Film & Arts - Film Festival Traveler

the traveler's resource guide to festivals & films
a FestivalTravelNetwork.com site
part of Insider Media llc.

Connect with us:

You are here: Home

Film & Arts

Reviews

Theater Roundup: "Virginia Woolf" on Bway; "Freedom of City," "Modern Terrorism," Heresy" off-Bway

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Saturday, 27 October 2012 20:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Written by Edward Albee; directed by Pam Mackinnon

Performances through February 24, 2013

The Freedom of the City

Written by Brian Friel; directed by Ciaran O’Reilly

Performances through November 25, 2012

Modern Terrorism, or: They Who Want to Kill and How We Learn to Love Them

Written by Jon Kern; directed by Peter DeBois

Performances through November 4, 2012

Heresy

Written by A. R. Gurney; directed by Jim Simpson

Performances through November 4, 2012

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in an incendiary new staging by Pam Mackinnon Virginia Michael Brosilow transplanted from Chicago to Broadway, proves that Edward Albee was once a vital, important playwright—which is hard to believe, considering the substandard Albee plays we’ve been seeing in New York in recent years, from The Goat or Who Is Sylvia and Me Myself and I to this year’s disastrous return of The Lady from Dubuque.

No matter: 1962’s Virginia Woolf, is by far Albee’s best play. It recounts one very long night for two couples in a small university town at the house of longtime history professor George and wife (and the college president’s daughter) Martha, as new and young professor Nick and wife Honey arrive for drinks and talk that turns nasty.

Sure, there are the familiar Albee tropes: the metaphysical grandstanding, unnecessary foul language, parsing of words and phrases, and surrealist touches, but Albee smartly keeping his high-wire dramatics going until an anti-climactic final scene. But since these couples—led by the endlessly squabbling, duking-it-out George and Martha—are multi-dimensional characters we are actually interested in, Virginia Woolf remains an emotionally charged three hours in the theater.

In a play about how words can hurt mercilessly, Mackinnon’s directing re-charges the physical confrontations into something that adds immeasurably to the conflicts between and among the couples. Although Todd Rosenthal’s set is a bit too gorgeously appointed for a mere professor’s house, it certainly provides a superbly-detailed ring for these figurative boxing matches to play out on. And what acting!

The four Chicago-based actors give flawless performances. Madison Dirks makes a perfectly annoying Nick and Carrie Coon—except for her overdone drunken scenes—is a perfectly weak Honey. Amy Morton, whose towering acting in August: Osage County was an indelible theater moment, plays Martha with remarkable nuance, making believable both her barbs at George and her underlying sadness.

Pacing Morton word for word and blow by blow is Tracy Letts: although I’ve admired his plays August: Osage County, Bug and Killer Joe—and he’s been onstage in Chicago for years, it’s my first time seeing him. And he’s a revelation: his George gives as good as he gets, making a much better sparring partner for Martha than an ineffectual Bill Irwin did for an overbearing Kathleen Turner in the dodgy 2005 Broadway revival.

City Carol Rosegg Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City—which reports on the deaths of a trio of Irish locals at the hands of the English—was written in 1973, following the killing of several people on what’s known as “Bloody Sunday,” which Friel alludes to in his most explicitly political play.

Friel is unapologetically didactic, humanizing his martyred trio and letting the British officials act like inhumane monsters, which may be truthful but makes for lopsided drama. Still, Friel’s poetic flair takes flight in several monologues that personalize an otherwise dispassionate tract. Ciaran O’Reilly’s straightforward directing, a solid group of actors, and Charlie Corcoran’s imaginative set richly transform the Irish Rep’s tiny stage into the volatile streets of Derry.

Two plays about our uncertain post-9/11 world are little more than Saturday Night Live skits stretched too thin. Jon Kern’s Modern Terrorism: Or They Who Want to Kills Us and How We Learn to Love Them (an obvious allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s classic satire Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) finds dark humor in three inept Middle East conspirators plotting to blow up the Empire State Building.

