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Music Review: "Seth Rudetsky’s Broadway" with Vanessa Williams

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Sunday, 03 July 2022 20:20; Written by Kevin Filipski

Seth Rudetsky’s Broadway with Vanessa Williams

June 20, 2022

The Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, NYC

thetownhall.org

Vanessa Williams at Seth Rudetsky's Broadway (photo: Sachyn Mital)

With a brilliant career that over the past three decades has seen her ascend to the top of the pop charts and star in several successful TV series and Broadway musicals, Vanessa Williams was a no-brainer as guest for the latest installment at the Town Hall of Seth Rudetsky’s Broadway. Both the host himself and the audience were in adoration mode for 90 minutes as Williams bantered easily with Rudetsky about her career and belted out several songs from her wide-ranging catalog.

Rudetsky is unequaled at being chatty, informative and always entertaining in his programs of conversation and musical performance with notable stage stars. Moving easily from the piano to the interlocutor’s chair and back, Rudetsky is knowledgeable, well-prepared and funny, putting his guests and audiences at ease. As a terrifically versatile pianist, he plays whatever is needed at the time. And with Williams, that ranged from Sondheim to Kander & Ebb to Disney.

The discussion—always enlightening, amusing, entertaining—ranged from Williams’ childhood (her mother, a music teacher, was in attendance, a few rows from the stage) and college years at Syracuse, where she majored in musical theater, to winning the Miss America pageant and, after being stripped of her crown with only a short while left in her reign thanks to nude photos that were published in Penthouse magazine, her slow but steady rise to a triple threat singer-actress-dancer onstage, onscreen, on records and on TV.

Seth Rudetsky and Vanessa Williams (photo: Sychan Mital)

Punctuating the conservation were the irresistible songs: Rudetsky and Williams would walk over to the piano, and he would accompany her in, say, “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods (in which she played the Witch in 2002), the title song from her smashing Broadway debut, replacing Chita Rivera in 1994 as the lead in Kiss of the Spider Woman, “Colors of the Wind” from the Disney movie Pocahontas, and—unsurprisingly, the final song of the night—her biggest radio hit, “Save the Best for Last.”

Williams is currently starring in the silly but hilarious play, POTUS, on Broadway, and at one point she invited her costar, Lilli Cooper, onstage. Cooper took over the conversation before belting a show-stopping “The Oldest Profession” from the Cy Coleman musical The Life—Cooper was amazing, but I couldn’t help thinking that Williams should have done another song or two instead.

Although Cooper deserves her own showcase, next up for Seth Rudetsky’s Broadway at the Town Hall is the great Jane Krakowski on September 12.

June '22 Digital Week IV

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 30 June 2022 03:02; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

Mr. Malcolm’s List

(Bleecker Street)

Based on a novel by Suzanne Allain (who also penned the screenplay), Emma Holly Jones’ feature debut divertingly plays with the conventions of 19th century novels—and their movie and TV adaptations—and gives its female characters agency in their own futures (including husbands).

Reminiscent of the recent Jane Austen adaptation of Emma with Anya Taylor-Joy, Mr. Malcolm’s List is light on its feet and unapologetically romantic, allowing two worthy if underused actresses—Zawe Ashton and Freida Pinto—the opportunity take center stage, and they take full advantage with delightful performances.

You Are Not My Mother

(Magnolia)

In this creepy and understated horror film, a teenager, Char, subject to school bullying, also must deal with the difficult relationship between her grandmother, Rita, and her mother, Angela, especially after Angela disappears, then returns…or does she?

Director-writer Kate Dolan keeps things percolating as the women’s behavior and relationships are continuously scrambled, and if she loses control before the too-literal denouement, her film remains deeply unsettling and is superbly acted by Hazel Doupe (Char), Carolyn Bracken (Angela) and Ingrid Craigie (Rita).

4K Release of the Week

Shaft

(Criterion)

In Gordon Parks’ groundbreaking 1971 detective picture, Richard Roundtree set the macho blueprint for the Blaxploitation heroes of the early ‘70s for an unbeatable blend of crime drama, romance, comedy and good old NYC location shooting. The first sequel, 1972’s Shaft’s Big Score!, is just as entertaining, so it’s nice that Criterion included it on one of the two Blu-ray discs.

