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Dance Theater Review—“Message in a Bottle” to Songs by Sting

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 07 May 2024 14:44; Written by Kevin Filipski

Message in a Bottle

Songs by Sting; directed and choreographed by Kate Prince

With Zoo Nation—The Kate Prince Company

Performances through May 12, 2024

New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, NYC

nycitycenter.org

The cast of Message in a Bottle (photo: Christopher Duggan)

Set to 27 songs by Sting—with the Police and from his solo career—Message in a Bottle is a story of the global refugee crisis told through the mesmerizing movement of choreographer Kate Prince’s brilliant dance company, ZooNation. Although it does get cheesy entwining the music and the dancers, as jukebox shows go, it’s much closer to Twyla Tharp’s take on the Billy Joel catalog, Movin’ Out, than to something like the Abba megahit, Mamma Mia.

In an unnamed desert country (hence the unsurprising opener, “Desert Rose,” with its North African feel), a family of five—father, mother, two sons and a daughter—becomes separated when a civil war throws the entire region into turmoil. Happy events like the marriage of one son are soon overtaken by awful 21st-century realities: abuse, trafficking, displacement, death. Prince and dramaturg Lolita Chakrabarti have fashioned a narrative of sorts from which to hang Sting’s words and music, which, with a few exceptions, have been extensively rearranged and rerecorded (with Sting’s and others’ solo and ensemble voices).

As the songs and the tale unfold, musical motifs from “Fields of Gold” and “Brand New Day” hover over the proceedings, hinting at the happy ending to come. There are times when the relationship of Sting’s lyrics to what’s happening onstage is tenuous—several men sexually abuse a young woman to “Don’t Stand so Close to Me,” which narrates a completely different kind of inappropriate relationship—or, conversely, too on the nose—the second act opens in jail as a chorus intones “Free, free, set them free” and, later on, the married son discovers his bride, forcibly separated from him, works in a brothel, so on comes “Roxanne.” (When she rejects him, we get “So Lonely,” of course.)

But the marriage of music and movement is spot on in several spots, notably in the show’s most affecting number, a tender pas de deux between the younger son (Deavion Brown) and the man (Harrison Dowzell) he’s fallen in love with, set to one of Sting’s loveliest songs, “Shape of My Heart.”

Whatever one thinks of the way Prince and her excellent music supervisor and arranger Alex Lacamoire have manipulated Sting’s tunes to fit into the contrived narrative—sometimes it’s a disservice to the songs and at others it’s a disservice to the story—the breathtaking dancing of Prince’s company, which specializes in effortlessly combining contemporary and hip-hop styles, is beyond reproach. Although the entire ZooNation is magnificent in its athleticism—the leaps, the flips, the freestyling, even the break dancing—the main dancers (as the children) are particularly dazzling.

Brown, Natasha Gooden and Lukas McFarlane convey as much with simple gestures as they do in the more athletic movements (too often, the stage is filled with busyness just for its sake). At those moments, the music and the stunning visuals—Anna Fleischle’s costumes, Ben Stones’ sets, Natasha Chivers’ lighting and Andrezjh Goulding’s projections—take over.

But however bumpy the journey, when the final healing strains of “They Dance Alone” arrive, Message in a Bottle delivers its message.

Broadway Musical Review—Alicia Keys' "Hell's Kitchen"

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 03 May 2024 02:31; Written by Kevin Filipski

Hell’s Kitchen

Book by Kristoffer Diaz; music and lyrics by Alicia Keys

Directed by Michael Greif; choreographed by Camille A. Brown

Opened April 20, 2024

Schubert Theatre, 225 West 44th Street, NYC

hellskitchen.com

The cast of Hell's Kitchen (photo: Marc J. Franklin)

It was inevitable that Alicia Keys’ semiautobiographical musical would jump from downtown to uptown—now that it’s on Broadway, it’s playing right near the neighborhood in which it’s set. Hell’s Kitchen comprises songs Keys had already written, recorded and turned into hits as well as new songs created specifically for the show. It introduces a rebellious 17-year-old, Ali (short for Alicia), who lives with her harried single mom in a high-rise apartment building a few blocks from the Schubert Theatre, where the show is now playing: Ali pines for a romance with an older street drummer and begins a burgeoning musical career that might give her a way out of a neighborhood she considers stifling.

