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April 30, 2008

The man behind Mapplethorpe

The role of the collector and museum curator Sam Wagstaff in the life and art of Robert Mapplethorpe is explored in the fine 2007 documentary, “Black White + Gray,” which has just been issued on DVD by Arts Alliance America.
Wagstaff was the product of a privileged upbringing in New York City — the family home was on Central Park South — and after attending Yale, he became a major force in the art world in his role as curator at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, among other institutions. Wagstaff had the ability to put new artists on the map by including them in his carefully constructed shows.
Writer-director James Crump shows how Wagstaff’s almost unerring taste and talent for finding the next big thing in the art world gave him the power to make careers.
In the 1970s, Wagstaff shifted into private collecting; his fascination with photography helped to elevate what was then viewed as a largely commercial or journalistic tool into a form of high art.
“Black White + Gray” focuses on the 1970s when Wagstaff became Mapplethorpe’s friend and lover. Mapplethorpe was living with poet and musician Patti Smith at the time and the three of them formed a tight bond.
Smith provided Crump with wonderful interview footage in which she talks about the way Wagstaff influenced Mapplethorpe as a budding photographer and Mapplethorpe introduced the older man to Manhattan’s gay sex underground.
The two men explored the S&M clubs that flourished in the pre-gentrification Meatpacking District; what they saw and did there inspired some of Mapplethorpe’s most striking — and most controversial — pictures.
Dominick Dunne contributes a witty and especially informed interview. The Hartford-born writer knew Wagstaff long before he met Mapplethorpe — before the patrician Wadsworth curator developed his taste for drugs and the underground.
Dunne also did a major piece on Mapplethorpe for Vanity Fair just a few months before AIDS claimed the photographer (Wagstaff had died a few years earlier, leaving most of his fortune and vast photo collection to Mapplethorpe).
“Black White + Grey” impresses with its seriousness of intent and the unusually smart comments Crump gathered from a wide array of articulate people who knew Wagstaff.
Writer Joan Juliet Buck gives the film an appropriately wry New York patina with her no-nonsense narration.

Posted by Joe on 5:06 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2008

"Dawn of the Dead" meets "A Separate Peace"

Over the weekend, I caught an early preview of “Good Boys and True,” the new play by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, starring J. Smith-Cameron, at the Second Stage Theatre in Manhattan.
Aguirre-Sacasa is a rising star off-Broadway, where his “The Mystery Plays” and “Based on a Totally True Story,” have intrigued and entertained me in recent seasons.
J. Smith-Cameron is one of the glories of the New York theatre, a stage actress of dazzling versatility and power, whose performance in Douglas Carter Beane's "As Bees in Honey Drown," as a Manhattan fast-lane woman who keeps reinventing herself, was widely admired (if the off-Broadway hit had ever made it to Broadway, Smith-Cameron would have had a lock on the Tony Award).
“Good Boys and True” is a gripping drama about the repercussions of a sex-tape scandal at a Jesuit high school in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s.
Brandon (Brian J. Smith) is a star football player — and an all-around nice guy — who becomes suspect number one when a tape surfaces of a school athlete having rough sex with a girl. The boy’s face is not visible on the tape, but from the back he looks a lot like Brandon.
Brandon’s mother, Elizabeth (J. Smith-Cameron), is a smart and warm physician who starts off believing there is no way her son could be involved in the incident. But, as more evidence comes to light, and she begins to think about the whole culture of the school — which her husband attended — Elizabeth sees the corruption of the elite class of which she has been a member all her life.
Things get so tense and there is so much anxiety on campus that one of Brandon’s friends sums up the atmosphere as, “‘Dawn of the Dead’ meets ‘A Separate Peace.’”
Aguirre-Sacasa keeps the suspense building with each new revelation, so that the play works both as a mystery and as the story of one woman’s coming to terms with the implications of wealth and social privilege in America.
Smith-Cameron is terrific and I’m sure her performance will get even stronger as she gets more performances under her belt (I saw one of the first public previews). The woman is not unlike the well-heeled character Stockard Channing played in “Six Degrees of Separation” — extremely likeable and so easy to identify with, even as we see how she has spent years pulling the wool over her own eyes.
(“Good Boys and True” is set to run through June 1. Second Stage Theatre is at 307 West 43rd St. For ticket information, call 212-246-4422)

