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Film and the Arts
Theater Review--Raging "Heart"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 05 May 2011 05:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Normal Heart
Written by Larry Kramer
Starring John Benjamin Hickey, Joe Mantello, Ellen Barkin, Lee Pace, Jim Parsons, Patrick Breen, Luke Macfarlane, Mark Harelik, Richard Topol
Directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe
Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which premiered in 1985 (two years before President Reagan even said the word “AIDS”), has still-timely rage in every single line as it decries the various states of denial leading to the disease spreading so quickly and lethally.
The play’s nominal hero is Ned Weeks, a tireless if gratingly obnoxious advocate for gay rights, who tries to get the attention of the New York mayor (nameless, but obviously Ed Koch) and the local homosexual community in his effort to combat a new, fatal disease targeting gay men. Strident, standoffish and difficult to like or appreciate, Ned founds a new gay organization (based on Gay Men’s Health Crisis), remains distant from his straight lawyer brother, and falls in love with Felix Turner, a closeted New York Times fashion editor who soon comes down the disease.
By presenting Ned’s personal and professional strife in the context of the beginnings of a disease still killing people 30 years later, The Normal Heart personalizes a tragic true story that, unfortunately, so far needs re-telling. Kramer, always the provocateur, doesn’t mince words or pull punches when aiming at the willful ignorance of his fellow advocates, who cringe at the idea of telling other gay men that they can no longer have unprotected sex (or any sex at all, for that matter), or the institutionalized homophobia of The New York Times, which mentioned Legionnaire’s Disease and the Tylenol scare more often than AIDS in the disease’s early years.
Kramer also unflinchingly takes on the government and medical establishment, which treated the crisis with kid gloves until it was too late. In the character of polio-stricken, wheelchair-bound Dr. Emma Brookner, Kramer shows how desperately futile the fight was for individual doctors without any support from the Centers for Disease Control.
Even if Ned is a thinly-veiled autobiographical character, Kramer doesn’t put himself on a pedestal. Although fighting the good fight against insurmountable odds from within (fellow gays) and without (everybody else), Ned is also a shrill, shameless self-promoter unable to connect emotionally with anyone—at least until he meets Felix, which makes him even more inconsolable when his lover is fatally stricken. It’s the dovetailing of the personal and the political that gives Kramer’s play its heartbreaking power, its few instances of dated dialogue or shrill speechifying aside.
David Rockwell’s impressively minimalist set consists of white walls on which are inscribed quotes and factoids from the disease’s history, and occasionally—and all the more effectively for it—are projected the names of the victims as it progresses, until the intensely moving finale, when the walls of the theater are filled with scores of names. David Weiner’s lighting, David van Tieghem’s music and Martin Pakledinaz’s costumes persuasively give these events a specific time and place while remaining timeless.
Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe’s understated direction, which states Kramer’s case starkly and straightforwardly, shrewdly uses the production’s nine actors to haunt the later scenes when they‘re not performing, sitting and watching the increasingly emotional proceedings with the audience.
The redoubtable acting begins with Jim Parsons, Lee Pace, Patrick Breen, Mark Harelik, Luke Macfarlane, Richard Topol and Wayne Alan Wilcox, all investing pivotal supporting roles with vivid humaneness. Ellen Barkin, by barking her lines, gives weight to the life-or-death pronouncements of Dr. Brookner, whose big scene—her excoriation of the CDC for playing politics—receives a prolonged ovation that’s been all too rare in my decades of play-going.
John Benjamin Hickey’s Felix is a beautifully shaded portrait of enormous warmth and empathy, and Felix’s wasting away from AIDS is magically pulled off by the actor without any obvious makeup or stage tricks: Hickey shows us the sad frailty of a dying man with a big heart. The superb Ned is Joe Mantello, a former actor who’s been collecting awards as a director for 15 years: he might not grab us by the throat as Raul Esparza so memorably did in the 2004 revival, but he does something equally valuable, making Ned more sympathetic by being less forceful and more physically fragile.
Mantello’s devastating performance is the beating heart of The Normal Heart.
The Normal Heart
Performances through July 10, 2011
Golden Theatre, 252 West 45th Street, New York, NY
thenormalheartbroadway.com
Photo: Mantello and Hickey in The Normal Heart (photo by Joan Marcus)
Music Review: JT @ Carnegie
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 04 May 2011 01:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Perspectives: James Taylor
Carnegie Hall has been music's premiere venue since Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky conducted the Hall's first concert on May 5, 1891. Along with thousands of classical artists, many rock, pop and folk musicians have "made it" at Carnegie Hall, including the Beatles, who played there in 1964 (on the day I was born, if you care). So it makes sense that this season, James Taylor would curate his own Perspectives, four Carnegie concerts in which the legendary singer-songwriter traces his own musical antecedents and celebrates his more than 40-year hit-making career.