Hell’s Kitchen is your garden-variety generation-gap musical comedy-drama, as Ali’s mom—whose name is, no lie, Jersey—tries to protect Ali from the temptations Jersey herself fell prey to as a teenager, finding herself pregnant with Ali while she was too young and immature to handle it. Ali’s dad is a musician named Davis (the fiery Brandon Victor Dixon) who’s charming but extremely unreliable. Of course, Ali fights back at every turn, complaining that whatever her mom wants or says are simply unfair restrictions.

Fortuitously, one day while seething over something her mom is making her do (or not do), Ali wanders into her building’s music room—seemingly for the first time, which is kind of strange in this context—and immediately becomes spellbound by wise old Miss Liza Jane (the scene-stealing and vocally formidable Kecia Lewis), who becomes a sort of surrogate mother to her, teaching her to play the piano along with other needed life lessons.

Despite the material’s shopworn quality, which has been accentuated on the larger Broadway stage, Hell’s Kitchen is always energetic and nearly as often exuberant, thanks to Keys’ rhythmically propulsive songs, which include those (sort of) showstoppers she has already written—and had huge hits with: a smart reconceiving of “Girl on Fire” is perfectly placed near the end of act one, and (no surprise) “Empire State of Mind” is the show’s big finale, even if, in this context, it’s somewhat anticlimactic. A song that wasn’t in the original Public Theater incarnation, “Kaleidoscope,” has been shoehorned into the middle of the first act, neither hindering nor improving its surroundings.

Since everything is bigger in the move to Broadway, it’s to director Michael Grief’s credit that his staging retains an impeccable proportion of the visual and the dramatic, thanks to Robert Brill’s multi-tier, multi-use fire-escape sets, Peter Nigrini’s clever projections of various areas of Manhattan and Natasha Katz’s always inventive lighting. As ever, Camille A. Brown’s dazzling choreography both complements and roars past Keys’ catchy tunes.

But Hell’s Kitchen is, ultimately, a vehicle for two remarkable leads. Although Maleah Joi Moon (Ali)—who made a stupendous professional debut when the show premiered at the Public—was unfortunately out the night I saw the show on Broadway, her understudy Gianna Harris was a more than capable singer, actress and especially dancer.

But the center of the show—which she wasn’t in the original incarnation—is Ali’s mom, Jersey, and Shoshana Bean runs with it, not only acting the hell out of the standard role of the difficult but loving mom but also lending her powerhouse voice to several songs. If Hell’s Kitchen settles in for a long Broadway run, it will be interesting to see who may replace Bean as Jersey—Idina Menzel? Sutton Foster? Sierra Boggess? In the meantime, run to the Schubert Theatre to see Shoshana Bean at the top of her game.

The Films of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi at Lincoln Center

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 02 May 2024 09:12; Written by Jack Angstreich

Evil Does Not Exist

From April 26th through the 30th, Film at Lincoln Center presented Hamaguchi I & II, a major—and indeed, necessary—retrospective of the work of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi—one of the most significant cinematic talents to have emerged in the past couple of decades—in anticipation of its release on May 3rd of the director’s latest work, the powerfulEvil Does Not Exist,whichhad its local premiere at last year’s New York Film Festival.

A cinephile and later a student of the eminent director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hamaguchi has acknowledged admiration for—or being influenced by—numerous directors, notably including, among others: Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, Jean Grémillon, Douglas Sirk, Robert Bresson, Masahiro Makino, John Cassavetes, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Hong Sangsoo. (Many scenes in automobiles also inevitably recall the oeuvre of Abbas Kiarostami although Hamaguchi has traced this tendency to a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.) In a 2019 interview with Vadim Rizov for the magazine, Filmmaker, he said, “I think the biggest inception for me to becoming a director was watching Cassavetes,” evidently especially Husbands. For me the connection to Rohmer is clearest—for both filmmakers the voluble characters frequently misjudge their own motives and contradict their professed opinions and in Hamaguchi there too is arguably a commitment to a kind of Bazinian realism; there is also a common fascination with coincidence although for the younger director this does not have a religious significance.

