in personality. The role is tricky; a poor Roxane risks making her insatiable desire for intellectual and poetic stimulation strident and her fixation on the physical aspects of her seemingly ideal lover merely fatuous. Gleason is so winning that her very impetuousness seems a virtue: you believe this woman would risk the battlefield for love. She is, rather like Falstaff, witty in herself and a cause of wit in others—or at least, in Cyrano.

The role of Christian is equally problematic. No mental or linguistic giant, he must nevertheless convince you that he can make a series of snide but clever puns on the subject of Cyrano’s proboscis, that his love for Roxane is as sincere as Cyrano’s own, and that there is within him a man capable of honor and complex emotion. In Steve Martin’s otherwise splendid variation Roxanne, “Chris,” as he is known, is lumpen to a point that would drive a dedicated Marxist into madness, and inconstant as well. This will not do, and in Grant Goodman’s lovely performance, never does. Compte De Guiche, Rostand’s Commander of Cadets, is the personification of the playwright’s generosity of spirit. Seemingly vain, pompous, authoritarian, even cowardly, De Guiche likewise proves his mettle, with disarming honor and decency, as the play moves toward a climax. John Feltch makes every act by this martinet possessed of surprising depth true and credible, so that he does indeed become a man haunted by “the sound of dead illusions.”

Jeffrey Blair Cornell, so fine in many previous PRC outings, is good at portraying Le Bret’s devotion to Cyrano but less felicitous in limning the kindred variety of that friendship. Joseph Bowen is properly orotund and swooning as the poetaster Ragueneau, and Julie Fishell makes her two roles so varied you’d swear you were watching not one actor but two; her Duenna is as deliciously common as her Mother Marguerite is gently benign.

Enough praise cannot be laid upon McKay Coble’s scenic design, which resembles a polished, two-tiered curio cabinet whose drawers may be opened, turned outward or removed to set each act. As the play progresses, these elements are gradually stripped away in a manner that is both ingenious and apt. This gradual dismantling accommodates each new setting—the theater, the bakery, Roxane’s balcony, the Arras battlefield, the abbey to which Roxane has retired—so that at the end only the superstructure is left. It’s a beautiful effect, so well-integrated into the arc of the play that it never smacks of simple gimmickry.

Marion Williams’ costumes are equally precise and, in their modesty, equally sumptuous, and her wigs are staggeringly good. Some might cavil at the simplicity of her designs for Roxane’s wardrobe, but Williams is canny and correct. There is always a temptation in period drama to over-embroider, and it should be remembered that Roxane is of the middle class, not the aristocracy. Justin Townsend’s intelligent, unobtrusive lighting reaches a spectacular climax in the fourth act battle before dissolving into the fifth act convent like a blissful, dying fall.

Joseph Haj, who previously directed the PRC production of Not About Heroes (which also starred Ray Dooley), has directed the very large cast of Cyrano with brisk and inventive command that never calls attention to itself conceptually—not mean feat, that. I was particularly struck by his staging of the balcony scene and the emotional climax at Arras; his placement of the actors, in relation to each other and the sentiments expressed, is masterly. My only quarrel is with some of his choices as a dramatic translator.

For many decades, the preferred translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was that of Brian Hooker (1923), which is highly readable but scarcely actable. Happily, it is being eclipsed by the Anthony Burgess adaptation of the 1970s and ‘80s (Burgess revised it considerably between the Guthrie Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company productions). Haj’s own transcription plays beautifully but runs to the occasional anachronism. Cyrano’s crying out “Please!” is a bit too contemporary, but “Not quite following the whole heart thing” is repugnant. Imagine Rostand’s hero saying such a thing! The play’s final line is a more debatable issue. Some versions use “My white plume,” which to Cyrano is the embodiment of his style but which may be a bit too vague for maximum impact. “My panache” has the virtue of being both idiomatic and expressive. Haj opts for the former, which is less problematic perhaps than his not translating the poem Cyrano extemporizes during his first act duel with Valvert. By failing to render the verse in English, Haj deprives us of Rostand’s effective, repetitive, and versified reminders to de Bergerac’s antagonist (“When the poem ends, I hit”). This seems a bit perverse.

Still, these are small matters overall. During the interval, one of my companions remarked that we’re lucky to have Ray Dooley. You may never see a finer argument in favor of that observation than this production; whether clothed with white plume or panache, this Cyrano nearly always hits.

50 Beautiful Flicks, 50

2006-01-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

Herewith, an annotated list of my 50 favorite movies, which no one asked for. It’s divided in three parts: an alphabetical inventory of numbers 50-14 and 15-9; 10-6 in order of preference; and 5-1, ditto.

Far too many movies I love are missing from this list. To my chagrin there are no titles from Robert Altman, Blake Edwards, Woody Allen, Vincente Minnelli, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, John Boorman, Sam Fuller, Arthur Penn, Richard Brooks, Carol Reed, William Friedkin, John Schlesinger, Norman Jewison, Leo McCarey, John Sturges, Mel Brooks, Peter Bogdanovich, Terry Gilliam, Fred Zinnemann, Anthony Manne, Clint Eastwood, Louis Malle, Sidney Pollack, Brian De Palma, Martin Ritt, James Whale, Joseph Losey, Joseph Mankiewciz, Jonathan Demme, Sidney Lumet, Hal Ashby, Robert Benton, Spike Lee, Raul Walsh, or William Wyler; nothing that stars Audrey Hepburn, Roddy McDowall or Paul Newman or the Marx Brothers; or was written by Paddy Chayefsky, Tennessee Williams, James Goldman or Larry Gelbart. Very little Jack Lemmon.

How could I not list How Green Was My Valley, Fiddler on the Roof, On the Waterfront, Night of the Hunter, All About Eve, The Third Man, Norma Rae, Gone with the Wind, Bride of Frankenstein, The Band Wagon, Harry & Tonto, Meet Me in St. Louis, Bite the Bullet, Apocalypse Now, Dumbo, 101 Dalmatians, The Lady Eve, An Unmarried Woman, The Outlaw—Josey Wales, All That Jazz, Twentieth Century, His Girl Friday, Rio Bravo, Red River, Young Frankenstein, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, North by Northwest, Adam’s Rib, Ninotchka, The Gold Rush, Greed, The Quiet Man, Bringing Up Baby, Duck Soup, Mikey and Nicky, Poltergeist, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, The Wizard of Oz, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Letter, The Best Man, Love in the Afternoon, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Irma La Douce, or even two of my “guilty pleasures,” The Great Race and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken?

I could have come up with 100 titles easily (I think I just did) but I have to do my work sometime.

[N.B. You’ll notice that I don’t use the word “film” as a descriptive term. I’m in agreement with the late Pauline Kael in her distaste for the word, which implies a kind of critical snobbism. “Movie” is a much more democratic word for what is, after all, the great democratic art form of the past century. To me, the use of “films” for the movies indicates a certain uneasiness in the user, as though you can only defend a popular art by slapping a fussy name on it.]

50. Ace in the Hole [1951] aka, The Big Carnival
Arguably Billy Wilder’s most scathing, incendiary movie. His follow-up to Sunset Blvd., it was dead on arrival at the theatres, but with every year its power grows. What is the tonal opposite of film noir? Visually the picture, set in New Mexico, is so bright it hurts. Thematically it’s about as dark as a movie gets; nearly every aspect of human greed, corruption and selfishness is explored in its tight running time. Inspired by the story of Floyd Collins, the spelunker who got himself trapped in a 1920s cave-in and became the center of a media circus, Wilder and his co-authors crafted an etching of complicity that reached the screen with the acid still wet. No other American movie has ever indicted the media so savagely—nor so fiercely broken the taboo against attacking the audience itself; the great sequence of the curious hordes arriving by bus and train is one of the most abysmally frightening ever captured on film.

49. Aliens [1986] Your basic bug-eyed monster story elevated to the level of art through the incisive screenplay and razor-sharp direction of James Cameron. An unnecessary sequel to Ridley Scott and Dan O’Bannon’s stunning 1979 original, this one foregoes the haunting atmospherics and elegiac horror in favor of mounting terror, aggressive action and staggeringly effective cutting. The so-called “Director’s Cut” [1992] adds an aching depth of feeling to Cameron’s conception of Sigourney Waver’s Ripley as well as illustrating how smart and adaptable Stan Winston’s aliens really are. With the always-splendid Lance Henriksen—who has one of the most interesting faces in American movies—as the android Bishop, and Michael Biehn, whose overbite is sexier than Mel Gibson’s ubiquitous ass any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

48. All the President’s Men [1976] Alan J. Pakula, working from a superb William Goldman screenplay, wrought the best newspaper movie of all in this marvelously detailed portrait of the two Washington Post reporters who first exposed the Nixon Administration’s petty chicanery. What makes the movie so absorbing is its documentary-like depiction of the sheer, mind-numbing meticulousness with which Woodward and Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, respectively) piece the story together. It’s a great tribute to a kind of dogged, perfectionist journalism that seems to have died with the Nixon Presidency itself. The movie is also a marvel in its singularly brilliant casting; every role, no matter how small, is cast to perfection. Jason Robards’ commanding Ben Bradlee leads the way, but look at this partial list of supporting players: Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Jane Alexander, Ned Beatty, Penny Fuller, John McMartin, Robert Walden, Nicolas Coster, Lindsay Crouse, Polly Holliday, James Karen, Neva Patterson, and (as John Mitchell, the voice on the other end of Woodward’s telephone) John Randolph. With Hal Holbrook in a rather terrifying performance as Deep Throat.

47. Almost Famous [2000] Probably the best rock’n’roll movie ever made. Cameron Crowe’s loving re-creation of his own adolescent experience as a fledgling reporter trailing a rising rock band is rendered with affection, expansive and good-natured humor, and a painful sense of innocence lost. Patrick Fugit, 18 when the film was released but looking more like 14, is stunningly good as Crowe’s alter ego. With Billy Crudup as the band’s somewhat amoral leader, Frances McDormand as Fugit’s smothering yet eminently likeable mother, Philip Seymour Hoffman in a couple of delicious cameos as the late rock critic Lester Bangs, and Kate Hudson, giving a luminous, revelatory and ultimately heart-ripping performance as the band’s notorious chief groupie, Penny Lane. Best seen in the expanded DVD release, Untitled: Almost Famous—the Bootleg Cut.

46. Anatomy of a Murder [1959] Otto Preminger’s legal drama, from a fine, meticulous screenplay by Wendell Mayes, broke a lot of taboos in its day. For the first time in an American movie, audiences heard words like “panties” and “spermatogenesis”—spoken by Jimmy Stewart, for god’s sake! But that’s not the reason to watch, and savor, this brilliant, understated look at the underbelly of American jurisprudence. Stewart’s “simple country lawyer” routine masks the nearly unflappable tenacity of a man who will do almost anything to win, yet never seems to be doing anything at all. Preminger and Mayes deliberately leave the movie’s ambiguous moral conundrums unresolved, which is what lingers in your mind long after the final credits have spun. With a superlative supporting cast including Lee Remick, Ben Gazarra, Arthur O’Connell, George C. Scott, Kathryn Grant, Murray Hamilton, John Qualen, Eve Arden, and, as the presiding magistrate, Joseph N. Walsh, the lawyer who used his own faux-naif shtick to help bring down Joseph McCarthy. Duke Ellington contributed a rare—and brilliant—score; the final, terrifying notes are as ambiguous as the finale itself. (He also appears on-screen, as the piano-player Pie-Eye.)

45. The Apartment [1960] Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s successor to Some Like it Hot is an excoriating expose of dirty little American business practices that was itself, amazingly (and rather hysterically) labeled smutty. Jack Lemmon has seldom been better than he is here, playing a nebbish who loans out the key to his apartment to his firm’s executive staff in hopes of bettering himself at the office. Shirley MacLaine is almost impossibly adorable as the elevator girl he pines for, and Fred MacMurray is used to unprecedented smarmy effect as the big boss who’s stringing them both along.

44. Citizen Kane [1941] If I have to bother introducing this one to you, you aren’t really interested in movies.

43. Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [1964] Stanley Kubrick, working from a script he concocted with Peter George and Terry Southern, made the ultimate black comedy on the ultimate subject: nuclear annihilation. There are so many memorably funny—and memorably disturbing—lines and images from this one you’d need a book to catalogue them all. (Many believe Terry Southern is the movie’s true genius, and it’s hard to deny that the movie’s total effect is not unlike one of Southern’s wild, pitch-black satirical novels—The Magic Christian comes to mind.) Peter Sellers is demented perfection in three roles. With two insanely, creepily funny performances, by George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden, as nightmare generals; Slim Pickens (never better); and Keenan Wynn confronting “perversion” as Col. “Bat” Guano.

42. Enemies, a love story [1989] Paul Mazursky had to appear on this list somewhere—every decade he makes at least one great, quirky comedy, and sometimes two or three in a row: Next Stop Greenwich Village, Harry & Tonto, An Unmarried Woman. So what better movie of his to list than this glorious adaptation of I.B. Singer’s exquisite comic-tragic novel about Holocaust survivors in New York? Everything about this one works, from the stunning art direction to Maurice Jarre’s klezmer-accented score. Working with a pluperfect cast (Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, Malgorzata Zajaczkowska, Alan King and the luminous, haunted Lena Olin) Mazursky and his co-scenarist Roger L. Simon crafted a sublimely contoured slapstick tragedy—a movie that delights and haunts in equal measure.

41. The General [1929]/The Navigator [1924] Every list should include at least one Buster Keaton movie. I choose two: The General for its robust storytelling and evocative, Matthew Bradyesque photography; and The Navigator which, after the first Richard Pryor concert movie, ranks as the second funniest I’ve ever seen. Do not eat while watching this unless you relish choking on your food while doubled-over in helpless, aching hilarity.

40. A Hard Day’s Night [1964] Catching the Beatles at the cusp of their phenomenal popularity, Richard Lester and his screenwriter, Alun Owen, concocted a loose series of vignettes to showcase the boys, and it’s one of the most effortlessly charming movies ever made. You may find yourself smiling broadly from the famous opening chord of the title song to the final, good-humored insult.

39. Heat [1995] Michael Mann’s complex, character-driven heist movie has the texture of a sun-lit nightmare: L.A. as a warm place to die a chilly death. Carefully balanced between the action sequences—and they’re both technically brilliant and horrific in their depiction of wanton violence engaged in with cool aplomb—are two lives on parallel, descending arcs. Al Pacino’s driven cop and Robert DeNiro’s ruthless thief are two sides of a very similar coin, a device Mann makes beautifully concrete in the stars’ mid-point tête-à-tête in an off-highway restaurant. Heat is no Rafifi: the nature of the job De Niro’s gang pulls off is mutable—almost incidental; if one doesn’t pan out, there’s always another. What matters for them is performance; for the audience, it’s context. Pacino’s explosive single-mindedness makes it clear we’re lost in a universe with no clear ethical boundaries. Who the hell do we root for? The homicidal thief who approaches his profession like an artist, or the police detective who yells into people’s faces to unnerve them? (Pacino has a field-day with the shtick; when he hollers, “Because she’s got a great ass!” at a recalcitrant criminal the moment is both funny and appalling.) With Ashley Judd, spectacularly effective as Val Kilmer’s impatient wife, and Kevin Gage as Waingro, the scariest ex-con since Robert Mitchum menaced Gregory Peck in Cape Fear.

38. Hot Millions [1968] This movie is a sure test of any potential friendship. If I show it to a new acquaintance and he or she doesn’t love it, there’s no point in going any further. Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith, two of the most effortlessly charming performers who ever appeared before a movie camera, play a pair of painfully lonely misfits who connect in this charming comedy co-written by Ustinov (with Ira Wallach). He’s a bright, if unworldly, embezzler whose dream is to conduct a symphony orchestra. She’s his incompetent secretary, who happens to play the flute. Bob Newhart is the thorn in their side, and Karl Malden is surprisingly funny as the ulcer-ridden executive. (Robert Morley also shows up early on, and Cesar Romero has a hilarious cameo in the Rio airport.) The dialogue is refreshingly quirky, and every scene is a small gem of comic observation. The final freeze-frame is among the sweetest and most moving of any comedy.

37. It Happened One Night [1934] It shouldn’t have worked. Or if so, should only have been a routine little B picture. Instead, this little charmer of a road-comedy swept the Academy Awards, made Frank Capra's bones, turned Columbia Pictures into a respected studio, unofficially inaugurated an entire genre and almost put the American undershirt industry out of business. Robert Riskin’s screenplay contains all the screwball totems—runaway heiress, cynical reporter, impending marriage—and mixes them up with gusto and sophisticated wit; the humor is both sharp‑edged and gentle. This is probably the least pretentious of all Capra's sound comedies, and if it makes social points it makes them tangentially. The movie revealed Claudette Colbert as a beauty with brains and whip‑crack timing, and brought Clark Gable to a new level of audience appreciation, setting his persona and defining him as the era’s great masculine sex symbol: the sequence in which he strips off a shirt to reveal his naked chest caused undershirt sales to plummet. (His chewing of a carrot was also said to have inspired the creators of Bugs Bunny.) This may be the cheeriest of all Depression‑era comedies; the long bus sequence contains something many later screwball films omit: simple pleasure, and charm.

36. Jaws [1975] On the basis of this item alone, Steven Spielberg must be regarded as one of the most talented people to ever stand behind a movie camera. The source was pure potboiler, the shooting went on and on and on, the crew’s activities were stymied by a mechanical shark that couldn’t work. And out of this chaos, Spielberg delivered a masterpiece—in what was only his second theatrical feature. The time spent waiting for the shark to function added to the movie’s special quality of life observed: the co-scenarist, Carl Gottlieb (Peter Benchley did the first draft) was on hand to add punch to the script, and the actors spent so much time together that their relationships (and improvisations) made for an especially rich character palette. And, since a working shark was largely absent, Spielberg made a virtue from a deficit by not showing the monster fully until well into the picture—the unseen menace is much more terrifying. Side-note: Roy Scheider improvised the famous “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” line on the set. With Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Murray Hamilton, Lorraine Gary and John Williams’ spectacularly effective orchestral score.

35. The Maltese Falcon [1940] Many years ago a writer in Film Comment claimed this as John Huston’s best movie. Since it was also his first, I vehemently disagreed with the assessment. 25 years later I think there’s a lot of merit in that statement. Working from a script he essentially transcribed from Dashiell Hammet’s definitive detective novel, Huston produced a film noir avant la lettre. It’s all there: the dim light and shadows, the ethical loner caught between the cops and his quarry, the duplicitous femme fatale, the menacing thug, the smooth master criminal, the existentialist rue. Add Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, and—as the gun toting kid who’s probably seen too many gangster movies—the unforgettable Elisha Cook.

34. The Manchurian Candidate [1962] John Frankenheimer’s best movie, a dazzling adaptation of Richard Condon’s dark satire on American geo-politics (adapted by George Axelrod at his wittiest and most concise). Basically, the narrative is a reiteration of the old trope that the extreme right and extreme left eventually meet in the middle. But the execution of the material, the expert manipulation before and behind the camera, the stunning hints of incest and the black-comedy send-up of Joe McCarthy make this perhaps the ne plus ultra of early 1960s American cinema. Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury have their best roles, and Janet Leigh isn’t far behind. With John McGiver, dry as sherry, as a warm-hearted Republican moderate.

33. Matewan [1987] Arguably the best American movie of the 1980s. John Sayles wrote, directed, appears in, and wrote the union folk songs for, this small but immensely powerful evocation of coal-mining troubles in the West Virginia of the 1920s. Every scene, character, moment and performance is absolute and essential—there’s not a frame wasted nor a dramatic sequence dwelt on a fraction of a second longer than required. There haven’t been all that many serious fictional movies on labor issues made in the U.S., but this one ranks at the top of any list, however short. Among it smany pleasures are the performances of Chris Cooper, David Strathairn and James Earl Jones, and the wonderfully lived-in face of Mary McDonnel. (Matewan would make a fascinating double-bill with Norma Rae—made 50 years after the events depicted in Sayles’ movie and proving that the more things change …)

32. Notorious [1946] Alfred Hitchcock at the top of his game. A dark fantasy (courtesy of Ben Hecht) in which romance must accede to duty, even at the cost of personal integrity. Cary Grant, never darker or more conflicted, is attracted to Ingrid Bergman (as who wouldn’t be?) but distrusts her. When she agrees to woo and marry Nazi envoy Claude Rains in Rio as a kind of special agent for the American government, Grant’s growing disgust nearly destroys her—literally. Rains’ character is painted in surprisingly humane colors, and there’s a great scene of eroticism seldom equaled in the movies, as Grant and Bergman kiss their way from terrace to alcove in a Rio hotel room.

31. The Palm Beach Story [1942] Preston Sturges, at the crest of his astonishing run of great Paramount comedies. In this one, Claudette Colbert escapes from New York and day-dreamer husband Joel McCrae (to find financing for his engineering schemes), survives a night on board a sleeper train with the Ale and Quail Club, meets up with Florida millionaire Rudy Vallee and his lubricious sister Mary Astor, is pursued by McCrae … There’s a scorching bout of kissing between Colbert and McCrae, the wonderful Robert Dudley as “The Wienie King,” the unofficial Sturges stock company (Jimmy Conlin, William Demarest, Roscoe Ates and Chester Conklin) as the band of bibulous sportsmen, and Rudy Vallee confounding expectations with an expert comic performance as the prissy yet likeable money-bags. The usual, blissfully sparkling Sturges dialogue lifts the whole thing into the comedic stratosphere. It’s marred only by the depiction of Fred “Snowflake” Toones as a quintessentially eyeball-rolling, terrified “coon” in the train sequence. Billy Wilder was the era’s other pre-eminent writer-director, and you’d never see something like that in one of his movies.

30 Parting Glances [1986] Far and away the finest movie about gay life in America. This is the single work of the enormously gifted Bill Sherwood, who died from AIDS-related complications before he could make another. That’s a loss of almost incalculable magnitude, because Parting Glances is so rich, humane and witty it makes almost every other attempt at a gay story by mainstream moviemakers look like impotent flailing. Starring Richard Ganoung and featuring a breakout performance by Steve Buscemi.

29. The Philadelphia Story [1940] George Cukor and Donald Ogden Stewart’s sparkling adaptation of Philip Barry’s stage comedy is almost Lubitschean in its look, performances, dialogue, humanity, and wealth of comic detail. (Stewart wrote the screenplay, with an uncredited assist from Waldo Salt.) This is the one that rescued Katharine Hepburn from Hollywood exile and won James Stewart the Oscar many felt he should have gotten for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. That he’s every bit as good here in what is, essentially, a supporting role—Grant’s was beefed up by combining aspects of two of the play’s major characters—gives lie to that claim and supports David Denby’s (and my own) contention that Stewart was the greatest actor American movies have ever produced.

28. Reds [1982] Warren Beatty’s huge, unwieldy paean to the radicals of the American left in the early part of the 20th century is energetic, intelligent, epic, rigorously fair, keenly observed and often exhilarating. It’s also mawkish, overfed, clichéd and goes on much too long. But it was a defining movie of my youth, and I still cherish its vigor, wit, honesty and underlying devotion to leftist principals. The famous framing device of assorted “witnesses” of the era shows Beatty in a gently loving mood—they’re just about the most wonderful old people anyone’s ever put on film. With Diane Keaton, Maureen Stapleton, a veritable who’s-who of great American character actors, and Jack Nicholson at his most astonishingly sexy as the young Gene O’Neill.

27. The Searchers [1957] John Ford’s magnificent, elegiac look at obsession and race-hatred, perfectly embodied by John Wayne’s astonishingly complex performance as a man on a fanatical hunt for a niece, kidnapped by Indians after a brutal massacre. A movie so rich in detail, so striking in composition and so disturbing in its moral complexities it’s been a beacon to any number of American filmmakers, many of whom have paid it homage in their own movies (George Lucas' depcition of the burning homestead in Star Wars being merely one). With a haunting musical theme by Max Steiner and one of the most memorable closing shots in all of movies.

26. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1948] The first of Ford’s so-called “Cavalry Trilogy,” and easily the best. This early exercise in Technicolor broke all the ever-fearful company’s established rules—when location filming was threatened by a possible desert thunderstorm, Ford kept right on shooting, and the resulting footage looks like life and nature caught on the fly. But what’s especially notable about the movie is its gentle, almost pacifist tone. John Wayne, playing a commander on his final mission, is so good it hurts. His reaction to the retirement gift his men present him is one of the great moments in movie acting, and his rueful powwow with the wonderful Chief John Big Tree as both old men try to avert a war, is among Ford’s finest sequences. With Victor McLaglen (overdoing it a bit in his comic drunk scenes), Ben Johnson, George O’Brien, Arthur Shields and the great Mildred Natwick.

25. The Shop Around the Corner [1940] Ernst Lubitsch’s utterly charming romantic comedy, based on the same source material later used in the adorable chamber musical She Loves Me and the recent Hanks-Ryan remake You’ve Got Mail. James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are the lonely-hearts correspondents who ardent mail-affair is offset by the fact they’re, unknowingly, co-workers who despise each other. With a pitch-perfect screenplay by frequent Lubitsch collaborator Samson Raphaelson and a splendid supporting cast that includes Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut and Felix Bressart. The bittersweet aspects of this essentially sunny comedy include, for me, the knowledge that the looming world war will irrevocably alter the Budapest in which the characters live and work, and probably see the deaths of most of them.

24. A Star is Born [1954] What can happen when a great director, a great screenwriter, a great composer, a great lyricist, a great actor and the greatest female talent the musical movie has ever known collaborate. Ruthlessly cut and re-cut on its release, the current version painstakingly pieced together by the late Ron Haver is among the most toweringly effective musicals ever made, and (with Sunset Blvd. and Singin’ in the Rain) one of the greatest—because most subtle—satires on Hollywood. George Cukor contributed the exquisitely sensitive yet robust direction, Moss Hart wrote the eminently quotable script, and Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin composed the ravishing score. Jack Carson has his best-ever role as a smarmy, opportunistic yet comprehensible studio P.R. flack, James Mason exhibits a performance of such eloquent despair you almost have to look away, and Judy Garland gives to the role of a lifetime the performance of her life.

23. Star Wars—The Empire Strikes Back [1980]/Star Wars—Revenge of the Sith [2005] My favorite of the Star Wars movies has long been the second installment, due in large part to the rich screenplay (credited to Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, although Brackett contributed only a first draft before her death and George Lucas, generously refusing a credit in deference to the old veteran scenarist, collaborated with Kasdan), superb direction by Irwin Kershner, and a darkness of narrative and tone that deepened the characters even as it propelled the story forward. Empire has, finally, been matched by the final installment in the series, a movie whose overriding sense of ruefulness makes its predecessor look like a walk in the spring rain by comparison. The inexorable sense of doom, exacerbated by our knowledge of future events, makes Revenge of the Sith the most moving of all the episodes in the series, and arguably the most visually sumptuous. Ewan McGregor, eschewing mere imitation, becomes in this final chapter a subtly convincing shade of Alec Guinness’ original Obi-Wan Kenobi, and John Williams’ towering score is among his finest ever.

22. The Sting [1973] One of the best-cast American movies ever made. The pleasures of this quintessential caper-comedy (by David S. Ward under George Roy Hill’s stylish direction) are many, and not the least of them is the parade of great character actors, clearly having a ball. Along with a relaxed Paul Newman and a very appealing Robert Redford, there’s mob kingpin Robert Shaw, corrupt cop Charles Durning and a supporting cast to die for: Ray Walston, Eileen Brennan, Harold Gould, John Heffernan, Dana Elcar, Jack Kehoe, Robert Earl Jones, Avon Long, and the extraordinary Dimitra Arliss as a waitress who isn’t quite what she seems. The art direction by Henry Bumstead beautifully evokes the Depression Era, and Marvin Hamlisch’s use of the Scott Joplin songbook, while technically anachronistic, perfectly captures, and reflects, the spirit of this sunny, cheerfully amoral comedy.

21. Sunrise [1927] F.W. Murnau’s stunning visual masterpiece—maybe the most beautiful of all silent movies; it’s one of the most exquisitely imagined movies of its already lush period. A deeply humane, expressionistic romance spiked with misery, fear, erotic obsession, guilt, murderous impulse—in short, love itself. George O’Brien is at his most ethereally beautiful, and Janet Gaynor personifies innocent vulnerability as the wife he plots to kill before recognizing the depth of his feeling for her. Carl Mayer wrote the broad but affecting scenario. The big city sequences are still staggeringly effective. With Arthur Housman and Gibson Gowland, the star of Erich von Stroheim’s aggressively butchered silent masterpiece Greed, in small roles. Full title, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

20. Sunset Blvd. [1950] Billy Wilder’s savage, yet deeply felt, black mass on the Hollywood he both loved and—on the basis of this one—must have loathed as well. Few talking pictures crammed in so many quotable lines, but the visuals are equally striking: William Holden, face-down in Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool; the celebrated monkey funeral; Swanson standing up amid a projector’s beam and swirling cigarette smoke like some demented harpy direct from Hell; and that long descent down her mansion’s rococo staircase at the finale. William Holden’s performance as the doomed, tawdry screenwriter was his breakout, and 55 years later it’s still riveting. This was the movie that finally put an end to Wilder’s fertile partnership with co-scenarist Charles Brackett; D.M. Marshman Jr. shares a screenwriting credit, largely on the basis of having helped Wilder over a narrative hurdle by saying, “What if the old dame shoots the boy?”

