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NYC Theater Roundup: Audra McDonald as ‘Lady Day,’ Steven Soderbergh Directs ‘The Library,’ Harvey Fierstein's ‘Casa Valentina’
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 25 April 2014 20:04
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill
Written by Lanie Robertson; directed by Walter Bobbie
Previews began March 25, 2014; closes August 10
The Library
Written by Scott Z. Burns; directed by Steven Soderbergh
Previews began March 25, 2014; closes April 27
Casa Valentina
Written by Harvey Fierstein; directed by Joe Mantello
Previews began April 1, 2014; closes June 15
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| Audra McDonald as Billie Holliday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill (photo: Evgenia Eliseeva) |
Audra McDonald has already won five Tony Awards for her performances in the musicals Carousel, Ragtime and Porgy and Bess and the plays Master Class and A Raisin in the Sun—and she very well may win her sixth for the play-musical hybrid Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, in which she plays Billie Holliday performing one last time at a Philadelphia club in 1959, just months before her premature death at 54 from various alcohol and drug-related maladies.
Lanie Robertson’s play intersperses 15 of Holliday’s songs—including her best known numbers like “God Bless the Child” and “Strange Fruit”—with her onstage patter, comprising small talk with her musicians, joking among her nightclub audience and confessional asides as she slides further into a drink-induced haze that only her impassioned singing can overcome.
At first, it’s disorienting to hear McDonald speak and sing with Holliday’s characteristic—and easily caricatured—vocal inflections, but soon she locks into the character and turns a mere impression into a heartfelt interpretation of a deeply scarred and scared human being. Although McDonald’s illuminating presence dominates, pianist Shelton Becton and his fellow musicians are also splendid, and a tiny dog named Roxie plays Lady Day’s beloved pup Pepi.
Walter Bobbie directs sensitively on James Noone’s set, which unerringly recreates a nightclub atmosphere with some audience members at tables set up in front of the stage; unnecessary wall projections of people in Lady Day’s life, from her parents to jazz greats like Artie Shaw, at least don’t detract. Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill might be a clever stunt, but Audra McDonald and Billie Holliday make it an unforgettable evening.
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| Chloe Grace Moretz in The Library (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns and director Steven Soderbergh, collaborators on such straightforwardly effective movies likeContagion and Side Effects, join forces for Burns’ first play, The Library, for which Soderbergh also makes his theatrical directing debut.
Burns’ familiar drama depicts the chilling aftermath of a small town school shooting, in which Caitlin, a sophomore in the library with other students when the killer came in, was grievously wounded. Now being rehabilitated, she’s been accused of squealing on others to save her own life, telling the killer where students were hidden with a gun at her head which has made her a pariah at school and in town despite what she went through.
In 90 minutes, Burns’ play touches on several strands, like the religious mother of a dead student who realizes she can cash in monetarily on her daughter’s saintly response to evil; or Caitlin’s parents, who ask her to change her story so they can also receive money a survivors’ fund that’s been set up; and Caitlin herself, whose body heals as her mental state starts fracturing thanks to skepticism—and worse—from everyone else, from her parents and the police to her fellow students.
The Library plays like one of Burns’ streamlined movie scripts, with little nuance and obvious—if plausible—narrative twists and turns. The talented cast is headed by Chloe Grace Moretz, the phenomenal teen actress from Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Although Moretz is an appealing and intelligent presence, she always seems in control, even when Caitlin is breaking down mentally.
Soderbergh’s taut direction brilliantly utilizes Riccardo Hernandez’s stark set of tables and chairs and David Lander’s lighting that bathes the stage in deep reds, cold blues or blinding whites, providing a disturbingly clinical vision of Caitlin’s fraught post-traumatic journey that Burns’ play avoids dealing with.
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| Reed Birney (center) in Casa Valentina (photo: Matthew Murphy) |
Harvey Fierstein is no stranger to drag queens: he wrote the books for two hugely popular cross-dressing musicals, La cage aux Folles and Kinky Boots. So Casa Valentina, a play about straight men in 1962 who stay at a Catskills resort where they can dress and act as women in perfect harmony and tranquility, is the next logical step. It’s too bad, then, that Fierstein’s play is hijacked by his own preachiness, which forces obvious if unnecessary links between these men and gays of the same era and later.
During one weekend at the Chevalier d’Eon, a group of respectable, married men arrives, taken care of by the place’s owners: saintly Rita (Mare Winningham, always quietly triumphant) and Roger (the excellent Patrick Page), who also changes into his female alter ego Valentina. Roger/Valentina has invited transvestite activist Charlotte (a fantastically persuasive Reed Birney) to try and convince the other guests to join a sorority of cross-dressers which will—they hope—legitimize them in the eyes of the government and law enforcement.
