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Off-Broadway Play Review—Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Sally & Tom”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 22 April 2024 18:32
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Sally & Tom
Written by Suzan-Lori Parks; directed by Steve H. Broadnax III
Performances through May 12, 2024
Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, NYC
publictheater.org
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| Sheria Irving and Gabriel Ebert in Sally & Tom (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Among contemporary playwrights, you’d think Suzan-Lori Parks would be the one to have an original and startling take on the complicated relationship of founding father Thomas Jefferson and enslaved Sally Hemings. But, with Sally & Tom, Parks has created an intermittently lacerating but mainly mild play about one of the most fraught subjects in our fraught national history.
To grapple with and have a contemporary dialogue with the historical subject at hand, Parks introduces a scruffy off-off-Broadway troupe putting on a play titled The Pursuit of Happiness—it was originally called E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One), something that Parks gets some decent mileage out of—in which the relationship between T.J. (as Jefferson is so-called) and Sally is dramatized from a distinctly 21st-century point of view.
The play-within-a-play is written by Luce, who plays Sally, and directed by Mike, who plays T.J. Luce and Mike are a couple bound by their art and their advocacy but who are starting to get tired of begging for money and shouting their words into mostly empty theaters—perhaps belatedly realizing that leftist politics onstage is an echo chamber.
Parks would seem to the perfect playwright to dig into these parallel provocations: studying a beloved American’s indefensible personal life and if it’s possible to make genuine art in these divided times. But she instead creates distance from the task at hand. Sally & Tom has three distinct levels: T.J. and Sally in The Pursuit of Happiness; Luce and Mike as lovers and artists; and the other players in the troupe, whose backstage interactions might be amusing to those who work in the theater but which are a combination of easy laughs and cheap melodramatics that simply pad the running time.
Such a dramatic and comic imbalance dilutes what Parks is saying about the pedestal our Founding Fathers have been put on; the unfairness of history being written by white men; and the agency of a woman like Sally, who bore seven of Jefferson’s children but was never freed by him, even on his deathbed, unlike both Washington and Franklin, as is mentioned in the play. (Jefferson’s daughter Patsy freed Sally and others after her father died July 4, 1826—significantly the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—along with John Adams in one of history’s best coincidences.)
To be sure, there are fleeting moments of precise observation and ringing insight, but Sally & Tom really only flashes to vivid life in the speeches that climax each act. Act one ends with a long and winding soliloquy by T.J. (of which Gabriel Ebert, who’s most engaging as both Mike and Tom, gives a persuasive reading), which treads the fine lines of self-pity, self-absorption, and self-analysis, thanks to Parks’ acuteness at studying this extraordinary man with extraordinary flaws.
Even better is the monologue Parks has written for Sally (the gifted Sheria Irving, who’s superb as both Luce and Sally, rises to Shakespearean heights here), in which she—and by extension Parks—grapples with her own place in a history she has officially never been part of, even if recent Jeffersonian history has started to grant her space there. Sally eloquently describes her conflicting emotions:
I want to push his hands off. Tear away whatever of myself makes him want me. And yet, the horror of him wanting me keeps me from other horrors. Some might say we were docile. I say we were resilient. And we pass that down to you. And there were so many things we wanted to say. But didn’t. So many things we wanted to do. But didn’t. We should have burned the whole place down. Instead we built it up.
Sally’s thoughtful, poignant plea overcomes some of the preceding two-plus hours’ repetitiveness.
Steve H. Broadnax III’s direction nicely corrals the three disparate story threads into a nearly cohesive whole, and the ensemble amusingly handles the doubled roles of the other performers and their characters. Riccardo Hernández’ scenic design, Rodrigo Muñoz’ costumes, Alan C. Edwards’ lighting, Dan Moses Schreier’s sound design and Schreier and Parks’ music adroitly dip us in and out of each segment.
But the final coup de theatre, a list of Monticello’s enslaved names appearing on the back wall, is a visual sledgehammer that unnecessarily underscores the play's bluntness, despite its lofty intentions.
Revel in Ravel with the Juilliard Orchestra
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 19 April 2024 17:54
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Juilliard Orchestra Conducted by David Robertson. Photo by Rachel Papo.
