Theater Review: "Flight" - A Staged Reading

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 19 May 2011 05:00

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

Written by Jacqueline Wolf-Enrione
Directed by Peter Von Berg
Read by Tony Newfield, Elizabeth Keefe, Stephen Innocenzi, Michael Citriniti, Leslie Alexander, Sherry Skinker

Interweaving research, news history, fact-based hypotheses and conjecture, playwright Jackie Wolf-Enrione has created an entertaining, multivariate drama with great drafts of adventure, suspense, romance -- even dawning horror -- from the inexplicable explosion of an American aircraft in the mid-1990s. Flight 800 "exploded" for no discernible reason.

While opinions vary as to causology, the playwright has stitched together a plausible theoretical rationale that suggests malfeasance by government -- a reasonable option -- or foreign malign influence, an even more likely scenario.

Pilot error? Testing misadventure? Secret government experiments? Foreign influence? Terror misfire? Deliberate missile strike? We are taken along the ride of the doughty protagonist-reporter as she penetrates the baffles and barriers erected to keep John Q Public from discovering which of these caused the explosion.

Like a charged lift from a Tom Clancy novel, Wolf-Enrione peoples her script with a determined, incredibly persistent investigative journalist, sundry government functionaries, a host of witnesses and electrifying ‘ordinary people’ (pained parents, mourning children) who are, fortunately for audiences, cleverer and more articulate than average folks are. The script is a constant delight, witty repartée alternating with probing dialogue that advances the process of unpacking what looks to be a gigantic cover-up.

Where the artist picks up from the factual evidences available (all too fleetingly to the public-at-large), and adds her own strong military and journalistic suppositions, is aligned with the kind of story-making of All the President’s Men (1976), The Insider (1999) and similar ratiocinative entrées.

Wolf’s familiarity with military jargon, technical explosives and weaponry is impressive, handled with terse deftness by her dramatis personae, many of whom -- like Leon Panetta and others from that era to this -- are real government appointees of the past through to the present.

She also serves up a slim, useful romance to swing the audience acclimated to love pairings into narratives of this type -- first, realms of buddy commitment, and then love. But the focus is scarcely deflected beyond the emerging themes of whitewashing and cover-up on a dark, uncomfortably splashy level.

Ironically, with such tales becoming daily fodder, SEALS downing the terror mastermind in Abbottabad, and Christian ministers predicting the end of the world within the month from unpremeditated end-of-the-world "earthquakes," Wolf-Enrione is not bandying the fanciful or rhetorical.

We are quite likely being served similar unreconstructed schemes and ploys on a daily basis, the which might emerge into ‛transparency‛ only a decade or more hence. Or maybe never.

Wolf-Enrione has crafted a provocative, plausible and nagging theoretical device that reminds us never to sit back and just nod our heads in bovine acquiescence to events that strike us as peculiar, illogical, irrational or possibly dangerous. Even if some government flack mumbles on a stack of affidavits what he thinks we are liable to accept.

The scaffolding Wolf-Enrione builds upon, while not yet in its ultimate crystallization, is all too real. It is up to the viewer to discern and decide what he or she can see beyond the bureaucratic persiflage that cloaks so much of what citizens are perhaps entitled to.

Marion DS Dreyfus
©2011

Theater Review: The New Musical "Baby It's You!"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 18 May 2011 10:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

 Baby It’s You!
Book by Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott
Choreographed by Birgitte Mutrux
Directed by Floyd Mutrux and Sheldon Epps
Starring Beth Leavel, Allan Louis, Geno Henderson, Erica Ash, Kelli Barrett, Kyra DaCosta, Erica Dorfler, JahI A. Kearse, Barry Pearl, Christina Sajous, Crystal Starr, Brandon Uranowitz

As jukebox musicals go, Baby It’s You! is closer to Jersey Boys than Mamma Mia -- maybe not in quality, but in its use of music to tell a true story rather than a fabricated soap opera.

The early ‘60s hit-making girl group the Shirelles’ (Erica Ash, Kyra Da Costa, Crystal Starr and Christina Sajous) songs form the skeleton of this stage bio of Florence Greenberg (Beth Leavel), a typical Jewish housewife from Passaic, New Jersey who became the quartet’s manager and steered them to short-lived success.