The guests—nearly retired judge Amy, septuagenarian Terry, feisty and fresh Gloria, halting newcomer Miranda—must decide whether gaining security and safety is worth losing their hard-won privacy over. Fierstein underlines their plight to that of gay men in the past half-century, even having Charlotte make nasty comments about homosexuals that, with the benefit of hindsight, allows audience members to “tsk tsk” them: “We don’t hunt children, expose ourselves, or proselytize our practices. All activities of which the homosexual is guilty and to which society rightly objects.”
Fierstein morphs his play uneasily from the mildly amusing and touching comedy it begins as to a tragedy of sorts—that turns overly sincere and redundant in the second act—by way of a sinister blackmail plot about pornographic photos sent through the mail. Still, as staged by ace director Joe Mantello and enacted by a droll cast, Casa Valentina opens up a world to its audience few had known about.
Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill
Circle in the Square Theatre, 235 West 50th Street, New York, NY
ladydayonbroadway.com
The Library
Golden Theatre, 252 West 45th Street, New York, NY
publictheatre.org
Casa Valentina
Freidman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY
manhattantheaterclub.com
April '14 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 23 April 2014 04:12
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Alice
(First Run)
Surreal Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s thrilling 1988 take onAlice in Wonderland is crammed with his singular visual inventiveness, showcasing his genius for dazzling stop-motion images.
Although it might be too offbeat for children, it’s a must-see for anyone who ODed on Disney’s more sanitized version. Although the movie looks enticing on Blu-ray, First Run dropped the ball by omitting the original Czech audio and forcing the child-friendly English track on viewers. There are also no extras, unlike the British Film Institute release.
(PBS)
Our quintet of intrepid female code breakers—who cracked Nazi spy codes to turn the tide of WWII—return for more post-war London sleuthing in these two entertaining full-length features.
Although the plotting is only intermittently arresting, it’s the women themselves—played by Anna Maxwell Martin, Rachael Sterling, Hattie Morahan, Sophie Rundle and Julie Graham—that hold our interest throughout. The Blu-ray image looks solid if a little soft; extras include interviews.
Copperhead
(Warners)
A lesser-known Civil War conflict is featured in Ron Maxwell’s static, occasionally gripping study of men on opposite sides of Lincoln’s declaration of war against the Southern states: Copperheads (named after the snakes) were against this obviously “just” war.
Although a handsomely mounted account of an obscure bit of American history, the movie creeps along for many of its 120 minutes, often undermining its potential power with derivative direction and lackluster performances. The hi-def transfer is first-rate.
(Opus Arte)
Porgy and Bess
(Euroarts)
Benjamin Britten’s final opera, 1973’s Death in Venice, receives a musically accomplished if dramatically inert 2013 revival by director Deborah Warner in London for the composer’s birth centenary; John Graham-Hall is persuasive as Aschenbach, the dying writer.
In San Francisco Opera’s 2013 staging of the Gershwins’ immortal Porgy and Bess, Eric Owens and Laquita Mitchell are histrionically and vocally imposing in the iconic title roles, highlights being “Bess, You Is My Woman” and “I Loves You, Porgy.” Both Blu-ray look impressive and sound even better; Porgy’s extras are interviews.
The Invisible Woman
(Sony Classics)
Ralph Fiennes plays novelist Charles Dickens as a Victorian-era rock star: an incredibly popular writer and speaker, Dickens lives for the adoration of his (mostly female) fans, and—even though he’s contentedly married with ten children—he embarks on an affair with a tempestuous young teacher, played with gusto by Felicity Jones.
Although Fiennes’ direction tends toward the undistinguished, the lush physical production surrounding two meaty lead performances helps make this unexciting soap opera watchable. The Blu-ray’s visuals look superb; extras include Fiennes’ and Jones’ commentary, interviews and Toronto Film Festival press conference.
The Pawnbroker
(Olive Films)
In Sidney Lumet’s heavily symbolic but powerful 1965 character study of a Jewish concentration camp survivor struggling in his new life as a Harlem pawnbroker—as he deals with people as emotionally adrift as he—Rod Steiger gives an understated performance, surprising coming from an actor not known for subtlety.
But despite Lumet’s uneven directing that culminates in a forced series of false climaxes, Steiger creates a psychologically credible portrait. Boris Kaufman’s moody B&W photography retains its grittiness on Blu-ray.
