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Broadway Review—Linda Lavin in "Our Mother's Brief Affair"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 28 January 2016 23:12
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Our Mother's Brief Affair
Written by Richard Greenberg; directed by Lynne Meadow
Performances through March 6, 2016
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| Greg Keller and Linda Lavin in Our Mother's Brief Affair (photo: Joan Marcus) |
For most of its first act, Richard Greenberg's new play Our Mother's Brief Affair ambles along uneventfully as it tells the story of Anna, the 70ish matriarch of a damaged Long Island family, and her two grown (and gay) children, Seth and Abby. Anna, who has been "dying" for years and is once again at death's door, breaks the news to her children that she had a brief but fulfilling affair long ago.
Then comes a bizarre plot twist, yet another example of the shark-jumping that sometimes afflicts plays and movies around their halfway points: Seth and Abby walk to the front of the stage and explain to the audience just who the distinguished gentleman their mom fell for on a Central Park bench one day really is.
A long and winding Cold War history lesson ensues, but the fallout for the family—Abby knew about an affair from their long-deceased father, while Seth had already felt betrayed upon discovering that Mom carried on her affair while he was unhappily studying the viola at Juilliard—is nothing compared to the fallout for the audience, as a relatively undistinguished dysfunctional-family comedy is overwhelmed by a plot reveal from out of the blue that sheds no light on either the family dynamic or the historical personages posthumously dragged into it.
As usual, Greenberg writes some amusing and facile dialogue (mainly shticky one-liners) that never digs as deeply into these relationships as it should; everything stays on the surface, so that none of these characters—not even the acid-tongued Anna, played with boisterous brio by Linda Lavin—comes to anything more than fleeting life. On Santo Loquasto's appropriately shape-shifting set, Lynne Meadow's staging still feels scattershot, hamstrung as it is by Greenberg's faulty dramatics, as if two completely separate plays were welded together in the most unwieldy fashion.
Our Mother's Brief Affair
Gerald Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY
manhattantheatreclub.com
January '16 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 27 January 2016 00:39
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Chi-Raq
(Lionsgate)
For his latest scattershot provocation, Spike Lee tackles the incendiary subject of the grievously high murder rate that's literally killing Chicago’s black neighborhoods—hence the punning title that the city is as dangerous as Iraq—and shoehorns in the plot of Aristophanes' play Lysistrata, where women withhold sex until men declare peace. The movie's tagline, "No Peace No Piece," is subtler than Lee’s own take on that pun, while much of the acting is even broader than usual in a Spike Lee Joint.
Although his heart is in the right place—and the casting of Teyonah Parris as a sexy and irresistible Lysistrata is inspired—his latest drama is just another long slog of a soapbox. The movie has a first-rate transfer; extras include a music video, deleted and extended scenes and making-of.
(PBS)
Throughout its six seasons, creator-writer Julian Fellowes' smash series about the Crawley clan and its (mainly) loyal servants during several periods of social upheaval has become the most popular PBS series ever aired.
And for the final season, it's all there: soap opera-ish contrivances and smothering sentimentality offset by a real sense of period atmosphere and a terrific cast led by Hugh Bonneville and Michelle Dockery upstairs and Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan downstairs. However, a pervading sense of of spinning its wheels validates Fellowes' decision to wrap it up. The series looks smashing on Blu; extras are three featurettes.
The New Girlfriend
(Cohen Media)
In Francois Ozon's most satisfying movie in years, Romain Duris gives a sensationally charismatic performance as David, a grieving widower whose "sordid" secret is discovered by his dead wife Laura's best friend, Claire, with whom he continues his secret life—until it complicates their own relationship and both of theirs with Claire’s husband Gilles, David's good friend.
Besides Duris—whose wounded authenticity transforms David from a mere stunt—Anais Demoustier's Claire is painfully lovely and restrained, Raphael Personnaz's Gilles solidly embodies what on paper is a thankless role. The movie has a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras include a 45-minute featurette about Duris' transformation and 10 deleted scenes.
(Arrow USA)
The three Japanese films in this set—Seijun Suzuki's Voice Without a Shadow (1958), Toshio Masuda's Red Pier (1958) and Buichi Saito's The Rambling Guitarist (1959)—are fast-paced crime dramas starring such young stars at the time as Hideaki Natani, Yujiro Ishihara and Akira Kobayashi.
Since the Nikkatsu studio pumped out a lot of these genre flicks, there will undoubtedly be a few more volumes coming. All three movies’ new hi-def transfers look very good, and the extras include video essays.