At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium on the evening of Tuesday, April 2nd, I had the pleasure of attending an excellent concert of modernist French music presented by the remarkable Juilliard Orchestra under the superb direction of David Robertson.
The program began brilliantly with one of the highlights of the evening, a marvelous account of Lili Boulanger’s extraordinary, seldom performed Of a Spring Morning, a beautifully scored, Impressionistic work from 1918, impeccably conducted here by Tengku Irfan. Robertson then entered the stage to introduce the next piece, a set of five challenging but rewarding selections from Pierre Boulez’s infrequently heard Notations for Piano and Orchestra, featuring the precocious Joanne Chew-Anne Chang as soloist. Originally written for solo piano when the composer was twenty, he orchestrated it admirably decades later, at the invitation of conductor Daniel Barenboim. Robertson led the artists in the first, seventh, fourth, third and second of the Notations, in that order.
The second half of the event was at least equally as accomplished, starting with a sterling performance of Maurice Ravel’s engaging Piano Concerto in G Major from 1931, dazzlingly played by another outstanding soloist, the incredibly promising Jingting Zhu. The initial, energetic and virtuosic Allegramente movement, which has a sprightly opening, strongly recalls the music of George Gershwin—Ravel evidently was greatly impressed by the latter’s Concerto in F, although his own personality is nonetheless unmistakable; the slower passages have the quality of a moody reverie and it ends forcefully and precipitously. The Adagio assai that follows begins with an extended, introspective introduction for solo piano; the movement, which contains some of the score’s most exquisite music, sustains an inward character, with some lyrical moments, throughout its length. The propulsive and percussive Presto finale, also concludes abruptly.
The event closed awesomely, first with a rare and very brief Ravel opus, Frontispice from 1918, one of the most avant-garde scores he ever composed. In it, according to the program note by Thomas May:
The numbers three and five have a notable presence—the original score comprises 15 (3x5) measures and is designed for three pianists and five hands. In 2007, Pierre Boulez arranged this music for a large orchestra.
Without a pause, Robertson transitioned to a masterly rendition of Claude Debussy’s incomparable La mer from 1905. One can discern many pronouncedly Oriental echoes across the first movement, From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, which has some of the eccentricity to be found in the early works of Igor Stravinsky and which builds to a powerful climax. The succeeding Play of the Waves is more animated, even turbulent, but concludes softly, and the finale, Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, is agitated and tumultuous and ends unforgettably.
The players were enthusiastically applauded.
April '24 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 16 April 2024 22:11
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Absence of Eden
(Roadside Attractions/Vertical)
In writer-director Marco Perego’s sketchy melodrama, Shipp, a rookie border agent with a conscience, must deal with the cynical Dobbins for a partner; a girlfriend, Yadira, who may be undocumented; and an undocumented Mexican woman, Esmee, who is trying to protect a young child. Perego tries to be even-handed in his study of these flawed characters, but his vision is no deeper than that of a driver looking through his windshield in the pouring rain without wipers on.
The director’s wife, Zoe Saldaña, gives a committed performance as Esmee, Grant Hedlund is a persuasive Shipp and Adria Arjona is an impassioned Yadira, but they are performing in a vacuum, since the film is so thin dramatically and politically that it suggests a first draft.
Blackout
(Dark Sky)
If you haven’t had your fill of werewolf movies yet, along comes writer-director Larry Fessenden with his typically astringent take on the nocturnal creature feature, as an artist in a small town thinks that he may be the one who is behind several recent overnight maulings.
Fessenden keeps a sense of humor about his material, along with a smattering of social commentary, but there’s little here that we haven’t seen before—An American Werewolf in London anticipated the jokey but gory genre more than 40 years ago—yet it does have its occasional successfully tense moments.
(Magnolia)
In 2008’s Food, Inc., director Robert Kenner teamed up with investigative authors Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser to tell a cautionary tale of how Big Agriculture has made it nearly impossible to eat healthfully. Nearly two decades later, the sequel has arrived to tell an even more alarmist story that encompasses the disasters of the recent pandemic, notably that Big Ag corporations carved out exceptions to the many COVID restrictions to keep their factories going—at the cost of sick workers, among other things.
