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Broadway's Kelli O'Hara Sings Classics at Carnegie

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 04 November 2016 13:58; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee

A touchstone of the current season at Carnegie Hall was the opportunity to hear Broadway star Kelli O'Hara at Stern Auditorium in her terrific solo debut there, on the evening of Saturday, October 29th.

Looking glamorous in a red gown, she opened with "Ain't it a pretty night" by Carlisle Floyd from his opera Susannah, thrillingly segueing into a jazz arrangement of "I Have Dreamed" from The King and I by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein, for the current revival of which (opposite Ken Watanabe) she won a Tony Award. (She recorded this on her first solo album, Wonder in the World.)

She further mined the Great American Songbook, the most impressive component of her repertoire, with a contemporary arrangement of "Without a Song" by the superb Vincent Youmans, which was popularized by Bing Crosby (with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra) and Frank Sinatra. After "To Build a Home" by Jason Robert Brown from The Bridges of Madison County, in which she appeared on Broadway, she delivered Leonard Bernstein's "Make Our Garden Grow" from Candide, originated by the legendary Barbara Cook whom she then brought onstage. Cook sang a ditty by Vernon Duke a cappella and O'Hara then led the audience in "Happy Birthday" for Cook, who had just turned 89 that week.

kelli O'Hara then performed "The Light in the Piazza" from the musical of the same name by Adam Guettel (the grandson of Rodgers) which she starred in on Broadway to acclaim, followed by "I Wish It So" by Marc Blitzstein from Juno and then the lovely "I Cannot Hear the City" by Marvin Hamlisch from his musical Sweet Smell of Success, in which show she had also starred on Broadway. The ensuing, delightful "He Loves Me" from the very underrated, recently revived, She Loves Me by Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick preceded a beautiful rendition of "Finishing the Hat", one of Stephen Sondheim's finest songs (from Sunday in the Park with George), expressing her debt to the composer in whose Follies she also had a role in on Broadway. She surpassed this with "This Nearly Was Mine" one of the supreme moments of the evening and one of the greatest popular songs, from Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific, another one of her Broadway successes. She recorded these last three for her second solo album, Always.

"The Sun Went Out" by her husband Greg Naughton led to his joining her for "Dance with Me" by his band, The Sweet Remains, who all entered the stage to accompany them as a bonus. O'Hara then brought up her father-in-law and the whole group performed "That Lonesome Road" by James Taylor, a cappella.

A gorgeous mash-up of Charlie Chaplin's "Smile" and George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" was another high-point. Her collaboration with composer Ricky Ian Gordon was registered with "God's There" from Dream True. She followed up her own song, the charming "She Sings", with Dan Lipton & David Rossmer's “They Don’t Let You In The Opera (If You’re A Country Star)” which is also on Always.

Another fabulous surprise was bringing the exquisite Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth onto the stage for a show-stopping performance of "Oklahoma" from the eponymous musical by Rodgers & Hammerstein. "Make Someone Happy" (on Wonder in the World) by Jules Styne, with lyrics by Betty Comden & Adolph Green, from Do Re Mi, was another pinnacle and she rewarded the audience with two welcome encores, the magnificent "I Could Have Danced All Night" (on Always) from My Fair Lady by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe and "With a Little Help from My Friends" from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles, assisted onstage by members of her family and friends.

November '16 Digital Week I

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 02 November 2016 14:58; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Body Snatchers

(Warner Archive)

Abel Ferrara’s 1993 “reboot” of Invasion of the Body Snatchers adds a further level of paranoia by involving the U.S. military—but this crude, single-minded story doesn’t really get going until the final reels (it took three screenwriters to think this up?).

As the heroine, Gabrielle Anwar has a striking presence: it’s still surprising that she (Scent of a Woman notwithstanding) never became a star. Overall, this isn’t bad, which for Ferrara is pretty good. The hi-def transfer is decent.

Forces of Nature

(PBS)

For this latest scientific eye-opener via PBS and the BBC, four 60-minute episodes parse the unique beauties of nature through the often unfathomable rules that science tries to make understandable; the episode titles tell all: Color, Elements, Motion and Shape.

The genuinely eye-popping hi-def photography, coupled with instructive commentary about what makes our universe go round—from forces of gravity to movement of animals—make this a must-watch: all four hours of it. The hi-def visuals look simply spectacular on Blu.

The ID

(Hutson Ranch Media)

A middle-aged woman living with her elderly father attempts to break free from his dire influence—with devastating consequence—in this sometimes frightening thriller by director Thommy Hutson and writer Sean H. Stewart.

Patrick Peduto is a bit too on the nose as the father, but Amanda Wyss—known to horror audiences for A Nightmare on Elm Street—gives a fiercely committed performance as the daughter. The hi-def transfer is impressive; extras comprise a making-of featurette, Hutson/Wyss commentary, deleted/alternate scenes and audition clips.

Men & Chicken

(Drafthouse Films)

This scattershot but amusing misadventure follows two half-brothers who are out to find their birth dad after the man they thought was their father confesses he isn’t in a video he makes for them before his death.

