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June 30, 2008
Taking it off for a good cause
The best time I had during a week away from work was at the 18th annual “Broadway Bares” show at Manhattan’s Roseland Ballroom on June 22.
The sexy spectacle raised a record-breaking $874,372 for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and featured some of the best talent on Broadway. Producer Jerry Mitchell was just a chorus boy when he came up with the idea for the show in 1992 and has since gone on to become one of the most successful choreographers and directors on Broadway.
Mitchell’s dance card is too full these days for him to stage this one-night only event, but he left the show in the very capable hands of director Denis Jones and associate director Peter Gergus.
“Broadway Bares” seems to get bigger and more elaborate each year; “Wonderland” was the theme of the June 22 benefit, with the best costuming and scenic design in recent years (if someone was able to move the show to a Broadway house, you wouldn’t really have to improve the production values).
When I talked to Mitchell a few years ago about the benefit, he said BC/EFA had talked about extending the run of “Broadway Bares” for more than the current two performances on one night, but the logistics make it impossible.
Almost everyone who works on the benefit is recruited from shows running on Broadway and Sunday night is the only evening the dancers and actors are all off.
On June 22, for instance, “South Pacific” Tony nominee Matthew Morrison (above) was the star attraction in a terrific “Humpty Dumpty” number in which he slowly shed a giant egg costume to the tune of Digital Underground's "The Humpty Dance." The fact that Morrison was willing to rehearse and perform such an elaborate piece of choreography while doing eight shows a week of “South Pacific” says a lot about the young star.
Although “Wonderland” will never be seen again, lots of promotional goodies tied in with the show, including posters, T-shirts, and coffee mugs, are available on the BC/EFA Web site at www.broadwaycares.org
Posted by Joe on 4:39 PM | Comments (0)
June 24, 2008
Back on Monday
Your faithful blogger is taking some R + R to recharge those old pop cultural batteries and will be back next week. See you then.
Posted by Joe on 9:07 AM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2008
The man with the double entendre gun
In one of the saddest movie ironies of the moment, the dreadful new Hollywood remake of the 1960s TV sitcom “Get Smart” is receiving a very wide national release today while a brilliant French comedy that spoofs 1960s international spy films — “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies” — has yet to open in our area.
The French film is on the “coming soon” list at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford, but business elsewhere in the country has been so tepid that you can’t blame programmer Adam Birnbaum for postponing the engagement.
The alternative movie business has been terrible this summer, with art house managers praying that some foreign or independent release will spark interest in the manner of last summer’s “La Vie en Rose.” So far that hasn’t happened and the churn rate of new releases at the Avon and the Garden in Norwalk has been scary.
“OSS 117” features an amazing performance by the rising French star Jean Dujardin who both embodies and parodies the way Sean Connery played the role of James Bond in the early films in that phenomenally successful series.
Dujardin is a comic actor with real charisma so it is not surprising to learn that he has quickly become a major box office draw in his native country. “OSS 117” was so successful that a sequel is now being filmed in Brazil.
Dujardin’s performance as agent OSS 117 was so widely admired that he received a Cesar nomination last year — the French equivalent of the Oscar — a tribute that rarely goes to comic work.
The actor, who turned 36 yesterday, moved into film after achieving great popularity as a stage performer somewhat in the vein of Eric Bogosian or Lily Tomlin — one of the characters he presented in his stage act, the surfer Brice from Nice, served as the basis for a hit 2005 film that was never theatrically released in this country.
In “OSS 117” Dujardin manages to sustain a parody performance for a whole movie — an achievement that sadly eludes Steve Carell in “Get Smart.” I haven’t seen anything quite like it since the glory days of Peter Sellers who was able to erase the line between "comic" and "actor" in films like “Lolita,” “Dr. Strangelove” and the Inspector Clouseau series.
Posted by Joe on 6:45 PM | Comments (0)
June 19, 2008
More than one toke over the line
The Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater has had a devoted cult following for many years, but never the break-out commercial hit he deserves.
Linklater's 2003 film-for-hire, "School of Rock," made lots of money, but it wasn't really in the spirit of the director's best work.
Back in 1993, many of us thought “Dazed and Confused” would do the trick, because it is one of the best high school comedies ever made — much more realistic than “American Graffiti” (1973) and just as funny.
Set on the last day of school in Austin, Texas, in June 1976, the movie ambles in a very entertaining manner, taking in jocks, nerds and everyone in between as they celebrate the end of classes. Linklater had the guts to present ’70s drug use in a frank and low-key manner that neither condemned nor celebrated Bicentennial potheads.
Sadly, the movie was distributed by a subsidiary of Universal Pictures that decided to dump the movie in multiplexes for a quick and wide release that didn’t give “Dazed and Confused” the time it needed for word-of-mouth to build. In 1993, the names of cast members Matthew McConaughey (above), Ben Affleck and Parker Posey didn’t mean anything to most moviegoers so the picture was sorely lacking in star appeal.
Thanks to video and cable screenings, “Dazed and Confused” has gathered a huge following (and a prestigious Criterion Collection special edition DVD).
But, a movie this lively and funny should be seen with an audience and I am thrilled to be hosting a free “Martini and a Movie” showing next Tuesday night at 7 p.m. at the Fairfield Theatre Company.
I will be joined at the screening by one of the savviest movie minds in the area — Drew Taylor — who writes for The Fairfield Weekly and holds down the fort at Media Wave in Fairfield. Drew also happens to be from Austin and is something of a Linklater scholar, so we should have a terrific discussion after the movie.
(The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. For more information, visit www.fairfieldtheatre.org of call 259-1036.)
Posted by Joe on 5:23 PM | Comments (0)
June 18, 2008
The trouble with revivals
Is it the production or the play?
That’s what I always wonder when I am underwhelmed by a new staging of a play that I once thought was terrific.
Current case in point — Christopher Hampton’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” which knocked me out when it debuted on Broadway in the 1980s, but left me ice-cold at the Roundabout Theatre last Sunday.
The play’s portrait of two French aristocrats who, for social sport, like to seduce and abandon prudes and virgins seemed diabolically evil and sexy as played by Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan in the 1980s.
The 1988 movie version was fun, too, with what might be Glenn Close’s best film performance ever and Michelle Pfeiffer so poignant as the married religious woman destroyed by John Malkovich’s seduction.
On Sunday, however, the antics of Laura Linney and Ben Daniels in the same roles seemed almost silly.
Wouldn’t their friends (and enemies) catch on to the obvious manipulations of this dastardly duo, I thought to myself, as I sat through close to three hours of sexual chess-playing. And who would fall under the spell of such an obviously two-faced woman (as played by Linney)?
It’s hard to base a whole play on the machinations of evil manipulators, but Rickman and Duncan pulled it off all those years ago and Close was a spectacular monster in the movie version.
Laura Linney is a wonderful actress, but I never got caught up in her character’s dangerous games — her heart didn’t seem to be in it, so she wasn’t really scary or funny. Linney's work reminded me of Meryl Streep’s performance in the remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” — a pale echo of that horrifying woman Angela Lansbury played in the original movie.
Do American actresses try to “understand” evil and then wind up softening it?
Or, is “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” just one of those stories that becomes tiresome when you’ve heard it a few times before?
Posted by Joe on 5:27 PM | Comments (0)
