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Theater Reviews—Broadway's "Hamilton" and Off-Broadway's "Love & Money"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 25 August 2015 21:06
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Hamilton
Book, music & lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda; directed by Thomas Kail
Performances began July 13, 2015
Love & Money
Written by A.R. Gurney; directed by Mark Lamos
Performances through October 4, 2015
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| Renee Elise Goldsberry, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Phillipa Soo in Hamilton (photo: Joan Marcus) |
There is so much that's good about Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's rollicking musical about one of our least-known Founding Fathers, that it's too bad that the show is not the instant classic so many are touting it as.
Unlike In the Heights, Miranda's breakthrough show—and the "game-changer" for musicals that everyone is belatedly saying Hamilton is—whose hip-hop inflected songs were actual emotional outpourings of its characters, the rapping rhymes of Hamilton, Jefferson, Burr and Washington sit uneasily on their tongues. Admittedly, what Sherman Edwards composed for his Founding Fathers in 1776 wasn't any more authentic, but those men (as portrayed by the likes of William Daniels and Howard da Silva) at least retained their dignity, while the characters in Hamilton sometimes approach parody.
That's especially true of King George III, whose sardonic appearances as, first, the colonies' ruler, later a defeated monarch, and lastly a bemused and amused observer of the new nation puts the show dangerously close to silly Something Rotten territory, however deliciously Jonathan Groff embodies the British tyrant.
Miranda's lyrics are clever—often very clever—but also flirt with the sophomoric: "raise the glass to the four of us/tomorrow there'll be more of us" isn't the most inspiring couplet. Miranda's score mainly soars when the entire cast sings variations of "whoa whoa" and Thomas Kail's extraordinarily savvy directing and Andy Blankenbuehler's astounding choreography come to the rescue.
In fact, the staging and movement in this show are so prominent that there's almost too much of it. There are precious few moments when characters are allowed to just sing without being upstaged by other doings—and the large stage turntables, stairs and a second tier that allow for even more movement throughout—and so the nearly three-hour Hamilton becomes, quite literally, exhausting.
It's too bad: shorn of 20 or so minutes, Hamilton would be the astute and theatrically exciting analysis of our country's complex, multi-hued early history that its being described as. As it is, it's at times exhilarating and always entertaining; even Miranda's stumbling attempts at profundity—the thick irony of "My Shot," the recurring duels, the wedding rewind, the bathetic summing-up finale—work well onstage, thanks to Kail and Blankenbuehler's breathtakingly inventive and cohesive visual structure, upon which Miranda's ambitious if not fully realized musical concept sits.
The indefatigable cast is tremendous, led by Miranda's self-confident Hamilton, Renee Elise Goldsberry's golden-voiced sister-in-law Angelica, Phillipa Soo's gorgeous-sounding wife Eliza, Daveed Diggs's strutting Thomas Jefferson and Leslie Odom, Jr.'s charmingly villainous Aaron Burr, whose own complicated history deserves a show of its own someday.
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| Maureen Anderman in Love & Money (photo: Joan Marcus) |
One of his most featherweight works, A.R. Gurney's Love & Moneytouches on this eloquent playwright's pet themes of the foibles of the rich and entitled in such a way that, at a mere 75 minutes, it's a mere blueprint for a more incisive play.
Sharply directed by Mark Lamos, Gurney's comedy introduces Cornelia Cunningham (an excellent Maureen Anderman), an Upper East Side widow about to enter an old folks' home for the affluent—there are even retired professors!—who has decided to give much of her wealth away to many charitable organizations. When her lawyer Harvey Abel (an amusingly flustered Joe Paulik) arrives to go over details of her will and trust (her children are dead and her two grandchildren are, she says, not entitled to much), he also brings her a letter from a young man in Buffalo, who insists he is her long-lost grandson.
A little later, Walker Williams (an unfortunately charmless Gabriel Brown) arrives and, after surprising them with the color of his skin, charms the pants off Cornelia, who acts like she believes his story of being the offspring of an affair between Cornelia's daughter and his father during a trip to Manhattan. Her skeptical lawyer digs up informaton that puts Walker's story under a microscope, while Cornelia's loyal maid Agnes (Pamela Dunlap, typical but funny) is also not fooled by the interloper.
Whether Walker is in fact her grandson or not is not the point—it does get resolved, by the way—instead, the play is an excuse for Gurney to provide jokes and observations about class, race, affluence, education and culture, none very penetrating but amusing at times, summed up by Cornelia's rather pedestrian quip about her lack of interracial romance: "The closest I've ever come to an affair with a black man is to vote for Obama."
