Joe's View

I had a great time last night at the Ars Nova performance space in Manhattan hearing a live sneak preview of Daniel Zaitchik’s in-the-works debut album, “Summer of the Soda Fountain Girls.”
Zaitchik was part of the ensemble of the Long Wharf Theater production of the Craig Lucas play “Prayer for My Enemy” in 2007. That was a non-singing job, but when I interviewed the performer he said music came first and acting was second.
We talked about his efforts to make one of my favorite movies of the 1970s — Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) — into a musical play.
The piece had a staged reading at Lincoln Center shortly after “Prayer” closed.
Last week it was announced that “Picnic” will be one of the two new musicals that will be worked on at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford this summer. Other shows that have gotten a big boost from this Connecticut showcase include “Avenue Q,” “(title of show)” and “Nine,” so Zaitchik would appear to be well on his way to a full production of this ambitious musical play.
Zaitchik is a wonderfully quirky songwriter.
One highlight last night was a tune inspired by his inability to finish “Jane Eyre.” Zaitchik apologized for the preponderance of songs about water and not wanting to get out of bed. The composer-performer brought three terrific guest musicians on stage with him — vocalist Emily Walton, cellist Lauren Riley Rigby and Ariana Rosen on the violin.
Zaitchik didn’t race through the songs, but kept his patter to a bare minimum, so the preview lasted less than hour (he joked that at earlier gigs he gabbed so much between tunes that some reviewers called them “cabaret” shows).
Still, the guy’s stage presence was very strong, living up to an amusing program note someone filed on an earlier Ars Nova gig that said the artist is “known for causing men, women and children to swoon with the simple clearing of his throat.” There were more than a few swooners in the house last night.
“Summer of the Soda Fountain Girls” should be a very interesting album.

The Brooklyn filmmaking couple who debuted with the 2006 Ryan Gosling vehicle “Half Nelson” — writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck — are back with a very strong second film, “Sugar,” set in the world of young Domician baseball players with dreams of playing professionally in this country.
Boden and Fleck researched the subject and came up with a movie that blends documentary elements with carefully shaped drama.
Like the Italian neo-realist directors of the 1940s, the filmmaking duo use real people in most of the major roles and yet there is nothing amateurish about the performances.
One can only imagine the care with which Boden and Fleck guided their neophyte “star” Algenis Perez Soto (above) through his remarkable work in the film’s title role. Soto was cast for his actual prowess in baseball but comes through with a very moving and very subtle performance.
Miguel “Sugar” Santos has already been spotted as a potential pitching star when the film opens. He is part of a Dominican Republic farm team operated by a (fictional) U.S. major league baseball team.
Since I am not a baseball fan this particular slice-of-life was brand new to me — I heard this morning on the National Public Radio show “The Takeaway” that a sizeable percentage of the players on American teams are Dominicans who come up through the system we see in the movie.
Sugar gets tapped for a minor league team in Iowa and the picture shows us his rough transition to living and working in a place that might as well be Mars. Few of the people around him speak Spanish. There is a running joke about the Dominican players ordering French toast at a diner every morning because it’s the only breakfast dish they know how to say in English. (“The food is so sweet here!,” the ballplayer complains in a phone call to his girlfriend back in the DR).
Although baseball is a world unto itself in American culture, “Sugar” is as much a classic tale of immigration as it is a sports story. Much of the movie is about how the language barrier and the culture shock work against Sugar’s success in Iowa.
(“Sugar” opens today at the Bethel Cinema, the Garden Cinemas in Norwalk, the Criterion in New Haven and the Bow Tie Plaza 3 in Greenwich.)

