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Off-Broadway Play Review—Revival of “A Raisin in the Sun”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 04 November 2022 21:51; Written by Kevin Filipski

A Raisin in the Sun

Written by Lorraine Hansberry

Directed by Robert O’Hara

Through November 20, 2022

Public Theater

425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY

Publictheater.org

Mandi Masden, Tonya Pinkins and Toussaint Battiste in A Raisin in the Sun
(photo: Joan Marcus)

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is one of those touchstone plays, like Death of a Salesman or Long Day’s Journey Into Night, that feels familiar even to those who haven’t seen it. Every decade or so, New York sees another revival—the last two were on Broadway, the ill-fated 2004 staging with Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and the 2014 one with the megastar power of Denzel Washington—and now we have a new production at downtown’s Public Theater.

It’s a good thing too, for Hansberry’s invigorating 1959 play about the Youngers, a struggling Black family on Chicago’s south side, intelligently blends comedy and tragedy in a pinpoint study of social, economic and political injustice that’s still sadly relevant. At the Public, director Robert O’Hara catches some of those qualities, and even though his three-plus-hour production often drags, there’s always another potent or prophetic Hansberry line of dialogue to propel it forward.

There’s also a formidable cast. As Lena, the matriarch of the Younger family, Tonya Pinkins has a powerful presence that’s imposing whether she’s browbeating or being tender. As Lena’s daughter, the wonderfully named Beneatha, Paige Gilbert gives an amusing but pungent portrait of a young woman dealing with a crushingly anti-female and anti-minority culture, studying to be a doctor until she discovers her African heritage.

As Lena’s beloved older son, Walter Lee, Francois Battiste arrestingly embodies the accumulating desperation of a man who feels like he’s always failing his family, no matter what he does. In a canny bit of casting, Francois’ actual son, Toussaint Battiste, plays Walter Lee’s son Travis, with a shrewdness that belies the young actor’s years. (Battiste shares the role with another youngster, Camden McKinnon.)

Finally, there's Mandi Masden’s lovely, subtle performance as Walter Lee’s harried wife Ruth, who has a melancholic quality beneath her steely exterior. Masden’s sensitive Ruth serves as the heart of Lorraine Hansberry’s timely tale, which survives O’Hara’s more leaden touches, such as making the ghost of Lena’s dead husband a speaking character and making literal what the Younger family will face when they finally move into the white neighborhood of Clybourne Park.

November '22 Digital Week I

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 02 November 2022 16:46; Written by Kevin Filipski

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Top Gun—Maverick

(Paramount)

This incredibly belated sequel does the bare minimum—rah-rah jingoism, exciting fighter-pilot sequences—but director Joseph Kosinski doesn’t bother to go any further, as the interchangeable scenes in flight school among Maverick’s students show.

The original movie was nothing special but at least had an interesting rivalry between Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer (who appears briefly here). And poor Jennifer Connolly, nearly always a refreshing presence in any movie, can do little with her contrived romance with Cruise, who cruises by only on movie-star wattage. There’s a first-rate UHD transfer; the Blu-ray disc includes 80 minutes of on-set featurettes and interviews.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Fuoco Sacro

(Naxos)

Jan Schmidt-Garre’s riveting documentary looks at three intense classical/opera singers: Albania’s Ermonela Jaho, Canada’s Barbara Hannigan and Lithuania’s Asmik Grigorian.

With access to these remarkable women for rehearsals and warmup exercises before singing, respectively, Tchaikovsky, Satie and Puccini, Schmidt-Garre has made an insightful portrait of committed artistry (“Fuoco Sacro” means “sacred fire”). Hi-def video and audio are first-rate; extras are extended scenes of their warmups, along with musicmaking.

The Good Boss

(Cohen Media)

In Fernando Leon de Aránoa’s aggressively second-rate satire, Javier Bardem skillfully portrays of the head of a company manufacturing scales who will do anything to ensure he wins another award for his wall, whether shaming and firing longtime loyal employees or screwing the new intern who happens to be the daughter of longtime friends.

