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Musical Theater Review—“Cabaret” at Barrington Stage

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 06 July 2023 22:32; Written by Kevin Filipski

Cabaret

Book by Joe Masteroff, from the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood

Music by John Kander; lyrics by Fred Ebb

Directed by Alan Paul; choreographed by Katie Spelman

Performances through July 8, 2023

Boyd-Quinson Stage, 30 Union Street, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

barringtonstageco.org

Krysta Rodriguez, center, in Cabaret (photo: Daniel Rader)

The Barrington Stage production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is, despite some provocative window dressing, a staging of this still disturbing, groundbreaking musical that’s close in spirit to the 1998 Sam Mendes restaging that took Broadway by storm. After I read the typically imperceptive and shrilly clever New York Times review, I was expecting an out-there interpretation (“OMG, a genderqueer Cabaret—run for your lives!”), but director Alan Paul has stayed pretty faithful to the book and songs, with the notable exception of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” which is sung by a trio of non-binary and trans performers as part of the renamed Kit Kat Ensemble.

Paul’s decision to do away with the Kit Kat Girls further underlines the notion that the immorality and decadence of Weimer-era Berlin will soon be comprehensively stifled quite brutally by the thuggish Nazis. But aside from that—and the amusing squirming of some audience members pre-show and post-intermission as the ensemble wanders among the seats to flirt or dance with the paying customers—there’s nothing here that screams, “Look! We’re making Cabaret relevant to our time!” Paul doesn’t have to make obvious the parallels to today’s wannabe fascists as they viciously fight a more progressive society—it’s already there in the show.

Paul and his able choreographer, Katie Spelman, use the small stage—which features a terrific small orchestra, led by music director Angela Steiner—to their advantage, as the song and dance interludes and dramatic scenes rub against each other effectively and, often, almost inevitably.

As the proudly amoral heroine, club chanteuse Sally Bowles, the always wonderful Krysta Rodriguez turns on her natural charm—along with a beguiling, if erratic, British accent—to complement her lithe movements and powerhouse voice. Her stirringly emotional rendition of the title tune is the very definition of a showstopper; maybe Rodriguez will finally get the Broadway starring role she deserves if this production makes it to New York.

Other cast members are accomplished, at times even inspired, although Dan Amboyer’s portrayal of Cliff Bradshaw—the naïve American writer who falls in love with Sally after coming to Berlin to start a novel—is more lackadaisical than it should be, even for such a passive character. As Cliff’s spinster landlady Fräulein Schneider, Candy Buckley has a lovely but sad presence; as her paramour, the elderly Herr Schulz, Richard Kline gives a noble performance as a German Jew who can’t comprehend what the Nazis have in store for him.

The Emcee has become a touchstone role, not only because of Joel Grey’s sinister Tony- and Oscar-winning portrayal but also because of Alan Cumming’s flamboyant, Tony-winning reinterpretation in Mendes’ revival. Nik Alexander mischievously combines both of them in a slyly uninhibited, subtly menacing performance. That Alexander occasionally swallows his lines doesn’t mitigate his idiosyncratic stage presence, which is the ominous center of this Cabaret.

June '23 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 29 June 2023 01:41; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

Revoir Paris

(Music Box Films)

Alice Winocour’s latest psychological study of individuals under duress (following Augustine, Disorder and Mustang) alternates between being perceptive and merely cursory as it follows Mia, a Russian translator who survives a horrific mass shooting in a Parisian café and tries to deal with its disastrous emotional and physical aftermath.

As Mia, Virginie Efira won the best actress Cesar for her devastating performance, which goes a long way toward making Winocour’s hit-or-miss drama seem more penetrating than it is.

Barbie Nation—An Authorized Tour

(Bernal Beach Films)

In anticipation of this summer’s Barbie movie by the overrated Greta Gerwig that stars Margot Robbie (whose 2022 appearances were in the huge bombs Amsterdam and Babylon), Susan Stern’s 1998 documentary exploring the history and legacy of the famous doll returns.

It clocks in at less than an hour, yet Stern brings up many facets—sexism, misogyny, empowerment—and includes interesting takes from Ruth Handler and her husband, Elliot, who founded Mattel, and others who have collected, enjoyed or hated the doll over the decades.

Loren and Rose

(Wise Lars LLC)

Similar to a sit-down chatfest like My Dinner with Andre, Russell Brown’s three-act film follows Rose, a former star hoping to plot her comeback, and Loren, an up-and-coming director hoping to help her out.

