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Film and the Arts
2015 Summer Festivals—Shaw Festival, Caramoor, Bard Summerscape
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 17 August 2015 00:08
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Shaw Festival
Performances through November 1, 2015
Caramoor Summer Music Festival
Performances through August 2, 2015
Bard Summerscape
Performances through August 16, 2015
Canada's Shaw Festival continues to be the premier summer theater destination, not only for its lovely lakeside location (whose cool breezes and usually moderate temperatures are the opposite of New York's sultry weather) but for its mostly superior productions of plays by Shaw and his contemporaries and—straying from the festival's original mandate—classic musicals and new plays by writers influenced by Bernard Shaw.
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| Julie Martell (center) in Sweet Charity (photo: Emily Cooper) |
This summer's musical, Sweet Charity, has two long shadows: it's based on Federico Fellini's classic 1956 film, The Nights of Cabiria,starring his beloved wife Giulietta Masina; and the original Broadway production, by Bob Fosse, starred his beloved wife Gwen Verdon. So that's four legends of film and theater towering over any production of this musical, which has a beguilingly tuneful score by Cy Coleman and an amusingly sassy book by Neil Simon.
Happily, multifaceted singer-dancer-actress Julie Martell brings her own mix of lovable naivete and hard-as-nails New York toughness to the lead role of Charity, and a large and merry cast surrounds her. Ken MacDonald's nicely evocative '60s New York sets, Cameron Davis's astute projections, Bonnie Beecher's lively lighting and Charlotte Dean's dead-on costumes complement the boisterous choreography of Parker Esse and solid direction by Morris Panych, which combine to make this Charity sweet indeed.
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| Harveen Sandhu (center) and Patrick McManus (right) in Pygmalion (photo: Emily Cooper) |
The same cannot be said for a new production of Pygmalion, one of Bernard Shaw's supreme masterpieces that's best known as the basis of the beloved musical My Fair Lady. Shaw's biting satire of class warfare has been pointlessly updated to the present day by director Peter Hinton (who did similar damage to Oscar Wilde's Lady Windemere's Fan a couple of summers back), in the hopes that everyone "gets" that Shaw's 100-year-old play is still relevant today.
Well, of course it is, and we don't need Hinton's sledgehammer introductions of pontificating TV talking heads and other video footage, an extraneous fashion show—yes, you read that right— and lousy contemporary songs to alert us to that fact. (When Vaughan Williams' elegaic Tallis Fantasia is heard during a scene, the effect in this confused context is of sheer irrationality.)
And, contrary to his published director's note, Hinton has "modernized" more than just dialogue about financial matters in order to push stodgy old Shaw into the 21st century. Whereas in the original, Eliza Doolittle famously used the expletive "bloody" to shock Shaw's upper-crust phonies, now she uses a more infamous F-word. It's good for an easy laugh—and feigned shock from an audience desensitized to hearing it by now—but little more.
In such a farrago, the actors don't stand a chance: even experienced Shaw Fest vets like Patrick McManus and Mary Haney as Henry Higgins and his mother are defeated by their director; poor McManus even has to fight off a collapsing chair in a painfully unfunny bit of slapstick. For her part, Harveen Sandhu is everything you would want in an Eliza: maybe she'll get to play her again in a more felicitous production of Pygmalion.
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| Dialogues des Carmélites: Jennifer Cheek, conductor Will Crutchfield, Alisa Jordheim (photo: Gabe Palacio) |
From Canada to two musical oases north of the city, each staging opera this summer. Caramoor, an estate in Katonah, 45 minutes north of Manhattan, hosts a music festival each summer that includes classical, jazz and folk, along with two operas in the "Bel Canto at Caramoor" series. However, this summer—in addition to Donzietti's bel canto La Favorite—a mid-20th century masterpiece was performed: Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites.
It was a wise choice for the outdoor Venetian Theater: Poulenc's extraordinarily moving drama about a group of martyred nuns during the French Revolution was given a forceful reading by conductor Will Crutchfield and his skilled orchestral forces, choir and singers, led by the formidable Jennifer Cheek's young nun Blanche and Alisa Jordheim's breakout performance as the novice nun Constance.
Directed adroitly if minimally on the cramped stage by Victoria Crutchfield (the conductor's talented daughter), this Carmelites was involving musical drama of the highest order.
