A couple of Buffalo legends, personal-injury attorneys Ross Cellino and Steve Barnes became famous—then infamous—for their billboards and earworm jingle that was heard on radio and TV ads throughout Western New York (and which seemed to follow me as they opened offices in New York City and Long Island). The melody for “888-8888” will unfortunately remain embedded in anyone’s head who’s ever heard it, including those audiences who see Cellino v. Barnes, a purposefully silly, occasionally funny parody of how the men began, then ended, their law norm-shattering partnership in Buffalo. 

 

Anyone wanting real insights into the ethics and gamesmanship of all ambulance chasing attorneys—Cellino and Barnes were preceded by the legendary William Mattar, whose last name had the good fortune to rhyme with “hurt in a car,” as Cellino jealously points out—will need to look elsewhere, for Cellino v. Barnes is content to throw anything and everything at the wall and see what sticks. It has the feel of an SNL skit gone rogue: Starting with the notion that Barnes was an insufferable egghead and Cellino was a complete idiot, the play, cleverly staged by Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse, ricochets from one extreme to another, shooting off in all directions simultaneously with variable comic results.

 

Writers Mike B. Breen (who’s from Buffalo) and David Rafailedes originally wrote Cellino v. Barnes in 2018 as a vehicle for themselves to perform, so it’s not surprising that the play contains a lot of rat-a-tat dialogue and a surfeit of knockabout physical comedy. The actors in this staging—Eric William Morris (Cellino) and Noah Weisberg (Barnes)—certainly deserve praise for their breathless performances, although Weisberg’s Barnes bald cap is quite distracting…which may be the point. 

 

For 80 minutes, Morris and Weisberg race around the cramped stage reenacting the men’s quick rise to becoming a multi-million-dollar firm, first in Western New York then downstate. It begins as a bromance and ends with the pair squaring off in a prize fight; before the finale, they joke that the bitter, acrimonious battle leading to their split and forming separate firms—the Barnes Firm and Cellino Law—was simply a PR stunt. 

 

Of course, Barnes’ 2020 death with his niece in a small plane crash is not mentioned at all, since it’s a sad and bizarre epilogue to a compellingly strange story. It also underlines how reality usually writes a much more complicated ending than two playwrights can, however amusing they make their quick run-through.

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Spanish director Victor Erice has only made four films in a career stretching back a half-century—his latest (and most likely last) finds the 84-year-old auteur spinning a yarn about an actor gone missing while making a movie decades earlier and the attempts by his colleagues, daughter and interested journalists to track him down.

 

 

It’s a not very subtle exploration of the power of cinematic images and of the past in our lives, although there’s some clever use of a film-within-a-film and the always haunting eyes of Ana Torrent, who plays the missing actor’s daughter and who was unforgettable as the little girl in Erice’s debut film, the overrated The Spirit of the Beehive. By the time, its ponderous 170-minute running time is finished, the film has played out as a sort of shaggy-dog story that’s both too literal and not literal enough, climaxing with an obvious and too casual visualization of its title.

 

 

 

The Falling Star 

In their latest absurdist feature, Belgian duo Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon spin an offbeat web ensnaring a bartender, his double, his ex, and a hitman—all of whom are at the daffy mercy of their creators.

 

 

Like Aki Kaurismaki and Quentin Dupieux, Abel and Gordon create deadpan, goofily improbable worlds that can only happen in the movies; but like Kaurismaki and Dupieux, Abel and Gordon often stuff their films full of precious, fey, even enervating material that mitigates any pleasure gotten from their unalloyed gems of visual or verbal humor. And—as here—when the entire film stops dead in its tracks so the cast can perform an incongruous happy dance, you’re in dire straits. 

 

 

 

The Wasp 

How two women who were friends as kids but fell out over bullying and abuse get together to kill one’s husband is the unlikely plot of an overwrought and progressively more irritating drama written by Morgan Lloyd Malcom, based on her own play. Guillem Morales’ film is basically a two-hander set mainly in one room, but opened up a bit and with others flitting by—including a nosy young neighbor who improbably peeks into windows at just the wrong times.

 

 

Viewer interest in the women’s plight depends on tolerance for contrivance and clumsy symbolism (even the title is literalized early on). Naomi Harris and Natalie Dormer, troopers both, give intense performances but are defeated by the heavyhanded material.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) is anything but a household name in music, yet his lone opera—despite never being produced in his lifetime—has gotten much attention over the decades, and this eye-opening 2023 Berlin State Opera staging shows off this fierce 1920s’ drama as an unsettling and staggering work of musical theater art. Ersan Mondtag’s colossally realized staging comprises his own brilliant sets and costumes (the latter with Annika Lu) transforming several singers into the demons that Langgaard calls for.

 

 

The cast is uniformly superb throughout, and the orchestra and chorus play vividly under conductor Stephan Zilias. There’s excellent hi-def video and audio; too bad there are no contextualizing extras or interviews about Langgaard’s work  and this production.