In the same interview, he went on to discuss his first feature film,Solaris,from 2007:

Solaris was the first project that my professor, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, gave me in my first year as a grad student at the Tokyo University of Arts. That was only the second year that this Tokyo University of Arts program had been founded. I had a huge budget, 4 million yen or so. The first iteration of that project is normally to do a school horror film project. But for my iteration, Kurosawa gave us this project to adapt the original novel ofSolaris. [He told us,] “I was really interested in the original novel. I thought maybe Tarkovsky did a good job with it, but Soderbergh didn’t really do a good job, so I wanted to see what you guys can do.” It was a 30-person class and we were all tasked to create this project together, performing different roles in the production. There was a competition for whose screenplay should be chosen, and mine was. The resulting 90-minute film was rather good, and critically well-acclaimed, but because we didn’t go through a rights process with the original novel, it couldn’t be shown publicly and we could only do internal screenings at school. I didn’t necessarily think of it as performance-based, but dialogue-based, and focused on the dialogue between the boy and the girl. I tried to film one line of dialogue that immediately results in the next in a direct, linear format, and realized that that had its limitations, so I tried to fix that in my next film,Passion.

Passion, his 2008 feature-length thesis film for the Tokyo University of the Arts—andwhich had its premiere local run at this venue last year—already evidences his originality and assurance. Film at Lincoln Center’s program note includes the following summary:

The film begins when a couple, Kaho (Aoba Kawai) and Tomoya (Ryuta Okamoto), announce their engagement to their friends over dinner, where it’s also revealed the groom had an affair years earlier. While the two spend the evening apart, Tomoya follows his friends to the apartment of a former classmate (Fusako Urabe,Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) with whom he’s in love and is led into ever more vulnerable and shocking exchanges of emotional honesty.

The extraordinary Happy Hour, from 2015, which runs longer than five hours, was Hamaguchi’s first movie to attract international attention, and given its scope and ambition is in some ways his magnum opus. Film at Lincoln Center’s brief description is as follows:

Four thirtysomething female friends in the misty seaside city of Kobe navigate the unsteady currents of their work, domestic, and romantic lives. They seek solace in each other’s company, but a sudden revelation creates a rift and rouses each woman to take stock.

It was screened in New Directors/New Films in 2016.

Also remarkable is Asako I & II from 2018 which screened at that year’s New York Film Festival. Film at Lincoln Center’s capsule on it reads thus:

Asako (Erika Karata) and Baku (Masahiro Higashide) share an intense, all-consuming romance—but one day the moody Baku ups and vanishes. Two years later, having moved from Osaka to Tokyo, Asako meets Baku’s exact double.

In an interview with Jordan Cronk for Film Comment at the Cannes Film Festival that year, Hamaguchi spoke about the work’s genesis:

This all started about six years ago, when someone who had seen my films recommended the novelist Tomoka Shibasaki’s work as something I might enjoy, and so I read a couple of her novels and found myself really liking this one. I thought that it would make a good film because it has visually intriguing elements built into it, the two being: what to show and what not to show. The first, what to show: of course you have to show the two men who look exactly the same, and it’s the story of a woman who falls in love with these two men—and this premise really spoke to me from the beginning. The way that the novel presented this story was very contemporary, which I really liked, a meticulously detailed account of everyday life. It’s written in first person, and things that happen can be veryout there, but it’s written in such detail that you go along with it, and I thought it would be interesting to see that translated onto film.

He went on to say:

I consciously decided to employ the conventions of genre films in the telling of this story because I felt that it would help the audience to accept what was happening a little bit easier. It also helped with the pacing of the film, employing these conventions allowed the film to move a lot faster than usual without losing the audience. Those who don’t really understand those conventions might feel what is happening to be a little strange or even grotesque—or maybe a better expression is absurd, surrealist, or illogical. But one of the things I wanted to do was to have realism and surrealism coexisting: allowing something real to come out of this absurd situation, or to have some absurd quality rooted in the reality that we crafted.

From the same interview, the director discussed his approach to directing actors, the same as that of Jean Renoir:

As for the matter of improvisation, I kind of carried on in the style that I had established with Happy Hour, which was very much a kind of repeated reading of the text. My workshops are basically having the actors not perform butread the text over and over, and for these readings I ask my actors not to add any nuances or inflections. It’s more about reading the text aloud, over and over, until they can almost say it automatically, and there comes a moment when I can hear it in their voice—a certain weight or thickness—and the words that are written are completely absorbed into the actors. Once we accomplish this, it’s time to shoot. That’s a method I had established with my previous work, and, even with Happy Hour, the scenes that were improvised mostly came through workshopping. Apart from the longer sequences which were deliberately done differently, everything is scripted. Once it comes time to shoot, once we’re on set, how the actors express that fully absorbed text is entirely up to them. I don’t prohibit anything, so whatever they feel in that moment, or however they react to the other person, as long as it’sreal, that’s what I’m looking for.