Skillful comic acting by Utkarsh Ambudkar, William Jackson Harper and Nitya Vidyasagar as the would-be bad guys and gal is blunted by Steven Boyer’s broad Jack Black impression as a doofus neighbor who stumbles upon them. Peter DuBois’ direction can’t give shape to Kern’s mostly misfiring comedy.

Old pro A.R. Gurney alternates between affectionate comedies of manners and screeds against former President Bush’s wartime bungling and overreaching: his Heresy is an example of the latter. In the near-future in what’s now called New America, a prefect named Pontius Pilate is visited by old friends Joseph and Mary, upset that their son Chris (without the final “T”) has been thrown in jail for no apparent reason.

Strained Biblical parallels aside, Gurney and director Jim Simpson keep things percolating amusingly until this paper-thin satire is resolved in 75 painless minutes. An accomplished cast led by Reg E. Cathey, Annette O’Toole and Karen Ziemba polishes off Gurney’s one-liners with comic zest, putting off the playwright’s worries about a future police state to a later date.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Booth Theatre, 222 West 45^th Street, New York, NY

http://virginiawoolfbroadway.com

The Freedom of the City

Irish Repertory Theatre, 136 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY

http://irishrep.org

Modern Terrorism, or: They Who Want to Kill and How We Learn to Love Them

Second Stage Theatre, 307 West 43^rd Street, New York, NY

http://2st.com

Heresy

Flea Theatre, 41 White Street, New York, NY

http://theflea.org

Concert Review: Shawn Colvin at City Winery, NY

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 26 October 2012 10:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

For the past few years, Grammy winning singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin has made the Shawn CD intimate Soho club City Winery her base when playing New York City during her annual fall “residency.” (She also comes to Chicago’s own City Winery for concerts on November 7 and 8.)

It was no different on October 25, the first of a four-night residency through October 28. For 100 minutes, Colvin held her audience in thrall with just her voice, acoustic guitar and pocketful of superb songs: for the second half of the concert, she was joined by Mary Chapin Carpenter, whose low harmonies beautifully accentuated Colvin’s own voice. The pair had just flown back from an eight-show run in England, Ireland and Scotland—but jetlag was nowhere in evidence.

Colvin, whose latest Nonesuch album, All Fall Down, came out in June—following a six-year hiatus after the release of These Four Walls—writes deceptively simple songs that incisively dissect relationships with straightforward but cutting lyrics. On display was a trio of melancholy tunes from the new record, “Knowing What I Know Now,” “Seven Time’s the Charm” and “Change Is on the Way.” Colvin, whose engagingly chatty banter between songs is an essential component of her live shows, wryly noted that she got one of her few upbeat songs, “Fill Me Up,” out of the way early in order to fool her fans into thinking she’s a “happy” performer.

But her fans are as savvy as she, and she knows it: in addition to her songwriting talent, Colvin also is a terrific cover artist—it’s not for nothing that an early album of hers, Cover Girl, comprised tunes of artists like the Police, Talking Heads and Greg Brown, whose “One Cool Remove” was a highlight of the evening. For this concert, Colvin balanced eight originals with nine covers, beginning with her signature re-working of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”

Colvin and Carpenter were at their vocal best during the four-song covers-only encore, beginning with a stark, emotional version of the Beatles’ “I’ll Be Back” and ending with, according to Colvin, “the sweetest song we know”: Willie Nelson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes.”

Shawn Colvin

October 25-28, 2012

City Winery, New York, NY

November 7-8, 2012

City Winery, Chicago, IL

http://citywinery.com

October '12 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Sunday, 21 October 2012 05:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Au Pair Girls

(Kino)

A lot of the late 60s-early 70s T&A movies are guilty pleasures, but this doesn’t even reach that exulted level. From its ear-splittingly awful title tune, this hackneyed flick follows the unarousing London exploits of a quartet of young women just arrived from the continent.

Even by the era’s low standards, Girls never rises to the occasion, despite ample nudity during many compromising positions. The Blu-ray image, obviously from a bad source, also disappoints.