Hamilton
Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 West 46th Street, New York, NY
hamiltonbroadway.com
Love & Money
Signature Theatre, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
signaturetheatre.org
August '15 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 18 August 2015 22:13
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Day for Night
(Criterion)
Francois Truffaut's tenderly funny valentine to cinema was an award-winning hit in 1973, but today it might be hard to see what the fuss was about, since Truffaut shows the behind-the-scenes machinations, squabbles and love affairs on the set of a commercial movie, which showed how far he’d come from his earlier auteurist works as one of the French New Wave of the ‘60s.
Still, this is accomplished and effective filmmaking, with in-jokes galore and the calm presence of Truffaut himself as the movie-within-movie director: Day for Night also kickstarted the careers of glamorous European actresses Jacqueline Bisset and Nathalie Baye. Criterion's transfer is immaculate; extras include vintage and new interviews, a 2003 documentary and a segment about the Truffaut/Jean-Luc Godard fracas touched off by Godard’s loathing of this film.
(Zeitgeist)
A masterly dissection of the “new” Russia—in which oligarchs outpace the working classes at a rate even greater than the U.S.—Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2012 drama is best when extraneous details fall away and we are left with the naked pain and desperation of the title character, a former nurse (now married to a gazillionaire) whose own family is ignored by her rich husband.
Too bad Philip Glass’s self-parodic music trashes every scene it’s heard in; sensibly, Zvyagintsev (who more recently made the interesting if fatally flawed Leviathan) builds the most powerful moments—beginning with the evocative opening shot—with silence that speaks volumes more than broken Glass. The movie's immaculate compositions are given new life on Blu-ray; extras are a 30-minute Zvyagintsev interview and 40-minute making-of.
La grande bouffe
(Arrow USA)
Italian provocateur Marco Ferrari's infamous 1973 black comedy purports to satirize Western culture's mass consumerism by chronicling a quartet of middle-aged male friends who decide to eat and screw themselves to death: it's a pretty feeble idea which Ferrari does little with except have the men overindulge in food and women until they give up the ghost one by one.
There's amusement in watching four of Europe's most civilized actors—Philippe Noiret, Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and Ugo Tognazzi—act brutishly and barbaric, but the 130-minute movie wears out its welcome by repeating itself until it, too, dies an overdue death. The film has been wonderfully restored in hi-def; extras include vintage interviews and featurette and an audio commentary.
(e one)
NCIS—Complete 12th Season
(CBS/Paramount)
For the fourth season of Hell on Wheels, the sturdy Anson Mount as our hero Cullen and colorful Colm Meaney as head of the Union Pacific Railroad make this down-and-dirty depiction of the post-Civil War West worth watching.
In its 12th season, NCIS continues its pursuit of evildoers from international pirates to cyberterrorists with a solid cast led by Mark Harmon, Emily Wickersham and Pauley Perrette. Both series look terrific on Blu; Hell extras are featurettes and interviews, while NCIS extras are featurettes, deleted/extended scenes and audio commentaries (a Best Buy exclusive includes an extra DVD with more bonus features).
La Sapienza
(Kino Lorber)
Eugene Green has been a favorite on the festival circuit for years, but his latest feature demonstrates his empty stylishness: ostensibly a study of two couples—one middle-aged and on the outs, the other young and just starting out—La Sapienza comprises 100 minutes of stilted, vacuous dialogue, stiff, emotionless acting, nicely-photographed exteriors and interiors of sublime Italian buildings (the protagonist is an architect) and Monteverdi vocal music that wells up on the soundtrack to give an air of artiness to the proceedings.
The movie looks luminous on Blu, at least, and could be a travelogue of gorgeous Italian architecture; extras are a Green interview and 2006 Green short, Les Signes, which in 32 minutes makes that usually expressive actor Mathieu Amalric as zombie-like as the rest.
(IFC)
Abel Ferrara has taken the torn-from-sordid-headlines story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, French presidential hopeful accused of raping a maid at a Manhattan hotel, and turned it into a fierce and even moral drama about a sex-crazed man with power finally being called to account for his actions.
A gigantic Gerard Depardieu (in girth as well as stature) bares all in a commanding performance, while Jacqueline Bisset gives the man's wife a knowingly icy elegance. For once, Ferrara has found a sordid, nasty tale worth telling that he doesn't muck with. The hi-def transfer is impressive.
