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Broadway Review—A.R. Gurney's ‘Sylvia'
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 06 November 2015 23:19
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Sylvia
Written by A.R. Gurney; directed by Daniel Sullivan
Performances through January 24, 2016
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| Annaleigh Ashford in Sylvia (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Sylvia is A.R. Gurney's most obvious (and probably only) crowd-pleaser: his kind-of shaggy-dog story, in which an affluent Upper East Side couple discovers that the stray that husband Greg brought home from Central Park is the wedge making them drift apart: Greg wants to keep her, while wife Kate does not.
The play's gimmick is that Sylvia, the adorable pooch, is played by an actress who speaks Sylvia's dialogue: sometimes to herself, other times to Greg and Kate, with whom she has actual conversations. The effect, while silly, is comically inspired and, depending on the actress playing the part, at times exhilarating.
When I saw Sylvia during its off-Broadway premiere run, Sarah Jessica Parker played her rather too cutesily: she was funny, of course, but not poignant. (I wouldn't be surprised if her replacement, Jan Hooks, found a better balance.) In this slick, brassy revival by director Daniel Sullivan, Sylvia is in the extremely capable hands of Annaleigh Ashford, an adroit physical comedienne who is also quick on her feet with a line or an ad-lib (especially, at the performance I attended, when an audience member's cell phone went off) and able to make us feel for her as...well, a human being.
Whenever Ashford barks—"hey hey hey hey!" is how Gurney has written it—it could be love, hate, anger, affection or irritation, and Ashford varies her tone and timbre to suit the occasion. The actress's showiness is out of necessity since it's a show-offy role, but Ashford smartly underplays as much as possible, and it's to her credit that she makes Sylvia (pooch and play) funnier and more affecting than it has any right to be.
Matthew Broderick long ago perfected his laconic, lazy-sounding line readings, which serves him well as Greg, whose midlife crisis (according to Gurney) comprises spending more time with a canine than with his wife Kate, who is played with her usual killer comic timing by Julie White. Even an underwhelming one-liner like calling Sylvia "Saliva" is done by White with a certain flair, even subtlety.
But subtlety is lacking in Robert Sella's portrayals in three minor roles, especially the two women he plays: a marriage counselor and old friend of Kate's. Perhaps Sullivan felt that Gurney's paper-thin play needed embellishing and so has Sella overact to the detriment of the small-scale joke at the play's center. But that isn't enough to derail this minor but entertaining comedy from one of our true living masters, with a true star turn by Annaleigh Ashford.
Sylvia
Cort Theatre, 138 West 48th Street, New York, NY
sylviabroadway.com
Theater Reviews—‘The Bandstand' & 'The Humans’ off-Broadway
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 05 November 2015 22:53
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Bandstand
Music by Richard Oberacker; book & Lyrics by Oberacker and Robert Taylor
Directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbueler
Performances through November 8, 2015
The Humans
Written by Stephen Karam; directed by Joe Mantello
Performances through January 3, 2016
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| Corey Cott and Laura Osnes in The Bandstand (photo: Jerry Dalia ) |
A swing musical about the shards left from World War II—when men came home emotionally and physically shattered, and women found themselves widows—The Bandstand, with original songs and a book by Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor evoking the era of Benny Goodman as it probes the mental morass of characters looking to finally put the war behind them, does a precarious, semi-successful balancing act between entertainment and psychological study.
Donny Novitski (and yes, there are Polish jokes) returns to Cleveland adrift. He survived the war, but his best buddy Michael, who played in a band with him near the front, died in battle. His survivor’s guilt makes him reluctant to visit Michael's widow Julia to tell her how he died. Meanwhile, he puts together a local band comprising other military men, and when he discovers Julia is a singer too, she joins the group; they also enter a radio contest to try and win a trip to New York City to perform on a national show and in a movie. The predictable trajectory of the story—romance! heartbreak! near-tragedy! happy ending!—is the weakest part of the show.
Oberacker’s music is a sturdy swing-music pastiche that purrs along nicely until the climactic number, an impassioned song called “Welcome Home,” comes out of nowehre, pouring out of Julia’s lungs and the men’s instruments, an affecting admittance of how damaged they still are. The polished cast begins with Corey Cott’s Donny, a nervy bundle of contradictions whose singing and music-making are nothing less than survival mechanisms. The rest of the band comprises Joe Carroll as drummer Johnny, Brandon J. Ellis as bassist Davy, Geoff Packard as trombonist Wayne, Joey Pero as trumpeter Nick and James Nathan Hopkins as sax player Jimmy, all of whom cannot only sing and act well but also persuasively play their instruments.
