Off-Broadway Summer: "All New People," "The Shoemaker," "Death Takes a Holiday"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 28 July 2011 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

All New People
Written by Zach Braff
Directed by Peter Dubois
Starring David Wilson Barnes, Justin Bartha, Anna Camp, Krysten Ritter

The Shoemaker
Written by Susan Charlotte
Directed by Antony Marsellis
Starring Danny Aiello, Alma Cuervo, Lucy DeVito, Michael Twaine

Death Takes a Holiday
Book by Peter Stone and Thomas Meehan; based on the play by Alberto Casella
Music and lyrics by Maury Yeston
Directed by Doug Hughes
Starring Matt Cavenaugh, Mara Davi, Simon Jones, Rebecca Luker, Julian Ovenden, Jill Paice

Although the long-delayed Spiderman and the national tour of Hair recently opened on Broadway, summer belongs to new off-Broadway shows.

But only Zach Braff’s All New People is truly new; The Shoemaker was originally a one-act and Death Takes a Holiday, originally from Alberto Casella’s play, became a movie in 1934 with Frederic March.

All New People, the first play by Zach Braff, shows the earmarks of someone who spent a lot of time working on sitcoms. When Charlie, on his 35th birthday, is caught trying to kill himself in a South Jersey beach house by Emma, who’s renting the place out, he ends up hosting her, her firefighter/drug dealer friend Myron and Manhattan high-priced escort Kim, who was sent to Charlie by the house’s owner in the hopes that she’ll cheer him up.

The quartet goes through emotional turmoil of the superficial sort found on a TV show like Scrubs, which Braff starred in, or a movie like Garden State, which Braff wrote, directed and starred in. The play’s lively if self-conscious dialogue furiously flies out of the characters’ mouths and zooms past the audience members’ heads. At one point, Charlie complains that Myron always has an obnoxious quip at the ready, but since each one tosses them out interchangeably, why poor Myron is singled out isn’t clear.

Braff, playing it safe, has his characters parrot many pop culture references, like The Lion King, Home Alone, Beverly Hills Cop and The Ten Commandments, TV shows like Fantasy Island, music artists like Sarah MacLachlan, Usher and Steely Dan, and even Riverdance, which is the music Charlie has on when Emma first walks in on him.

Braff’s clever but slight writing is marred by his characters’ unearned epiphanies, especially when Charlie’s claim of being responsible for six people’s deaths turns out to be true: that heavy-duty plot twist that has no business among such frivolity. There’s also a quartet of diverting film sequences to help flesh out the characters, while Peter DuBois’ engaging direction, which smoothes over the rough patches, keeps a brisk pace.

The comedy percolates thanks to Krysten Ritter (Emma), David Wilson Barnes (Myron) and Justin Bartha (Charlie), but they pale next to Anna Camp’s hilarious Kim. Breathing new life into a stock blonde bimbo part, Camp (featured in season 2 of HBO’s True Blood) never camps it up in an enchanting performance as the sexy, unwittingly wise hooker prone to malapropisms. Camp effortlessly turns the routine into something special: so when will she get her much deserved Born Yesterday moment on Broadway?

Susan Charlotte’s well-intentioned but impossibly naïve The Shoemaker not only treads the ground of September 11, but adds the Holocaust into its ungainly mix. A Hell’s Kitchen shoe repairer, who closed his store following the attacks, meets Hilary, a breathless woman with a hole in her sole after walking uptown for miles once the Twin Towers collapsed.

After he agrees to fix her shoe, he tells her about Louise, a young woman who hasn’t yet returned to pick up her pair of fancy shoes. The worried shoemaker, an Italian Jew who escaped the Fascists, also speaks with his dead father, who never made it out of Italy alive, for which his son still feels shame and anger.

Charlotte’s play has been expanded from a one-act version which omitted the Holocaust. The added second act makes a clunky play even more lumbering. Originally dealing with the immense loss of human life on September 11, the play has now become a disjointed and creaky melodrama which reeks of insufferable sentimentality.

Charlotte’s pretentious symbolism ("sole/soul" puns, for starters) makes it impossible to respond to rationally, and Anthony Marsellis’s blatant directing follows suit. If Alma Cuervo’s shrill Hilary and Lucy DeVito’s barely-there Louise are cardboard caricatures, at least Danny Aiello’s sympathetic shoemaker deserves plaudits for finding an emotional connection to the material.

If The Shoemaker was staged in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, it might have played successfully on our frayed nerves; a decade later, more substance is needed.

In Death Takes a Holiday, the title character takes a weekend off, ostensibly because he’s weary of dealing with so many corpses (it’s 1921, and World War I had him working overtime). But really it's because he’s fallen for Grazia, beautiful daughter of the Duke and Duchess Lamberti, whose grand villa is where Death spends his time disguised as a Russian prince whom Grazia promptly falls for, her impending nuptials notwithstanding. 

Casella’s play touched on the tragedy of young men dying in war, but little of that melancholy survives in the musical, with its by-the-numbers Thomas Meehan and Peter Stone book and Maury Yeston’s hummably forgettable score. Although "Losing Roberto," in which the Duchess mourns her son’s wartime death, is the most memorable number, it’s mostly thanks to Rebecca Luker’s heartfelt singing.

