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Reviews
For 25 Years, Joe Hurley has Produced His All-Star Irish Rock Revue With NY’s Finest
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 22 March 2023 14:16
- Written by Bruce Alexander & Brad Balfour
Photo by Bruce Alexander
Joe Hurley’s 25th Anniversary All-Star Irish Rock Revue
Friday, March 17, 2023
6-8 pm
City Winery
25 11th Ave. (at 15th St.)
New York, NY
646-751-6033
A St. Pat’s Day celebration took place in City Winery’s main space with veteran rocker and producer Joe Hurley and his band, Rogue’s March. They were joined by what seemed like a cast of thousands of NYC Stars coming together to sing The Great Irish Songbook.
Founded in 2008 by Michael Dorf, City Winery is more than a music venue — it is a winery, restaurant, fine wine bar and private event space. Recently re-located to Pier 57 on the Hudson River in New York, it has excellent views of the Little Island NYC, is near the Whitney Museum, Chelsea Market, and the High Line. The location delivers a unique culinary and cultural experience for urban wine enthusiasts passionate about music. And as a venue for events—a place for happy hours, family reunions, and birthday parties. — it hosts live events most nights from concerts to comedy shows as well as including Joe Hurley with his All-Star Irish Rock Revue.
The dapper Hurley led his all-star cast of singers and musicians in performing a selection of classic Irish songs — both traditional and those by contemporary composers. Performers included NY1 news reporter Roger Clark, who let loose with a rocking stage presence and led the grand finale rendition of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” Another great New York rocker, Willie Nile, performed the late poet/performer Jim Carroll’s “The People That Died” — a song that should not be forgotten. Mike Fortunate did a killer version of Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come On Eileen.”
Sheryl Marshall, whose husband was telling stories of Soho New York in the ’70s while his wife performed, provided a soulful presence to the musical festivities. Guitarist Mark Bosch — once a member of Bowie-produced Ian Hunter’s band — kept trying to edge his way in during Clark’s unstoppable punk dancing stage bombast — but the green-clad rocker held his own.
UK comic hero, the bald-headed Stephen Frost, R&B singer Carlton Smith, Austrian exotic dancer Anna Copa Cabanna, accordion player Kenny Margolis and former Meatloaf singer Ellen Foley were among the many hitting the stage. All were keeping it real for the entire show –especially legendary NYC singer Laura Cantrell. And the list goes on — Sage Leopoid of Panik Flower, Tiffany Lyons of Slyboots, James Maddock and Ricky Byrd, the guitarist from Joan Jett’s band. All jammed it up with fine renditions of songs from U2 to Thin Lizzy and The Pogues and many more.
It was a packed house with everyone dancing and singing in celebration of Saint Patty’s Day. And there was no better MC and singer than Joe Hurley to make it all happen for what became a three-hour long extravaganza.
Film Series Review—“Jeanne Moreau, Cinéaste” at Film Forum
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 17 March 2023 22:35
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Jeanne Moreau, Cinéaste
Through March 23, 2023
Film Forum
209 West Houston Street, Manhattan
filmforum.org
The series Jeanne Moreau, Actrice, at Film Forum for the past two weeks, was a superb reminder of how seminal Moreau was onscreen, playing so many memorable roles in films by Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim), Luis Bunuel (Diary of a Chambermaid), Louis Malle (The Lovers, Elevator to the Gallows), and Michelangelo Antonioni (La Notte).
The quintessential French woman onscreen, Moreau was sophisticated and sensible, intelligent and sensual. But her brilliance wasn’t relegated to merely acting, as Film Forum’s current series, Jeanne Moreau, Cineaste, collects the trio of films she directed between 1976 and 1984 to give viewers the opportunity to watch her develop her own directorial voice.
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| Lumière |
The three films are features Lumière (1976) and The Adolescent (1979) as well as a documentary, Lillian Gish (1984). Her first film, Lumière, stars Moreau as a middle-aged actress relaxing at her rural estate with three good friends, also actresses. Gentle and modest, the film at times is too casual in its observation of the intersecting relationships and attendant rivalries, affections and jealousies. But Moreau, thanks to excellent acting from her quartet and the judicious use of flashbacks, creates an insinuating portrait of the complications of womanhood.