Hamaguchi co-authored the screenplay for Kurosawa’s acclaimed spy drama,Wife of a Spyfrom 2020, and then wrote and directed the beautiful anthology of three stories, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy from 2021, which also screened at the New York Film Festival and was on the list of the ten best films of 2022 according to Cahiers du Cinéma. (The invaluable critic Jonathan Rosenbaum also selected it for his list of the best films of that year.) The director has cited as inspiration Rohmer’s marvelous Rendezvous in Paris.

Drive My Carfrom 2021—and also shown at the New York Film Festival—based on short stories by the internationally celebrated author Haruki Murakami, is another major achievement. Film at Lincoln Center’s note on it says:

Hamaguchi charts the unexpected, complex relationships that theater actor-director Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) forges with a trio of people out of professional, physical, or psychological necessity: his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), with whom he shares an erotic bond forged in fantasy and storytelling; the mysterious actor Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), whom he’s drawn to by a sense of revenge as much as fascination; and, perhaps most mysteriously, Misaki (Tôko Miura), a plaintive young woman hired by a theater company, against his wishes, to be his chauffeur while he stages Uncle Vanya.

The director continues to move from strength to strength with his latest feature, the enigmatic Evil Does Not Exist—he has acknowledged the work of Jean-Luc Godard as an influence. Film at Lincoln Center offered this synopsis:

Deep in the forest of the small rural village Harasawa, single parent Takumi lives with his young daughter, Hana, and takes care of odd jobs for locals, chopping wood and hauling pristine well water. The overpowering serenity of this untouched land of mountains and lakes, where deer peacefully roam free, is about to be disrupted by the imminent arrival of the Tokyo company Playmode, which is ready to start construction on a glamping site for city tourists—a plan, which Takumi and his neighbors discover, that will have dire consequences for the ecological health and cleanliness of their community.

May '24 Digital Week I

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 01 May 2024 12:41; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Challengers

(MGM)

If a menage a trois among a female tennis player turned coach and the tennis pros in her life, each on opposing career trajectories, sounds like fun, director Luca Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes make sure it’s anything but. The flimsy, impossibly cutesy rom-com is crammed with flashbacks within flashbacks to try and present some variety, but even that doesn’t help—something that Guadagnino is obviously aware of, since he uses a surfeit of camera tricks and ridiculous angles to keep things bouncing.

Then there’s the awful use of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pounding electronic score, which always seems to begin and end at the wrong time, as if the music cues are slightly but obviously off. The threesome enacted by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist is impressive on the court (they all look and move like tennis players) but off the court the trio is saddled with stilted dialogue and must deal with desperate symbolism like a windstorm of Biblical proportions that actually happens twice. It’s all about as sexy as a celebrity doubles match.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

(Magnolia)

Lena Dunham’s shallow confessional fingerprints are all over this feature debut by Joanna Arnow, which is both self-effacing and extremely self-absorbed in its leaden look at Ann, a 30ish Brooklynite, whose boring life is also meaningless.

It’s one thing for Arnow to show Ann’s roundelay of overbearing parents, dull corporate job, robotic S&M play with male doms and a tentative new romance quite different from her other relationships—but it’s quite another to provide neither insight into nor an explanation for how Ann ended up here. Maybe a 15-minute short would have handled the material more succinctly and less tediously than 85 minutes do.

Terrestrial Verses

(KimStim)

In this daring piece of advocacy filmmaking, writer-directors Alireza Khatami and Ali Asgari brilliantly dramatize how Iranian officialdom (governmental, cultural, even religious) tamps down individualism through several self-contained vignettes that pit ordinary persons—a man registering his baby’s name with the authorities; a woman wearing a hijab and a tattooed man each interviewing for a job; a young girl in a store who must wear a school uniform that completely covers her—against a person of authority.

Each segment is shot with a fixed, unmoving camera and begins normally, even informally, then soon morphs into a theater of the absurd as the invisible interlocutor pushes back at each individual’s individuality. The resulting horror grows cumulatively until the end, when an impending, if symbolic, event becomes all too awfully real.

