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Theater Reviews—Sam Waterston in 'The Tempest' in Central Park; Chris Noth in 'Doctor Faustus' Off-Broadway
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 22 June 2015 19:21
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Tempest
Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Michael Greif
Performances through July 5, 2015
Doctor Faustus
Adapted by David Bridel and Andrei Belgrader, from the play by Christopher Marlowe; directed by Andrei Belgrader
Performances through July 12, 2015
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| Waterston and Carpanini in The Tempest (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Whether or not The Tempest represents Shakespeare’s symbolic leave-taking of the theatre, there's no denying its powerful evocation of the theatrical magic conjured for audiences by performers and creators. But for this Central Park staging, director Michael Greif comes to grief right from the storm that starts the exiled Duke Prospero's plot machinations in motion.
Heretofore foolproof comic bits of the island's monster Caliban and clowns Trinculo and Stephano are off-handedly offered; the scenes among the shipwrecked survivors are handled in a desultory manner; the romance between Miranda and Ferdinand palls; and the masque accompanying their wedding is a shambles despite astounding gymnastics.
Greif has set designer Riccardo Hernandez erect the director's adored scaffolding, which never suggests the play's glistening isle; costume designer Emily Rebholz has created drab clothing for everyone, while bafflingly giving the same leather vest to both Caliban and Prospero's sprite Ariel; and composer Michael Friedman, whose banging percussion is part of a burgeoning onstage cliche, supplies songs and incidental music of forgettable quality. At least lighting designer David Lander does achieve some illuminating moments of visual poetry.
Trinculo and Stephano's comic relief is crudely provided by the usually able Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Danny Mastrogiorgio. Ariel and Caliban can played any number of ways, except as here: Chris Perfetti's Ariel is a disastrous mess, while Louis Cancelmi's Caliban is impressive in his physical contortions, far less so in his mealy-mouthed way of speaking. Although Juilliard student Francesca Carpanini is a fetching, well-spoken Miranda, Ferdinand is played by Rodney Richardson, who tends to unnecessarily bark or shout his lines. He does provide an audience-pleasing flip, however.
Finally, there's Sam Waterston's Prospero. Anyone who saw him as King Lear a few seasons back shouldn't be surprised that he can't do Prospero properly either: his croaking voice is all wrong for Shakespeare's poetry, his odd enunciations are distracting, as are his pauses and stressing syllables in the wrong places. He also has no sense of the majesty, pathos, resentment and, finally, forgiveness in Prospero: he's best at hopping giddily when his machinations are working to bring Miranda and Ferdinand together.
I didn't expect Waterston to approach the best Prospero I've seen, Christopher Plummer, but I hoped that this stage veteran could at least make a respectable showing. I was wrong.
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| Noth and Grenier in Doctor Faustus (photo: Joan Marcus) |
I don't know if Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus can still work onstage at this late date, but I can empahtically state that, as adapted by David Bridel and this production's director Andrei Belgrader, it most assuredly cannot.
Marlowe's 17th century take on the Faustian legend explores what awaits those who, like Faustus, get bored with life and sell their soul for a chance at immortality. Belgrader turns this still rich ore into a messy staging that never decides if it wants to be an update to the supposedly enlightened 21st century or a sitcom-level spoof of the play's more dated elements: instead, it keeps a foot in both camps, making for a protracted, fitfully amusing but mainly dull pageant. (The continuous attempts at audience participation underline Belgrader's desperation, as if viewers will enjoy what they're watching more if they are part of it.)
Zach Grenier nicely underplays Mephistopheles as a tired demon, resigned to dealing with men like Faust and forcing himself to feign interest. Chris Noth—who certainly looks the part of the intelligent but arrogant man of science who wants spice in his life, his soul be damned—finds humor in Faust, although, thanks to Belgrader's misdirecting, only fleetingly projects the protagonist's complexity. Lithe dancer Marina Lazzaretto disrobing as Helen of Troy perks things up at the end, but this misbegotten Faustus never gives the devil, or Marlowe, his due.