19. The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers [1973/1974] A joyous collaboration between Richard Lester and the satirical novelist George MacDonald Fraser. One of the few times in movie history the assembling of an “all-star” casts wasn’t just a P.R. stunt: every actor in the picture is utterly right for the role, and they’re clearly having a blast, from Charlton Heston’s subtly duplicitous Cardinal Richelieu to the late Spike Milligan’s peerlessly pandering coward: wed to Raquel Welch, he’s so lust-smacked he actually vibrates. The tone is pleasingly light, the sets and costumes meticulously recreated, and the elaborate swordplay both comic and breathtakingly intricate. Starring Michael York as a sumptuously desirable D’Artagnon. With Faye Dunaway, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay and the great Roy Kinnear. Although released in two parts, it was filmed as a single, 4-hour epic. The first movie boasts a melodic and very witty score by Michel Legrand, reportedly written, under deadline pressure, in 7 days.

18. To Have and Have Not [1944] When I consider the movies that have entertained me the most, Howard Hawks is the name that—aside from Billy Wilder’s—most often recurs. This is arguably his most sheerly enjoyable movie, and manifestly more pleasurable than Casablanca, which enjoys the greater popularity. It's the one that introduced Bogie to Bacall, and you can actually see them falling in love as the picture unreels. Part intrigue, part action flick, part comedy, and perfectly integrated into one blissful package. With Hoagy Carmichael, Marcel Dalio and the peerless Walter Brennan, who asks the immortal question, “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?”

17. To Kill a Mockingbird [1962] It’s seldom a good idea to adapt great literature to the movies. But if you’re intent on doing it, at least hire Horton Foote to write the screenplay. Foote’s script distills the essence of Harper Lee’s wonderful novel, and that’s about all you can hope for in these things. Gregory Peck’s performance as the good man doing a difficult job probably inspired an entire generation of activists, and the children, Mary Badham and Phillip Alford are about as good as it’s possible to imagine. With a score by Elmer Bernstein that soars past genius and into something very much like the sublime.

16. Trouble in Paradise [1932] Ernst Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson made other movies together, but this is the top—the Coliseum, the Louvre Museum, the purple light of a summer night in Spain. Maybe the single most deft, sophisticated sex comedy ever made, it’s a virtual compendium of the things Lubitsch did best, and could do better than anyone else. Once you’ve seen it, you have a yardstick against which to measure romantic high comedy. Starring Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall as the libidinous Riviera thieves, Kay Francis as the mark who almost comes between them and, in a sparkling supporting cast, the great Charlie Ruggles—dithering as usual—and Edward Everett Horton as his fussiest.
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15. Chinatown [1974] L.A. noir via Roman Polanski and Robert Towne. One of the key American movies of the 1970s, this rueful evocation of a time, a place, and a real-life environmental scandal has lost some of its power to shock—that’s the trouble when your plot involves graphic nostril-cuttings and revelations of incest—but retains its ability to haunt. Jack Nicholson is impossibly beautiful as the private dick who’s unintentionally bitten off more than he can chew, and Faye Dunaway’s face is one of the great icons of modern American filmmaking. With John Huston as the most casually amoral of villains, and a great Jerry Goldsmith score.

14. City Lights [1931]/Modern Times [1940] I’m taking a leaf here from John Simon, who once said his favorite of these two “silent” masterpieces was whichever one he’d watched most recently. I often think City Lights has the edge, until I see Modern Times again, and then I’m not sure. The latter has Paulette Goddard at her most appealing, a beautifully composed finale, and Charlie performing French-laced gibberish as a singing waiter. But the former has a final shot that, as James Agee once said, constituted “the highest moment in movies.” If it fails to move you, your heart is a dishrag.

13. GoodFellas [1990] Martin Scorsese’s greatest movie, an exhilarating—and unflinching—look at the ineffable lure of crime. It’s an exuberant movie, full of great sequences and ebullient camerawork. A pitch-perfect cast (including Ray Liotta, Paul Sorvino, Lorraine Braco, Robert De Niro and a truly frightening Joe Pesci), a superbly layered screenplay (by Scorsese and Nick Pileggi, from the latter’s “true crime” book), and Scorsese’s patented brand of breakneck pace and audacious editing combine to make this the funniest, most shocking and, ultimately, most satisfying gangster picture of all time.

12. The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] If RKO had not cut, and then destroyed, 40 minutes of Orson Welles’ exquisitely imagined adaptation of the great Booth Tarkington novel, this would be Welles’ undisputed masterwork, and definitely among my five favorite movies. As it stands, it’s still astonishing, absorbing and deeply moving. The saga of a “great” family in a small town and the way time and progress passes it by is made an entrancing waltz of a movie though Welles’ unerring sense of place, timing, visual perfection and empathy. Tim Holt leads a perfect cast that includes Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Richard Bennett, and—supremely—the great Agnes Moorehead, giving the performance of her life as the family’s unloved, lonely, spinster aunt (although much too much of her performance was edited out in the final cut). Welles produced, wrote the elegiac screenplay, and provides the understated, ironic narration. The lovely, evocative cinematography is by Stanley Cortez, and Bernard Herrmann composed the rueful score.

11. Top Hat [1935]/Swing Time [1937] No one should be forced to chose a single Astaire-Rogers musical. Top Hat is probably the better movie: it’s swifter, more sparkling, lays some nice emphasis on those two incomparable sissies Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton, and boasts a pluperfect Irving Berlin score that includes a title song that elegantly sums up the appeal of Fred Astaire—whom Graham Greene once called the human equivalent of Mickey Mouse. (That isn’t the insult it seems; in the early ‘30s Mickey was not yet the figure of respectability he became; he was rambunctious, elastic, mischievous, even slightly cruel—just like Fred.) Swing Time, despite its occasional longuers and a truly silly finale, has a Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields score that is just about the greatest of its kind, and inspired Astaire to one of his supreme achievements: the duet with Rogers on “Never Gonna Dance.” Shot in a single take, the final portion of this breathless medley of everything for which we love these two required endless re-takes, and somewhere in the middle of it all, Rogers’ feet started to bleed. A side-note: Astaire was one of the American songbook’s great stylists, but just compare the way he listens to Ginger singing with the manner in which she takes in his vocalizations. He smiles a lot but looks faintly bored; she hangs on every word whether she’s facing him or not, and always seems to be hearing them for the first time. She not only (in Sylvia Fine’s memorable phrase) “did everything Fred did, backwards and in heels”; she also acted him off the screen.
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10. Singin’ in the Rain [1952] The best musical ever made. Period. The screenwriters, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, had only one order: turn the Herb Nacio Brown Arthur Freed song catalogue into a movie. All they knew was “at some point, there’d be rain, and someone would be singing in it.” Their first notion, involving a singing cowboy to be played by Howard Keel, was thankfully overpowered by their second: a loving if satirical look back at the beginnings of Talking Pictures. Every sequence works, building on and then topping the one that came before. The repartee is as fast and crackling as a '30s screwball farce, and the musical numbers are so well integrated into the movie's themes and action as to be positively Hammersteinian: when Gene Kelly serenades Debbie Reynolds, he evokes the mood on a Hollywood sound stage and his riotous “Moses Supposes” routine with Donald O’Connor takes off from a pompous lesson in early sound elocution. The title number is without doubt the most joyous musical declaration of love ever filmed, and the massive “Broadway Ballet” is, seemingly, a satire on Kelly’s own American in Paris ballet of the year before as the actor-dancer and (nominal) co-director deliciously mocks his own egocentric grandeur—the ballet ends with an extreme close up on his hammy, grinning face. (Never mind that no sound movie of 1927 could have been that mobile.) Reynolds was never more endearingly spunky, and O'Connor out does Danny Kaye in his loony perfection. If only all concerned had dropped the fey costume parade number, which isn't all that funny anyway, and reinstated Reynolds' charming, cut rendition of "You Are My Lucky Star"—which also would have given the eventual singing of it by Kelly in the finale a greater emotional force. Directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen (who did most of it). Cyd Charisse, all legs and green stockings, is Kelly’s partner in the ballet. But best of all is Jean Hagen as Kelly’s impossibly thickheaded screen paramour. A true test of devotion is to imitate her saying, “And I can’t stan’ ‘im!”—those who don’t get it are probably not people you’d want to be around anyway.

9. The Thief of Bagdad [1940] Alexander Korda’s monumental Arabian Nights fantasy is one of the most enchanting movies ever made, and as the “little thief” Apu, the young Indian actor Sabu epitomizes the sunny exuberance of every small child in the audience. (When you’re older you may notice how stunningly beautiful he is; those thighs are a work of art in themselves.) The color cinematography is ravishing, the sets astonishing, and the movie contains the first—and in some ways, finest—of Miklos Rozsa’s film scores; the great Conrad Veidt as a villain so archetypal that the folks at Disney “borrowed” him for Aladdin; Rex Ingram as a deliciously devious djinn who utters what may be the most stirring cry of the pre-Civil Rights era (“Free! Freeeeee!”); and John Justin and June Perez are a dream-team of thoroughly embraceable lovers. That charming rotter Miles Malleson—who also worked on the screenplay—is the emotionally retarded rajah with a yen for exotic toys. Flying carpets, wise old Muslims, an ancient and supernally gentle spirit, a terrifying battle with a giant spider, and a Persian market so cunningly recreated you can almost smell the honey Sabu slathers on his pancake. If I ever become so jaded I don't find tears in my eyes at the mischievous smile on the ancient face of the old mountain spirit as he discreetly observes Sabu’s heartfelt disobeyance, I’ll know I’ve lived too long. (And no, that’s not a misspelling in the title.)

8. The Wild Bunch [1969] When I first saw Sam Peckinpaw’s brutal, elegiac western a few years back—mercifully in the reconstructed edition—it took me about a week to get over it. Only one other American movie has affected me in a similar way (see Number 2 on this list) and for completely different reasons. Was it the opening sequence, in which a gun battle between an inexperienced posse takes out more by-standers than criminals? The slow motion fall of the horses when the bridge is blown up? The iconic final walk of the Bunch down a Mexican street? The excruciating battle between the Bunch and the Mexican Army that perfectly reflects the opening image of a quartet of scorpions beset by a colony of ants? The agonizing regret on Robert Ryan’s face, or William Holden’s heartbreakingly life-eaten countenance? The answer, of course, is all of this. Taken together, these elements—and so many more—were mixed by a master filmmaker who was obstinately misunderstood by his critics and who seldom had the success he deserved. The trim, incisive screenplay is by Walon Green and the superb score is by Jerry Fielding.

7. Vertigo [1957] A commercial disappointment on its original release and never chosen by the casual movie-goer as a Hitchcock favorite, this great, sad rumination on obsessive love is one of the most original American movies ever made. It also contains what may be James Stewart’s finest performance in an unsurpassed career of great performances. Whether you respond to this tragic emotional statement—it’s certainly not a thriller—will probably depend on your own personal response to the loss of ideal love. Kim Novak is radiant as the woman in question and the late Barbara Bel Geddes a revelation as the commercial artist silently pining for Stewart. Bernard Herrmann, who for all of his facility with the action genre, responded especially deeply to stories of romantic inevitability, wrote what may be his finest score.

6. Lawrence of Arabia [1961] David Lean’s best movie is one of the few intelligent—even intellectual—epics. It’s certainly unique in focusing on an essentially unknowable protagonist. The movie is an overwhelming experience on the big screen, which is really the only way to see it; no matter how wide your television screen, this is the sort of movie for which Panavision was created. If you aren’t watching those vast expanses of sand or the train blown off the rails and heading pell-mell toward the camera on a huge canvas, you aren’t really seeing them at all. There’s a great cast (Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Jose Ferrer and Claude Rains), a literate screenplay (credited to Robert Bolt), an iconic score by Maurice Jarre, and best of all, Peter O’Toole’s stunning central performance. Among the movie’s many pleasures is what I consider the single finest edit in the history of the movies: Lawrence, in profile, blows out a match and Lean immediately cuts to a humbling vista of sun-drenched desert. It’s a thrilling moment, but only one of many to come.
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5. The Godfather/The Godfather Part II [1972/1975] Not really two movies so much as a single, long narrative in two parts, this is Francis Coppola’s crowning achievement as a filmmaker. Taken separately these movies constitute two chapters in a uniquely American tragedy. Seen together, they form an overwhelming mosaic, a grand and heartbreaking look at one man’s single-minded pursuit of his own destruction. The parallel narrative style of Part II, which juxtaposes the rise of Don Corleone (Robert De Niro) with the personal downfall of his son Michael (Al Pacino), constitutes an increasingly emotional diptych contrasting the subtlety and warmth of the father with the ruthlessness and frigidity of his son. (It also, in a curious way, keeps Marlon Brando alive.) Both movies feature superb performances, especially those of Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale and Talia Shire. The first is dominated by Brando’s indelible presence and the second gives us not only De Niro but also an almost shockingly great performance by Lee Strasberg. Nino Rota composed the famous score for the first movie and was abetted by the director’s father Carmine on the second.

4. Pinocchio [1940] Bar none the greatest animated movie ever made in this country, and the finest work of Walt Disney’s long career. Its failure, along with that of Fantasia, caused Disney to retreat from conscious art to conscious kitsch—one of the great tragedies in popular American art. Pinocchio has never been as popular in its various reissues as more comforting fare such as Cinderella, and it’s a dark movie, no question. The Pleasure Isle transformation of Pinocchio’s truant pal Lampwick into a donkey ranks among the most terrifying animated sequences ever created, and there’s a truly disturbing image of an axe hurled at an immobile marionette. But it’s an enchanting picture overall, from its great Leigh Harline-Paul Smith score to the inspired voice work of Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards as Jiminy Cricket. The movie has a deep, detailed look unparalleled in animated features and, in the whale chase, one of the most excitingly executed cartoon sequences ever put on film. I can’t hear Cliff Edwards’ pure, ethereal falsetto on the high notes at the end of “When You Wish Upon a Star” without chills running up my back.

3. Cabaret [1972] I said Singin’ in the Rain was the best musical ever made, and I meant it; Bob Fosse’s adaptation of the Broadway hit Cabaret is less a musical than a drama with musical numbers. Only one of them occurs outside the context of the creepily seductive Berlin nightclub where Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles performs, and that isn’t a production number (the movie doesn’t really have any) but an impromptu anthem by an angelic-looking Aryan Youth that builds into a terrifyingly musical mob statement of National Socialistic fealty. Based rather loosely by Jay Presson Allen on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret goes much further into the original’s slightly veiled sexuality than any other version of this material prior to the recent Broadway revival of the stage musical. (Isherwood famously described Michael York’s homosexuality in the movie as something undesirable and uncontrollable, “like bed-wetting” and was heard to say, after a screening, “It’s a goddamn lie! I never slept with a woman in my life!”) Is it condescending? I don’t think so. Fosse and Allen never condemn York’s bisexual adventures, and you have to take their version of Isherwood as merely a single variation on the original material. (Although Minnelli using it as a pretext against marrying York is a bit much; would the real Sally Bowles have cared?) In any case, the look of the movie is overwhelming—it’s how we now think the Berlin of 1929 must have felt—and Fosse’s editing style dazzles no matter how often you’ve seen the movie. York is sumptuous to look at and, with his slightly shy smile and Isherwood-like haircut, perfectly cast. Minnelli was never better, or more controlled, and Joel Grey’s Emcee becomes a truly Mephistophelean figure, commenting on the action and winking lewdly. With Helmut Griem as the sexy bisexual count who woos both Minnelli and York, and, memorably, Fritz Wepper and Marisa Berenson as the ill-met lovers. The faux-Kurt Weill songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb are about as good as you can get.

2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977] The most entrancing movie I’ve ever seen. I can vividly remember sitting in a crowded theatre in 1977, with almost no foreknowledge of the story, and feeling this great, empathic fantasy wash over me like annealing waters. Steven Spielberg may have greater audience popularity with Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park and won his Oscars for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, but Close Encounters is his masterwork. It’s the most benign alien-invasion movie ever made, and full of wonders. (The special effects look so natural because Spielberg shot them in standard ratio and then blew the images up to widescreen.) Richard Dreyfuss makes a perfect Everyman, Francois Truffault’s face shines with gentle passion, and little Cary Guffey is an absolute amazement. The perfectly integrated score is, of course, by John Williams.

1. Some Like it Hot [1959] My favorite movie, and arguably the funniest comedy made after the advent of sound. Billy Wilder and co-scenarist I.A.L. Diamond took an episode from a forgotten German comedy and expanded it into a breakneck farce that took in gangland massacres, sexual duplicity, homosexual implication and transvestitism, turning it into one of the cheeriest comedies in movie history. Marilyn Monroe, famously unreliable, is luminous—when she’s onscreen you can’t take your eyes off her. The only fault I can finds in Tony Curtis’ defining performance as an unrepentant heel is that, in the persona of “Josephine,” his falsetto was provided by Paul Frees. But it is Jack Lemmon, whooping it up as “Geraldine,” who gives the movie’s greatest performance. It’s so inspired it seems to have come (as Lemmon always claimed the character was anyway) from the moon. Lemmon was, and is, my favorite actor, and for all his fine work (in The Apartment, Irma La Douce, Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, “Save the Tiger,” The China Syndrome, Missing and Glengarry Glen Ross) I don’t think he was ever better than he is here. This is Billy Wilder’s ultimate masterpiece, the movie that summed up everything he could do without breaking a sweat. The great Joe E. Brown has the classic final line—which Wilder always claimed was written by Diamond.

John Williams: "Star Wars Epsiode III: Revenge of the Sith"

2005-11-07T11:10:00.001-08:00

Professional film score aficianados are a curious breed, and they haven't been a bit happy with the closing installment of John Williams' magnificent magnum opus. "Too much of this, too little of that, he doesn't write new themes, whine whine whine."

Despite the purblind fan-boy carping directed at it, this is a score I've listened to repeatedly, with great emotion and a sense of awe at Williams' exquisite mastery. His choral work has become almost incredibly rich over the past few years (cf, "Duel of the Fates" in The Phantom Menace) and it reaches a true apogee here. His thematic use of motives has, of course, spread throughout the Star Wars scores, but in Revenge of the Sith this technique reaches unimagined heights. Williams' weaving of themes and variations is so subtle, complex and deeply felt it makes the score for what stands as the best of Lucas' "prequel" (horrible neologism) trilogy the second finest of the series, with The Empire Strikes Back its only competition.

Professional bitches have complained that the End Title medley is nothing more than a long recap of the series and a sort of "preview of coming attractions," suited more to the concert stage than the movie. I would argue that, aside from being a summing up and a look ahead, it is an almost overwhelming emotional journey through the series, reminding us (as Lucas himself does at the climax) what has passed and what pains, horrors and triumphs are yet to come for these beloved characters. I've found I can scarcely listen to it without misting up—maybe because I've lived with the series so long (I was 16 when it premiered in 1977) but largley due to John Williams' unparalleled artistry.

Star Wars changed the face of movie scoring; Revenge of the Sith shows us why it was Williams who did so.

Lily Tomlin at Duke

2005-10-26T10:00:00.001-07:00

Duke Performances Review
An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin Showcases

By Scott Ross

Lily Tomlin. Magical, musical name. But, my God—what can be said that hasn’t been already? And where to begin?

With her first inspired bit on national television, taps attached to her bare feet, tripping the light fantastic on a portable wooden floor? Or perhaps those indelible, utterly original characterizations—the endearingly acerbic yet somehow oddly sensual Ernestine Tomlin, Ma Bell’s favorite enforcer; the bratty, precocious, and utterly sane Edith Ann, dispensing fractured wisdom from her oversized rocker; and Audrey Earbore, the indefatigably proper “Tasteful Lady”—that both shot her to stardom and made the otherwise spotty “Laugh-In” the television comedy to watch in 1970?

Should we begin with the sublime Judith Beasley, that heartbreakingly sincere Calumet hausfrau with a backbone made of tungsten? Or with Tomlin’s astonishing movie debut in Robert Altman and Joan Tewkesbury’s superb 1975 mosaic Nashville, resplendent and moving as the Gospel-singing wife and mother who leaves perpetual satyr Keith Carradine dazed and confused after what he assumed would be just one more in an endless series of one-night stands? Or maybe with her loopy yet resilient Margo, first confounding, then becoming indispensable to tattered private detective Art Carney in Robert Benton’s charming take on modern L.A. criminology The Late Show (1977)?

But, stay—that doesn’t dent the surface, omitting as it does Tomlin’s exasperated corporate secretary Violet in ersatz Snow White costume, cheerfully ladling rat poison into her hated boss’s coffee cup, to the approval of her animated forest pals, in Nine to Five (1980). And what about her imperious, lonely Edwina Cutwater in All of Me (1984), challenging Steve Martin not to love her and creating an indispensable comic portrait out of little more than voice-overs and the occasional glimpse into a mirror?

And I haven’t even mentioned her sui generis multilayered (and densely populated) one-woman collaborations with her partner, that quiet genius of subversive wit Jane Wagner: the landmark “Modern Scream” LP, arguably the single most creatively brilliant and incisive comedy album of the 1970s; their superb initial journey to Broadway, Appearing Nitely (1977); their charming (if environmentally alarming) 1981 comic remake The Incredible Shrinking Woman; and—supremely—the transcendent The Search for Signs of Inteligent [sic] Life in the Universe (1986), the nearest thing to a Zen extravaganza Broadway has ever seen.

The foregoing may seem an exhaustive list, but I don’t think it touches the breadth and accomplishment of this most chameleon-like and protean of all solo performers. To call Lily Tomlin a stand-up comedian would be a bit like referring to Mark Twain as a humorist. It’s all too easy, and it doesn’t come close.

The Sept. 15th Duke Performances-sponsored An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin was something of a regression for this American original, a sort of “Greatest Hits” tour taking in selections—some excerpted, others fully realized—from her disparate projects. Whereas it was surprising to see Tomlin redux, rather than charting new horizons, the more important thing was just seeing Tomlin.

This was the irrepressible Lily in full: at the improbable age of 66, her inimitable voice deepened to husky smoke, her particular genius honed to glorious perfection. Present too those crisp, double-take-inducing cosmic one-liners (“Why is it when we talk to God we’re said to be praying -- but when God talks to us, we’re said to be schizophrenic?” “The most valuable survival skill we have is the ability to delude ourselves”) that, taken with the wistful smile, constitute the Tao of Tomlin (or is it Jane?) Here was Lily Tomlin, all of them: that gallery of strikingly sane eccentrics, from Trudy the Bag Lady to Sister Boogie Woman, that constitutes one of the living greatest ensemble companies in American entertainment. Tomlin is a little bit like illustrated radio: it’s all laid out for us, if we can only hear it. Perhaps only Richard Pryor (with whom she occasionally worked in the 1970s) shares Tomlin’s unbound ability to slip into and out of personas at will, locating their centers of comic gravity with unerring precision.

Re-locating material now outmoded by the speed of technology is a risky business, but may be imperative. What would today’s young people make of Ernestine’s telephone switchboard? (And when Lucille the Rubber Freak talks of eating a typewriter eraser, do they even know what she’s talking about?) We can take heart that Ernestine herself may be bowed as well as bloodied (“I gave the best years of my life to Ma Bell and what did it get me? When she went to pieces, so did I”) but not down and defiantly not out (“No matter how nasty I become, I’m still holding back”). Or that Judy Beasley, having given herself over to a more personal technology (the “Good Vibrations” sexual aid) has become “a semi-orgasmic woman”: “‘But does it kill romance?’ you say. And I say, ‘What doesn’t?’”

In the universe as seen by Lily Tomlin, you could almost swear she’s cloned herself; as Lud and Marie argue anew over that piece of cake that drives daughter Lily to paroxysms of hysteria, the merest gesture of hand miraculously convinces us that a conversation may be conducted by a single person, or that the carefully emolliated face of Madame Lupe, the World’s Oldest Living Beauty Expert (who once advised Somerset Maugham to “live by candlelight”) can be undone by a sneeze.

And when Tomlin waxes political (“I worry that we have the technology and the Administration to finally make Fascism work”), we can—after shuddering—only concur with Trudy, that survival of the fittest should be re-thought: If the continuity of life really was dependent on “survival of the wittiest,” Lily Tomlin (and Jane Wagner) would outlive us all.

Lily Tomlin: http://www.lilytomlin.com/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina prints these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/.

Paula Poundstone at the Carolina

2005-10-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Paula Poundstone at The Carolina Theatre

By Scott Ross

Ask most people what Improvisational Comedy means and chances are they’ll assume you’re referring to what happens on “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” or (at the other extreme, and with more preparation) Viola Spolin’s noble experiment in Chicago, which led to the original Second City and the ascendancy of its graduates—Alan Alda, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Joan Rivers, Severn Darden, Roger Bowen, Robert Klein, Paul Mazursky, and, earlier, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—to the Pantheon of post-war American humor.
Those are valid responses, of course, but the greater form is that practiced occasionally by Robin Williams and wholly by Mel Brooks in his heyday with Carl Reiner: wading in without prepared remarks. Call it what you will—working without a net, riffing on the audience itself—it’s the comedian’s equivalent of an extended jazz break, an ability so uncanny it’s almost akin to spiritual channeling. And while there are, seemingly, thousands of comics around, big and small, more than ready to perform what Spaulding Gray once called “genital-scented humor” (“pop!” “bang!” “pow!”), usually on the prescribed topics, there are never more than a handful of true verbal magicians in existence at any one time. Paula Poundstone is more than one in a million; she’s one in 300 million.

She was in top form last Friday evening, when she brought her Big Picture tour to convulsively funny life in Fletcher Hall at The Carolina Theatre in Durham, skewering with deadly accuracy everything from the ubiquity of Viagra commercials and the media’s current obsession (in which the news is about “how everyone’s talking about Martha Stewart”) to her own, much publicized, difficulties with alcohol, during which she “got a court order to attend Alcoholics Anonymous—on television.”

Poundstone, as her website correctly maintains, is not a comic “defined by the usual gender-biased topics of relationships, diets, men, or sex.” Yet the last time I saw this astonishing American treasure, at Charley Goodnight’s in Raleigh, some unsung idiot booked three female stand-ups to open for her, and all three made endless (and largely puerile) jokes about—wait for it—relationships, diets, men, and sex. It was as though Henny Youngman had introduced Lily Tomlin.

Although she now works a good deal of material concerning her foster and adopted children into the mix, Poundstone’s observations are the furthest thing from the usual young comedian’s applause-milking pap about family or—more horrifying—the precious, sick-making bilge we used to get courtesy of Art Linkletter. Poundstone’s world is one in which her daughter uses cerebral palsy as an attention-getting device, abandoning her mother to the task of explaining it to strangers (“Really, she doesn’t fall over any more than the rest of us”); her son’s grammar school teacher thinks she’s reading obscenities to the class when the phrase “silly ass” turns up in Emil and the Detectives; and their school requires parents to compose something called “Comfort Notes” in case of emergency.

Poundstone also delivered a phalanx of achingly funny remarks on any number of peripatetic subjects: the increasing difficulty, in our age of ear-bud cell phones, to tell CEO from the schizophrenic; the insanity of injecting man-made fat into our food. Concerning Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Poundstone proved her own manifestation of the condition -- as she phrases it, her “inability to stop talking”—by regaling us for over two hours, sans the intermission she forgot to stop for.

I doubt anyone minded. We were all much too busy laughing.

Paula Poundstone: http://www.paulapoundstone.com/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.
SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

Glen Berger's "Underneath the Lintel" at Flying Machine

2005-10-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

Underneath The Lintel

By Scott Ross

If you’re perusing this and have not seen the Flying Machine Theatre Company production of Glen Berger’s Underneath the Lintel at Raleigh Charter High School, stop reading, call 800/514-ETIX, and book your tickets now. Because if you miss this one—and too many Triangle theater-goers already have—you will have deprived yourself of an experience so unique and rapturous it will refresh your spirit, fire your mind, and enrich every corner of your life.

Make the call. I’ll wait.

Got your tickets? Good. Now please allow me to give you some small notion of the sublime pleasures that await you. I’m going to be brief, and somewhat elliptical, because any proper encapsulation of this play risks revealing too much, and lessening its powerful impact.

