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Film and the Arts
Theatre Review: American Idiot
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 04:14
- Written by Lucy Komisar
American Idiot
Book by Billie Joe Armstrong & Michael Mayer
Music by Green Day
Lyrics by Billie Joe Armstrong
Directed by Michael Mayer
Sets by Christine Jones
Costumes by Andrea Lauer
Starring Van Hughes, David Larsen, Justin Guarini, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Libby Winters, Jeanna de Waal, P.J. Griffith, Joshua Henry
American Idiot plumbs angst among youths with no politics or vision
This vibrant rock production about youthful rebellion in the face of a fraudulent society is in the tradition of Hair. But it’s not Hair with the memorable tunes that we still remember decades later. It’s more like MTV: fast, often driving, and the kind of hard rock of the 28 Green Day tunes that doesn’t much distinguish it from anything else of that genre.
The protagonists are beer-drinking kids from 18 to their 20s. A U.S. flag hangs upside down. North Korea has successfully detonated a nuclear weapon. There’s a video of the second Bush. The kids sing/shout: "We are the kids of war and peace/ From Anaheim to the Middle East" and "Let’s start a war shall we." "I’m not part of a redneck agenda," declares one.
They rage against lies and consumerism. But the lyrics reflect free-floating political angst, though not much politics. These working class kids are self-destructive or destroyed.
A youth seduced by drugs, head shaved, body tattooed, asks, "Do you know the enemy?" The enemy is partly themselves. One tries to hold up a convenience store, then admits his mom ignored him. A guy wears a big cod piece; women are glittery cover art. Lives diverge. One couple has a baby, another takes heroin.
Converging with Hair – we have bloody wars every few decades, don’t we? — one of the youths becomes an army officer with iconic reflecting glasses. We hear the sound of artillery, of troops in battle. Then the inevitable grievously wounded soldier arrives.
There’s also a generational thing about diminished attention span, melody replaced by sensory din, the audio cacophony of rock and the visual cacophony of modern technology: the stage is filled with pulsating video screens ranged along the backdrop and hanging from the rafters.
I wish I’d understood all the lyrics, which listeners of a certain age perhaps imbibe, but which is lost on people who can’t absorb the screeching slurred words. Nonetheless, the words take second place to the stunning visuals and staging. Perhaps another sign of the times.
In fact, the most innovative part of the play is the set by Christine Jones and staging by director Michael Mayer -- except for some hokey production touches, such as a bad imitation of Andrew Lloyd Weber: the hero and a woman fly through the air.
American Idiot
St. James Theatre
246 West 44th Street
New York, NY
212-239-6200
Opened April 20, 2010; closes April 24, 2011.
For more by Lucy Komisar, visit thekomisarscoop.com.
Film Review: Jaglom's Queen of the Lot Now Playing
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 21 March 2011 10:00
- Written by James Van Maanen
Queen of the Lot
Written and Directed by Henry Jaglom
Starring Tanna Frederick, Christopher Rydell, Noah Wyle, Jack Heller, Kathryn Grant, Mary Crosby
If you're a Henry Jaglom fan, you won't want to miss his latest attempt to turn today's Hollywood into the glitter capital of yore.
It seems that Jaglom would like to create some of that old-fashioned glamour that Hollywood used to hand us by the mile -- the mansions, the swimming pools, the egos, the drama -- but he wants to manage this sweetly and affectionately.
The filmmaker doesn't really do satire; he's generally too kind for that. A scene will seem to be making fun of the people on view -- then suddenly, the filmmaker starts identifying with them and becoming one with their foibles and needs. You don't get real satire or wit from this sort of thing, but you do get something else that can be appealing and dear.
Theater Review: "Arcadia" - Unstoppable Stoppard
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 19 March 2011 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Arcadia
Written by Tom Stoppard
Directed by David Leveaux
Starring Margaret Colin, Billy Crudup, Raúl Esparza, Grace Gummer, Byron Jennings, Bel Powley, Tom Riley, Noah Robbins, Lia Williams
Along with The Real Thing, Arcadia may be the closest to an audience pleaser that Tom Stoppard has written.
That’s not to say he’s slumming; on the contrary, the famously erudite playwright has stuffed Arcadia full of playful puns, historical and literary allusions, and discussions on topics as wide-ranging as chaos theory, landscape architecture and heat death of the universe. But the context — trying to find order in chaos, whether in the arts or sciences or romantic relationships — makes Arcadia among the least arcane of Stoppard’s works.