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| The Adolescent |
The same could be said for The Adolescent, another low-key character study about complex female relationships. The protagonist, Marie, is a 13-year-old who spends the summer of 1939 with her parents at her beloved grandmother’s home in a rural village. Moreau the writer and director sympathetically shows Marie’s childish nature, budding sexuality and the growing rift between her father and mother—who soon begins an affair with the local doctor, whom Marie also has an unrequited crush on. Although the great Simone Signoret is the grandmother, the astonishing young actress Laetitia Chauveau is rightly the focus of Moreau’s camera throughout.
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| Lillian Gish |
Moreau’s interview with a movie legend makes up the entire running time of Lillian Gish, a touching portrait of old Hollywood that also includes clips from Gish’s silent-film career—including D.W. Griffith’s early epics Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Moreau’s warmth and Gish’s very presence make this a nice hour of nostalgia for film buffs.
NYC Theater Review—“The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan at BAM
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 14 March 2023 14:34
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
Written by Lorraine Hansberry
Directed by Anne Kauffman
Performances through March 24, 2023
BAM Strong Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY
bam.org
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| Rachel Brosnahan and Oscar Isaac in The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (photo: Julieta Cervantes) |
By turns amusing and melodramatic, cringy and tragic, Lorraine Hansberry’s sprawling The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window—the author’s follow to A Raisin in the Sun, which took Broadway by storm in 1959—is an intelligent but flawed mess that still feels relevant, six unsettling decades later.
Written in 1964 and set in a West Village flat, the play follows a couple, Sidney Brustein and his wife Iris, as they come to terms with the limits of their idealism. Sidney’s latest venture, running a small Village Voice-like weekly, takes the place of his most recent failure, running a nightclub. Iris is a failed actress still desperately hoping for her big break as she slings hash at a local diner. Their days and nights are filled with smoke, drink and ongoing arguments in which Sidney devastatingly insults his wife about her lack of either acting talent or true ideals, which he usually walks back.
When they’re not at each other’s throats, Sidney and Iris welcome guests to their apartment in a revolving-door fashion, akin to a sitcom. Alton, a young radical who’s also a light-skinned Black man; David, a brooding playwright from the upstairs apartment; Wally, another longtime radical who’s running for city council; Max, a colleague who designs the the new weekly’s cover for Sidney; and Iris’ sisters—the older and seemingly straitlaced Mavis, and the younger Gloria, a “model” in Florida—all hover around the couple, each entering or exiting so Hansberry can show another angle of the couple’s volatile relationship along with the limits of being a real liberal.
As in A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry treats serious subject matter with a light touch—not superficially but also not ponderously. The problem with The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is that, unlike Raisin’s laser focus, it encompasses so much—idealism, racism, sexism, misogyny, political corruption, for starters—that it shortchanges itself. Supposedly, Hansberry might have tweaked parts of Brustein if she wasn’t battling the pancreatic cancer that would kill her at age 34 as the play’s first Broadway production was closing.
It’s rarely been rarely staged since, instead accumulating the baggage of a white elephant in intervening 60 years. Anne Kaufmann, who directed a production in Chicago a few years ago, does the honors in Brooklyn, with a nicely-paced rhythm that keeps things moving for a still too-long three hours. The particulars of the Brusteins’ world are well developed: the collective dots’ authentically lived-in set, Brenda Abbandandolo’s spot-on costumes, John Torres’ incisive lighting and Bray Poor’s imaginative sound design.
There’s the occasional directorial misstep, as when Kaufman has Iris and Mavis sit in front of the audience and watch the sad meeting between Sidney and Gloria that leads to an intimate kiss after she admits that Alton—who was head over heels in love with her—is cutting her off after discovering that she is a sex worker. Otherwise, Kaufmann makes sure that the actors honestly serve Hansberry’s words, and the harmonious supporting ensemble is led by Miriam Silverman, whose forceful Mavis emerges as fully-realized character rather than the stereotype she could have been in lesser hands.