The Tempest
Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York, NY
shakespeareinthepark.org
Doctor Faustus
Classic Stage Company, 123 East 13th Street, New York, NY
classicstage.org
June '15 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 16 June 2015 23:47
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Girlhood
(Strand)
Yet another perceptive coming-of-age exploration by French director Celine Sciamma—whose earlier wonderful movies about children, Water Lilies and Tomboy, are classics of a kind—Girlhood follows black teenagers living in the projects outside Paris, zeroing on Marieme, whose abusive older brother causes her to join a group of "cool" girls.
The alternating exhilaration and confusion of adolescence is dramatized with liveliness and sympathy by Sciamma, and Karidja Touré’s Marieme is a protagonist of charming awkwardness that makes this another painfully truthful portrait by who now can be considered a major director. The Blu-ray image looks sharp; lone extra is a Karidja Touré interview.
My Dinner with Andre
(Criterion Collection)
The pairing of playwright-actor Wallace Shawn and playwright-director Andre Gregory always fills me with dread, from their cinematic collaborations with Louis Malle to their New York stage work. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt with their latest, an adaptation of Ibsen’s Master Builder, gestating for 17 years and finally filmed by Jonathan Demme, who gives an otherwise risible production a professional gloss. Updating a problematic play provides no illumination, and Shawn himself is disastrous as the bitter aging architect; slightly better are Julie Hagerty, Lisa Joyce and Larry Pine.
Then there's My Dinner with Andre, the self-indulgent 1981 film directed by Louis Malle that brought Shawn and Gregory fleetingly into the cultural spotlight, recounting the men's catching up on old times and discussing topics of supposed intellectual heft. Some find it life-changing; I find little of interest. The Criterion transfers are superlative; extras feature new and vintage interviews.
Then there's My Dinner with Andre, the self-indulgent 1981 film directed by Louis Malle that brought Shawn and Gregory fleetingly into the cultural spotlight, recounting the men's catching up on old times and discussing topics of supposed intellectual heft. Some find it life-changing; I find little of interest. The Criterion transfers are superlative; extras feature new and vintage interviews.
(Warner Bros)
In this violent tale of revenge and honor killing, Liam Neeson plays a longtime hitman on the run one last time: he's killed the shady son of an old friend and mob boss and now tries to clear his own estranged son's name while taking the fall himself.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra stylishly stages car chases and shoot-outs that border on the ludicrous; but despite the script's many holes, a committed cast brings it home: along with the usual laconic Neeson, there's Ed Harris, Joel Kinnaman, Common and the criminally underused Genesis Rodriguez. The movie's nighttime grit transfers well to Blu-ray; extras comprise featurettes and deleted scenes.
Slash Live at the Roxy
(Eagle Rock)
At the legendary L.A. club The Roxy, Slash and his band The Conspirators—which includes his own ace in the hole, singer Myles Kennedy—blast through 17 songs (13 in the main concert and 4 bonus tracks), many from the new album World on Fire with a couple from Velvet Revolver and the rest from a certain band Slash was in 20-plus years ago.
With Kennedy's controlled banshee-like vocals leading the way (he can sound like Axl Rose without imitating him outright), and with Slash's memorable riffs and ultra-melodic solos, this is crushing hard rock at its best: standouts are "Rocket Queen" and "World on Fire." The Blu-ray image and sound are first rate, but obviously the bonus songs should be part of the concert proper.
(Sony Pictures Classics)
Argentine director Damian Szifron's omnibus film comprising six exaggerated stories of vicious vengeance is not as clever as it thinks it is, as Szifron reverts to obvious Twilight Zone-hammering irony at every turn (including a real hammer at a pivotal point in one story), despite each self-contained episode being extremely well-shot and well-acted.
The opening pre-credit sequence works superbly as a tasty intro, and the final demented wedding reception is hilariously nasty, but the other four are bludgeoning and shrill "ironic" tales of ordinary madness. The movie looks splendid on Blu-ray; extras are making-of and Toronto Film Festival footage.