And, as Julia, there’s the magnetic Laura Osnes, one of our very best singing actresses—and someone who goes from strength to strength with every appearance—showing once again that she can summon not only great beauty but great power in her voice: her raw rendition of "Welcome Home" is guaranteed to leave every last audience member an emotional wreck.
Andy Blankenbueler’s stylish direction and lively choreography keep the show on the right track even when it bogs down in trite familiarity, such as introducing Donny's parents for no good reason and allowing the usually indispensable Beth Leavel to be saddled with unnecessary baggage as Julia’s sitcom-level mother. (She still sings beautifully.) But whenever Osnes and company let loose with another tune, most of the flaws of The Bandstand are forgiven.
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| The cast of The Humans (photo: Joan Marcus) |
In Stephen Karam’s The Humans, Erik and Deirdre arrive from Scranton to spend a snowy Thanksgiving with youngest daughter Brigid and her older boyfriend Richard in a Chinatown apartment they've just moved into. While oldest daughter Aimee came on Amtrak from Philadelphia, mom and dad drove with the girls' grandmother Fiona, seemingly in the early throes of Alzheimer's.
For 95 minutes, the family talks, argues, yells, apologizes, eats and, finally, calls it a night so the visitors can make it home. Karam writes believable conversational dialogue, knowing when to withhold information only to let it appear naturally later on. Several family secrets are spilled during the course of the evening, and Karam is able to make us feel that we too have lived with these people, getting to know them fairly intimately over the course of his one-act play.
But—of course there’s a "but"—Karam is a slave to contrivance, making The Humans similar to a TV sitcom trying to get serious and illuminate its characters' psychology. The convenient layout of Brigid and Richard’s apartment (perfectly rendered by designer David Zinn)—two distinct floors separated by a winding staircase—makes it too easy for characters to overhear others who think they are safe from prying ears. There always seems to be somebody (and it's always the person being discussed) who catches something he or she shouldn’t have.
Karam also drags poor Sept. 11 into this mix: Erik and Aimee went to the city that morning because—surprise!—Aimee had a job interview at the World Trade Center, and for awhile Erik couldn’t track Aimee down and thought she had perished. These people have enough in their daily lives to deal with without giving them some ginned up near-tragedy to add to their back story.
Finally, there’s the play's very structure: would a 60-year-old man and his 61-year-old wife take his sickly 79-year-old mother in a car for a three-hour plus drive in snowy weather to New York, only to plan to leave the same day after visiting their daughter for a mere hour and a half? (Forget that Erik has too much too drink so Aimee calls a car for them instead.) At the very least these people would stay over somewhere and start fresh in the morning.
Reservations aside, Joe Mantello’s always engaging staging and a top-flight ensemble—even among such veterans as Reed Birney (Erik), Jayne Houdyshell (Deirdre) and Cassie Beck (Aimee), Sarah Steele is a formidable presence as Brigid—help make The Humans seem more incisive and truthful than it really is.
The Bandstand
Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, NJ
papermill.org
The Humans
Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY
roundabouttheatre.org
November '15 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 03 November 2015 23:33
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Amour Fou
(Film Movement)
(Film Movement)
The murder-suicide pact of poet Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel is the jumping-off point for director Jessica Hausner's potent dissection of passion, madness and art: her obvious antecedent is Eric Rohmer's minimalist 1976 adaptation of Kleist's novella The Marquise of O, with its unadorned editing and camera setups, affectless acting and no musical soundtrack.
But Hausner doesn't slavishly ape that blueprint, which was a way of creating theater on film; instead, she has created an intelligent and robust work of art punctuated by bursts of onscreen music-making that underscore the art and artistry in her story and in Kleist’s life. The movie looks striking on Blu; extras are deleted scenes, Hausner interview and commentary, and her short film,Oida.
Tenderness of the Wolves
(Arrow)
In Arrow's most attractive-looking set to date, two films loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe story are brought together. Lucio Folci's The Black Cat (1981) and Sergio Martino's Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) are both definitively of their era, with mainly schlocky shocks, but Cat's cast (led by that consummate ham Patrick Magee) and Vice's femme fatale Edwige Fenech (so enticing that she gets her own bonus featurette as a ‘70s sex symbol) make these true guilty pleasures.
