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May 30, 2007
What is this thing called love?
The new Harold Prince show, “LoveMusik,” proves that it is still possible to put together a sophisticated adult musical in the age of “Legally Blonde” and “Mary Poppins.”
The play with music delves into the unconventional relationship between composer Kurt Weill and his muse, the actress Lotte Lenya.
“LoveMusik” opened to mixed notices at the Biltmore Theatre earlier this month. Sadly, many Broadway critics and columnists seemed to bristle at the affrontery of Prince and book writer Alfred Uhry daring to craft a jagged, unresolved show that accurately reflects the life and times of artists who refused to lead conventional lives.
Lenya was a maid and parttime prostitute when she met Weill who was just beginning to break through as a composer. The eccentric actress and musician inspired each other to take risks and found a great success together in “The Threepenny Opera” which brought genius and madman Bertolt Brecht into their lives.
Prince worked with Lenya on the original Broadway production of “Cabaret” 40 years ago, a show which was drenched in the decadent atmosphere of Germany in the years between the two world wars.
The director has staged “LoveMusik” in the confrontational style of a Weill-Brecht piece. The show doesn’t judge the fact that neither Weill nor Lenya could be faithful to each other in a sexual sense. It’s a “love” story stripped of sentimentality that nevertheless shows us an unbreakable personal bond between great artists.
The performances are brilliant, with Donna Murphy once again devoting herself entirely to the character that she is playing, rather than any personal "image" concerns, so that it is not so easy to warm up to her selfish and crude Lenya in Act One.
Time Out New York has called Murphy the “Meryl Streep of musical theater” and that’s a good description of the performer’s determination to vanish into whatever character she plays, whether we “like” her or not. In “LoveMusik” Murphy has dampened her own gorgeous singing voice to give us her take on Lenya not a concert of Murphy doing Weill.
Murphy is matched each step of the way by her two fellow Tony nominees, Michael Cerveris as Weill and David Pittu as Brecht. You rarely see acting of this high caliber in a musical, so I would suggest you rush to see this daring show before the limited run ends next month. I doubt that we will see anything else like it on Broadway anytime soon.
Posted by Joe on 2:50 PM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2007
The beauty of character
The pressure on actresses to look young has gotten more intense in recent years as the median age of the hot stars has come down.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the actresses who dominated the scene were already in their 30s by the time of their peak success — stars such as Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, Jill Clayburgh, Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek.
Most of those actresses had the luxury to focus on their work, rather than the “glamour” side of show business. They might not have been great classical beauties, but they all had great movie faces. The big actresses of that period did virtually no TV interviews and the most prestigious of them would have laughed at the idea of doing multi-page fashion spreads. When they turned up at the Oscars they were wearing clothes they bought, not shilling for a hot designer. On their way into the ceremony, they were asked movie questions not “Who are you wearing?”
That was then. Now, the demo for movies has gone down, so the “stars” are much younger. Because so many of them are glorified models, the hot young actresses have taken over the fashion pages and are having their looks and “style” dissected on a minute-by-minute basis on the popular Internet entertainment blogs.
In this new universe, callow twentysomething actresses like Kirsten Dunst and Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Biel have much more leverage than “character” types who might not be so effective at showing off the latest dresses and accessories in a big Vanity Fair or Vogue spread.
Movies are full of these girl-women at the moment which makes the current indie film, “Away from Her,” starring 1960s and ’70s icon Julie Christie all the more startling.
The 67-year-old actress is willing to look her age and the experience and character that we can see on that wonderful old face adds to the power of the performance.
Christie is part of a remarkable generation of Brit actresses that includes Vanessa Redrave, Helen Mirren, Charlotte Rampling and Judi Dench. In the 1960s they were all gorgeous young things, but somewhere along the line they made the decision to opt for a more natural “look” that gives their contemporary performances the depth of women who have lived real lives.
Because Christie hasn’t been airbrushed in life or on screen, writer-director Sarah Polley is able to play out much of “Away from Her” in giant close-ups where we can register every flicker of emotion on the character’s face.
Posted by Joe on 1:17 PM | Comments (0)
May 22, 2007
A guilt-free beach book
I like a beach-book trash wallow as much as anyone — last year at a used book store, an old Bantam paperback copy of “Hotel” sent me spinning through a time tunnel to the New Jersey beach in the 1960s where as a young teen I devoured the Arthur Hailey potboiler that took readers behind the scenes at a first-class hotel.
These days, my time for literary froth is limited, so I’m always in the market for high quality escapist reading. I’m happy to report that Danielle Ganek’s “Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him” (Viking) — set to be published June 4 — is a very tasty combination of romance and contemporary Manhattan social commentary set in the Chelsea art gallery scene.
The publisher is comparing the book to “The Devil Wears Prada” and “The Nanny Diaries” but this isn’t a payback novel in which the writer gets revenge on an old boss. Ganek is a former magazine editor — and longtime observer of the New York art scene — who is telling a good story not presenting a thinly disguised memoir.
Ganek’s heroine, Mia McMurray, is the receptionist at one of the smaller, less prestigious, Chelsea galleries.
Mia has aspired to be a painter since she left college but she keeps postponing her “real” life by digging herself deeper into the gallery job. The novel begins with the opening night of a show by a 54-year-old painter, Jeffrey Finelli, who has been living a reclusive life in Italy.