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| A scene from The Wreckers (photo: Cory Weaver) |
Would that I could say the same about Ethel Smyth's middling The Wreckers, this summer's operatic offering at the annual must-attendBard Summerscape, on Bard College's campus two hours north of New York. Smyth was a contemporary of Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, the subject of this summer's Bard Music Festival, which is why her 1908 opera—never before staged in America—was chosen, but a sketchy libretto and long, arid stretches of uninspired music drag it down.
Smyth's melodies are remindful of Wagner, Strauss and particularly Bizet and Carmen, but without reaching the emotional or dramatic heights of those masters. And director Thaddeus Strassberger forced the poor performers to navigate what looked like a precarious setup of crates that could at any moment send them tumbling into the orchestra pit. As it is, only soprano Sky Ingram made any vocal or dramatic impression in a cast that might have been more capable in more sympathetic circumstances.
Leon Botstein ably conducted the American Symphony Orchestra, but the end result was indifference toward an operatic oddity with little to recommend it. Perhaps Chavez's only opera, The Visitors, should have been staged instead.
Shaw Festival
Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada
shawfest.com
Caramoor Summer Music Festival
Katonah, NY
caramoor.org
Bard Summerscape
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
fishercenter.bard.edu
NYC Theater Review—'Cymbeline' in Central Park
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 13 August 2015 19:29
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Cymbeline
Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Daniel Sullivan
Performances through August 23, 2015
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| Lily Rabe and Raul Esparza in Cymbeline (photo: Carol Rosegg) |
That Shakespeare jumped the shark with Cymbeline, a late-career romance that includes so many wild plot twists and crazy final-act revelations and reversals it's as if the Bard had decided to send up his entire playwriting career in one fell swoop, is pretty indisputable.
So it's not surprising that director Daniel Sullivan plays fast and loose with its many eccentricities for his Central Park staging, jettisoning the ancient Britain and Renaissance Rome settings, doing the usual Delacorte dumbing down by making things cruder and more farcical, and excising one of Shakespeare's most famous dream sequences: the appearance of the god Jupiter on an eagle.
The problem with this approach is that Cymbeline, for all its inconsistencies (literary luminaries Bernard Shaw and Samuel Johnson famously hated it), is a carefully constructed and ultimately moving exploration of love, death and reconciliation. By treating it as a string of entertaining scenes with added song and dance interludes, Sullivan ends up merely skimming the surface of Shakespeare's deep, dark, often sorrowful text.
His fast-paced three hour production thrives on audience participation, a desperate strategem for any director: the performers get to play to and ackowledge a few dozen spectactors sitting in several rows placed on either side of the stage, which makes for fun but unnecessary interaction. There's also much bric-a-brac at the sides of the stage (which looks salvaged from earlier Delacorte productions), including piles of crates—not to be confused with the trunk featured in the famous bedroom scene—on which are stampedKing Lear and Hamlet and, unaccountably, oversized cutouts of Napoleon on horseback and an armored tank.
None of this really adds anything, but doesn't really detract either. What does detract are the mediocre performances of the Delacorte's current "it" couple, Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater, whose inflated reputations as top-flight Shakespeareans continues to mystify. Rabe, whose Imogen never reaches the poetic heights of one of Shakespeare's most sympathetically drawn females, fleetingly rises to the occasion when disguised as a boy, while Linklater fails to impress in not one but two roles (nine performers enact some two dozen roles throughout). As both the heroic Posthumous and the idiotic Cloten, Linklater falls equally flat.
Others fare better. Kate Burton makes a gleefully evil stepmother as the Queen and doubles amusingly as banished old man Belarius, whose "sons" are integral to the convoluted plot revelations, while Patrick Page is a well-spoken and quietly elegant King Cymbeline. Best of all is the villainous Iachimo of Raul Esparza, whose charismatic performance works despite Sullivan making him a Rat Pack-era Sinatra.
Esparza beautifully sings "Come, thou monarch of the vine," lifted from Anthony and Cleopatra (the not inapposite music is by Tom Kitt), dances sinuously when given the chance, and is the lone cast member who sounds like he understands what he's saying, especially in the bedroom scene, when he takes the measure of the sleeping Imogen to gather proof that he slept with her to win a bet with Posthumous.
If only Sullivan had given Esparza more Shakespearean songs to sing, I wouldn't have minded that his Cymbeline isn't really Cymbeline at all.