The Barrens

(Anchor Bay)

Set in New Jersey woods, this would-be creepy thriller channels superior movies like The Hills Have Eyes (setting) and The Shining(father goes insane) without approaching either in quality.

While his cast is adequate—although it’s off-putting to see Mia Kirshner in a drab stepmom role—writer-director Darren Lynn Bousman never figures out how to make the horror real rather than risible. The Blu-ray image looks fine; extras are a director/cinematographer commentary and a deleted scene.

Broadway—
The American Musical

(PBS)

Michael Kantor’s six-part historical overview of America’s great contribution to theater spans its beginnings in 1893 to 2004, when this film was originally shown on PBS.

Crammed full of amazing excerpts from classic musicals and interviews with the likes of Stephen Sondheim and Carol Channing, this monumental undertaking is narrated by Julie Andrews—a British singing superstar at home on the American stage throughout her career. The Blu-ray image is decent; voluminous extras include three hours of additional interviews and a featurette, Wicked: The Road to Broadway.

A Cat in Paris

Chico and Rita

(New Video)

These foreign animated features prove there is life left in the non-computerized cartoons we’re used to. Paris is a charming adventure about a feline who takes off for the rooftops of the world’s most beautiful city each night, while Chicois a romantic glimpse at the Cuban and American music scenes before and after Castro, and by extension savvily political.

Both films’ hand-drawn animation look eye-poppingly good on Blu-ray; Paris extras include a short film, and Chico extras include a making-of featurette, directors’ commentary and soundtrack CD.

Chernobyl Diaries

(Warners)

When dumb American tourists visit Pripyat, the town near the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, they get more than the thrills they bargained for: after the van breaks down, they are attacked by mutants and are picked off one by one.

This might have made a diverting little thriller if it wasn’t yet another “found-footage” feature, a gimmick that seems never ending. The ending is particularly yawn-inducing; an alternate ending, included among the extras along with a deleted scene and featurette about Chernobyl itself, is more clever. The graininess of the “shot cheaply” look lends itself well to Blu-ray.

Fear and Desire

(Kino)

Stanley Kubrick’s 1953 debut, though far from auspicious, contains the seeds of his later, superior war films Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket. An otherwise naïve effort, it’s unsurprising Kubrick never wanted it from being shown. That now, years after his death, it reappears is due to the Kubrick estate’s ignoring his wishes, an about face from immediately after his death.

All the better for fans, I suppose. The B&W movie is undistinguished in every way except visually, and the Blu-ray transfer is strong enough to make fans happy they’ve finally seen Kubrick’s worst film. The lone extra is 1953’s The Seafarers, Kubrick’s 28-minute short about merchant seamen, most interesting as Kubrick’s first foray into color.

Khovanshchina

(Opus Arte)

Although Modest Mussorgsky’s epic opera details 17^thcentury Russian history—a rebellion against Peter the Great’s western reforms—Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2007 Munich production instead updates it with modern dress that makes the drama nonsensically absurd.

It’s too bad, for the singers (led by John Daszak and Valery Alexejev) and Bayerische Staatsoper Orchestra, led by conductor Kent Nagano, stirringly perform what the composer himself described as a “national music drama.” The static visuals do look clear in hi-def, and the music sounds fantastic.

Little Shop of Horrors

Whatever Happened to Mary Jane

(Warners)

Based on the campy Broadway musical, Frank Oz’s 1990 Little Shop tries to be scary and funny simultaneously, but the creaky, low-brow material trips it up: only Steve Martin escapes with his tongue-in-cheek portrayal of a nasty dentist (which owes something to his Maxwell in the botched Sgt Pepper movie).

Robert Aldrich’s 1962 camp fest, Mary Jane, smartly trains its cameras on Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and lets them go at it. Both movies have top-notch hi-def transfers; extras include Oz’s commentary on Shop, and a commentary and Davis and Crawford featurettes on Baby.