Underneath the Lintel consists of an impassioned semi-lecture by a shabby Dutch librarian—played with extraordinary depth of feeling by Julian “J” Chachula, Jr.—which relates his belief-shaking, life-altering attempt to track down the borrower of an extremely overdue book. As interest becomes obsession, the Librarian takes us on a mystic, metaphysical journey that, much like a peeled onion, reveals layer upon layer of the miraculous. The play is spiritual in the very best sense, and concerned with some of the profoundest questions of human experience.

It gives little away to note that the Librarian’s “Impressive Presentation of Lovely Evidences” takes in an ancient Baedeker, a laundry ticket used as a bookmark, a pair of unclaimed trousers, a tram ticket from 1912, a 232-year-old work voucher, several productions of Les Misérables, a whistled tune that defies the logic of time, the death of Aeschylus, and a 50-cent recording made at the 1939 World’s Fair.

There’s more than a hint of the marvelous James Burke series “Connections” here, but that is peripheral. What matters is the emotional core the playwright slowly reveals, and the exquisite texture of those revelations. In Underneath the Lintel, Glen Berger has pulled off one of the most difficult forms of theater—the monodrama, or one-man show—with verve, wit, style, passion, and breath-taking aplomb. The language soars with unselfconscious brilliance, and the characterization is one of exceptional solidity. All of that is impressive enough, but Berger’s ultimate triumph lies in the contents of the exercise. Here, the everyday assumes the contours of the genuinely poetic and the unexceptional an emotional aspect of terrible, moving import.

I can only hint at the transcendent perfection of Chachula’s performance in this limited space, but it’s a beauty. The Librarian is slightly self-important, more than a bit priggish, and often achingly funny, and the actor gets it all absolutely right. (His Dutch accent is somewhat variable, but that’s a minor aside.) Chachula lets us see how obsession enlivens this gray little functionary in increments, until at last his eyes shine with the fever of discovery, desire, hope, and a desperately human need. This is a performance of such rare acumen, joy, erudition, and anguish it can sear your skin off.

The staging by Mark Perry (himself a playwright of note) could scarcely be bettered: his work encompasses pace, tension, and a superbly timed reflectiveness that meshes perfectly with the actor and the text. Devra Thomas deserves a mention as well for her apt and well-chosen props, which are of uncommon importance to the play. Steve Tell has done wonders lighting a difficult space, and Wade Dansby III has designed an exceptionally haunting graphic image for the playbill.

This vital production has been playing to shamefully small audiences during its run. This, it seems to me, is so appalling it verges on the criminal. The Librarian wonders if he would recognize a miracle if he saw it? To which I can only reply: I would. I saw one Saturday night: it’s called Underneath the Lintel.

Go thou and do likewise.

http://www.flyingmachinetheatre.com/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

Harold Brighouse's "Hobson's Choice" at PlayMakers

2005-10-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

Hobson’s Choice

By Scott Ross

Few theatergoers, I suspect, are all that familiar with Harold Brighouse’s 1915 comedy of Victorian manners Hobson’s Choice. Movie mavens may recall with fondness Charles Laughton’s drunken encounter with a huge, puddle-reflected moon and his subsequent (and marvelously cinematic) fall down a coal-chute in the 1954 David Lean adaptation. Musical theater aficionados may likewise call up dim recollection of the 1966 Broadway musical Walking Happy, about whose star John Simon memorably remarked, “If this is Norman Wisdom, I’ll take Saxon Folly.”

It is with thanks, then, that we turn to PlayMakers Repertory Company, whose current, scenically spare production emphasizes Brighouse’s rich dialogue and precise characterizations and returns a forgotten treasure to glory.

Hobson’s Choice is also a cunning curtain raiser of sorts for PRC’s next undertaking. For, as with King Lear, the Lancashire bootmaker Henry Horatio Hobson—a small-time tyrant—must contend with three querulous daughters, a divided kingdom, and inexorable descent into helplessness. Unlike Shakespeare’s monarch, however, Hobson is able to discover the true nature of his wayward daughter’s fidelity before irreparable harm is done and is thus spared having to carry her lifeless form to cries of “Howl, howl, howl!” That’s the difference between comedy and tragedy.

The play’s bustling, forward drive keeps the events moving at a brisk pace yet allows for a reflective contemplation of its characters, and a quietly dawning realization that these Victorian figures (the period is, roughly, 1886) are far more modern than may at first be supposed. Hobson’s eldest, Maggie, contemptuously referred to as an Old Maid, is something of a feminist prototype; and her final triumph over her father’s patriarchy is a victory for all disenfranchised daughters.

But Brighouse was no polemicist, and his characters are more than mere symbols. The play’s final scene carries with it a darker, more contemporary notion: the father becomes the child, the daughter his caregiver. (Maggie’s sisters, as one with Regan and Goneril, deny this second-rate Lear any succor.)

Blake Robison, the production’s director, gives us Hobson’s Choice neat. My only cavil is his tendency toward stasis, which robs the actors of some physical characterization and blunts the effect of later moments that require a contemplative stillness for their impact.

Still, the cleanness of Robison’s staging is perfectly realized in McKay Coble’s minimalist set design, a thing of beauty in its own right. Coble’s spare set (in concert with Peter West’s evocative lighting and Russell Parkman’s peerless costumes) strips away the overfed clutter of Victorian verisimilitude, replacing it with a striking simplicity which provides just enough detail to place the action and allow us to revel in Brighouse’s splendid stage language.

A ladder, some curved stools, a rack of display shoes, a fitting seat, a large hanging boot icon, and a trapdoor, below which the bootmakers toil in anonymity, represent Hobson’s bootery. A brick façade hangs above, which will eventually fuse with a rising cellar to create the impoverished storefront of Hobson’s eventual rival Will Mossop. A beautifully detailed period street along the upstage wall, complete with plank fence, worn advertisements and the residue of old posters, completes the detail. An addition fillip is Anthony Reimer’s delicious Victorian band music, which punctuates the action between scenes with witty aplomb.

The casting, with a single exception so small it barely merits comment, is perfection. Robert Breuler’s expansive Hobson is everything one could wish—imperious, disdainful, petty, misogynist, sodden, and oddly endearing at once. Matching him blow for blow is the indomitable Rachel Fowler, who manages the enviable feat of making Maggie both holy terror and curiously likeable, never more so than when playing Pygmalion to the Galatea of Jeffrey Blair Cornell’s adorably reticent Will Mossop.

As Maggie’s siblings Alice and Vicky, Carrie Heitman and Karen Walsh move from latent to explicit snobbery without a hitch. As the sisters’ equally social-striving beaus, Kenneth P. Strong and Jeffrey Meanza deftly slide from potential caricature to Hobson’s worthy opponents. In smaller roles, Julie Fishell, Adam Sheaffer, David Adamson and (all-too briefly) the superb Ray Dooley, lend the imprimatur of absolute thespic authority.

It’s doubtful we’ll see a more intelligent, thoughtful, or fulsome comedy this season than this sunny, if black-tinged, saga of upward mobility and the downward spiral of dipsomania. This Hobson’s Choice is choice indeed.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Joe Calarco's "Shakespeare's R & J" at StreetSigns

2005-10-26T09:57:00.001-07:00

Shakespeare’s R & J

By Scott Ross

I’ve often thought a fascinating play is waiting to be written around the Elizabethan practice of boy actors assaying the female roles in the plays of Shakespeare, and the sexual tension this convention almost certainly lead to. This idea applies perhaps especially to the lucky youths who first performed those magnificently ardent adolescent lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare’s R & J, Joe Calarco’s re-imaging of the Bard, isn’t precisely the play of my fond imagination either. But, as its splendid new production by StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance in Studio 6 of Swain Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill proves, it doesn’t need to be. It’s quite stunning enough on its own.

By setting his adaptation in a Catholic boy’s school where four young students surreptitiously examine the play by enacting all the roles, Calarco gets to the heart of institutionalized taboo. For Shakespeare’s lovers, of course, the forbidden nature of their courtship lies in the extreme enmity between their warring clans. For Calarco’s, it’s the bursting forth of feeling between young males in a repressive environment.

The promotional material for Shakespeare’s R & J emphasizes that Romeo and Juliet itself (and, presumably, all of Shakespeare) is banned by the school, and that the book from which the students read is discovered hidden away, yet there is no real evidence of this in Calarco’s treatment. We see the boys (called Students 1-4) in regimented study, much of which consists of misogynist discourses on the prescribed differences between the sexes, but there is no direct imprecation against the reading of Shakespeare; Student 1 merely produces the volume from a trunk. The subsequent “performance” is clearly clandestine, but the reasons for its surreptitious nature are barely implied.

That said, Shakespeare’s R & J, especially as performed here by a superb cast of young actors under the searching direction of StreetSigns associate artistic director Joseph Megel, is joyous. We hear that glorious text enacted by a quartet of uncommonly gifted players, and the seditious context gives this well-known tragedy a resonance well beyond the contours of your high school English prep experience.

The game is afoot early on, when Student 1 (Akil) breaks away from the stultifying routine of Latin, mathematics, religious instruction, and antiquated imprecations against sex to “write” Shakespearean love poetry while his cohorts make obeisance to God for their sins. This, already, is Romeo: aloof, apart from his friends in his romantic melancholy—a grandiose form of painful pleasure accessible only to the young and hopeful.

It is this young man who entices the others to imbibe from the fount of iambic pentameter. His reluctant friends, embarrassed at first (and initially inclined to childish improvisation, particularly when called upon to portray the women of the play), gradually become intoxicated by the words they’re speaking and submit to the power, and the beauty, of Shakespeare’s Verona. This is especially apt given that Romeo and Juliet are as besotted with words as they are with each other; they’re as drunk on language as they are on their own sudden passion.

As Student 2 (Francis A. Sarnie IV) takes on the role of Juliet, what begins as anxious and fearful role-playing relaxes into acquiescence and, finally, to full-bodied romantic feeling. As their staged courtship intensifies, the emotional and physical desires of the two boys likewise catch fire. At the same time their compatriots, disturbed by the blurring of the line between stage poetry and sexual expression, begin to reflect the actions and attitudes of those characters most opposed to the union between Capulet and Montague in the play itself.

This is notably true of Student 3 (Christopher Salazar), who frequently thrusts himself physically between the lovers—attempting to stave off this “unacceptable” behavior and, perhaps, to protect himself from his own deepest fears. Student 4 (Ronnie Cruz) is, initially, as troubled as his friend, but relents more easily. The “impromptu” casting in this play-within-a-play reflects these concerns: Student 4 assumes the role of the sympathetic Nurse (although he’s also the hot-blooded Tybalt); Student 3 the bellicose mother Capulet and an initially reticent Friar Laurence.

The opposition of the third boy to the events swirling out of his control is most effectively illuminated when, in the marriage scene, he and Student 4 play “keep away” with the book before he tears out the offending page, crumples it, and hurls it to the ground in righteous defiance. (When the event goes ahead, both boys mockingly vocalize the familiar Nino Rota theme from Zefferelli’s film.)

The impact of the greater social forces surrounding the budding lovers is alluded to early on when, at the Capulet’s ball, the boys attempt to waltz with each other; each time two of them face off, the stern warning “Thou shalt not!” is repeatedly invoked just as hands are about to touch. When Romeo woos Juliet, Student 2 first resists the closeness of Student 1, then relents; allows his hand to be kissed, then resists; yields again, allowing Student 1 to take his hand but covering this intimacy with the length of red cloth the boys employ as their sole prop. When he finally gives in, that first tender, halting kiss is wrenchingly curtailed by the other boys—just as the couple’s wedding kiss will be rudely torn asunder by the tolling of school bells and a flash of antiseptic institutional light.

As the Romeo of both Calarco’s play and Shakespeare’s, Akil gives a performance of enormous sensitivity and a certain cunning that lends his portrayal a quality of interesting edginess: it is his cajoling that encourages the others to undertake the tragedy, his intensity that wears down his reluctant Juliet. His “Nightingale” scene with Student 2 is terribly sweet and ineffably moving. As Student 4, Ronnie Cruz is an altogether more malleable figure, troubled by the flaring of erotic and emotional attachment between Students 1 and 2 but less obstreperous than Student 3 in opposing it. Cruz’s Nurse begins as caricature and finishes all too human.

As the object of Student 1’s increasing affection, Francis Sarnie gives a lovely, iridescent performance. As Student 2 Sarnie, like Juliet herself, goes from skittish but pliable to swooningly entranced, triumphantly rebellious and, later, unabashedly grieving -- all without recourse to anything so obvious as the broad effeminacy a lesser actor might affect. Like the boy he plays, Sarnie gives himself over to rhapsody; as the balcony scene begins, he sits, musing, a look of hopeful serenity on his face that broadens to a smile of utter romantic joy at the approach of his beloved. I’ve seldom seen the state of love-struck bliss so endearingly conveyed.

It would be unfair to single out one performer from a quartet as accomplished as this. A special nod must be given, however, to Christopher Salazar’s complex and unpredictable Student 3. His Mercutio is athletic, playful, and insouciant in equal measure, and his reading of the “Queen Mab” speech begins with joking and climaxes with a shout of agonized, enigmatic rage. Later, as Friar Laurence, his fury at Romeo’s self-pitying emotional excess neatly dovetails with the Catholic schoolboy’s own impotent anger as his classmates step over the boundary of play-acting into genuine emotional entanglement.

The play, and Megel’s direction of it, resounds with delicious theatricality. When figures of mature authority (Lord Capulet, the Prince, the Apothecary) speak, they do so in staggeringly effective roundelay as the boys recite together or echo and overlap each other’s lines, giving the speeches a gravity and a sense of adult propriety lording itself over the students even in their play-acting. As the first act closes, the boys doff their school ties and sweaters, a simple act that stands as a metaphor for their increasing rebelliousness—a revolutionary pose all too easily retreated from at the close of the play. As Juliet awaits news of Romeo, two of the boys beat out the hours of the clock. Calarco (and Megel) use the play’s single prop, that vibrant red cloth, as everything from prince’s cape and priest’s vestment to Juliet’s wedding veil and even as a representation of the blood that flows so freely throughout the text.

Rob Hamilton’s set design powerfully conveys both the medieval architecture of Verona and the sense of the Church’s repressive corporeal solemnity hanging over the boys and their play, and is beautifully complimented by Steve Dubay’s evocative lighting.

Personal Note: There seems to be some curious force at work on Triangle audiences of late. At a recent Friday evening performance of Underneath the Lintel, fewer than a dozen spectators gathered to see that beautifully lucid, incandescent play. At the subsequent Saturday night performance of R & J, there could scarcely have been more than double that number in attendance.

What is scaring audiences away from theater so vital and enriching that nearly everything else on offer pales to insignificance? Is the economy to blame? It seems unlikely, given the crowds that assemble for other, less probing and essential fare. Have we become so frightened of the new, the untested, that we eschew the experience altogether? Great theater is available right this minute, and it goes begging. Why are there so few takers?

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Mark Ravenhill's "Shopping and Fucking" at Manbites Dog

2005-10-26T09:57:00.000-07:00

Shopping and Fucking

By Scott Ross

When it comes to assaying Mark Ravenhill’s deliberately scabrous 1996 London hit Shopping and Fucking, I suspect there’s no winning. A rave invites accusations—on evidence, well deserved—of pretension, a lukewarm response some suspicion of obtuseness, and outright condemnation those dread twin bogeys “closed-minded” and “homophobic.”

A playwright who names his magnum opus with a word no newspaper will print is looking for means to shock. And when that play begins with a graphic display of vomiting and includes gratuitous nudity, simulations of anilingus, and copious quantities of bloodletting, sadomasochism, impenetrable dialect (and dialogue), and characters who bear little relation to life as we know it on this planet, that dramatist pushes well beyond outrage and into something very like assault.

For someone who attempts to uphold Seneca’s maxim (“I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me”), a play like this is something of an acid test for tolerance. I don’t mind being disturbed by art or performance; indeed, I often relish the experience. But Ravenhill (who, astonishingly, has been compared to Joe Orton) piles on the ugliness and casual—if not downright bored—depictions of violent activity, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated by and against characters for whom we feel not the slightest empathy. His script gives every sign that its author has suckled too long at the teat of Sam Shepard and David Mamet—pretty undernourished sources to begin with.

The current production of the play by Manbites Dog Theater Company, under the direction of Jay O’Berski, is certainly arresting. His cast, especially Sarah Erickson and Amit V. Mahtaney, is game, but the play is gamier. Only the treasurable Lissa Brennan (in a role written for a male actor) manages to combine humor and profanity in a striking manner. Despite my intense aversion to the play, I suspect I’ll long cherish the way Brennan expresses the phrase “attacked by a herd of wild coos.”

Publicity for Shopping and Fucking includes this helpful imprecation: “Faint of heart or easily offended? Attend A Christmas Carol instead.” It takes a special kind of arrogance to make a statement like that, a presumption that any yahoo philistine enough to dislike this play deserves, and can appreciate, only pap—even an audience predisposed to support the decidedly adult offerings of Manbites Dog. Judging from the number of walkouts at intermission (my own included), that snotty little caution may turn out to be less caveat than self-fulfilling prophecy.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

"Cabaret" at NCSU

2005-10-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

Cabaret

By Scott Ross

Before discussing John McIlwee’s recent, often astonishingly effective, production of Cabaret for University Theatre at N.C. State (Oct. 1-5), a few side observations on the show’s artistic progenitors.

First, Christopher Isherwood. Although heavily camouflaged, Isherwood’s dispatches from pre-Hitler Berlin—collected in Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin—are the front from which all else flows: the John Van Druten play I Am a Camera, which first enshrined Sally Bowles as the central figure of the franchise (she’s only one of many in the Isherwood stories) and its subsequent film; the 1966 musicalization; the great 1972 Bob Fosse film, arguably the finest movie musical of the past 50 years; and the current, aggressively de-glamorized 1998 revision, still tempting New York audiences with its slightly sinister opening number of welcome. (When it closes in November, it will have run nearly twice as long as the original production.)

Each incarnation of the material has played fast-and-loose with its source, to varying degrees of success; the Fosse film comes closest, but even it transforms the Isherwood figure from ardent homophile to reluctant bisexual. (At an early screening, Isherwood was heard to hiss, “It’s a goddamned lie! I never slept with a woman in my life!”) But no version, even the gritty recent edition put together by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, has had the courage to deal honestly with the author as an observer of, and participant in, the action. Isherwood went to Germany in search of an idealized romantic friendship; his fictional compatriots are there to write, or teach English, or both—certainly not to indulge their erotic imaginations with the more adventurous boys of Berlin. Worse, every edition of this material gets the Isherwood figure (whether called Chris, Cliff, or Brian) romantically—and sexually—involved with Sally Bowles.

Skipping over such matters as Christopher’s Americanization—like Sally, he was British—the second difficulty with Cabaret is its secondary leads: a pair of Rodgers and Hammerstein holdovers, they’re purveyors of the subplot, made more relevant only by dint of their confrontation with nascent Nazi-era anti-Semitism. Fraulein Schneider, the landlady, and her Jewish beau Herr Schultz are vividly rendered, and Schneider benefited originally from the inspired casting of Lotte Lenya, a living link to the era and the Kurt Weill-ish vamps by the show’s composer John Kander. But they’re still largely comic relief until late in the first act. Their story, however affecting, is—as with Sally and Cliff—all too conventional for a musical as boldly theatrical as this one.

Which brings us rather neatly to Harold Prince. More than anyone else, it is Prince who “created” Cabaret, or at least, gave it its iconic style. I would go so far as to say without fear of contradiction that Hal Prince has had a greater influence on musical theatre, both here and abroad, than any other single figure of the past 40 years. Devotees of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon aren’t aware of it, but the shows they love are the direct result of the innovations Prince (with Jerome Robbins, and abetted by Stephen Sondheim) bequeathed to the musical play: continuous action, unbroken by all those boring blackouts to shift the scenery; complex, contrapuntal intermingling of scene, character, and song; juxtapositions and narrative commentary that buttress and expand upon the emotive and intellectual cores of the shows themselves. More than staging his musicals, Prince has shaped or re-shaped them, often before the authors’ ink was dry. With Cabaret—more than most—what you see today, however revised, exists only because Harold Prince dreamt it first.

It was Prince who recalled the midget M.C. of a seedy dive in post-World War I Berlin, patent-leather hair parted down the middle, face whitened and lips painted red. It was Prince as well who, floored by a performance of the Taganka Theatre in Russia, burned to adapt its radical notions of staging and brilliant use of light. It was Prince, too, who gave the show its central metaphor: the tilted mirror over the stage which rose and fell, reflecting and implicating the audience. It was also Prince who, with his librettist Joe Masteroff, took 15 minutes of introductory material and wove it into the show itself, each number now illustrating the hedonism of the late Weimar era and commenting on the action. And it was Prince’s notion that the Emcee (and other characters as well) should observe the action of the “book” scenes, from various vantage-points, throughout the evening. There was, of course, a superbly dark score by the always-underrated Kander and his lyricist Fred Ebb, and Masteroff’s concise, effective book; but it was Prince’s direction of the show that made Cabaret, with Fiddler on the Roof (which he also produced) one of the two essential musicals of the 1960s.

Prince’s creative spirit hovered over the recent production of the Mendes edition of Cabaret at Stewart Theatre, beginning with the pre-show arrival of the Kit Kat Klub’s audience: the maitre d’ teased a leather-clad waiter, playfully swatting his bottom; a drunken, eye-patch and fez-wearing Moroccan tottered drunkenly about the stage; a pair pinstripe-suited Lesbians flirted with a lumpen showgirl; a cabaret boy crossed by, in half-drag, while respectable ladies and gents thrilled to the demi-monde around them. The Kit Kat Klub was now much a dive, tattered and stripped of all glamour, the girls more closely resembling the blowsy Valkyries of the Fosse vision—tawdry, dumpy, and omnisexual.

This, more earthy version of the cabaret also rings changes in the opportunistic figure of the Emcee. He still sports make-up and parted hair (in this production, Dan Seda wore garish, glitter lipstick) but his tuxedo has been replaced with a bare chest augmented by parachute straps, and his manner is even seedier than the more familiar Joel Grey characterization. This Emcee positively glories in his own vulgarity and (seeming) pansexuality. I say “seeming” because at the end of the evening he’s dressed in the striped uniform of the concentration camp inmate, an unambiguous pink triangle pasted over his chest.

McIlwee took a few liberties of his own, such as adding a trio of boy singers clad as brown-shirted Hitler Youth to perform the show’s Nazi anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” their beautiful voices a perfect counterpoint to the ominous lyric and their angelic Aryan looks a chilling reminder. (This year marks the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the more or less beginning of the Nazi pogroms against the Jews of Germany.)

The cast of this production was just about perfect, from the protean Bobby of Jeff Spanner, whose interpolations included a stint as one of the Emcee’s “Two Ladies” and the female gorilla courted by the Emcee in the alternately hilarious and chilling gymnastic buck-and-wing “If You Could See Her,” to the spectacularly effective Sally of Katie Flaherty.

Sarah Schrock was a warm, funny Fraulein Schneider, her almost maniac devotion to being sensible finally winning out over her romantic feelings for Herr Schultz (Fred Gorelick). Long a University Theatre favorite, Schrock had an unerring sense of movement, gesture, and intonation: when the inevitable Nazi brick was hurled through Schultz’s fruit-shop window, her reading of Schneider’s line “I understand ...” carried within it all of the character’s warring emotions. That one moment, devastating in its clarity, was easily as heartbreaking as Schrock’s impassioned rendition of that haunting ode to practicality, “What Would You Do?”

Gorelick gave a lovely interpretation of Schultz, his blindness to the reality closing in on him most movingly conveyed at the end when, with incomparable—and exceptionally underplayed -- dignity he sealed his own fate with the unutterably sad statement of defiance, “After all, what am I? A German.” Kate Isley made the most of her role as the opportunistic Fraulein Kost, a whore who—like so many Germans of the period -- places her shattered faith in the promise of National Socialism.

Curtis Kirkhoff, lithe and blond, was practically a poster child for the Nazi movement as the charmingly seductive Ernest Ludwig who, in this version of the show, is reputedly attracted sexually to Cliff—making him less an SS man than a member of the SA—although I could detect no sign of this. Will Sanders’ Cliff was a well-meaning minnow swimming against the increasing current of nationalism. The Mendes revision leaves him largely un-musicalized, which works toward making him a more Isherwoodian figure, observing but never quite a part of, the events. And that brings us to Katie Flaherty’s utterly flawless Sally Bowles.

Hal Prince felt that Sally, a third-rate entertainer in a fifth-rate nightclub, wouldn’t be much of a singer. He caught a large measure of flack for this decision, but as Mendes proved in his casting of Natasha Richardson, it can be made to work. The great contradiction of the Fosse film is the presence of Liza Minnelli who, great as she was (will she ever be again?), sang far too well to be quite believable, yet pulled us over that hitch in logic with consummate musicianship and complete conviction. The same may be said of Flaherty, whose intensity, overwhelming strength of personality, and staggering vocal ability somehow made the fantasy work. Her vocal quality put me in mind of the clarion belt of Bernadette Peters, but that isn’t saying nearly enough to convey the sheer, staggering force with which she essayed those familiar anthems.

When she stepped outside the scene she was playing with Cliff to imagine herself as the (in Ebb’s curiously un-Sallylike phrase) “Lady peaceful/Lady happy” of “Maybe This Time,” Flaherty almost made us believe the character’s momentary self-delusion. And when, late in the second act, she confronted Cliff with the news of having aborted “their” child, Flaherty allowed Sally’s pain to surface incrementally but without the hysteria a lesser actor would be tempted to indulge. Her performance of “Cabaret” was masterly. When she sang, “I used to have this girlfriend/Known as Elsie,” her faraway look suggested she had really just recalled that girl—a stand-in for Sally herself—who succumbed to “too much pills and liquor.” And her movements, increasingly frantic, became a kind of mad invocation; this Sally Bowles was desperate to convince herself that life really was a cabaret, old chum.

Matching Flaherty blow-for-blow (a feat in itself) was Dan Seda’s polymorphously perverse Emcee. His body a fluid mass of unabashed exhibitionism, his every leer a come-on to some as-yet undiscovered level of Hell, and possessing a voice that floated with seeming ease from high baritone to lyric tenor, Seda gave an account not of evil but of show-biz with a death’s-head grin: his Emcee’s foolish embrace of National Socialism, born of god only knows what sense of self-satisfied pragmatism, is only a reprieve. By the end, it has betrayed him, as it did so many others. His support of its gleaming promise was not enough to keep that pink triangle off his cadaverous chest.

I cannot say enough about how the varied elements of this production—Cindy Hoban’s exuberantly vulgar choreography; Julie Florin’s superbly balanced musical direction; Crawford Pratt’s marvelously tatty and inventive set designs; Terri L. Janney’s the evocative, chiaroscuro lighting effects; Ida Bostian’s cheerily decadent costumes—illuminated the dark corners of this great, flawed masterpiece of American musical theater. Nor can I convey the authoritative command with which John McIlwee mounted it. For well over a decade now this witty, congenial man has been quietly directing some of the Triangle’s most consistently engaging productions, usually with scant (and often willfully dismissive) critical praise. It’s long past time his undemonstrative genius was acknowledged. Consider it done now, and gratefully.

University Theatre at N.C. State: http://www.ncsu.edu/theatre.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

"Tintypes" at Peace

2005-10-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

Peace College Theatre Review

Tintypes May Well Be the Best Show
of the 2003 Theatrical Year

By Scott Ross
Robert's Reviews

When Tintypes premiered in 1981, Stephen Sondheim called it “just about the best show I’ve seen in 20 years.” Heady praise indeed, but as the new production by Peace College Theatre so deftly proves, Tintypes is a musical of rampant joy and boundless ingenuity. It’s been one of my personal favorites for just over two decades, but I must admit I never expected to see it done with the unalloyed brilliance on display in the Leggett Theater.

Conceived by Mary Kyte (with an assist from Mel Marvin and Gary Pearle) and featuring the great Lynne Thigpen (can she really be dead?), Tintypes suffered—unfairly, I think—through comparison with E.L. Doctorow’s magnificent Bicentennial novel Ragtime. One could almost call the show the first musical based on Doctorow’s book.

Both are set in the early days of what came to be known (rather prematurely, I suspect) as The American Century. Both use that syncopated explosion once called “ragged-time” as a jumping off point. Both refract the era’s less discussed, more bitter realities through the artless optimism that greeted it. Both contain as central figures that remarkable anarchist Emma Goldman, and both look askance at the activities of that perpetual infant, Teddy Roosevelt. (As Gore Vidal reminds us, the British Ambassador once warned his superiors, “We must never forget that the President is seven years old.”) Both feature a distinctly prominent stage performer of dubious origins—Stanford White’s mistress Evelyn Nesbit in Ragtime, Ziegfeld’s inamorata Anna Held here. And in both is the genteel noblesse oblige of the comfortable white male contrasted sharply with the experience of the Jewish immigrant, the black American, and the poor of all stripes welcomed so memorably by Emma Lazarus, if not by many of her contemporaries.