As Aránoa’s script moves along its predictable trajectory, Bardem anchors the movie as a three-dimensional character and not simply the cardboard villain he’s written as. There’s a superior hi-def transfer; extras are two interviews with Bardem and Aránoa.

The Last Romantic Lover

(Cult Epics)

Softcore purveyor Just Jaeckin made elegant features like this 1978 entry about the editor-in-chief of a women’s magazine hosting a “last romantic lover” contest who falls for the winner, the lion tamer of a rural circus company. Of course, Jaeckin is greatly helped by his lead actress, the breathtaking Dayle Haddon, who speaks French and English fluently and makes the editor a tantalizing bundle of independence, professionalism and charm.

Some of it’s risible, like the circus vs. sophisticated subject, while suave actor Fernando Rey is wasted as the lion tamer’s father, but it’s still highly watchable. There’s a good hi-def transfer; extras are an audio commentary, new interviews with Jaeckin and Haddon and footage from a Jaeckin tribute.

Titans—Complete 3rd Season

(Warner Bros/HBO)

In the latest season of this HBO Max series about young superheroes, Robin returns to Gotham as a dangerous adversary after a particularly nasty end, and the other titans must regroup to stop him—he’s now known as Red Hood.

The capable and energetic young cast helps put this over despite its inherent silliness. All 13 episodes of the third season—the fourth is on the way—are included on three discs; extras comprise several featurettes and interviews.

La Traviata

(Dynamic)

American soprano Nadine Sierra dazzlingly demonstrates why lustrous singing, accomplished acting and winning charm make her one of this generation’s few triple-threat opera performers as Violetta, the consumptive tragic heroine in Giuseppe Verdi’s classic romance, here seen in Florence, Italy, in fall 2021.

Davide Livermore directs a stylish modern-dress version of the opera, but it’s the musicmaking (Zubin Mehta leads the orchestra and chorus) and performances, with Sierra’s overwhelming dramatic and sonic presence, that makes this a satisfying production.

Two Films by Patrice Leconte

(Cohen Film Collection)

French director Patrice Leconte has made stylish studies of strangely compelling and unbalanced relationships for decades, and while the films in this set—2001’s Felix and Lola and 2002’s Love Street—are not up to his best, like Monsieur Hire or The Hairdresser’s Husband, they are as elegantly made as ever.

Philippe Torreton and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Felix and Lola and Laetitia Casta, Patrick Timsit and Vincent Elbaz in Love Street make Leconte’s assiduously oddish characters palatable even through the overall weirdness. Both films look great on Blu-ray; each has a commentary by reviewer Wade Major.

DVD Release of the Week

Ray Donovan—Complete Series/Ray Donovan: The Movie

(Paramount/CBS)

For seven seasons, Liev Schreiber passionately played Ray Donovan, the fixer who can save any politician or celebrity, but whose family life’s a mess that he’s not able to handle. This set collects all 82 episodes of the Showtime drama series, along with the superfluous two-hour Ray Donovan: The Movie, which premiered earlier this year.

Along with Schreiber’s best performance, there’s fine acting by Jon Voigt along with an array of guest stars throughout the show’s run. The comprehensive 29-disc set also includes more than two hours’ worth of special features.

CD Releases of the Week

Sehnsucht—Berg and Mahler

(Alpha-Classics)

The German term “Sehnsucht,” referring to longing and nostalgia, informs this 2020 lockdown recording, performed in an empty Rotterdam concert hall. The music, unsurprisingly, follows suit: melancholy songs by Austrian Alban Berg, tenderly sung by the exciting Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan (see review of Fuoco sacro, above) and up-and-coming Dutch baritone Raoul Steffani.

Hannigan returns to sing the angelic child’s song in the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s lovely Symphony No. 4, a musical linchpin of the Viennese fin de siècle era. Conductor Rolf Verbeek leads the Camerata RCO ensemble on this affecting disc.