The original film looks supremely gritty and grainy in 4K, while the sequel looks good in hi-def. Many extras include vintage and new featurettes, including interviews with Roundtree, Parks and Oscar-winning composer Isaac Hayes (who did not return to score Shaft’s Big Score!, but did contribute a song), along with new video essays that put the movie in context, like the full-length 2019 documentary exploration, A Complicated Man: The "Shaft" Legacy.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Breathe In

(Cohen Media)

For exploring a near-taboo coupling—a married 40-ish father and a high school exchange student who attends classes with his daughter—director-cowriter Drake Doremus deserves credit for restraint; but since the 95-minute drama isn't interested in chronicling a strictly sexual relationship, the gradual reveal of an intimate relationship is slow and unrewarding.

Still, this intriguing character study has a strong cast: Guy Pearce (dad), Felicity Jones (student), Mackenzie Davis (daughter) and especially Amy Ryan (mom) provide credible character arcs throughout. The hi-def transfer is immaculate; extras are a making-of and director interview.

Mozart—Don Giovanni

(C Major)

Mozart’s masterpiece is given a conventional but powerful staging by director Michael Hampe at the 1987 Salzburg Festival, and the artists are even better: conducting the orchestra and chorus is none other than the great—if controversial—Herbert von Karajan, near the end of his life (he would die two years later) but still commanding on the podium.

The rakish Don is the imposing American bass-baritone Samuel Ramey; the Don’s conquests are sung and acted brilliantly by American soprano Kathleen Battle (Zerlina), Bulgarian soprano Anna Tomowa-Sintow (Donna Anna) and German soprano Julia Varady (Donna Elvira); and the Don’s servant, Leporello, is the redoubtable Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto. The hi-def video and audio are acceptable.

Strawberry Mansion

(Music Box Films)

Set in 2035, when the government has the right to tax citizen’s dreams, this too-clever sci-fi romance follows a man who arrives at a senior citizen’s house to audit her VHS dream tapes. What follows is unsurprisingly surreal but also surprisingly forgettable, as codirectors/cowriters Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley fashion an arbitrary world that never coheres emotionally or histrionically.

It doesn’t help that Audley (who plays the auditor) isn’t much of an actor, so any soulfulness or sympathy toward the relationship is negated from the outset. There’s a fine hi-def transfer; extras include a directors’ commentary, deleted/extended scenes, making-of, test footage and Birney’s short films.

We Need to Do Something

(RLJE Films)

What begins as a tense drama set in a bathroom—a family is barricaded there during a strong storm—soon degenerates into a risible scarefest in which anything goes, particularly the convenient appearances of a poisonous (and symbolic) snake. Director Sean King O’Grady and writer Max Booth III have absorbed the lessons of countless horror flicks, but they forgot that the best ones know that a sense of inevitability is subordinate to plausibility.

Once the parents’ argument leads to the young son getting bitten by the snake, empathy is thrown out the window; the flashbacks setting up malevolence are similarly ham-fisted. The best thing about the film is Vinessa Shaw, who has been seen far too infrequently since Eyes Wide Shut nearly a quarter-century ago and who nearly makes the mother fully inhabited. There’s a superior hi-def transfer.

"Don Quixote" & "Of Love and Rage": Kings & Windmills Take to the Stage

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 27 June 2022 13:56; Written by Jack Angstreich

Hee Seo and Joo Won Ahn in Don Quixote. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor.

At the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, on the evening of Friday, June 17th, I had the enormous pleasure of attending an exquisite performance of the classic ballet, Don Quixote, presented by the wonderful American Ballet Theater, auspiciously inaugurating their spring season.

An epitome of comic escapism, much of the work is a fantasy—even utopian—vision of Spain, and thus an opportunity for brilliant pastiches of Spanish styles in dance, music, and costume—with dresses that evoke flamenco and soldiers dressed in elegant uniforms. (In the second act there is a reversion to an equally familiar genre with a dream-scene of ethereal nymphs, while the third act is a prototypical set of divertissements celebrating the wedding of the central couple.) The presiding genius here is the legendary Marius Petipa whose choreographic wizardry—restaged by Alexander Gorsky and in a production from 1995 by Kevin McKenzie (who retires as Artistic Director this year) and Susan Jones—delights from beginning to end. His enterprise is immeasurably aided by the tuneful Romantic score—here excellently conducted by the reliable Ormsby Wilkins—by Ludwig Minkus who, along with Ceasre Pugni and Riccardo Drigo, enlivened the Imperial Russian Ballet for decades with bewitching music. The charming scenery and costumes are by the eminent Santo Loquasto, whose remarkable versatility is seemingly proven by the fact that I can discern no connection between his work for the ballet and his distinguished art direction for innumerable films by Woody Allen.