In a series of conversations framed by a device out of Citizen Kane, the pair discusses the movie industry, her long career and other issues, none of which are given much depth but at least are colored by the presence of the still glamorous Jacqueline Bisset. Kelly Blatz comes off less well opposite Bisset in this engaging but slight 90 minutes.

Make Me Famous

(Red Splat)

The New York art scene of the 1980s is given a thorough run-through by director Brian Vincent in his documentary about artist Edward Brezinski, who ran in the same downtown circles as Basquiat and Keith Haring but who never achieved their public and critical renown, dying forgotten in Cannes, France, in 2007.

Vincent dissects Brezinski’s life and career through an array of chatty subjects, including art historians, gallery owners, photographers and fellow painters, along with much valuable archival footage that puts Brezinski’s work and legacy into perspective.

Umberto Eco—A Library of the World

(Cinema Guild)

Umberto Eco was a polymath, author, intellectual, and philosopher whose library—which contains thousands of volumes in several languages and on a myriad of subjects—may be his greatest and lasting posthumous legacy, according to director Davide Ferrario’s fascinating documentary.

Through archival interviews with Eco and discussions with family members, associates and close friends, Ferrario presents a complex portrait of a multifaceted individual whose rigorous intelligence, pointed humor and best-selling novels mark him as a giant of the 20th century.

4K/UHD Releases of the Week

Evil Dead Rise

(Warner Bros)

This exceptionally icky reboot of another horror franchise is base and unimaginative: a malevolent spirit causes people to mercilessly butcher others and then reincarnates to continue the butchering. If that sounds appealing—I know some will sign up for it immediately—then go for it.

Too bad that writer-director Lee Cronin only finds a few different ways to keep blood spurting and gore flowing (and does it flow, opening with a young woman being scalped and ending with a wood chipper vaporizing a multi-headed monster) and the 90 minutes seems mercilessly padded. On UHD, the color is vividly present; no extras, which seems a recent trend for new releases.

National Lampoon’s Vacation

(Warner Bros)

This genial 1983 comedy is a very bumpy ride, with mainly cheap and obvious laughs and crude sexism: we see Beverly d’Angelo nude in the shower for no reason and Christie Brinkley’s available/unavailable supermodel entices Chevy Chase to skinny dip in a hotel pool. Harold Ramis’ slapdash directing and John Hughes’ sloppy script don’t help, while Chase sleepwalks through the laconic persona that serves him much better in Fletch.

At least it has Lindsey Buckingham’s hummable “Holiday Road” and small but fun parts for John Candy, Brian Doyle-Murray and Imogene Coca. The film looks sharp in 4K; lone extra is an audio commentary.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Horowitz in Moscow

(C Major)

When superstar pianist Vladimir Horowitz, at age 82, returned to his native Russia for the first time in six decades in 1986, cameras followed him while meeting with people he hadn’t seen in years and performing an emotional recital in Moscow.

This absorbing documentary intercuts moments of intimacy between the pianist and others with his penetrating performances of pieces by Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Schubert and Schumann. The film looks fine if a little ragged on Blu, with decent audio.

Like Water for Chocolate

(Opus Arte)

This new ballet, scored by Joby Talbot and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon (and based on the beloved novel by Laura Esquivel, which spawned the hit 1992 movie adaptation) was filmed at last year’s world premiere staging in London’s Royal Opera House.

The Royal Ballet’s principal dancers—especially the incandescent Francesca Hayward as the heroine Tita—are unimpeachable, as is Wheeldon’s expressive choreography. Talbot’s conventional music is led by the terrific conductor Alondra de la Perra, who teams with the orchestra to give it more warmth. The hi-def video and audio are first-rate; extras are interviews with the principals.

DVD Release of the Week

Matter Out of Place

(Icarus Films)

In his latest provocative visual essay, Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter chronicles how our planet has pretty much become a gigantic garbage dump, and travels to various places—Switzerland, Albania, Nepal, Maldives, Austria, Greece and Nevada’s “Burning Man”—to record how our massive amounts of trash have reached all corners of the earth, even far-flung areas, and the sheer struggle it is to try and get it under control.

Exceptionally beautiful, as all of Geyrhalter’s films are, it’s also extremely unsettling to watch as our only home is overtaken by refuse—even under the sea.

