In-Theater Releases of the Week 

In the slow-burn follow-up to his Oscar-winning, nearly three-hour Drive My Car, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has created a mythic journey into the ongoing—and possibly eternal—tug of war between human civilization and the natural world. When a clueless entrepreneur plans to turn an unspoiled rural village into a new “glamping” site for the affluent, the local citizenry fights back in a carefully calibrated town meeting—then Hana, the young daughter of easygoing widower Takumi (our erstwhile protagonist), goes missing.

 

 

The film has its share of seeming longueurs that are actually part of the director’s scheme (Hamaguchi rarely goes where he think he will), and the final moments of this melodrama-cum-environmental plea-cum existential horror film are as confoundingly powerful as anything he’s ever done.

 

 

 

Slow 

When dancer Elena and sign-language interpreter Dovydas meet, they are instantly attracted to each other, then Dovydas admits that he is asexual, with no interest in physical intimacy. How this revelation affects their relationship is at the heart of Marija Kavtaradze’s intimate character study.

 

 

Despite the bumpiness of the narrative, Kavtaradze has a real ability of homing in on this couple’s psychology, and that—coupled with persuasive performances by Kęstutis Cicėnas (Dovydas) and especially Greta Grinevičiūtė, who creates in Elena a character of intensity and lived-in truthfulness—makes this worth watching.

 

 

 

In-Theater/Streaming Release of the Week 

She was best known for being the girlfriend of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones followed by the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards—and the muse who inspired the songs “Gimme Shelter” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”—but directors Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill want to show Anita Pallenberg as much more. She was a model and actress who had a life of her own after splitting with Richards in 1980. Included are numerous interviews with Pallenberg’s children, Richards, and others who knew her (she died in 2017), along with priceless archival video, audio and photographs, and even excerpts from her unpublished autobiography narrated by Scarlett Johansson.

 

 

Yet the directors hedge their bets by only devoting the last 15 minutes of a 110-minute running time to Pallenberg’s post-Richards life and career, even dragging in model Kate Moss to speak on her behalf. It probably wasn’t intended that way, but it comes off as special pleading for a woman who didn’t need—or want—it. 

 

 

 

4K Releases of the Week

When Steven Soderbergh got together with George Clooney, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac (RIP), Brad Pitt, et al, for a trio of supremely entertaining, infectious heist movies, it was the last word in ultra-cool Hollywood glamor—Ocean’s Eleven (2001) is the best of the lot, but both Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) are excellent time-wasters as well, slickly made and directed by Soderbergh with generosity for his many stars on display.

 

 

All three films look perfectly coiffed on UHD; extras include commentaries on all three films, making-ofs and other on-set featurettes as well as deleted scenes for Twelve and Thirteen.

 

 

 

Peter Gabriel Live in London—Back to Front 

Like most classic rockers, Peter Gabriel decided that a gimmick for his 2013 tour would draw audiences, so he played his breakthrough 1986 album So in its entirety in order—or, at least, in the order Gabriel wanted to play it. He stuck “In Your Eyes,” side two’s lead track, at the end, so the concert would finish with a rousing audience participation number rather than the offbeat “This Is the Picture.”

 

 

Filmed in London, Gabriel and his crack band—the same musicians he toured with in ’86, when I saw him twice—tear through the nine So tunes and a dozen other Gabriel classics with often wild abandon; the show climaxes with the always emotional encore “Biko.” The 4K image looks incredibly sharp, and the surround sound is even better; lone extra is an interview with Gabriel and tour director Rob Sinclair.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s 1887 opera has never held the stage as memorably as his masterpiece Eugene Onegin or the flawed but fascinating Queen of Spades, although this 2022 Frankfurt production by director Vasily Berkhatov makes a credible attempt to wrestle with this riveting but unwieldy tragic romance, updated from 15th-century Tsarist Russia to modern times.

 

 

Although the music is often beautiful, there are stretches when it’s not—still, this is an impressive musical performance with Valentin Uryupin conducting the orchestra and chorus master Tilman Michael leading the chorus. Canadian baritone Iain MacNeil is a tower of strength as antagonist Prince Nikita while Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian makes a gorgeous-voiced heroine Nastasya. The hi-def video and audio are unbeatable. 

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week 

John Adams’ operas have often taken the pulse of 20th century history, from Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer to Doctor Atomic (which preceded—and bettered—Christopher Nolan’s overrated Oppenheimer by more than a decade). His most recent opera—premiered in 2017 and extensively revised in 2019 and now, for this 2023 concert performance—goes back another century, to the California of the 1850s gold rush. The only similarities to Puccini’s own The Girl of the Golden West are the title and setting; otherwise, Adams and librettist Peter Sellars strike out in different territory, like miners panning for gold in a new stream.

 

 

This forceful recording reunites much of the original cast with Adams conducting the LA Phil and the Los Angeles Master Chorale in a riveting performance of a richly textured if occasionally meandering work. The vocal soloists, led by Julia Bullock, Davóne Tines, Paul Appleby, Daniela Mack and Ryan McKinny, are unimprovable, as is the magisterial chorus. If it’s ultimately not as gripping as it could be, perhaps a future filmed performance will give it its due as music-theater, not simply a concert version.

 

Set to 27 songs by Sting—with the Police and from his solo career—Message in a Bottle is a story of the global refugee crisis told through the mesmerizing movement of choreographer Kate Prince’s brilliant dance company, ZooNation. Although it does get cheesy entwining the music and the dancers, as jukebox shows go, it’s much closer to Twyla Tharp’s take on the Billy Joel catalog, Movin’ Out, than to something like the Abba megahit, Mamma Mia.