But Tintypes is less a plotted musical play—as is the eventual musical based directly on Doctorow—than a kind of ragtime oratorio, a scrapbook illuminated (and just as often, unironically misrepresented) by the American popular songbook.

The canvas from which Kyte et al. took their the score is not only rich, but beautifully encapsulates the urban American experience from roughly 1890 to 1917: the parlor-safe romantic oleos of Victor Herbert are made obsolete by the “scandalous” rags of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries; the brash enthusiasm of George M. Cohan must make way for the rueful comic arias of Bert Williams; and the marches of Sousa (himself a child of immigrants) fall before the exuberant vulgarity of the “coon” song and the vaudeville turn.

The emergence of Jewish and African-American tonalities swept away the more decorous cobwebs and gave us a new music to match the changes being wrought in our formerly white bread—and white-bred—world. When the Jewish composer filtered the melodic strain of black America through the klezmer-call of Eastern Europe, something new arose: a native American sound which would receive its fullest apotheosis in the songs of George Gershwin and Harold Arlen. This cross-pollination, so vital to our cultural sense of self, is what Tintypes is really about.

None of this, I hope, makes Tintypes sound like some ethnographic musicological treatise, because nothing could be further from the truth. But that’s the kind of show this is: you’re royally entertained for two hours by one of the most ebullient little musicals ever created, then left to ponder the most profound questions about what it means to be an American.

Under the astonishingly inventive yet never obtrusive direction and choreography of Deb Gillingham, a protean cast of five expertly plays out all the contradictions, disparities, joys, and affirmation Tintypes bequeaths. It’s the tightest, most gifted ensemble of musical performers I’ve seen in years.

Kenny Gannon is by turns wistful, tremulous, abashed, joyous, and altogether endearing as the Chaplinesque newcomer—he even does a tiny dance of mechanized heebie-jeebies, like Charlie in the factory of Modern Times—whose rush of immigrant enthusiasm (“I think in this place, anything is possible”) butts up against the crueler realities of the closed society. David Bartlett essays any number of impressive roles but is at his considerable best mouthing the empty jingoism of T.R., behind which lay disquieting dreams of American imperialism. (It’s no accident that his signature song is that egotist’s delight, “I Want What I Want When I Want It,” climaxed by a held “I” that threatens to go on forever.) The seemingly guileless menace lurking beneath Bartlett’s robust performance may put you in mind of another occupant of the White House, rather more recently ensconced. (For the Philippines, think Afghanistan; for Cuba, Iraq.)

Christian Sineath has a lyric soprano of uncommon beauty, but she’s equally adept at putting over a blazing vaudeville turn like the pre-feminist comic anthem “Fifty-Fifty.” And Yolanda Batts can turn her unerring melismas loose on a hymn-shouter one moment, and build Bert Williams’s “Nobody” from a disconsolate lament to a full-fledged battle cry the next, sending her intoxicated audience through the proverbial roof.

A solo nod must be given to the astonishing, infallible comic artistry of Meghan Beeler. Hers is the smallest of the evening’s singing voices, and she has a tendency to render Emma Goldman’s passionate intensity a bit shrill. But in her breathtaking comedic aplomb she is the ablest clown I’ve seen on an area stage since John McIlwee took a silly British farce by the horns during this year’s TheatreFest and wrestled it to hilarious submission.

To list the feats of zany dexterity Beeler displays would be akin to compiling a master class in physical humor. I’ll chance it, because it’s deserved: her open-mouthed, horrified reaction to T.R.’s sudden wooing of her with a buck and wing; her hilarious pantomiming with Gannon’s bemused suitor; the exuberant, shameless means by which, with an oversized hair ribbon and a single roller skate, she persistently interrupts a coloratura aria. She has exquisite facial and eye command, her timing is a thing of absolute beauty, her instinct is unerring, and her pauses triumphant. This is not the sort of thing that can be learned, and at times she seemed to me the happy love-child of Jane Curtin and Nanette Fabray. Should she persist in her stubborn pursuit of a psychology degree, I can only remark with a certain sadness that therapy’s gain will definitely be comedy’s loss.

Thomas Mauney has designed, and perfectly executed, a little marvel of a set, festooned with bunting and complete with footlights and a weathered wooden floor. Murals represent (at right) Lady Liberty and (at left) girders and a dynamo, capturing precisely the bifurcated hopes and realities the show depicts, and hemming its performers between them. Paul B. Marsland’s lighting consists of a warm, supple palette that gives the musical a glow at once idealized and sincere, while Judy Chang’s delicious costumes complete the picture, especially the stunning lavender gown with which she clothes Anna Held. The musical director, Brett Wilson, has assembled a band of uncommon versatility and expertise; if it occasionally (although never fatally) drowns out the singers, that may be a small price to pay for this much sheer, euphonious plenty.

Deb Gillingham’s staging is immaculate in every way—clean, uncluttered, swift, and brimming with invention. It’s difficult to say where her direction leaves off and her inspired choreography begins. Her sense of movement is zippy, wonderfully alive. She depicts the backbreaking, mind-numbing (and soul-stealing) nature of repetitive industrialization with piquancy and a sense of how even that contains within it a kind of musicality. Yet moments later she creates, with little more than a rubber sheath pressed into service as a steering-wheel, the uncanny illusion of an Oldsmobile filled with terrified joy-riders. The exhortations of three soapbox orators meld together, summoning up a cacophony of rhetoric turned to rhythmic expression; a challenge dance becomes a struggle for political power; and a seemingly impromptu game of musical chairs attains the quality of metaphor. I realize that these moments are scripted, but it takes a special sort of genius to pull them off with the concision Gillingham exhibits, and she does it time and again throughout this show.

It’s early in the season to say so, I know, but Tintypes may well be the show of the theatrical year. It’s going to be that tough to beat.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Tim Miller's "US" at Manbites Dog

2005-10-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

Tim Miller: US

By Scott Ross

When it comes to Tim Miller, I lack much of anything you could reasonably call objectivity.

This incisive, brilliant man seems to me—in a term I think he would probably disavow with vehemence—the voice of his generation. Not simply those at the tail-end of the Baby Boom, but a more specific demographic: 40-ish gay men who came of age in a time of sweet abandon which, all too soon, became a nightmare. Men—like me—who must look at the world (or more to the point, the country) around them through a prism of disillusionment, rage, and resolution knowing that, whatever our gains, a basic human grace is beyond our grasp.

Miller’s current performance piece, US (presented Sept. 18-21 in Durham, NC, as part of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell 2003,” Manbites Dog Theater’s 10th annual festival of queer theater and performance) will be his last as a permanent resident of the United States. If that fact doesn’t shake you, it should.

On October 3rd, the visa held by Alistair, Miller’s Australian-born partner of nine years, will expire. With no legal standing as a couple in the Land of the Free, the pair will be forced to immigrate to Great Britain. The government that attempted to still Miller’s artistic voice a decade ago (when, as one of the “NEA Four,” his federal grant was rescinded—he fought that one, and won) has found an effective means of getting rid of him altogether—one a great deal easier, and right under its nose all along.

Because while these two have been together nearly a decade, they lack the right to marry, which would give Alistair an automatic reprieve. That this basic right, granted (as Miller puts it) to “any straight couple who’ve known each for five minutes” is denied these two and countless others, is the basis upon which Miller builds the edifice he calls US.

That simple moniker contains a world of meaning. As a word, “us” refers not only to Miller and his partner, but also to every gay person in America—even to our society as a whole. As an acronym, of course, it stands for the country itself. The central question, to Miller, is not “What’s wrong with us?” but “What’s wrong with US?”

As with all of Miller’s performances, US takes in its author’s autobiography, making the specific universal and the idiosyncratic a metaphor. In pondering which personal necessities to take with him on his journey, the performer begins with that cultural artifact so crucial to the shaping of his (and I would say, legions of gay men’s) identity, the Original Cast Album.

For Miller, these recordings were “where [he] learned about the world ... they were [his] finishing school.” As he lays a series of LP jackets on the stage floor, they become his stepping stones: “A bridge to my future.” For the queer-in-training, Broadway scores are a kind of talisman; they evoke dreams, legitimize yearnings, and illuminate a sense of ethics. “Who needed Marx and Engels,” Miller asks, “when you had Rodgers and Hammerstein?” (Not that they can serve every need: while preparing his “one-hour fifth grade adaptation of Hamlet” Miller’s choice of incidental music—the overture to Hello, Dolly!—was nixed by an older brother. Probably only Miller himself could explain that peculiar artistic association.)

The solace he takes in these totems is only one of many instances in which Miller’s past, his passions, and the creative commingling of the two, strike a plangent chord in me. When he considers the concomitantly soothing and inflaming images he sought in the National Geographic, he could be reading a page from my own adolescence (for me it was underwear pages in the Sears catalogue.) When he talks of affecting an English accent, he brings me up with a start; I did the same thing when I was 17. And when he broods on the part the televised images of that living room war we called Vietnam might play in his own future, the conclusions he reaches (“I knew it would go on forever ... and I knew I didn’t want to die”) are the same ones that caused me so many sleepless 12-year-old nights.

US reaches its emotional zenith when Miller and Alistair, “planning [their] exile” from America, visit Niagara Falls in hopes of a Canadian wedding. And it is here that Miller’s unique observational gifts attain their richest images: Observing the—sometimes openly hostile—heterosexual couples promenading “like shabby Balkan royalty.” Standing in the middle of that loaded metaphor which links the U.S. and Canada, the achingly-named Rainbow Bridge. Watching as police officers from both sides engage in an annual tug-of-war that somehow metastasizes into the struggle taking place within Miller’s own conflicted psyche. Wondering how a nation that in its much-vaunted love of peace has casually sanctioned its own invasions of “112 countries in the past 58 years” can so blithely dismiss any two souls caught in the hopeful embrace of love.

The ritual doffing of his clothes during his performances brought Miller his initial notoriety, and has become its own kind of artistic curse—a weapon with which the biased and the ignorant (so often the same) can pummel him. But those who take this symbolic unveiling out of context miss the point, as they always do. Becoming naked is intrinsic to Miller’s work, and to our understanding of it. For him, this act of “stripping in the light” is a creative means to an instructive end: “Stripping away lies, stripping away hypocrisy.” It is, quite literally, the way Tim Miller gets to the naked truth, of his life and of ours.

Finally, heartbreakingly, US boils itself down to an essential desire. “Someday,” Miller concludes, “I want there to be less fear in US—less fear of us.” Maybe when a sufficient number of native artists are self-exiled to other lands? (And how many are too many? One, I would think, is one too far.) Or perhaps when enough of us face our own October 3rd.

Manbites Dog Theater:http://www.manbitesdogtheater.org/. Tim Miller:http://members.aol.com/millertale/timmiller.html.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

The Capitol Steps at Stewart Theatre

2005-10-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

The Capitol Steps

By Scott Ross

Surprisingly for a nation with profound political interests, America lacks much in the way of true political satire.

For dryness and wit, we turn to Gore Vidal’s peerless essays. But the Sage of Ravello is, for all his gifts as a polemicist, less satirist than amused observer of the scene. Vaughan Meader and David Fry are mere memories now, and Norman Lear has more or less hung up his TV producer hat for good. Satire—some of it brilliant—reigns on the Internet, but is by the very nature of the medium, largely hidden.

Larry Gelbart writes the most caustic and darkly hilarious satire around (Power Failure and Mastergate for the stage, Weapons of Mass Distraction for cable) but he’s a minority of one. If not for Jon Stewart and the inspired gang of put-on artists who concoct “The Daily Show,” trenchant political humor in this country would be, for all intents and purposes, as dead as Mort Sahl’s career.

Potent musical satire is even rarer. Mark Russell’s middlebrow musings, once a PBS mainstay, were never especially incisive. And our most gifted, biting purveyor of the form, Tom Lehrer, hasn’t written a new song in years.

Which leads us to—or leaves us with—the Capitol Steps, which performed two sold-out shows Jan. 31st for N.C. State University Center Stage.

A quintet of former political staffers, the group (Kevin Corbett, Brian Ash, Brad Van Grack, Nancy Dollar, and Janet Gordon) has, rather astonishingly, cut 23 discs of lukewarm song parodies—one for each year of its existence—and the troupe’s concerts are aired, with a certain numbing regularity, on NPR. While the material is occasionally amusing, most of it is drear: piddling send-ups of the most obvious targets. It certainly has its followers, though, many of whom packed Stewart Theatre last weekend—mainly, I would guess, to have their prejudices reinforced.

I’ll elucidate. The Steps’ introductory medley was a rapid series of takes on the Democratic candidates. Lieberman was represented by “The Candy Man” (“The Lieberman Can”), John Kerry with “Kerry Baby,” and Wesley Clark with a Gilbert and Sullivan parody (“I am the very model of positions that are general”). If this is your notion of stinging political wit, you might also have enjoyed John Edwards being skewered via an “I Feel Pretty” knock-off, for which I can see no logical point. I’m not aware that Edwards has made an issue of his own good looks. And if not, why parody them?

The capper was “Cheer Up, Howard Dean,” a thigh-slapper performed by a pair of Steps masquerading as two of the Queer Eye squad. As the number devolved into a shameless series of limp-wristed faggot jokes and the audience hooted its approval, I felt myself sinking into my seat. It was going to be that kind of an evening.

A shame, too, because this ugly bit was immediately followed by one of the evening’s few truly inspired moments; as the cast bulled its way through a parody of “Shout,” the sleeves of Dean’s shirt unrolled themselves into a handy straight-jacket in which the manic candidate was quickly enwrapped. That is pointed, specific, and funny. But the number’s impact—on me at least—was diminished by the residual loathing I felt for its predecessor.

There were a few other good moments. Saddam Hussein, talking via cell-phone with the President, asked that ubiquitously annoying question, “Can you hear me now?” George W. Bush was cited watching “what he called an Al Passino movie.” Intrusive telemarketers were roasted to the tune of “Some Enchanted Evening” (“Ev’ry single evening/MCI will call you”), John Ashcroft morphed into the Phantom of the Opera (“The loonies of the right”) and Dick Cheney made his appearance in a hilariously opaque baldhead wig.

But what were we to make of an extended Bill and Hillary duet explicating Mrs. Clinton’s exasperation with her husband’s philandering when it ended with the line “She’ll see that I’m spayed”? Males aren’t spayed, they’re neutered—or aren’t the Steps aware of the difference? Similarly, a knee-jerk skit on the perceived cowardice and anti-Americanism of the French ignored the truth of the matter for the sake of cheap laughs at the expense of one of our most generous and longest-standing allies. First “Freedom Fries,” and now this. And can the most scathing possible satire of Donald Rumsfeld really be no more than a toothless re-setting of an old Beach Boys song (“Help Rwanda”)?

The Steps’ funniest bit was, interestingly, its least overtly political: Brad Van Grack’s marvelously loopy backwards-talking ramble on celebrity scandal, “Lirty Dies.” Much of it was silly, some of it merely clever, and good parts of it were utterly without a point, but all of it made us laugh. And we laughed, I think, not so much at any particular, pointed wit as at the sheer, intoxicating daffiness of the sounds. It’s a schtick, but at least it provided genuine amusement. The Capitol Steps could use more of that.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Chiam Potok's "The Chosen" at Theatre Or

2005-10-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

The Chosen

That the late Chaim Potok (1929-2002) rebelled against his stringent religious upbringing is not incidental to his work as a novelist. Yet he was not a mystical skeptic like that sly Yiddish fabulist Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904—1991). His writing often examined the painful choices open to young American Jews in the secular, adopted land to which their fathers refused to assimilate. Yet he did so not with the slashing satirical fury of a Philip Roth but with a gently rabbinical approach. He saw both sides of the struggle, and it is his compassion and empathy for characters with wildly divergent systems of belief that has made his books treasurable to so many readers.

With novels such as The Chosen, The Promise, and My Name Is Asher Lev, Potok, to his credit, remains one of the most important of post-war American writers. The play the author (with Aaron Posner) made from his first novel is a thing of beauty: spare, precise, and marvelously theatrical. The Chosen dramatizes its source with astonishing candor and shattering emotional impact.

As with the novel, the play concerns the difficult friendship of two boys and the means by which each navigates the troubled waters of family, faith, and expectation. Danny (Marshall Botvinick), aloof and seemingly cold-blooded, is the eldest son of the rigidly Hasidic Reb Saunders (Bob Barr) and, as such, his chosen successor. Reuven (Max Kaufman) is his polar opposite: scion of the respected Torah scholar David Malter (Herb Wolff), devout but relaxed in his Americanism. The relationship between the pair begins in murderous antagonism before mutating into something altogether remarkable. The boys do not switch positions exactly, but each finds in the other the key to his unexpected future.

Potok and Posner wisely retain much of the novel’s rich passages of observation through the omnipresent narration of the adult Reuven (Scott Franco), whose presence also cunningly allows for the appearance of minor but important characters, shoes Reuven steps into with theatrical aplomb. The action is largely confined to three spaces—a pair of diametrically opposed locations for each of the fathers and a central area belonging primarily to Reuven and Danny (and into which Reb Saunders will pointedly enter at the climax, in a sense uniting these disparate galaxies.) Yet, like the dialogue itself, the staging spills and overlaps, creating a mosaic of life in the Williamsburg of 1944—48 as rich as the evocative black-and-white collages by Rob Hamilton against which the drama is performed.

If Max Kaufman’s Reuven is physically taller than his adult self, it’s a slight distraction. This young actor pours himself into the confusions, fears, and hopes the character must negotiate with a sureness that belies his age. Marshall Botvinick’s Danny, meanwhile, is altogether exceptional. He absolutely commands the conflicted schoolboy’s persona, from the rigidity of his stance to the superior smirk he often wears. He makes Danny’s desire for a world of knowledge outside his own, and the attendant guilt he feels in reaching for it, achingly palpable. He even manages to overcome a badly matched set of earlocks—no mean feat, that.

Bob Barr too triumphs over earlocks and beard that turn his head into a pigmentational triptych. When his Reb Saunders engages in an earnest Numerological explication, he pierces you with a glare at once challenging and profoundly humane. His cry upon gauging the true extent of the horror we know as the Holocaust (“The world kills us! Oh, how it kills us!”) is a knife to penetrate the stoniest heart. As David Malter, the gentle yet impassioned Talmudic scholar who becomes a passionate supporter of the Zionism so despised by Reb Saunders, Herb Wolff provides a superbly calibrated counter-balance to Barr’s exclusionary patriarch. His easy camaraderie with Reuven provides a wrenching contrast to the cool formality with which Reb Saunders deals with his own son.

Scott Franco proves a most amiable interlocutor, knowing yet almost surgically disengaged from the past playing out before him; he listens with an extraordinary sense of concentration, aware of the outcome the boys cannot know but never quite giving the game away. He also provides a boisterous baseball coach (much different from the one in Potok’s novel) and a taunting instructor who swivels his lectern around when pontificating at Danny. In one of the play’s most audacious moments of theatricality, he confronts his troubled younger self, engaging the boy in a Socratic dialogue that one suspects even Reb Saunders would admire.

It’s always a pleasure to welcome a new performing company to the area, particularly when its initial production is as accomplished as its aspirations. Such is the case with Theatre Or and its maiden effort. “Or,” for the uninitiated, is Hebrew for “light,” and it does my soul a world of good to report that this name proves an apt one indeed. Under the muted yet vibrant and inspired direction of Joseph Megel and the dedication of his producer, Diane Gilboa, THE CHOSEN casts revelatory illumination on some of the most profound questions of 20^th (and 21^st) century experience. It’s a labor of love, and it shines.

Theatre Or: http://www.theatreor.org/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

SCOTT ROSS is a prize-winning playwright who has written theater criticism for Spectator (1981-86), movie and book reviews for the N&O (1986-91), and served as dance, comedy, and theater editor for Triangle.citysearch.com (1998-2000). He has been the CD reviewer for the quarterly Sondheim Review since 1994.

Romulus Linney's "Silver River" at Manbites Dog

2005-10-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

Romulus Linney’s Silver River

By Scott Ross

Romulus Linney’s luminous, compassionate, and redemptive new play, now receiving its world premiere at Manbites Dog Theater, is that rare bird: a solo turn as full-bodied, complex, and dynamic as the finest multi-character drama. Silver River, a stunningly crafted monodrama adapted by Linney from two sources, both his own (his novel Slowly, By the Hand Unfurled and a previous play, A Woman Without a Name), provides the great Christine Morris a superb vehicle in which to exhibit the full range of her seemingly illimitable brilliance.

Linney triumphs over the primary danger inherent in one-person plays -- allowing us to see only one side of a character or situation—in the very means by which the unnamed Woman of the piece communicates and through which she will grow as a woman and a human being: through the use of a ledger book pressed into service as a personal journal. A Woman Without a Name brought each of the characters in the Woman’s life onstage, albeit in a highly theatrical fashion; in Silver River the Woman becomes each of the dramatis personae in turn as she writes down the dialogue in which they engage her. In this way, the audience is aware of the conflicts surrounding the Woman without the filter of personal agenda. The character is too artless to censor the conversations she records: the observations are hers, the words their owners’, and it is up to us to divine the truth—or, at any rate, attempt to.

To speak to the specifics of the Woman’s journey would be to give too much of the game away. At the core of her story is a mystery, masterfully set out in the first act, the solution to which drives the second and shatters all preconceived notions we may entertain of guilt, innocence, or the thin line between commission and omission. Do not imagine, however, that Silver River is anything so trite as a mere mystery story. Linney is concerned here with some of the profoundest notions of the last century, and this one: motherhood, sensuality, the dissolution of familial ties, the social position of women in the wider spheres of influence, the grace that accompanies forgiveness, and the personal struggle to break free of accepted bounds for the sake of one’s own, tortured, soul.

Yet the play is no polemic. It is, rather, a robust portrait of an exceptional woman on her way to self-enlightenment. That the son who will eventually turn on her in the gravest imaginable fashion gives to her the instruments of her own education is one of Linney’s keenest dramatic ironies, one that—as with the finest dramatists—he leaves the audience to recognize. And if there is more than a touch of O’Neill’s similarly haunted Tyrones in the time of the action (ca. 1900), in the Woman’s male off-spring (the youngest son contracts TB, the elder succumbs to drink), and in their relation to her, this may be more in the nature of an hommage. Certainly it doesn’t feel “borrowed” in this context; Linney’s characters, even embodied by a single actor, breathe their own complicated air.

Under Jeff Storer’s simple, yet inspired direction, Christine Morris gives the sort of performance that you recall when everything else has fallen away. I do not think it hubris to suggest that what you will witness on the stage of Manbites Dog has the aura of singular greatness that people still feel in recalling Laurette Taylor’s Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Morris’s work here is portraiture of the richest kind. She gives us not merely the Woman, but an entire community, slipping into various personalities as effortlessly as most of us might don an old familiar jacket. This is a performance of such complete honesty that it becomes something beyond acting. Morris soars in every particular, especially in Linney’s climactic gesture, a bold theatrical metaphor given flesh and sinew in writing, staging, and performance. You hold your breath, wondering if it can possibly work. It does. Magnificently. Like Underneath the Lintel, Silver River feeds the mind, the heart, and the soul.

Jan Chambers’s scenic design is spare yet rich and her costumes apt even if the black mourning dress is a tick ill fitting. Sam Piperato has composed some elegiac original music that matches and reflects the reach and compassion of the playwright’s work.

This production will head to Portland in May. I hope it goes much further. It deserves to be seen, and with Christine Morris at its radiant center. Miss it now, and regret it forever after.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

John Leguizamo at Duke

2005-10-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

Broadway at Duke Review - John Leguizamo

By Scott Ross

John Leguizamo is one of the most prodigiously talented and, I would argue, most important, performers in the United States. And that stature derives as much from his unique position as a Latino-American show-business pioneer as it issues from the mad inspiration of his feverishly nimble brain.

In a mere few years, Leguizamo (pronounced “le-gwee-sa-mo”) has ascended from bit player (whose work was cut, likely as not, from the completed film) through embodying stereotyped Latin hoods, to the ranks of this country’s premier performance artists. He can create characters from whole cloth, and from the observation of his own inner-city culture, in the manner of Lily Tomlin. And while he does not tell jokes, he can nail a zinger with the panache of a master. (I treasure his succinct recollection, in Freak, of discovering adolescent masturbation: “I was cleaning it and it went off.”) But Leguizamo is at his most febrile when weaving his solo shows from the stuff of autobiography.

Which is precisely what Leguizamo was doing in Page Auditorium on Duke University’s West Campus on March 2 of this year in a performance co-produced by Broadway at Duke and OnStage, in association with Mi Gente. It was not, like the actor-writer’s previous work (Mambo Mouth, Spic-O-Rama, and the peerless Freak), a fully articulated piece but a kind of rehearsal. As with the (late?) monologist Spaulding Gray, whom Leguizamo invoked at the beginning of his solo, the actor took his material from notes.

Leguizamo performed largely behind a rostrum, but occasionally, when he was more certain of the physical approach the piece demanded, emerged to enact one of his characteristically energetic pieces of business. These all-too-brief exhibitions merely served to point up the essential disappointment of the evening, for all the acumen and often achingly funny material it contained. As with Robin Williams and Richard Pryor, this actor requires complete freedom of movement to convey his genius in all its peripatetic glory. Leguizamo bound is not Leguizamo whole and entire.

Despite that podium, however, Leguizamo was anything but academic. “I don’t want to be an example,” he told an audience comprised largely of Duke students, “I just want to be a horrible warning.” Yet his subsequent tour through his own show-biz history did have something like a philosophical theme, based on that old debbil, the untutorable ability to sense the right choice at the right moment. Timing is everything, and not simply in what vaudevillians used to call the show business.

Since Leguizamo is nearly my exact contemporary, I share with him a certain theatrical experience, or at least an awareness of the 1970s-1980s cultural zeitgeist (he on the inside and me, I hasten to add, on the out) from which he sprang. And this new piece conjures the spirit, excitement, and excesses of the time -- the lure of (and disappointment with) acting classes, improvisational troupes, performance art, Shakespeare at the Public Theatre -- as well as the crushing means by which show biz deals with what it perceives as its outsiders (at least until they become “hot,” as Latinos and gay men seem, for the ephemeral moment, to be).

In what must be sweet vengeance, Leguizamo, who never tried to tamp down his ethnicity for a fast reward, has become successful precisely because of it. His rough-hewn drag queen wannabe Chi-Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) is a classic performance, far edgier than the movie that (barely) contains it. (“I was scarily hot in that flick,” Leguizamo notes with a certain awe. And he was.) It’s the kind of thing that could only have come from a performer in tune not only with the character and with his own creative limberness, but with the essential truth of that life, observed from beneath the same glass under which he himself has been studied.

Along the way, Leguizamo offered some deliciously nasty takes on his co-stars (like Patrick Swayze and Kurt Russell, both of whom hated his ad-libs, and that perennial high school amateur Penelope Anne Miller) and detractors (such as Lee Strasberg, who demanded in an improv that the young actor “become the dog,” to which Leguizamo adds simply, “So I bit his ass”). In a knowing topical aside concerning his Catholic youth, he said, “I always felt rejected by the Church. Now I know it’s because I wasn’t cute enough.” (He’s wrong about that, as Chi-Chi proves.) The structure of the new show is loose enough to allow Leguizamo room to breathe comedically yet remain roughly chronological. At present, it’s merely promising. But my hunch is that, by the time it’s ready, it will share the brilliant athleticism of its predecessors.

My sole criticism of Leguizamo’s comic persona stems from his occasional bouts of semi-hysterical weeping. In these moments he sounds less like himself than like an imitation of the man who was, arguably, the greatest of all modern observational comedians. On the other hand, not everyone can be compared, even negatively, with Richard Pryor. Leguizamo earns the assessment.

John Leguizamo: http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0000491/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

"Waiting for Godot" at Burning Coal

2005-10-26T09:48:00.000-07:00

Burning Coal Theatre Company Review - Waiting for Godot

By Scott Ross

It’s difficult to imagine modern drama without Waiting for Godot, a play as radical for its time (the early 1950s) in style, form, and content as were Our Town and The Threepenny Opera in their own. If this essential work is not the greatest play of the 20^th century -- and if it isn’t, I’m not sure what is -- it’s certainly the most written about; Samuel Beckett is second only to the Bible in official bibliography.

And yet, Godot doesn’t seem to be performed all that often, outside of prisons and in the occasional starry “revival.” The play itself is hardly difficult: two tramps wait for the elusive, eponymous savior. They blarney, argue, engage in vaudeville, part, reunite. They encounter a man of means and his slave, and are diverted. They are left alone. A boy messenger tells them Godot will not come today. They wait. They are revisited by the bourgeois gentleman and his factotum -- the same, yet different. The boy returns with the same message. They despair. They wait.

