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September 30, 2008

Seeing what’s not there (yet)

The New York Musical Theatre Festival began Sept. 15 and is running through Oct. 5, showcasing an impressive-sounding 24 “full productions” of new musicals and a whole host of special events, concerts and works-in-progress.
Saturday afternoon I saw “Bonnie & Clyde: A Folktale” and came away with mixed feelings about the material and the presentation.
I have friends who love to see the first rough cut of a feature film or the earliest preview of a new show, but I would much rather wait and see a fully realized version of a play or movie.
Clearly, it is important for the creators of a musical to get their show up on its feet somewhere so that potential producers and investors can get enough of an idea of a show’s potential to write a check.
The NYMF staging of “Bonnie & Clyde” was a bit more than minimal — the characters wore period costumes, a few props were included, there was a five-piece band, and everyone wore the sort of headpiece microphones that are used on Broadway.
Honestly, if the NYMF was not selling tickers to the public and advertising “Bonnie & Clyde” as a full production, I don’t think I would write about it, even in this informal blog space.
The performers were perfectly capable — albeit lacking in the charisma that would be needed for a Broadway version of the show — and the songs were pleasant, but I kept thinking what a more finished version might be like. What would the show be like, for instance, with Sutton Foster and Patrick Wilson in the leads and fabulous costumes by William Ivey Long?
The Depression era setting, the theme of crime generating celebrity, and the sexual hypocrisy of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover all seemed to cry out for more elaborate visuals and real choreography that might do a better job of putting some of the blander numbers across.
We’re in a period where highly publicized non-profit film and play festivals too often take the place of commercial runs.
An “insider” audience sees rough drafts of shows that will never be fully staged, shortchanging the creative staff behind the piece by putting a sketchy piece of work in front of a paying public. Actors who might have crafted stronger performances with a longer rehearsal period are not seen at their best, blurring the line between problems in the material and weaknesses in the casting.
Rather than throw two-dozen bare bones musicals on 12 stages around town, a group like the NYMF might do more good by focusing on a few shows and giving them productions that would warrant the word “full.”

Posted by Joe on 3:46 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2008

Paul Newman, R.I.P.

Most of the tributes to Paul Newman that were published over the weekend stressed his role as a philanthropist in the years since he founded Newman’s Own in 1982.
If you had told the actor back in his Hollywood glory days that he would come to be nearly as well known for his salad dressing and popcorn as he was for his performances in dozens of movies, he probably would have thought you were mad. And with good reason. Who could have forecast that an almost jokey stunt — bottling Newman's own salad dressing as a gift to pals — would turn into a major food company and charitable organization?
The star used the power of his celebrity to do good in a way that very few peers of his have ever managed. Locally, we enjoyed the benefit of his generosity at more fundraisers and in the coffers of more local non-profit organizations that anyone could ever count. The first time I ever saw Newman in the flesh was at a small Westport benefit in the early 1980s designed to raise money for the Russian Jewry who were emigrating to this country to flee the Soviet repression in the years just before glasnost.
Elsewhere on this website, I wrote a tribute to the way Newman became a truly good neighbor in Westport, especially when he and his wife Joanne Woodward pitched in to save the Westport Country Playhouse a decade ago when the theater’s future was dim indeed.
Over the weekend, I thought more about Newman as an actor than a public figure, however.
He was a star when I began going to movies as a child and he remained a major force in film through the 2002 hit “Road to Perdition.”
An actor who I saw play Melvyn Douglas’s angry son in “Hud” when I was just a kid in 1963 wound up his career 39 years later as the father of an angry son played by Daniel Craig.
When we watch the stars of our youth age and then die there is a special resonance. For baby boomers, Newman leaving the scene is a shock of the sort we only get when a loved one dies. Obviously, few of us “knew” him, but we saw him grow as an actor, branch out into directing (with the marvelous “Rachel, Rachel” which debuted 40 years ago this month) and then become a grand old man of the cinema (his performance in the 1994 “Nobody’s Fool” was a stunning culmination in the tradition of Burt Lancaster’s similar age-embracing work in “Atlantic City”).
Newman received 10 Oscar nominations for his best serious work, but I also loved his lighter performances during his 1960s peak years, fluff like “Harper” (1966) and “A New Kind of Love” (1963).
Saturday night, instead of sitting down with one of his classics like “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) I watched a picture that no one would place on the list of Newman’s best pictures — “The Prize” (1963) — a dopey, overblown MGM thriller about an attempted kidnapping of a Russian scientist during Nobel Prize week in Stockholm.
It was, no doubt, one of those big commercial items that made it possible for the star to appear in bleak downers like “Hud” (released the same year). Newman and his pal Robert Redford built their careers on a solid one-for-them-one-for-me foundation that demonstrated the possibility of juggling commerce and art in Hollywood.
Anyhow, I hadn’t seen “The Prize” in many years and, honestly, it doesn’t hold up very well, but to see Newman at the peak of his physical attractiveness dashing off a very appealing movie star performance was a wonderful reminder of why audiences adored both the actor and the man. Newman knew when (and how) to have fun with a part that made very few demands on his talent.

