When Wendy Wasserstein won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Play for The Heidi Chronicles, she became the first—and so far only—female American playwright to win the Tony. Wasserstein went on to write two more substantial plays (1992's wondrously warmThe Sisters Rosensweig and 1997's political character study, An American Daughter) before her untimely 2006 death at age 55 of lymphoma.

 

The semi-autobiographical Heidi Chronicles covers a quarter-century in the life of Heidi Holland, a feminist art historian whom we meet giving a 1989 lecture about obscure female artists through the ages. From there, we jump back to several pinpoint, razor-sharp scenes between 1965 and 1989, as Heidi moves from naive co-ed to grad student to independent career woman, always dealing with her fraught relationships with the men in her life: Peter, whom she meets cute at a 1965 dance and who remains her backbone (and who is, she later discovers, gay); and Scoop, the self-confident letch who seduces Heidi at a 1968 New Hampshire Humphrey campaign headquarters and becomes her sometime lover until he finally marries another woman.

 

Several women are semi-constants in Heidi's ever-changing life, but—as the bittersweet but optimistic ending shows—she remains on her own: even the momentous decision (which foreshadows Wasserstein's own a decade later) that closes the play is made alone.

 

Wasserstein's episodic play, which comprises 13 scenes set during a 24-year period, takes the pulse of the playwright's generation socially, culturally and politically. The otherwise adroit director Pam MacKinnon has turned this entertaining revival into a time capsule, as each scene change is accompanied by a hit song from its era by Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Fleetwood Mac, Hall & Oates, etc. And many projections on John Lee Beatty's agile set design display momentous events or celebrities like the failure of the ERA amendment and Presidents Nixon, Carter and Reagan. Unmerited complaints thatHeidi is dated stem from MacKinnon spoonfeeding her audience.

 

Wasserstein mixes humor and heartbreak with a touch of the sentimental, but her zippy one-liners hit with equal force and finesse, and Heidi herself remains an endearing combination of self-empowerment and naivete. In the original production, Joan Allen gave a magnificent portrayal shot through with humanity and tenderness. Although Elisabeth Moss does well as Heidi—she nails the great monologue scene where Heidi confesses her own disappointments and failures in what was supposed to be a celebratory speech—she lacks Allen's effortless charm, a crucial component of the character.

 

With the stark exception of Tracee Chimo—who plays several supporting roles with an unnecessary brashness that's the actress's stock-in-trade—MacKinnon has fashioned a fine supporting ensemble, led by Bryce Pickham's ever-loyal Peter and Jason Biggs' often disloyal Scoop. A strain of melancholy pervades at the end, as we realize that this talented playwright, who worked out her neuroses and frailities for all to see, is no longer here to chart where we're headed in the 21st century. Maybe more Wasserstein revivals will further remind us what we're missing.

Like its namesake, Placebo seems an impersonation of a play, and the main problem is that writer Melissa James Gibson seems to care very little about the four characters she's put onstage, making them pawns for her to move around at will, not caring how implausible or downright deranged their actions and dialogue become.

 

Louise, a lab researcher who keeps tabs on women taking a new drug for their lack of libido (a sort of female viagra) checks on a 40-ish patient, Mary, who may have been given a placebo instead. Louise, who's also getting flirty with another researcher, Tom, whom she meets in the laboratory break room, has a home life in shambles: her live-in boyfriend, Jonathan, has hit a wall writing his dissertation on Pliny the Elder, while her 59-year-old (unseen) mother is on an oxygen machine.

 

Though too-familiar territory, it's fertile enough for any good writer. Instead, Gibson ignores her own content and context and allows the characters to go off on tangents, endlessly parsing nearly everything they say, like discussing the correct pronunciation of "Pliny" or "bogeyman" or punning on "needing" and "kneading" and on "oral" and "aural."

 

Consider this bit of dialogue:

 

LOUISE: But it's not insurmountable.

JONATHAN: Well, depends on your definition of mountable.   

 

Would a supposedly intelligent PhD candidate not know that "surmountable" is the correct word? In any case, it doesn't matter, as long as Gibson gets a cheap laugh. 

 

Later sequences become even more irritating, as when Louise and Tom listen to a recording of patients loudly having sex, then repeat what they've heard. Or when Louise and Tom sprint back and forth to the break room candy machine for minutes on end, choosing items but never taking them out of the machine. Or, in the final scene, Louise and Jonathan, who are about to break up, toss their apartment keys back and forth, since Louise commented on Jonathan's inability to do so. None of this makes any pertient or intelligent commentary on relationships, but Gibson (who wrote scripts for the current House of Cards season, by far its weakest) seems most interested in getting momentary reactions from the audience, no matter how little her play and its characters cohere narratively and psychologically.

