Brief Encounter and the Pee-wee Herman Show were both great fun, packed with theatrical tricks and surprises. Too bad they're closed now.
As is the dreary Haunted, starring a dynamite Brenda Blethyn. Why playwrights insist on writing things nobody would WANT to see is a mystery to me.
The Illusionist--Sylvain Chomet's follow-up to his wonderful though somewhat meaningless look at the grotesque side of how we entertain ourselves, the Triplets of Belleville--does, indeed, have a moral. Points for that. The downside is the moral is--well. I won't spoil it for you. In spite of that, the film is still well-made, mostly dialogue-free and aurally rich (as Triplets was), and mature in the way that the really great anime films of Japan are.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Odd Couple
Forkish review of Broadway play 'Elling'.
Wonderful show, delightfully performed by a cast of television and Hollywood character actors who--surprise, surprise--can do theatre. O'Hare is magnificent and Coolidge does her trademark thing to hilarious effect, even if the old folks didn't quite get it.
I've long been a secret fan of Mr. Fraiser as I've suspected he knows full well how absurd the Hollywood "thing" is as he seems only to choose projects that are fun. He's a far cry from his George of the Jungle days but he's clearly having a ball on the stage and gives the show much of its heart.
Scene changes are also helped along by a soundtrack that feels deliberate and part of the show, either fading into a radio playing in the background or stopping as soon as the lights come back up. Whoever came up with that, thank you. It feels so clean. The slow audio fade out as lights slowly fade up needs to go.
This Norwegian 'Odd Couple' is an absolute breath of fresh air, pure escapism in a time when such entertainments are sorely needed and greatly appreciated. Deftly directed, graciously apolitical, and mercifully NOT GAY, the story shows us a deep friendship between two very 'rare' men (to use their word) in an unassuming relationship that American men can no longer have with one another.
Loved it. I'd see it again in a second.
Wonderful show, delightfully performed by a cast of television and Hollywood character actors who--surprise, surprise--can do theatre. O'Hare is magnificent and Coolidge does her trademark thing to hilarious effect, even if the old folks didn't quite get it.
I've long been a secret fan of Mr. Fraiser as I've suspected he knows full well how absurd the Hollywood "thing" is as he seems only to choose projects that are fun. He's a far cry from his George of the Jungle days but he's clearly having a ball on the stage and gives the show much of its heart.
Scene changes are also helped along by a soundtrack that feels deliberate and part of the show, either fading into a radio playing in the background or stopping as soon as the lights come back up. Whoever came up with that, thank you. It feels so clean. The slow audio fade out as lights slowly fade up needs to go.
This Norwegian 'Odd Couple' is an absolute breath of fresh air, pure escapism in a time when such entertainments are sorely needed and greatly appreciated. Deftly directed, graciously apolitical, and mercifully NOT GAY, the story shows us a deep friendship between two very 'rare' men (to use their word) in an unassuming relationship that American men can no longer have with one another.
Loved it. I'd see it again in a second.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Driving Miss Crazy
Fork-sized reviews of Broadway revivals La Bete and Driving Miss Daisy
Recession is here. Plays the new big thing on Broadway, minimal sets, tiny casts, hefty star-power. But is fame enough...?
La Bete, a revival of 90s play that ran for, like, two performances, stars David Hyde Pierce, Joanna Lumley, Mark Rylance. Shakespeare-type (Hyde Pierce) being forced by Queen (Lumley) to bring Shrek-esque buffoon (Rylance) into acting troupe because she thinks he's funny. Interesting piece on the hows and whys of society allowing low art to be elevated to high art, while high art becomes an object of scorn among the masses who, at the end of the day, don't care about iambic pentameter and just want to be entertained.
Sets, costumes, etc., etc., the elements are there, lovely, creative, perhaps a bit inconsistently literal. Hyde Pierce and Lumley simply spectacular. May inquire at box office to see how much it would cost to slip in for their closing monologues in the last 30 minutes of the 2 hour play.
Why just last 30 minutes? Because if I have to sit through Rylance's somebody-shoot-me-please-I-beg-of-you-I-can't-take-anymore AWFUL comedic stylings again, all the cheer and goodwill I have left will be permanently sucked out of me. What, I believe, should have been the embodiment of every handsome, self-absorbed, pseudo-intellectual actor you've ever disliked, is interpreted here as a Jerry Lewis/Adam Sandler (in his early days) type of mental retard who takes a dump behind Shakespeare's bookshelf, cannot make eye contact with anyone in an irritating childlike manner, drops the end of 2/3 of all his lines for comic effect which gets old after the first 45 minutes, farts, belches, spits, strips, basically delights the dumbed-down audience so Hyde Pierce can turn around at the end of the play and tell me and three other people who want to gouge out our eyes that we must defend art from the people sitting around us.