Mad Men—Complete Season 5

(Lionsgate)

In the fifth season of the perennial Best Drama Emmy winner, the divide between protagonist Don Draper and the ‘60s becomes more pronounced, visualized by his pulling the needle on the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”: Draper doesn’t get it….get it?

Despite its production sheen and committed acting by a large and interesting cast, Mad Men isn’t as brilliantly groundbreaking as defenders claim: its originality is more a case of nostalgia for a bygone era, which it captures well. The Blu-ray image is excellent; extras include interviews, featurettes and commentaries.

Produced by George Martin

(Eagle Vision)

Best known as the Beatles’ producer, George Martin’s storied career before and after his amazing Fab Four studio work is chronicled by his son Giles, who asks him about his time at EMI and afterwards, with Martin engagingly and modestly discussing his work with comedy legends like Peter Sellers and the Goons, and what he did when he wasn’t in the studio with John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Paul and Ringo also sit down with Martin, and the mutual respect among the men is obvious even while they joke around together. The Blu-ray image is first-rate; extras include 52 minutes of additional interviews.

DVDs of the Week

Bill Moyers—Great Thinkers

(Athena)

Brave New World

(Acorn)

Yet another set of Bill Moyers’ excellent interviews has the PBS host speaking with famous intellectuals including Noam Chomsky, Jonas Salk and movie producer David Puttnam.

Brave New World is an intelligent British series featuring Stephen Hawking, who introduces episodes of fantastic scientific breakthroughs that may well change our very lives, like cars that drive themselves and wheelchairs motored by the occupant’s brain power.

The Lovers’ Guide—

Original Collection and Essential Collection

(True Mind)

These quintessential sex-ed DVD releases feature explicit but clinical footage of couples as narrators explain how men and women can enjoy better sexual experiences.

The two five-disc sets, the Original Collection and the Essential Collection, summarize basic and advanced lessons for those who want to improve their sex lives. There’s also a one-disc primer, Sexual Positions, for those whose budget doesn’t allow picking up either (or both!) of the collections.

Nazi Collaborators

(Shanachie)

Dramatizing the horrific stories of those inhuman collaborators who willingly helped the Nazi regime murder their fellow citizens, comrades, friends and even families, this four-disc set deals with dozens of such people, from the Polish Jew Chaim Rumkowski to traitors from Belgium, Croatia, Greece, Holland, even Germany.

Each one-hour program lucidly tells one story, interviewing surviving witnesses and showing compelling footage that underline unbelievable but true tragedies.

Olmsted and America's Urban Parks

(PBS)

This hour-long PBS documentary—narrated by Kerry Washington and with Kevin Kline as Olmstead—about American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted informatively provides biographical bits and glimpses of grandest creations, starting with Manhattan’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

I know there are dozens of his glorious spaces spread across the country, but not even mentioning—let alone giving any face time to—his incredible achievement designing Buffalo’s linked park system is a crime.

30 Beats

(Lionsgate)

Writer-director Alexis Lloyd’s tired look at ten New Yorkers’ roundelays during a steaming hot day is an unnecessary update of Arthur Schnitzler’s classic drama La Ronde.

There’s a sense of arbitariness to the structure, which a better director would more interestingly tease out; with few exceptions—Condola Rashad in the first and last episodes most particularly—there’s little insight nor, for those so inclined, any titillation.

2016—Obama’s America

(Lionsgate)

This mostly fact-free documentary hopes to scare us about President Obama’s Otherness. What’s surprising is that Dinesh D’Souza is an outsider himself, so his pointing out Obama’s foreignness bumps up against out-of-context insinuations that are easily refuted, like a Winston Churchill bust taken out of the White House not because Obama hates imperialism, but because it was returned after a loan.

The casual linking of Obama to anti-Americanism—because a friend of his father has such ideas, so must Obama by implication—is most troublesome. D’Souza flies around the world, but 2016 is no travelogue: this slapdash doc is so ideologically rigid and pandering that only those who already hate Obama will fall for it.