Cymbeline
Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York, NY
shakespeareinthepark.org
August '15 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 12 August 2015 00:33
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Barely Lethal
(Lionsgate)
This comic caper about a lethal assassin who, because she's a teenage girl, decides to become a "normal" high school kid, works on and off for 90 minutes, growing increasingly desperate to balance its Sixteen Candles homage with warmed-over Spy Kids-like action.
Kyle Newman's movie at least has Hailee Steinfeld, an accomplished and charming actress who holds the screen formidably since her memorable 2010 debut in True Grit: with the likes of Samuel Jackson and Jessica Alba wasted, Steinfeld is the only one worth watching. The movie looks good on Blu; extras comprise a commentary, deleted scenes and featurette.
(Alchemy)
In a faith-based drama with a twist even O. Henry would have rejected, a high school senior is framed for murder in 1950s Georgia and his identical twin brother takes matters into his own hands to set everything right. It's too bad hamfisted director Joshua Mills' inability to tell a straightforward story without obvious religious symbolism drags down his competent cast.
Some may find its message emotionally or spiritually satisfying, but it would have been more so without such heavyhanded writing and directing. The movie looks fine on Blu.
The Dovekeepers
(CBS/Paramount)
This collaborative followup to The Bible by actress Roma Downey and husband Mark Burnett is an equally leaden and laugh-inducing mini-series, the opposite of Alice Hoffman's original novel about the events leading to the mass Jewish suicide at Masada around A.D. 73 through the eyes of several women.
This could have been gripping television, but if the visuals (well-chosen costumes, sets and locations) look OK, actresses Cote de Pablo, Rachel Brosnahan and Kathryn Prescott can do little, while someone like Sam Neill does even less. The superior hi-def transfer is the best thing about this release.
Far from the Madding Crowd
(Fox)
The latest adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel about the free-spirited Bathesheba Everdene and the very different men she juggles has been directed crisply by Thomas Vinterberg and well acted by the always remarkably Carey Mulligan and, as her suitors, Tom Sturridge, Michael Sheen and Matthias Schoenaerts; too bad it loses out to John Schlesinger's longer 1967 film.
(Over)length is necessary, but Vinterberg's version clocks in at exactly two hours, making it more like Cliffs Notes. It looks gorgeous, of course, but there's a lack of sweep and grandeur amid the intimacy of Hardy's classic story. The Blu-ray transfer is excellent; extras comprise deleted scenes, an alternate ending and crew and cast interviews.
The French Lieutenant's Woman
(Criterion)
John Fowles' novel about an affair between a Victorian woman and a dashing man was long considered unfilmable, and the middling 1981 adaptation by director Karel Reisz, from a clever but unsatisfying script by Harold Pinter, does nothing to dispel that theory: by making the story a parallel affair between that couple and the contemporary movie stars portraying them, it crudely visualizes Fowles' intelligent conceit.
The Criterion Collection, of course, goes all out with its new Blu-ray edition: stunning hi-def transfer, new interviews with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, and a South Bank Show episode from 1981 with vintage interviews of Reisz and Pinter.
(Warner Bros)
Anne Fletcher's mostly unfunny odd couple/buddy comedy, which stars Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon as a hot tamale fugitive and tomboyish Southern cop on the run together (don't ask), might have been more palatable if the actresses had switched roles, but that would have forced the filmmakers to come up with something original and humorous.
Neither actress can overcome the sexist jokes thrown her way for 85 minutes; except for a decent opening title sequence, the movie is DOA. The hi-def transfer is solid; extras are featurettes and an alternate ending.
Insurgent
(Lionsgate)
For this Divergent follow-up, it's up to Shailene Woodley and her rockin' short haircut to save the world—or at least post-apocalyptic Chicago—from Jeanine (a bored-looking Kate Winslet), who wants all divergents hunted down. Woodley is terrific, as always, but even she finds it hard to keep a straight face when speaking many howlers in the dialogue or perform nonsensical stunts in several unexciting action sequences.
Whether director Robert Schwentke or Veronica Roth's original novel is to blame is immaterial, as we await the next installment of what's becoming another underwhelming dystopian young person's fantasy with trepidation. The movie looks very good on Blu; extras are a commentary and featurettes.