Successful? Sure. But this isn't Theatre of Cruelty. It's Broadway and most people are paying $121.50 to be entertained, not tortured ($35 for me. Thanks, TDF!) I've never had anyone shoot to the top of my MUST MISS list faster than Mark Rylance who pulled almost exactly the same shtick in Boeing Boeing, and how he continues to steal all the reviews is quite beyond me. 15 minute monologue delivered by actor, while dazzling the folks who still wonder how actors "memorize all those lines" utterly excruciating.
Hyde Pierce and Lumley, however, positively light up the stage (Lumley quite literally). If you can stomach the 21st Century's Jerry Lewis acting like an barking idiot for 45 minutes you'll be treated to a handful of wonderful monologues by these two.
Driving Miss Daisy. Vanessa Redgrave (THE Vanessa Redgrave!), James Earl Jones, Boyd Gaines. 90 minutes. Drab set. Unfortunate costumes. Okay. So the color and sparkle will come from Redgrave and Jones, right?
Sad to say, once again, another tiny cast with a weak line that, in this case, renders the show difficult to watch. Gaines is great in the thankless role of Miss Daisy's exposition-spouting son, and Jones defies expectations as Hoke, giving a swell, if a bit emotionally heavy-handed, performance which is likely to delight Star Wars fans the world over.
Unfortunately, someone needs to tell Ms. Redgrave that merely speaking with a false Southern accent does not a genteel Southern lady make. More to it than that. Don't know why they keep putting British actresses in roles which require Southern accents--they can never do the Rs and the As. When Redgrave first comes on stage mixing cake batter, looking extremely awkward doing so, you know this doesn't bode well. Moving too much, pantomiming, it's too much, too unreal, and, worst of all, too phoned-in. Tender moment teaching Hoke to read is reduced to Redgrave clowning and dropping all pretense of character. Two sneezes during the show reminded me of the studies done attempting to understand why actors "in the moment" NEVER SNEEZE on stage.
A little heavy-handed on the "THIS IS SEGREGATION" side of things. We get it, okay? We're not stupid.
Then again, based on audience response to Rylance in La Bete, maybe we are.
Recession is here. Plays the new big thing on Broadway, minimal sets, tiny casts, hefty star-power. But is fame enough...?
La Bete, a revival of 90s play that ran for, like, two performances, stars David Hyde Pierce, Joanna Lumley, Mark Rylance. Shakespeare-type (Hyde Pierce) being forced by Queen (Lumley) to bring Shrek-esque buffoon (Rylance) into acting troupe because she thinks he's funny. Interesting piece on the hows and whys of society allowing low art to be elevated to high art, while high art becomes an object of scorn among the masses who, at the end of the day, don't care about iambic pentameter and just want to be entertained.
Sets, costumes, etc., etc., the elements are there, lovely, creative, perhaps a bit inconsistently literal. Hyde Pierce and Lumley simply spectacular. May inquire at box office to see how much it would cost to slip in for their closing monologues in the last 30 minutes of the 2 hour play.
Why just last 30 minutes? Because if I have to sit through Rylance's somebody-shoot-me-please-I-beg-of-you-I-can't-take-anymore AWFUL comedic stylings again, all the cheer and goodwill I have left will be permanently sucked out of me. What, I believe, should have been the embodiment of every handsome, self-absorbed, pseudo-intellectual actor you've ever disliked, is interpreted here as a Jerry Lewis/Adam Sandler (in his early days) type of mental retard who takes a dump behind Shakespeare's bookshelf, cannot make eye contact with anyone in an irritating childlike manner, drops the end of 2/3 of all his lines for comic effect which gets old after the first 45 minutes, farts, belches, spits, strips, basically delights the dumbed-down audience so Hyde Pierce can turn around at the end of the play and tell me and three other people who want to gouge out our eyes that we must defend art from the people sitting around us.
Successful? Sure. But this isn't Theatre of Cruelty. It's Broadway and most people are paying $121.50 to be entertained, not tortured ($35 for me. Thanks, TDF!) I've never had anyone shoot to the top of my MUST MISS list faster than Mark Rylance who pulled almost exactly the same shtick in Boeing Boeing, and how he continues to steal all the reviews is quite beyond me. 15 minute monologue delivered by actor, while dazzling the folks who still wonder how actors "memorize all those lines" utterly excruciating.
Hyde Pierce and Lumley, however, positively light up the stage (Lumley quite literally). If you can stomach the 21st Century's Jerry Lewis acting like an barking idiot for 45 minutes you'll be treated to a handful of wonderful monologues by these two.