The program featured a magnificent cast led by the superb Hee Seo—a shining star of the company—as Kitri, terrifically partnered by the ascendant Joo Won Ahn. (My greatest memory of this production was that with Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev.) The secondary cast was also outstanding: Luciana Paris as Mercedes, a street dancer, splendidly complemented by Andrii Ishchuk as Espada, the matador; Katherine Williams and Paulina Waski, enchanting as the Flower Girls; Betsy McBride and Garegin Pogossian as the Gypsy Couple; and above all, the dazzling Zhong-Jing Fang as the Queen of the Dryads, along with the remarkable Erica Lall as Amour. The deft character actors included Roman Zhurbin in the title role, Luis Ribagorda as Sancho Panza, and Duncan Lyle as Gamache, the rich nobleman betrothed to Kitri. The fabulous corps de ballet danced at their near best.

oflove On the evening of Tuesday, June 21st, I was able to experience what will probably be the most momentous event of the current season: Of Love and Rage from 2020, the twenty-first full-length ballet—which receives its local premiere with these performances—by the Artist in Residence, Alexei Ratmansky, arguably the most important choreographer working today. The work was inspired by the artist’s vacation in Siracusa, Sicily, in the summer of 2018, a city which was a jewel of the ancient Greek world—and in which some extraordinary ruins from that period survive. The source for the ballet’s scenario is the first century Hellenistic romance, Chaereas and Callirhoë, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as “probably the earliest fully extant romantic novel in Western literature.”

In the beautiful scenography and costume designs of Jean-Marc Puissant, one can detect the influence of the classicizing productions of the Ballets Russes, such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë—itself based upon a Hellenestic romance—as well as Art Deco, especially in the first section of the ballet which is set in ancient Syracuse. (In the dream-scene in the second act—as well as at the end—one encounters what inevitably recalls one of the giant marble heads of the astounding Valley of Temples of Sicily’s ancient Agrigentum.) The art director commented:

We start in Siracusa with a more Greek look. But once the story goes to Miletus and the court of Dionysius, the costumes become much more early-20th century, more Ottoman. Then, with Mithridates, the style is much more Cossack, more Armenian—that’s artistic license, but it comes from the music.

The music in question—elegantly conducted here by David LaMarche—is Aram Khatchaturian’s fabulous score for his ballet, Gayné, which has many of the striking sonorities found in Soviet ballets by composers such as Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Boris Asafyev, and Rodion Shchedrin.

There are many lovely dances here that will be counted among the choreographer’s most amazing accomplishments and subsequent viewings will allow one to determine the true stature of the work as a whole. Petipa does seem to be an artistic precursor for Ratmansky with this ballet, but channeled through George Balanchine. (The latter’s formalism intersects interestingly and seamlessly with Ratmansky’s “postmodernism.”) The fine cast was led by the incandescent Christine Shevchenko as Callirhoe, effectively partnered by matinee idol Thomas Forster as Chaereas. The main participants also included Blaine Hoven as Dionysius, Jarod Curley as Mithridates, Zhurbin again as the King of Babylon (and as Hermocrates), and Chloe Misseldine as the Queen of Babylon. The secondary cast featured Zimmi Coker as Callirhoe’s Maid, Eric Tamm as Polycharmus, Fang again as Plangon, and Lyle again as Ariston.

June '22 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 22 June 2022 10:24; Written by Kevin Filipski

4K/UHD Release of the Week

The Bad Guys

(Dreamworks)

With a dream voice cast, led by bickering buddies Sam Rockwell and Marc Maron, this animated romp based on the book series by Aaron Blabey about a wolf, snake, shark, tarantula and piranha who try to change their evil ways and become good is amusing and clever.

Many of the jokes land thanks to Rockwell, Maron, and other voices Awkwafina, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos and Zazie Beetz, while the bright visuals are appropriately tongue-in-cheek. It all pops off the screen in 4K/UHD (there’s also a Blu-ray included); extras comprise a commentary, new short, deleted scenes and making-of featurettes.

Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week

Lux Aeterna

(Yellow Veil Pictures)

French enfant terrible Gaspar Noé’s 2019 cinematic experiment is a 50-minute tease instead of a provocation, taking place on a movie set, as Beatrice Dalle (who plays sort-of herself) directs Charlotte Gainsbourg (ditto) in a film about witchcraft.

In Noé’s mind, sexism on a film set is today’s version of burning a witch at the stake; but with a plethora of visual gimmicks ranging from split screens and varying aspect ratios to flashing strobes (which come with a trigger warning), Lux Aeterna seems like a lazy Gaspar Noé parody.