CDs of the Week

Alison Balsom:
Sound the Trumpet

(EMI Classics)

Trumpeter Alison Balsom returns with a beguiling disc of works by Handel and Purcell. Although the baroque music world is one I return to far less often than others, Balsom’s assured technique on historically correct valveless trumpets carried me through excerpts from works like Handel’s Water Music and Purcell’s The Fairy Queen.

Superior cameos by singers Iestyn Davies and Lucy Crowe don’t overshadow Balsom, who has the last word with a technically astonishing performance of Handel’s Oboe Concerto, modified for her triumphant trumpeting.

Bedrich Smetana:
The Bartered Bride

(Harmonia Mundi)

Smetana’s perennial folk-opera favorite—and the breakthrough Czech opera that anticipated Dvorak and, later, Janacek—gets a glistening performance by a group of mainly Czech artists, beginning with Jiri Belohlavek (who conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra with brio) and extending to such wonderful singers like Dana Buresova, Tomas Juhas and Jozef Benci.

From the famous overture’s irresistible opening, Smetana’s masterly melodic music sweeps the listener away for over two enjoyable hours.

Theater Roundup: 'Grace,' "Cyrano' on Broadway; 'Him,' 'Harper Regan' off Broadway

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 15 October 2012 05:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

Grace

Written by Craig Wright; directed by Dexter Bullard

Performances through January 6, 2013

Cyrano de Bergerac

Written by Edmund Rostand; adapted by Ranjit Bolt

Directed by Jamie Lloyd

Performances through November 25, 2012

Him

Written by Daisy Foote; directed by Evan Yionoulis

Performances through October 28, 2012

Harper Regan

Written by Simon Stephens; directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch
Performances through October 28, 2012

Shannon, Arrington, Rudd, Asner in Grace (photo: Joan Marcus)

From the beginning, Grace cheats. Craig Wright’s play opens with its horrifying climax, which then runs in reverse: the gimmick recurs later, and such contrivances severely undercut the atypical—and welcome—Broadway subject matter: how religious beliefs (or lack of them) inform relationships.

Born-again Steve and wife Sara have moved from Minnesota to a Florida condo, where the pair starts a new life based on Steve succeeding in a real estate deal with a shady character from Zurich. (We know they are serious about religion because Sara sings along to Christian rock one evening when Steve returns home, after which they pray their thanks to God on their knees).

The couple lives next door to Sam, a loner who—as they find out from the local exterminator, an elderly Holocaust survivor named Karl—is dealing with the aftermath of a car crash that killed his girlfriend and left him disfigured. (But why does he wear a transparent mask so his scars are easily seen?) Steve tries to talk Sam into helping finance his deal for Crossroads Inns, a chain of hotels based on the Gospels, while Sara spends so much time with Sam while Steve works that….well, you get the picture.

Wright writes snappy dialogue, but he takes too many shortcuts, beginning with the fact that his 90-minute play is little more than a too-familiar adulterous triangle. Steve and Karl—who vividly recalls what the Nazis forced him to do (his revelation rivals that in Red Dog Howls for sheer inhuman brutality)—are defined exclusively by their atheism and the awful things that befall them: and when Grace ends, both are unfairly subjected to more unspeakable tragedy.

That violent ending seems little more than a punch line to a hoary old joke. Dealing with weighty matters, Grace appears to have more depth than it does, thanks to Dexter Bullard’s snappy direction and Beowulf Boritt’s canny set, which stands in for two apartments simultaneously, stage mischief borrowed from a far superior playwright, Alan Ayckbourn. The acting quartet—Paul Rudd (Steve), Michael Shannon (Sam), Kate Arrington (Sara) and Ed Asner (Karl) as the world’s oldest exterminator—is animated enough to pave over Wright’s bumpy writing. Well, almost.