 

Carrie Coon is an incisive actress but, although she has her moments as Louise, even she can't create a sympathetic character out of such disparate, self-contradictory fragments. Likewise, director Daniel Aukin, who fashions a clever mise-en-scene that overlaps the play's various settings, can do little else, lost as he is in Gibson's meanderings.

 

Blu-rays of the Week

Amazingly, Philly-soul masters Hall & Oates had never played Dublin before this 2014 concert in the Irish capital's Olympia Theatre, as the legendary pop duo performs a charged 90-minute set of their greatest '70s and '80s hits to a boisterous response from the singalong crowd.

 

Daryl Hall is in fine voice on classics like the opening "Maneater" and the mid-show peak of "She's Gone" and "Sara Smile," while John Oates sings lead on lesser-known songs "Back Together Again" and "Las Vegas Turnaround." While some of the '80s hits haven't aged well—like the climactic blast of "Kiss on My List" and "Private Eyes"—no one in the audience or onstage seems to mind. The hi-def image and audio are first-rate; extras are Hall and Oates interviews.

 

The Roommates/A Woman for All Men 

These early '70s sexploitation movies by director Arthur Marks would be right at home on Cinemax after midnight, with their kitschy combination of sex and murder: The Roommates follows nubile young women being followed by a killer; A Woman brings a sexy young wife between an old patriarch and his sons.

 

Marks has made perfectly watchable trash, although The Roommates suffers from a plethora of amateurish acting; at least A Woman has Keenan Wynn as the father, Andrew Robinson as one of the sons and Judy Brown as the femme fatale. The hi-def transfer is solid; extras include a Marks commentary and interviews with Marks, Brown and Roberta Collins (from Roommates).

 

 

 

 

Rob Reiner's innocuous comedy about collegian John Cusack, who must decide between hot blonde of his dreams Nicolette Sheridan and levelheaded fellow student Daphne Zuniga, hasn't really dated in the 30 years since its release: it's still the same safely mainstream rom-com it was back in 1985.

 

Although Cusack, Zuniga and Sheridan do their level best with their flimsy characters, Reiner's middlebrow sensibility ends up making this pleasant but blandly forgettable movie anything but a sure thing. The Blu-ray transfer is good; extras include several vintage featurettes.

 

Les vepres siciliennes 

One of Giuseppe Verdi's most obscure grand operas was given a rousing 2013 revival at London's Royal Opera House, and director Stefan Herheim's concept of setting the story in the Parisian opera house for which the work was composed happily doesn't make hash of the riveting historical drama.

 

Conductor Antonio Pappano leads a gripping account of Verdi's score; singers Lianna Haroutounian, Bryan Hymel, Michael Volle and Erwin Schott (better known as Mr. Anna Netrebko) can scarcely be improved upon. The hi-def image and audio are equally excellent; extras comprise two backstage featurettes.

 

 

 

 

 

DVDs of the Week

Using found footage from several videographers, in 2009 Huang Weikai stitched together an unsettling cinematic collage that alarmingly shows how China's fast-paced modenization has wrought many unexpected  consequences to both dwellers in the cities and suburbs and animals both domesticated and wild.

 

Unforgettable images include a massive mess of pigs roaming a highway, hucksters pretending to be hit by some of the many cars on the road in order to extort the innocent drivers, and bystanders protesting police brutality being brutalized themselves. A perfect complement to Huang's hour-long documentary, his earlier Floating (2005), explores the life of a street musician in rural China.

 

Hot Legs/California Gigolo 

These late-'70s X-rated features creak along for 75 or so minutes as their flimsy plots vie for primacy with explicit sex scenes, starting with Hot Legs, which stars an able actor named Richard Pacheco—one of the few "porn" actors as believable out of bed as in—in a typically dumb sex comedy. 

 

California Gigolo stars the one and only John Holmes as the biggest stud in Hollywood: his lack of acting talent is usually overlooked by unfinicky adult-film connoisseurs, but there's also his complete inability to look like he actually enjoys having sex on camera. 

 

 

 

 

Sinkholes

Two Nova PBS specials explore notable recent news stories; first up is Sinkholes, which dissects these hazardously collapsing dangers that can occur slowly, over time, or in the blink of an eye, bringing death and destruction in their wake. The accompanying video footage is both hard to watch and hard to look away from.

