« November 2007 | Main | January 2008 »

December 28, 2007

King of the showstoppers

When it comes to pop music, people remember the 1960s as a decade dominated by rock, but that’s a distortion of the truth due to the faulty memories of baby boomers.
1964 was the year that introduced The Beatles to America, but the Liverpool phenomenon was surpassed on the top 40 charts by Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Hello, Dolly!” from the Broadway hit of the same name.
“Hit” is too weak a word to apply to a show that spun off music that galvanized the country for months.
Not only did the title tune become hard-wired into the DNA of every man, woman, child, cat and dog living in the U.S.A. at that moment in time, the show itself ran longer and won more Tonys than any musical comedy before it.
“Hello, Dolly!” was just about the last Broadway show to have such a galvanic impact on the whole culture — rock did come to rule the pop charts by the end of the 1960s — so a new documentary about composer-lyricist Jerry Herman debuting on PBS Monday night should be of interest to TV viewers who are not show music fans per se.
“Word and Music by Jerry Herman” is a smart and entertaining 90-minute look at the man who gave Lyndon Johnson his 1964 campaign song (we see “Hello, Dolly!” star Carol Channing singing “Hello, Lyndon!” at the Democratic Convention) and went on to create another 1960s blockbuster, “Mame,” which made veteran film actress Angela Lansbury into the toast of Broadway.
“Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame” set in motion the title tune showstopper mania that Mel Brooks would spoof so mercilessly with his “Springtime for Hitler” number in the 1968 Broadway satire “The Producers.”
Herman admits in the special that the demand for title tunes got out of control in the 1960s and that it was a mistake for him to do one for the otherwise low-key “Dear World” in 1969. The composer-lyricist believes the show flopped because he allowed the producers to talk him into making it bigger and louder than the material warranted.
Herman got in just under the wire. He was able to benefit from the pop music industry in a way that was closed off to the Broadway composers of the 1970s and later decades (when theater music was relegated to second class status in the show biz hierarchy). Like the creators of “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music,” and many other pre-rock Broadway hits, Herman earned millions from the countless recordings that were made of tunes from “Hello, Dolly!” (not to mention a record-breaking sale of the movie rights to 20th Century Fox).
Herman is still with us, but hasn’t had a new hit on Broadway since “La Cage Aux Folles” two decades ago.
“Words and Music by Jerry Herman” re-establishes the composer-lyricist’s place as one of the finest craftsmen and one of the most successful songwriters in the history of American popular music.
(The PBS special will be aired on Channel 13 Monday at 10 p.m. and on CPTV Tuesday at 9:30 p.m.)

Posted by Joe on 2:24 PM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2007

Being kept in Brooklyn

The title of Jami Attenberg’s moving and funny second novel, “The Kept Man” (Riverhead Books), has a double meaning.
During a visit to a neighborhood laundromat, the book’s heroine, Jarvis Miller — who lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn — bumps into a handsome trio known as “The Kept Man Club” because they have hard-working wives who have given their husbands the freedom to stay at home.
There is another “kept man” looming in the background of this beautifully written page-turner, however — Jarvis’ artist husband, Martin, who has been in a coma for six years when the story starts.
Jarvis is a premature professional widow when she meets Mal, Scott and Tony in the laundromat — the young woman’s primary occupation is tending to the art world business of her spouse who was already famous and successful when he fell off a ladder and into the limbo of a coma.
Jarvis has few contacts with the world outside her Williamsburg loft other than Martin’s agent (who runs a fashionable Chelsea gallery) and his best friend (about whom Jarvis has many reservations).
“The Kept Man” is about Jarvis’ limbo life and the story is played out — ironically enough — in a section of Brooklyn that has been going through a tremendous transformation over the past few years. Attenberg lives in Williamsburg and views it with the mixed urban feelings that come out of a great love of place — she doesn’t want to lose the funky side of the neighborhood that stems from the cheap rents and original artist tenants that began changing the area more than a decade ago, but she also understands why so many would-be bohemians are still flocking there and changing it in ways that the original artist settlers regret.
Jarvis is shaken out of her routine and her complacency by the three kept men and then a major shock — the young woman finds evidence of adultery in a cache of Martin’s photos that surface in his gallery.
Attenberg juggles light comedy and looming personal drama with great ease — in the second half of the book there are strong echoes of the Terry Schiavo case when Jarvis decides the time has finally come to pull the plug on her husband so that she can begin to live again.
The relationship between Jarvis and the three new men in her life continues to evolve in surprising ways as our heroine finally faces up to her need to awake from a suspended state of living that parallels the limbo her husband has been in.
“The Kept Man” is a good read that will leave you wondering where its charming and confused heroine might be going after she takes care of Martin’s affairs (in more than one sense).

