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Film and the Arts
Angel Blue Takes Stage With Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 23 February 2022 15:11
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Angel Blue with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Photo by Steve Sherman
At Carnegie Hall, on the evening of Tuesday, February 8th, I had the great pleasure of hearing the superb musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra, under the excellent direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in a terrific concert independent of their marvelous cycle of the complete symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven being presented at this venue this season.
The program opened with the New York premiere of contemporary composer Matthew Aucoin’s extraordinary, arresting and dramatic Suite from his opera, Eurydice, which first appeared in 2020 and was co-commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and the Los Angeles Opera. The instrumental excerpts performed here were especially exemplary for their display of a mastery of orchestral color. Felicitously, Aucoin was in the house to experience the audience’s acclaim.
The wonderful and appealing soprano Angel Blue then took the stage—she wore a beautiful gown with a blue satin skirt and a black bodice—for an exquisite, luminous performance of Samuel Barber’s magnificent Knoxville: Summer of 1915, his setting of a prose poem by the renowned author, James Agee. Following appreciative applause, she then powerfully sang another New York premiere, “This Is Not a Small Voice,” by the contemporary African-American composer Valerie Coleman, whose memorable Umoja, Anthem for Unity and Seven O’Clock Shout have both been performed recently by this ensemble in this hall. I found this new work compelling, with most of my ambivalence about the seeming programmatic “wokeness” of the poem by Sonia Sanchez that it sets overcome and it too was notable, like the composer’s other pieces mentioned here, for its impressive orchestration. Coleman was also present to receive a warm ovation.
The second half of the program provided a splendid opportunity to hear some forgotten repertory—the Symphony No. 1–by a neglected African-American composer, Florence Price, whose lovely Violin Concerto was recently performed by the Juilliard Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall. The opening Allegro was melodious—even sumptuous—and gripping and drew applause. The ensuing Largo was stately, lyrical and quietly affirmative while the following movement, the Juba Dance, was joyous, celebratory and enchanting and also was applauded. The exciting finale was also dancelike but more propulsive, closing a rewarding evening.
The Philadelphia Orchestra returns to Carnegie Hall on the evening of February 21st to finish their Beethoven cycle with the First Symphony and the monumental Ninth Symphony.
February '22 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 17 February 2022 01:49
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week
The Beatles and India
(Britbox)
1968 was pivotal for the Beatles, coming off the previous year’s artistic high of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and crashing lows of manager Brian Epstein’s death and the Magical Mystery Tour TV debacle. Their journey to India to follow the Maharishi and his teachings introduced much of the West to Eastern spiritual enlightenment and consolidated the reach of Indian and world music and artists, as this straightforward, informative documentary chronicles.
Many of those musicians discuss their admiration of the Beatles, which allows directors Ajoy Bose and Pete Compton an original way of exploring the Fab Four’s continued musical relevance and widespread cultural influence over the past half-century. (See review, below.)
(Briarcliff Entertainment)
Even by the low standards of Liam Neeson revenge vehicles, Mark Williams’ cheapo action thriller shows how a secret FBI agent (Neeson, of course), whose boss is a bad guy, soon fights for his life against the bureau itself. It’s all less plausible and more risible than usual and, although supposedly taking place in D.C., the movie screams “shot far away from D.C.” (it was filmed in Australia, of all places).
Neeson’s sleepwalking routine has grown awfully tiresome, but if it worked for Clint Eastwood for more than a half-century, I’m not surprised that Neeson will see how long he can get away with it. Maybe not much longer.
Fabian—Going to the Dogs
(Kino Lorber)
In Dominik Graf’s expansive, engrossing saga—set in Weimar Germany between the two world wars and based on Erich Kästner’s classic of German literature—a young man falls in love with a struggling actress whose career takes off while he flounders in a decadent society preceding the horrors of Nazism. In a brisk three hours, Graf plausibly recreates a society on the edge of disaster and develops fully rounded, quotidian characters.
There are sensationally good performances by alumni of the last great three-hour German epic, 2018’s Never Look Away: Tom Schilling and Saskia Rosendahl are brilliantly three-dimensional and sympathetic. Graf shrewdly uses the nearly square full framing of 1.33:1 to nod to films of the era in which his own film is set as well as recording the malign hardships awaiting many in this claustrophobic environment.
