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NYC Theater Review—“A Streetcar Named Desire” with Paul Mescal at BAM

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 03 April 2025 01:22; Written by Kevin Filipski

A Streetcar Named Desire

Written by Tennessee Williams

Directed by Rebecca Frecknall

Performances through April 6,2025

BAM Strong Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY

bam.org

Patsy Ferran and Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire (photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Although A Streetcar Named Desire hasn’t fared well on Broadway—if anyone even remembers botched revivals like the 2005 disaster with Natasha Richardson and John C. Reilly and stillborn 1992 production with Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin—things have been different in Brooklyn, where in 2009 a fresh take on Tennessee Williams’ classic drama at BAM gave it back its poetry and poignancy: anchored by a surprisingly unmannered Cate Blanchett as Blanche Dubois and directed with unadorned realism by Liv Ullmann, the Sydney Theatre Company production was as good a Streetcar as could be wished for.

Now, London’s Almeida Theatre stops at BAM with its Streetcar, directed with arrogant assurance by Rebecca Frecknall, whose deconstruction of Williams’ familiar drama has some interesting detours but is burdened by too much distracting, unnecessary gimmickry.

Heading her mostly capable cast and making his American theater debut, current heartthrob Paul Mescal plays Stanley Kowalski intelligently, letting us see the humor as well as the rage of this self-styled “Pole” (not “Polack,” as he corrects Blanche) who loves his wife Stella fiercely—so much so that he at times lets his passions spill over into brutishness and violence.

As Stella, Blanche’s younger sister, Anjana Vasan is a sympathetic presence. And at the performance I attended, a solid Eduardo Ackerman subbed for Dwane Walcott as Stanley’s poker-playing buddy Mitch, who is sweet on Blanche until things go sour. But things get problematic with Patsy Ferran’s Blanche, a strangely off-putting performance that has little of Williams’ poetry and a surfeit of nervous energy.

Most damaging, however, is that Ferran and Mescal have little chemistry together; at one point, Mescal gets on all fours and prowls around like a literal beast to try and underline the feral attraction between these memorably mismatched characters. It doesn’t really work.

Frecknall seems to sense this; she all but eclipses Stanley and Blanche’s relationship with busy stage business. Madeleine Girling’s set, a square wooden platform with a walkway surrounding it, resembles a boxing ring sans ropes. When actors are not in a scene, they mill around and hand props to those performing, like trainers giving the boxers a towel or a bottle of water during a match. Lee Curran’s lighting and Peter Rice’s sound design strongly contribute to the claustrophobic atmosphere.

Occasionally, the cast breaks into stylized dance moves that aren’t integrated enough to be effective—only the movements of the cast’s male actors closely surrounding Blanche when Stanley rapes her is memorable. And although Williams asks for a “blue piano” in his stage directions, Frecknall provides music that almost entirely comprises a drummer on a second tier above the stage (the talented Tom Penn, who also plays the doctor in the final scene) pounding away throughout, needlessly underscoring the dramatic beats, so to speak. And a repeated ghostly image of Blanche’s dead first husband needlessly clutters her monologues without any additional illumination.

One thing this Streetcar shares with the superior Blanchett/Ullmann production is a misconceived ending. In the 2009 Sydney Theatre staging’s biggest misstep, Blanchett rode Williams’ poetry too hard and director Ullmann allowed Blanche the indignity of being led away while not properly dressed.

Here, Frecknall turns what should be a shattering ending into mush, the mass of performers onstage obscuring Blanche’s final tragedy—it misses the theatrical magic that Williams’ most indelible creation always yearned for.

March '25 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 28 March 2025 02:30; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Black Bag

(Focus)

In Steven Soderbergh’s typically stylish espionage flick, a married British spy couple (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) attempt to root out the traitors in their midst when they realize they’re being set up from within the agency.

David Koepp’s clever script withholds just enough info to maintain interest, while the double crossings are recorded by Soderbergh’s sleek camera, which along with his editing is unsurprisingly impeccable. It all builds up to not much, but it’s a fun 90-minute ride, enlivened by Fassbender’s sturdy presence and Marisa Abela’s scene-stealing drone operator. Only Blanchett’s icy operator seems off-base.