Posted by Joe on 5:52 PM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2007

The man who loved/hated show biz

Bob Fosse didn’t have the chance to direct many movies, but his batting average was awfully good — the director-choreographer received Oscar nominations for three of the five films he completed before he died in 1987 at the age of 60.
The filmmaker is the subject of a retrospective — “All That Fosse” — starting Friday at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater that will include archival 35mm studio prints.
Fosse started working in movies in the late 1960s after establishing himself on Broadway with a series of hit musicals including “Damn Yankees” and “Sweet Charity.”
The stage director tried a little too hard to be “cinematic” in his first Hollywood outing, “Sweet Charity,” in 1969. The Shirley MacLaine vehicle suffers now from dated 1960s camera and editing gimmicks that keep throwing us out of the story.
The movie bombed at the box office, so it took Fosse another three years to get a film assignment.
“Cabaret” was shot on a tight budget in Germany, but the financial restrictions worked to the movie’s advantage. Audiences used to glossy, over-produced Hollywood musicals loved Fosse’s grittier approach and the fact that he cut all of the Broadway show’s numbers that took place outside of the decadent Berlin cabaret. The movie felt more "realistic" than any musical that had come before it.
Fosse grew up in show biz — he was a strip club hoofer and Hollywood dancer before he began working behind the scenes — but he always harbored deep reservations about his profession. As much as he loved to razzle-dazzle audiences, Fosse hated the weird mix of sentimentality and vulgarity in show business.
“Cabaret” was a smash that won a bunch of Oscars (including Fosse’s upset win over Francis Coppola for “The Godfather”). The movie gave Fosse the clout to make three blistering show biz dramas — “Lenny,” “All That Jazz” and “Star 80” — that moved song and dance to the sidelines in favor of exposing the crud behind the scenes in Hollywood and on Broadway.
No one has ever bit the hand that fed him with more style and more punch than Fosse. His final three films were bitter pills that went down semi-easy because they were so extraordinarily well made.
“Star 80” is one of the toughest show biz movies, an unsparing look at the Playboy mystique and the pursuit of stardom that uses the sad life and death of playmate/actress Dorothy Stratten as its jumping off point.
Although the film was sold as Stratten’s story (and Mariel Hemingway got top billing in the role), “Star 80” spends more time on the murder victim’s hustler/pimp husband Paul Snider (Eric Roberts) who thought the blonde bombshell was his ticket to fame and fortune.
When Snider lost his wife to Playboy czar Hugh Hefner and film director Peter Bogdanovich (who starred Dorothy in “They All Laughed”), the man had an emotional meltdown and wound up blasting Stratten with a shotgun and then turning the weapon on himself.
“Star 80” was an assault on the culture that continues to pump out “American Idol” and Paris Hilton et al, and audiences were sickened by Fosse’s refusal to candycoat the show biz dream.
The movie deserves to be rediscovered as one of the few tough-minded studio financed dramas from an era that was dominated by the kiddie fantasies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
(“Star 80” will be screened at Lincoln Center on Friday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 8:15 p.m. For the complete “All That Fosse” schedule visit www.filmlinc.com)

Posted by Joe on 5:43 PM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2007