Sorcerer
(Warners)
William Friedkin’s 1977 adventure has received a critical reappraisal as a lost classic, but it’s anything but: instead it’s a wrongheaded if technically accomplished remake of H.G. Clouzot’s classic The Wages of Fear (Friedkin even dedicates his film to Clouzot).
There are tension-filled sequences, especially with the truck on a bridge, but since the characters all remain ciphers, there’s no one to root for in this this two-hour slog through the jungle. Tangerine Dream’s electronic soundtrack is alternately effective and overdone, like the film itself. On Blu-ray, the movie looks stunning.
La Maison de la Radio
(Kino Lorber)
Nicholas Philibert’s latest fly-on-the-wall documentary follows the daily interactions of dozens of employees at Radio France, the state-run Gallic equivalent of the BBC or NPR.
Talk-show hosts, news readers, weather forecasters, sports announcers, singers and performers, technicians and people behind the scenes are seen informing, entertaining and giving the news to millions of listeners, and Philibert films it all in his inimitable way, showing the teaming mass of humanity inside the radio conglomerate’s recognizably circular headquarters in the heart of Paris.
Russia’s Open Book—Writing in the Age of Putin
(PBS)
Juliet Stevenson narrates this hour-long account of Russian authors surviving and even thriving despite the black marks on their reputations in Vladimir Putin’s supposedly democratic Russian regime.
Instead of criticizing their fearless leader outright, Russian’s Open Book allows writers from Anna Starobinets to Vladimir Sorokin to speak for themselves, both in interviews and in excerpts from their provocative books, read here by the show’s host, British actor Stephen Fry.
(Kino Lorber)
In Bill Siegel’s arresting documentary, the world’s most famous man—known as much for his brash mouth as his pummeling fists—is shown as a polarizing cultural and political figure: from changing his name to joining the Nation of Islam, Ali’s very public mistakes and successes outside the ring are as important as his boxing achievements.
Interviews with Ali’s brother, daughter and ex-wife are touching, while others like Louis Farrakhan come off as self-serving: but all paint a fuller portrait of a complicated man. Extras are four deleted scenes, audio commentaries and a mock trial by school students.
Wrong Cops
(IFC Midnight)
Writer-director Quentin Dupieux’s heavy-handed, ineffectual comedy about cops abusing their standing in the community—we see them sell drugs and force a woman to provide her phone number in the first few minutes alone—is the kind of unfunny spoof that might have the crew in stitches on the set, but does little for an audience.
Good performers like Agnes Bruckner and Roxane Mesquida are mercilessly wasted; when Marilyn Manson doesn’t even register onscreen, it’s hopeless. Lone extra is a Manson featurette.
Joyce Yang—Wild Dreams(Avie)
and Tchaikovsky (Bridge)
Exuberant pianist Joyce Yang demonstrates a prodigious keyboard talent on these discs. On Wild Dreams, her easy facility for a wide range of solo piano music from Robert Schumann to Bela Bartok is highlighted by her impassioned playing of two Sergei Rachmaninoff works and Paul Hindemith's deceptively difficult passages.
On the Tchaikovsky orchestral disc, Yang dispatches one of the concerto genre’s true warhorses by showcasing the composer’s generous lyricism. Conductor Alexander Lazarev and the Odense Symphony Orchestra provide solid support and give an appropriately stormy reading of the tone poem The Tempest.
Shani Diluka—Road 66
(Mirare)
Sri Lankan pianist Shani Diluka’s programming idea for this recital disc is to play various pieces by American composers as complements to Jack Kerouac’s fragmented writings.
That Kerouac’s work directly correlates with the music is questionable, but Diluka’s tremendously precise playing—particularly on unheralded gems like Copland’s Piano Blues No. 1, Samuel Barber’s Pas de Deux and even Philip Glass's Etude No. 9—makes the program secondary to the glorious musicmaking. She’s also joined by soprano Natalie Dessay for the bittersweet finale: Cole Porter’s “What is This Thing Is Love?"
Marco Bellocchio Retrospective @ MOMA
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 21 April 2014 13:34
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Marco Bellocchio: A Retrospective
April 16–May 7, 2014
Museum of Modern Art
Italian director Marco Bellocchio, now 74, has been making highly charged dramas that take the social, moral and political pulse of his native country for nearly 50 years, and shows no signs of slowing down. Although Bellocchio remains highly respected on the international festival circuit—three of his recent films were shown at the New York Film Festival in 2002, 2003 and 2009—he has fallen prey to that strangely mysterious disease that seems to afflict veteran directors considered past their prime in that it’s no longer a given that his films will distributed or released on DVD and Blu-ray.