What is difficult is the meaning. When Alan Schneider, the play’s first American director, asked Beckett for one, the playwright replied: “If I knew, I would have said so in the play.” (Of course, there’s always the possibility that this dour Irish sprite was being disingenuous.) David Henderson, the director of the current Burning Coal Theatre Company production (which runs through April 18 in the Kennedy Theatre in the BTI Center for the Performing Arts in Raleigh, NC) notes, quite correctly, that “You take away from the play whatever […] you bring to it.”

That the unseen Godot is not “God” is fairly obvious, despite the proper -- if never used -- Beckettian pronunciation (“God-O.”) Is Godot, as Vladimir, the more intellectual of the tramps suggests, “Hope deferred”? A meaning for existence beyond the corporeal? A validation of our own, essentially pointless, lives? Prisoners, for whom the play is a perennial favorite, probably “get” Beckett as well or better than anyone. Godot is whatever you most desire, and most fear not finding. We are born, we die, and we spend the time between in waiting. (“Astride of a grave and of a difficult birth,” says Vladimir at the climax. “Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps.”) The play holds no comforting song to take out with you into the night.

Yet Godot is far from fearsome. It is often playful, frequently hilarious -- something we might call an intellectual vaudeville. Beckett’s Joycean wit bubbles up throughout as his tramps, Vladimir (“Didi”) and Estragon (“Gogo”) engage themselves and each other in bursts of wordplay, sarcasm, and slapstick. Their visitors, the bourgeois Pozzo and the hapless Lucky, form a duo of a different sort, but even they can be imagined as comedic “types.” Roger Blin, who directed the original Paris production, thought the right casting to be “Chaplin for Vladimir … Keaton for Estragon.” Kenneth Tynan felt Laurel and Hardy to be “the ideal casting of these roles.” (Although L&H might be better imagined as Pozzo and Lucky.)

The first American production starred Bert Lahr, seemingly out of his depth, but the one cast member who probably best understood it. (Of the initial Florida premiere Lahr famously said, “Playing [it] in Miami was like doing Giselle at Roseland.”) The climactic image of Estragon is classic burlesque: a man with his pants down around his ankles. A comic totem and a picture of the human at his most movingly vulnerable.

Henderson says his “commanding image” for this African-American edition of Godot has been “the Mississippi delta blues” and Robert Johnson’s mythic encounter with the Devil. I saw little evidence of it, aside from the Johnson recordings heard during the intervals and a blues rendition by Vladimir of the “dog came into the kitchen” song at the top of the second act. Nor do I think it matters much; doing more to integrate concept would be to damage the play itself.

That said, and even accounting for the diffident performance of one of its leads, Henderson’s is far and away the finest production of Waiting for Godot I’ve ever seen. His direction is imaginative, swift, and profound without undue gravitas. There are occasional missteps: Vladimir directs rather too much of his longer speeches upstage, making him difficult for most of the audience to hear; the removal of Lucky’s hat does not reveal the text’s “long white hair”; and the interpolation of a helpful line to the urinary-impaired Didi (“Back of the lobby, on the left”) is both unnecessary and theatrically wrong-headed. But by and large Henderson proves nearly as deft a director as he is an actor. That’s about the highest praise I can give.

Where this production really scores, however, is in the casting of its Estragon and Pozzo. Paul Garrett is, like Lahr before him, a Gogo to cherish. Although his physique makes a hash of the tramps’ hanging discussion, Garrett’s performance is otherwise utterly right. From his delicate, Oliver Hardy-like gestures to his aplomb with a tragicomic line (“What do we do, now that we are happy?”), from his growing frustration in the bowler hat routine to his exceptionally graceful pratfalling, Garrett is Estragon to the life. His eyes sparkle with sly wit one moment, go dead blank the next. It’s the perfect meeting of actor and role. You can imagine this man doing almost anything, and doing it superbly well.

Scarcely less staggering is Vaughn Michael’s Pozzo. With his sneer of a laugh, cruel intonations, and dangerously ingratiating bonhomie, Michael -- who bears a trace of Andre de Shields in his physique, countenance, and movement -- conveys a sense of power over others as unquestioned noblesse oblige. (The significance of one black man owning another is not lost on him.) Never more alive than when attention is focused upon him, Michael is equally at home with the anguish of a master who needs his slave as much, if not more, than the servant needs him. When delivering an oration, he slows his conversation, coating each, slightly sinister phrase (“Pozzo” is the Italian for “enemy”) with an actor’s anxiety to the reaction of his audience.

Thaddeaus Edwards is, I think, an ideal Lucky. Permanently stooped with the weight of his baggage and perpetually waiting to pick it up again once it’s been momentarily set down, Edwards performs Lucky’s difficult, garbled Act I peroration as the last desperate gasp of a schizophrenic academician. He makes cunning use of four voices, each separate and distinct and wedded to a specific portion of the speech: professorial tone here, sermonizing Baptist preacher there. It’s a marvelously varied means of performing one of the longest speeches in modern theatre.

Forte Brookings’ Boy is perfectly acceptable, if over-age. It is with the Vladimir of Lamont Reed, however, that the production falters most egregiously. There is no lightness to his playing, and he seems equally ill equipped for the play’s darker aspects. Vladimir’s anguished “I can’t go on! What have I said?” is not merely the most moving line in Godot but one of the most agonizing in all of 20^th century theater; its implications should rend the heart. Yet Reed speaks it as though ticking off an inventory.

Robert John Andrusko’s scenery consists, quite properly, of a spindly tree upstage center with the suggestion of infinite roots in the marbled cloth that flows from it. The lighting design by Christopher Popowich shimmers with a slow twilight, a rapid nightfall, and a slightly unsettling pale blue moon. Jennifer Baker’s costumes are at their most inventive with Pozzo: black gloves, a feather in his bowler, and topped off by a velvet-lapelled riding coat. The effect is, somehow, both elegant and seedy. Like the characters themselves.

Burning Coal Theatre Company: http://www.burningcoal.org/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Eve Ensler's "Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man" at REP

2005-10-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

Raleigh Ensemble Players Review - Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man

By Scott Ross

In a unique collaboration last week, Raleigh Ensemble Players, in conjunction with Legends Nightclub, presented a staged reading of an early Eve Ensler play on the club’s dance floor: a serio-fantastic comedy, oddly (but appropriately) named Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man.

For those poor souls unacquainted with one of most idiosyncratic and important voices of the early 21^st century, Ensler is the author/performer of the astonishingly successful (and OBIE-winning) solo piece The Vagina Monologues. Witty, engaged, unabashedly feminist-humanist in an entertainment world increasingly weak-kneed about such labels, Ensler plows the stature and profits with which her phenomenal achievement provides her into the V-Day foundation, generating hundreds of local productions annually and working toward a diminution of violence against women. Her position is a rare one -- as if Spaulding Gray had been cross-pollinated with Pete Seeger.

Political savvy is only half the story, however. It is Ensler’s dramatic gift to hone in on the sexuality of women, a field which, when explored at all, more generally yields yet another version of the storied femme fatale: avaricious whore, psychopath, slut, nymphomaniac, castrating bitch. Her great subject is men’s fear of female sexual power, the sort of terror which, in its extreme, leads to genital mutilation, rape, and an almost genocidal inclination to murder.

But Ensler is no mere polemicist, hectoring her audience with rhetoric. In Floating Rhoda, men and women grapple with each other and with their own profound uncertainties over sexuality, brutality, and gender identity. The women of the play struggle against the sexual stereotypes that bedevil a woman’s assured sexuality as masculine; the men fight against social imperatives to maintain decency in a society that challenges and belittles gentleness as effeminate. All the more appropriate, then, that Heather Willcox should eschew conventional venue in her staging of Floating Rhoda. Where better than a gay bar to challenge outmoded notions of sexual persona?

The invention, raw theatricality, and passionate involvement displayed by Willcox and her splendid cast frequently belied the fact of Floating Rhoda being a staged reading rather than a full production. The quartet of actors engaged in the play’s major roles gave performances of exceptional polish and aplomb, largely off-book; the thin line separating this reading from a completely realized production was little more than another week of studying lines.

Rhoda (Lynne Guglielmi) is involved in an unsettlingly masochistic relationship with the brutish Coyote (David Harrell) when she meets his polar opposite, the gentle artist Barn (Joe Brack). Initially rejected by Rhoda, Barn accepts the erotic invitation of the aggressive Storm (Andrea Maddox) and submits at Rhoda’s insistence to a blind date with her best friend Terrace (Sarah Kocz). Uneasily paired, Barn and Terrace recognize that both are in love with Rhoda, who is hospitalized after a shocking attack by the pithecanthropoid Coyote. Her attending physician turns out to be none other than Storm, who turns her sexual attention to Terrace while Rhoda switches allegiances to Barn. End of Act One.

This sounds in the re-telling more like spruced-up soap opera than cutting-edge theatre, and might be, but execution is all. Ensler studies these characters like specimens under a dramatist’s glass; the dialogue she provides for them is by turns poetic, humorous, devastating and formal. Take, for example, this knowing exchange between friends:

Rhoda: You never like my men.

Terrace: You don’t either, Rhoda!

With a single, perfectly aimed, funny/sad verbal blow, Ensler encapsulates Rhoda’s erotic and emotional predicament. (Although Ensler generally avoids contractions, which makes Terrace’s startled declaration about penises -- “I do not want one!” -- tremble on the verge of self-parody, the incantation of an erotic Dr. Seuss.)

The playwright engages a marvelously effective theatrical metaphor for her peculiarly modern personas in the use of Stand-Ins (Kelly Lowery for Rhoda, Thaddaeus Edwards for Barn). Her use of them requires the two to step back and observe their own behavior, separately and together. It’s a symbol of detachment that perfectly encapsulates the third-person aspect of modern urban existence -- call it by whatever absurd neologism you will (post-modern, post-Freudian, post-feminist!) The device is an essential one in Floating Rhoda, getting as it does to the heart of the characters’ dissatisfactions, frustrations, and neuroses: Rhoda somehow believes she deserves nothing better than Coyote; Barn, acting out of devotion, is troubled by the negation of his own self.

Willcox extrapolated from Ensler’s heady theatricality, making of her cast a bundle of bodies, wrapped around each other, shifting in slow motion, characters departing from the circle to play out their scenes and returning to it once they’d finished.

A play this rich, and a performance this exact, can lead a reviewer into the bog of verbosity, and I’ve waded in far enough already. But the climactic argument between Rhoda and Barn moved me, almost inexplicably, to tears. Rhoda’s description of her father’s abuse, however disturbing, somehow felt inevitable. More plangent was Barn’s anguished admission of the struggle to be a man without the brutality to which males are still unaccountably directed. It’s a tender issue with me, and Barn’s “Do you think […] my dad wanted a gentle boy?” got at something crucial and unresolved in the father-son dynamic that wracked me, perhaps because of my own father’s recent death.

The REP cast could scarcely have been bettered. Rhoda is no easy role -- she risks unpleasantness -- but Lynne Guglielmi united its many disparate colors. Sarah Kocz gave what is by now her standard performance, by which I do not mean predictable but fulsome: embracing contradictions, resolving them within herself, and presenting the results as though they have just occurred to her. David Harrell’s task was no easier than Guglielmi’s, since Coyote is so macho he stretches credulity. But the pathetic neediness Harrell came to in his last scene, conveyed largely through the eyes, leant the character some absurd humanity. Andrea Maddox gave a lush, febrile performance as Storm, especially in the long sequence of blissful sexual discourse between her and Terrace, in which much of her joy came from dropping her assigned gender role for perhaps the first time.

Most impressive of all was Joe Brack’s exquisitely limned performance as Barn. Brack exhibits, at an impossibly youthful age, pluperfect timing and expressive gesture, both of which reminded me, in their astounding fluidity, of David Henderson, arguably our finest local actor. Where does this come from, in one so young? In his superb novel Morality Play, Barry Unsworth describes the most gifted of a troupe of medieval players this way: “There was in Straw an instinct for playing, or rather a meeting of instinct and knowledge, a natural impulse of the body, I do not know what to call it, but it is something that can neither be taught nor learned.”

I don’t know what to call it either. But whatever it is, Joe Brack has it.

Raleigh Ensemble Players: http://www.realtheatre.org/pages/2004/shows/rhoda2004two.htm.
Eve Ensler: http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/aboutvday/eveensler.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

"The Servant of Two Masters" at Peace

2005-10-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

Peace College Theatre Review - The Servant of Two Masters

By Scott Ross

Carlo Goldoni’s best-known (at least to Anglo-Saxon audiences) comedy was, in keeping with the commedia dell’arte tradition of the day, not so much written as prescribed. In 1744 the actor Antonio Sacchi, known for his playing of the comic prototype Truffaldino, commissioned Goldoni to concoct an appropriate plot for his company. In commedia fashion, Sacchi’s players improvised the dialogue and comic business for The Servant of Two Masters … and this is where Goldoni’s own plot thickens. Four years later, emulating his idol Molière, the youthful playwright transcribed the production, effectively reversing the timeworn process.

The commedia approach is alive and surprisingly well in Kenny Gannon’s Peace College Theatre production of The Servant of Two Masters. The playbill lists no author other than Goldoni, and I assume that this spirited and often wildly amusing take on the piece is the improvisatory work of Gannon and his (largely) superb company of farceurs. They ought to have taken a credit. They deserve it.

The production is a raucous mélange of pop culture references, borrowings (both judicious and in-), in-jokes, running-gags, demented arias, comic athleticism so inspired it borders on genius, and an overall zaniness for its own sweet sake -- a kind of classical Helzapoppin -- what kids today call “a goof.” Gannon and Co. take in everything from Airplane! and Margaret Mitchell to (repeatedly) interpolations from “The Sopranos” and Francis Ford Coppola, with admittedly varied results: much of it lands, some of it doesn’t. But, as in those early, cherished Marx Bros. movies, things move at such a heady clip that the clinkers are scarcely over before the next fusillade assaults you.

Goldoni’s comic premises are, like those of Plautus, full of tropes and stereotypes. Thus: the conniving servant, the lovesick swain, the heroine in trouser role, the idiot bride-to-be, the bumptious father. These roles are so beautifully cast here, and played with such dazzling abandon, that you can’t tell where direction ends and virtuoso playing begins.

Accompanied by the musicianly aplomb of Randy Reed (guitar) and Paul Minnis (accordion), a cast of comic tornadoes blasts its way across Thomas Mauney’s delicious pastel set and, to mix my metaphors, takes no prisoners. Only Margaret Ellen Shouse seems less than game as the transsexualized Beatrice. Nicole Solimano plays exasperated waiter and back-sassing “plot device” with equal brio. Niki Dobbins is apposite as Clarice, both spoiled and resilient, and Sarah Thomas is smart and slightly punk as her maidservant Smeraldina (although she’s almost a better match for Clarice’s beloved Silvio -- played here as a would-be j.d. by Sarah Virginia Smith -- than for the wily Truffaldino). Terrell Williamson is baffled and ardent in turn as Beatrice’s beloved Florindo.

Three performers here deserve special mention. Mary Kathryn Tyson is marvelous as Clarice’s much bedeviled father Pantalone, at once harried, combative, and given to grandiose sentimental vocalizing. As the excitable Dr. Lombardi, Gina Kelly is possessor of the production’s greatest comic mask: a little Sonny Corleone here, a bit of Luca Brazzi there, all bound up in a face that can contort itself from eye-squeezing malice one moment to rubber-mouthed astonishment the next.

Kathryn Fuller is, simply, astonishing as Truffaldino. Although intermittently shrill, sometimes tiresome, and -- with her Megan Mulally-like voice -- occasionally unintelligible when especially frenetic, Fuller is something very like a force of nature. She has the supreme confidence of a master clown, tossing off prodigious feats of histrionic (and athletic) legerdemain without breaking stride or letting us know she knows how funny she is. She has complete control, even as various parts of her body seem to fly off in several directions at the same time. I’ve only seen one other comic performance as singular and inspired as this one in the past year -- Meghan Beeler in Tintypes -- and that was also at Peace. Is it something in the water over there, or is Kenny Gannon some kind of genius?

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Jose Rivera's "Sonnets for an Old Century" at Manbites Dog

2005-10-26T09:43:00.000-07:00

Manbites Dog Theater Review - Sonnets for an Old Century

By Scott Ross

It’s probably no accident that Edgar Lee Masters serialized his Spoon River Anthology in 1914-15; with daily news reports of fresh European horrors confronting a largely isolationist America, death was much on the national mind. Masters’ blank-verse testimonials from the dead of a Midwestern graveyard must have touched a nerve in a public still reeling from the Titanic disaster and (although it could not have known it) about to face even greater atrocity in the sinking of the Lusitania, its country’s inevitable entry into what was rather optimistically deemed The War to End All Wars, and the great influenza epidemic of 1918. (Is it inconceivable that the national plunge into heedless pleasure that characterized the 1920s was a delayed, if ostrich-like, reaction to so much ineluctable death?)

Coming so quickly on the heels of an entire century of wholesale slaughter, a new edition of Spoon River seems a necessary corrective, or at least a more immediate variation. In Sonnets for an Old Century, the playwright José Rivera limns the contours of his own set of newly departed. Rivera’s piece, subtitled Monologues for the Theatre and currently on view at Manbites Dog Theater, meets the challenge handily. Some of his stories are a tad elliptical; but all of them contain not merely life, but lives, whole, and shining with humanity both common and decidedly uncommon.

Under the splendid direction of Jeff Storer, a flawless ensemble of 16 enacts Rivera’s lively collection of dead souls and, in poetry ranging from the hilarious to the deeply moving, reminds us not only that every human being has a story, but that each personal history resonates perforce with vital meaning.

Given a script full of speech this opulently detailed, I’m tempted to fill this space with quotations. Equally, with a cast this perfect, it is tempting to dwell at length on the specifics of the individual riches displayed in what is almost a profligate fashion on the Manbites Dog stage. But half the joy of this experience, it seems to me, is to approach it without foreknowledge -- to let its exquisite light envelope you as it will. I’ll note merely that in a cast as uniformly radiant as any you’ll see this season, Allison Kirkland, Beth Popelka, Julie Oliver, and Mario Griego are especially fine; and Nanci Burrows, Kendall Rileigh, and Rida Perez-Salazar are considerably more than that.

In Spoon River Anthology, the 96-year old Lucinda Matlock observes, “It takes life to love Life.” Judging by these Sonnets, José Rivera must be as strong as an ox; his love is more like adoration.

Manbites Dog Theater: http://www.manbitesdogtheater.org/2/.
José Rivera Bio: http://courses.csusm.edu/geh101cv/JoseRiveraBio.htm.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviewsonline at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Mel Brooks' "The Producers" (Lewis J. Stadlen tour)

2005-10-26T09:42:00.001-07:00

Broadway Series South Review - Lewis J. Stadlen in The Producers

By Scott Ross

When I first heard there was a Broadway musical adaptation of Mel Brooks’ riotous 1968 comedy The Producers in the works, I cringed. Coming from a musical theater now as bankrupt of original ideas as the Hollywood studios, this was news akin to discovering some moron was launching a remake of Duck Soup -- pointless, unnecessary, and insulting to the sui generis original.

Then came more reassuring intelligence: the composer/lyricist was to be Brooks himself. While not a trained musician (neither were Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, and Frank Loesser), Brooks has written a wildly inventive series of parodic songs for his own films -- not only the original Producers’ “Prisoners of Love” and its juicily infamous “Springtime for Hitler” (the original title for The Producers) but such Brooksian hummables as “Blazing Saddles,” “I’m Tired” and “The French Mistake” (Blazing Saddles), “Look for the Best, Expect the Worst” (The Twelve Chairs), the faux-Sinatran “High Anxiety,” and the aquatic Inquisition ballet and the immortal “Jews in Space” (History of the World -- Part One). Not to mention a Polish rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown” (To Be or Not To Be) and that hardy perennial anthem of the 2,000 Year Old Man, “Let ‘em all go to hell/Except Cave 76!”

There was one last obstacle impeding my full acceptance, however: the movie, released in 1968, featured an acid-blasted character called LSD so of the moment he probably dated the film a month after it debuted. The solution, by Brooks and his gifted co-librettist Tom Meehan, both resolved the issue and gave the authors a perfect hook on which to hang their new-fashioned old-fashioned musical. By retrofitting the scenario to the late 1950s, Brooks the composer was free to indulge in the kind of lush, traditional Broadway melodies of his youth, making The Producers the best-musical-of-1959-that-wasn’t-written-until-2001.

That’s no exaggeration. It’s fairly safe to say at this juncture that The Producers boasts the most insistently tuneful, instinctively melodic Broadway score by an amateur since Frank Loesser pounded out How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Mel Brooks is a great admirer of juxtaposition -- think of Peter Boyle slurring the elegant lyrics to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” like Boris Karloff with a lip full of Novocain. The crowning irony is that Brooks’ ingratiating tunes are wedded to a perfect set of outrageously vulgar, irresistibly offensive lyrics. (I like to think the show’s record 12 Tony Awards® were given in acknowledgement of the dozen rhymes Brooks comes up with for “nights” in the opening number’s on-rushing mazurka-like climax.)

Mel Brooks’ musicality is doubtless innate. All great comedy (and most great writing) depends on rhythm, and Brooks is to American comedy what Louis Armstrong is to American jazz. To listen to his peerless albums with Carl Reiner is to experience a great improvisatory talent in full cry. You can almost hear, in these impromptu sets, the sound of Mel Brooks’ mind clicking madly after some inspired turn of phrase only it could articulate, or imagine. At their best, Brooks and Reiner bounce off each others’ thought-waves like Billie Holiday and Lester Young -- anticipating, meeting, blending, and surpassing each other to form a series of comedic riffs unique in the annals of post-war national culture. Like Joseph Heller in Catch-22, Mel Brooks works best without a net. (He’s also, to those who pay attention, refreshingly literate, and The Producers makes reference to James Joyce and Dostoyevsky.)

Which probably goes a good league toward explaining why The Producers spins on the axis of a book that ranks as one of the three funniest in American musical comedy. That the other two -- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and City of Angels -- are the work of Brooks’ old “Caesar’s Hour” colleague Larry Gelbart is surely no accident: that writers’ room housed and nurtured the people, Woody Allen and Neil Simon among them, who shaped and defined an entire epoch of American comedy.

I won’t belabor the plot of The Producers here. It’s too well known already; and if by some miracle you’re uninitiated, I’m loath to spoil your surprise. But it’s a classic farce scenario, and suffice it to say that it involves a search for the worst musical ever written; an unreconstructed Nazi playwright; a director who could make Liberace look butch; a sex-bomb receptionist who not only cannot speak English, but doesn’t need to; a production number of sublimely surpassing awfulness; and a central figure who is a demented amalgam of Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Danny Kaye, David Burns, Paul Ford, Bert Lahr, W.C. Fields, and Zero Mostel, reduced to making love to elderly patrons for his meager survival.

Mostel, who created the role of Brooks’ impecunious producer Max Bialystock, hovers over The Producers like a benign demon. Even Nathan Lane, the splendid progenitor of the musical version, owed part of his acclaimed performance to that great, strutting, sweating egomaniac. As does Lewis J. Stadlen, the Max of the national tour presented by Broadway Series South Nov. 2-7 in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium in the BTI Center for the Performing Arts.

Stadlen started his career assaying the young Groucho in the musical Minnie’s Boys, all but single-handedly kept the perpetual-motion machine that was Hal Prince’s 1974 edition of Candide running in place, and has latterly churned up superlatives as the sexually frustrated alta kaka Senex in Forum and the Harpo-inspired Banjo in The Man Who Came to Dinner (both as co-star to Nathan Lane). His distinctive vocal pattern, which segues from a rich baritone in its lower registers to a slightly strangulated nasality in the upper, neatly separates his Bialystock from all others. (It may or may not be an in-joke, but the fulsome mustache he sports makes him a dead ringer for that late, unlamented Broadway producer prototype David Merrick.) Stadlen gives us Bialystock whole: the greedy wheeze, the outraged geshrai of the fallen idol who knows he deserves better than the best, the unrestrained lust for gold and glory that is its own form of comedic grace, and the hilarious despair of the narrowly thwarted.

If Alan Ruck is slightly less impressive as Max’s sheep-like co-conspirator Leo Bloom it’s only because the accountant-cum-hotshot is not as showy a role. (And anyway, no one has yet quite channeled Gene Wilder’s nonpareil turn in the original film. Mostel constructed Max out of the brilliant Borscht-Belt shtick he’d honed for decades; Wilder was a True Original.) As the linguistically challenged Ulla, Charley Izabella King is utterly sensual and somehow supremely innocent. The gyrations she commits during “When You Got It, Flaunt It” constitute the most arresting display of erotic athleticism since Anita Morris got banned from the Tony broadcast in 1982.

Michael McCormick gives a robust performance as the Nazi dramatist Franz Liebkind, and Harry Bouvy minces his way to comic glory as the marvelously named Carmen Ghia. But the greatest glory among the supporting cast is that grand old hand Lee Roy Reams. As Roger De Bris, the musical stager who “never realized that the Third Reich meant Germany,” Reams not only gets to show off his patented Broadway belt, but turns a delicately perched “faggot” stereotype into a thing of comic beauty, whether gathering up his gown with distracted panache or sitting on the edge of the stage invoking Judy Garland at the Palace.

William Ivey Long’s scrumptiously outlandish costumes, like Doug Besterman’s Jule Styne-esque orchestrations, could scarcely be improved upon. (Glen Kelly, who is credited with the show’s musical arrangements and supervision, is the genius who transcribed Brooks’ unwritten ditties.) The evening’s highest praise, however, goes to the two individuals, aside from Brooks himself, who make The Producers the unforgettable experience it is.

One: the great Robin Wagner, whose scenic designs provide the perfect palette with which Brooks & Co. paint their indelible portraiture. If I had the gifts of a Byron, I would write odes in praise of Wagner’s ingenuity. From his bubbling champagne bottle served via water cooler and the red heart projections that blossom into twin bouquets to his neon-lit jail cell, Wagner has imagined The Producers Mel Brooks intended: a great big, acid-tinged Valentine to the Broadway of his dreams.

And two (but really One Squared): Susan Stroman, the show’s irreplaceable director and choreographer. The Producers boasts the most consistently, insanely, profligately, extravagantly brilliant and inventive staging of a musical since the heyday of Bob Fosse. An SS officer executes a slapstick schuhplattler in one scene and a Jolsonesque mazurka in another; hilariously articulated pigeons flap and coo out a chorus of “Deutschland Über Alles”; a wounded ham makes the longest exit in theatrical history using only his arm; two lovers dance a blithely romantic hommage to Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds; prisoners in Sing-Sing emulate Fred Astaire with his Blue Skies cane; trying to sabotage his own show, Max pulls in everything from a ladder under which the actors must pass to a black cat thrown into the dressing room (its insulted screech provided by Mel Brooks). The only thing Stroman didn’t come to grips with was how to replicate that great master-shot of the audience reacting to “Springtime for Hitler” in the original film -- a moment as achingly funny today as it was in 1968. (She doesn’t try.) But she has found a way to evoke Brooks’ hilarious Busby Berkeley overhead crane shot of the living swastika, so we’re more than amply compensated.

A final word here, about taste. Brooks’ alleged lack of it is a shibboleth that has dogged him for decades, often without merit. Rather amazingly, his parody of Nazism in The Producers (as was the case in 1968) is still a source of public outrage, as if to satirize Hitler were the same thing as trivializing, or ridiculing, the Holocaust itself. It’s a specious, or at least overly sensitive, position. I could more easily understand a gay protest at the unrestrained nellyness of the show’s 1950s-era homintern, or a feminist outcry at the bubble-headed Ulla. That there has been none is a testament to Mel Brooks’ skill as a satirist; he slays his serious dragons (i.e., Hitler) with savagery; everyone else is skewered with affection.

So, a caveat: if you’re unhinged by the sight of chorines topped by knockwurst headgear, a bevy of pigeons sporting SS armbands, a black accountant singing his woe in the cadences of an old Negro spiritual (and, later, turning up as a very Irish cop), a production team resembling an anachronistic gathering of Village People archetypes, or a chorus-line of old ladies tapping out a number with their Zimmerman frames -- stay far, far away. For everyone else: run to Papa.

Preview by Robert W. McDowell (Interview with Lewis J. Stadlen): http://www.cvnc.org/th-arch1004.html#ProdPre.)

The Official Broadway Site: http://www.producersonbroadway.com/.
The Tour Site: http://www.producersontour.com/.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Stephen MacDonald's "Not About Heroes" at PlayMakers

2005-10-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

PlayMakers Repertory Company Review - Not About Heroes

By Scott Ross

“This book is not about heroes,” wrote Wilfred Owen in the preface to his posthumously published first book of war poetry, “Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honor, might, majesty, dominion or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” Both concerns -- poetry and pity -- are beautifully and heartbreakingly limned in Not About Heroes, the intensely felt Stephen MacDonald two-hander currently in production at PlayMakers Repertory Company (Nov. 30-Dec. 19 in the Paul Green Theatre in the Center for Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

Owen has been called the greatest of the war poets, a subgroup that also takes in (to a lesser extent, in terms of quality) Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, and (to a greater) Owen’s own mentor Siegfried Sassoon. Their experience in the First World War led these young men to an artistic vision as far removed from the jingoistic imperialism of a Rudyard Kipling as it’s possible to imagine.

