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Off-Broadway Review—“Terms of Endearment” with Molly Ringwald

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2016 03:25; Written by Kevin Filipski

Terms of Endearment

Adapted by Dan Gordon; directed by Michael Parva

Performances through December 11, 2016

Molly Ringwald and Hannah Dunne in Terms of Endearment (photo: Carol Rosegg)

I’ve never read Larry McMurtry’s novel Terms of Endearment, so I don’t which parts playwright Dan Gordon used for his stage adaptation. But since I know James L. Brooks’ film of the book—which swept the 1983 Oscars—pretty well, it’s striking how many of the best lines in this alternately sardonic and sentimental comedy-cum-tragedy about the volatile relationship between a headstrong widow and her only daughter are taken directly from the screen version.

Of course, in the movie, writer-director Brooks had such acting luminaries as Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson, Debra Winger and Jeff Daniels—all at their considerable best—at his disposal. Their long shadows unfortunately hang over the stage version of Terms, efficiently directed by Michael Parva and tidily if a bit too obviously adapted by Gordon.

This is not to blame the very capable actors: Molly Ringwald is, like MacLaine, a simultaneously appealing and exasperating matriarch Aurora Greenaway; Hannah Dunne gives feisty daughter Emma a tangy Texas twang a la Winger, but smartly never apes her outright; Jeb Brown treads lightly around the scene-stealing Nicholson performance as the aging but still womanizing astronaut Garrett Breedlove; and Denver Milord makes a likable Flap, Emma’s put-upon husband, who was so memorably played by Jeff Daniels.

But even with such solid acting, whenever the all-time classic dialogue tumbles out of the characters’ mouths—Aurora (“Why should I be happy about being a grandmother??!!”), Garrett (“If you wanted to get me on my back, all you had to do was ask”); and Emma (“I don't give a shit, mother, I'm sick”)—anyone with passing familiarity with the movie will miss the legendary spins put on it by MacLaine, Nicholson, Winger, et al. It earns the tears it gets at the end, but this Terms of Endearment sits uneasily between the screen and the stage.

Terms of Endearment

59e59 Theatres, 59 East 59^th Street, New York, NY

59e59.org

Off-Broadway Review—Anna Deavere Smith’s “Notes from the Field”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 21 November 2016 04:30; Written by Kevin Filipski

Notes from the Field

Written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith; directed by Leonard Foglia

Performances through December 11, 2016

Anna Deavere Smith in Notes from the Field (photo: Joan Marcus)

We need Anna Deavere Smith more than ever. Her form of documentary theater—where she “plays” real-life individuals discussing whatever subject she has to hand, starting with Fires in the Mirror, about the Crown heights riots, and continuing with Twilight Los Angeles 1992, House Arrest and Let Me Down Easy—returns with Notes from the Field, another provocative and wide-ranging exploration of a peculiarly American problem: the uneasy relationship between education and the penal system.

The starting point for Smith is the police killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. But Smith is after something more substantial than simple racial politics: she charts a more systematic failure in how people who need help are treated, often being thrown them in prison instead. The words of the NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill—who bookends the show with remarkably clear-headed pronouncements on race, education and prison—puts it into perspective by saying “one of the huge investments that we made was in the criminal justice system. And that investment was made at the expense of other investments.” Namely, she elaborates, education and mental illness. And so it begins…

Smith introduces school officials like Philadelphia principal Linda Cliatt-Wayman and teacher Stephanie Williams, who continue fighting the good fight even while having little in the way of ammo to fight with, as Williams willingly admits: “It's like me running a jail without a gun…I can’t throw you in a closet, I can't do any of that. It's just like, I gotta keep you in order just by being me!”

There’s Pastor Jamal-Harrison Bryant, speaking to an emotionally charged audience at Gray’s memorial service, where he gives his own take on why Gray ended up dead in the back of a police van: “in a subtlety of revolutionary stance, (Gray) did something that black man were trained to—taught—know not to do. He looked police in the eye. I want to tell this grieving mother, you are not burying a boy, you are burying a grown man. Who knew that one of the principles of being a man is looking somebody in the eye.”

And, most poignant of all, there’s John Lewis, Congressman and former 1960s civil rights protestor, who was seriously injured marching with Martin Luther King. Lewis’s story about meeting ex-Klan members who apologize to his face for their viciously racist actions against him and them crying genuine tears over it is heartrending and hopeful.

As always, Smith’s chameleon-like ability—indeed, genius—to bring out the nuances in 19 very different people underlines the fact that this is a moral dilemma, not a partisan one, which is something we desperately need during this uncertain time in our country. Leonard Foglia’s astute direction shifts the visuals often enough to keep the performance from stagnating—particularly the use of a video camera to bring subjects into closer focus—and the appearance of Marcus Shelby occasionally playing an upright bass, which at times enters into a duet of sorts with Smith that makes the subject matter even more urgent.