(Juno Films)
In Bille August’s intelligent biopic, famed Danish writer Karen Blixen, back in Denmark after living in Africa—from which her memorable memoir, Out of Africa, was written—finds a willing victim in writer Thorkild Bjørnvig, who becomes her protégé without realizing that the manipulative Blixen will try and control every aspect of his life, despite the fact that he’s married and has a young son.
August’s simple but compelling biography doesn’t make moral judgments about a genius dominating a neophyte, which makes it all the more unsettling. August smartly centers this intimate drama on two excellent performances: Birthe Neumann as Blixen and Simon Bennebjerg as Thorkild.
The Unmaking of a College
(Zeitgeist)
Progressive Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts—which boasts alumni like documentary master Ken Burns—nearly shuttered a few years ago when a new president quickly changed its mandate to simply “stop hemorrhaging money,” without notifying the students, staff, faculty or even well-heeled alumni who could have assisted.
Director Amy Goldstein insightfully documents the very fraught months among the student body—many of whom engage in a president’s office sit-in for several weeks—staff and administration, succinctly showing grassroots activism at its most basic.
(Screen Media)
Whether one can sit through this silly romcom about an actress, reeling from discovering her actor husband has a new and pregnant girlfriend, who visits her cousin on a beautiful Caribbean island and promptly falls for a charismatic (and conveniently single) chef depends on your tolerance for unalloyed cutesiness amid gorgeous locales.
At least director Philippe Martinez cast in the lead role Malin Akerman, who’s an underutilized but charming actress; Connie Nielsen also scores as the flirty cousin. Too bad the men—Akerman’s real-life hubby Jackie Donnelly as Akerman’s cheating hubby and Philip Winchester as her chef love interest—aren’t up to the task of making us care enough about her choice.
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
Dido and Aeneas
L’Enigma di Lea
(Naxos)
British composer Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, composed in 1689—six years before Purcell died at age 36—is only an hour long, but its very compactness elevates its dramatic power, as in Deborah Warner’s 2008 Paris staging. Purcell’s music is wonderfully rendered by Les Arts Florissants under conductor William Christie, while soprano Malena Ernman (mother of Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg) gives a rendition of Dido’s Lament, which climaxes the opera, that’s among the most haunting I’ve heard.
Spanish composer Benet Casablancas’ 2018 opera L’enigma di Lea—seen in its 2019 Barcelona production—gives ample proof of its own unsettling musical power. Allison Cook gives a fearless performance as Lea, a difficult role histrionically and musically. Both operas look and sound terrific in hi-def; Lea has interviews with Casablancas, librettist Rafael Argullol, conductor Josep Pons and director Carme Portaceli.
The Beatles and India
(Silva Screen Records)
The film The Beatles and India (see review, above) inspired several Indian artists to tackle Beatles songs, to varied but welcome effect. Kiss Nuka’s inspired cover of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is a stunning opener, and other standouts are Dhruv Ghanekar’s emotional “Julia,” Anoushka Shankar’s delicate sitar playing on “The Inner Light” and Karsh Kale and Monica Dogra’s lovely rendition of “Dear Prudence.”
With the exception of George Harrison’s sitar-laden “The Inner Light” and “Love You To,” most of these arrangements use Eastern and world-music instruments and sounds as ornamentation to underscore the Beatles’ brilliance. Surprisingly (or maybe not), most of the 19 songs are Lennon’s: a baker’s dozen of his are covered, while there are only 4 by McCartney and 2 by Harrison. A second disc comprises Benji Merrison’s film score.
February '22 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 10 February 2022 03:16
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week
Air Doll
(Dekanalog)
This 2009 drama from Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda doesn’t have the resonance or emotional pull of many of his other films—Like Father Like Son, Shoplifters and After Life, for starters—but its story of a middle-aged loner’s sex doll who has her own separate life and relationships while he leaves the house is too diffuse to be anything more than an only occasionally effective portrait of loneliness, especially coming right after his sublime drama about grieving, 2008’s Still Working.