This is an exceedingly timely production. It’s nearly impossible to not think of our own imperialist adventure in Iraq while observing in this play the disgust with which Sassoon -- himself almost insanely heroic -- holds those responsible for the senseless, wholesale slaughter of so many young men. (Tellingly, his public protest got him a session at Craiglockhart Hospital as a mental case; his government dared not denounce so highly decorated a war hero.) A largely epistolic memory-play, much of the dialogue taken from letters and memoirs, Not About Heroes is both specific and universal: narrow in its focus on Owen and Sassoon and ecumenical in concerning itself with the profoundest questioning of relative values imaginable.

The text is so rich in language, wit, and meaning that one is tempted to quote endlessly: the familiar way in which Owen’s shell shock, for which he is at Craiglockhart, is euphemized by the authorities as a “critical nerve case”; the way a catalogue of horrors can be met by a blandly stated “The ways of God are strange”; how Death is anatomized by “the green, thick odor of his breath”; and traditional heroic behavior is dismissed as “more like being drunk than being brave.”

While MacDonald eschews overt reference to the sexuality of either Owen or Sassoon, their relationship is represented as keenly emotional, of a closeness that seems to embarrass them slightly, as when Siegfried is glad of not being observed embracing Wilfred at the latter’s parting from him. There are other clues for the knowing, such as vague homoeroticism of the poets’ verses, the makeup of the literary circle whose doors Sassoon opens to Owen (Graves, Osbert Sitwell, the Proust translator Charles Scott Moncrieff, and Oscar Wilde’s one-time lover Robbie Ross), Sassoon’s description of his attachment to a Welsh soldier named David, in the way Owen addresses Sassoon in his letters as “Dearest of Friends,” and in one of Siegfried’s earliest lines about Wilfred, the intriguingly elliptical “I wanted -- I wanted you -- ….”

Greg Felden, a newcomer to PRC, gives a lovely performance as Owen, gently illuminating naiveté, shyness, and sweetly self-aggrandizing youthfulness (“I will be a poet”) as well as the agonies of imagined cowardice, the bitter recognition of war’s obscenity, and the aching need to prove worthy of one’s subject. I am not sure it’s possible to do justice to Ray Dooley in this space. In a growing gallery of indelible portraits, Dooley’s Sassoon ranks as one of his most magnificent. Here are anger, compassion, loss, kindness, despair, literary generosity (a rare thing among writers), and physical and emotional trauma played with acute veracity and a staggering intensity of feeling.

Guest director Joseph Haj does masterly work, imbuing the production with an exquisite grace of movement and emphasis, as when Sassoon upsets a wine bottle and the red flows like crimson spurting from an artery, the image capped by Justin Townsend’s powerful scarlet lighting effect. Marion Williams’ costumes are apt, and M. Anthony Reimer’s sound design seemed inventive and right except that it was barely audible on the night I saw the play performed.

McKay Coble outdoes her own considerable past work with the set design here. Haj wanted “a monochromatic world” for the play, and has Coble delivered! Her unit set contains an ornate column and a bent pole, both draped in barbed wire, upstage, and between them a scrim on which are listed the names of the war dead, the furls gathered at the bottom like a gruesome promise. Above the stage hangs a piece of ornately painted ceiling, hanging in tatters and the playing area is seemingly supported by the sort of sand bags seen in No Man’s Land. The color of the whole enterprise is a sort of dusty silver-gray the color of ashes, taking in the destruction of war and its appalling human waste. It’s a set both beautifully in keeping with the play, and the production, and an eloquent statement in itself.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" at PlayMakers

2005-10-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

PlayMakers Repertory Company Review - Copenhagen

By Scott Ross

This much is known: in 1941, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg traveled, at no small risk to himself, to occupied Copenhagen, meeting there his old mentor and one-time colleague Niels Bohr. It had been their habit when talking together to walk outside, and with the Bohrs’ home almost certainly bugged by the Germans, perambulation seemed the safest course.

That stroll was exceptionally brief. After a few minutes Bohr returned in a rage, and Heisenberg departed. The subject of their conversation -- and the reason for Bohr’s fury -- has remained something of a tantalizing mystery, although there is a strong belief that it likely concerned German efforts toward producing an atomic bomb. From this famous (or infamous) incident, the British dramatist Michael Frayn fashioned his provocative, intellectually bracing three-hander Copenhagen, the 2000 Best Play Tony Award® winner currently being given spirited life at PlayMakers Repertory Company.

Somewhat astonishingly, Frayn manages to give, in his dramatic crash-course on physics, precisely enough information on the subjects debated by his characters -- quantum physics, Complimentarity and, particularly, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, a key concept here -- that his audience (like Margrethe, Bohr’s scientifically untrained wife) can follow the free flow of ideas without confusion. (Although it must be exquisite hell for the actors to learn.) Through the striking use of metaphor, and the recurrent notion of seeing the 1941 meeting -- like drafts for a scientific paper -- from various angles and perspectives, Frayn illuminates Uncertainty in more ways than one. (Interestingly, he used a similar device to quite different effect in his great backstage farce Noises Off.)

The playwright’s innate theatricality is exhilarating; Copenhagen is not so much a variation on Rashomon (three perspectives of the same incident) as it is a depiction of what might have been said and done in a crucial moment, now lost to view. Bohr, Heisenberg and Margrethe circle each other continuously, electrons revolving around a nucleus whose essential component is a riddle. As Frayn himself notes, “The Uncertainty Principle says that there is no way, however much we improve our instruments, that we can ever know everything about the behavior of a physical object. And I think it’s also true about human thinking.”

Frayn, one of the finest of all Chekhov translators, writes dialogue ironic (Bohr to Margrethe: “My dear, no one is going to develop a weapon based on nuclear fission”), plangently repetitious (Heisenberg’s repeated phrase “If something works, it works,” which begins to achieve truly unnerving connotations) and strikingly visual, as when Heisenberg describes walking through a Berlin raining phosphorous into puddles (“My shoes kept bursting into flame”).

Copenhagen addresses some of the profoundest questions of human existence -- indeed, the easily imagined end of humanity itself. Was Heisenberg working on the bomb or was he, as he later claimed, subtly working against it? Did he, through a kind of passive resistance, deliberately miscalculate the essential numbers? Could a man of his keen competitiveness bear to cede so momentous a scientific discovery to others -- especially those nations arrayed against his beloved Germany? Did he bear the guilt of consigning his countrymen to their bitter ruination while simultaneously saving the world from the ghastly specter of a nuclear-armed Adolf Hitler? Or had he, as some have imagined, hopes of luring Bohr to collaboration in Germany? (Since Bohr was half-Jewish and the Nazis had already, in their typically self-defeating fashion, purged all Jews from German science, this seems the least likely explanation.)

Drew Barr, who a few seasons back mounted a superb production of the lovely Jeanine Tesori-Brian Crawley musical Violet at PRC, has directed his cast of three with perfect fluidity and grace, complimenting and expanding upon Frayn’s ideas. He does so in large part through the evocative use of Narelle Sissons’ ingenious set, which mirrors Bohr’s concept of the atom: electrons jut out at right and left angles, up- and downstage -- two of them bearing complimentary floors of gravel and sand -- leaving the central playing area as a nucleus (although the rather hideous green covering is suggestive not so much of grass as of a well-used billiard table). Similarly, Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting is effective, but there are perhaps a few too many blackouts and cross-fades, although her approximation of an atomic blast -- in concert with M. Anthony Reimer’s rather terrifying sound effect -- builds to a doom-laden intensity of orange.

Barr’s actors could scarcely be improved upon as they essay Frayn’s overlapping dialogue and three-pronged arguments with flawless élan. Greg Thornton is, it seems to me, an ideal Bohr -- kindly and warm, now cautious, now distraught and finally, combative. Todd Weeks embodies Heisenberg’s rigorous intellectual competitiveness as well as his curious affability -- wanting so badly to be loved, to remain the good son to his adoptive father figure. (He is, as he well knows, the Prodigal, as grave a disappointment to his mentor as the accidental death of Bohr’s own son.) There is a splendid moment in the first act when Weeks, invoking 1937 by remarking “Just when all my troubles -- ” turns his head away from the Bohrs, open-mouthed, coming to a dead stop. It’s a thrillingly elliptical moment. Has the actor gone up on his lines? Will Heisenberg speak again? When? Even better is the Margrethe of Nicole Orth-Pallavicini: proud, courageous, intelligent, outraged, and yet never pushing Margrethe beyond her essential dignity. Her vocal control is a thing to cherish, rich in timbre without any recourse to histrionics.

In a season which has already included a beautifully observed production of Not About Heroes, with Copenhagen PlayMakers continues to sustain its considerable reputation as one of the finest of all local -- and regional -- companies.

PlayMakers Repertory Company: http://www.playmakersrep.org/news/index.cfm?nid=26.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Nick Stafford's "Luminosity" at PlayMakers

2005-10-26T09:40:00.000-07:00

Playmakers Repertory Company Review - Luminosity

By Scott Ross

I’m not sure I can express the full range of my feelings about Nick Stafford’s Luminosity without taxing your indulgence on a matter of personal preoccupation. The fact is, this magnificent play, now receiving its American premiere at PlayMakers Repertory Company through May 2 at the Paul Green Theatre in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Dramatic Art. Luminosity touches on matters of human congress of primary importance in my own stage work.

Every writer develops a specific theme -- usually without premeditation -- to which he or she returns, perhaps obsessively. In my own case as a playwright, the past and its bearing on the present have been the touchstone. Then, too, there is the matter of style. I find that I cannot write a one-set, two-act, naturalistic play. I’ve nothing against the form, but as a writer I’m drawn to theatricality: scenes that play out simultaneously, dialogue in one area (or era) that bounces off another, staging that is unbroken by conventional scene endings, the juxtaposition of words and imagery.

I won’t belabor the point any further, except to say that what Nick Stafford has achieved with Luminosity -- and, by extension, PRC artistic director David Hammond, who has staged it with breathtaking aplomb -- is, to my mind, something approaching a consummation of everything I love and to which, as a writer of plays, I aspire. Total theater, for lack of a more eloquent phrase, and without question the production of this theatrical season.

The play, an unalloyed miracle of intelligent stagecraft, concerns three generations of a wealthy family in the West Midlands of England and the unintended effects of its past on its present. The adopted daughter of the current Mercers, Debra (Charity Henson) is haunted by her uncertainties concerning the family’s official history. As Debra confronts her mother Margaret (Tandy Cronyn) and brother Robert (Chandler Williams) in the clan’s physic garden, the enigmas of the Family Mercer are revealed to us in a prismatic fashion, the past answering as the present challenges.

In the same spot 200 years prior, we see how the Mercer patriarch John Gardner (Ray Dooley) began his fortune while in the South Africa of 1799 we witness the truth behind the mystery of Margaret’s grandmother Victoria (Melissa Hickey). In both settings, race becomes a powerful force whose reverberations are felt, if not entirely understood, in the present -- and in neither with archness or didacticism. The most urgent questions are posed concerning murder, duplicity, economic barbarism, bigotry, racial exploitation in both the abstract and the concrete, empathy, redemption -- even the legitimacy of art -- and the ways in which we must accept even the distant past as a means of connecting with and, finally, transcending it.

Revealing even a scintilla more would spoil your immersion into the world Stafford, Hammond, and Co. have so -- well, luminously -- created. Quotation too runs the risk of diminishment; but when a playwright has so rich a gift for expression at his command, one worth taking. First, wit, as when the much-enslaved Saul Mercer (Earl Baker, Jr.) says of himself, with ironic good humor, “I was a profitable business.” Second, poetry: John Gardner, who feels certain his employer will reward his labors in his will, observes, “You can’t eat hope. But it can sustain you.” Third, incisiveness: When Debra’s brother accuses her of the dread “political correctness,” she quite rightly ripostes, “You use P.C. as a slur to shut off debate.” Fourth, metaphor: When Margaret refers to the “taut, sinewy, root-like memories” she needs to pull up. Fifth, intellectual rigor: In one of his many faux-academic debates with his sister -- arguments that contain more than a kernel of serious intent -- Robert notes that “All versions of history are partial.” Luminosity also contains one of the most effective first act curtains I’ve ever seen. A playwright whose arsenal contains all of these attacks, and who employs them as naturally as Nick Stafford does, is one to watch. That sort of hope can sustain you through many a dark season of theater.

The company is without blemish. Ray Dooley performs one of his patented marvels, making Gardner both appalling and, somehow, achingly human; the tenderness with which he looks at the bundle containing a victim of smallpox is quietly devastating. Tandy Cronyn gives Margaret splendid texture, although I fail to see how she earns the final bow at curtain call for what, however brilliantly limned, is decidedly a supporting role. Earl Baker, Jr. is ideally cast in a brief but terribly important part, and his expressive bass-baritone is an instrument to cherish. Victoria is, necessarily, cryptic, but Melissa Hickey gives her a beautiful, wounded dignity that is, ultimately, a kind of benediction.

Chandler Williams’ Robert is superbly detailed, allowing the character’s concealed ambivalence to gradually rise through a veneer of mocking hostility. As James Mercer, whose diamond-cutting duty gives the play much of its plangent metaphorical rue, Bjorn Thorstad embodies both the excitement of a man in love with his craft and the unbearable tension by which tradition erodes the soul of an otherwise decent man. PRC company members Kenneth P. Strong and Jeffrey Blair Cornell give especially vivid performances as, respectively, the Mercers’ benefactor and an alarmingly Nixonian Quaker lawyer, more frightening in his own way than the murderer he advises.

The production’s most astonishing presence, however, and the one on whom the play’s success depends, is the Debra of Charity Henson. I don’t know what impresses me more: Henson’s total immersion in, and command of, an expansive and difficult role, or the fact that this performance marks the young actor’s first professional engagement. In the wrong hands, Debra could well become merely militant and faintly unpleasant, but Henson inhabits the character to such a degree, and with so much empathy, that her frustrations become ours, and we have an equal share in her quest and its ultimate triumph. Chuck Jones used to say that when you put work and love into a project, at its unveiling only the love should show. Charity Henson never lets us see the work.

Bill Clarke’s sets and costumes, like the lighting designs by Peter West, are splendidly functional yet beautiful in and of themselves. Clarke has created a brilliantly effective space on which the Mercers play out their passionate contradictions. His main set, the physic garden, is an artfully arranged mixture of peat, straw, effectively aged terraces, flowering plants, and rich brown earth, out of which death emerges and into which transcendence departs. Train station lamps and chandeliers drop from the flies with graceful inevitability, a slatted wooden walkway curves downstage center, and a working pump sustains the Mercer’s homestead in both 1799 and 1999. Clarke’s costumes are equally apropos, particularly the grimly humorous way in which he swaths a Quaker in muslin during an epidemic. He also provides a pair of stunning ensembles for Victoria; the one she sports in the “blessing” sequence has been dyed using the ombré technique -- a strong dye bath that creates a gradation of color. The effect makes the dress appear to be casting shadows as she walks through the set and is a perfect mate to Stafford’s use of diamonds as metaphor.

Finally, though, it is to David Hammond that we give the fullest measure of thanks -- first for finding the play and second for directing it with consummate style and sensitivity. Every moment of Stafford’s script has been prepared for with utmost care, yet there is nothing fussy about a single step or gesture. Hammond’s direction has room for everything -- a subtly placed glance or an act of shocking violence juxtaposed with the saving of a life in another time and place. He also gives us a riveting coup de theatre in which staging, performance, lighting, and music (by M. Anthony Reimer, whose little tinklings for the diamond scenes is otherwise rather twee) combine to create a moment possible only in the theater and then only when so many extraordinary human elements coalesce.

Triangle audiences may have to search long and hard for another play as deeply rewarding as this one. I know I will. Luminosity is precisely the sort of work our theater needs and so seldom receives. It makes one proud.

PlayMakers Repertory Company: http://www.playmakersrep.org/news/index.cfm?nid=14.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Gore Vidal's "On the March to the Sea" at Duke

2005-10-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

Theater Previews at Duke Review - On the March to the Sea

By Scott Ross

I cannot be neutral about Gore Vidal. It’s a condition shared by a great many of his readers -- and detractors. Establishment figures of both parties (which Vidal views, aptly, as two wings of the same organization) either dismiss our greatest essayist as an addled gadfly or demonize him as a kind of ideological heretic; during the Iraqi invasion a reactionary web site issued its own deck of “most wanted” cards, with Vidal the King of Clubs.

If America has an unaffiliated official historian, it is Gore Vidal. His series of connected historical novels (Washington DC, Burr, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and The Golden Age) limn the entirety of the American experience from the Revolution onward with both an unerring sense of drama and an enlightened view of the democratic experiment gone hopelessly (and Ben Franklin would say, inevitably) awry. Vidal’s masterful novel Lincoln fully re-imagines our most enigmatic President -- even Richard Nixon was more immediately comprehensible -- and his The Best Man is arguably the finest (and funniest) political play ever written in this country.

Vidal was the first popular American novelist to publish a novel (The City and the Pillar, in 1948) unapologetic about its homosexual protagonist’s obsession with his boyhood lover, a move that got his future work banned from review in The New York Times -- a reprieve Vidal endured with considerable success. Hardly daunted by the experience, Vidal went on to publish, in 1968, the uproariously incisive sexual satire Myra Breckinridge (the last name suggested, perhaps, by a notable Hollywood transsexual?) and its equally devastating 1973 sequel Myron, in which the author memorably replaced “obscenities” with the names of then-current Supreme Court Justices. A penetrating critic of religious hysteria, Vidal is also the author of two extraordinarily savage and prophetic novels: Messiah (1954) and Kalki (1978), the latter eerily prescient: its central notions were born out, not much later, by the Jonestown Massacre.

As an essayist and social critic, the man has no peer; his 1993 collection United States: Essays 1952-1992 would be an essential Desert Island tome, in tandem with his luminous 1995 memoir Palimpsest. Naturally, Vidal’s social-political-historical oeuvre (as Polonious might term it) is incessantly -- even obsessively -- picked at by those academicians Vidal refers to, deliciously, as “scholar squirrels” as well as by his contemporaries. (William F. Buckley, piqued by Vidal’s trenchant analysis of that perennial Harvard man’s “crypto-fascism” during a live 1968 debate, threatened to punch his opponent “in the goddamn face.”) When the History Channel broadcast the British-made “Gore Vidal’s Presidents of the United States” a few years back, the network assembled a cohort of talking heads, including the dread Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to refute at length nearly all of Vidal’s conclusions -- a display of public cowardice and pre-emptive self-censure pretty much unparalleled in the history of American television.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Vidal’s newest work, the invigorating Civil War play On the March to the Sea, currently on display in a thoroughly satisfying staged reading as part of Theater Previews at Duke (March 1-6 at the Reynolds Industries Theater in the Bryan Center on the University’s West Campus) is an event of enormous significance and dramatic integrity.

Adapted, and expanded, by Vidal from his 1955 “Playwrights 56” television drama “Honor,” On the March to the Sea is especially relevant now, given the Imperialist adventures of the present presidential administration in what Vidal rightly calls this nation’s “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” (If there was ever a time to rediscover the beautifully astringent 1964 Paddy Chayefsky comedy The Americanization of Emily, and its exaltation of cowardice as the universal antidote to warfare, this is it.)

I won’t take away from your experience of Vidal’s brilliance here by divulging the plot, save to note that it concerns the seizing by Union troops of a Georgia mansion during Sherman’s infamous 1864 campaign, and a communal promise reneged upon for possibly ignoble reasons. What matters is the work in itself.

I am bored to tears by the vogue, beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing, seemingly without surcease, ever since, for what I think of as “elliptical theater.” This will doubtless get me into a world of trouble, but what I feel is missing from the incoherent flailings of David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, and others of their ilk is the traditional theatergoing pleasure in hearing language luxuriant with literacy and character, spoken by dramatic figures of great richness and complexity. This sort of generous, full-bodied playwriting still exists, of course, but much less ink is dispensed extolling its virtues. (Although I take the popular and critical success of the movie Sideways as a hopeful sign.)

On the March to the Sea abounds with wit, metaphor, keenly human observation -- even poetry. To sit in a theater and let this sort of erudition and feeling wash over you is to experience one of the great joys available in life. I’m tempted to quote from Vidal’s vigorous aphorisms and pointed exchanges endlessly, but will make do with two, one humorous, the other dramatic.

The first, a beguiling defense of preparing one’s words: “Even Cicero rehearsed his speeches -- especially the impromptu ones.” This is pure Vidal, impressing with historical acumen, then disarming with an ironic fillip. (The line is pronounced, appropriately, by the character most closely resembling the author himself.)

The second, a strand of dialogue that both illuminates its characters’ impotent fury on the one hand and resignation on the other, and serves as a heresy that will be shocking to those convinced that all good Americans are, and ever have been, solidly Christian. No, on second thought, I’ll let you discover it for yourself.

While there is heroism as well as villainy on display here, no one is either wholly good, or wholly evil. That may not be an attribute a vast public can swallow in our time of instant human codification, but it is at the core of great drama, from Shakespeare to Shaw. The Southern merchant Hinks, unable to restrain himself from profiting even at the expense of friends, is in many respects complimented by his captor, the Union Colonel Thayer, a man so deadened by the “wearisome pursuit” of killing men that he longs only to be cruel. And caught between them is a wife who has grown to hate the word duty.

In a large (and remarkably stellar) cast, Chris Noth and the great Harris Yulin conjure figures worthy of comparison with Willy Loman and Stanley Kowalski. I don’t mean that either role is imitative, merely that both can stand with the finest characters in American theater. (Although I suppose it could be argued that Yulin’s John Hinks shares with Loman a certain self-delusion, and that Noth’s Col. Thayer matches Stanley in the area of deliberate malice.) These are bold, complicated, contradictory figures, fully and pitiably human, whose dimensions are as beautifully evoked by Noth and Yulin as the characters are brilliantly invoked by the playwright.

Michael Learned does wonders with the relatively minor role of the Hinks’ social dragon of a neighbor, and the splendid Charles Durning exhibits a graceful civility in both triumph and defeat. Richard Easton is stunningly effective as the Vidal prototype Grayson, affably discursive one minute and barely suppressing a seething rage the next. Isabel Keating is a revelation as Mrs. Hinks. Not for her (or the author) the simpering, honor-corseted Southern belle; this is a role, and a performance, of searing dimensions. Vidal knows, as Euripides before him, that the greatest atrocity of war is what becomes of its vanquished women.

The young people in On the March to the Sea are wonderfully written, and equally well acted. Indeed, in a play less dominated by its older characters, the performances of Cheryl Chamblee, David Turner, and Corey Brill would be star making. They are utterly, and devastatingly, there.

The play’s director, Warner Shook, preserved from the distractions of set, lights, and costume, has been free to work with his actors on the nuances of character and dialogue, and it shows. At the improbable age of 79, Gore Vidal says he’d “rather give up sets than give up actors.” Change “Actors” to “authors” and, on evidence the feeling is, pretty obviously, mutual.

The Gore Vidal Index: http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/vidalframe.html.

John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.

Musgrave Essential: Fright Night

2005-10-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

From the Roddy McDowall Tribute website

Fright Night
Film Review by Scott Ross

The title conjures up a number of images, none of them especially promising. Not another slasher film, please god! But, being an unofficial lifetime member of any Roddy McDowall appreciation society that might be out there, I considered it my duty to give the movie at least a cursory glance. I've given it more than that, twice now, and even at a second viewing Fright Night remains one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had at the movies since Steven Spielburg scared the bejeezus out of me with Poltergeist.

There's some elemental quality in the horror genre that generations of movie-goers have tapped into, time and again. Without going into the complex psychology of the attraction, there is something about the horrific that touches some chord in people—a deeply rooted and seldom-explored chamber of the darker parts of our souls that filmmakers learned how to exploit very early on. This is something that Tom Holland, the writer-director of Fright Night understands well, and he's served up two terrific hours of it in this witty exercise in genre-bending.

The horror film has never been a particularly reputable genre, and its glories have been rare. The macabre sensibilities of James Whale gave rise to the two undisputed classics in the field, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, but that was in the early 1930s. (Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula is a terrible movie, and a reminder that—inexplicably—no Dracula film has ever used Bram Stoker's superb novel as a basis.)

The work of his successors—mostly hacks—have served to make Whale's contributions seem Tolstoyan in comparison. And in some strange fashion, the occasional stylistic successes (like The Haunting of Hill House and The Legend of Hell House) are as frustrating as they are satisfying; they merely whet our appetites for elegant trash, but they're essentially self-contained. The haitus between events worthy of notice becomes more protracted, the disappointments more discouraging. I imagine the same holds true for Fright Night.

The film concerns a high school student (William Ragsdale) who discovers he's living next door to a vampire (played with a delicious mix of charm and menace by Chris Sarandon.) That's it really, but one of the wonders of the movie is that it plays fair by the conventions. Even if he occasionally goes for the obvious effect, Holland doesn't tamper with the time-honored traditions of vampire lore. The film's surprise ending may seem like both a cheap shot and a break with tradition, but it's neither. It's simply the logical conclusion to an action whose elements are presented to the initiated as a given.

There is a remarkable respect for the rudiments of gothic horror unities here; even as it pokes sly fun at fustian nonsense, Fright Night pushes all the right buttons and pulls all the correct switches associated with our cherished ideas of how a good vampire tale is supposed to affect the viewer.

But the film's most important component lies in the casting of Roddy McDowall. As Peter Vincent, "the Great Vampire Killer" - host of a silly, third-rate TV chiller theatre called "Fright Night", McDowall serves as a cunning reminder that what we're watching is make-believe. Through the juxtapositions of the movie's rising action with Vincent's repeated appearances on the tube nonchalantly dispatching Hollywood vampires, Holland is winking at us even as he's piling on the more horrific trappings of his own Fright Night. Peter Vincent is the joke within the joke.

Nor is McDowall's casting accidental; he's shown up on enough horror-tinged "Twilight Zone" and "Night Gallery" episodes, TV movies and theatrical releases to have become a part of the genre himself. His performance both validates the form and pokes mischievous fun at it.

Although it's a joy to watch McDowall ham it up as Peter Vincent, glorying in his own essential hokiness, you become aware as the film rolls on of the actor's mastery of craft. His performance seems deliciously camp at first, as he struts about in pompous fashion—until he realizes that, for the first time in his synthetic life and career, he's dealing with a real vampire. At the same time, McDowall is artfully etching a portrait of abject failure—a pathetic shill who knows in his bones that his time is up, a time he never really had to begin with.

When these disparate strands crystallize, Vincent's veneer cracks; he becomes correspondingly more terrified, and we get the movie's only taste of non-surface acting. He's a charlatan, this Peter Vincent - broken-down and seedy, with his actorish posturings and calculated authoratiative timbre, but as McDowall plays him, the character has a conscience. Watch him as he wrestles with his own terror and you become cognizant of this shallow figure's real depth.

There is a long sequence late in the film, as Vincent stands mute witness to the (seeming) death-throes of a demon that is positively moving because of the unspoken pity McDowall evinces. I'm not certain all of the emotions that play across his weathered, oddly beautiful features were written into the script per se, and I doubt they could be. But McDowall gives them to us, subtly and movingly, through his own unassailable artistry—the sheen of craft that resonates throughout his performance.

Despite the cleverness of the movie's admittedly double-edged title, it has a point of view. When Vincent's stint as a late-show host comes to an ends, he laments the taste of the horror-viewing public: "Nobody wants to see vampires any more. What they want are demented madmen running around in ski-masks, hacking up young virgins." This seems to me a key speech, for even as we're being royally entertained, Holland reminds us that his movie is something of a dead-end. He's reminding us that it's all a sham. Even as Richard Endlund's often brilliant special effects are conjuring up images straight from medieval concepts of Hell, the movie is itself almost funeral: a final specimen of a dying species.

Whichever way you care to view it, Fright Night is quite a valedictory.