Theatre Review: Importance of Being Earnest
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 16 March 2011 05:00
- Written by Lucy Komisar
The Importance of Being Earnest
Written by Oscar Wilde
Directed by Brian Bedford
Sets and Costumes by Desmond Heeley
Starring Brian Bedford, Sara Topham, Dana Ivey, Charlotte Parry, David Furr, Santino Fontana, Paxton Whitehead
Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest delightfully skewers British upper classes
The genius of Oscar Wilde’s skewering of the British upper classes circa 1895 is that his satire is rather gentle, even affectionate, but his pointed steel neatly pierces the targets. In his deft and delightful The Importance of Being Earnest, he manages to get a few licks in at the literary establishment as well. All is done with enormous wit and panache, and not a trace of meanness.
In the world that Wilde describes, members of the upper classes are useless, though some have wrong-headed convictions and other are merely frivolous. Even Lady B seems a Gorgon, but not necessarily an evil one. Theirs is world where people go to dinner and tea and back and forth between townhouses with servants and country estates with servants.
Where pedigree is all, what could be more distressing to Lady Bracknell than a suitor for her daughter Gwendolen (Sara Topham), who appears to have none? Worthing (David Furr) not only doesn’t have appropriate parents, but as an infant was left in a leather satchel in the Victoria Station cloakroom. The satchel was given by mistake to a rich country gentleman, Thomas Cardew, who adopted the foundling and named him Worthing because the man had a ticket to Worthing in his pocket. And then there’s his first name, on which hangs a long joke of the play.
Worthing has been brought up in privilege, endowed with class values. He is a traditional, serious, intense man committed to the social system, including marriage.
Not so his pal, Lady Bracknell’s nephew, the buffoonish Algernon Moncrieff (Santino Fontana), who comes with a pedigree and insists that nobody of their class works.
Gwendolen ridicules convention by making Worthing go down on one knee to propose. The plot thickens because both men practice deception -- Worthing to get away from the Shropshire country estate where he lives with his ward, Cecily (Charlotte Parry), the granddaughter of his benefactor; and Algie to escape from town.
At the estate, we see how stultifying social rules also afflict the lower middle classes. Miss Prism (Dana Ivey), Cecily’s governess, is as stolid as Lady B and as tightly tied by propriety. But her infatuation with the Rector (Paxton Whitehead) lights a spark that makes her seem about to burst with suppressed desire.
From a critic of the upper classes, Wilde moves to a fonder spoof of the fanciful absurdities of romance. Cecily, for example, writes everything in her diary, including fantasized engagement letters.
Wilde spices the script with wonderful literary digs and bons mots. Algernon tells Worthing, "Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers."
The Rector notes that he has preached his sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness as a charity talk on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of Discontentment among the Upper Classes.
We learn from Lady B that the university extension service is sponsoring a lecture on "The Influence of a Permanent Income on Thought."
The production owes much to the flawless direction and acting of Brian Bedford. He is powerful in his portrayal of the dominating matriarch Lady Bracknell, the epitome of the hypocrisy and shallowness of British aristocrats that the Irishman Wilde found insufferable.
Though Bedford is a man playing a woman, this character does not appear as a man in drag. Bedford’s visage is screwed into a permanent frown or glower. His character is chilling, heavy in spirit as well as size, rather like a general who goes around shaking his rules like a stick, yet whose genuflection to station can be overcome by money.
The fetching Topham seems to float and flutter like a white bird on the wings of her chirpy, trilling voice. Parry has a comic seductiveness as the breathless ingénue.
Worthing is finely portrayed by Furr, and Algernon is captured well by the quirky, appealing Fontana. Ivey is brilliant, shaky and high-pitched. Her mouth is pulled down, but her eyes sparkle and roll.
Desmond Heeley’s stunning sets and costumes move the action from a pale violet London drawing room to a gorgeous garden and summer house where the elegantly clad ladies -- and I include Lady Bracknell -- turn and preen.
This production is in every respect a charmer.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Roundabout Theatre Company
American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd Street, New York
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org
Opened Jan 13, 2011; closes July 3, 2011.
(After the March 20th performance, Jayne Houdyshell replaces Dana Ivey as Miss Prism, Brian Murray replaces Paxton Whitehead as the Rector, and Jessie Austrian replaces Sara Topham as Gwendolen Fairfax.)
For more by Lucy Komisar, visit thekomisarscoop.com.