Luckily for us, some of Bellocchio’s most trenchant films are screening at the Museum of Modern Art through May 6. AlthoughMarco Bellocchio: A Retrospective is sadly incomplete, comprising only 18 of some 40 features, it does include some of his most important works, from his still-remarkable debut, 1965’s Fists in the Pocket, and the even more assured follow-up, 1967’s China is Near, to his latest provocative feature. 2012’s Dormant Beauty, an intelligent and thought-provoking exploration of Italy’s right to life debate (Terri Schiavo was the U.S. equivalent), informs the personal, professional and religious lives of several characters, played splendidly by Isabelle Huppert, Toni Servillo, Maya Sansa, Alba Rohrwacher and the director’s son Pier Giorgio.
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| Maya Sansa in Dormant Beauty (photo: Francesca Fago) |
Accompanying the MOMA retro is a gorgeous hardcover book about Bellocchio. Morality and Beauty, edited by Italian cinema scholar Sergio Toffetti, contains essays and appreciations by critics, collaborators, actors and actresses and other directors about Bellochio’s lengthy cinematic career. The book itself is worth it not only for its insights into his artistry but also for its presentation: there are rare stills from many films, a complete filmography, and even Bellocchio’s own paintings and storyboards for several films. Morality and Beauty is an essential volume for anyone with an interest in one of our greatest filmmakers.
In Bellocchio’s films, from Fists to Dormant Beauty, there are no innocent bystanders: after his first two features, the director himself joined the radical Communist Union in 1968, and the characters populating his dramas are equally committed individuals, in every sense of the word. Bellocchio keeps returning to variations on his themes of obsessive love affairs or relationships often based on abuses of power. As often as he tackles the incendiary worlds of political, economic and social status—which, in these films, are one and the same—Bellocchio often pushes the envelope even further. 1990’s The Conviction is the movie David Mamet’s Oleanna wishes it were: a professor hides from a young woman he was intimate with in a locked museum overnight the fact that he had the keys all along. Angered, she accuses him of raping her; Bellocchio raises pertinent—and unsettling—questions that remain difficult to answer.Bellocchio’s most recent films are among his most refined, even as they unfold as hysterically fever-pitched melodramas hinging on notions of faith, idealism and mortality. My Mother’s Smile (2002) takes on the Roman Catholic Church in the form of an atheistic artist horrified to find his deceased mother on the fast track to canonization. Bellocchio shows no mercy depicting a church more concerned with public relations than saving souls.
Good Morning, Night (2003) is a dreamlike retelling of the 1975 kidnapping of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, told from the point of view of terrorist group’s lone woman. Bellocchio, who expertly shows how even radical causes can become domesticated, saturates his film with hallucinatory colors which match the strains of Pink Floyd’s atmospheric music.
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| Marco Bellocchio on the set of Vincere (photo: Daniele Musso) |
2009’s Vincere, another stunning re-examination of Italian history, tells the little-known true story of Ida Dalser, Mussolini’s beautiful, intelligent lover who bore him a son before he became the fascist leader of Italy—whereupon both she and the boy were erased from Il Duce’s life and, consequently, history itself. Intense, gregarious, and thought-provoking from its opening credits, Vincere finds Bellocchio in his most freely expressionist mode, intercutting actual newsreel footage of Mussolini alongside this riveting tale of a real-life heroine fighting against all odds for her and her son’s lives.
Vincere’s frequent, jarring and extreme tonal shifts are reminiscent of Lina Wertmuller’s audacious Seven Beauties (1976), a similarly go-for-baroque masterpiece. Like Seven Beauties, which was anchored by Giancarlo Giannini’s superlative performance, Vincere works so marvelously because Giovanna Mezzogiorno leads us through Ida’s tragic tale. This fabulously expressive actress—whose face is illuminated by the most dazzling pair of hazel eyes in cinema—is the prime focus of Bellocchio’s camera, and her brave, emotionally naked piece of acting is the ultimate collaboration with Italy’s most fearless and fiery filmmaker.