DVDs of the Week
Bottoms Up
Knifed Up
(Cinedigm)
These 45-minute documentaries are semi-serious glimpses at the ultra-serious American epidemic of plastic surgery—the obsession with, in the first, big butts and, in the second, everything else—which amateurishly use talking heads who alternate one-liners with more cogent observations, and a plethora of video footage and photographs, mostly of celebrities but occasionally of “regular” people who went too far in their quest for physical perfection.
There are a few moments that are genuinely disturbing—as, most notably, when we see a bit too much of a woman's butt enlargement operation—but too much of this is superficial and jokey, their abbreviated running times militating against any in-depth analysis.
(IFC)
In this wish-fulfillment fantasy by writer-director Victor Levin, a 20ish writer meets a gorgeous and oh-so-willing French housewife on Fifth Avenue and begins an affair in which he discovers how the French deal with adultery: unlike puritanical Americans, her husband and children welcome him as a friend of the family.
Although Anton Yelchin is too dull to deserve his character's lucky fate, Bérénice Marlohe is so exquisite, elegant, refined—in other words, so French—that she makes this threadbare 90-minute rom-com seem more substantial than it is. Well-used Manhattan locations (this is also, of course, a Woody Allen homage) are another plus. A short making-of is the lone extra.
It Happened Here
(Cinedigm)
The ongoing discussion of campus rape is not going away, even if shoddy journalism like that in Rolling Stone forced it to unfairly take a hit, since—as this strong documentary shows—male college students continue to rape female college students.
Director Lisa F. Jackson follows several victims who are forthcoming after initial reluctance at sharing their stories, their clear-eyed truth-telling and activism permeate the film, especially when they come up against obvious circling the wagons from clueless institutions like the University of Connecticut, whose (female) president defended the school against their accusations.
Greta Gerwig is "Mistress America"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 17 August 2015 15:56
- Written by Jack Angstreich
On the evening of Thursday, August 13th, the Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted the local premiere of Noah Baumbach's marvelous new work, Mistress America, co-written by and starring the delightful Greta Gerwig, at the Walter Reade Theater. The film opened in Manhattan the following day.
A comedy about a freshman at Barnard College — played by the lovely Lola Kirke in a moving performance — who befriends the daughter of her mother's fiancé — played by Gerwig, in some of her most impressive work to date — Mistress America has screwball elements and, in its use of voiceover, its stylized dialogue and its visual wit, often recalls the films of Baumbach's sometime collaborator, the brilliant Wes Anderson.
Like the director's previous outing, the exhilarating While We're Young, Mistress America has a lighter touch than his three preceding, more agonized works, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, and Frances Ha. (Amusingly, at the onstage Q & A with Baumbach and Gerwig following this screening, the director was asked if he had any plans to return to the "more brutal" mode of Margot at the Wedding — he promised to do so.) The dialogue in this new film, like that of his last, is consistently hilarious and the comic effect is enhanced by brisk editing.
Having seen all of the narrative features directed by Baumbach, barring the disowned Highball, I'm still not certain whether he is genuinely a stylist, whereas Anderson so manifestly is one — this was undeniable by the time of the latter's excellent Rushmore, if not quite in his remarkable debut, Bottle Rocket — but Baumbach seems to be a more accomplished filmmaker than the exceptionally talented Whit Stillman who, like the director of Mistress America, owes a debt to Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer.
The post-screening Q & A with the director and Gerwig — looking as gorgeous as ever — was moderated by Kent Jones, the New York Film Festival Director, and was not without several pleasurable moments.
2015 Summer Festivals—Shaw Festival, Caramoor, Bard Summerscape
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 17 August 2015 00:08
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Shaw Festival
Performances through November 1, 2015
Caramoor Summer Music Festival
Performances through August 2, 2015
Bard Summerscape
Performances through August 16, 2015
Canada's Shaw Festival continues to be the premier summer theater destination, not only for its lovely lakeside location (whose cool breezes and usually moderate temperatures are the opposite of New York's sultry weather) but for its mostly superior productions of plays by Shaw and his contemporaries and—straying from the festival's original mandate—classic musicals and new plays by writers influenced by Bernard Shaw.
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| Julie Martell (center) in Sweet Charity (photo: Emily Cooper) |
This summer's musical, Sweet Charity, has two long shadows: it's based on Federico Fellini's classic 1956 film, The Nights of Cabiria,starring his beloved wife Giulietta Masina; and the original Broadway production, by Bob Fosse, starred his beloved wife Gwen Verdon. So that's four legends of film and theater towering over any production of this musical, which has a beguilingly tuneful score by Cy Coleman and an amusingly sassy book by Neil Simon.