 

Sunken Ship Rescue recounts the amazing resurrection of the ill-fated cruise ship Costa Concordia, which hit a reef off the Italian coast and sank, killing dozens. Engineers lift the ship from its semi-submerged position and safely move it in history's biggest-ever ship recovery operation.

 

Sukkah City 

Sukkahs, temporary structures that Jewish people live in every fall during the holiday of Sukkot, are built according to basictenets in the Bible; "Sukkah City" is the brainchild of Joshua Foer, creator of a contest for architects to design sukkahs from which a dozen were chosen,  financed, built and displayed in Manhattan's Union Square Park one September weekend in 2010.

 

Jason Hutt's engaging film, which shows the process for those whose designs were selected, culminates in a remarkable sequence of the 12 sukkahs being shown to the park's crowds. Extras comprise short featurettes like The Yeshiva Boys, which shows two young students who discuss whether these sukkahs are kosher.

 

 

 

 

CDs of the Week

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein cleverly links the centuries-old Franco-USA alliance with the affinities between American and French composers (using the downtown New York City subway stop on Broadway and Lafayette Streets for the cover shoot is a nice touch, too).

 

Two works are warhorses, but since they are Maurice Ravel's scintillating piano concerto and George Gershwin's equally amazing Rhapsody in Blue, who's to argue? The newest work, The Circle and the Child, a concerto by French-American Philip Lasser, was written for Dinnerstein, while her precise playing makes it seem as if all these works are hers: she gives brightness and clarity to Ravel and Gershwin's jazzy syncopations. 

 

Weinberg—Violin Concerto/Symphony No. 4 

Now that his splendid and thoroughly original music has been rediscovered, Polish-Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (who died in 1996) receives another memorial to his talent with the latest must-listen disc of his work, which pairs his muscular Violin Concerto with his vigorous fourth symphony.

 

Persuasively performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under sympathetic conductor Jacek Kaspszyk, Weinberg's Fourth Symphony pulsates throughout with taut energy, while violin soloist Ilya Gringolts brings out the concerto's marvelous musical touches.

Blu-rays of the Week

In this action-packed Korean drama, a professional player of the game GO, framed for his brother's murder, returns from prison to extract revenge on one of his opponents, and a final game between them becomes an orchestrated orgy of violence.

 

So what if director Jo Bum-Gu doesn’t know the meaning of the word subtle: that’s not his aim. Instead, he builds slowly (and sometimes dully) to a final blast of brutally balletic gore, the reason fans of this genre are watching anyway. The Blu-ray transfer is dazzling, and the lone extra is a making-of.

 

IMAX Island of Lemurs: Madagascar 

The lemurs of Madagascar—an island off Africa's coast that's the only place on earth where these adorable creatures live—are seen in their singular glory in this amusing and eye-opening 40-minute film narrated by Morgan Freeman.

 

By now the formula is familiar, but it still works: these stunning IMAX nature documentaries have beautiful cinematography, exotic locales and nature to show off. The hi-def transfer is luminous, both in 3D and in 2D; extras are several featurettes.

 

 

 

 

Director Rob Marshall has already done (or done in) two classic Broadway musicals, Chicago andNine, winning an Oscar in the process, so what could he do to Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s decidedly adult take on familiar fairy tales? Since the source material is fairly indestructible—both the original stories and the twisted Sondheim/Lapine version—the movie is more entertaining than Marshall's previous flops.

 

Still, there's his questionable casting, led by Meryl Streep's scenery-chewing that's far more corrosive onscreen than it would have been onstage, where I saw Bernadette Peters and Vanessa Williams do far more with her role of the Wicked Witch. Anna Kendrick, a sweet-voiced Cinderella, should be doing Broadway with her fine comic and musical chops. The movie has a lustrous look on Blu; extras are Marshall's commentary, behind the scenes featurettes and a new Sondheim song.

 

Live at Knebworth 

This concert to end all concerts, held to raise money for music therapy, was held at London’s Knebworth House on June 30, 1990, and featured the biggest British rock and pop acts of the time, from Paul McCartney, Elton John and Eric Clapton to Mark Knopfler, Phil Collins and Genesis. The daylong event, trimmed to a mere three hours, means each act only gets a few tunes, instead of the full performances many of them deserve.

 

Still, there are memorable musical moments, like Tears for Fears’ “Badman’s Song,” Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and Robert Plant and Jimmy Page tearing up on a rarely-heard Zeppelin number, "Wearing and Tearing." On hi-def, the video is passable but the sound is terrific.