DVDs of the Week
Generation Baby Buster
(Cinema Libre)
As director Terra Renton notes, not every woman wants to get pregnant, and Renton’s very personal documentary explores the stories of some who've decided to do (or not do) just that, despite the still prevalent ostracizing by our society over such extremely private decisions.
Renton talks with everyone from childhood experts to those, like her, who remain child-free, and it’s her presence, steely but willing to hear all sides, that makes this a most engaging documentary on a thorny subject. Extras comprise additional interviews.
(Ondine)
Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen has written some of the most strikingly original operas of the past 40 years—notably his first two, The Horseman and The Red Line—and he continues his winning streak with his dramatically piercing adaptation of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy: unlike German Aribert Reimann's Lear (a notable example of atonalism), Sallinen writes in a thoroughly melodic if astringent musical idiom.
His operatic equivalences of the Bard's poetically diabolical crushing of every possible light in the darkness is evident in the accomplished writing and performers like Matti Salminen as Lear, Lilli Paasikivi as daughter Cordelia and Aki Alamikkotervo as the Fool, which allow Sallinen's brave gamble to work brilliantly in this 2002 Helsinki world premiere production.
180 Days—Hartsville
(PBS)
In the second installment of a PBS series exploring the precarious current state of American education, Jacquie Jones and Garland McLaurin's two-part documentary spends a full year among students and faculty in Hartsville, South Carolina, to shine a light on a public school system that, despite a district that is in abject poverty, has a 92% graduation rate.
Such an anomaly is not a one-off: despite the success of the local schools, the district’s new superintendent rightly worries about how students who are graded by standardized testing can survive in an increasingly non-standardized 21st century world environment.
An American in Paris—Original Broadway Cast Recording
(Masterworks Broadway)
What was really the best musical of the just-completed Broadway season (sorry, Fun Home), An American in Paris not only stars two dizzyingly talented triple-threat dancer-actor-singers Robert Fairchild and Leanne Cope, but also features George Gershwin’s glorious music, head and shoulders above anything being composed by today’s practitioners on the Great White Way.
In addition to timeless tunes like “I Got Rhythm,” “The Man I Love” and “’S Wonderful,” there are the instrumental pieces like the classic title ballet, which showcases Rob Fisher’s arrangements and Christopher Austin’s Tony-winning orchestrations. Of course, since this is primarily a dancing show—Christopher Wheeldon rightly won the Best Choreography Tony Award but was robbed for Best Director—the music is only half of what makes it such a masterly musical, but that half is touched by pure genius.
June '15 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 09 June 2015 22:42
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Camp X-Ray
(IFC)
Guantanamo Bay is the setting for writer-director Peter Sattler's straightforward account of the unlikely friendship between a female American soldier and a Muslim man she guards inside the notorious prison.
Kristen Stewart and Payman Maadi give strong portrayals of the confused young woman and equally bemused detainee who discover their common humanity; too bad Sattler's weakness for repetition makes for a saggy midsection: 15 to 20 minutes could have been cut. The hi-def transfer looks superb; lone extra is a making-of featurette.
(Lionsgate)
An amusing riff on high school a laJohn Hughes, The Duff stands for "Designated Ugly or Fat Friend," which is what Bianca discovers she is as while navigating the land mines of high school's hallways, classrooms and online bullying.
It's funny despite an obvious moral hammered home at the end, with a percolating cast led by Mae Whitman as Bianca, Skyler Samuels and Bianca Santos as her prettier friends and Bella Thorne, who effortlessly embodies the hottest girl in school. The Blu-ray looks excellent; extras include gag reel and featurettes.
Island of Death
Society
(Arrow)
In director Nico Mastorakis's demented 1976 horror flick Island of Death, a weirdly religious couple visits the Greek isle of Mykynos and proceeds to kill everybody immoral, irreligious or plain not worth living; its insane plot and laughably bad acting aside, there's a certain chuztapah to the inventive murderous ways, including a beheading, a hanging from a flying airplane and impaling a nude woman on a blade through a door.