 

In an unnamed desert country (hence the unsurprising opener, “Desert Rose,” with its North African feel), a family of five—father, mother, two sons and a daughter—becomes separated when a civil war throws the entire region into turmoil. Happy events like the marriage of one son are soon overtaken by awful 21st-century realities: abuse, trafficking, displacement, death. Prince and dramaturg Lolita Chakrabarti have fashioned a narrative of sorts from which to hang Sting’s words and music, which, with a few exceptions, have been extensively rearranged and rerecorded (with Sting’s and others’ solo and ensemble voices).

 

As the songs and the tale unfold, musical motifs from “Fields of Gold” and “Brand New Day” hover over the proceedings, hinting at the happy ending to come. There are times when the relationship of Sting’s lyrics to what’s happening onstage is tenuous—several men sexually abuse a young woman to “Don’t Stand so Close to Me,” which narrates a completely different kind of inappropriate relationship—or, conversely, too on the nose—the second act opens in jail as a chorus intones “Free, free, set them free” and, later on, the married son discovers his bride, forcibly separated from him, works in a brothel, so on comes “Roxanne.” (When she rejects him, we get “So Lonely,” of course.)

 

But the marriage of music and movement is spot on in several spots, notably in the show’s most affecting number, a tender pas de deux between the younger son (Deavion Brown) and the man (Harrison Dowzell) he’s fallen in love with, set to one of Sting’s loveliest songs, “Shape of My Heart.”

 

Whatever one thinks of the way Prince and her excellent music supervisor and arranger Alex Lacamoire have manipulated Sting’s tunes to fit into the contrived narrative—sometimes it’s a disservice to the songs and at others it’s a disservice to the story—the breathtaking dancing of Prince’s company, which specializes in effortlessly combining contemporary and hip-hop styles, is beyond reproach. Although the entire ZooNation is magnificent in its athleticism—the leaps, the flips, the freestyling, even the break dancing—the main dancers (as the children) are particularly dazzling.

 

Brown, Natasha Gooden and Lukas McFarlane convey as much with simple gestures as they do in the more athletic movements (too often, the stage is filled with busyness just for its sake). At those moments, the music and the stunning visuals—Anna Fleischle’s costumes, Ben Stones’ sets, Natasha Chivers’ lighting and Andrezjh Goulding’s projections—take over. 

 

But however bumpy the journey, when the final healing strains of “They Dance Alone” arrive, Message in a Bottle delivers its message.

 

 

It was inevitable that Alicia Keys’ semiautobiographical musical would jump from downtown to uptown—now that it’s on Broadway, it’s playing right near the neighborhood in which it’s set. Hell’s Kitchen comprises songs Keys had already written, recorded and turned into hits as well as new songs created specifically for the show. It introduces a rebellious 17-year-old, Ali (short for Alicia), who lives with her harried single mom in a high-rise apartment building a few blocks from the Schubert Theatre, where the show is now playing: Ali pines for a romance with an older street drummer and begins a burgeoning musical career that might give her a way out of a neighborhood she considers stifling. 

 

Hell’s Kitchen is your garden-variety generation-gap musical comedy-drama, as Ali’s mom—whose name is, no lie, Jersey—tries to protect Ali from the temptations Jersey herself fell prey to as a teenager, finding herself pregnant with Ali while she was too young and immature to handle it. Ali’s dad is a musician named Davis (the fiery Brandon Victor Dixon) who’s charming but extremely unreliable. Of course, Ali fights back at every turn, complaining that whatever her mom wants or says are simply unfair restrictions. 

 

Fortuitously, one day while seething over something her mom is making her do (or not do), Ali wanders into her building’s music room—seemingly for the first time, which is kind of strange in this context—and immediately becomes spellbound by wise old Miss Liza Jane (the scene-stealing and vocally formidable Kecia Lewis), who becomes a sort of surrogate mother to her, teaching her to play the piano along with other needed life lessons. 

 

Despite the material’s shopworn quality, which has been accentuated on the larger Broadway stage, Hell’s Kitchen is always energetic and nearly as often exuberant, thanks to Keys’ rhythmically propulsive songs, which include those (sort of) showstoppers she has already written—and had huge hits with: a smart reconceiving of “Girl on Fire” is perfectly placed near the end of act one, and (no surprise) “Empire State of Mind” is the show’s big finale, even if, in this context, it’s somewhat anticlimactic. A song that wasn’t in the original Public Theater incarnation, “Kaleidoscope,” has been shoehorned into the middle of the first act, neither hindering nor improving its surroundings.

 

Since everything is bigger in the move to Broadway, it’s to director Michael Grief’s credit that his staging retains an impeccable proportion of the visual and the dramatic, thanks to Robert Brill’s multi-tier, multi-use fire-escape sets, Peter Nigrini’s clever projections of various areas of Manhattan and Natasha Katz’s always inventive lighting. As ever, Camille A. Brown’s dazzling choreography both complements and roars past Keys’ catchy tunes.

 

But Hell’s Kitchen is, ultimately, a vehicle for two remarkable leads. Although Maleah Joi Moon (Ali)—who made a stupendous professional debut when the show premiered at the Public—was unfortunately out the night I saw the show on Broadway, her understudy Gianna Harris was a more than capable singer, actress and especially dancer. 

 

But the center of the show—which she wasn’t in the original incarnation—is Ali’s mom, Jersey, and Shoshana Bean runs with it, not only acting the hell out of the standard role of the difficult but loving mom but also lending her powerhouse voice to several songs. If Hell’s Kitchen settles in for a long Broadway run, it will be interesting to see who may replace Bean as Jersey—Idina Menzel? Sutton Foster? Sierra Boggess? In the meantime, run to the Schubert Theatre to see Shoshana Bean at the top of her game.