Ulli Lommel's 1973 Tenderness, conversely, is similar to the campy films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who appears in, but supposedly disliked, the film); Lommel's dramatization of a grisly real-life murderer who seduces then kills young men, cuts up their bodies and sells the parts to restaurants is clinical in the extreme, yet never comes to sickening life. All three films have been beautifully restored; extras include featurettes, interviews, location featurettes and commentaries.
The Exorcism of Molly Hartley
(Fox)
Apparently this is a sequel to The Haunting of Molly Hartley, which I either missed or completely forgot about: in any case, this is little more than a brazen Exorcist ripoff, with an opening scene that, astonishingly, closely follows the climax of William Friedkin's 1973 classic.
The rest of the movie follows the worn-out formula of medicine failing to cure the unfortunate young woman, and religion comes to the rescue. Sara Lind (Molly) and Gina Holden (psychiatrist) could be persuasive under far better circumstances. The film looks fine on Blu; extras include featurettes and hidden-camera footage.
(Universal)
Writer-director-actor Joel Edgerton’s Fatal Attraction-type thriller, which thrives too readily on the inconsistencies that populate the genre, smartly stars Edgerton himself, who plays the villain with a nervy mix of nastiness and shyness, and Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall, who bring an appealing realism to the terrified couple, which helps smooth over many implausible moments.
The nastiness, eventually involving possible rape and impregnation, piles up illogically, but it's done so slickly that most viewers won't mind. The movie has an excellent Blu-ray transfer; extras include Edgerton's commentary, featurette, a less effective alternate ending and deleted scenes.
Inside Out
(Disney)
In what's Pixar's cleverest conceit yet—with a big (uncredited) assist to the hilarious orgasm segment of Woody Allen's classic Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex—this gorgeous animation concerns a young girl whose life is uprooted by moving to a new neighborhood and new school, as her various emotions battle one another inside her brain’s control center.
The 95-minute movie wears out its welcome (75-80 minutes would have sufficed), but inventive animation and stand-out voice cast (Diane Lane as Mom and none other than Lewis Black as Anger take top honors) make this a worthwhile watch. The hi-def transfer is splendid; extras include two shorts, Lava and Riley's First Date?, and several featurettes.
(Warner Bros)
This set of four films from the primitive era of special effects—1933’s Son of Kong, 1949’s Mighty Joe Young, 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and 1954’s Them!—might not mean much to anyone who's grown up on (or been spoiled by) today's CGI, which renders nearly anything possible onscreen.
But for anyone who wants to relive the days of really cheesy visual effects—whose shoddiness is accentuated by Blu-ray's greater resolution—then by all means watch these often risible but entertaining thrillers of yore, filled with giant apes, radioactive giant dinosaurs and mutant ants. Extras include commentaries and featurettes.
Vacation
(Warner Bros)
Any list of unnecessary reboots includes the comic adventures of the Griswold family as they travel to the infamous Walley World: Ed Helms and Christina Applegate take over the roles closely related to those originally played by Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo in the far-from-classic 1985 original.
Writers-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley manage to come up with some bad-taste 2015 comic equivalents, but they desperately end up resorting to Chase and D’Angelo cameos to save their movie. The film looks sharp on Blu; extras are featurettes, gag reel and deleted scenes.
The Civil War—A Film by Ken Burns
(PBS)
Ken Burns' classic mini-series, which brought his signature documentary style to the masses with its nine-hour exploration of the destructive War Between the States, celebrates its 25th anniversary with a long-awaited restoration, allowing Burns' now iconic visuals to be seen in a way they never have.
In addition to the original series, the six-disc DVD set includes a 16-page collectors' booklets and several hours' worth of extras, including the featurettes Making The Civil War: 25 Years Later and Restoring The Civil War;complete interviews with historian Shelby Foote in high definition; and additional interviews that didn't make the final cut.
Do I Sound Gay?
Seymour—An Introduction
(Sundance Selects)
Do I Sound Gay? is director David Thorpe's exploration of his own (and others’) voice: is there such a thing as a gay voice, and if so, why? He speaks with Dan Savage, Tim Gunn and David Sedaris, voice counselors and other experts, and even though the results are equivocal, Thorpe goes on interesting tangents, such as showing long-time stereotypes in the entertainment world, from swishy minor characters to Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares.