Marco Bellocchio: A Retrospective
MOMA, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY
moma.org
Broadway Theater Roundup—‘The Realistic Joneses’ and ‘Mothers and Sons’
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 17 April 2014 14:01
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Realistic Joneses
Written by Will Eno; directed by Sam Gold
Previews began March l3, 2014; opened April 6
Mothers and Sons
Written by Terrence McNally; directed by Sheryl Kaller
Previews began February 23, 2014; opened March 24
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| Letts and Tomei in The Realistic Joneses (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Will Eno’s brand of absurdism is an acquired taste. His promising short works nod to Beckett and Albee, but his full-length playsMiddletown, Thom Pain and The Realistic Joneses are stretched unbearably thin. Although some find profundity and insight in his work, that seems like wishful thinking: his cascading lines of dialogue, instead of exploding into meaning, too often fizzle into meaninglessness.
The Realistic Joneses introduces two couples, both improbably named Jones, which are neighbors in a bucolic mountain area. Stable long-timers Jennifer and Bob welcome the slightly daffy newcomers John and Pony; at the start, John’s non-sequiturs and inappropriate outbursts are mocked by an incredulous Bob, whose wife Jennifer is the epitome of levelheadedness, especially when compared to the airheaded Pony.
Soon, however, John insinuates himself, in a rather unlikely fashion, into Jennifer’s good graces, while—even more ludicrously—Bob and Pony begin an affair. That’s about the extent of the plot: the play has been constructed as a series of blackouts featuring two, three or all four Joneses. And Eno’s epigrammatic dialogue repeatedly falls flat, whether it concerns a dead squirrel in the backyard, a fictional disease both men suffer from or even John mocking the dullness of Bob’s name, to which Jennifer quickly shoots back a riposte about dyslexics liking it—a quip more clever than funny.
By the time we reach the would-be deep finale showing the Jones quartet (the title’s “realistic” is another Eno joke) idly chatting, Eno’s shallow exploration of humanity has very little of import to impart. On David Zinn’s aptly cluttered set, director Sam Gold artfully paces this disjointed sitcom, while the cast—Toni Collette (Jennifer), Michael C. Hall (John), Marisa Tomei (Pony) and especially Tracy Letts (Bob)—works hard, and at times effectively, to make it all seem more pointed than pointless.
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| Weller and Daly in Mothers and Sons (photo: Joan Marcus) |
That Mothers and Sons is one of Terrence McNally’s most personal plays is obvious, dealing as it does with the AIDS crisis, gay marriage and clueless parents of homosexuals; its strengths and weaknesses stem directly from wearing its heart on its sleeve.
McNally’s schematic set-up—while visiting her long-dead son Andre’s lover Cal on the Upper West Side to get some closure, grand dame Katharine meets Cal’s husband Will and their adopted young son Bud—is merely an excuse for him to pontificate about subjects still near to his heart and own life. The no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners Katharine barks nastily at Cal upon her arrival, hiding her own fear and anger over her son’s death from AIDS 20 years earlier: her outbursts, while sometimes funny, are nearly always vitriolic. And McNally stacks his dramatic deck by making Cal, Will and Bud too good to be true—especially young Bud, a sentimental figure of vindication and love who singlehandedly transforms Katharine from nasty old lady to caring “grandmother.”
Mothers and Sons is preachy and didactic, but McNally doesn’t care; he wants to emphasize to audiences that the AIDS era was recent history that shouldn’t be repeated and that the current battle for gay equality is a clear next step for a cultured society. True, there are cheap shots at Dallas and Port Chester, and Katharine herself is self-contradictory: if she grew up in a NYC suburb, why was/is she so obtuse about her gay son? It’s obviously so that McNally can have it both ways, letting Katharine simultaneously raging against right-wing Texan rubes and be ignorant of her son’s sexuality, insisting that it was New York that turned him gay when he moved there at age 18.
Whatever its faults, McNally’s topical play has well-earned laughs and tears. Sheryl Kaller directs persuasively on John Lee Beatty’s gorgeous set—who wouldn’t want to live in this well-appointed apartment that overlooks Central Park?—and the acting quartet is beyond reproach. Grayson Taylor’s Bud is as adorable as written, Bobby Steggert ensures Will’s niceness doesn’t equal blandness, and Frederick Weller makes a strong, full-blooded character out of the stick figure of Cal.
Then there’s Tyne Daly, who makes Katharine as big a diva prowling the stage as the actress was as Maria Callas in McNally’s Master Class. Daly gives her lines more bite, an added dollop of bitterness tinged with sadness, that gives Katharine an extra dimension not found in the script. If the play itself is a bumpy, manipulative ride, at least a master navigator is at the controls.
The Realistic Joneses
Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45th Street, New York, NY
therealisticjoneses.com
Mothers and Sons
Golden Theatre, 252 West 45th Street, New York, NY
mothersandsonsbroadway.com
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