Any Day Now

(Blue Harbor Entertainment)

The brazen 1990 robbery of Boston’s Gardner Museum—which netted Vermeer and Renoir paintings along with other priceless objects—has never been solved and the artifacts have never been found; Eric Aronson’s cleverly mounted drama imagines how the heist was planned and executed, with the film’s runtime the exact length of the actual theft.

It’s more a stunt than a full-blooded story, but it’s enacted compellingly by a cast led by Paul Guilfoyle (usually cast in subordinate roles, he’s given a chance to be the anchor), Taylor Gray and Alexandra Templer.

Ash

(RLJE/Shudder)

This derivative sci-fi flick introduces its heroine Riya, the lone survivor of an attack aboard a space station on the distant planet Ash—her fellow astronauts are dead and she has no memory of what happened. Soon, flashbacks help her piece together the incident along with a rescuer named Brion, whom she supposedly knows but doesn’t completely trust.

Director Flying Lotus cleverly conveys Riya’s fraught situation, but even with the gifted and properly intense Eiza González in the lead, the film ultimately doesn’t amount to much more than mere fragments, disappointingly.

The Assessment

(Magnolia)

In an authoritarian near-future, couples can only have children if they pass rigorous government testing, and director Fleur Fortuné’s stylized debut feature stars Alicia Vikander as Virginia, an assessor who visits the home of Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) to see if they will be worthy parents.

The script by Dave Thomas, Nell Garfath-Cox and John Donnelly starts out well, but as Virginia acts more illogically infantilized and, finally, dangerously reckless, the extremes in everyone’s behavior are less than plausibly developed. The final half-hour is a mess, and the committed cast—led by the always magnetic Vikander, a captivating Olsen and Minnie Driver in a memorable cameo as a centenarian—keeps this watchable as it stumbles to end.

Bob Trevino Likes It

(Roadside Attractions)

Despite the mawkish premise—a young woman, Lily, with a mostly absent father Bob reaches out on Facebook desperate for a connection and finds a man without children (and with her dad’s name) who becomes an unlikely correspondent and, later, friend—writer and director Tracie Laymon has made a sweet-natured study of two lonely people who fulfill each other’s needs, at least for a little while.

Most of the credit goes to the quietly affecting John Leguizamo and Barbie Ferriera, with good support from French Stewart as Lily’s deadbeat dad and Rachel Bay Jones as her friend Bob’s wife.

Misericordia

(Sideshow/Janus)

French director Alain Guiraudie’s latest slow-burn drama shows the complex underside of placid village life as a young man returns to his hometown after his employer, the local baker (whom he had a crush on), dies—he is soon at odds with the baker’s son, spends time with his widow and begins a reciprocal relationship with the local priest.

In Guiraudie’s world, sexuality brazenly intrudes on a seemingly conservative lifestyle, but here contrivance overpowers a more nuanced exploration of human behavior. Instead of finding depth in these characters, Guiraudie moves them around like pawns; even the quiet ending isn’t as affecting as it wants to be.

Blu-ray Release of the Week

A Woman in Paris

(Criterion)

This 1923 silent feature was Charles Chaplin’s Interiors—an attempt by a one-of-a-kind comic voice desperately wanting to be considered a Serious Artist. Despite the baggage, it’s an entertaining melodrama notable for not starring Chaplin; instead, Edna Purviance stars the eponymous heroine. While not a disaster like Chaplin’s final film, A Countess from Hong Kong, it’s nowhere near the level of Chaplin’s legendary comedies that would come right after this.

The restored film (which is the 1976 rerelease version featuring a score composed by Chaplin) has an excellent hi-def transfer, and the extras include an alternate score by conductor Timothy Brock, based on music by Chaplin; intro by Chaplin scholar David Robinson; new video essay by Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance; Chaplin Today: A Woman of Paris, with interviews of Liv Ullmann and Michael Powell; an audio commentary; audio interview excerpts with Chaplin Studios cameraman Roland Totheroh; deleted shots from the original film; and archival footage.