Posted by Joe on 5:15 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2008

Making movies

Everyone seems to be making movies these days — video technology has made possible the cinematic equivalent of the self-published novel — but how do you make something that gets seen in festivals and theaters?
That’s one of the questions on the agenda at a gathering called “So You Want to Make a Movie?” that I am moderating tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the non-profit Fairfield Theatre Company.
Writer Susan Cinoman and director Doug Tenaglia will screen their 40-minute film, “Love and Class in Connecticut” (left), which has been on the festival circuit for the past several months (including several stops on the traveling Connecticut Film Festival).
The process of making the movie has taken three years, and involved several local actors, so there should be a lot to talk about.
The movie is a slice of life about family dysfunction in the suburbs and two sisters who envy each other’s lifestyle — the artsy older sister living a single life in Manhattan and the younger one who is married and going through hell over the naming of her baby.
Funny and lifelike, “Love and Class…” makes you care about each of the diverse characters and wonder where they might be going next.
Whether you are in the process of trying to get a film off the ground or just want to hear the behind-the-scenes struggles of one filmmaking duo, there should be lots of fun and enlightenment at tonight’s event.
(Admission for the session is $5. The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St.)

Posted by Joe on 1:42 PM | Comments (1)

April 25, 2008

The toast of Broadway

Kelli O’Hara’s star has been steadily rising on Broadway for the past few years.
After being noticed in supporting roles in the 2001 revival of “Follies,” and the musical version of “Sweet Smell of Success” the following season, she won her first Tony nomination in 2005 for playing the young romantic lead in “The Light in the Piazza.”
O’Hara followed that long-running hit with an equally acclaimed performance in the Roundabout revival of “The Pajama Game” the following year (which earned the actress another Tony nomination).
Now, she is starring as Nellie Forbush in the wonderful revival of “South Pacific” (above) that has turned into one of the biggest critical and commercial successes of the season (The New York Post reported last week that $9 million worth of advance tickets have been sold since the show opened last month).
O’Hara acts as well as she sings, so there doesn’t seem to be any limit on what she might do after “South Pacific.”
In between “The Pajama Game” and “South Pacific,” the actress played Eliza Dolittle in a concert version of “My Fair Lady” with the New York Philharmonic (a role O’Hara has said is at the top of her dream list for the next Broadway revival she might do).
On May 6, Ghostlight Records is releasing O’Hara’s solo debut CD, “Wonder in the World,” an eclectic group of tunes that reflect the Oklahoma native’s appreciation for a wide range of music. The CD contains two Broadway standards — “I Have Dreamed” from “The King and I,” and “Make Someone Happy” from “Do Re Mi” — but she also sings tunes by Don McLean, James Taylor and “Pajama Game” co-star Harry Connick, Jr. (who arranged the music and plays piano and organ on most of the tracks).
O’Hara includes two lovely tunes she wrote herself — “Here Now” and “I Love You the World” — and she opens the album with “The Sun Went Out,” a song penned by her husband Greg Naughton (the Fairfield County native who is the son of Broadway star James Naughton).
Times are hard for CDs — perhaps that’s why this set recorded two years ago is just appearing now — but “Wonder in the World” captures a star near the beginning of what should be an amazing career.
A late-night May 5 Joe’s Pub show to celebrate the release of the CD is already sold-out, but O’Hara will be doing a free performance and signing at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble store on May 12 at 7:30 p.m.

Posted by Joe on 1:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2008

Four skits + one comic genius

Paul Rudnick is one of the funniest men in America, but he has yet to write a completely satisfying play.
“Jeffrey,” “Valhalla,” and “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told” were packed with wonderful one-liners, and an appealingly cockeyed view of contemporary sexual relations, but the gags never really came together as plays.
Rudnick has a new production that just opened at Lincoln Center — “The New Century” — and it might be his most insubstantial play yet, but the first of the four scenes features Linda Lavin in an awesome display of comic timing that makes the whole thing worth seeing.
Lavin is alone on stage during “Pride and Joy,” as long-suffering Long Island matron Helene Nadler, who is chairing a meeting of a support group for parents of sexually offbeat children (we go far beyond the notions of gay and lesbian when Helene talks about the proclivities of her three children — one is a young man who has a sex change only to discover that “she” is a lesbian).
The material is funny, but Lavin puts it across sensationally, with every look, every pause, every inflection resulting in explosive laughter. Like a great stand-up comedian, Lavin is able to include perfectly timed pauses during the laughter so that we don’t miss a single line.
Lavin is, of course, nationally known for her work on TV and in movies, but she has also been honing her craft on stage in dramas, comedies and musicals for more than 40 years. Her work in Charles Busch’s “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” seven years ago was one of the funniest performances I’ve ever seen in the theatre, but Lavin had a great character to play and wonderful people to play off (including that old pro Tony Roberts).
Alone on stage in “The New Century” Lavin as Helene is a world unto herself and she makes Rudnick’s far from fresh material into a major theatrical event.

Posted by Joe on 5:17 PM | Comments (0)