MET Orchestra Plays Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 27 June 2023 20:42; Written by Jack Angstreich

Soprano Angel Blue and mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel performing with the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on June 22, 2023. Photo: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera

At Carnegie Hall on the night of Thursday, June 15th, I had the enormous pleasure of attending a magnificent concert presented by the extraordinary MET Orchestra—along with the fabulous MET Chorus, led by Donald Palumbo—under the brilliant direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The conductor spoke briefly before the music began to dedicate the performance to the ensembles’ members or staff that lost their lives as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The event opened superbly with an unforgettable account of the beautiful and haunting Oraison—heardhere in its New York premiere—by the contemporary Cuban-Canadian composer, Luis Ernesto Peña Laguna. The program note by Claudio Ricignuolo reports:

In 2021, the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal commissioned Peña to write a choral work in tribute to the victims of COVID-19 and intended to be programmed with Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem. In composing Oraison, Peña was inspired by the poem “Danse humaine,” written for the occasion by French author Jean-A. Massard (b. 2000). As the composer explains:

There’s a word that’s very present in my composition, and that word is gestes (“gestures”). It’s a word that resonates with me when I think about the pandemic and how Canada and specifically Quebec managed it. The composition ends just like it begins … a way of representing each wave, how the pandemic is cyclic and still not over. The use of several languages (Latin, French, English, and Spanish) speaks to the fact that COVID has affected the entire planet.

The pinnacle of the evening, however, was achieved with a stunning realization of the awesome German Requiem of Johannes Brahms—which was hilariously misdescribed by the arch-Wagnerite music critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw who said it “could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker”—featuring two outstanding soloists: soprano Lisette Oropesa, a luminary of the Metropolitan Opera—she was replacing Nadine Sierra who had to withdraw due to illness—and baritone Quinn Kelsey. The artists were rewarded with a tremendous reception.

Nézet-Séguin and the ensemble returned to this venue exactly one week later for another terrific concert which began thrillingly with an energetic performance of Leonard Bernstein’s ingenious Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, which were selected and orchestrated by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal. Also impressive was the world premiere of contemporary composer Matthew Aucoin’s powerfulHeath(King LearSketches), which uncannily recalled the mainstream of twentieth-century music. Here I reproduce in toto his eloquent program note on the work:

The heath, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is the bare, windswept place, devoid of civilization and human comforts, where Lear, the Fool, and others end up after Lear’s eldest two daughters—to whom he has unwisely bequeathed his kingdom—have systematically stripped him of the last shreds of his authority. It is on the heath that Lear loses touch with reality, or at least with the world of unchecked privilege that he has inhabited for his whole life, and enters a state somewhere between madness and prophecy, a kind of lucid nightmare.

But the heath is more than a mere geological site; it is the psychological bedrock of the entire play.King Lear expresses a bottomlessly bleak vision of human nature, one in which laws, customs, and hierarchies—what we call “norms” in the contemporary world—are a flimsy safeguard against devouring animal appetites. When Lear lets his guard down for an instant and makes a major decision for sentimental reasons rather than according to the dictates of realpolitik, the wolves that surround him instantly show their fangs.

So, even though my orchestral piece does not directly enact the play’s heath scenes, Heath felt like the only possible title. This play’s inner landscape is a rocky, barren place, one in which every human luxury is ultimately burned away to reveal the hard stone underneath: “the thing itself,” as Lear puts it.

Heath is divided into four sections, played continuously with no break. The first and longest, “The Divided Kingdom,” embodies the atmosphere of the play’s first scenes: the uneasy sense of rituals failing to serve their purpose, of political life unraveling into chaos. The second section, “The Fool,” is full of darting, quicksilver music inspired by the Fool’s mockery of Lear. The brief third section, “I have no way ...”, is inspired by the blinded Gloucester’s slow, sad progress across the landscape. And the final movement, “With a Dead March,” embodies the accumulated tragedies of the play’s final scenes.

The first half of the event closed exhilaratingly with a fully compelling version of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s marvelous Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. Interestingly, the composer later envisioned writing an opera adapted from the William Shakespeare play about which he said to his brother, Modest:

This shall be my definitive work. It’s odd how until now I hadn’t seen how I was truly destined to set this drama to music. Nothing could be better suited to my musical character. No kings, no marches, and none of the encumbrances of grand opera—just love, love, love.