Bae Doona gives a sublimely understated performance in the title role, but the sympathy she engenders can’t completely overcome the surprising one-note shallowness of Kore-eda’s work here.
(Cohen Media)
In this bracing documentary set at the A-Sham Arabic Food Festival in Haifa, Israel, director Beth Elise Hawk introduces us to Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, a microbiologist who won the Israeli reality series Master Chef, and who presciently founded the food festival in order to foster the beginning of social change among Israelis and Arabs.
The director and the Master Chef winner both show us the scrumptious-looking meals made by chefs from traditional recipes and ingredients, helping to foster the (maybe outlandish) notion that—just perhaps—satisfied stomachs could be the key to the common ground that has yet to be found in the Middle East.
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
Fidelio
(Opus Arte)
Beethoven’s only opera, a magnificent but messy masterpiece, concerns liberty, equality and love in its story of a woman, Leonore, who disguises herself as a man, Fidelio, to free her husband, Florestan, a political prisoner.
The music is as glorious as anything Beethoven ever composed, but the dramaturgy is a little clunky; luckily, this 2020 Royal Opera House (ROH) production from London, adroitly staged by Tobias Kratzer, has in place the superb ROH orchestra and chorus, led by veteran conductor Antonio Pappano. In the leads, there are the magisterial voices of Lise Davidsen (Leonore) and David Butt Philip (Florestan). There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio; extras are short interviews with cast and crew.
(Warner Archive)
This nearly perfect display of singing and dancing is the apogee of Busby Berkeley’s onscreen and onstage style: with his story of a producer creating a Broadway musical amid the Great Depression, Berkeley creates a series of exhilarating production numbers like the risqué “Pettin’ in the Park.”
Then there’s “The Shadow Waltz,” a showstopper featuring several chorus girls in hooped skirts dancing with violins, and their movements are choreographed, shot and edited with skill and precision. Warner Archive’s typically superior hi-def transfer presents the film in all its B&W glory. Extras are a retrospective featurette and several vintage shorts and cartoons.
King Richard
(Warner Bros)
In a frightfully overlong biopic that comes perilously close to hagiography—at least it’s not titled Saint Richard—Will Smith plays Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena and who’s shown as the architect of their championship-caliber careers, in a bizarre, unfocused performance that drops this would-be inspirational drama down a few notches.
Director Reinaldo Marcus Green and writer Zach Baylin try in every way to make Richard the hero of his daughters’ tennis achievements, with surprisingly little nod to their own talent and perseverance. Far better are the portrayals of Aunjanue Ellis (the girls’ mother Oracene), Saniyya Sidney (Venus) and Demi Singleton (Serena). There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras comprise on-set featurettes and deleted scenes.
(Shout/Scream Factory)
Madness, death, suicide were themes in several Hammer Studios movies, and this 1963 entry, cleverly directed by Freddie Francis (and moodily photographed in B&W by Arthur Grant), takes advantage of its spooky plotline to create some arresting images and eerie moments.
The 80-minute flick reaches maximum lunacy at its climax, while finely calibrated performances by Oliver Reed, Janette Scott, Sheila Burrell and Alexander Davion finesse its clumsier aspects. The film looks great in hi-def; extras include an audio commentary, a making-of featurette and new interviews with Hammer film experts.
Stargirl—Complete 2nd Season
(Warner Bros)
What’s the JSA (Justice Society of America)? Stargirl, also known by her civilian name, Courtney Whitmore, is part of the teen JSA and has difficulty balancing her superhero work with being a normal high school kid. In fact, she has to go to summer school to make up the classes she failed. But when adversaries Eclipso and the Shade appear, the JSA kids band together to stop them.
With the right amount of humor and drama, the series balances silly and heartfelt, and a cast led by young Brec Bassinger as Stargirl and Patrick Wilson and Amy Smart as her stepfather and mother make this an appealing entry in the superhero canon. All 13 episodes look terrific on Blu; extras are two featurettes and the ubiquitous gag reel.