Valentin Silvestrov—Maidan

(ECM New Series)

Ukrainian composer Vaklentin Silvestrov wrote Maidan 2014 as, he says, “a musical response to the events on the Maidan in 2014 in Kyiv.” Those events—wave after wave of demonstrations throughout Ukraine—were the source for the haunting a cappella four-part cycle with texts from both liturgical passages and Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchencko’s relevant verses.

This poignant musical statement is complemented by a trio of other unaccompanied choral works, all arrestingly sung by the Kyiv Chamber Choir, under the guidance of conductor Mykola Hobdych.

Lost Classics With The Philadelphia Orchestra

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 02 November 2022 15:10; Written by Jack Angstreich

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra. Photo by Jennifer Taylor.

At Carnegie Hall, on the evening of Friday, October 28th, I had the great privilege to attend a terrific concert featuring the superb musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra under the exhilarating direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The event began with its greatest work, a ravishing presentation of Maurice Ravel’s glorious Le tombeau de Couperin. Paul J. Horsley in a program note provides some useful background:

The concept of the tombeau, or “homage-piece,” dates back many centuries. French composers of the 17th century commonly wrote sets of chamber or keyboard pieces—which they calledtombeaux(literally “tombs”) or occasionallyapothéoses—to pay musical tribute to a dead colleague.

He adds:

Couperin himself (1668–1733) wrote sets of homage-pieces, too, including apothéoses for two early Baroque masters, Jean-Baptiste Lully and Arcangelo Corelli. Ravel’s set of pieces thus paid tribute not only to a French master, but also to a distinctly French tradition of musical tribute. At the same time, the work took on another dimension related specifically to the war: Each of the six piano movements is dedicated to a friend or colleague lost on the battlefield.

And:

Pianist Marguerite Long, who later was to play the premiere of the composer’s G-Major Piano Concerto, presented the first performances of the piano version of the Tombeau in Paris on April 11, 1919. As he often did with his keyboard works, Ravel created orchestrations of four of the six, which were performed in Paris in February 1920 and made into a very popular ballet by the Swedish Ballet the same year.

The Prélude that opens the piece is sprightly, if not entirely so, whereas in the ensuing, dance-like Forlane, the emotional undercurrents move more strongly to the fore. The Menuet that follows is more lyrical, with an elegiac quality, while its Trio is more somber and meditative. The closing Rigaudon is the most energetic movement, with a quieter more plaintive section.

The remainder of the first half of the concert consisted of a confident account of Florence Price’s wonderful Symphony No. 3. About the composer, program annotator John Michael Cooper writes: “Her First Symphony remained unpublished until 2008, her Second Symphony is missing, and her Fourth Symphony (1945) went unperformed in her lifetime and unpublished until 2020.” About the Third Symphony, he adds:

It was performed by Valter Poole and the Michigan WPA Symphony Orchestra on November 6 and 8, 1940. Those performances were a success, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reported enthusiastically on the work in her syndicated newspaper column,My Day.

And: “It was not heard again in her lifetime and remained unperformed until 2001 and unpublished until 2008.” Price described the work as “a cross section of present-day Negro life and thought with its heritage of that which is past, paralleled or influenced by concepts of the present day,” which Cooper glosses as “a reference to the Third Symphony’s cultivation of dissonant passages, jarring percussion, and other Modernist expressive devices that were absent from the First Symphony but central to 20th-century music in general, and to much of Price’s later music.”

The opening movement is agitated—contrasting both a with slower section seemingly influenced by Negro spirituals and ‘populist’ music in a jauntier vein—but it eventually unfolds into a grander statement. The succeeding Andante ma non troppo, which is more cheerful for much of its length, is the purest Americana, and the Juba:Allegrois ebullient, with the strongest connection to popular music of all the movements, while theScherzo: Finaleis tumultuous but ultimately triumphant.