As Kenner, codirector Melissa Robledo, Pollan and Schlosser show, this is not a left-right issue, but one that affects all of us, and they allow several individuals (including U.S. senator Cory Booker) to discuss new and innovative ways of food production that might lead toward more food sustainability.
Irena’s Vow
(Quiver Distributing)
The astonishing true story of Irena Gut Opdyke, a Polish Catholic nurse who was able to hide 13 Jews in the house of a prominent Nazi for whom she worked, is vividly dramatized in Louise Archambault’s feature from a script by Dan Gordon, based on his own play that played briefly Broadway in 2009.
Like the play, Gordon’s script is too melodramatic, even saccharine at times, but the humane, believable Irena of Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse rescues this low-key study of an ordinary person who almost backs into becoming a heroine.
(Abramorama)
This deeply felt documentary chronicles several instances of successful Jewish resistance against the barbarism of the murderous Nazis throughout Europe that counteracts the prevailing narrative that the Jews were just meek victims. Directors Paula Apsell and Kirk Wolfinger adroitly mix testimony from survivors and their descendants alongside discussion of historians to underline the heroic actions of so many.
With narration and other voices by Corey Stoll, Maggie Siff and Lisa Loeb, among others, this necessary portrait illuminates how goodness was able to, at times, overcome evil.
4K/UHD Releases of the Week
The Devil’s Honey
(Severin)
When her boyfriend Johnny dies on the operating table at the hands of neglectful Dr. Wendell Simpson, vengeful young Jessica kidnaps Wendell and subjects him to torture of the physical and emotional kind, which morphs into a twisted sexual relationship. Italian director Lucio Fulci’s 1986 drama is often risible but always watchable, as he’s unafraid to get down and dirty with his characters—whether it’s the opening music-studio salvo between Jessica and Johnny as he plays his horn or the increasingly creepy interactions between Jessica and Wendell.
There’s also the stunningly erotic presence of Blanca Marsillach, the Romanian actress who plays Jessica persuasively. The film looks quite good in 4K as well as on Blu-ray; extras include interviews with Fulci, Marsallich and costars Brett Halsey and Corinne Clery as well as an alternate opening.
(Severin)
Not many would bring up this 1979 monster movie as one of the better rip-offs that arrived in the wake of Jaws, but Sergio Martino’s waterlogged thriller is demented enough to keep one watching, despite the silly dialogue and acting—especially by poor Barbara Bach, who looks properly embarrassed throughout.
The plot—an island god, seeking vengeance, takes the shape of a supergator to take down the natives and tourists at a tropical resort—is also ridiculous but keeps one interested for a relatively brief 90 minutes. The UHD transfer is good enough, as is the Blu-ray; extras include several interviews with cast and crew, including Martino, and English and Italian audio tracks are included.
Rambo—Last Blood
(Lionsgate)
If this is truly the final go-round for John Rambo, as this 2019’s title surely promises, then we’ve had worse before—I gave up after the awful third entry—and this, the fifth go-round, has Rambo going after the drug cartel criminals who have kidnaped and forced into sexual slavery the granddaughter of the woman who comanages his horse ranch.
Director Adrian Grünberg knows that Rambo’s—and Sylvester Stallone’s—bread and butter is action, the more violent the better, and this entry checks all the boxes, from the xenophobic treatment of Mexicans to some creative ways of taking out Rambo’s enemies when they attack him at home for a satisfying if predictable conclusion to the series. The UHD transfer is sparkling; extras are a substantial production diary and musical score featurette.
Benjamin Britten—Violin Concerto
(BR Klassik)
Just weeks after listening to Baiba Skride tackle the youthful Violin Concerto by English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-76), I got to hear another formidable take on that masterpiece, this time in an excellent recording by soloist Isabelle Faust, who easily dispatches the technical demands of this masterly workout for her instrument. Jakub Hrůša intelligently conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Rounding out the disc are a few enticing chamber works by Britten that predate his concerto, including the world premiere recording of Two Pieces for violin, viola and piano, nicely played by Faust, her violist brother Boris, and pianist Alexander Melnikov.