Hodge, Poesy in Cyrano (photo: Joan Marcus)

Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is a nearly perfect romantic tragedy that begins as a comedy, slowly moves into more dramatic territory before ending with one of theater’s saddest death scenes. It needs an actor who is a swashbuckling charmer early but a tragic hero later on; Christopher Plummer, by all accounts, was an unforgettable Cyrano, but more recently on Broadway, Kevin Kline was disappointingly unheroic.

In a new Broadway staging, Douglas Hodge does much right as Cyrano: he speaks Ranjit Holt’s tart rhyming translation well and his energetic pace fits the early scenes, particularly the clever way Cyrano makes his entrance. But he has little tragic hauteur or poetry, which is especially fatal in this role.

Happily, Clemence Poesy’s devilishly charming Roxane strikingly balances what Rostand strains credulity to demand: that this beautiful young woman would fall for mere physical attractiveness over true poetic wit. Poesy is also heartbreaking in the final scenes, which play out in a strangely inert fashion in Jaime Lloyd’s otherwise physically agile staging, abetted by Soutra Gilmour’s impressive costumes and sets.

Hallie Foote, Tim Hopper in Daisy Foote's Him (photo: James Leynse)

A pale imitation of her father Horton Foote’s plays, Daisy Foote’s Him grafts its plot threads clunkily and inelegantly. Middle-aged spinster Pauline and her brother Henry, who has just returned to the family’s New Hampshire home, are worried about their faltering store’s demise after their sickly father dies. Complicating matters is their mentally slow brother Farley, who lives with them: he meets a similarly-minded young woman, Louise, falls in love with her, gets her pregnant and gets married.

Why the domineering Pauline would allow Farley and Louise to marry is never believably dramatized; whenever their subplot takes center stage, it’s nearly distasteful because it’s played so broadly. If Foote had concentrated on how this couple would deal with having a baby and building a relationship, it might have become mildly interesting. Instead, it’s merely a distraction from the main thread about revelations after the father (the “him” of the title) finally dies.

There are interludes when the performers playing “Him’s” children recite poetic entries from the old man’s journals that Henry discovers after his death. But if the father’s writing is so good, why would Pauline throw out the journals? Why not publish them to make money? And would their father have been able to keep his purchase of prime local land a secret for so long? Such holes in Foote’s writing cause Him to fatally falter, despite the efforts of the cast and director Evan Yionoulis.

Madeleine Martin, Mary McCann in Harper Regan (photo: Kevin Thomas Garcia)

Simon Stephens’ exasperating Harper Regan is a meandering attempt to inject meaning into a middle-aged woman’s decision to leave her job and family and return home to see her dying father.

Stephens’ conceit finds Harper—an intelligent woman in a troubled marriage (her husband may or may not be a child pornographer) with a typically bratty teenaged daughter—meeting with different people, beginning with her implausibly dickish boss, who refuses to give her time off. Stephens’ dishonest outline, out of Mamet by way of Pinter, fills these encounters with arbitrary weirdness and malevolence. There’s a black teenager she may be attracted to; a jerk in a bar who goes off on an anti-Semitic rant apropos of nothing (which Harper neither approves of nor repudiates); a middle-aged married man whom Harper contacts on a singles website, however unlikely; a foolish young hospital employee when Harper arrives too late to see her dad before he dies; and her remarried mom, who reduces Harper to tears.

None of these encounters is particularly enlightening and, after awhile, the accumulation of oddball characters and Harper’s equally curious responses makes the play surreally silly. Mary McCann is an expert Harper, the other actors deftly sketch their small roles, and Gaye Taylor Upchurch adroitly directs on Rachel Hauck’s artfully minimalist set, complemented by Jeff Croiter’s subtle lighting. But Harper Regan is much less than the sum of these parts.

Grace

Cort Theatre, 138 West 48th Street, New York, NY

http://graceonbroadway.com

Cyrano de Bergerac

American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

http://roundabouttheatre.org

Him

Primary Stages, 59 E 59th Street, New York, NY

http://primarystages.org

Harper Regan

Atlantic Theatre, 336 West 20th Street, New York, NY

http://atlantictheater.org