The centerpiece in the show, “Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him,” is a portrait of Jeffrey’s niece as a young girl when she dabbled with painting.
The artist is hit by a cab outside the Chelsea gallery, the niece (who now works on Wall Street) turns up claiming the painting was promised to her, and the Finelli show becomes an art world sensation.
Mia is off on an adventure that throws into relief the mix of art and commerce and PR that drives New York art gallery operators (and collectors) crazy.
Danek has created a wonderful heroine who is savvy and funny and the perfect guide for one of the most interesting slices of New York culture. The book is much too good to qualify as a summer “guilty pleasure.”
Posted by Joe on 4:21 PM | Comments (0)
May 21, 2007
Living up to your hype
Ever since the musical “Grey Gardens” opened at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons last season, Christine Ebersole’s performance as Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter “Little” Edie Beale has been the subject of near-hysterical praise.
The actress won a bunch of the off-Broadway acting prizes last season and now that the show is on Broadway (at the Walter Kerr Theatre) Ebersole is a front runner for a Tony on June 10.
I missed the Playwrights Horizons production and have been trying to get half-price tickets for the Broadway version for several months. Saturday, I lucked out, got an excellent orchestra seat for 56 bucks at the TKTS booth, and am happy to report that Ebersole’s performance totally lived up to my expectations.
“Grey Gardens” is one of the most eccentric musicals of recent seasons, an adaptation of the 1976 cult documentary of the same title by David and Albert Maysles, about the reclusive aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who caused a New York society world scandal when they were revealed to be living in squalor in their East Hampton mansion, Grey Gardens.
The house was filthy, overrun with cats and squirrels, and the two Beale ladies had lived together in relative isolation for so long that they appeared to be completely ga-ga.
The musical has a much broader scope than the movie. Act Two is set in the 1970s squalor of the Hamptons house, and delves into the same eccentric mother-daughter love/hate dynamic shown in the movie, but Act One takes us back to 1941 when Grey Gardens was full of life and one of the most beautiful homes in the area.
We meet “Little” Edie as a hopeful girl about to announce her engagement to Jack Kennedy’s older brother — Joseph Jr. — and we get to see what a vivacious woman Edith was in her prime. Ebersole plays Edith in the first act and then Edith’s daughter in Act Two and this is one of those theatrical feats for which the term tour de force was minted.
The star has been given a formidable partner in veteran actress Mary Louise Wilson who is quite sensational as the decrepit but still sharp-tongued Edith of Act Two.
“Grey Gardens” becomes a love story about a mother and daughter who were each unable to find a life partner who approved their wacky “artistic” lifestyles or a lover who could live up to the fantasies of Edith and “Little” Edith’s over-active imaginations. It is to the credit of book writer Doug Wright, composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie that we come away from the show understanding how the Beale ladies could have wound up the way they did and with appreciation for their oddball humor and old money grit.
The score has a couple of bummer numbers in it — especially a gratuitous setpiece “Choose to Be Happy” performed by Edith’s favorite radio minister, Norman Vincent Peale — but Ebersole’s big numbers, “The Revolutionary Costume for Today” and “Another Winter in a Summer Town,” are classic Broadway moments.
Posted by Joe on 2:59 PM | Comments (7)
May 18, 2007
The weight of the soul
One of the perks of having an Internet presence is that you get to hear from people all over the country and in a few cases filmmakers have been nice enough t o send me copies of their work.
Recently, the Los Angeles writer-director JR Burningham sent me a DVD of a remarkable short film he made as a student project at the University of Southern California: “The Lost Journal of Vice Marceaux.”
Unlike so many of his peers who seem to be trying to second guess Hollywood trends, Burningham has made a beautifully detailed (but thematically timeless) historical drama with existential overtones, set in the middle of a late 18th century smallpox epidemic.
The title character (played with great power by Darin Singleton) is a doctor who is trying to save lives while still dealing with the death of his own wife and child in the epidemic.
Vice Marceaux finds himself going from hope to despair and back again as he grapples with the ultimate question involving death: where does the soul go when the life of the body ends?
Marceaux becomes aware of a weight discrepancy in a patient right after he dies. The doctor then puts a terminal case on the hospital scale just as he is dying and sees the weight bar shift a few seconds after the moment of death.
In a phenomenon that also inspired the title of a 2003 Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film, Vice determines that 21 grams are being lost by his patients at death: Is this the “weight” of the soul?
Burningham packs the 15 minutes of his film with more good acting and more dramatic punch than many Hollywood features deliver in two hours. Although he was obviously working on a limited budget and schedule, the filmmaker makes the period come alive; the horrors of smallpox are convincingly rendered with fine make-up work.
The film switches from historical drama to H.P. Lovecraft style horror after the doctor becomes more determined to prove that there is a soul and a life after this one. The ending is enigmatic but satisfying and left this viewer hoping that Burningham might be able to expand the piece to feature length in the near future.
At a time when so many young filmmakers squander their energy on recycled genre pieces — or souped-up action melodramas — Burningham is using his talent to deal with important issues as he tells a very powerful story.
For more information on the film, visit the Website at www.thelostjournal.com.
Posted by Joe on 2:08 PM | Comments (0)