The Phantom of the Open

(Sony Classics)

In 1976, ordinary worker Maurice Flitcroft decided to enter the British Open, despite the fact that he never played golf—through a series of coincidences, he played in the qualifying round, shooting the worst 18 holes in Open history.

Director Craig Roberts, writer Simon Farnaby and actor Mark Rylance join forces to tell Flitcroft’s story with sympathetic humor, although after awhile, the singlemindedness of the protagonist wears somewhat thin. But with Rylance and Sally Hawkins (as his loving wife Jean) in top form, this is diverting and even at times memorable.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Last Passenger

(Cohen Media)

Omid Nooshin’s rote 2013 thriller about how the few remaining passengers must try and stop a runaway train lasts 96 minutes, which helps this unimaginative run-through of a clichéd drama pass by harmlessly.

There’s little chemistry between Dougray Scott and Kara Tointon as a single dad and married woman thrown together by circumstance, and the would-be explosive ending simply peters out. There’s a nice hi-def transfer; extras are short featurettes and interviews.

Rolling Stones—Licked Live in NYC

(Mercury)

The Rolling Stones’ 2003 tour touched down at Madison Square Garden for an inspired performance of two-plus hours of greatest hits and classic album tracks. Mick, Keith and the boys hit their stride mid-show with volatile and bracing versions of “Monkey Man,” “Let It Bleed” and “Angie,” played with energy and even aggression.

Their backing vocalist, the great Lisa Fischer, moves front and center for a lacerating “Gimme Shelter” and even Sheryl Crow shows up to duet with Mick on “Honky Tonk Women.” The hi-def video and audio are excellent; the entire concert audio is on two additional CDs, and Blu extras are performances from Amsterdam, including the infamous “Star Fucker,” and the hour-long documentary about the tour, Tip of the Tongue.

DVD Releases of the Week

Billions—Complete 6th Season

(CBS/Paramount)

Once Axe flew off into the sunset at the end of season 5, district attorney Chuck Rhoades needed a new adversary: Michael Prince takes over Axe Capital and is as shady as Axe was. The problem dramatically is it doesn’t feel personal any more: the strange triangle among Chuck, ex-wife Wendy and Axe (Wendy’s boss) made for an absorbing tragicomedy that the other subplots revolved around.

Now the show ls generic and ordinary, despite the best efforts of Paul Giamatti, Maggie Siff, Asia Kate Dillon, David Constabile and Condola Rashad. But Corey Stoll brings little shading to Prince, unlike what Damien Lewis did to Axe. Extras are three short featurettes.

Curb Your Enthusiasm—Complete 11th Season

(Warner Bros/HBO)

Now into season 11, Larry David and his irascible alter ego keeps getting into as much trouble as he possibly can—nearly always self-inflicted, of course, but he’s self-aware enough not to care.

As always (for me), a little of David’s observational comedy goes a long way, so many others’ comic mileage will obviously vary; still, there are several priceless moments throughout, as when, in the first episode, Larry ruins Albert Brooks’ “living funeral” when he discovers that Brooks has been a COVID hoarder of hand sanitizer and toilet paper. The two-disc set includes all 10 episodes but no extras.

Putin’s Witnesses

(Icarus Films)

Is a filmmaker complicit when someone like Vladimir Putin gains power? That’s the question director Vitaly Mansky asks himself years after putting together footage for Russian state television that introduced Putin to the electorate two decades ago, knowing what that footage helped him become a dictator.

Though made in 2018, nothing Mansky shows and discusses has been negated by the past four years, and it remains a difficult but rewarding watch. Lone extra is How Putin Came to Power, a film by director Tania Rakhmanova about how the unknown may or St. Petersburg became president in eight short years.

CD Release of the Week

Maurice Ravel—Piano Concertos/Mélodies

(Harmonia Mundi)

Performing on an 1892 piano on Maurice Ravel’s two great concertos and song cycles, Cédric Tiberghien demonstrates his mastery of Ravel’s singular musical world in this ambitious recording. Baritone Stéphane Degout is in impressive form in several sets of songs for voice and piano, including the lively Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, Ravel’s final composition before his death in 1937.

Conductor Farncoix-Xavier Roth and the period-instrument ensemble Les Siecles, providing brilliant accompaniment for Tiberghien on the Concerto in G Major and Concerto for the Left Hand, exploring the varied colors of Ravel’s palette.

Reviews

Music Review: "Seth Rudetsky’s Broadway" with Vanessa Williams

June '22 Digital Week IV

"Don Quixote" & "Of Love and Rage": Kings & Windmills Take to the Stage

June '22 Digital Week III

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