Uncropped

(Greenwich Entertainment)

The life and career of photographer James Hamilton—whose masterly portraits were done mainly for the Village Voice but also other publications like Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Observer—are recounted in D.W. Young’s richly entertaining documentary, in which Hamilton narrates his own fascinating story from his beginnings at the Voice to the esteemed elder statesman he is considered today, an influential chronicler of pop culture and alternative journalism in New York.

There are interviews with his wide circle of friends and admirers, from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and director Wes Anderson to journalists Joe Conason and Alexandra Jacobs, all adding anecdotal detail to his legendary journey, along with a copious amount of his classic photos.

4K Release of the Week

Frivolous Lola

(Cult Epics)

Italian director Tinto Brass, in his titillating, not-quite-hardcore sex comedies, relied on finding a young beauty with screen presence to shoulder the load, so to speak.

For this 1998 entry, he cast the beguiling Italian actress Anna Ammirati as the free-spirited Lola, a magnet to every man in town, from her boyfriend to local priests; Ammirati’s refreshing naturalness unsurprisingly dominates this slight but amusing film, whether she’s clothed or unclothed. The UHD transfer looks excellent; a Blu-ray disc also includes the film, and extras comprise an interview with Brass and an audio commentary.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

The Beekeeper

(Warner Bros)

In Jason Statham’s latest revenge flick, he plays Adam, who takes care of the bees on the farm of retired teacher Eloise, who kills herself after an online scam robs her of her considerable life savings and charity funds. Adam immediately jumps into action, tracking down the scammers and destroying their offices—but that’s just the beginning, for he is part of a dangerous group, the Beekeepers, secret and highly skilled operatives.

It’s all risible, which Statham and director David Ayer know, so they keep upping the ridiculous ante as the hero takes care of wave upon wave of bad guys—including the corrupt son of the U.S. president. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer, but no extras.

Stigmata

(Capelight)

In this creepy 1999 horror entry, Father Andrew (Gabriel Byrne) fights the church hierarchy as he tries to help atheistic hairdresser Frankie (Rosanna Arquette), whose mystifying stigmata stems from a rosary she got from her mother.

Director Rupert Wainwright puts his cast through its paces well enough; Nia Long, Jonathan Pryce and Rade Šerbedžija lend able support, while Byrne and Arquette intermittently make this silliness—Frankie tries to seduce Andrew at one point—watchable. There’s a fine hi-def transfer; extras include Wainwright’s commentary, making-of featurette, deleted scene and an alternate ending.

Tormented

(Film Masters)

The definition of a guilty pleasure, Bert I. Gordon’s 1960 B-movie take on Edgar Allan Poe’s chilling short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, follows jazz pianist Tom Stewart, who sees his ex Vi fall to her death and is haunted by her ghost (in the form of her disembodied head) as he tries to resurrect his music career and marry Meg, his current girl.

It’s borderline inept at times—and the cheesy effects don’t do justice to Vi’s ghostly presence—but those who are the target audience for this sort of thing will get something out of it. The film looks decent on Blu; extras include Mystery Science Theatre 3000’s 1992 version of the film, archival Gordon interview, documentary about Gordon, visual essay on the film and an audio commentary.

CD Release of the Week

Ligeti—Concertos and Other Works

(Alpha Classics)

If Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) is best known for the otherworldly music so memorably used by Stanley Kubrick in three of his most unsettling films—2001, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut—the composer’s genius consists of an unclassifiable oeuvre whose singular vision always looked forward even while it nodded to the past.

And the magnificently curated works on this splendid two-disc set brilliantly demonstrate Ligeti’s musical ethos; in fact, the three concertos on disc one—for violin (1990-92), cello (1966) and piano (1985)—may lay claim to the most astounding concerto set of the second half of the 20th century. Of the five striking works on disc two, the pair of early ones for piano only give a hint of the shattering sounds to come. Then there are the Chamber Concerto (1969-70), Solo Viola Sonata (1991-94) and the Horn Trio (1985), each marvelously unique in their sound world, all innovative and vital. The performances by members of Ensemble Intercontemporain led by Pierre Bleuse are thrillingly intense, especially the concerto soloists: Hae-Sung Kang (violin), Renaud Déjardin (cello) and Dimitri Vassilakis (piano).

Reviews

Dance Theater Review—“Message in a Bottle” to Songs by Sting

Broadway Musical Review—Alicia Keys' "Hell's Kitchen"

The Films of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi at Lincoln Center

May '24 Digital Week I

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