(Cinema Guild)
In Lisandro Alonso's western, a foreigner in late 1800s Patagonia looks for his teenage daughter a la The Searchers, but that cliched plotline is merely a pretext for Alonso's artful location camerawork and impressive editing, which partially compensate for the lackluster acting and script.
The claustrophobia induced by the square 1.33:1 frame provides tension, but Viggo Mortensen's hero has been directed so laconically that he literally fades into the background after awhile. The film has received a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras comprise a 30-minute New York Film Festival press conference and two Alonso shorts.
A Little Chaos
(Universal)
In his pleasant if uninspired directorial debut, Alan Rickman stars as the king of France in this fictional tale of the first female landscape designer (Kate Winslet) in a 17th century field dominated by men: Matthias Schoenaerts plays the head Versailles Gardens designer who has eyes for Winslet.
It's all very pretty (with enticing costumes and sets) but also pretty forgettable; Schoenaerts and Winslet are hamstrung by the middlebrow romance, Rickman's king is less droll than dull and Stanley Tucci's foppishness quickly turns enervating. The Blu-ray transfer is impeccable; surprisingly, there are no extras.
Flamenco Flamenco
(Music Box)
Legendary Spanish director Carlos Saura's brilliant career making music and dance films continues with this 2010 exploration of the indigenous Spanish art form, a follow-up to his own 1995 documentary, Flamenco; once again, stupendous performances of flamenco's greatest practitioners are superbly recorded by Saura and his frequent collaborator, the master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.
Saura and Storaro's deftly (and intricately) choreographed camera movements create yet another intoxicating musical journey. Too bad that, on DVD, voluminous extras (short Saura interview, a look at the performers and a 100-minute making-of documentary) are included, which make the movie's transfer less than scintillating.
Match
(IFC)
Stephen Belber, who adapted his own play, also directed this occasionally involving drama about an aging ballet dancer-teacher and his surprising relationship with a couple that's come to interview him.
Although the dialogue has bite and some wit, the machinations that trigger what happens to the trio are too contrived to take seriously, even if the intimate final scenes have a sort of tenderness to them that's likely due to the sensitive acting of Carla Gugino, the calm at the center of the overacted storm of Patrick Stewart and Matthew Lillard.
(Warner Bros)
Rookie Blue—5th Season, Volume 2
(e one)
The fourth season of Person finds the investigators as often as not being investigated themselves, all the while coming to terms with bleak ending of season 3; solid acting by Michael Emerson, Sarah Shahi, Jim Caviezel and the rest of the team is what propels the season's 22 fast-paced episodes.
In the first 11 involving episodes of Blue's 5th season, the men and women of the precinct try to deal with the physical and psychological aftereffects of two of their own being shot at last season's end.Person extras are featurettes, Comic-Con panel and gag reel; Rookie extras are a featurette and webisodes.
August '15 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 04 August 2015 23:16
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
The Casual Vacancy
(Warner Bros)
Based on J.K. Rowling's post-Harry Potter novel, this four-hour HBO miniseries is crammed with stellar performers like Michael Gambon, Rory Kiear, Julia McKenzie and Simon McBurney, but director Jony Campbell and writer Sara Phelps haven't summoned a sense of urgency about the various misdeeds, dilemmas and disasters surrouding everyone in the picturesque town of Pagford.
I don't know if Rowling's underlying book suffers similarly (numerous changes were made), but the miniseries comes across as a vacuous but pretty-looking Masterpiece Theatre wannabe. The movie looks quite good on Blu; extras are three behind-the-scenes featurettes.
(Lionsgate)
This '50s Cold War thriller, with its dark, dank Russian locations and murky secret-police operatives engaging in a widespread coverup of a series of killings, is Gorky Park-lite, even if it's based on Tom Rob Smith's first novel about agent Leo Demidov, played with steely-eyed resolve by Tom Hardy.
Director Daniel Espinosa keeps things moving, and there's strong support from Noomi Rapace and Gary Oldman, but the movie alternates between fast-moving sequences and meandering among its dreary characters and locations. The Blu-ray transfer is top-notch; lone extra is a making-of featurette.
Innerspace
(Warner Bros)
Joe Dante's intermittently delightful 1987 comic fantasy, with amusing (and Oscar-winning) special effects, is too satisfied with its cleverness, which prevents its ever really taking off; it also pretty much coasts on Dennis Quaid's and Martin Short's screen personas, which moots the effectiveness of the entire inside-the-body experience.