Notes from the Field

Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43^rd Street, New York, NY

2st.com

Off-Broadway Review—Classic Musical “Finian’s Rainbow” Returns

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Sunday, 20 November 2016 03:51; Written by Kevin Filipski

Finian’s Rainbow

Music by Burton Lane; book by E.Y. Harburg & Fred Saidy; lyrics by E.Y. Harburg

Adapted & directed by Charlotte Moore

Performances through December 31, 2016

Ryan Silverman and Melisa Errico in Finian's Rainbow (photo: Carol Rosegg)

The Irish Rep’s revival of the 1947 musical, Finian’s Rainbow, is stripped-down musically (a four-piece ensemble led by piano and harp), but such a small-forces staging allows this charming show—with a smart, sassy book by E.Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy, clever lyrics by Harburg and sweetly beguiling music by Burton Lane—to inhabit such a tiny space so engagingly.

The story, a messy mix of the magical and mundane, has progressive racial attitudes for its day—and for our day too, it now appears. Irish immigrant Finian (the delightful Ken Jennings) and his marriageable daughter Sharon (the delightfully plucky Melissa Errico) arrive in America with a crock o’gold Finian stole from a leprechaun, which he hopes helps them become rich in their new country.

The pair settle in Rainbow Valley, Missitucky, where Sharon falls in love with handsome local yokel Woody (a nice turn by Ryan Silverman), leprechaun Og (a too campy Mark Evans) slowly turns human while searching for the lost gold, and racist Senator Rawkins (an amusingly blustery Dewey Caddell) gets his comeuppance when he’s transformed into a black man.

Combining standard ethnic jokes with standard romantic comedy, the show bubbles along nicely, spurred on by wonderful Lane-Harburg songs like “Old Devil Moon” and “Look to the Rainbow,” and spirited dance numbers choreographed by Barry McNabb, particularly “Dance of the Golden Crock,” performed with gusto by young dancer Lyrica Woodruff.

The whole shebang is wrapped up with a reprise of one of the score’s most soaring melodies, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” Director Charlotte Moore obviously loves Finian, and it shows: even in her scaled-down version, it’s an unalloyed pleasure.

Finian’s Rainbow

Irish Rep, 132 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY

irishrep.org

Wagner, Ravel, Brahms, and More, Lift Spirits in NYC

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 17 November 2016 05:52; Written by Jack Angstreich

Sir Simon Rattle

Conductor extraordinaire Sir Simon Rattle opened this season at the Metropolitan Opera with a new production of Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde starring the phenomenal soprano Nina Stemme; he also led the marvelous Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in a thrilling performance of Gustav Mahler's dazzling Symphony No. 6 — this was his only appearance with an American orchestra this season. New York concertgoers must be thankful that Rattle returned to Carnegie Hall on the evenings of Wednesday and Thursday, November 10th and 11th for two excellent concerts leading the sterling Berlin Philharmonic.

The first program opened with the late Pierre Boulez's curious Éclat for chamber ensemble. The highlight of the evening, however, surely was a commanding account of Mahler's rarely performed, kaleidoscopic Symphony No. 7, which the composer said was his "best work". Rattle is a great champion of this underappreciated opus and conducted it from memory.

The following night's concert featured three remarkable touchstones of the Second Viennese School played without pause, which the conductor suggested could be conceived collectively as a symphony that Mahler might have gone on to write: Arnold Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Anton Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra, and Alban Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra. These challenging works are magnificent examples of coloristic scoring and it would be difficult to imagine a more satisfying performance of these pieces than this one.

The second half of the evening was devoted to the lyrical Symphony No. 2 of Johannes Brahms. If this was not the most impressive reading of this popular work that I have heard in the concert hall, it was nonetheless gratifying to hear this estimable conductor's interpretation presented with so fine an ensemble.

The Philadelphia Orchestra returned to Carnegie Hall nearly a week later on the evening of Tuesday, the 15th, this time led by its adorable and exhilarating music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, for a fabulous concert of early modernist works, opening with a scintillating account of Maurice Ravel's exquisite Le tombeau de Couperin.The young virtuoso, Benjamin Beilman then took the stage for a gripping performance of Sergei Prokofiev remarkable Violin Concerto No. 1, one of the few of his works that the composer's elder friend and rival, Igor Stravinsky, admired. An enthusiastic ovation elicited a riveting encore, the wonderful Finale from Eugène Ysaÿe's Sonata for Solo Violin in E Minor, Op. 27, No. 4.

The second half of the program was devoted to a mesmerizing realization of Ravel's sumptuous complete score for the ballet, Daphnis et Chloé—which Stravinsky praised as "one of the most beautiful products in all of French music"—featuring the superb Westminster Symphonic Choir led by Joe Miller. A few years ago Nézet-Séguin had conducted this opus to brilliant effect with the Juilliard Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall and it was delightful to hear this work again so soon after seeing American Ballet Theater mount Benjamin Millepied's staging of the ballet at the David Koch Theater at Lincoln Center this season, as well as attending the same piece played by the New York Philharmonic a few days previously, led by Vladimir Jurowski, at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.

Reviews

Off-Broadway Review—“Terms of Endearment” with Molly Ringwald

Off-Broadway Review—Anna Deavere Smith’s “Notes from the Field”

Off-Broadway Review—Classic Musical “Finian’s Rainbow” Returns

Wagner, Ravel, Brahms, and More, Lift Spirits in NYC

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