Posted by Joe on 1:58 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2008

Jesus + Queen Elizabeth + Hitler + Reagan

Funny and provocative and overpowering, Sarah Ruhl’s “Passion Play” is a feast for theatergoers who want to see the boundaries of traditional stagecraft pushed to their limits.
Yale Repertory Theatre presented the world premiere of Ruhl’s “The Clean House” four years ago and now the regional theater has opened its 2008-2009 season with an awesome staging of the writer’s trilogy of interconnected plays about the ways in which the Christ story has been dramatized for the last 500 years.
Act One takes us to England in 1575 where the queen has just banned stage tellings of the Passion, and the people in a small northern village are having their livelihoods threated since they are famed for an annual staging of the Bible story.
Act Two moves us to Germany in 1934 and the Oberammergau Passion which draws tourists from all over the world. Ruhl shows us the role the pageant played in reinforcing the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party.
The third play is set in Spearfish, South Dakota in 1969 and 1984 where locals put on a popular Middle American version of the Christ story.
“Passion Play” is about acting and the theater as well as religion and politics.
Ruhl shows us the struggle of artists in three different eras in coming to terms with a stage representation of “the greatest story ever told.”
The playwright also examines the provocative and perhaps unintended sexual undertones in the story of the “virgin” birth and a handsome messiah’s relationship with prostitutes and eager male followers.
“Passion Play” never directly addresses the hugely popular Mel Gibson filmed “Passion” a few years ago, but Ruhl does explore the way show biz has benefitted from the sensational violence and near-nudity involved with various Bible tales and the end of Christ
Joaquin Torres (above) plays the young actors entrusted with the role of Christ in all three eras and we see how women (and men) are drawn to him. In the first act, two female admirers keep hoping the actor’s loincloth will slip; director Mark Wing-Davey makes Torres a sexual symbol as well as a religious icon in each of the three plays.
The cast is quite extraordinary from top to bottom, with several ensemble members returning to work on the play after doing earlier productions in Chicago and Washington, D.C. Polly Noonan plays a “village idiot” in the first two acts who is actually much wiser than most of the folks who mock her. In Act Two, the encounter between the “idiot” and a Nazi in the forest becomes one of the most subtle and horrifying dramatizations of the Holocaust that I’ve ever seen in a film or on stage.
Kathleen Chalfant delivers a tour de force performance as the queen, Hitler and President Ronald Reagan. Chalfant’s shape-shifting skills were part of the thrilling theatricality of the original New York production of “Angels in America” — where she kicked off the epic as an elderly rabbi — and she brings down the house with her work in “Passion Play.”
Chalfant’s Reagan has tinges of parody in it, of course, but she also draws us in close to the actor-turned-president in a fantastic and very brief aside in which Reagan confides to us about his love of public performance: “I always liked the light from the camera. The wall of light gave me privacy, made me feel comfortabke. A light would go on and I would relax. All I saw was the light.”
“People are afraid of actors,” the president continues. “They’re afraid we’re good at lying. I’ll let you in on a little secret. We’re really just EXTRA good at telling the truth.”
Sarah Ruhl and the company of actors presenting “Passion Play” demonstrate that Reagan was right in that bit about “the truth.”

Posted by Joe on 5:21 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2008

New York in the good old/bad old days

“The Organ Grinder” (Five Star) by Maan Mayers is what you might call a hard-boiled historical — a gritty crime novel set in Manhattan a century ago that doesn’t contain an ounce of fake nostalgia for “Old New York.”
The book delves into the brutal murder of a prostitute — for a missing locket that might have fallen into her hands — but the crime is just the starting point for a thrilling examination of the social and cultural changes that were sweeping through the city at the beginning of a new century.
The novel is packed with interesting characters including two women — photographer Esther Breslau and reporter Flora Cooper — who are pioneers in the revolutionary roles that women were about to play in the 20th century city.
“The Organ Grinder” is just the latest in a series of Maan Meyers novels following a Dutch family — the Tonnemans — from the earliest days of the settlement of the city through the beginnings of the modern era.
The blend of good storytelling, accurate history and deft characterization have made the books favorites of both mystery readers and those who love to explore New York City’s past.
Maan Meyers is the pseudonym of the husband and wife writing team of Annette and Martin Meyers whom I have come to think of as quintessential New Yorkers.
Annette and Martin are not related to this blogger, but I have known them and their work since Annette started her fiction career with a bang when Bantam published “The Big Killing” in 1989.
Annette brought a unique background to the mystery genre. She had two separate careers before her ficton debut — working as assistant to Broadway legend Harold Prince (in his glory days of producing and directing “Cabaret” and “Company” and “Follies”) and then as a Wall Street headhunter.
In her “Smith and Wetzon” mysteries, Annette captured the zeitgeist of Broadway and Wall Street as the city headed toward a new millennium.
She and her writer-actor husband Martin teamed up for the “Dutchman mysteries” and they have been writing wonderful stuff together — and separately — ever since.
In novels and short stories that have appeared in some of the best mystery anthologies (including Lawrence Block’s great collection, “Manhattan Noir”), Annette and Martin Meyers have displayed a peerless understanding of the city and the way it shapes people.

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

September 24, 2008

Dear one, please respond

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion USD. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who (God willing) will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a former U.S. congressional leader and the architect of the PALIN / McCain Financial Doctrine, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. As such, you can be assured that this transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

(From the blog of the terrific American crime writer S.J. Rozan - above - who tips her hat to Christina Sum for this one.)

Posted by Joe on 10:39 AM | Comments (0)