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Broadway Play Review— Selina Fillinger’s “POTUS”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 09 May 2022 20:35; Written by Kevin Filipski

Vanessa Williams and Julie White in Selina Fillinger's POTUS (photo: Paul Kolnik)

POTUS

Written by Selina Fillinger; directed by Susan Stroman

Opened on April 27, 2022

Schubert Theatre, 225 West 44th Street, New York, NY

potusbroadway.com

The subtitle of Selina Fillinger’s unbridled farce, POTUS, which just premiered on Broadway, is Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, which means that Fillinger is aware of one of the greatest political and social satires, Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove—Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

It’s no surprise that POTUS is nowhere near Strangelove’s level: it’s spotty and messy, even if it has moments where it’s freshly, even nastily, funny about the fractured state of our politics. Fillinger is clever enough to know that, in a comedy about a bumbling, adulterous president, he should remain offstage and the women in his personal and professional life are front and center.

Fillinger’s play comprises seven women: First Lady Margaret, the president’s sister Bernadette, chief of staff Harriet, press secretary Joan, secretary Stephanie, and pregnant mistress Dusty, with journalist Chris rounding out the cast. There are jokes aplenty about what even the most accomplished women must deal with in the workplace, the fact that capable women are still under the thumb of unseen men.

But if Dr. Strangelove dared to riff on nuclear annihilation in the middle of a nervous cold war in the mid ‘60s, unafraid to shock viewers while making them laugh, POTUS is more tentative in its approach.

For example, Harriet brings up abortion for Dusty’s baby, but Fillinger seems content to simply bring it up and quickly move on to other matters. There’s also a lot of literal door-slamming, just as in other farces as Noises Off, Lend Me a Tenor and Boeing-Boeing, with the many White House rooms where the action takes place shrewdly finessed by the resourceful designer Beowulf Barritt’s roundtable set, which seems to be moving constantly, especially in the even more breakneck second act.

Happily, the entire production is in the expert hands of veteran director Susan Stroman, who makes sure that it all doesn’t collapse under the weight of sheer dizziness and instead zip along frothily for 100 minutes. In the Tony-winning musicals The Producers and Contact—as well as in Young Frankenstein and Bullets Over Broadway—Stroman impressively shapes large casts into cohesive, consummate ensembles, which she does in POTUS as well.

There’s Vanessa Williams as Margaret, elegantly funny even while wearing clunky crocsto make her seem more approachable. There’s Suzy Nakamura, amusingly exasperated as the always harried Joan. There’s Julianne Hough, whose dancing background provides the energetic physical humor of the not really bubbleheaded Dusty.

Lilli Cooper’s levelheaded Chris gets the chance to set act two’s lunacy in motion by throwing a marble bust of suffragist Alice Paul. Lea Delaria and Rachel Dratch—Bernadette and Stephanie, respectively—are allowed to play to their obvious strengths, with Delaria’s butch, drug-dealing felon as exuberant a character as Dratch’s woozily inept assistant.

Best of all, however, is Julie White as Harriet, who must come up with a solution to every new POTUS disaster. White, one of our most naturally gifted stage comedians, always knows when to underplay and when to play to the last row of the balcony, and that expertise helps put over even Fillinger’s crudest dialogue, like the play’s very first utterance, the dreaded “c” word, reiterated in minutely modified ways.

And when she screams “Get off my dick!?!” in response to Joan blurting it out to Chris (anonymously, of course), White gloriously makes POTUS into more than merely SNL-level sketch comedy.

May '22 Digital Week I

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 04 May 2022 10:46; Written by Kevin Filipski

Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week

Black Box

(Distrib Films US)

This exciting French thriller follows a genius black-box investigator who begins probing the reasons behind a puzzling plane crash that killed 300 people, soon upsetting his boss, his girlfriend, and seemingly everybody else as his search for the truth becomes ever more singleminded and obsessive.

From the word go, director Yann Gozlan makes this relentlessly, even crazily entertaining, and his actors—Pierre Niney as the investigator, Lou de Laage as his girlfriend, the great Andre Dussolier as his boss, and Olivier Rabourdin as his mentor—give the kind of performances that ground the movie in the reality it needs to keep viewers on the edge of their seats for two hours.