 

 

 

 

Pioneer 

Based on a true story about the 1980s' Norwegian oil boom, this tense thriller dramatizes the perils lying in wait for divers who had to reach the sea's bottom to help bring up the oil through the pipelines laid down there.

 

Director Erik Skjoldbjærg, who made the atmospheric thriller Insomnia (the original, of course), precisely captures the claustrophobia and danger of the mission, and is aided by an accomplished cast that includes familiar faces like Stephen Lang and Wes Bentley. The hi-def transfer is first-rate; extras are making-of featurettes.

 

Son of a Gun 

Ewan McGregor's intense portrayal of an ex-con whose robbery plan goes spectacularly wrong is the main reason to watch Son of a Gun, a routine heist movie by director Julius Avery, which also includes a nice bonus in the fetching actress Alicia Vikander.

 

In Vice, whose dystopian futuristic setting harkens back to the superior Westworld, Bruce Willis stars as creator of a resort where people can live out their fantasies with help from human-looking "artificials," until one of them escapes. Both films look good on Blu-ray; Gun extras are a commentary and making-of, and Vice extras are a commentary, making-of and interviews.

 

 

 

 

Vice & Virtue 

Based on de Sade’s novel Justine, Roger Vadim set his 1963 adaptation in WWII era France, where two women—played by Annie Girardot and Catherine Deneuve—act out their destinies as kept women by the Nazis: one willingly, the other not.

 

Too bad Vadim’s basic lack of filmic sense doesn't allow him to intelligently explore the exploitation of women during wartime; his B&W drama has little to offer other than the pleasure of watching two glamorous French actresses at work. The hi-def transfer is exquisite.

 

The Way He Looks 

Brazilian director Daniel Ribeiro has made an unsentimental study of a blind teenager’s burgeoning (and confusing) sexuality as he falls for a fellow male classmate, much to the consternation of his female best friend.

 

With winningly natural performances by his talented young actors, particularly Ghilherme Lobo in the lead, Ribeiro has made a wonderfully focused drama that's never condescending. Extras include I Don't Want to Go Back Alone, Ribeiro’s original 2010 short film, deleted scenes and cast and crew interviews. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DVDs of the Week

A trio of British matinee idols headline a trio of middling '50s and '60s pictures, starting with Alec Guinness in All at Sea, a mild 1957 Ealing Studios comedy now more dated than daring, though it has its occasional amusing moments. In The Doctor's Dilemma, Anthony Asquith's 1958 adaptation of a barbed and witty Bernard Shaw comedy, Dirk Bogarde is appropriately smarmy as a sickly artist living with lovely Leslie Caron; various medical men are played by Alistair Sim, Robert Morley and John Robinson.

 

Then there's the frantic but mostly frivolous 1965 spy drama, Where the Spies Are, in which David Niven looks hopelessly lost, except when he unsurprisingly perks up whenever the gorgeous Francoise Dorleac appears.

 

Code Black 

Physician-turned-cirector Ryan McGarry’s startling and intimate documentary about Los Angeles County Hospital’s always-busy emergency room—where more lives are lost (and saved) than anywhere else in the country—shows the selfless dedication of the men and women working long, thankless hours to treat the seriously injured and sick.

 

In the age of Obamacare, where health care and people’s lives themselves are being troublingly politicized by lawmakers, places like L.A.'s "C booth" have become ground zero in the ongoing battle for humane and affordable treatment. Extras include a McGarry interview and short film.

 

 

 

 

Dixie Ray Hollywood Star 

From the Golden Age of adult films, Anthony Spinelli's 1983 homage to detective movies features then-porn superstar John Leslie as a Sam Spade-like private dick on a case that leads him to the beautiful, eponymous actress at its center.

 

Along with the faithful '40s atmosphere, the movie includes plentiful sex scenes between Leslie and some of the biggest porn actresses of that time like Lisa Deleeuw and Kelly Nichols, which remains its main claim to fame.

 

Mondovino 

Jonathan Nossiter’s absorbing 10-hour, 10-part 2004 mini-series about the surprisingly cutthroat world of wine and wine-making is an exhaustive and endlessly fascinating look at one of the most profitable industries in today’s world, with a global expansiveness that moves from California to Tuscany and Burgundy to Argentina.

 

Nossiter interviews wine makers, wine importers, wine salesmen, wheelers, dealers and superstars like infamous tastemaker and critic Robert Parker; the adroit editing juggles disparate characters and story lines that meander around and often overlap with one another. Like a fine wine, Mondovino has a full-bodied, delectable lushness that’s worth drinking in.