Streaming Release of the Week

Invader

(Doppelgänger Releasing)

What begins as a reasonably diverting mystery—a woman named Ana goes to her cousin’s home in suburban Chicago and finds someone else there—quickly degenerates into a ridiculously unpleasant study of a maniac terrorizing innocent people as if Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs was given too much screen time.

Director-writer Mickey Keating doesn’t seem to be simply showing such abhorrent behavior but actually reveling in it, negating the sympathy afforded Ana (a nice turn by Vero Maynez) in the beginning.

CD Releases of the Week

Kate Lindsey—Samsara

(Alpha Classics)

“Samsara” refers to the recurring cycle of death and rebirth, which is why mezzo Kate Lindsey chose it as the title of her latest recital disc—and the major song cycles she sings so beautifully, by Robert Schumann and Gabriel Fauré, take women’s points of view about the joys and sorrows of life. Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, which was composed in 1840 (his celebrated “year of lieder,” during which he also wrote his other great cycles Dichterliebe and the two sets of Liederkreis), is remarkable in its piano writing, which in no way sounds like mere accompaniment.

Fauré’s La Chanson d’Eve, an autumnal work of uncommon grace and sensitivity, is also the fastidious French master’s longest cycle. Several other Schumann lieder and Faure mélodies round out the recording, and pianist Éric Le Sage provides delicate and thoughtful playing to complement Lindsey’s lovely vocal performances.

William Walton—Violin Concerto and Other Orchestral Works

(Chandos)

British composer Wiliam Walton (1902-83) had so much success early on with Façade and his First Symphony that he had to live in their shadows for the rest of his long career—but, as this disc of a trio of his flavorful orchestral works shows, at his best, Walton was as formidable a composer as his contemporary Benjamin Britten. The rousing Portsmouth Point Overture is the earliest piece here (written when Walton was in his early 20s), while the Symphonic Suite from Troilus and Cressida—Walton’s wonderful opera that has never gotten a foothold in the repertoire (I don’t think it’s been staged in New York City since its 1955 City Opera production)—contains Walton’s music at its most dramatic and gripping.

Finally, there’s his masterly Violin Concerto from the late 1930s, lyrical yet technically demanding and containing a surfeit of melodies and inventive ideas throughout. Charlie Lovell-Jones is the accomplished concerto soloist, and John Wilson leads the Sinfonia of London in perceptive readings of all three works.

Cleveland Orchestra Performs Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka at Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 24 March 2025 13:55; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Fadi Kheir.

At the wonderful Stern Auditorium on the night of Wednesday, March 19th, I had the privilege to attend another superb concert presented by Carnegie Hall—the second of two on consecutive days—featuring the outstanding musicians of the Cleveland Orchestra under the incomparable direction of Franz Welser-Möst.

The event started brilliantly with a fabulous rendition of Igor Stravinsky’s marvelous Pétrouchka, played here in its 1947 revision. In quite useful notes for this program, Peter Laki provided some relevant background:

After the resounding success of The Firebird in 1908, Igor Stravinsky became an instant celebrity in Paris. His name was now inseparable from the famous Ballets Russes, whose director, Sergei Diaghilev, was eager to continue this most promising collaboration. Plans were almost immediately underway for what eventually became The Rite of Spring.

When Diaghilev visited Stravinsky in Lausanne in the summer of 1910, he expected his friend to have made some progress with The Rite of Spring. Instead, he found the composer engrossed in a completely different composition. Stravinsky had begun writing a concert piece for piano and orchestra in which the piano represented “a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios.” The puppet was none other than Petrushka (or Pétrouchka, in French), the popular Russian puppet-theater hero. Diaghilev immediately saw the dramatic potential of Stravinsky’s concert piece and persuaded the composer to turn it into a ballet. Alexandre Benois, a Russian artist and longtime Diaghilev collaborator, wrote the scenario with Stravinsky and designed the sets and costumes for the performance.

The annotator then describes the initial movement of the score:

The first of the four tableaux (“The Shrovetide Fair”) alternates between the noise of the crowd and songs played by street musicians. At first, we hear a flute signal accompanied by rapid figurations that evoke the bustle of the fair. Soon the entire orchestra breaks into a boisterous Russian beggars’ song, followed by the entrance of two competing street musicians, a hurdy-gurdy player and one with a music box.