Oscar Isaac’s Sidney and Rachel Brosnahan’s Iris are a believably authentic couple, imperfect but loving. The play’s final scene speaks shatteringly in its pauses and silences between the barely uttered words, as Isaac, Brosnahan and Kaufman get to the heart of the poetry in Hansberry’s uneven but compelling exploration of humanity.
March '23 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 08 March 2023 20:29
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week
Film, the Living Record of Our Memory
(Kino Lorber)
In director Inés Toharia’s cautionary chronicle about the urgency of film preservation—in one of the film’s many eye-opening statistics, it’s noted that more than three-quarters of all films from the silent era are gone forever—archivists, filmmakers and historians discuss an unexciting but concerning subject for any cinema lover.
It’s also pointed out that saving films digitally isn’t a panacea, since—as anybody who has tried to watch a movie on an older DVD can attest—digital media deteriorates as badly as film does. What to do? That’s the question, and whatever the answer, it had better happen soon: we are in danger of losing a lot of more of our shared film history. Among the articulate talking heads are directors Ken Loach, Wim Wenders and—of course—the ubiquitous Martin Scorsese.
(Kino Lorber)
Set in Berlin in 1940, director Maggie Peren’s tense but playful drama follows Cioma Schönhaus, who joins the burgeoning underground to uses his expertise at forging documents for other Jews trying to escape the Nazis before it’s too late—but his bold, even reckless, flaunting of his own excitement for life, even falling in love with an unavailable woman, puts a bullseye on his back.
Peren’s engrossing film from a real-life subject reflects its protagonist’s almost carefree joie de vive but never loses sight of its tragic center. Louis Hofmann is excellent in the lead role, a deceptively complicated character.
Free Skate
(Indiecan Entertainment)
Set in the cutthroat world of figure skating, Roope Olenius’ rugged feature concerns a young Russian—called only the Figure Skater—who goes to Finland to live with her grandmother while taking up skating again, but as she ascends to greater heights on the ice she sees that her position is precarious, especially when it comes to those who would use her for their own ends.
Veera W. Vilo, who is impressive in the lead, also wrote the scathing script, which never shies away from showing the worst of the sport: from physical and emotional bullying to sexual assault, it’s all here.
(Oscilloscope)
Helmut Dosantos’ visually rich documentary, which unveils the natural beauties of the director’s beloved homeland, alternates between crisp black and white and richly textured color as it shows the indigenous denizens of varied rural areas at work and at leisure, in a sense resisting the modernization that has become the norm elsewhere.
Dosantos (who is also his own cinematographer) has made a nearly abstract visual and aural essay that at times becomes didactic and repetitious but retains a compelling fascination throughout.
(Film Movement)
Japanese writer-director Naomi Kawase makes intimate dramas about relationships, like this 2014 feature about teenage lovers who, after discovering a dead body floating in the sea, discover a new-found maturity that may help them on the path to adulthood.
As always, Kawase too often relies on sentimentality and contrived plotting but, unlike an affecting film like True Mothers, here she has made what isn’t much more than a well-acted soap opera. Certainly, it’s not the masterpiece the director herself thought of it at its premiere at Cannes.
La vie parisienne
(Opus Arte)
French operetta composer Jacques Offenbach reached his storytelling zenith with this work about quotidian life and love in the greatest of all cities—it’s not titled “Parisian Life” for nothing. And this delectable staging at, appropriately enough, the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, is frothy, fizzy fun.
Director Christian Lacroix’s dazzling sets and costumes perfectly complement Offenbach’s beguiling music (played by Les Musiciens du Louvre under the baton of conductor Romain Dumas), and it’s charmingly sung by a superlative cast. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.
CD Release of the Week
Alexander Scriabin—The Poem of Ecstasy/Symphony No. 2
(Naxos)
Alexander Scriabin gets short shrift among his Russian contemporaries, possibly because he didn’t write operas like Mussorgsky, Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov. But his music has a voluptuousness all its own, and the two orchestral works on this disc show off how his rapturous style evolved.
The aptly titled The Poem of Ecstasy and his Symphony No. 2 were written within a few years of each other in the early 1900s, but Ecstasy is far more chromatic; JoAnn Falletta conducts the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in rousing performances that catch all the nuances of these towering works.
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