In Seymour—An Introduction, a diverting portrait of octogenarian Seymour Bernstein, director and admirer Ethan Hawke follows the chatty, personable pianist as he discusses his life, career, art and teaches his students: there’s also, not coincidentally, a lot of good music, as Seymour performs (and talks about) Schubert, Brahms and Beethoven, and even his own compositions, both in the film and in the welcome 45-minute bonus recital.
Rapa Nui
(Warner Archive)
In Robert Mandel's 1983 drama Independence Day, restrained, believable performances by Kathleen Quinlan and David Keith overcome cliched, tepid writing as two small-towners who find each other look to escaape their constricting lives; also memorable is a newcomer named Dianne Wiest, heartbreaking as Keith's put-upon married sister.
Rapa Nui, Kevin Reynolds' 1994 historical epic, gains points for authenticity—it was shot on location on Easter Island—Sandrine Holt's beautifully modulated portrayal and the impressive physical production, which compensate for a trite story and other wooden actors.
October '15 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 27 October 2015 23:58
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
3 Films by Benoit Jacquot
(Cohen Film Collection)
Mediocre French director Benoit Jacquot specializes in surface studies of young women that are energized by his actresses—notably Virginie Ledoyen, who became a star in 1995's A Single Girl, in which she persuasively portrays the title character juggling a boyfriend, pregnancy and dead-end job.
Ledoyen highlights this three-film set, which also includes 1990's The Disenchanted, a blah look at a confused teenager starring Judith Goreche, and 1999's Keep It Quiet, a wan, sub-Chabrol satire that features Isabelle Huppert and Vahina Giaconte. The films themselves are noticeably improved in hi-def; extras are audio commentaries and new Jacquot interviews, but it’s too bad there's nothing about any of his leading ladies.
(Anchor Bay)
Revenge is always a go-to trope for a horror movie, and when a woman bashes men who've done her and others wrong, so much the better: at least that's what this blunt, bloody sequel to the sequel to the latest reboot promises.
For awhile, it's a trashy guilty pleasure as rape victim Jennifer (a lively Sarah Butler) gets vengeance after her friend is killed by going after sleazebags who meet their applause-worthy demise; but it soon bogs down in ham-fisted visualizations of Jennifer’s crazed mindset. The hi-def transfer is first-rate.
Indian Summers
The Widower
(PBS)
Indian Summers, a novelistic depiction of the misunderstandings among native Indians and their British rulers, takes its time fleshing out its characters’ political, personal and social status while fashioning a deepening and involving mystery; superb acting and unerring recreations of a bygone era give this 10-part series staying power.
Based on a bizarre true story, The Widower absorbingly dramatizes how Malcolm Webster, after killing his first wife, tries to off his second and fools a third woman into falling for him: the performances of Reece Shearsmith (Malcolm), Sheridan Smith, Kate Fleetwood and Archie Panjabi (the women) and John Hannah (detective) are brilliantly of a piece, lending dramatic gravitas to this three-part mini-series. Both series have excellent hi-def transfers; lone Indian extra is a one-hour series documentary.
Roxy—The Movie
(Eagle Rock)
Shot live in Paris during his latest tour,Just Let Go shows Lenny Kravitz pumping out hit after hit for an adoring audience; although he took too commercial a turn after his first two well-crafted albums, there's no denying the joy in songs like "Let Love Rule," "It's Not Over Til It's Over" and "New York City."
Roxy—The Movie, the Holy Grail for Frank Zappa fanatics, is the long-awaited video release of the legendary 1973 Los Angeles concerts that found Zappa and his crack band at their peak, kicking out classic jams and showcasing Zappa's inimitable humor and nimble guitar playing. Both films look and sound excellent on Blu; extras include bonus songs.
The Making of the Mob
(Anchor Bay)
This eight-part mini-series—narrated by Ray Liotta and featuring talking-head interviews with everyone from Rudy Giuliani to Chazz Palminteri, alongside many historians and experts—is a bastardization of the current mania for reenactment documentaries and docudramas.
But the subject matter—how mobsters were able to rule New York City—is so compelling that it remains watchable throughout. The visuals are vividly evoked in hi-def; extras comprise deleted scenes and featurettes.
(Lionsgate)
As the drug-addicted title character, Edie Falco has proven her mettle as a gifted dramatic and comedic actress far beyond The Sopranos, in the process making this self-consciously cute but “serious” sitcom entertaining during its seven up-and-down seasons.
