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Theater Review—Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” with Dianne Wiest
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 23 May 2017 01:41
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Happy Days
Written by Samuel Beckett; directed by James Bundy
Performances through May 28, 2017
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| Dianne Wiest in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days (photo: Gerry Goodstein) |
It’s her voice that does it. Despite the deep, throaty intonations of her signature line, “Don’t speak!”, hilariously repeated throughout Woody Allen’s 1994 classic Bullets Over Broadway, Dianne Wiest is known for her fragile, even squeaky voice that flutters and fibrillates. But as Winnie—the defiantly unflappable heroine of Samuel Beckett’s shattering comedy about mortality, Happy Days—Wiest gathers reservoirs of strength almost entirely through that unique instrument: that’s because Winnie, initially buried up to her waist in a mound of sand, finds herself trapped up to her neck at the end.
With easy mastery, Wiest displays Winnie’s unbridled brightness throughout her two-hour near-monologue—occasionally interrupted by appearances by Winnie’s husband Willie—punctuating her dialogue with the hopeful exclamation “happy days.” Wiest’s Winnie is sympathetic without being pathetic, and optimistic without being naïve, her precise and subtle gestures punctuating the hilarious (and often devastating) prattle that Beckett wrote to demonstrate her last, desperate attempt to stave off inevitable extinction.
James Bundy perceptively directs on Izmir Ickbal’s impressive set of an arid landscape, adhering closer to Beckett’s stringent stage directions than did Deborah Warner’s 2008 staging at BAM with Fiona Shaw. Jarlath Conroy’s amusing Willie complements Wiest, who finds the poignancy and sadness in Winnie’s final song, leaving a collective lump in the throat of the entire audience.
Happy Days
Theatre for a New Audience, 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY
tfana.org
Windmills & Wonder at the Metropolitan Opera
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 19 May 2017 10:00
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Gillian Murphy in Don Quixote. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor
The new season of the estimable American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center opened splendidly on the evening of Monday, May 15th, with a delightful performance of the popular and winning Marius Petipa & Alexander Gorsky. Don Quixote, set to a charming score by Ludwig Minkus, and seen here in the serviceable staging by Kevin McKenzie and Susan Jones. In addition to the classic (and classical) story-ballets that comprise the backbone of the company's glittering repertory, the new season promises several novel and less conventional gems including the New York premiere of Whipped Cream by Alexei Ratmansky—the most dazzling of contemporary choreographers—a setting of an underappreciated Richard Strauss score from the 1920s, along with a revival of the his fabulous, recent The Golden Cockerel, and a celebration of works with music by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
In recent years, the most memorable pairing in Don Quixote has been Ivan Vasiliev and Natalia Osipova, but one of the strongest Ballet Theater principals, Gillian Murphy, proved to be an incandescent, if worldlier, Kitri. Her partner, Cody Stearns, has seemed more and more effective in the past few seasons, and was here seen at his near best as Basilio.
In the secondary cast, Craig Salstein, so hilarious as one of the wicked stepsisters in the glorious Frederick Ashton Cinderella, was an equally deft comedian as Gamache. The radiant Hee Seo astonished as Mercedes (and as the Queen of the Dryads) and was beautifully complemented by her partner, the commanding James Whiteside as Espada. Also superb were Devon Teuscher and Cassandra Trenary as the Flower Girls and Luciana Stone and Gabe Stone Shayer as the Gypsy Couple. The luminous Sarah Lane was an exquisite Amour while the terrific corps de ballet was consistently wonderful.
May '17 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 17 May 2017 20:03
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Accidental Tourist
(Warner Archive)
One of Anne Tyler’s most satisfying novels—about an emotionally distant travel writer reeling from his young son’s death and grieving wife’s leaving him who finds redemption and love—became director Lawrence Kasdan’s best film in 1988. This melancholy romantic comedy with few false Hollywood moments is also a showcase for extraordinary performances by William Hurt (husband), Kathleen Turner (wife) and especially Oscar-winning Geena Davis as the new woman. The movie’s subdued colors look impressive on Blu; extras are Kasdan’s intro, deleted scenes, vintage making-of featurette and Davis’s commentary.
Africa’s Great Civilizations
(PBS)
For his latest entertaining history lesson, Henry Louis Gates travels to the great continent to explore nearly a quarter of a millennium’s worth of civilizations that thrived, traded and battled with and often defeated their adversaries from Europe and Asia. Throughout these six hour-long episodes, Gates speaks engagingly with experts who provide edifying discussion and also goes to the actual locations—from Zimbabwe and Ethiopia to Zanzibar and Timbuktu—which look ravishing in their uniqueness and importance on Blu-ray.
Good Morning
(Criterion)
A humanist filmmaker blessed with uncommon grace and rigor in equal measure, Yasujiro Ozu was the rare artist who could elevate the quotidian into the sublime, as in this gentle but hilarious 1959 comedy about two young boys who refuse to speak until their parents get them a television set. Ozu’s films contain enough wit and insight, laughter and tears to be worth any discerning viewer’s time; that Criterion has included Ozu’s amusing silent comedy,1932’s I Was Born, But… (Good Morning’s forerunner), with Donald Sosin’s 2008 musical score, is a delightful bonus. There’s a first-rate new hi-def transfer; other extras are a fragment of Ozu’s 1929 silent A Straightforward Boy, interview with David Bordwell and video essay by David Cairns.
The Loved One
(Warner Archive)
Tony Richardson’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s sly novel might have been racy and daring in 1965, but half a century has dulled its edge and muted its satiric depiction of Southern California as a land of shallow slickness compared to the more cultured Old World. The movie is best seen as a time capsule that features cameos by stars of the day from Jonathan Winters and John Gielgud to Liberace and Milton Berle. Haskell Wexler’s exquisite B&W widescreen compositions look even more luminous in hi-def; the only extra is a featurette.