Taylor's Perspectives began on April 12 with a gala concert commemorating the Hall's 120th year, and the musician was joined onstage by an impressive array of star performers, from Bette Midler and Broadway legend Barbara Cook to Steve Martin and Sting.
Theater Review: "The People in the Picture"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 02 May 2011 15:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The People in the Picture
Book and lyrics by Iris Rainer Dart
Music by Mike Stoller and Artie Butler
Starring Donna Murphy, Alexander Gemignani, Christopher Innvar, Nicole Parker, Rachel Resheff, Hal Robinson, Lewis J. Stadlen, Joyce Van Patten, Chip Zien
Directed by Leonard Foglia
The People in the Picture, the heartwrenching story of Bubbie, a Polish grandmother in 1970s New York City, who lives with her daughter Red and granddaughter Jenny, shows how ghosts from her past haunt her present: these are the close friends and relatives from Nazi-occupied Warsaw, with whom she (then a talented actress named Raisel) worked in a Yiddish theater group until Hitler’s mass murderers destroyed the group and many lives.
A perfectly valid subject for a Broadway musical, The People in the Picture is, however, consistently softened by its creators, who sense that musical numbers about Kristallnacht and the Warsaw Ghetto wouldn’t go over well with their audience. So a lot of the show is given over to cutesy scenes of the theater troupe making its audiences happy while performing live or making movies, which allows for conventional and self-referential ethnic jokes alongside extraneous recreations of 1930s filmmaking.
Bookwriter/lyricist Iris Rainer Dart, who obviously feels this story is close to her heart, alternates tender and antagonistic scenes between Bubbie and Red, whose relationship has been strained for years. Later, the big secret that caused the strain is dramatized, but any horror we should feel is conspicuously absent from a threadbare stage production that has been scrubbed clean of any needed ambiguity or tension. Riccardo Hernandez’s sets comprise various oversized picture frames that literalize the title but do little else. James F. Ingalls’ evocative lighting and Ann Hould-Ward’s well-worn costumes are closer to the mark, but Andy Blankenbuehler’s by-the-numbers choreography reeks of desperation: “this is a musical, so let’s have dancers onstage” is its calling card.
Mike Stoller and Artie Butler's songs, either klezmer-infected pop or sappy power ballads, are interchangeable, with the partial exceptions of two Act II numbers, “Selective Memory” and “Saying Goodbye,” that receive powerhouse performances.
And a powerhouse is what Donna Murphy is. Extolling the virtues of Sutton Foster as our reigning Broadway musical champion in Anything Goes doesn't mean I hold Murphy in lesser esteem. Obviously, she won’t play ingénues or romantic leading ladies any more, but her Raisel/Bubbie is a psychologically complex and musically expert performance that separates her from everyone else around. Effortlessly playing a character in her 30s and in her 70s—and quite often in the same scene—Murphy cannily adopts pinpoint stage movements and unique vocal mannerisms to keep Raisel and Bubbie separate, even brilliantly singing in two different voices.
Her Act II solo number, “Selective Memory,” is a big showstopping aria that finds all of its power in Murphy's emotionally naked vocals, which put across Bubbie's sorrow at losing her memory at the same time she still remembers Raisel's long-lost love. The musical's other memorable song, “Saying Goodbye,” which Murphy sings with Andie Mechanic as Young Red, works because of the inspired pairing of the veteran actress with this young girl with a dynamite voice. Unfortunately, these heartbreaking moments don't ensure the show's success, unless our selective memory tells us otherwise.
Murphy and Mechanic both rise above the fractured material, but Nicole Parker (Red), Rachel Resheff (Jenny) and the ghostly troupe led by Broadway pros like Chip Zein, Joyce Van Patten and Alexander Gemignani are defeated by it. And Leonard Foglia's flashy direction suggests that he too is fighting a losing battle against a subpar book, forgettable lyrics and mostly routine songs.
The People in the Picture
Performances through June 19, 2011
Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, New York, NY
www.roundabouttheatre.org
Donna Murphy (right) in The People in the Picture (photo by Joan Marcus)
Cinefantastique Spotlight Podcast: Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 02 May 2011 04:04
- Written by Daniel Persons
Much like the denizens of the night that its title character is purported to protect, the horror-comedy Dylan Dog: Dead of Night has stealthily crept onto our mortal plane, sneaking into a handful of theaters for the consumption of a small (very small) audience. But are those who witness this Buffy-like mash-up of zombies, vampires, werewolves, and Roger Rabbit discovering a rare, cinematic gem appreciated by a select few, or does distributor Freestyle Releasing have another motivation for giving this film the kind of release that draws as little attention as possible? Join Cinefantastique Online's Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons as they search for the answer.
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