After an intermission, the evening concluded memorably with a wonderful performance of Act IV of Giuseppe Verdi’s penultimate opera, Otello. An excellent slate of singers was led by the enchanting soprano Angel Blue—another luminary of the Metropolitan Opera—as Desdemona along with tenor Russell Thomas in the title role; the secondary cast included mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel as Emilia, tenor Errin Duane Brooks as Cassio, baritone Michael Chioldi as Iago, and the bassi Richard Bernstein and Adam Lau as Lodovico and Montano respectively. Especially enthusiastic applause for the artists elicited a splendid encore: Florence Price’s Adoration featuring the concertmaster, David Chan, as soloist.

Marco Ferreri Retrospective at Lincoln Center

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 26 June 2023 13:54; Written by Jack Angstreich

Tales of Ordinary Madness

From June 9th through the 22nd, Film at Lincoln Center presented “Marco Ferreri: Beyond the Absurd,” a major retrospective of the films of that director. Below I survey the fiction features in the series that were shown in 35-millimeter.

The bleak The Seed of Man from 1969 is one of the strongest films by Ferreri that I’ve seen and visually is one of the most striking. The Film at Lincoln Center program note provides the following description:

Dora (Anne Wiazemsky) and Cino (Marzio Margine) are the survivors of a plague that has eradicated almost all of humankind. In a post-apocalyptic world, they need to decide whether they should have a child or refuse to repopulate a toxic planet. Cino collects objects from the ancient world and wants to force his consort to give birth. But Dora, faced with the potential to carry a child, refuses to perpetuate a sick humanity.

The popular Annie Girardot has a small but engaging role in the film.

Dillinger Is Dead—which was acclaimed by Cahiers du cinéma—from the same year, is a pessimistic and enigmatic work, a very strange one from an especially eccentric filmmaker, deploying a functional, even inelegant, style. In a useful article for The Criterion Collection, Michael Joshua Rowin has written the following about the film: “Dillinger’s trajectory may seem simple—a gas mask designer played by Michel Piccoli (Glauco, although his name appears only in the script) returns home after work, cooks himself dinner, discovers a gun, and shoots his wife in the head—but the film’s refusal of clear-cut logic, its contradictory symbols, and its moral ambiguity open it to endless interpretation.” He adds:

In a 2007 interview with Cahiers du cinéma, the actor described how Ferreri’s hands-off direction forced him to come up with his own ideas for the lead role inDillinger:“Ferreri didn’t direct me for a second during the shoot; he would simply give spatial indications. It was up to me to play this solitary person, this solitude, this eternal child or this childlike rebirth of ‘mature’ man, between despair, suicide, simple insomnia, dream.”

In his entry on Ferreri in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Richard Roud, Edgardo Cozarinsky remarks appositely upon the film: “A certain disregard for finish, and frequently careless mise-en-scène, nevertheless contribute to the atonal quality of the most gruesome situations, most notably in Dillinger è Morto (Dillinger Is Dead, 1969).” Piccoli, one of the subtlest of French actors—he collaborated with Ferreri six times—is a brilliant practitioner of the verbal but gives a largely wordless performance. The incredibly alluring Anita Pallenberg here as elsewhere is an object of intense erotic fascination. (The film also features Girardot in another indelible supporting role.) Dillinger Is Dead was screened in a superb print from Janus Films which preserved its extraordinary color photography.

The 1974 Don’t Touch the White Woman!, an attractively photographed, postmodern, burlesque Western—a commercial failure about which maybe the less said, the better—struck me as a major disappointment despite the spirited defense of it—in Film Comment—by the estimable critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and notwithstanding an impressive cast including a characteristically amusing Marcello Mastroianni as Colonel George Armstrong Custer; a gorgeous and charming Catherine Deneuve as his object of sexual and romantic interest; Piccoli as Buffalo Bill; Ugo Tognazzi as Custer’s traitorous, Indian scout; along with Philippe Noiret, Alain Cuny, Serge Reggiani, and Franco Fabrizi. Rosenbaum’s brief description is accurate: “Acts follow one another, not constructive links, and each is another hit-or-miss detail. The result is a number of loose improvisations on a given theme, but rarely (or only intermittently) a cohesive story.” More pictorial in style thanDillinger is Dead,the final Battle of Little Bighorn generates some long overdue narrative excitement. The film was screened in an excellent print from Cinecittà.

Film at Lincoln Center encapsulates the disturbing The Last Woman from 1976 as follows:

Gerard, left behind by a woman who joined the feminist movement, raises his baby alone. He meets Valerie, a young caregiver who will become the last woman, and probably his greatest love.