Society, Brian Yuzna's 1989 gore-splattered mess, has an absolutely lunatic finale in which the hero improbably escapes—maybe to set up a sequel that mercifully never came. One point of interst is Devin Devasquez, a Playboy playmate who showed off her best attributes. Both movies look properly grainy on Blu-ray; extras comprise interviews and featurettes.
(Fox)
Bill O'Reilly's "killing" cash cow, which has already done in Lincoln, Kennedy and Patton, goes after even bigger game in this stillborn adaptation of his best-selling book about the crucifixion of Christ that adds nothing dramatically, philosophically or cinematically to what we've seen onscreen for deacdes, from King of Kings and The Greatest Story Ever Told to The Passion of the Christ.
Lacking the grandiosity of the reverent Biblical epics and the out-and-out sadism of Mel Gibson's movie (although it tries), the movie also features a blank slate in Haaz Sleiman's Jesus, although Pontius Pilate—a foolproof role—is well-played by Stephen Moyer. The hi-def transfer is first-rate.
The Pillow Book
(Film Movement Classics)
Peter Greenaway's 1996 Tokyo-set drama of vengeful calligraphy written on men's bodies was the beginning of his fall from arthouse grace following the extreme violence of The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover and The Baby of Macon: its unwieldy mix of visual experimentation, eclectic music from U2 to Japanese songs and Greenaway's own formal elegance never coheres into anything beyond empty if stimulating images.
The Blu-ray—with a new Greenaway commentary covering the first 38 of the film's 127 minutes—has a transfer which shows the varied aspect ratios within the square 1.33:1 frame, cutting down considerably the visual information one can see. Too bad the hi-def transfer isn't like that for The Grand Budapest Hotel, which utilized the entire 16:9 widescreen for its varied ratios.
(Warner Archive)
This 1943 musical revue fills its two-hour running time with appearances by the biggest names in Hollywood at the time, some of whom (Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Errol Flynn) might be surprising in this context, while others—Bette Davis, Dinah Shore, Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith—make it a glittering paean to the Great American Songbook.
The enjoyable musical numbers are the main interest of this embodiment of the era's "that's entertainment!" type of moviemaking. The restored film looks perfect on hi-def; extras comprise vintage cartoons, shorts and a radio broadcast.
DVDs of the Week
Gett
(Music Box)
Writer-director-star Ronit Elkabetz and her brother, co-writer-director Shlomi, have made a remarkably gripping study of the difficulties middle-aged Viviane has getting a divorce (or gett) from her husband in Israel.
Humanizing a managerie of characters—Viviane, her husband, her lawyer, his brother/court representative and the three-man panel of judges—the talented siblings' stunning look at how modern society butts heads with ancient law gives as much weight to their characters' pauses, silences and gestures as they do the words that alternately wound and heal. Extras comprise a making-of featurette and interviews.
(Warner Archive)
The grit and grime of working-class criminals underscores this 1965 cop drama about a former thief tempted with one last big score by his brother while a relentless detective bears down on him, his innocent wife and young daughter.
The screws are tightened by Ralph Nelson's taut direction and Zekial Marko's precsise script (based on his own novel), and even if the finale is too convoluted, the acting by Alain Delon, Van Heflin, Jack Palance and Ann-Margret help finesse the plot holes to keep things moving.
Pretty Little Liars—Complete 5th Season
(Warner Bros)
Aria, Emily, Hanna and Spencer are joined by Alison—presumed dead last season—to find answers to seemingly unanswerable questions, as the mysteries continue unabated for what is now a quintet of "liars" in the popular ABC Family series' fifth season.
The five-disc set, which includes 25 episodes, also contains a plethora of bonus features: several featurettes, cast interviews, a look inside the series' 100th episode, a fan appreciation episode and deleted scenes.
(Kino Lorber)
Daniel Leconte’s account of the 2007 trial of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo after being sued over its publication of cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims has an added poignance after the horrific January events when its editorial staff was cut down by extremists. (Many of those interviewed by Leconte are now dead.)