And unfortunately, there's also the usual dead space occupied by a tiresome Meg Ryan trying desperately to act. On hi-def, the movie's visuals are still eye-popping; the lone extra is a commentary by Dante and others.
Jenufa
War and Peace
(Arthaus Musik)
Playing Czech composer Leos Janacek's first great tragic heroine in Jenufa, German soprano Michaela Kaune performs with sensitivity and intelligence, bringing Kristof Loy's flimsy production to surging life with help from conductor Donald Runnicles and the the Berlin Opera orchestra and chorus; hi-def video and audio are first-rate.
In Sergei Prokofiev's masterly War and Peace, based on Leo Tolstoy's massive novel, 1000 pages of dense prose have been stunningly transformed into a stirring four-hour stage drama. The Kirov Opera's 1991 production by director Graham Vick has been transferred to hi-def with a disappointingly soft image; at least conductor Valery Gergiev and several Russian singers give Prokofiev's varied score a lively intensity.
Madame Bovary
(Alchemy)
Sophie Barthes is the latest director to take a crack at Gustave Flaubert's classic novel about a young woman whose boredom as a country doctor's wife leads her to several affairs, disgrace and death; while Barthe gets the physical production's details right, her casting drags Flaubert's heroine down into superfluous melodramatics.
Mia Wasikowska might be the right age for Emma, but she never gets past acting like a petulant teenager, while someone like Paul Giamatti is utterly too contemporary to play the local pharmacist; Henry Lloyd-Hughes fares better as Emma's husband Charles. The film does look sumptuous on Blu.
(IFC)
Those who like their violence gruesomely nasty will find it in this western by Danish director Christian Levring, in which the perfectly cast Mads Mikkelsen plays an immigrant whose just-arrived wife and young son are murdered by low-lifes whom he kills before facing the wrath of a vengeful widow and her brother-in-law. Whether one responds to its singlemindedness will depend on how much one cares about wall-to-wall, blood-filled revenge.
Along with Mikkelsen, Eva Green makes the most of a thankless role as the mute widow and Nanna Oland Fabricius has a lovely if too-short presence as the ill-fated wife. The movie's spaciousness looks great on Blu; lone extras are behind-the-scenes and interviews.
Showdown in Little Tokyo
(Warner Archive)
Why this loud but empty 1991 action flick is worthy of a Blu-ray upgrade over more worthy titles is even more mysterious than the goofy look on star Dolph Lundgren's face whenever he attempts to act or show emotion.
Director Mark L. Lester never met a cliche he didn't like, and fans of Tia Carrere will be disappointed to know that a body double did her nude scenes (although years later Carrere did pose nude for Playboy, for what it's worth). The hi-def transfer is good.
Any Day
(Anchor Bay)
What could have been a gritty study of an ex-con deal with the harsh realities of the post-prison world is turned by writer-director Rustam Branaman into a mawkish, sentimental drama cobbled together with the gracefulness and intelligence of a fourth grader's first book report.
The sloppiness in Branaman's writing—every story arc is so predictable that it's easy to guess the risible twists and turns—destroys a game cast led by Sean Bean as the ex-con, Kate Walsh as his sister and Eva Longoria as an unlikely neighborhood beauty whom our hero meets grocery shopping.
Every Secret Thing
(Anchor Bay)
Amy Berg made the fascinating documentary West of Memphis; for her feature debut, she takes Nicole Holofcener's bumpy adaptation of Laura Lippman's novel—about two girls, who once caused a toddler's death, caught in another missing child controversy—and turns it into an occasionally gripping psychological mystery.
Fine acting by Elizabeth Banks, Diane Lane, Abigail Breslin and Danielle Macdonald as the girl at the center of the case help smooth over a script that merely skims the surface of its serious themes. Extras comprise deleted scenes.
(Decca)
For the 200th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi's birth, this 2013 concert at Milan's famed La Scala Opera House shows a different glimpse of the great opera composer with a selection of purely instrumental sections of his operas, played with verve by the Filharmonia della Scala orchestra and conductor Riccardo Chailly, all of whom have Verdi's music in their blood.
The operas excerpted include Jerusalem, Nabucco, Giovanna d'Arco, I vespri siciliani, and La forza del destino, whose thunderous overture closes a triumphant performance of Verdi without any vocalists.
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