Revised Version of a Critique Written for The Middlebury College, October 1985
Copyright 1985, 1996 by Scott Ross

Insight/Out

2005-10-26T09:35:00.001-07:00

A couple of quickie reader's book reviews:

How I Paid for College by Marc Acito

Very funny, but oddly non-homoerotic
For musical theatre mavens, this novel is a must-read. It's wildly funny, with great comic observations and a unique tone—imagine Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories updated to the '70s, and with sex. But there's the rub, so to speak: although the narrator is slowly coming to grips with his latent homo (or at least bi-) sexuality, ALL of the sex in the book, save an alluded-to bit of felatio (and one moment of felatus-interruptus) is of the heterosexual variety. Gay theatre-queen boys hoping to see a bit of their own high school experience will be disappointed, or at least naggingly aware of the lack. That said, it's still a highly amusing ride and a very promising debut novel.
—7 June 2005

Light Before Day
by Christopher Rice

When is a "literary thriller" not a "literary thriller"?
Answer: when someone as prodigiously gifted as Christopher Rice produces his take on modern L.A. noir, slightly tongue-in-cheek. Not his best work (I think The Snow Garden is his finest novel so far) but ambitious, and vastly entertaining.
—20 May 2005

Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire

Maguire, the Magician
With the curious exception of "Lost," Gregory Maguire's novels are nearly perfect examples of writerly genius laced with expert popular craftsmanship. "Wicked" was an extraordinary feat of literary legerdemain -- one of the most beautifully imagined and thematically brilliant books of the last decade. "Son of a Witch," although briefer and less complex, is nonetheless equally superb in its way. Liir makes a great protagonist -- sharp, intelligent, seemingly passive yet capable of great courage and kindness. As an added treat, like "Wicked," homoeroticism in "Son of a Witch" burbles just below the surface, finally emerging in the most surprising (and pleasing) way. Critics used to call William Kotzwinkle "The Magician"; I think the mantle has passed to Gregory Maquire.
—11 October 2005

A few more capsules from a nameless website

2005-10-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

The Deputy
by Rolf Hochhuth

A great (if unwieldy) play on a subject of devastating importance
It may be difficult to imagine how one would stage this play effectively: it's length is prohibitive and it moves around from location to location, each described in great, novelistic detail by the playwright, and utterly impractical in a theatrical context. But it's a riveting, rigorously intelligent and utterly damning take on Pius's unforgivable reticense regarding the Holocaust. What with the Vatican's continued talk of canonizing Pius—in spite of its much-ballyhooed (by the Vatican only) talk of repentence for centuries of murderous anti-Semitism—this is a timely play and should be read widely.
—July 5, 2005

Boomtown: Season One
DVD

Best new series since Homicide
Whatever you think about Homicide getting cancelled, you at least have to acknowledge that the brass at NBC did right by it for as long as they could in the face of its poor ratings. The current realities of network television don't seem to allow for such such partisanship. Schematic cop shows (i.e., the Law & Order and CSI franchises) are easy to sell; something different, deeper—better—not so easy. Viewers prefer the realtive comfort of shows which, hoewever disturbing their content, resolve themselves neatly within the 60-minute time frame. And so NBC knocked off not only its best show since Homicide (which I argue was the finest drama in the history of the medium) but anyone's best show. The creative team behind Boomtown was determined to exploit the medium in refreshing ways. I hate that phrase "It was too good to last" but in this case, it seems to have been true. Too good for viewers, and much too good for the suits to recognize its unique virtues.
—February 22, 2005

The Phantom Tollbooth
VHS

Chuck in Wackyland
You can easily imagine how Norton Juster's whimsical, punning, and perfectly logical book might have appealed to Chuck Jones (his adaptation of Juster's The Dot and the Line had won an Oscar.) Parts of this occasionally doleful transfer are effective, and the vocal talent is impeccable: Mel Blanc, Hans Conreid, June Foray. But the musical score is almost unbelievably poor (Leonard Maltin's capsule review refers to the songs as "icky"), the character designs pale in comparison with the nifty pen-and-inks Jules Feiffer drew for Juster's book, and Jones's Milo runs his hand through his forelock so often you want to break his wrist. Worth seeing, for Juster's admirers and Chuck Jones fanatics. But only once.
—November 20, 2003

N.B.

2005-10-26T09:25:00.001-07:00

I am an idiot. In my capsule review of the Nine cast recording I said, quote: "Nine represents the first instance I'm aware of in which a record company got down a Broadway recording by having the cast perform the entire show—not simply the score—in the studio, from beginning to end, and editing from there" End-quote. Apparently I'd forgotten a little thing called The Most Happy Fella.

In 1956 Goddard Lieberson did this great, unweildy, slightly schizoid Frank Loesser musical up brown, with a grand and lovingly-presented 3-LP boxed set that was still in print in the late 1980s (and made it to CD in the '90s.) I'd be willing to bet Lieberson did not record the score "in one," as the producers of the Nine cast recording did, but that's not the point: I made it sound as though the Yeston show was the first to be gotten down in its entirety. (And—Jesus Christ! how could I have neglected Lieberson's full-lengther of the 1974 Hal Prince Candide revival? Mea cupla!)

Not what I meant, but one should be clear about these things, no?

End of N.B.

Being Pauline Kael (or at least aping her for a bit)

2005-10-26T09:25:00.000-07:00

The following are a series of capsule movie reviews, written for a 1999 film festival at the Stanford Theatre in San Francisco when I was the Dance, Comedy and Theatre Editor for Triangle CitySearch. An old CSTriangle editor and friend who was then working at the San Jose office asked me to write up these movies for her site. Unfortunately, she didn't make the request until the series ("Our Top 50: 10th Anniversary Hit Parade") was nearly half over, but it gave me the chance to dash off a few film precis in something like the manner of my critical idol, Pauline Kael. "Manner," please note; I can't claim anything more for what follows. Kael was a (contradictory? mad? certainly maddening) kind of genius. I am merely, as Dick Cavett once claimed for himself in a different context, an entertainer and pantaloon.

It Happened One Night
Behold, the Walls of Jericho: Gable's back and Colbert's got him in Frank Capra's trend-setting screwball comedy.

It shouldn't have worked. Or if so, should only have been a routine little B picture. Instead, It Happened One Night swept the Academy Awards, made Frank Capra's bones, turned Columbia Pictures into a respected studio, unofficially inaugurated an entire genre and almost put the American undershirt industry out of business.

Robert Riskin's screenplay contains all the screwball totems—runaway heiress, cynical reporter, impending marriage—and mixes them up with gusto and sophisticated wit; the humor is both sharp-edged and gentle. This is probably the least pretentious of all Capra's sound comedies, and if it makes social points it makes them tangentially. The movie revealed Claudette Colbert as a beauty with brains and whip-crack timing, and brought Clark Gable to a new level of audience appreciation, setting his persona and defining him as the era's great masculine sex symbol: the sequence in which he strips off a shirt to reveal his naked chest caused undershirt sales to plummet. (His chewing of a carrot was also said to have inspired the creators of Bugs Bunny.)

Gable didn't want to make the film (he'd been sent by MGM to "Poverty Row" Columbia as punishment) and no one else expected much of it. But It Happened One Night was an enormous popular success and won the top five Academy Awards of its year: Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay—a feat unequalled for forty years, until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (and, later, The Silence of the Lambs.) This may be the cheeriest of all Depression-era comedies; the long bus sequence contains something many later screwball films omit: simple pleasure, and charm.
—August 16, 1999

It's a Wonderful Life
Lasso the moon: James Stewart gives one of his finest performances in Frank Capra's slightly queasy parable.

There's a terrible irony in the way this movie got over-exposed in the 1980s. Frank Capra pinned his hopes for a successful post-war independent venture on this gossamer fantasy, and when it failed the heartbreak pretty much ended his career. (It had been sliding anyway since the late '30s and while he made a handful of movies after 1946, none of them were worth his time.) And the irony is double-edged: through an oversight, Capra neglected to renew the movie's copyright and it passed into the public domain. This led to endless, marathon airings on television every December, from which Capra received not one penny, although the seemingly universal love his movie began to inspire surely salved the wounds a bit.

The movie is too long—over 2 hours—and the pace is sometimes off, especially in the first half. The setting, Bedford Falls, is so full of lovable small town types you may long for that little Vermont boy in Nothing Sacred who bit a chunk out of Frederic March's leg. The movie is Capra at his best, and worst, and your reaction will vary depending on your ability to digest the treacle; the stuff about the rumpled angel Clarence (Henry Travers) earning his wings could rot your back teeth. But the central notion is a good one, and when James Stewart, like Scrooge, is forced to confront an alternate realty, Capra unveils the darker sides of his nature with a vigor so bold it's almost shocking.

Still, the movie would be little more than a curiosity without James Stewart. His performance is one of the four or five most deftly shaded and achingly humane of his entire career, and it's a rare case of an American actor exposing his nerve endings so ruthlessly it's almost too painful to watch. There were hints of this deperation in his performance as Mr. Smith, but the sweaty, suicidal wildness he conveys here is terrifying.

Donna Reed is Stewart's radiant wife, Lionel Barrymore chews the scenery with gusto as the villain, and Thomas Mitchell gives a lovely, wounded performance as an undependable alcoholic. The screenplay is by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Capra, with additional material by Jo Swerling. With Beaulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Graham, H.B. Warner and, as a surly bartender, Sheldon Leonard.
—August 16, 1999

The General
Hold on, Buster: Keaton's masterpiece, and one of the greatest of all silent films.

This may not be the most hilarious silent comedy (The Navigator is far funnier) but it's certainly the greatest. Taking a daring Civil War train robbery as his source, Buster Keaton crafted one of the most beautiful American films of its era: a living recreation of Matthew Harrison Brady's period photographs wrapped in a cunningly constructed comic premise and topped by one of the most staggering movie sequences of its time. Orson Welles once called a movie soundstage "the biggest model train set any little boy ever had to play with." Keaton got the tracks, the engine—the whole damn show.

Keaton is Johnnie Gray, the General's civilian engineer. When the locomotive (and his girl, Annabelle Lee) are stolen by Union spies, he gives chase. That's the plot in a nutshell. What matters is how Keaton handles the material, his brilliant physical comedy always arising from the circumstances of the action, and the stark realities of war and death played seriously but not somberly. It's a movie piled high with great sequences and indelible images: Buster, rejected by Annabelle (Marion Mack), making a forlorn exit atop the gears of the engine; chasing the General from a railway handcart; and in one of the most gloriously romantic moments in American movies, first strangling Annabelle for her idiocy, then rapturously kissing her.

And then, of course, there's the death of the General itself, a sequence so colossal the shoot became something of a holiday among the Washington state locals, many of whom appear as supernumeraries. It would be a spectacular set-piece for any movie, but as the climax of a comedy, it's non pariel. This 1927 epic was the capstone of Keaton's career, but it didn't make much money and before long Buster was at the mercy of Louis B. Mayer, alcohol and a parade that had passed him by. Thankfully, the comedian lived long enough to see his masterwork embraced by a new generation of critics and audiences, who joined him in proclaiming The General as his finest film.
—August 17, 1999

My Man Godfrey
"Godfrey loves me!": Carole Lombard at her loopiest, in pursuit of reluctant butler William Powell in Morrie Ryskind's delirious screwball classic.

One of the freshest of all screwball comedies, and one of the most intelligent. Carole Lombard wins "forgotten man" William Powell in a scavenger hunt and installs him as her dizzy family's butler, then decides she's in love with him ... whether he likes it or not. Powell is at his fastidious best as the slightly mysterious Godfrey, and the off-kilter Park Avenue household consists of spoiled glamour-puss Gail Patrick, Alice Brady as the peripatetic mater familia and gravel-voiced, frustrated father Eugene Pallette. With Mischa Auer as Brady's pretentious gigolo. (His imitation of a gorilla is one of the great, grotesque images in American comedy.)

Good as they all are, you'll have a hard time noticing them when Lombard's on-screen. Unique among the popular actresses of American cinema, Lombard was not only ravishing but could play darma and high comedy with equal assurance. The moment in which she emerges with a look of absolute rapture, fully-dressed from a shower Powell has shoved her under and shouts, "Godfrey loves me!" is probably the most pig-headedly luminous declaration of its kind. She's either the funniest beauty or the most gorgeous clown in movie history.

The most surprising element of Godfrey is the fact that the mildly disgusted screenplay is by that old reactionary Morrie Ryskind. Here, he pins down the rich like so many squirming butterflies, yet the script never descends to Capra-corn idealization of the working class either. And the dialogue is laden with gems, like Lombard's breathless definition of a society scavenger hunt. Directed by Gregory LaCava, who guided another unruly phalanx of comic performers (mostly women) to perfection a few years earlier in Stage Door.
—August 17, 1999

The Wizard of Oz
A horse of a different color: Judy Garland, Bert Lahr, winged monkeys ... and Margaret Hamilton scaring several generations of American children silly.

Is there an American over the age of four with a television set who doesn't know "Over the Rainbow" better than any song except "Happy Birthday"? The MGM brass wanted it cut from the movie, but producer Arthur Freed protested until sanity reigned again (or the nearest Hollywood facsimile, anyway). There are more accidents, happy and unhappy, associated with the making of this musical jewel-box than almost any other movie of comparable worth. Buddy Ebsen nearly died from the Tin Man's make-up and had to be replaced by Jack Haley; Margaret Hamilton was severely burned in a freak smudge-pot fire; a plethora of directors—most of whom (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood) also worked on Gone With the Wind that year—shot the thing; and MGM wanted Shirley Temple for Dorothy but had to settle for the greatest musical talent of her time.

Imagining this movie without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to? It's her blend of openness and mid-western practicality that carries the movie from one supernatural crisis to the next. And when Garland isn't enough, you can always marvel at Bert Lahr's indelible performance as the Cowardly Lion. One of the funniest and most original comedians of his generation, Lahr never had much luck with the movies; even here, in his greatest role, he's covered with fur. But has there ever been a more intoxicating mix of pugnacious street-corner comedy, mangled verbal bravado and ineffable sweetness? Lahr was one of the lyricist E. Y. Harburg's two favorite comedians (Groucho Marx was the other) and his delicious opera parody lyric "If I Were King of the Forest" is the perfect meeting of writer and performer.

The other pleasures are considerable, from Harold Arlen's charming musical score—brilliantly arranged and augmented by Hebert Stothart—to Frank Morgan as a one-man army of Ozian bureaucrats. It can get a little cloying on repeated viewing (especially the sequence in Munckinland) but it's fair to say that The Wizard of Oz has probably entertained more people than any other movie in history.
—August 20, 1999

Gigi
Crashing through the ceiling: Collette's Paris by way of Minnelli, MGM and Lerner and Loewe.

The last great flower from the Arthur Freed hothouse at MGM. The musical structure by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe may too nearly resemble My Fair Lady—Gigi herself is a Gallic Liza Dolittle and the title song is very Henry Higgins—and the beach in the "I Remember it Well" sequence looks like the soundstage it most assuredly is. But who can cavil about when the trappings are this deluxe?

The education of a courtesan seems the least likely premise imaginable for an MGM musical, but after the success of My Fair Lady, the top brass probably would have let Lerner and Loewe adapt the New York telephone directory. Somehow Lerner, as screenwriter and lyricist, managed to retain the sharp satirical tone of Collette's short story without diluting its sophistication. As a result, Gigi may be the most adult of all movie musicals.

Vincente Minnelli's colorful evocation of fin de siecle Paris is just about perfect in its way, and Lerner's witty lyrics sit most agreeably on Loewe's chamer of a score. As the reluctant courtesan, Leslie Caron is both ingratiating child and disarming young woman. Maurice Chevalier gives his patented boulevardier sheen to the role of narrator, while Louis Jordan almost makes ennui a desirable state as Gigi's dissatisfied suitor. With Hermione Gingold as Gigi's robust grandmama and Isabel Jens as her imperious aunt. Cecil Beaton designed the movie, and Andre Previn arranged and conducted the score.
—August 27, 1999

The Philadelphia Story
With the rich and mighty, always a little patience: George Cukor's magnificent film of Philip Barry's biting stage comedy.

From the Lubitsch-like opening sequence to the freeze-frame finale, The Philadelphia Story delivers like no other comedy of its period. A tiny amount of Philip Barry's dialogue was bowdlerized for the screen, but Donald Ogden Stewart's screenplay (with uncredited contributions by Waldo Salt) is a miracle of adaptation. What it says about class and empathy is still pertinent, and the performances by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart are evergreen.

The screenplay makes a virtue of losing one of the play's main characters (Hepburn's brother) by giving his lines to Grant and strengthening his importance. He's agile and funny, and his performance has surprising gravity. This was Hepburn's "comeback" film after having been labelled box-office poison; she bought the play, originated the central role on stage, then cannily bargained with MGM for the movie rights. She's so right for the part that it's difficult to imagine the movie without her. She looks splendid in Adrian's graceful costumes, plays the high comedy to a fare-thee-well and her timing is a thing of beauty—her drunken sequence with Stewart is one of the high spots of pre-war American movies. (Unfortunately, the success of the movie also set up MGM's condescending blueprint for a Hepburn movie: make her the goddess who must be torn down and "humanized.")

There are those who believe the Oscar James Stewart won for his performance as the cynical news-hound was an apology from the Academy for not awarding his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the previous year. Nonsense. You only have to watch him as he describes Hepburn's heiress as having "hearth-fires and holocausts banked down inside" her to see what a superb and uniquely truthful actor he was. In 1956 the studio concocted a tepid musical remake called High Society. With Ruth Hussey, John Howard, Virginia Weidler, Roland Young and the wonderfully serpentine Henry Daniell. The jazzy score is by Franz Waxman.
—August 27, 1999

The Shop Around the Corner
You've got mail: Forget Hanks and Ryan—this is the original, and it doesn't get much better.

Arguably the greatest comedy director of the 1920s and '30s, Ernst Lubitsch was to European sophistication what Preston Sturges became to American knockabout. This is one of his most gentle and charming movies. It, and the Miklos Laszlo play on which it's based, have been the source for everything from a ho-hum Judy Garland musical called In the Good Old Summertime to Nora Ephron's recent Hanks/Ryan vehicle You've Got Mail. (The only edition that comes close to it in spirit or execution is the utterly delightful Broadway musical She Loves Me, a flop in the 1960s.)

The basic device concerns a pair of perfume-shop clerks who unwittingly write each other anonymous love letters. The only hitch: they despise each other. The movie's unwilling lovers, James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan, are just about perfect. Stewart somehow manages to be utterly charming and rather brutal, and the sequence in which he discovers the truth about his "Dear Friend" contains one of his tenderest performances. Sullivan is correspondingly haughty and endearing. The Sampson Raphaelson screenplay is one of the wittiest and most empathetic of all comedy scripts; even the delivery boy (William Tracy), the least of the perfumery's employees, is allowed his moment of comic dignity.

The supporting cast includes the great Frank Morgan as the besieged owner of the perfume shop; Felix Bressart as Stewart's practical, cowardly co-worker; and Joseph Schildkraut as a cad. Ben Hecht worked on the screenplay. The sumptuous black and white photography is by William Daniels.
—August 28, 1999

Singin' in the Rain
Let's make no bones about it: This is the best musical ever made.

It could have been another of MGM's run-of-the-mill musicals. The screenwriters, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, had only one order: turn the Herb Nacio Brown-Arthur Freed song catalogue into a movie. All they knew was "at some point, there'd be rain, and someone would be singing in it." Their first idea, involving a singing cowboy to be played by Howard Keel, was thankfully overpowered by their second: a loving if satirical look back at the beginnings of Talking Pictures. Somehow, a routine assignment gave birth to the best movie musical of all time.

Every sequence works, building on and then topping the one that came before. The repartee is as fast and crackling as a '30s screwball farce, and the musical numbers are so well integrated into the movie's themes and action as to be positively Hammersteinian: when Gene Kelly serenades Debbie Reynolds, he evokes the mood on a Hollywood sound-stage and his riotous "Moses Supposes" routine with Donald O'Connor takes off from a pompous lesson in elocution. The title number is without doubt the most joyous declaration of love ever filmed, and the massive "Broadway Ballet" is, seemingly, a satire on Kelly's own American in Paris ballet of the year before.

Gene Kelly deliciously mocks his own egocentric grandeur as the silent matinee idol Donald Lockwood—the ballet ends with an extreme close-up on his hammy, grinning face. Reynolds gives a spunky, determined performance as the girl he loves, and O'Connor out-does Danny Kaye in his loony perfection. His big number, "Make 'Em Laugh" is a classic (although the song itself is a shameless Freed rip-off of Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" from The Pirate.) Directed (nominally) by Kelly and (largely) Stanley Donen. With Millard Mitchell as the short-sighted studio boss; Douglas Fowley as the harassed movie director; and Cyd Charisse, all legs and green stockings as Kelly's partner in the ballet. Best of all is Jean Hagen as Kelly's impossibly thick-headed screen paramour. A true test of devotion is to imitate her saying, "And I can't stan' 'im!"—those who don't get it are probably not people you'd want to be around anway.
—September 4, 1999

Holiday
Can you really do a backwards flip? Grant and Hepburn in George Cukor's charming comedy of manners.

This elegant Philip Barry comedy, directed by George Cukor, kicked off a great period of collaboration between Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. They'd already appeared together in Cukor's odd gender farce Sylvia Scarlett in 1935, and were about to co-star again in Howard Hawks' quintessential screwball, Bringing Up Baby—the movie that temporarily sealed Hepburn's fate as "box office poison." But Holiday is a tantalizing hint of the richness Grant and Hepburn would bring to their pairing in The Philadelphia Story two years later (again under Cukor's direction).

Grant plays Johnny Case, a nonconformist affianced to one of the daughters (Doris Nolan) of a stuffy 400 family. There's only one problem: Johnny wants to reverse the standard terms; he wants to enjoy a life of leisure before "retiring" into business. The family, needless to say, is appalled—everyone, that is, except Nolan's free-spirited sister (Hepburn). It's obvious from the beginning who Grant's going to end up with, but the Barry dialogue is so luscious the velveteen plot almost doesn't matter.

This was a breakthrough performance for Grant, whose light underplaying of the film's high comedy suggests considerable depths in Johnny's makeup, just as his own early acrobatic training gives his characterization a liquid physical grace. Hepburn is at her loveliest—you may gasp when she makes her first entrance. She's far from the arch, stereotyped image of her at the time; her playing has a freshness that even 60 years of changing fashion can't erase. There's also a heartbreaking performance by Lew Ayres as the bibulous scion of the family, who knows his future is a corporate prison sentence but lacks the strength to alter it. His presence lends the film a grave, disturbing beauty. Edward Everett Horton provides gentle support as one of Johnny's best friends. (A 1930 version also featured Horton, in the same role, paired with Hedda Hopper; Jean Dixon plays Horton's wife, delightfully, in this one.) The script is by Sidney Buchman, who wrote Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
—September 7, 1999

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
The Captain's paradise: Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney find love across the astral plane in Joseph L. Makiewicz's charming fantasy.

Joseph Mankiewicz craved a unique and perfect niche for himself as the writer and director of smart, sophisticated social comedy with the back-to-back Oscar winners A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. Before that, he was one of 20th Century-Fox's more reliable house directors, and this gentle romantic comedy gives a good indication of his gifts. It's also a damn good excuse for the not inconsiderable pleasure of staring at Gene Tierney's overbite.

Tierney is the youthful widow of the title, whose new home on the coast of Britain is said to be haunted by the shade of a sea captain. Rex Harrison gives one of his patented half-glamorous, half-bellowing performances as the spirit who prefers to live alone but who eventually succumbs to Mrs. Muir's charms. When you first see him, with his mandarin eyes, trim little beard and enviable waistline, he's almost shockingly desirable; all those re-runs of My Fair Lady can make you forget what a dashing figure Harrison cut in the 1940s.

The movie is slight and self-contained, but it slides down like honey. Aside from Harrison's outbursts (and the occasional bombast of Bernard Herrmann's otherwise glorious background score) it's a movie whose softness and gentle humor would not have been possible 10 or even 5 years later. It's a bit like a last fond adieu to a kind of lyrical, civilized pre-war romance. The film is lovely to look at, the central relationship one of refreshing maturity. The supporting cast includes Robert Coote as a nervous real estate salesman and George Sanders, whose less-cad-like-than- usual performance as the captain's rival is a mark of Mankiewicz's remarkable lightness of touch.
—September 14, 1999

Laura
But she's only a dream: Gene Tierney is radiant in Otto Preminger's nifty film noir.

Darryl Zanuck, the head of production at 20th Century-Fox, made it clear to Otto Preminger that he could produce this adaptation of the Vera Caspary novel but under no circumstances was he to direct it. That job fell to Rouben Mamoulian, a man largely at home more in the theater than on a Hollywood set. When Zanuck saw Mamoulian's rushes, he fired him. That left only Preminger to finish the job.

Zanuck needn't have worried. In Preminger's hands Laura became something of an instant classic, with Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity one of the first—and best—examples of the film noir genre. The movie made Gene Tierney a star, established Dana Andrews as a stolid leading man and, most peculiarly, set up the arch and slightly acrid Clifton Webb as a potential box office draw.

The story is lean and simple: a chic young woman named Laura has been murdered in her Manhattan apartment. A detective (Andrews) investigates the usual motley suspects: Laura's dissipated fiancee (Vincent Price); her aunt (Judith Anderson), with whom Price is obviously having an affair; and Waldo Lydecker (Webb), the cultural gadfly and radio commentator who claims to have been in love with Laura. The plot takes a perverse turn when, midway through the film, Laura (Tierney) suddenly turns up alive.

Preminger keeps the action and the occasionally purple dialogue moving at a zesty clip, and his style is shot through with noir shadings: dimly-lighted rooms full of shadow and subterfuge. It's by no means as great a film as the wonderfully ambiguous Anatomy of a Murder,which Preminger would direct 14 years later, but its pleasures are considerable. Among the incidental delights are Tierney's famous overbite, David Raksin's evocative theme music and, for the symbol-minded, the movie's central paradox: Anderson, Price and Webb—especially Webb—all seem to be playing homosexuals. (Zanuck later starred the former dancer and middle-aged specialist in priss as the urbane Mr. Belvedere in Sitting Pretty and its sequels, which were curiously popular. Imagine that Paul Lynde had become a superstar in the '60s and you have some idea just how curious.)
—September 15, 1999

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Fighting for that lost cause: Niavete, hope, cyncism, sentiment, wit and pure corn meshed miraculously together in Frank Capra's most characterstic movie.

David Denby once called James Stewart the greatest actor in American movies, and any serious study of that claim has to begin here. (Capra had used Stewart the year before, in his soft-hearted—and soft-headed—film of the Kauffman and Hart comedy You Can't Take it With You, and knew what he was getting.)

It's Stewart, in his brealthrough performance, who gives the occasionally cringe-inducing story its conviction; it's difficult to imagine any comparable actor of the period pulling off the almost grisly mix of shy gentleness, midwestern optimism, bulldog tenacity and general-purpose saintliness the role demands. His long filabuster is one of the great sequences in American movies, calling on everything Stewart could do and revealing that he could do it better than anyone—much as he would triumph over the treacle and sentimentality of Capra's It's a Wondeful Life a few years later, bringing out the darker and more desperate contours of the role and the story with greater intensity of feeling than any other star of his generation could, or would, have attempted.

1939 was a great year for the movies in general, and for Stewart in particular: he made Destry Rides Again and Made for Each Other the same year, proving his mettle in both comedy and drama—a rare feat for an actor at that time of rigid star stereotyping. In Mr. Smith he's brilliantly matched by Jean Arthur as the cynical newspaper reporter who first mocks and then embraces Smith's middle American ideals. With one of the greatest supporting casts ever assembled for one film, including Edward Arnold, Guy Kibbee, Eugene Pallette, Beaulah Bondi, Porter Hall, Charles Lane and William Demarest. Thomas Mitchell is Arthur's hard-boiled colleague, and the virtually-forgotten cowboy star Harry Carey plays the amused President of the Senate.Sidney Buchman wrote the schizophrenic screenplay (probably tampered with by the director.)
—September 17, 1999

Oh, what the hell ...

2005-10-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

As long as I'm courting legal action, herewith a few Lists posted by me to a certain well-known purveyor of printed merchandise:

I. Best Westerns: The Masterpieces (& the Incredibly Overrated)
1. The Searchers
If any film gives the lie to John Ford’s claim of not being an intuitive, deliberate artist, this is it. Strikingly bitter, vastly influential, and John Wayne is stunningly good.

2. Red River
Isn’t it interesting that the much-beloved Wayne, like James Stewart, is at his best playing murderous obsessives? Walter Brennan is a stitch, and Montgomery Clift is so beautiful it hurts.

3.) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Not Ford’s final film, but his valedictory none the less. Achingly humane, this lyrical meditation on the western myth feels more profound with each new viewing.

4.) Rio Bravo
A Western with nothing much on its mind is usually a Western best avoided. But not with Howard Hawks directing, Wayne at his most likable and Walter Brennan toothlessly chewing (gumming?) the scenery.

5.) She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
Ford’s most effortlessly beautiful movie, and his gentlest and most elegiac. Wayne is shockingly tender, even pacifist, in his most effortlessly moving performance.

6.) Stagecoach
The Grand Hotel of the horsey set. This is where all the cliches and stereotypes come from. Watch for Wayne’s star-making entrance.