After intermission, the impressive soloist Beatrice Rana, who wore a sparkling—indeed dazzling—dress, entered the stage to admirably perform Clara Wieck-Schumann’s underrated Piano Concerto. In a useful note for the program, Christopher H. Gibbs comments on the composer:

She began writing her ambitious Piano Concerto, Op. 7, in late 1832 or early 1833 at age 14 and premiered the piece with Felix Mendelssohn conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in November 1835. It is her only surviving orchestral composition. The few works she wrote after her marriage tended to be occasional pieces, usually birthday and Christmas gifts, although in 1846 she produced her magnificent Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 17. Following Robert’s death, when she was 37, she only wrote one minor piece, a march. Her intense musical activities continued as she went on performing, teaching, tending to her husband’s legacy, and being Brahms’s principal adviser.

He adds:

It is unclear who orchestrated the first movement (the orchestra does not play in the second), but the instrumentation there is generally quite modest, usually scored just for strings, or entirely absent. Clara performed the concerto across Europe many times in the years to follow, fulfilling her hope that it would please audiences and be in demand.

The opening Allegro maestoso was exuberant and, like the work as a whole, an expression of full-blown Romanticism. Gibbs remarks on the inward and song-like middle movement that “It is initially for piano alone until a solo cello joins for an extended duet,” here ably performed by Hai-Ye Ni. The Finale recapitulates theethosof the first movement with even greater drama.

The concert concluded thrillingly with a mesmerizing version of Ravel’s fabulous Boléro. According to Horsley, “Ravel said later that he wanted to write a piece that had ‘no form, properly speaking, and no modulation, or almost none—just rhythm and orchestra.’” The composer described it as “a piece lasting 17 minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral effects without music—one long and very gradual crescendo.”

The musicians received a very enthusiastic, standing ovation.

Broadway Play Review—“Death of a Salesman” with Wendell Pierce

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 01 November 2022 22:44; Written by Kevin Filipski

Death of a Salesman

Written by Arthur Miller

Directed by Miranda Cromwell

Through January 15, 2023

Hudson Theatre

141 West 44th Street, New York, NY

Salesmanonbroadway.com

Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke in Death of a Salesman
(photo: Joan Marcus)

The story of Willy Loman, the titular character whose myriad disappointments in life—and impending senility—literally kill him, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is one of the creakiest classics of the theater. Repetitiousness, melodramatic flourishes and a lack of poetic language are all justifiable criticisms of Miller’s play.

So it’s not surprising that director Miranda Cromwell would want to make Salesman relevant for our era, where striving to do well is getting ever more difficult for many Americans. Her decision to make the Loman (“low man”—get it?) family Black might give Willy; his suffering wife, Linda; and his sons, the sensitive Biff and carefree Happy even more baggage as they navigate the postwar era, which was anything but welcoming to minorities. But only the scene where Willy is fired by Howard, his boss (who’s the uncaring son of Willy’s original boss, one of Willy’s oldest friends), does the subtext scream racism instead of classism and ageism.

Missing, however, is any overarching directorial idea; aside from beginning and ending the play with spirituals stirringly sung by the cast, the play lurches forward in the usual way, the clumsy flashbacks to the boys as young kids and the contrived hallucinatory conversations with Willy’s long-dead brother Ben (whose scheming and wealth gave Willy his belief in the American dream) that rarely illuminate or prove insightful.

Cromwell is better with the intimate, often painful moments between Willy and Linda. Of course, this has a lot to do with the towering performances of Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke. Willy has been a linchpin role since Lee J. Cobb played him in 1949 premiere, his tragic trajectory irresistible for any actor. Pierce trenchantly catches the quiet desperation of Willy, his anger and fear of failure, culminating in his anguished attempts to be loving and honest to his family amid a lifetime of dejection and dishonesty. And Washington makes a wonderfully compassionate sparring partner whose moments of pathos and emotion ring unerringly true.

The decent supporting cast is led by Khris Davis, whose Biff isn’t as heartrending as he could be, and McKinley Belcher III who, as Happy, makes the most out of the least thought-out Loman family member. This Death of a Salesman, running more than three hours, feels every bit as long and drawn-out as Willy’s final demise.

Reviews

Off-Broadway Play Review—Revival of “A Raisin in the Sun”

November '22 Digital Week I

Lost Classics With The Philadelphia Orchestra

Broadway Play Review—“Death of a Salesman” with Wendell Pierce

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