The final season ends on an unsurprisingly ambiguous note, but even amid the many haphazard and wayward changes in tone, Falco is always on point. The hi-def transfer is solid; extras are commentaries, featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel.
Paper Towns
(Fox)
Lightning doesn't strike twice when it comes to movie adaptations of John Green's popular young adult novels: whereas The Fault in Our Stars had a schmaltzy if tragic premise and the fantastically authentic actress Shailene Woodley, Jake Schreier's Towns has insufficient amounts of drama, comedy and even believable teenage behavior.
I'm not asking for The Breakfast Club, mind you, but something more than the jokey silliness mitigating the nicely understated performances of Cara Delevingne and Nat Woolf as unlikely friends would be welcome. The movie has a sharp Blu-ray transfer; extras include deleted scenes, gag reel, making-of and featurettes.
(Magnolia)
Crystal Moselle's documentary about six home-schooled brothers who never ventured outside their lower Manhattan apartment and who began making home movies based on favorites they watched repeatedly begins rather one-dimensionally, as they’re seen primarily through their bizarre movie-only existence.
Soon, however, Moselle effectively builds a sympathetic portrait of siblings using the only means possible to survive incarceration by their parents. The movie looks fine on Blu; extras include some of the brothers’ home movies.
DVDs of the Week
The Great American Dream Machine
(S'more)
Shown on PBS from 1971-3, this satirical comedy-variety series, hosted and starring humorist Marshall Efron, was a forerunner of Saturday Night Live, but its three seasons were marked by the same sort of unevenness plaguing the shows that followed, as classic bits like Albert Brooks' hilarious "School for Comedians" are interspersed with pieces that don’t work or take too long to hit their marks.
The wide-ranging nature of the show—short documentary interludes included a “Great American Hero” segment—allowed it to feature such notables as Studs Terkel, Evel Knievel and Andy Rooney, and the four discs have some true gems amid the dross. Extras include additional sketches.
(Accentus Music)
French composer Erik Satie was a master of musical miniatures, mostly piano works with the perfect balance of exquisite musicality and offbeat humor that no one else could approach without seeming hopelessly retrograde.
This impressive hour-long exploration of his life and art finds the wondrous whimsy in the absurd that was Satie’s most endearing (and enduring) feature. The program includes interviews with experts and friends such as Jean Cocteau, as well as performances of some of his most representative works. Extras include more performances.
CDs of the Week
Anne Akiko Meyers—Serenade
(e one)
Leonard Bernstein’s five-movement Serenade, based on Greek philosophers' writings about love, is a concerto in all but name: and when Anne Akiko Meyers plays the solo violin part with such passionate intensity, it certainly sounds like the most romantic (in both senses) of Bernstein’s works.
The rest of the CD comprises shorter pieces arranged for violin and orchestra (Keith Lockhart leads the London Symphony); the picks of this litter—Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion and two Gershwin compositions—sound ethereally beautiful in Meyers' radiant hands (and bow).
(UME)
On his fourth solo studio album, Chris Cornell again teams with producer Brendan O'Brien for a sometimes dazzling trip through many of the singer's influences, from intimate folk to muscular rock to the Beatles; his trademark yelp is held in check as he shows off his vocal range on an eclectic group of songs adorned with sparse but inventive instrumentation by (mainly) Cornell and O'Brien.
Highlights include the soaring chorus of "Before We Disappear," the majesty of the piano-based title track, the soothing optimism of "Our Time in the Universe" and the acoustic strumming on "Only These Words," which wouldn't be out of place on the American version of Rubber Soul.
Prokofiev—Peter and the Wolf…and Jazz!
(Le Chant du Monde)
Viktoria Mullova—Prokofiev
(Onyx)
For those for whom classical music might seem too imposing, Sergei Prokofiev’s bright and friendly Peter and the Wolf provides an intro to orchestral sounds and instrumentation: for those for whom even that might be too much, a clever big-band arrangement is played with cheerful aplomb by the French jazz combo The Amazing Keystone Big Band, with actor David Tenant as the capable narrator.
On her new Prokofiev CD, the exciting Russian violinist Viktoria Mullova tackles three of the master's violin works—the spry and lively Second Concerto, the melancholy Sonata for Two Violins (with Tedi Papavrami) and the rueful Solo Violin Sonata—in a rich, purposeful recital.
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