The Ritchie Blackmore Story
(Eagle Rock)
Legendary guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s estimable career, comprising Deep Purple and his indelible "Smoke on the Water" riff, his next band Rainbow and today's pairing with his long-time girlfriend for medieval songs, is ably recounted in this straightforward documentary.
Extolling Blackmore’s creative genius are fellow band members, rock analysts and guitar contemporaries like Brian May, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. Plentiful musical footage dominates this entertaining overview of a classic artist. The image looks fine; extras are added interviews.
Meet the Patels
(Alchemy)
In this disarming documentary, sister-brother directors Geeta and Ravi Patel show how their conservative Indian parents deal with Ravi not being married: he even hid his long-term white girlfriend from them, then broke up with her, to avoid having them meet her.
He humors his parents by going along with their matchmaking, and the movie presents the Patels as a real family that has balanced the traditional and the modern, and Ravi himself is a charming guide as he deftly negotiates this world.
CD of the Week
Scriabin—Symphonies 3 & 4
(LSO Live)
Russian composer Alexander Scriabin's interest in a kind of opaque mysticism and occult spirituality is in evidence in sometimes erratic but often ecstatic music, of which these two symphonies are prime examples, especially as played with vigor by conductor Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra in a pair of propulsive live performances.
Both symphonies are musical poems; the third, The Divine Poem, is an exhilarating juggernaut of swirling orchestral colors, while the compact fourth, The Poem of Ecstasy, presents Scriabin in his maturity, using fewer means to achieve the same artistic ends.
January '16 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 21 January 2016 00:09
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Die Freischutz
(Unitel Classica)
One of the staples of the German operatic repertory, Carl Maria von Weber's 1821 classic drama—which concerns a would-be marksman, the young woman he loves and seven magic bullets—is shot through with romantic musical moments.
This 2015 Dresden production, while fairly unremarkable as far as story, setting and atmosphere, has illuminating orchestral playing under conductor Christian Thielemann and, in an accomplished cast, Sara Jakubiak superbly plays Agathe, the female lead. This performance looks and sounds tremendous in hi-def.
(Warner Bros)
Nancy Meyers makes movies filled with juvenile comedy masquerading as adult, phony dramatics straining for significance and an unchecked sentimentality that floods the entire enterprise; her new effort is no exception.
After retired widower Robert DeNiro begins interning at a hip company for hard-driving boss Anne Hathaway, the odd couple gradually learns life lessons from each other: despite their professionalism, DeNiro and Hathaway can't overcome their writer-director's inadequacies. The hi-def transfer is fine; extras are three featurettes.
King Roger
(Opus Arte)
One of the great 20th century operas, Polish master Karol Szymanowski's compact 90-minute masterpiece is crammed with tautly unsettling music and a strangely compelling story that nods to ancient myths and Arabic musical idioms.
Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien makes a commanding Roger and American soprano Georgia Jarman nearly equals him as the queen; but dominating Kasper Holten's fluid staging is the orchestra’s magnificent playing of Szymanowski's hypnotic score under conductor Antonio Pappano.
(Troma)
Believe it or not, there are not one, not two, not three, but four Toxic Avenger movies, each more ludicrously amateurish than the previous installment, but that's how Lloyd Kaufman likes it: the willful ineptitude on display comprises incredibly fake mutilations and disembowelments, coupled with horrible non-acting and cheesy makeup.
But the movies enjoy a cult status that stems from the onscreen ridiculousness and, admittedly, there's a certain fascination in watching it all unfold. The hi-def transfers look decent; extras include commentaries, interviews, featurettes and a two-hour making-of mockumentary about the fourth film.
DVD of the Week
Hate Crimes in the Heartland
(Virgil Films)
Rachel Lyon's thought-provoking documentary examines two racially motivated crimes in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which occurred nearly a century apart: 1921’s Tulsa Race Riot was led by murderous white supremacists, followed by random 2012 killings of several innocent blacks at the hands of two white men.
Despite the film's brevity (it clocks in at under an hour), it makes distinct parallels that add up to a salient statement on American race relations, which hasn't progressed as far as we've liked in the past 100 years.
Alfredo Casella—Orchestral Works, Vol. 4
(Chandos)
One of the unsung Italian composers of the first half of the 20th century, Alfredo Casella was facile proficient in many genres, even—as the latest volume in a series of Chandos discs shows—though his greatest facility was for orchestral music, three early examples of which are heard here.