The Hunt’s Mads Mikkelsen and David Dencik head a marvelous cast in this flat-out insane look at strange family relationships, even if writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen goes too far with his yen for vomiting and violence, however slapstick it is. The Blu-ray image is solid.

Norman Lear—Just Another Version of You

(PBS)

One of television’s towering geniuses, 92-year-old Norman Lear—creator of, among others, All in the Family, Good Times, Maude and The Jeffersons—is profiled in this informative documentary about his life and career—and, most important, his influence on American culture far beyond the boob tube.

Lear discusses his own political and social viewpoints (which obviously informed his shows), and there are new interviews from some of his actors and vintage interviews with those—like Carroll O’Connor—who are unfortunately no longer around. Too bad it’s only 90 minutes: it could easily go on for another hour or so. The film looks fine on Blu; extras are deleted scenes.

Ugly, Dirty & Bad

(Film Movement)

Italian director Ettore Scola won Best Director at Cannes in 1976 for this grotesque, at times trenchant but mostly wallowing comic study of a large poor family near Rome and their newly wealthy patriarch, who decides to spend his money on an obese prostitute he loves.

As the father, Nino Manfredi makes the unlikeable protagonist likeable, but for nearly two hours, Scola rubs our noses in the grime of this family’s immorality, all to diminishing returns by his film’s end. The restored transfer is sharp and detailed; the lone extra is an informative Richard Pena commentary.

DVDs of the Week

Casella—La Donna Serpente

(Bongiovanni)

Elgar—The Dream of Gerontius

(ICA Classics)

Alfredo Casella, an accomplished mid-20^th century Italian composer, penned his lone opera, La Donna Serpente, in 1928; this 2014 staging in Martina Franca, Italy, highlights its attractive and eminently singable music, but also the silly libretto which keeps it from being anything more than an entertaining curiosity.

Edward Elgar, England’s most famous 20^th century composer before Benjamin Britten, was known for Big Statement works like the Enigma Variations or Pomp and Circumstance; The Dream of Gerontius is a massive choral work: this 1968 performance, filmed in the famous Canterbury Cathedral, has an array of brilliant forces, from conductor Sir Adrian Boult to singers Peter Pears, Janet Baker and John Shirley-Quirk, which give it a professional veneer. A second Elgar disc includes an hour-long 1989 BBC Boult profile.

Eva Doesn’t Sleep

(Film Movement)

Pablo Aguero’s potent piece of speculative fiction sprinkled with fact takes the measure of one of the 20^thcentury Argentina’s most seminal historical events—the death of Eva Peron in 1952—and covers episodes over the next quarter-century surrounding her body’s burial.

With a giddy mixture of dramatization and documentary footage, Aguero shows how explosive were the clashes between opposing political factions following the death of a 33-year-old president’s wife who embodied the hopes and fears of millions of her countrymen and women.

One Day Since Yesterday

(Warner Archive)

Peter Bogdanovich’s career—recounted in Bill Teck’s sympathetic 2015 documentary—began inauspiciously with Targets, then flew into orbit with The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc and Paper Moon before thudding back to earth with duds Daisy Miller, At Long Last Loveand Nickelodeon (the latter unmentioned here).

There’s an inordinate amount of time spent on the mild 1981 romantic comedy They All Laughed, which the likes of Quentin Tarantino champion; the 980 murder of its star, Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten, Bogdanovich’s then-girlfriend, gives a tragic twist to an otherwise undistinguished screen career. Bogdanovich, a chatty interview subject, has ties to cinematic greats like John Ford and Orson Welles, which will probably outlive his cinematic achievements, such as they are.

CD of the Week

Bohuslav Martinu—Ariane/Double Concerto

(Supraphon)

Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu’s one-act opera Ariane—one of his final compositions before he died in 1959 at age 68—is a captivating dramatic work that leads up to a marvelous final aria for the heroine, sung here with absolute control and poise by Slovakian soprano Simona Saturova.

Conductor Tomas Netopil and the Essen Philharmonic, who do wonders with Ariane, sound similarly muscular with Martinu’s masterly Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano and Timpani, an overpowering work composed on the eve of World War II, and whose three movements are bursting with intensity and dramatic vividness, especially in the passages played by piano soloist Ivo Kahanek.

Off-Broadway Review—Rachel Weisz in David Hare’s “Plenty”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 28 October 2016 12:29; Written by Kevin Filipski

Plenty

Written by David Hare; directed by David Leveaux

Performances through December 1, 2016

Rachel Weisz and Byron Jennings in Plenty (photo: Joan Marcus)

One of our most literate and provocative playwrights, David Hare has never shied from merging the personal with the political. Perhaps none of his plays makes that as explicit as Plenty, the 1978 drama that introduced what might be his most complicated protagonist—I hesitate to say heroine—Susan Traherne, a young British woman who, returning home following World War II (as part of the French Resistance, she seemingly found her calling to make a difference in the world), finds that the post-war years leave her unmoored and disaffected.