Greenberg’s story -- which touches on always-pertinent topics like music biz racism and sexism, even if they’re simply name-checked without delving too deeply before returning to the hit parade -- personalizes Baby It’s You! in a way that jazzes up creator/co-director Floyd Mutrux’s otherwise rote "band history" comedy-drama, whose 2-½ hour running time is dominated by a slog through several years of pop history before the Beatles invaded America and changed everything in 1964.

Florence deals with her increasingly fractious (and melodramatic) home life: nagging husband Bernie (Barry Pearl) believes her music "hobby" is just a phase, their blind son Stanley (Brandon Uranowitz) writes his own minor hit songs, and her daughter Mary Jane (Kelli Barrett) -- who discovered the Shirelles in high school -- is put off by the fact that Florence is more of a mother  to those four young women than to her.

Then there are the issues she faces on the business side: as the lone female, she learns the hard way that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, while her love affair with Luther Dixon (Allan Louis), the black songwriter who becomes her record-label partner, is frowned upon by all parties, personal and professional.

But Baby It’s You! doesn’t trust Florence’s story alone to keep interest, so Mutrux and Colin Escott’s choppy book provides a narrator, a DJ named Jocko (Geno Henderson), who explains things and checks off what was popular on TV and at the movies for certain years (1960 Best Picture Oscar, The Apartment; Best Actress, Liz Taylor).

The first act moves quickly as we get caught up in Florence’s liberation and the Shirelles’ rise to fame. The second act, conversely, is padded by so many song interludes (performances by Lesley Gore, Dionne Warwick, Gene Chandler and Kingsman) that the crumbling of Florence’s marriage, her relationship with Luther and the Shirelles’ career all seem like afterthoughts.

But the audience doesn’t care: they came to hear dozens of the hits of yesteryear, and they get them. Shirelles’ hits like "Dedicated to the One I Love," "Soldier Boy" and the Bert Bacharach-Hal David title song preside, but there are also Dionne Warwick’s "Don’t Make Me Over" and "Walk on By," and others like "Since I Don’t Have You," "Duke of Earl" and "Louie Louie."

The Shirelles’ biggest hit, the Carole King-penned Number One smash "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," is not in the show, apparently because King may create her own musical someday.

An ace onstage band knocks out these and other tunes, and the performers have a blast belting them. Erica Ash, Kyra Da Costa, Crystal Starr and Christina Sajous are a vocally formidable quartet as the Shirelles, with Ash doing additional good work as Dionne Warwick. Henderson and Louis make memorable music as Jocko and Luther, respectively.

The always-amazing Kelli Barrett, who’s been treated badly by Broadway (she was delightful in the otherwise forgettable Rock of Ages off-Broadway, but was not in it when it transferred), gets only a few song showcases as (mostly) Mary Jane and (once) Lesley Gore, but she stops the show each time.

Tony-nominated Beth Leavel grabs the part of Florence by the throat and, with a powerhouse voice and charismatic stage presence, transforms a caricature into an indelible portrait of a Jersey housewife finding herself in the Big Apple.

Baby It’s You!
Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th Street
New York City
212-239-6200
babyitsyouonbroadway.com
Opened April 27, 2011; closes September 4, 2011

For more by Kevin Filipski, go to The Flip Side blog at http://flipsidereviews.blogspot.com/

Cinefantastique Spotlight: Priest

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 16 May 2011 12:35

Written by Daniel Persons

The post-apocalyptic future, what could be more fun? Well, puppies, stick ball, and watching Donald Trump eat a bug, amongst other things. Nevertheless, the producers of Priest are hoping you're jazzed to see a ravaged world in which the war between humanity and blind, sluglike creatures called vampires has reached a stalemate, and Paul Bettany's taciturn, neck-biter-hunting priest threatens to disrupt the peace by chasing after his kidnapped niece. Is a movie that blends Blade Runner with The Searchers and throws in a despicable Karl Urban -- far, far from the U.S.S. Enterprise -- and a toothsome Maggie Q for good measure ready to take its place in the pantheon of top-notch action films, or is it just Jonah Hex tricked out with concrete bunkers and nitro-enhanced motorcycles? Join Cinefantastique Online's Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons as they discuss the merits and demerits.

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