Leconte's cameras record editorial meetings where cartoons, columns and cover art are discussed, and he sits down with everyone involved—from editors and cartoonists to aggrieved Muslims—to arrive at a thorough overview of a still-volatile subject, allowing all sides to speak openly.
Off-Broadway Reviews—"The Way We Get By," "Permission"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 08 June 2015 23:41
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Way We Get By
Written by Neil LaBute; directed by Leigh Silverman
Closes June 21, 2015
Permission
Written by Robert Askins; directed by Alex Timbers
Closes June 14, 2015
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| Seyfried and Sadoski in The Way We Get By (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Playwright Neil LaBute has made a career out of random shocks, but his latest The Way We Get By makes it look as if the well is running dry. Positioned somewhere between earlier taboo-busters as Wrecks and Fat Pig and recent LaBute-lite works like Reasons to Be Pretty, the new play is pleasantly bland but ultimately forgettable.
After covering incest with Wrecks, LaBute kinda sorta returns to the subject with his two-hander about the aftermath of a one-night stand between Doug and Beth, twenty-somethings who tiptoe around each other the next morning until they finally confront an inescapable fact that will impact their decision to become a couple. For 80 minutes, they sift through their feelings, fears and personal histories, all to little avail because, in LaBute's hands, their story has all the urgency and excitement of watching the mirowave heat up one's leftovers.
Lame jokes about Doug's Star Wars t-shirt (which Beth wears after their night of sex) and Beth's annoying unseen roommate garner easy chuckles, but the psychology of two people unsure of where they stand in their relationship is bypassed for facile moments like Doug guiltily stopping Beth from going down on him, even though they just had a wild night of satisfying sex.
LaBute's facility with dialogue sounds, in its hemming and hawing, like twenty-somethings earnestly trying to break through their inarticulateness, while Amanda Seyfried and Thomas Sadoski give engaged and engaging performances. Leigh Silverman adroitly directs on Neil Patel's perfect apartment set, but Doug and Beth's morning-after predicament remains less than earth-shattering.
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| The cast of Permission (photo: Jenny Anderson) |
Permission emanates from the pen of Texan playwright Robert Askins, who wrote the Tony-nominated Hand to God. Askins undoubtedly knows the people about whom he writes, and he has a genuinely skewered perspective: but Hand to God trafficked in juvenile humor and Permission unfortunately follows suit.
Friends Eric and Zach and their wives Cynthia and Michelle are eating dinner at Zach's home: when Eric and Cynthia see Zach spanking Michelle for percevied indiscretions, they discover that CDD, Christian Domestic Discipline, is being practiced and start using it themselves. Eric is also interested in Jeanie, his cute student assistant at the local college where he is acting head of the Computer Science department, and soon finds himself juggling a willingly disciplined Cynthia, a reluctantly discplining Zach and a confused Jeanie, who believes she's joining a swinging marriage cult after her tryst with Eric.
As in Hand to God, Askins treats a valid comic subject in a trashy way; the earlier play copped cheap laughs from its foul-mouthed hand puppet, and Permission is no less risible. Rather than explore the mingling of religion, patriarchy, sexual pleasure and hypocrisy in a serious but amusing way, Askins again reverts to the lowest common denominator with glib jokes about things like gluten, kale, Facebook and Matlock reruns.
Director Thomas Kail plays into the frivolity by staging the play like a sitcom, letting the audience chuckle at rather than with these stick figures. Only Nicole Lowrance's performance shows she's aware that the play should have multiple layers: her Michelle is strong, smart, sexy and sympathetic. But for the most part, Elizabeth Reaser's Cynthia, Justin Bartha's Eric, Lucas Near-Verbrugghe's Zach and Talene Monahon's Jeanie approach caricature. Permission ends up lacking the courage of its convictions, preferring cheap laughs to stinging adult satire.
The Way We Get By
Second Stage Theatre, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
2st.com
Permission
Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher Street, New York, NY
mcctheatre.org
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