The original production of Plenty (which came to New York in 1982) starred Kate Nelligan, by all accounts a splendid Susan. I saw Fred Schepisi’s handsomely mounted 1985 film adaptation with a steely but polished Meryl Streep in the lead, then completely forgot that I saw Cate Blanchett’s Susan in a 1999 London West End staging. A new New York production by David Leveaux lays bare what’s wrong with the play—Susan herself.

Hare’s drama opens in 1962, introducing Susan, her best friend Alice Parks and Susan’s husband Raymond Brock, who is lying naked and unconscious on the floor: an unexplained occurrence that announces the play’s foggy atmosphere of disconnect. We then jump back to a field in France in 1943—as Susan meets a fellow Brit, Lazar, who’s also aiding the Resistance—then proceed chronologically through scenes that show Susan making fateful decisions affecting her post-war life.

For the final scene, Hare returns to halcyon France in 1944: a luminous Susan sits in an open field and says her famous final line, “There will be days and days and days like this,” which we know—thanks to Hare’s blatant dramatizing—is a delusion. He does write dazzlingly distinctive dialogue for Susan, Brock, Alice, Lazar, and the unfortunately named Leonard Darwin, ambassador who breaks with British protocol over the Suez Canal fiasco. Hare’s insights into politics informing everyday lives are second to none.

But Plenty never makes the case that Susan is worth following through the years. A neurotic idealist in a world of hard realities, she makes foolish decisions—like marrying diplomat Brock, the opposite kind of life she wants, notwithstanding he helped her out—that seem made more for dramatic irony than plausible characterization. Another is her decision to have a baby with no strings attached: she gets an acquaintance, working-class Mick, to be the father, but after 18 months of shooting blanks, she unceremoniously dumps him as no longer being worthy of being her would-be baby daddy, and he explodes with righteous anger over her manipulation. Well, duh.

David Leveaux’s terse staging can’t thaw the chilliness in Hare’s script and Susan’s character, and Mike Britton’s sleek set, comprising three movable walls and a rotating stage, ably moves through the play’s dozen scenes without clearly defining them. Similarly, the performers are a mixed bag: Byron Jennings is a one-note Darwin, ditto Ken Barnett’s Lazar, while Emily Bergl’s Alice is sweetly endearing and Corey Stoll is a persuasive Brock.

Rachel Weisz makes the most of her commanding onstage presence to give Susan’s fuzzy psychology a semblance of reality, which keeps her plight interesting if only intermittently involving. Plenty ends up being as much a mirage as the future its elusive protagonist envisions.

Plenty

The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY

publictheatre.org

The "Four Seasons" in Fall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 27 October 2016 14:07; Written by Jack Angstreich

Thomas Crawford, conductor of American Cassical Orchestra. Photo by William Neumann Photography.

The enjoyable second concert this season by the American Classical Orchestra under the direction of Thomas Crawford—given on the evening of Tuesday, October 25th, at the marvelous Alice Tully Hall—was devoted to Baroque concerti for string ensembles.

The program opened with the excellent, rarely performed Concerto Grosso in D minor, Op. 5, No. 12, by Francesco Geminiani, a recomposition of a work by the great Arcangelo Corelli, a theme and variations of the famous melody "La follia".

This was followed by the wonderful "Autumn" concerto of Antonio Vivaldi's magnificent The Four Seasons, the four parts of which Crawford, in his engaging remarks preceding the concert, said he had only performed once before and described as "the most famous Baroque piece of all" and as more "ingenious" and variegated than other concertos by the composer.

The musicians then presented the appealing, "virtually unknown" Concerto a Quattro, Op. 7, by the obscure and enigmatic Giovanni Albicastro, which Crawford averred was not a great piece but "a little bonbon against the Vivaldi and [Georg Friedrich] Händel" in the program, adding that not every work "can be a masterpiece" but assuring that this was nonetheless beautiful, calling attention to the oboe solo. He said that the score has been out of print for fifty years and that he had to copy it from the Bobst Library.

The first half of the program concluded with the lovely "Winter" concerto from The Four Seasons while the even better second half opened with Handel's superb Concerto Grosso, Opus 3, No. 2, which Crawford noted is one of his "all-time favorites". He asserted that the composer was "able to take up the spirit of another country" and that the work "sounds more English than German", only sounding particularly German in "one lousy fugue". He also said that "the real reason" he programmed this piece was the adagio oboe solo. He noted with respect to the minuet that it's "charming and beautifully written" and that Händel "wrote some of the finest minuets of the era".

On the delightful "Spring" concerto that ensued, Crawford amusingly reported that "the most annoying thing in all Baroque music" is "the dog barking in the viola" in the middle movement. On the glorious "Summer" concerto that concluded the evening, he claimed that it "begins in the weakest way of all them" but is the "strongest" of all the concertos in the set "from a compositional point of view", adding that "if Vivaldi is good at anything, it's at repeating things, sometimes too much" and that the final movement of the work is "absolutely thrilling". It was a splendid ending to a worthwhile program.

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