Dear Mr. Brody

(Greenwich Entertainment)

In 1970, a 21-year-old margarine heir, Michael Brody Jr., impulsively married a drug dealer named Renee and even more impulsively publicized that he would give away the bulk of his money—tens of millions of dollars, according to sources—to anyone who needed it, whatever the reason.

Director Keith Maitland’s documentary digs into this improbable but true story, as each revelation reveals the true reality of Brody’s personal life and his money; through interviews with Renee and several others connected to him or his story, we sadly discover his final answer to the heartfelt letters so many wrote to him in desperation (some of whom appear in the film).

Hello, Bookstore

(Greenwich Entertainment)

At the Bookstore (its actual name) in the heart of the Berkshires in Lenox, Massachusetts, proprietor Matt Tannenbaum—who answers the store’s phone with the film’s title—holds forth as not only the last of a dying breed of physical, independent bookstores but someone put into a nearly impossible position by the pandemic, which basically blocked his ability to make a profit.

But as A.B. Zax’s revealing documentary shows, Tannenbaum keeps going, trying to survive the most difficult time in his store’s existence—at one point it’s said that the store is only making as much in a week as it used to take in daily before the lockdown—while keeping the faith about the importance of real, physical, actual books.

Blu-ray Release of the Week

V/H/S 94

(RLJE)

The third in the V/H/S series, this latest horror contraption has the same minimal strengths and maximal weaknesses of the entire found-footage genre, namely that the ground has been trod so many times in so many ways that it’s tough coming up with something original and scary.

The consortium of creators tries, however, and a couple of the entries—Simon Barrett’s The Empty Wake and Ryan Prows’ Terror—are downright disturbing, which partly compensates for the fact that the rest is rather routine. It all looks believably pre-digital on Blu-ray; extras include interviews with the filmmakers, behind the scenes featurettes, deleted and extended scenes and an audio commentary.

DVD Release of the Week

The Good Fight—Complete 5th Season

(CBS/Paramount)

This sturdy courtroom series tackled the pandemic, the January 6 attack on the Capitol and the ascendance of Slack, among other topical subjects, in its latest season, as its 10 episodes were packed not only with compelling drama in and out of the courtrooms but also—as usual—superb acting.

There’s always the engaged if sometimes enraged Christine Baranski in the lead, along with superlative support from Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, Stephen Lang, Audra McDonald and Cush Jumbo. Extras are deleted scenes and a gag reel.

Concert Review—Shawn Colvin at City Winery, NYC

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 02 May 2022 02:11; Written by Kevin Filipski

Shawn Colvin

April 25-26, 2022

City Winery, New York City

citywinery.com

Shawn Colvin at City Winery

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin’s 2020 tour was going to be a celebration of the 30th anniversary of her splendid debut record, Steady On. (Never mind it was actually released in late 1989.) But COVID put paid to that for two years: so, tongue in cheekly, Colvin’s new tour celebrates the album’s 32nd anniversary, and included her first appearance at the new, improved home of one of New York City’s best music spaces, City Winery.

As she has done in her previous City Winery visits—the last time I saw her there was in 2012 after the release of her All Fall Down album—Colvin sated the rapt audience for 100 minutes with her voice, acoustic guitar, humorous stories and, most importantly, a clutch of superb songs.

After opening with her gentle cover of “Words” by the BeeGees, Colvin performed all 10 songs from Steady On, accompanied only by her (highly underrated) acoustic guitar playing. Colvin’s deceptively simple songs incisively dissect (mostly broken) relationships with straightforward but cutting lyrics.

Some of her best songs populate Steady On, like “Diamond in the Rough” and “Shotgun Down the Avalanche.” These melancholy and haunting tunes caused Colvin—whose engagingly chatty banter between songs is an essential component of her live shows—to wryly note that the upbeat sound of something like “Stranded” might fool people into thinking she’s a “happy” performer.