 

 

 

Mozart—Le nozze di Figaro 

One of the classic comic operas, Figaro contains some of Mozart’s most sublime music and beautiful arias, all at the service of Lorenzo da Ponte’s near-perfect libretto. This 2023 Salzburg Festival production, staged adroitly by Martin Kusej, is crammed with talented singing actors who give wonderfully funny but meaty portrayals of these cunningly conceived characters—Krzysztof Baczyk’s Figaro, Sabine Devieilhe’s Susanna and Lea Desandre’s Cherubino are the best of a superb cast.

 

 

Leading the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera Chorus with aplomb are Raphael Pinchon and Jorn Hinnerk Andresen, respectively; both hi-def video and audio are first-rate.

 

 

 

Ride 

As a father desperate to treat his young daughter’s rare form of cancer, C. Thomas Howell gives a formidable portrayal that’s the heart of writer-director-star Jake Allyn’s well-intentioned if cliched character study. Allyn himself plays Howell’s rootless son—his driving while drunk caused an accident that badly injured his sister, although her hospital stay led doctors to discover her cancer—a rodeo vet hoping to earn enough to pay for her treatment.

 

 

The always underrated Annabeth Gish is on hand as Howell’s ex-wife, Allyn’s mom, and the local sheriff, who’s investigating a theft and shooting that just might involve both of them. It’s all very soap-operaish, but the excellent acting and Allyn’s flavorful directing are major assets. The film’s hi-def transfer is crisp and clean; extras are actor interviews.

 

Ah, summer in the Berkshires—beautiful weather (usually!), bucolic landscapes, great museums, concerts and theater. It’s pretty much been an annual tradition for us for three decades. This summer, we saw the wonderful Mad magazine exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge and the Clark Art Institute’s revelatory exhibition of Caribbean artist Guillaume Lethière, along with a couple concerts at Tanglewood and a Rodgers & Hammerstein revival at the Berkshire Theatre Group.

 

 

Pipe Dream, one of R&H’s more bizarre items—based on John Steinbeck’s novels Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday—is set among the populace of seaside Monterey, California, and centers around Doc, a marine biologist, and Suzy, a new gal who becomes a prostitute in the local brothel. They fall in love, but take awhile to admit it. The show hasn’t been on Broadway since its disastrous 1955 premiere; it was last in New York in a beautifully sung 2012 Encores revival with Laura Osnes, Will Chase and Leslie Uggams that nevertheless could do nothing with the dramatically diffuse romance.

 

The tunes are there, of course, but several sound like outtakes or discarded versions of other, better-known R&H tunes, like Suzy’s first number, “Everybody’s Got a Home But Me,” which is similar to “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” And a large ensemble—there are more than a dozen singing roles—dilutes any emotional or dramatic impact, since we keep bouncing around among Monterey’s many outcasts, male and female.

 

Since the Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge is a tiny jewel box, director Kat Yen and choreographer Isadora Wolfe seem hamstrung about what they can accomplish. Jimmy Stubbs’ movable sets help, although a pivotal scene between Doc and Suzy in an abandoned boiler is nearly impossible to see from all the seats. 

 

The six-piece ensemble, led by pianist and music director Jacob Kerzner, acquits itself well, although we lose the sumptuous orchestral sound Rodgers’ tunes need. Noa Luz Barenblat’s Suzy, though a bit standoffish, has a gleaming singing voice (although the incandescent Laura Osnes at Encores was pitch perfect in the role). The rest of the accomplished cast is led by Joe Joseph’s Doc and Sharone Sayregh’s madam Fauna. Too bad it might be a pipe dream to hope for a perfect Pipe Dream production.

 

 

Tanglewood has been the go-to summer destination for outdoor classical performances for decades; the Boston Symphony Orchestra has made its summer home there since 1936. Spending a day on the grounds is to immerse oneself in the history of outdoor music making, even if our first performance was indoors, in the Linde Center for Music and Learning, which opened in 2019, and where several Tanglewood Music Center Fellows—students who come from around the world every summer to perform and study—played a lovely chamber recital.

 

Music by Debussy (sonata for flute, viola and harp) and Ravel (piano trio) bookended Jessie Montgomery’s new Concerto Grosso, which the composer—who spoke before the performance—described as “a contemporary take on the baroque dynamic of solo against ripeno” in a program note. The Fellows played with enthusiasm and precision, bringing out Debussy’s elegance, Montgomery’s spontaneity and Ravel’s ravishment.

 

Our Tanglewood evening culminated with a marvelous BSO concert in the venerable Koussevitzky Music Shed. Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska led an adventurous summer program, opening with fellow Finn Jean Sibelius’ Canzonetta, in an arrangement by Igor Stravinsky for clarinets, horns, harp and double bass. Then came Stravinsky’s own Violin Concerto, a rare enough appearance on any program, which was played with exuberance by the brilliant Leila Josefowicz, who didn't need a score: she was so focused that she nearly bumped into the BSO violinists behind her—they pulled their music stand back to give her more room.

 

After intermission, Stasevska corralled her forces for a nimble reading of Sibelius’ brooding Symphony No. 5, whose rousing finale left the audience sated.