Driving Miss Daisy. Vanessa Redgrave (THE Vanessa Redgrave!), James Earl Jones, Boyd Gaines. 90 minutes. Drab set. Unfortunate costumes. Okay. So the color and sparkle will come from Redgrave and Jones, right?
Sad to say, once again, another tiny cast with a weak line that, in this case, renders the show difficult to watch. Gaines is great in the thankless role of Miss Daisy's exposition-spouting son, and Jones defies expectations as Hoke, giving a swell, if a bit emotionally heavy-handed, performance which is likely to delight Star Wars fans the world over.
Unfortunately, someone needs to tell Ms. Redgrave that merely speaking with a false Southern accent does not a genteel Southern lady make. More to it than that. Don't know why they keep putting British actresses in roles which require Southern accents--they can never do the Rs and the As. When Redgrave first comes on stage mixing cake batter, looking extremely awkward doing so, you know this doesn't bode well. Moving too much, pantomiming, it's too much, too unreal, and, worst of all, too phoned-in. Tender moment teaching Hoke to read is reduced to Redgrave clowning and dropping all pretense of character. Two sneezes during the show reminded me of the studies done attempting to understand why actors "in the moment" NEVER SNEEZE on stage.
A little heavy-handed on the "THIS IS SEGREGATION" side of things. We get it, okay? We're not stupid.
Then again, based on audience response to Rylance in La Bete, maybe we are.
My job
Aaand now I'm a werewolf with raptor feet.
I have the coolest job in the world.
*does more pull ups, crunches*
Monday, September 27, 2010
Howling
A dog has been howling in a nearby apartment for days and days.
It seems whenever the owner of this stupid animal leaves, it begins howling. And the howling does not stop until the owner returns around 11pm.
If you live in Hell's Kitchen, right here in the heart of Manhattan, and know where this howling is coming from, please let me know so I can do what that person's neighbors SHOULD have done two weeks ago and called freakin' 311!!!!!!
But that's really the trouble with New York City, isn't it? Some unseen person can be smoking near their window in a downstairs apartment and sending the smoke into all the open windows above him. Someone can have a dog which howls every minute on the minute for 8 hours a day that the rest of the block has to suffer through. Some filthy person in some apartment has bedbugs and the entire building becomes infested.
What the crap are those of us suffering from these people's lack of consideration supposed to do about it? There's nothing you CAN do, it seems to me. Other than stare at the wall and wonder why you pay a zillion dollars a month for a little square room with paper-thin walls and neighbors whose noises, smells, and lives just WON'T STAY OUT when you could pay the same amount elsewhere and have a HOUSE.
I'm just saying.
It seems whenever the owner of this stupid animal leaves, it begins howling. And the howling does not stop until the owner returns around 11pm.
If you live in Hell's Kitchen, right here in the heart of Manhattan, and know where this howling is coming from, please let me know so I can do what that person's neighbors SHOULD have done two weeks ago and called freakin' 311!!!!!!
But that's really the trouble with New York City, isn't it? Some unseen person can be smoking near their window in a downstairs apartment and sending the smoke into all the open windows above him. Someone can have a dog which howls every minute on the minute for 8 hours a day that the rest of the block has to suffer through. Some filthy person in some apartment has bedbugs and the entire building becomes infested.
What the crap are those of us suffering from these people's lack of consideration supposed to do about it? There's nothing you CAN do, it seems to me. Other than stare at the wall and wonder why you pay a zillion dollars a month for a little square room with paper-thin walls and neighbors whose noises, smells, and lives just WON'T STAY OUT when you could pay the same amount elsewhere and have a HOUSE.
I'm just saying.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Drawing Competition: Days 3 & 4
Yep. My brain is fried.
You can't stand in silence for 8 hours a day with a room full of people staring at you and not walk away a little shaky.
It's been fun though. I decided to get to know everybody yesterday. I had had it with the dread silence. So on the little breaks instead of collapsing into a chair and taking a four minute nap, I walked around the room and struck up conversations.
Made everyone a little more relaxed, I think. Hey, I want them to be successful as much as I want to avoid going completely bonkers from this experience.
Almost over. This one's different from the sculpture competish. I honestly don't know HOW they'll pick a winner. The drawings are...
Well... you'll see.
You can't stand in silence for 8 hours a day with a room full of people staring at you and not walk away a little shaky.
It's been fun though. I decided to get to know everybody yesterday. I had had it with the dread silence. So on the little breaks instead of collapsing into a chair and taking a four minute nap, I walked around the room and struck up conversations.
Made everyone a little more relaxed, I think. Hey, I want them to be successful as much as I want to avoid going completely bonkers from this experience.
Almost over. This one's different from the sculpture competish. I honestly don't know HOW they'll pick a winner. The drawings are...
Well... you'll see.
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