Paul Moravec—The Shining
(Pentatone)
Despite being based on Stephen King’s original 1977 novel—which Mark Campbell’s libretto follows fairly faithfully—Paul Moravec’s opera must deal with the proverbial elephant in the room: Stanley Kubrick’s chilling 1980 film classic that jettisoned much of King’s book and remains The Shining of choice for me. That long shadow includes Kubrick’s music choices: his innovative and original use of works by 20th-century modernists Bartók, Ligeti and Penderecki are are one of the main reasons why the film remains disturbing and indelible. Moravec has gone in a different direction; the rumblings of menace always bubble under the surface of his score but often hold back the terrors that beset the Torrance family once father Jack becomes haunted by the Overlook Hotel’s ghosts.
Though it still effectively tells the tale, especially in its quieter moments like the touching finale, this adaptation falls short of the incendiary and baroque visual and musical explosion Kubrick created. Gerard Schwartz ably conducts the Kansas City Symphony and Lyric Opera of Kansas City Chorus, while the main roles are well taken by Edward Parks (Jack), Kelly Kaduce (Wendy), Tristan Hallett (Danny) and, best of all, Aubrey Allicock (Hallorann).
Broadway Musical Review—“Water for Elephants”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 14 April 2024 22:58
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Water for Elephants
Book by Rick Elice; music and lyrics by PigPen Theatre Co.
Directed by Jessica Stone
Through September 8, 2024
Imperial Theatre, 249 West 45th Street, NYC
waterforelephantsthemusical.com
 |
| Isabelle McCalla in Water for Elephants (photo: Matt Murphy) |
Based on Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel that became a mediocre 2011 movie, Water for Elephants has splashed down on Broadway. And the most dazzling moments of this musical set in a circus are exclusively visual: the incredible acrobats and dancers as well as—impressively if derivatively—the puppetry that brings the captive animal performers, including Rosie the elephant, to life.
But despite that, Water for Elephants has songs that are unmemorable and a story that makes soap operas look like Shakespeare. The romantic triangle spotlights our desperate Depression hero, Jacob Jankowski, who joins the circus after a rural New York State performance—since his dad was a vet and Jacob studied it in school, he’s taken on as the new horse doc; Marlena, the beautiful star of the horse show; and ringmaster and circus owner August, who’s Marlena’s loving but brutal husband.
Jacob and Marlena meet cutely when he gives her recommendations about her ailing Silver Star, then they grow closer while training Rosie, who August hopes will be the big new attraction the circus needs. The musical then turns into a romantic rectangle, but its predictability overwhelms it: is anyone shocked by the comeuppance August contrives for aging circus veteran, Camel (who also was close to Jacob)? Then there's the unabashedly sentimental framing device of an elderly Jacob (played by the old pro Gregg Edelman), wandering into a circus from the rest home and telling his story to the workers—and us.
That Water for Elephants isn’t completely risible is due to Jessica Stone’s savvy staging that, whenever the love story cloys, comes to the rescue with spectacular acrobats or boisterously busy dance numbers—credit also to Shana Carroll and Jesse Robb’s clever choreography, Carroll’s lively circus design, Takeshi Kata’s evocative sets, Bradley King’s sharp lighting and David Israel Reynoso’s detailed costumes.
Then there’s the arresting appearance of several adorable animals, from a pet pooch and the circus monkeys to the unfortunate Silver Star, who gets the show’s best moment when Antoine Boissereau exquisitely performs a ballet in the air to visualize the animal’s suffering. Rosie, by contrast, isn’t very imaginatively thought out; in any case, the anthropomorphic animals’ look and movement are cut from the same cloth as the puppetry of The Lion King and War Horse, tweaked by Ray Wetmore & JR Goodman and Camille Labarre but coming in a distant second.
The merely serviceable songs by PigPen Theatre Co. and book by Rick Elice are enlivened by the large and energetic cast, with the lovers Marlena and Jacob winningly enacted by Isabelle McCalla—who might soon give Lea Michele a run for her money—and Grant Gustin. They might not save Water for Elephants from drowning, but the show is a mild diversion.
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