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.
Joe's View
Archive for April, 2008
The man behind Mapplethorpe
“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)
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.)
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.
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.
Our James Dean?
I’m happy to report that the forthcoming DVD version of Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” is packed with extras that are truly special.
The two-disc release will be on sale May 6 and it includes a wonderful tribute to the late Heath Ledger, who died only a few months after the Bob Dylan bio-pic opened late last year.
Ledger is one of six actors who play Dylan in this wonderful re-imagining of the way movies treat the lives of pop artists.
Because Dylan has gone through so many changes in his life and career, it seems entirely right for Haynes to use different actors for each phase of the artist’s life.
Cate Blanchett dominated most of the coverage of “I’m Not There” with her Oscar-nominated gender-bending performance as the Dylan of the mid-1960s — the “Don’t Look Back” period — but the other five actors are equally strong.
Ledger’s performance takes on a whole new tone in the aftermath of the actor’s Jan. 22 death because he plays out some of the most difficult moments in Dylan’s life — when the artist’s marriage was collapsing and the singer-songwriter sank into a depression.
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the troubled wife, and she and Ledger have an intense sexual and romantic chemistry.
In the special tribute to Ledger on the second disc, Haynes includes extended shots of the two glamorous actors driving along a country road in a sports car.
Ledger is wearing vintage sunglasses and gives off the same sort of Hollywood movie star charisma James Dean has in those photos showing the legendary actor in and around the sports car in which he died in 1955.
“I’m Not There” is drenched in movie style as well as the sounds of Dylan — Haynes references Fellini and Godard throughout the 1960s scenes — so the director’s pairing of Ledger with the sports car now carries haunting echoes of another star who died too soon.
Finishing the hat (again)
Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Sunday in the Park with George” is back on Broadway in a critically endorsed revival that features a strong cast of singer-actors and state-of-the-art video projections.
The score includes several of Sondheim’s most frequently performed tunes — “Putting It Together,” “Children and Art” and “Finishing the Hat,” among them — but, for me, it remains the same chilly piece of theatre it was when I saw the original production in 1984.
With only a couple of exceptions — “A Little Night Music” and “Sweeney Todd” — the Sondheim music and lyrics have always been superior to the material around them. Indeed, the brilliant songwriting too often points up the inadequacy of the shows for which they were written.
“Anyone Can Whistle,” “Company,” “Follies,” and “Merrily We Roll Along” have fantastic song scores, but Sondheim labored under the handicap of storylines that were not at his high level of artistry.
The non-profit Roundabout Theatre Company has imported their revival of “Sunday in the Park with George” from London, where it debuted at The Menier Chocolate Factory before moving into the West End.
The technology-heavy show received several Olivier Awards — the London theatre’s equivalent of the Tony — including two prizes for the stars, Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell, who are heading up a fine new company of American actors on Broadway.
The show was Sondheim’s first collaboration with writer-director James Lapine. They built most of the first act on a clever but ultimately shallow premise: Who were all those people George Seurat included in his giant painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”?
As the George character sketches and sings we get little vignettes about the lives of “An Old Lady,” “A Boatman,” “A Soldier” and the other figures in the painting. We also meet the only other major character in the show, George’s mistress Dot, who gets pregnant by the painter but leaves him for a baker with big plans in the United States.
Sondheim seems to be venting his own frustration with the critics of the 1970s and early ’80s in scenes showing Seurat being harshly judged by the reviewers of his time. When he wrote this score, the lyricist and composer was coming off the flop of “Merrily We Roll Along” and the break-up of his long artistic collaboration with director Harold Prince, so the bitter tone is understandable, but the artistic establishment-baiting is a little too facile as drama.
It is such a film and theatre bio-drama cliché to have boobish contemporaries of George Seurat and Mozart and Van Gogh throw stones at the artists’ work (In “Sunday in the Park…” Sondheim and Lapine have too many moments built around the notion, “If those dolts only knew George’s painting would go on to be hailed as a masterpiece all over the world!”).
Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell sing the hell out of Sondheim’s terrific songs, and the production values are glorious, but the play around the music still feels thin and distant to me.
Not knowing what comes next
Romantic comedy is pretty much a dead issue in movies, but the genre is alive and well on stage.
Saturday afternoon I saw Adam Bock’s “The Drunken City” at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan and felt the thrill of discovering a fresh approach to love and laughs in this crazy new century we are in.
The play ended a limited run at the non-profit theater on Sunday, but I would be shocked if something this sharp and this funny didn’t get picked up by a commercial producer for an open-ended run off-Broadway. Bock has created something that should have special appeal to that elusive under-35 demographic live theater has been losing to other media.
Powered by a terrific six-actor ensemble, “The Drunken City” is a 90-minute, intermission-less piece that takes us deeper into “real life” than many plays that are twice as long.
Bock never really answers the main question he poses — What is this thing called “love”? — but he makes every step of his confused characters’ journeys interesting and all of the laughs grow out of shocks of recognition.
What a kick it is to see a play where it is impossible to tell from moment to moment what might happen next and yet everything that does happen rings true.
Bock takes a simple situation — three suburban girls barhopping in the big city — and opens it up into a hilarious and surprisingly profound examination of the search for love.
The just-engaged Marnie (Cassie Beck) thinks she has won a prize in the form of her off-stage fiance and her girlfriends Melissa (Maria Dizzia) and Linda (Sue Jean Kim) are fully vested in that belief because they have both become engaged recently, too.
The girls bump into two handsome, unattached guys — Eddie (Barrett Foa) and Frank (Mike Colter). When Marnie agrees to kiss Frank, the ground underneath all of the characters shakes — literally — thanks to David Korins’ simple but unexpectedly mobile urban sidewalk set.
Marnie and Frank go missing and Melissa and Linda fear the worst, calling their friend Bob (Alfredo Narciso) to come into the city and join in the hunt. Bob happens to be one of the least stereotypical gay men ever seen on a New York stage — a baker who is tired of being walked-out on by his boyfriends — and what happens between him and dentist Eddie is as surprising and funny as what happens to the three girls.
In his remarkably direct program notes, Bock states, “There’s a dramatic truism that when a character is drunk he or she will be the truth-teller, so I thought, ‘Hey, why not write a play where everyone is drunk — that way truth’ll be flying around everywhich everywhere.’ And then I thought, ‘Plus, it’ll be funny because drunk girls are funny and I’m gonna write about some girls in the city.’ But mostly I thought, ‘If everyone is drunk, and the world is drunk, who knows what’ll happen and that’s usually a good start.’”
“…I keep hoping to learn how to tell the truth. That’s why I write plays. There are those beautiful moments, when we are all together, because some voice has talked to us all, and we have all heard it — ‘I hear that,’ I whisper; ‘So do I,’ says another — and suddenly we are all together. Feels very worthwhile to search for these moments.”
“The Drunken City” is packed with those “beautiful moments” when we are in the presence of a playwright who is, indeed, telling us the truth.