The excellent BBC Philharmonic, under Gianandrea Noseda's sensitive conducting, performs Casella's Russian-accented Symphony No. 1, gracefully balletic Symphonic Fragments, and haunting Elegia eroica.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg—Violin Sonatas
(CD Accord)
Already showing up on many recordings in a classical market that if anything seems relegated to regurgitating the tried and true standards, Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg—who died in 1996 in relative obscurity—has deservedly become a composer of stature, with every new CD of his music consolidating that argument.
Here, violinist Maria Slawek and pianist Piotr Rozanski give exceptional performances of some of Weinberg's violin-piano works, including the fiercely hard-nosed Sonata No. 4 and the expansive Sonata No. 5.
Broadway Review—Michael Frayn's "Noises Off"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 16 January 2016 21:47
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Noises Off
Written by Michael Frayn; Directed by Jeremy Herrin
Opens January 14, 2016
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| Megan Hilty, David Furr and Jeremy Shamos in Noises Off (photo: Joan Marcus) |
One of the funniest plays of this or any year, Michael Frayn’s fiendishly clever Noises Off (first on Broadway in 1983, then again in 2001) is a farcical deconstruction of the first rank whose set-up is simple: actors stumble through a rehearsal of something called Nothing On as their incredulous director wonders whether they will actually make it through the first performance the following night.
The genius of Noises Off is that Frayn's characters don't just run around and slam doors for two-plus hours: they do much more, as the three acts slyly feed off one another so that, in Act II, we see what goes on backstage during a performance, as the actors' personal lives intrude backstage (but never onstage) to brilliant comic effect. Later, Act III presents the play-within onstage again, now raggedly played after months of exhausting touring: everything that can does go wrong, even more frantically than in Act I.
In Frayn's expert hands, the laughs keep coming...and coming: he has written with such controlled comic intensity for his nine actors—seven players, one director and the stage assistant having an affair with him (other offstage pairings lead to more hilarious complications onstage and backstage)—that it's possible to miss something happening to some characters because one is following others.
Director Jeremy Herrin's superlative staging mines Frayn's crammed script for every one of its minute details, all on Derek McLane's extraordinary set, which becomes yet another character with its very slammable doors and its slippery staircases onstage and backstage that are cause many a pratfall. If Act III dips somewhat, it's only because Act I is a procession of wonderfully observed mishaps while the largely wordless Act II is an unequalled display of slapstick that even the best mimes could only hope to equal. Act III, conversely, rehashes what we've already seen while showing the implausibility of what occurs onstage since we've already seen the farcical machinery at work, so some of the entrances and exits don't make sense. But really, in the end, who cares?
Herrin—whose two-part production of Wolf Hall was a highlight of last season—again shows his unsurpassed ability to corral a large cast into an imposing, singleminded juggernaut. As Belinda, an accomplished, haughty actress, Kate Jennings Grant remains delightfully levelheaded throughout the ever-increasing lunacy. As Tim, the befuddled stagehand roped into understudy duties, Rob McClure again shows off his physical comedy flair from the ill-fated Chaplin musical a few seasons back: his entire body shaking and quaking in fear is priceless hilarity.
If Daniel Davis gives soused, over-the-hill star Selsdon Mowbray (a great name!) an irresistibly tainted aura of a past master gone to seed, only Tracee Chimo marks a sour note by overplaying how pathetic assistant Poppy is, making her far less funny and poignant than she should be. As the play-within's actors, clueless Garry and wimpy Frederick, David Furr and Jeremy Shamos provide endless chortles while mangling lines (Garry) and getting nose bleeds whenever things get too hectic (Frederick).
As aging leading lady Dotty, Andrea Martin is deliciously daffy whether wielding a phone, a newspaper or a plate of sardines (all of which figure heavily in the play-within), and Campbell Scott is winningly sardonic as director Lloyd, juggling his own career and his fraught relationships with Poppy and Brooke, the bimbo to end all blond bimbos.
Brooke is enacted so commandingly by Megan Hilty that she may plausibly claim the title of our best stage comedienne. Not only does Hilty do the obvious things right—she looks stunning in her barely-there wardrobe and acts as brainlessly as any Marilyn Monroe double should—but she projects subtlety in her movements, the stiff gesticulations, the mouthing of other actors' words so she knows when to speak next, or the crawling around the stage whenever she loses a contact lens.
As peerless as the cast of this unmissable revival of Noises Off is, Hilty provides a comedic acting class by herself.
Noises Off
American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
roundabouttheatre.org
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