Derek McLane’s attractive but cramped set and Catherine Zuber’s routine period costumes don’t help matters, and director Doug Hughes is unable to move his large cast around the small stage area with graceful ease. Leads Jill Paice, a sweet-voiced Grazia, and Julian Ovenden, a powerfully-sung Death, have little chemistry together, which keeps this old-fashioned, overlong crowd-pleaser from being much more than a nostalgia piece.

All New People
Second Stage Theater
375 West 43rd Street
New York City
2st.com
Opened July 26; closes August 14, 2011

The Shoemaker
Acorn Theatre
410 West 42nd Street
New York City
causecelebre.info
Opened July 24; closes August 14, 2011

Death Takes a Holiday
Laura Pels Theatre
111 West 46th Street
New York City
roundabouttheatre.org
Opened July 21; closes September 4, 2011

Buddy Holly Lives On

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 26 July 2011 05:00

Written by Lloyd Carroll

Buddy Holly
Icon (UME)

Various Artists
Rave On (Concord Music)

Rock & roll is chock full of "what if" questions. Certainly on the top ten list of most rock aficionados’ lists would be "Could you imagine how much richer American pop culture would have been had Buddy Holly not died at age 22" in a plane crash along with Ritchie Valens and JP "Big Bopper" Richardson in Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3, 1959?

Twelve years later, Don McLean further immortalized Holly to Baby Boomers with his iconic "American Pie" that referred to that fateful frigid night as "the day the music died." Holly also inspired a Broadway show and a 1978 biopic that starred a still sane Gary Busey.

Buddy Holly would have been celebrating his 75th birthday next month if he were alive. Concord Records commissioned a number of artists to record their favorite tunes associated with Holly, while Universal Music Enterprises, which holds the rights to Holly’s original recordings, has compiled a dozen of his best in a new recording titled Icon.

Paul McCartney owns the publishing rights to Holly’s catalog, so he clearly had the pick of the litter here. On "It’s So Easy," which was a big hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1977, he tries so hard to give a different interpretation that the song is unrecognizable and quite awful to boot. He bizarrely attempts to emulate Dave Edmunds' 1971 hit cover of Smiley Lewis’s "I Hear You Knocking" by singing through a fuzz box.

Sir Paul is happily the only weak link here. Fiona Apple duets with Jon Brion on a touching version of "Everyday" while Graham Nash -- of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young -- delivers a faithful, heartfelt version of "Raining In My Heart" to close the album.

Other veterans who deliver are Kid Rock on the lively Motown-style "Well All Right"; Lou Reed on a very moody take on "Peggy Sue"; and Patti Smith, who shows a rare romantic side for her with "Words of Love".

The biggest surprise is Cee Lo Green, of Forget You and Crazy fame and one of the hosts of NBC’s The Voice. He wonderfully captures the sound of Holly and his backup band, the Crickets, on the rather obscure "(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care" that was written for Holly by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame composing/production team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

As fine as the aforementioned Holly tribute album is, as the old cliche goes, there’s nothing like the real thing. Icon captures a dozen of Holly’s most memorable recordings, from such catchy seminal rockers as "Oh Boy!" and "Maybe Baby" to the full orchestral ballad, "True Love Ways", which was recorded in New York City mere weeks before his untimely passing.

Also included here are tunes that were written by fellow up-and-coming pop stars at the time, Paul Anka and Bobby Darin, "It Doesn’t Matter Anymore" and "Early in the Morning", respectively.

Stevie Nicks
In Your Dreams (Reprise)

Judging from both the album cover and her voice on her new album, In Your Dreams, Stevie Nicks has found a way to cheat time. She looks and sounds just the way we all remember her when she was cranking out hits with Fleetwood Mac in the mid to late 1970s.

As has long been the case in her music, Nicks is full of contradictions. In the opening cut, "Secret Love", she is content with a no-strings-attached relationship, while on the very next track, "For What It’s Worth" (not the Buffalo Springfield classic), she yearns for a grand romance.

It has been six years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, so Stevie’s concern for the city in New Orleans may be a bit late. But it serves as a reminder that the Crescent City is still not what it once was.

Nicks has been singing about spooky characters way before Twilight, HBO’s True Blood and the CW’s Vampire Diaries, so we have to indulge her slow ballad, "Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)".

The title track, "In Your Dreams", is the kind of snappy, up-tempo, hummable tune that we haven’t heard from Nicks since Stand Back, Edge of Seventeen and Stop Dragging My Heart Around back in the early ‘80s.

In Your Dreams shows that Stevie Nicks can still carefully craft fine pop music.

Cinefantastique Spotlight Podcast: "Captain America: The First Avenger"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 25 July 2011 14:38

Written by Daniel Persons

We're betting Paramount would've preferred that Captain America: The First Avenger had come out on the Memorial Day or July 4th weekends. However, martial-arts-happy animals and big-ass robots claimed those two slots, so here we are in later summer, trying to get our patriotism going for a red-white-and-blue bedecked super hero doing his bit for mom, apple pie, and gas-guzzling automobiles in the thick of WWII.

Does director Joe Johnston's Rocketeer-tested period style work its magic for this final bit of table setting before next year's The Avengers? Are two hours enough time for an origin story, rescue adventure, and ultimate clash between good and evil? And where the hell are all the Nazis? Join Cinefantastique Online's Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons as they discuss these issues and more.

Also in this episode: Dan gives his capsule review of the moody, science-fiction drama, Another Earth.

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