Soon, the puppet theater opens and the Showman, playing his flute, introduces Pétrouchka, the Ballerina, and the Moor to the audience. As he touches them with his flute, the three puppets spring to life and begin the famous “Russian Dance,” in which the piano plays a predominant part. The dance and the tableau eventually end with a bang.

The fantastical is seemingly invoked at the very outset of the music even if what it ostensibly depicts is relatively prosaic. The propulsive rhythms impart a suspenseful quality and the “Russian Dance” proves especially exhilarating. Laki continues:

The second tableau moves the action to Pétrouchka’s room. It starts with a sonority that has become emblematic of the work: two clarinets playing a bitonal melody—that is, in two different keys at once. After a short piano cadenza, we hear a theme giving vent to Pétrouchka’s anger and despair at his failure to win the Ballerina’s heart. His fury changes into quiet sadness in a slow, pseudo-folk song, played by the flute and piano with occasional interjections from other instruments. The Ballerina soon enters, and Pétrouchka becomes giddy with excitement. Then she leaves, and the earlier despair motif closes the tableau.

The third tableau takes place in the Moor’s room. His slow dance is accompanied by bass drum, cymbals, and plucked strings, whose off-beat accents impart a distinctly Middle Eastern flavor to the music. Soon, the Ballerina appears, trumpet in hand, and dances for the Moor. She then starts waltzing to two melodies by Viennese composer Joseph Lanner (a forerunner of the great Strauss dynasty) while the Moor begins his own, less graceful dance. The waltz is interrupted as Pétrouchka suddenly enters the room. His fight with the Moor is expressed by frantic runs before the orchestra plays violent fortissimo chords as the Moor chases Pétrouchka out the door.

The Ballerina’s waltz is particularly lovely but not without a comic dimension that becomes more pronounced. The annotator goes on to add:

The fourth and final tableau brings us back to the fair, where, as the sun sets, more and more people are gathering for the festivities. A series of numbers are performed in succession. Among them: A group of nursemaids dance to two Russian folk songs, a trained bear dances to a peasant’s pipe (represented by two clarinets playing in their highest register), and a drunken merchant stumbles across the stage, his tune played with frequent glissandos in the strings.

Suddenly, the celebration is disrupted by a scream coming from the puppet theater. Pétrouchka rushes in, pursued by the Moor, who overtakes him and strikes him down. Soft woodwind solos, accompanied by high-pitched violin tremolos, lament Pétrouchka’s death. But as the Showman arrives to pick up the puppet and take him back to the theater, Pétrouchka’s ghost appears overhead as two trumpets intone his melody. Only a few soft string pizzicatos accompany the close of the curtain; the last event in the piece is the resurgence of Pétrouchka the invincible, thumbing his nose at the magician and the entire world, which had been so hostile to his pure and sincere feelings.

The work concludes very quietly.

The second half of the evening was comparable in strength: a terrific account of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64, from 1888. Laki again is informative:

After his return from abroad, Tchaikovsky decided to write a new symphony, his first in 10 years. Characteristically, the first sketches of the new work, made on April 15, 1888, include a verbal program portraying an individual’s reactions in the face of immutable destiny, involving stages of resignation, challenge, and triumph:

“Introduction. Complete resignation before Fate, or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. Allegro. (1) Murmurs of doubt, complaints, reproaches against XXX. (2) Shall I throw myself in the embraces of faith??? A wonderful program, if only it can be carried out.”

Tchaikovsky never made this program public, however, and in one of his letters even went out of his way to stress that the symphony had no program.

He adds:

Many people believe that the unnamed, mysterious “XXX” in the sketch stands for homosexuality. In his diaries, Tchaikovsky often referred to his homosexuality as “Z” or “That.”

The theme of Fate is first heard in the somewhat lugubrious opening movement’s Andante introduction. Laki comments:

English musicologist Gerald Abraham noted that this theme was taken almost literally from an aria in Mikhail Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar, in which it was sung to the words “Ne svodi na gore” (“Do not turn to sorrow”).