The horror

I don’t think I’ve watched a movie produced by the defunct British company, Hammer Films, in more than 20 years, but when the new book, “The Hammer Story” (Titan Books), by Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, landed on my desk a few weeks ago, the nostalgia factor was considerable.
Hammer was the B-movie outfit that peaked in the late 1950s and early 1960s with a series of horror movies that baby boomer kids devoured on a regular basis. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were the two house stars and they appeared in more derivations of “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” than I care to remember.
Another key Hammer film — one that was much dicussed by me and my friends at the time — was the 1960 Oliver Reed vehicle, “The Curse of the Werewolf,” a horror picture that was both gorier and sexier than the B-movies that came out of Hollywood then.
Me and my pre-teen pals knew that if a horror picture had the Hammer imprint the chances were good that it would be scarier than the standard U.S. product (most of the films were in garish color so that when blood was spilled the scenes were much more shocking than was common at that time).
Hammer had a big advantage over the American companies that churned out similar fare — the studios were near London and had access to higher caliber actors (and writers and directors) who appreciated the quick and fairly well paid work.
The book was fascinating to read and page through because Hammer had a much longer life than I ever realized.
Hammer began in 1934 and continued up to 1980 (by the mid-70s, the company was reduced to a couple of anthology TV shows, ala “The Twilight Zone,” that rested on the laurels of earlier productions).
Hearn and Barnes have a great affection for Hammer, but they are also quite blunt in their assessment of the company’s deficiencies.
Hammer is long gone as a production entity, but you can see the influence of its lurid approach to period horror films in the work of director Tim Burton whose new picture, “Sweeney Todd,” often has the look of a Hammer production that somehow managed to find an extra few million dollars for the production design. And there is a bit of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in Johnny Depp’s deliberately outsized performance as the mid-1800s London murderer who became known as “the demon barber of Fleet Street”

Posted by Joe on 4:51 PM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2007

Walking through theater history

There are a couple of New York guide books devoted to famous film locations and the city’s movie history, but as far as I know Howard Kissel’s “New York Theater Walks” (Applause Books) is the first pocket-sized volume devoted to the city’s important stage sites.
Kissel was the theater critic for the New York Daily News for many years and is the author of a juicy biography “David Merrick: The Abominable Showman” about the legendary producer of “Hello, Dolly!,” “Marat/Sade” and many of the most important and successful shows of the post-World War II era.
So, few writers are better equipped to present seven different walking tours devoted to Broadway, off Broadway and all stage points in between.
As Kissel points out in his introduction, theater “is embedded in New York’s streets and sidewalks…(the city) was built as much upon show business as upon finance.”
While the movies and television devastated live theater in other cities around the country, Broadway remains one of the top tourist attractions in New York City.
Kissel’s walking tours include information on most of the major legitimate theaters in the city, but he also points out sites that once contained glorious theaters that were pulled down.
“Only two days after finishing (the chapter on the Broadway theater district) I was startled to read that the Lambs Club, which had been the subject of negotiations between preservationists and developers would finally be torn down. I have left the description in place in the — I’m afraid — naïve hope that yet another compromise may be effected,” Kissel writes in the first chapter.
The book reminds us of the bad old days of the 1970s when the Broadway neighborhood was in such decline that three grand theaters were razed — right in the heart of the Broadway district — to make way for the Marriott Marquis hotel.
Two chapters are devoted to walking tours of Greenwich Village and the East Village whose histories as the incubators of important off Broadway production is given a full account. Kissel notes that the now undistinguished Second Avenue multiplex, City Cinemas Village, was formerly the Eden Theatre, where “Oh, Calcutta!,” began its long life in 1969 (the show was eventually moved to another theater in the West 40s where it played to audiences made up primarily of Japanese tourists for nearly a decade).
“New York Theater Walks” is beautifully designed and packed with maps and good photos by Brent Brolin. I’m sure that I will be referring to it frequently in the months to come.

Posted by Joe on 5:19 PM | Comments (0)