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra—Light in a Time of Darkness
(Beau Fleuve)
After months of not performing together when the COVID lockdown began in March 2020, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) began returning to its architecturally and acoustically marvelous home, Kleinhans Music Hall, to start recording in fall 2020. The six works on this program might seem random, but as music director and conductor JoAnn Falletta explains in her note, they were works that “were high points … in terms of their emotional depth and spirituality.”
And what high points there are! Ralph Vaughan Williams’ incandescent Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis kicks things off, a piece I never grow tired of no matter how often I hear it. The trio of short works—Pietà by Ulysses Kay (a world premiere recording), The Winter’s Passed by Wayne Barlow and Lyric for Strings—Lament by George Walker—are unsurpassed in their musical beauty. Bach’s familiar Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 and Haydn’s facile Symphony No. 44 (with its haunting Adagio movement) round things out. Falletta and the BPO perform with their usual elegance and ebullience, making this CD musical uplift of the highest order.
Musical Review—“The Tap Dance Kid” at Encores
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 07 February 2022 22:03
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Tap Dance Kid
Music by Henry Krieger; lyrics by Robert Lorick
Book by Charles Blackwell; adaptation by Lydia Diamond
Directed by Kenny Leon; choreography by Jared Grimes
February 2-6, 2022
New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, NYC
nycitycenter.org
 |
| Alexander Bello and Trevor Jackson in The Tap Dance Kid (photo: Joan Marcus) |
As Encores’ first show since February 2020, The Tap Dance Kid felt like a balm, a true crowd-pleaser that, whatever its faults, made everyone happy, both onstage and in the audience.
In fact, the cast’s big smiles at the curtain calls let the audience know that the show meant a lot to them as well. Although the 1983 Tony-nominated musical has problems—starting with a scattershot book that, while ostensibly about 10-year-old Willie, who dreams of following in the tap shoes of his grandfather, Daddy Bates, and his uncle, Dipsey (his mother Ginnie’s younger brother), keeps moving back and forth among the rest of the family’s travails, to diminishing dramatic returns—whenever the dancing, the reason for the show’s existence, takes center stage, all is forgiven.
Happily, The Tap Dance Kid is crammed with several exhilarating dancing sequences, which director Kenny Leon and choreographer Jared Grimes—with an assist from playwright Lydia Diamond, who has streamlined the story to make it slightly less choppy—ensure stop the show, time and again. Throughout, a dazzling chorus line functions as an ensemble being rehearsed by Dipsey for a show to be put on in Buffalo with an eye toward Broadway as well as Manhattan residents in Willie’s way on the streets and the bus. There’s also Daddy Bates, who reappears as a spirited spirit, dancing miraculously in the person of Dewitt Fleming Jr., particularly in his showcase number, “Tap Tap.”
But the show hinges on the actors playing young Willie and Uncle Dipsey, and Alexander Bello and Trevor Jackson are simply spectacular, together and apart, as the boy whose precocious talent is ignored by his strict father William but is encouraged by his mom and uncle eventually gets the break he’s been hoping for. Bello is remarkably self-assured, even while dancing alone in “Dancing Is Everything,” and Jackson is so effortless and athletic in his numbers like the first act finale, “Man in the Moon,” and the second act’s “My Luck is Changing” that it’s surprising he actually does break into a sweat after certain strenuous and complex moves.
The show falters most when it centers on the family, soap opera style, as William’s singleminded way of providing for his family precludes love, tenderness and any flexibility. But the actors are so good in their spotlight numbers that they sweep aside any criticism of the family storylines: Shahadi Wright Joseph’s Emma, the older teen sister who wants to be a lawyer, powerfully voices her solo turn, “Four Strikes Against Me”; Adrienne Walker, as Ginnie, is dynamic in her lament, “I Remember How It Was”; and Joshua Henry, as tightly-wound father William, finally breaks out in the brilliant showstopping finale, aptly titled “William’s Song,” in which all the pent-up emotion comes flowing out in ovation-worthy fashion.
Joseph Joubert and the Encores Orchestra make the most of composer Henry Krieger’s rather derivative tunes, comprising mainly by-the-numbers power ballads and belters that are elevated by the musicians and singers. But it’s all that dancing that Encores audiences will rightly remember of The Tap Dance Kid.
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