Her stories behind the songs make her concerts the most memorable never-aired episodes of VH1’s Behind the Music. When it came to the Steady On—the affecting ballad “The Dead of the Night”—she explained its long gestation, starting several years earlier when she lived in the Bay area and finishing after she moved to New York City in the mid ’80s.

Despite her succinct, subtle songwriting, Colvin is also a superb cover artist: it’s not for nothing that her third album, 1994’s aptly titled Cover Girl, features her personal takes on tunes by other artists including Bob Dylan and Talking Heads, both of which were highlights of her City Winery show. She sang wonderfully on Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”—along with Tom Waits’ “Ol’ 55,” which was not on Cover Girl—and her final encore was her emotionally plaintive version of the Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody).”

When she sang David Byrne's lyrics, “Home is where I want to be/But I guess I'm already there,” the warmth of the sentiment, coming out of the pandemic, was felt by the entire audience.

Classics & Contemporary Music With the New York Philharmonic

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 29 April 2022 14:11; Written by Jack Angstreich

Jaap van Zweden conducting the New York Philharmonic. Photo by Chris Lee

At Carnegie Hall, on the evening of Wednesday, April 27th, I was fortunate to attend a wonderful concert presented by the accomplished musicians of the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Jaap van Zweden.

The program opened gloriously with a confident reading of Claude Debussy’s magnificent tone-poem, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The celebrated soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, then took the stage for an engaging performance of contemporary composer Nico Muhly’s interesting In Certain Circles: Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, here receiving its US premiere. The first movement, titled L’Enharmonique, is moody and ends abruptly. Muhly’s program note states:

In Certain Circles is in three movements. The first contains a little fragment of a piece by Rameau, L’Enharmonique. The movement is about uncovering it through various disguises and lifting those disguises. From time to time, the tune from the Rameau appears and quickly vanishes; while it’s not always meant to be fully audible, there should be a sense of “hauntology” here, in which the simple intervals of the Rameau permeate the texture in oblique and sometimes obscure, ghostly ways. A very simple gesture permeates all three movements: a rising second, forcefully declared by the brass in the very first bar; the brass often insists on these intervals even when they antagonize the pianos.

About the second movement, Sarabande & Gigue, he writes: “The second movement is a pair of dance-suite movements,” but it is nonetheless strangely impressionistic with passages strongly influenced by minimalism. He adds:

I tried to call on my knowledge of French Baroque music to make something I’ve never done before—which is to say, music that more or less obeys the rhythmic rules of a received form. Here, the pianos go in and out of rhythmic unison with one another—a little mechanical, a little expressive. While the sarabande is quite supple, the gigue is explicitly mechanical and a bit unstable. The normal sets of six and 12 beats are often interrupted with unwelcome little hiccoughs of four or five beats, creating a sense of anxiety despite the explicitly diatonic harmonies.

The third movement, Details Emerged, could perhaps be described as more dramatic and more impassioned. Muhly comments:

The third movement begins with the pianos in completely different rhythmic worlds from one another. “Disconnection” is the guiding musical principle here; the music shifts quickly from very dark to very bright, from jagged rhythms to simple ones, and from delicate to quite violent. Every playful moment is offset by something severe and mechanical. After a relatively joyful, pulse-based episode, we perceive a final specter of L’Enharmonique, and the movement ends abruptly.

The second half of the event was also impressive, beginning with an effective account of Richard Wagner’s sublime Prelude and Liebestod from his opera Tristan und Isolde. The evening concluded memorably with a convincing realization of Debussy’s subsequent programmatic masterwork, La Mer. The opening movement, From Dawn till Noon on the Sea, was lively, although with moments of stillness, and finished grandly. The ensuing movement, The Play of the Waves, was more ebullient and more volatile. The turbulent closing movement, Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, was often suspenseful, punctuated by brief, mysterious episodes, with passages of intense excitement as well as majesty. The artists were rewarded with appreciative applause.

Reviews

Broadway Play Review— Selina Fillinger’s “POTUS”

May '22 Digital Week I

Concert Review—Shawn Colvin at City Winery, NYC

Classics & Contemporary Music With the New York Philharmonic

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