7.) Winchester ‘73
This, and Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur, would make a great “Jimmy-Stewart-as-civilized-madman” double feature. Stewart nearly breaking Dan Duryea’s arm still has the power to shock.

8.) The Naked Spur
Mann and Stewart’s unnerving masterpiece. There’s a remarkably staged raid that comes, seemingly, from nowhere, and Robert Ryan is slyly winning as the conniving outlaw.

9.) Bad Day at Black Rock
Robert Ryan was perhaps the least acclaimed great screen actor of his era. (See above.) An impressively tight little thriller that should never be seen in pan&scan.

10.) My Darling Clementine
Another Ford beauty. Fonda is superb, which isn’t surprising; but so is Victor Mature, which is.

11.) The Wild Bunch—The Original Director’s Cut
No one so brilliantly explored the effect of violence as Sam Peckinpaw. Still has the power to make you walk around in a daze afterward. William Holden’s sad, weathered face is ineffably moving.

12.) McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Arguably the most eccentric—and beautiful—of all Westerns. Poetic, funny, and with a revelatory performance by Warren Beatty. Utterly unwatchable on VHS.

13.) Bite the Bullet
Richard Brooks’ powerfully empathetic, lyric poem finds decency in every character. Gene Hackman is perhaps the gentlest cowboy of all time. Should only be seen in widescreen.

14.) True Grit
Not a masterpiece, but awfully entertaining. In little Kim Darby, John Wayne finally met his match. Great Elmer Bernstein score.

15.) Unforgiven
A rare Oscar winner deserving of all its prizes. Curiously, misinterpreted by many of its critics as having it both ways. Nonsense.

16.) The Outlaw Josey Wales
Eastwood's first great film as a director. Angry, expansive and exciting. And how could anyone not love Chief Dan George?

17.) The Clint Eastwood Gift Set (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)
You can argue the authenticity of Sergio Leone’s approach, but not his style, nor that of Ennio Morricone’s trend-setting scores. Smart, surprising and just plain entertaining.

18.) Support Your Local Gunfighter/Support Your Local Sheriff
Sheriff is funnier, but both of Burt Kennedy’s spoofs are endearingly loopy. Harry Morgan gets funnier and funnier every time he bellows, and Jack Elam is what Goofy might be like if he was human.

19.) Hour of the Gun
A striking re-interpretation of the Wyatt Earp mythos. Garner is as intense here as he is amusing in the Support Your Local ... series. Terrific score by Jerry Goldmsith.

20.) The Big Country
William Wyler’s smart “anti-Western,” with a terrific cast, some stunning cinematography, and one of the greatest of all film scores, by Jerome Moross.

21.) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Special Edition)
William Goldman’s screenplay is occasionally too smart-ass for its own good, and the movie as a whole isn’t as emotionally resonant as The Wild Bunch. But what a ride it is. “Who are those guys?”

22.) Blazing Saddles
Only Mel Brooks could have done it. Yiddish Indians, hip black sherrifs, Harvey Korman, and Madeline Kahn out-Dietrichring Dietrich. Vulgar, profane, infantile? Yes. Hilarious? Woof!

23.) How the West Was Won
Surely Cinerama couldn’t have made this overstuffed farrago much better. Dull, cliched, and—shockingly—made with almost no real sense of the visual.

24.) High Noon
With Shane, one of the two most overrated Westerns of all time, despite Gary Cooper. Forsake it, my darlin’.

II. Billy Wilder: He was Big—It’s the Pictures That Got Small.
1.) Some Like It Hot (Special Edition)
Arguably the greatest sound comedy, certainly the finest of the post-war era. Jack Lemmon’s best comic performance—so why did they give the Oscar that year to Charleton Heston?

2.) Sunset Boulevard (Special Collector’s Edition)
No one, not even Robert Altman, has made a more incisive dark comedy about Hollywood. Holden is so good it hurts, and Swanson is far more than the crazed harpy she seems.

3.) The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
Wilder’s most underrated movie. A bittersweet variation on the canon, which the director was forced to butcher before release. The un-cut version is a Holy Grail of film restoration.

4.) The Apartment
Both bitter and sweet; the most vitriolic satire of American business is also one of Wilder’s most moving love stories. MacLaine is astonishing, Lemmon magnificent.

5.) Ace in the Hole (AKA The Big Carnival)
They keep changing the title (see also The Big Carnival) but its original, the punning Ace in the Hole, sums it up best. May be Wilder’s most misunderstood movie. And one of his greatest.

6.) Double Indemnity
Wilder’s unconscious film noir (too early, and not a B movie) is a dead-solid perfect depiction of American avarice gone haywire. Stanwyck was never more libidinously carnivorous.

7.) One, Two, Three
The most frenetic of Wilder’s comic eruptions, and one of his funniest. Cagney quit movies after this one; its pace may have put him on the verge of a breakdown.

8.) Stalag 17
For anyone who doubts William Holden's genius. He got the Oscar he should have won for Sunset Blvd. for his performance here as a good man hiding his grace behind a cynic’s crooked grimace.

9.) The Lost Weekend
Wilder’s examination of alcoholism is, inevitably, dated. But his visual approach to the story, the subtle emphasis on time, and Ray Milland’s desperate performance still throb with hellish power.

10.) Irma La Douce
The only complaint against this delectable farce is that it’s not quite Gallic enough. But that’s a minor cavil next to the good, dirty fun of it. MacLaine and Lemmon give classic comic performances.

11.) Love in the Afternoon
This one has all the Continental flair Irma lacks, and Audrey Hepburn besides. Wilder’s most consciously Lubitschian comedy is delicate, salacious and utterly charming. Bound to be remade, badly.

11.) Sabrina
Not nearly so good as Love in the Afternoon, just more well-known. Still, Audrey is at her most effortlessly charming and Bogart is oddly moving as a heel unexpectedly caught on emotion's hook.

12.) Witness for the Prosecution
Utter fluff and nonsense, but nonsense done in high style. Charles Laughton makes a veritable feast of every scene; even Dietrich is hard pressed to top him.

13.) Avanti!
Another of Wilder’s under-appreciated comic gems. Lemmon’s tight-rope walk as insufferable prig turned human by love is remarkable and sure. A celebration of love stymied but un-bowed by convention.

14.) A Foreign Affair
Dietrich was never more audaciously, selfishly sexy than in this dark farce of love in the unconquered ruins of Berlin.

15.) The Major and the Minor
Wilder’s directorial debut is a sunny, if slightly foreboding, farce of mistaken identity and pre-Lolita sexual panic. Rogers was never better.

16.) Five Graves to Cairo
Virtually forgotten, Wilder’s second movie as a director is a taut, beautifully sustained war-time thriller with some welcome touches of salubrious eroticism.

17.) Kiss Me, Stupid!
This heart-felt farce was denounced from press and pulpit alike. Would have been far better if Peter Sellers hadn’t been replaced by Walston, but it’s still a moving testament to marital commitment.

18.) The Emperor Waltz
Wilder marking time, albeit in three-quarter. Slight but charming, with Der Bingle’s usual cavalier insouciance softened by private anguish.

19.) The Fortune Cookie
Although its idealized sentiment toward a wronged, black athlete is heavy-going, it gave Matthau a well-deserved push to stardom. His shyster lawyer is perfectly pitched, and unrepentantly hilarious.

20.) The Front Page
No masterpiece, but Wilder’s hommage to his own days as a tabloid reporter has a vicious charm, a sweet performance by Austin Pendleton and a superb turn by Matthau as the ultimate press jackal.

21.) The Spirit of St. Louis
A curiosity. The great Stewart is much too old, and the Wilder touch is submerged in biopic convention. But the flight sequences are beautiful and heart-stoppingly effective.

22.) Buddy Buddy
Inconsequential but frequently hilarious. Matthau’s performance as a dead-pan paid assassin virtually defines the art of being funny without giving the game away.

23.) The Seven Year Itch
The absolute nadir. Wilder’s only truly bad film, redeemed only by Monroe’s innocent lubriciousness. A smutty sexist joke unworthy of the man who made The Major and the Minor & A Foreign Affair.

24.) AFI Lifetime Achievement Awards: Billy Wilder
Well worth having, if only for glimpses of the great now dead (Lemmon, Matthau, Wilder). A nice pocket history of Wilderian pleasures.

III. “A Guy You’re Gonna Like”: The Best of Jack Lemmon
1.) Some Like It Hot (Special Edition)
Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s masterpiece; Marilyn was never better, Curtis more inspired, nor Joe E. Brown so memorable. Lemmon’s greatest comic performance. Or anyone else’s.

2.) The China Syndrome
Lemmon’s superb turn as a good man shattered by circumstance haunts you long after the move ends.

3.) Save the Tiger
Lemmon won his second Oscar for his almost unbearably raw performance in this dark examination of success’s underbelly.

4.) The Apartment
Wilder & Diamond’s still-scorching satire on office politics and sexual hypocracy. MacLaine is utterly adorable. Lemmon is asked to do everything an actor can do, and does it better than anyone else.

5.) Days of Wine and Roses
May be Lemmon’s greatest dramatic performance. His destruction of a greenhouse cannot be forgotten; his equally terrifying stint in a straight-jacket is as good as acting gets.

6.) The Odd Couple
Captures for posterity Matthau’s definitive Oscar Madison and features a strikingly felt Lemmon performance as fuss-budget Felix Ungar.

7.) Irma La Douce
Delicious sex comedy from Wilder and Diamond has Lemmon doining double duty as a reluctant pimp and his own rival. MacLaine is superb in the titular role.

8.) Avanti!
Wilder & Diamond’s rueful, lovely late romantic comedy is an unheralded masterwork. Lemmon plays a man you start out despising and grow to love, which surprises him as much as us.

9.) The Great Race
No one could have been funnier than Jack Lemmon as the cape-wearing, mustache-twirling villain to end all cape-wearing, mustache-twirling villains. Absolutely inspired.

10.) Mass Appeal
Bill C. Davis’s theatrical two-hander gets a lovely adaptation. Lemmon is extraordinary as the eager-to-please parish priest, and Zeljko Ivanek is astonishing as an impassioned seminarian.

11.) The Prisoner of Second Avenue
Neil Simon in a nervous vein. Bancroft and Lemmon lend what might be too much reality to this bitter comedy. Lemmon’s “comic” nervous breakdown is rather terrifying.

12.) Mister Roberts
Lemmon bounces off every available wall as the inexhaustably lazy Ensign Pulver. James Cagney gives him a run for his money as the dispeptic captain of a WWII delivery ship.

13.) My Fellow Americans
Not nearly as successful as the Grumpy Old Men entries, but much smarter, and far funnier. Lemmon and Garner are blissful as ex-Presidential enemies wrathfully joined at the hip.

14.) The Fortune Cookie
Even minor Wilder & Diamond is worthwhile. Lemmon takes a deliberate back-seat to Matthau, whose shameless shyster lawyer "Whiplash Willy" is a classic comedy performance.

15.) The Out-of-Towners
This one got hammered by the critics. It is fairly relentless, but it's also a deliciously nasty love/hate letter to New York. Lemmon and Dennis are pitch-perfect as the eponymous Ohioans.

16.) Grumpy Old Men
No great shakes as comedy or social portraiture, but it's got Jack & Walter feuding, Ossie Davis’s warmth, and an uproariously scatalogical Burgess Meredith as Lemmon’s father (!)

17.) It Should Happen to You
“A guy you're gonna like” was Columbia’s weak endorsement of Lemmon in his debut film, a gentle satire on instant celebrity, with a great Judy Holliday performance. Lemmon has enormous appeal.

18.) That’s Life!
Blake Edwards’ affecting improvisatory comedy/drama features a breath-taking Lemmon performance. But why is the DVD in full-screen format???

19.) The Front Page
Slightly mis-timed Wilder & Diamond, with Lemmon in a lower key. Matthau’s cagy portrait of newspaper snake Walter Burns may lack suavity, but who cares when it’s this funny?

20.) Glengarry Glen Ross
A powerhouse cast (including Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, and Al Pacino) squares off in this visually undistinguished Mamet adaptation. Lemmon is heartbreaking as a blowhard salesman on his last legs.

21.) The Murder of Mary Phagan
Lemmon gives a rich, understated performance as a Georgia politico who risks his reputation to save an innocent man’s life in this superb TV movie which also stars Peter Gallagher and Kevin Spacey.

22.) The War Between Men and Women
Underrated gem with Lemmon as a Thurber stand-in who's going blind; the great Barbara Harris is his bemused wife.

23.) A Life in the Theatre
Broderick is the young actor, Lemmon his unwanted mentor in this bittersweet David Mamet playlet. Gently amusing, and rather sad look at the profession.

24.) Buddy Buddy
More minor Wilder & Diamond, but very funny. Lemmon is a walking disaster as a suicidal censor; Matthau is droll and hilarious as a dead-pan paid assassin.

IV. Brooks & Reiner, Reiner & Brooks
1.) Oh, God!
Reiner’s finest hour as a director, with a superb, rueful screenplay by Larry Gelbart. If George Burns isn’t God, who wants to go to Heaven?

2.) All of Me
A delirious tour-de-force physical performance by Martin, and a savvy, witty one by Tomlin. A true gem. (Alas, no widescreen DVD.)

3.) Ten From "Your Show of Shows"
Hard to locate, but worth the effort. A dizzying compilation, capped by Howward Morris’s screamingly funny Uncle Doofy in the "This is Your Life" parody. DVD, please?

4.) The 2000 Year Old Man
Charming, quirky, and well-edited visualization of excerpts from the canon.

5.) Young Frankenstein (Special Edition)
May not be Brooks’s funniest, but it’s certainly his best. Beautifully directed, with Marty Feldman and Madeline Kahn at the height of their loopy inspiration.

6.) Blazing Saddles
Crude, vulgar, obvious ... and as hilarious now as it was in 1974. Madeline Kahn’s take on Dietrich is treasurable. Only regret: Warners wouldn’t let Brooks cast Richard Pryor as Bart. Sigh.

7.) The Complete 2000 Year Old Man [BOX SET] (Audio CD)
The Rosetta stone of comedy recordings. Reiner & Brooks seem to anticipate each other's responses in an almost uncanny fashion. They feed off each other like great jazz musicians at their peak.

7.) The Producers (Special Edition)
The filmmaking is almost primitive, but with this much pleasure, who cares? Gene Wilder was never more inspired.

8.) Recording "The Producers"—A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks
Not as artful and definitely not as heartbreaking as the great Pennebaker film on the Company session, but a treat watching Nathan Lane & Co. get down their tracks.

9.) The Producers (2001 Original Broadway Cast)
Who would have guessed that Mel Brooks would write the most delicious, tuneful, gut-wrackingly funny score heard on Broadway in decades? Sondheim needn’t lose any sleep, but what a pleasant surprise.

10.) The Producers (1968 Film) [SOUNDTRACK]
Worth owning if only for "Springtime for Hitler," it also allows you to savor the genius of Zero Mostel, the hysterical brilliance of Gene Wilder, and the inspired Teutonicism of Kenneth Mars.

12.) The Producers: The Book, Lyrics, and Story Behind the Biggest Hit in Broadway History!
It’s all here, and in glorious color. But a question that borders on sacrilege: wouldn’t Martin Short have been a more appropriate choice for Leo than Matthew Broderick?

13.) The Man with Two Brains
Silly premise done to a comic T. (Again, not available in widescreen.) "Into the mud, Scum Queen!"

V. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?: A Hawks-eye View
1.) To Have and Have Not
The most entertaining of all Warner Bros. WWII adventures, and one of the most entertaining movies ever made. You can see Bogie and Bacall falling in love on camera. All that, and Hoagy Carmichael!

2.) His Girl Friday
The most accurate and hilarious of the Front Page adaptations, with Grant at his most slyly engaging, and some astounding rapid-fire overlapping dialogue. "Sold American!"

3.) Rio Bravo
The prototype “small-band-up-against-it” movie. Leisurely, exciting, character-driven, witty, with some attractive songs tossed in. Great Leigh Brackett script. And was John Wayne ever more charming?

4.) Red River
Hawks’ answer to High Noon, the most influential of all non-Ford westerns. Wayne is staggeringly good, Clift almost supernaturally beautiful, and the commencement of that cattle drive a marvel.

5.) Twentieth Century
Barrymore’s best film role, and Lombard blossoms into one of the greatest of screen comedians while you watch; her feet going up and down like pistons is one of the most beguiling sights in movies.

6.) The Big Sleep
Hawks claimed neither he nor Raymond Chandler ultimately knew the identity of the killers (the novel is pretty explicit) but it hardly matters. Maybe the finest of the hard-boiled detective movies.

7.) Only Angels Have Wings
An ode to male bonding in the approved Hawksian manner. But Grant’s devotion to Thomas Mitchell is, finally, no match for Jean Arthur.

8.) Hatari!
An expansive, low-key and leisurely jungle movie with a good heart (the hunted animals aren't killed) and an especially relaxed and generous performance by John Wayne. Great Mancini score.

9.) The Thing from Another World
Did Christian Nybie direct, or did Hawks? The overlapping dialogue and male-female banter suggest the latter. In any case, a tremendously exciting bug-eyed monster tale.

V. The Magnificent Elmer: Film Scores by The Other Bernstein
1.) To Kill A Mockingbird: Original Motion Picture Score (1996 Re-recording)
There is probably no other film score I love quite as I do this one. Gentle, lyrical, with an exquisite theme. Its finale is among the most moving of its kind ever written.

2.) The Great Escape (Score)
Exciting, original, with a hopeful march theme and some beautiful character work. Best heard on the full-length Varese Sarabande Soundtrack Club release.

3.) The Magnificent Seven
Along with Jerome Moross’s The Big Country, this is the source of all those Western scoring cliches. Big, expansive theme, perfectly orchestrated and performed.

4.) The Man With the Golden Arm
Not the first jazz film score (Alex North’s Streetcar Named Desire came before) but among the best, with great Shelly Manne drum solos augmenting a tough, even harrowing story.

5.) Far from Heaven
How this could have failed to win an Academy Award is a mystery and a source of great frustration. Mockingbird-like sensitivity and passion make this the perfect capstone to a master’s career.

6.) The Grifters
Stanley Kaufman complained that this score was “hysterical.” Did he hear it? A mocking, Kurt Weillesque main theme that hints at the quirkiness to follow.

7.) Christopher Parkening: Elmer Bernstein—Concerto for Guitar (Bernstein, Isaac Albeniz, Jack Marshall)
Utterly beguiling. Listen to this, and bemoan how little Bernstein wrote for the concert stage.

8.) How Now, Dow Jones (1967 Original Broadway Cast)
Universally panned, this odd musical comedy boasts an impressive, playful score and some of Carolyn Leigh’s sharpest lyrics. Dares you to find in it any trace of the Hollywood composer.

9.) Oscar
Charming light comedy score for a Stallone curio. A delicious homage to 1930s-style arrangements, composed and conducted with wit and brio.

10.) Midas Run/The House/The Night Visitor (Bernstein, Henry Mancini)
Mostly Mancini, but graced by one of Bernstein’s evocative, entrancing and subtly moving scores for short films by the Eameses.

VI. Last Partisan of the Old Republic: The Essential Gore Vidal
1.) United States
The distilled wisdom of a lifetime's thought. Our greatest essayist in his element.

2.) Palimpsest: A Memoir
Vastly entertaining. And nearly every page contains a dagger, perfectly aimed at just the right hearts.

3.) Imperial America : Reflections on the United States of Amnesia
If more people had read this before last November ...

4.) Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
And this ...

5.) Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta
And this ...

6.) The Last Empire : Essays 1992-2000
Not to mention this ...

7.) Inventing A Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson
Both a perfect pocket history of our beginnings and a devastating comparison to where we are now.

8.) The American Presidency (The Real Story Series)
Where else will you find a remark by the British ambassador reminding his correspondent to remember that Teddy Roosevelt is "only five years old."

9.) The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (The Real Story Series)
Splendid little collection of essays—a perfect introduction to the man, his themes, and his style.

10.) Washington, D.C.: A Novel
The first published volume of Vidal's American Chronicle series (though not the first chronologically) is a witty take on pre- and post-war political chicanery.

10.) Burr : A Novel
In what may be Vidal's most enjoyable novel, Aaron Burr recalls the Revolutionary period from his own slippery perspective. An utter delight.

11.) 1876 : A Novel
A Centennial novel published at the Bicentennial, Vidal's Burr follow-up takes us through an American Presidential election eerily like our own 2000 edition.

13. Empire : A Novel
Could be subtitled "How the Republic Was Lost and Imperialism Took the Day." A bitter satire with a cast that includes a bellicose TR and a baroque-tongued Henry James.

14.) Hollywood
Vidal's penultimate "Family" novel is also a knowing depiction of the precise moment when image replaced substance.

15.) The Golden Age : A Novel
The final installment in the series is, at base, a revision of (and improvement over) Washington DC—richer, more expansive, and more personal yet just as astringent and amusing.

16.) Two Sisters
This "novel in the form of a memoir" is among Vidal's finest—a dizzying feast that is part reproach to Anais Nin, burlesque of her style, comic extravaganza and deft, moving sexual epic.

17.) Myra Breckinridge/Myron
No other native American writer has written so hilariously about sexual matters as Vidal in these two fables. Outrageous, pointed and utterly unique in American letters.

18.) Lincoln
A masterful attempt at explicating an enigma, Lincoln also contains penetrating portraits of Sewell, Chase, Mary Todd, and John Wilkes Booth.

19.) The City and the Pillar: A Novel
The first unapologetic popular American novel with a homosexual protagonist. Hints here of Vidal's own adolescent affair with the late Jimmy Trimble.

20.) Screening History
A series of Harvard lectures summing up, in a most appealing manner, the author's life-long attraction to the moving image.

21.) Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings
Trenchant and provocative. Vidal's sane, ecumenical views on sex have always been bracing and erudite. Here's a very good sampling.

22.) The Best Man
Arguably the best (and funniest) political play ever written by an American. (The movie, which Vidal wrote and produced, is very fine as well.)

23.) An Evening with Richard Nixon
Political satire at its most scathing ... and much of its comes verbatim from RN's own words, with which Vidal hangs him quite thoroughly.

25.) Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal by Bob Stanton
A very fine compendium of Vidal's views on politics, American history, fiction, and sex.

26.) Bob Roberts
As the soon-to-be ousted Senator Paste in Tim Robbins' splendid satire, Vidal seems to have improvised his dialogue from own collected statements. It sure sounds like him.

VII. You'll find such gaiety there: Great movies for Gay men
1.) Parting Glances
The late Bill Sherwood's only feature is wry, tender, witty and empathetic. Richard Ganoung is utterly right, and Steve Buscemi is a revelation. Just about perfect in every way.

2.) The Times of Harvey Milk
An alternately inspiring and heartbreaking documentary. If you don't dissolve in tears during the last third, you may not have a heart.

3.) An Englishman Abroad
Alan Bennett's small masterpiece about Coral Browne's encounter with an aging Guy Burgess is probably the single finest hour of television ever.

4.) Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Arguably John Schlesinger's masterpiece, with a beautifully compassionate and novelistic script by Penelope Gilliatt and a towering performance by Peter Finch.

5.) Gods and Monsters
As the great James Whale, Ian McKellan gives a performance of such compassion it tides you over the rougher spots, and Brendan Fraser is almost staggeringly good.

6.) Midnight Cowboy
Hoffman and Voight wanted John Schlesinger to film a scene of physical intimacy between their characters, but the homoeroticism is vividly implicit in this astonishing evocation of hustler angst.

7.) Longtime Companion
Craig Lucas's taboo-breaking AIDS quilt still packs a wallop, especially in the devastating scene in which Bruce Davison tells his lover to "let go."

8.) Wilde (Special Edition)
Stephen Fry is so perfectly cast he seems less like an actor than a medium. Jude Law is astonishing, and the final scene is utterly devastating; you want to warn Oscar to run the other way.

9.) Heavenly Creatures
Peter Jackson's best film is a wild, rich, comic, visually stunning look at a real-life tragedy. Kate Winslet is revelatory.

10.) Word Is Out
This movie made such a difference in my life at 17 I can scarcely begin to extol its virtues - nor those of the once bold, now castrated PBS that aired it in 1978.

11.) Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss
See how sweet and likable Sean Hayes was before he went over the top on Will & Grace (and became so coy about his sexuality). A unique, funny, eccentric comedy.

12.) Prick Up Your Ears
Alan Bennett's dark comic take on the irrepressable Joe Orton. Oldman is spectacularly good, but Molina is woefully miscast.

13.) Get Real
A real gem. Ben Silverstone is a revelation (is it me, or does he resemble a cuter version of Rowan Atkinson?) in this ultimately sunny, compassionate comic drama.

14.) Edge of Seventeen
Another gem. Chris Stafford, as the quintessential sensitive (and slightly queeny) gay teenboy gives a performance of rare depth and sweetness. Painful, sweet and very true.

15.) In & Out
A little of Paul Rudd's smart-ass dialogue goes a long way. But Kline is brilliant, his how-to handbook scene one of the funniest pieces of character acting of the last decade.

16.) Victor/Victoria
How gay is this one? Ehh. But Blake Edwards's classy comedy is beautifully realized, Garner is (as usual) a low-key delight and Robert Preston is non pariel. Was he robbed at the Oscars? Yes!

17.) Another Country
Another fictionalized look at the Guy Burgess story, with a superb script, incandescent direction and a great central performance by Rupert Everett.

18.) The Wedding Banquet
Ang Lee's breakthrough film is both hilarious and deeply moving in its honest depiction of parental anguish and private desire. (And Winston Chao is gorgeous, which doesn't hurt.)

19.) The Birdcage
I wish Elaine May had retained the son's apology to his "mother," but this is still one of the funniest farces of the past 20 years. Lane and Azaria are in the grand tradition of inspired comic genius

20.) Beautiful Thing
The Thames accents and dialogue are a bit impeneterable at first, but the movie is so loving and exuberant it floats you along to the sweetly charming finish.

21.) Maurice—The Merchant Ivory Collection
Slow but exquisitely beautiful Merchant-Ivory rendering. Rupert Graves is not only perfect casting, but mouthwateringly beautiful to boot.

21.) Torch Song Trilogy
Yes, it's too short, and bowdlerized, and not nearly sexy enough. But Matthew Broderick is adorable, and it's got Harvey's indelible performance.

22.) Before Stonewall
The first undeniably great television documentary about gay liberation. Frank Kameny alone is worth the price of admission.

23.) The Celluloid Closet (Special Edition)
Okay, so the narrator's in the closet. But where else would you get to see Gore Vidal, Jay Presson Allen and Arthur Laurents holding forth about the bad old days?

24.) You Are Not Alone
A lovely, underseen gem about adolescents, rebellion, and burgeoning sexuality. The final scene is astonishingly fresh—no American moviemaker would ever go near it.

In a Critical Condition

An Immodest Proposal

The calla lillies are in bloom again...

On Completing "Bleak House"

Hello, Mr. Chips

Ray Dooley as Cyrano

Ray Dooley Gives PRC Patrons a Cyrano for the Ages

50 Beautiful Flicks, 50

John Williams: "Star Wars Epsiode III: Revenge of the Sith"

Lily Tomlin at Duke

Paula Poundstone at the Carolina

Paula Poundstone at The Carolina Theatre

Glen Berger's "Underneath the Lintel" at Flying Machine

Underneath The Lintel

Harold Brighouse's "Hobson's Choice" at PlayMakers

Hobson’s Choice

Joe Calarco's "Shakespeare's R & J" at StreetSigns

Shakespeare’s R & J

Mark Ravenhill's "Shopping and Fucking" at Manbites Dog

Shopping and Fucking

"Cabaret" at NCSU

Cabaret

"Tintypes" at Peace

Tintypes May Well Be the Best Show of the 2003 Theatrical Year

Tim Miller's "US" at Manbites Dog

Tim Miller: US

The Capitol Steps at Stewart Theatre

The Capitol Steps

Chiam Potok's "The Chosen" at Theatre Or

The Chosen

Romulus Linney's "Silver River" at Manbites Dog

Romulus Linney’s Silver River

John Leguizamo at Duke

"Waiting for Godot" at Burning Coal

Eve Ensler's "Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man" at REP

"The Servant of Two Masters" at Peace

Jose Rivera's "Sonnets for an Old Century" at Manbites Dog

Mel Brooks' "The Producers" (Lewis J. Stadlen tour)

Stephen MacDonald's "Not About Heroes" at PlayMakers

Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" at PlayMakers

Nick Stafford's "Luminosity" at PlayMakers

Gore Vidal's "On the March to the Sea" at Duke

Musgrave Essential: Fright Night

Insight/Out

A few more capsules from a nameless website

N.B.

Being Pauline Kael (or at least aping her for a bit)

Oh, what the hell ...

Tintypes May Well Be the Best Show
of the 2003 Theatrical Year