The main body of the Allegro con anima movement is frequently dynamic and passionate but with more subdued passages; it finishes abruptly and very softly. The ensuing, soaringly Romantic Andante cantabile is indeed song-like with a beautiful main theme played by the French horn and a second—that too is captivating—introduced by the clarinet; a powerful crescendo ushers in a recapitulation of the first motif. The music again intensifies followed by the recurrence of the initial theme; the movement closes gently.

The brief Valse movementthat succeeds this, marked Allegro moderato, is very charming; as it becomes more spirited, it remains enchanting, ending more forcefully. The glorious Finale has a majestic character that becomes more animated, although with lyrical interludes; the music reaches a turbulent climax, while the jubilant, Presto codaachieves a triumphant close.

The artists, deservedly, received a very enthusiastic ovation.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Chisa Hutchinson’s “Amerikin” at Primary Stages

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Sunday, 23 March 2025 23:50; Written by Kevin Filipski

Amerikin

Written by Chisa Hutchinson

Directed by Jade King Carroll

Performances through April 13, 2025

Primary Stages @ 59 E 59Theatres, 59 East 59th Street, NYC

primaryStages.org

Molly Carden and Daniel Abeles in Amerikin (photo: James Leynse)

Chisa Hutchinson’s Amerikin, an examination of how the country’s racial attitudes haven’t changed much, was written in 2018—during the first Trump administration, which seems like the good old days—and could serve as a cautionary tale of what’s happening now, on an even more devastating scale.

It’s too bad, then, that Amerikin seems a blueprint for a more insightful comic drama, heavyhandedly welding two plays together to form an intriguing but unsatisfying one. (The first act is “Inside Out,” and the second is “Outside In,” which explains it all.) We first meet Jeff Browning (his last name a bad pun) of Sharpsburg, Maryland—near where the Civil War’s bloodiest battle, Antietam, was fought; he’s a blue-collar stiff who wants to give his newborn son a head start in life by taking a genetic test to show his purity so he can join a local white-supremist organization, the Knights. Complicating things are Jeff’s wife Michelle, who suffers from extreme post-partum depression, and next-door neighbor Alma, Jeff’s girlfriend before he married Michelle.

Jeff discovers his DNA isn’t as pure as he thought, and the play’s first act ends with a cross burning on the front lawn just as the family is leaving to celebrate Jeff joining the Knights. Jeff’s friend, computer whiz Poot, successfully fudged the results but Poot’s latest girlfriend, daughter of one of the group’s leaders, saw the original report and relayed the truth about Jeff’s ancestry: 14 percent sub-Saharan African.

The second act introduces veteran Washington Post columnist Gerald and his daughter, aspiring journalist Chris. Gerald saw a Facebook post from Alma about how Jeff’s life has been ruined by these events and decides it’s a perfect subject for his column: a white racist isn’t white enough to join a racist organization. So Gerald reluctantly brings Chris along for the drive to rural Maryland (Chris says to her father, “You think I’m letting you go into Confederate territory by yourself, black man?”) to meet Jeff and hear his side of the story—about which he isn’t entirely truthful.

Amerikin traffics in narrative contrivances and cardboard characters. There are shrewd observations and sympathy for everyone in the play, however loathsome they may be personally, but even though there’s much to be said for creating dialogue and bridging differences, there are too many stereotypes, easy jokes and “shocking” moments like Jeff naming his black dog the N word, of all things, or Michelle singing a lullaby to her newborn that goes, “Lullaby and goodnight/Shoulda had you aborted.” Then there’s a suicide that happened a week earlier, which could never be covered up in such a tiny living space.

Director Jade King Carroll has trouble making it all cohere, but Christopher Swader and Justin Swader’s lively set of Jeff and Michelle’s home—replete with Trump-Pence stickers on a refrigerator filled with Miller beer—and Jen Caprio’s spot-on costumes ground the caricature in an identifiable, and sadly real, America. And though the actors are constricted by the script, Daniel Abeles makes Jeff a likable dope and Molly Carden takes the impossible role of Michelle—who isn’t given much to do except cry and rage, while her ultimate fate occurs offstage—and winds her so tightly and tautly that she deserves a more thoughtful play to bring out her character’s fascinating contradictions.

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