Happily, multifaceted singer-dancer-actress Julie Martell brings her own mix of lovable naivete and hard-as-nails New York toughness to the lead role of Charity, and a large and merry cast surrounds her. Ken MacDonald's nicely evocative '60s New York sets, Cameron Davis's astute projections, Bonnie Beecher's lively lighting and Charlotte Dean's dead-on costumes complement the boisterous choreography of Parker Esse and solid direction by Morris Panych, which combine to make this Charity sweet indeed.
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| Harveen Sandhu (center) and Patrick McManus (right) in Pygmalion (photo: Emily Cooper) |
The same cannot be said for a new production of Pygmalion, one of Bernard Shaw's supreme masterpieces that's best known as the basis of the beloved musical My Fair Lady. Shaw's biting satire of class warfare has been pointlessly updated to the present day by director Peter Hinton (who did similar damage to Oscar Wilde's Lady Windemere's Fan a couple of summers back), in the hopes that everyone "gets" that Shaw's 100-year-old play is still relevant today.
Well, of course it is, and we don't need Hinton's sledgehammer introductions of pontificating TV talking heads and other video footage, an extraneous fashion show—yes, you read that right— and lousy contemporary songs to alert us to that fact. (When Vaughan Williams' elegaic Tallis Fantasia is heard during a scene, the effect in this confused context is of sheer irrationality.)
And, contrary to his published director's note, Hinton has "modernized" more than just dialogue about financial matters in order to push stodgy old Shaw into the 21st century. Whereas in the original, Eliza Doolittle famously used the expletive "bloody" to shock Shaw's upper-crust phonies, now she uses a more infamous F-word. It's good for an easy laugh—and feigned shock from an audience desensitized to hearing it by now—but little more.
In such a farrago, the actors don't stand a chance: even experienced Shaw Fest vets like Patrick McManus and Mary Haney as Henry Higgins and his mother are defeated by their director; poor McManus even has to fight off a collapsing chair in a painfully unfunny bit of slapstick. For her part, Harveen Sandhu is everything you would want in an Eliza: maybe she'll get to play her again in a more felicitous production of Pygmalion.
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| Dialogues des Carmélites: Jennifer Cheek, conductor Will Crutchfield, Alisa Jordheim (photo: Gabe Palacio) |
From Canada to two musical oases north of the city, each staging opera this summer. Caramoor, an estate in Katonah, 45 minutes north of Manhattan, hosts a music festival each summer that includes classical, jazz and folk, along with two operas in the "Bel Canto at Caramoor" series. However, this summer—in addition to Donzietti's bel canto La Favorite—a mid-20th century masterpiece was performed: Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites.
It was a wise choice for the outdoor Venetian Theater: Poulenc's extraordinarily moving drama about a group of martyred nuns during the French Revolution was given a forceful reading by conductor Will Crutchfield and his skilled orchestral forces, choir and singers, led by the formidable Jennifer Cheek's young nun Blanche and Alisa Jordheim's breakout performance as the novice nun Constance.
Directed adroitly if minimally on the cramped stage by Victoria Crutchfield (the conductor's talented daughter), this Carmelites was involving musical drama of the highest order.
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| A scene from The Wreckers (photo: Cory Weaver) |
Would that I could say the same about Ethel Smyth's middling The Wreckers, this summer's operatic offering at the annual must-attendBard Summerscape, on Bard College's campus two hours north of New York. Smyth was a contemporary of Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, the subject of this summer's Bard Music Festival, which is why her 1908 opera—never before staged in America—was chosen, but a sketchy libretto and long, arid stretches of uninspired music drag it down.
Smyth's melodies are remindful of Wagner, Strauss and particularly Bizet and Carmen, but without reaching the emotional or dramatic heights of those masters. And director Thaddeus Strassberger forced the poor performers to navigate what looked like a precarious setup of crates that could at any moment send them tumbling into the orchestra pit. As it is, only soprano Sky Ingram made any vocal or dramatic impression in a cast that might have been more capable in more sympathetic circumstances.
Leon Botstein ably conducted the American Symphony Orchestra, but the end result was indifference toward an operatic oddity with little to recommend it. Perhaps Chavez's only opera, The Visitors, should have been staged instead.
Shaw Festival
Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada
shawfest.com
Caramoor Summer Music Festival
Katonah, NY
caramoor.org
Bard Summerscape
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
fishercenter.bard.edu
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