Seven Days in May
(Warner Archive)
In John Frankenheimer’s tense 1964 Cold War thriller about a U.S. president whose disarmament overtures towards Russia triggers an attempted military coup by a cabal of right-wing generals, an array of stars makes this a deliciously paranoid drama in the manner of Frankenheimer’s own The Manchurian Candidate. Frederic March (president), Burt Lancaster (bad guy), Kirk Douglas (good guy), and Ava Gardner (love interest) are all in top form; the hi-def transfer brings the striking B&W visuals to the fore, and there’s a Frankenheimer commentary.
DVDs of the Week
Between Us
(IFC)
Writer-director Rafael Palacio Illingworth’s dreary and pretentious drama of a longtime, just-married couple whose wedding-day argument turns into a chance for both to cheat comes to life only when that amazing and underrated actress Olivia Thirlby gets a chance to shine. Too bad Thirlby is stuck in the contradictory part of an intelligent, confident woman who ends up screwing a performance artist she just met to get a measure of revenge against her husband, who ends up not what she does. The banal ending—which fails to be happy and deep simultaneously—perfectly summarizes the director’s pretentiousness, at the expense of his actors.
The Great War
(PBS)
PBS’s excellent American Experience series tackles the complexities of the First World War in a three-part, six-hour documentary which illustrates how it was the first modern war, one which brought America global prestige and power but also increasing political difficulties back home. The must-see program brings together precisely chosen newsreel footage, images, speeches, songs, etc. (along with Oliver Platt’s narration) to give a robust flavor of an era of true devastation and destruction—and a slight hopefulness that there would be no Second World War in the future.
New Musical Revivals—“The Golden Apple” at Encores!; Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” at Classic Stage Company
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 13 May 2017 20:17
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Golden Apple
Music by Jerome Moross; written by John Latouche; directed by Michael Berresse
Performances May 10-14, 2017
Pacific Overtures
Book by John Weidman; music & lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Directed and designed by John Doyle
Performances through June 18, 2017
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| Ryan Silverman and Mikaela Bennett in The Golden Apple (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The Golden Apple is the kind of musical Encores! was made for: an almost forgotten show that ran off-Broadway in 1954, then transferred to Broadway—the first musical ever to do so—only to close after a few months. Now, for all of us who’ve never seen or heard it in the ensuing 60-plus years, it’s back for a few performances.
Most noteworthy is Jerome Moross’s beguiling, sung-through score, closer in spirit to operetta (and opera) than your garden-variety Broadway musical. The infectious and witty songs are in a variety of styles within the Moross’s distinctly Americana vernacular; John Latouche’s accompanying lyrics run the gamut from solid to stolid, with clever and welcome tongue-in-cheek rhymes. But Latouche takes the heroic Greek myths of The Odyssey and The Iliad and, by transplanting them to the year 1898 during the Spanish-American War in the fictional town of Angel’s Roost in Washington State, makes them utterly ridiculous.
Luckily, the story’s silliness doesn’t derail the show: Michael Berresse’s adroit staging—the usual Encores! mix of concert and full production—features Allen Moyer’s droll sets, William Ivey Long’s sassy costumes, and Joshua Bergasse’s lively choreography for the many dance sequences. Moross’s songs are given full-voiced loveliness by newcomer Mikaela Bennett, as Penelope; she belies her inexperience—this is the Juilliard student’s first professional production—with a powerful but not show-offy voice and a scary heaping of stage confidence.
Lindsay Mendez, an amusing Helen, steals scenes right and left while giving a beautiful rendition of the show’s solo standout, “Lazy Afternoon.” Ryan Silverman’s robust Ulysses joins Bennett’s Penelope for Moross’s romantic duets, “It’s the Going Home Together” and the finale “We’ve Just Begun.” The non-singing Barton Cowperthwaite dances up a storm as Paris, a hot-air balloon traveling salesman who kidnaps Helen.
Rob Berman and his Encores! orchestra give Moross’s charming music the best possible platform, but an inane plot and large cast make The Golden Apple a doubtful Broadway revival any time soon.
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| Geroge Takei (center) in Pacific Overtures (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Pacific Overtures was made for Broadway: its huge cast and expansive storyline about the opening of Japan (starting with the 1853 landing of American Commodore Matthew Perry) need a big stage to house Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s problematic but thought-provoking show exploring the fallout of the West’s introducing the East to “progress.”
Unfortunately, John Doyle—who tinkers with everything he touches, usually Sondheim (Sweeney Todd, Company, Passion) and opera (his disastrous Peter Grimes at the Met)—has downsized Pacific Overtures in its staging and its music, which reduces it to a highlights performance with tantalizing bits of pointed commentary strewn throughout its intermissionless 85 minutes.
Doyle’s spare but evocative visuals—the stage splits through the audience like an unfurling scroll—are complemented by his suggestive blocking, as the ten performers mimic stylized Japanese movements. But why Doyle has cut several songs—including those that make a strong case for the show’s musical supremacy among Sondheim aficionados—and instead kept a more obvious satirical rant like “Please Hello,” in which stereotypically arrogant Western representatives convince the Japanese to bow to their cultural superiority, is puzzling.
In a generally fine cast, George Takei’s stately presence as The Reciter stands out. Too bad Doyle’s unfocused production reduces a provocative piece of theater—with a punning title (taken directly from Commodore Perry) that speaks volumes about its intentions—to a stale deconstruction mistaking poverty for intimacy. One awaits Doyle’s next move with increased trepidation.
The Golden Apple
New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, New York, NY
nycitycenter.org
Pacific Overtures
Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, New York, NY
classicstage.org
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