The film stars Gérard Depardieu, Zouzou, Piccoli again, Renato Salvatori, the immeasurably desirable Ornella Muti, and features a luminous Nathalie Baye in a brief appearance. Ferreri co-wrote the screenplay with the eminent Spanish writer Rafael Azcona—with whom he collaborated on his early films produced in Spain and who is also known for his outstanding screenplays for Luis Garcia Berlanga, Carlos Saura, among others. Some sequences and compositions interestingly recall Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert. It was screened in its Italian-language version.

The transgressive Bye Bye Monkey from 1978—which tied with Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout for the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival—is also bizarre. Film at Lincoln Center’s note says: “Gérard Lafayette finds a young monkey by the seashore, and decides to raise him as his own child.” A seemingly post-apocalyptic ambience accords well with Ferreri’s fatalism. The film is consistently visually compelling with an effective use of New York locations but the lack of narrative drive here is a recurring weakness across the director’sœuvre. Many distinguished contributors were involved in the production, such as editor Ruggero Mastroianni and Philippe Sarde, who composed the score. The director co-authored the script with Azcona and Gérard Brach, who is most famous for his unforgettable collaborations with Roman Polanski. The film stars Depardieu again and features memorable supporting performances by Marcello Mastroianni and Geraldine Fitzgerald along with James Coco, Mimsy Farmer—the subject of Lewis Klahr’s amazing experimental film, Her Fragrant Emulsion—and pornographic actress Gail Lawrence. It was screened in another exceptionally good print from Cinecittà.

The less ambitious and seemingly resolutely minor Seeking Asylum from 1979—it won the Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival—is another curiosity, a utopian vehicle for the gentle, endearing and Chaplinesque Roberto Benigni who co-wrote the screenplay with Ferreri and Brach. Film at Lincoln Center’s summary is apt:

Roberto is a most unorthodox yet talented kindergarten teacher—perhaps because he is still a child at heart. As he tries to help a boy who doesn’t speak, he falls in love with the mother of one of his pupils.

The film’s visual approach and episodic—even rambling and diffuse—nature recalls neorealism but it also often has the uncanniness of a dream or even science-fiction. The fine color photography was fully appreciable in the superb print from Cinecittà.

Also unsettling is the depressing Tales of Ordinary Madness from 1981 adapted from stories by Charles Bukowski and starring Ben Gazzara. Film at Lincoln Center provides the following description:

Writer Charles Serking refuses to become an academic by day, poet by night. A drunkard, selfish, and a bit of an anarchist, he wanders around Los Angeles. While doing so, he meets the beautiful and mysterious Cass (Ornella Muti).

Susan Tyrrell appears briefly in a notable role. Sergio Amidei, famous as a scriptwriter for Robert Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica, collaborated with Ferreri on the screenplay. The film is enhanced by the work of one of the greatest cinematographers, Tonino Delli Colli, who shot unforgettable works by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Leone, Polanski, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. But despite these and other promising elements, my impression on seeing this again is that Barbet Schroeder’s film from a Bukowski script,Barflyfrom 1987, seems like a more enduring treatment of similar material.

The atmospheric The Future Is Woman from 1984, also shot by Delli Colli, is one of Ferreri’s most satisfactory achievements, especially on a formal level. Film at Lincoln Center summarizes it thus: “A love triangle: a woman nostalgic for silent films (Hanna Schygulla), a man obsessed with saving trees (Niels Arestrup), and a lost pregnant young woman (Ornella Muti).” It was screened in the most beautiful print in the entire series.

Also a minor work was, despite some odd elements, the much more conventionalThe House of Smilesfrom 1991, which features a wonderful lead performance by Ingrid Thulin. The Film at Lincoln Centerprécisreads as follows:

Adelina (Ingrid Thulin), once crowned a beauty queen, has lost her teeth in the nursing home. She falls in love with Andrea (Dado Ruspoli), another patient. Their mutual desire shocks all of the home’s young nurses and employees.

The film won the Golden Bear at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival. It was shown in a good print from Cinecittà.

Diary of a Maniac from 1993, Ferreri’s last fiction feature, is another curiosity. The Film at Lincoln Center capsule provides the following description:

Benito (Jerry Calà), a middle-aged, half-broke salesman, writes in his diary all the details of his mediocre everyday life, including every subtle alteration of his physical state and his stormy worn-out romance with Luigia (Sabrina Ferilli). He is certain that his diary could become a literary masterpiece one day.

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