Two nights ago I saw a preview of the new Broadway musical version of the 1980 movie “9 to 5” for feature story research purposes (I’m working on a piece for the “Go” section set to run early next month).
It wouldn’t be kosher to “review” a show that won’t officially open until April 30, but I can report that the musical is in great shape and played to a tremendous audience response throughout (and the crowd didn’t appear to contain too many “friends” of the show — there were four tourist ladies from England sitting next to me and they were very vocal in their approval of “9 to 5” right from the start).
I have seen some real bummers in the movie-to-stage-musical genre in my time — “Urban Cowboy” and “Legally Blonde” among them — but “9 to 5” has been very cannily adapted by book writer Patricia Resnick and songwriter Dolly Parton.
The high points of the movie are all in the musical — many in the audience started to laugh in anticipation of their favorite lines from the film — but much of the source material has been improved in the transfer to the stage. The minor movie character of the office snitch Roz has been transformed into a really juicy role for Kathy Fitzgerald whose big fantasy number, “Heart to Hart,” is one of the best moments in the show.
The three leads — Allison Janney, Stephanie J. Block and Megan Hilty — are terrific in the office worker roles played by Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton in the film.
Janney and Block have been given some leeway to reinterpret their characters, but Hilty does a spot-on impression of Parton that is smashingly effective (Hilty gets the biggest laughs in the show and sings the hell out of several of the new tunes Parton wrote for the musical).
Director Joe Mantello and the adapters have retained the late 1970s time period of the movie which is used for some very amusing costume and hair designs.
“9 to 5” is pitched straight to the females in the audience — the male characters are either boobs or dreamy idealizations — and the women around me screamed their approval. I have a hunch the show will be a hit no matter what the reviewers might say on April 30.

The thriller fiction genre is bursting with talent these days — Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Daniel Silva, and Andrew Gross are a few of my book-a-year favorites.
Last night I finished “No Survivors” (Viking) by newcomer Tom Cain which is definitely worthy of comparison with those best-selling fellows I just mentioned.
Cain does a terrific job of reviving many of the elements that made Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels so much fun all those years ago. Cain’s hero Samuel Carver is a British agent with the same sort of larger-than-life foes and sensationally attractive (but possibly duplicitous) bed partners who used to be featured in the 007 novels.
But, Cain attaches his hero to a more realistic vision of the modern world; he also views global politics with a slightly satiric eye that recalls the thrillers of Richard Condon (in particular “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Winter Kills”). The feeling of slightly jaundiced realism in “No Survivors” might stem from the fact that Cain is the pen name of British journalist David Thomas
Cain begins the book with a preface “These are the facts…” and ends the book with a postcript, “This much is also true” that grounds his story in a sensational mix of late 1990s news events — the death of Princess Diana, the theory that the Soviets had planted “suitcase nukes” all over America before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war on the West.
He also throws the FBI’s “Project Megiddo” into the pot — a “long-term investigation into fundamentalist Christian cults who ‘believe the year 2000 will usher in the end of the world and who are willing to perpetrate acts of violence to bring that end about.’”
The less you know about Cain’s deliriously paranoid plot the better. If you enjoy espionage fiction you won’t want to miss “No Survivors.”

It has been announced in some of the movie trade papers that Mike Nichols is working on a possible American remake of the 1963 Akira Kurosawa kidnapping thriller, “High and Low.”
This seems like a pretty natural idea since Kurosawa was so heavily influenced by American cinema and he in turn inspired American directors who used several of the Japanese filmmaker’s samurai pictures as the starting point for “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Outrage,” among other Hollywood productions.
Kurosawa looked to American crime fiction for “High and Low,” which was loosely based on “King’s Ransom” one of the terrific 87th Precinct police procedurals by the late Fairfield County writer Ed McBain (the nom de plume of Evan Hunter).
Tomorrow night it will be my pleasure to introduce a free screening of “High and Low” at the Fairfield Library as part of the “Foreign and Fringe” series that I have co-curated with Drew Taylor of The Fairfield Weekly (he’s fringe and I’m foreign).
Movie buffs often overlook the contemporary dramas Kurosawa made in favor of the samurai pictures and the great Shakespeare adaptations “Throne of Blood” (1957) and “Ran” (1985).
American crime fiction has proven to be a potent source for directors all over the world, with Francois Truffaut drawing on the Philadelphia pulp noir novelist David Goodis for “Shoot the Piano Player” (1960) and Jean-Luc Godard using English language crime novels for several French pictures, including “Pierrot le Fou” (the director’s loose but fantastic 1965 adaptation of a Lionel White thriller).
More recently, Frenchman Claude Chabrol and Spanish director Pedro Almodovar have turned to British crime fiction master Ruth Rendell for inspiration and one of last year’s biggest U.S. art house hits “Tell No One” was a French dramatization of a novel by the hugely popular New Jersey writer Harlan Coben.
“Globalization” is nothing new when it comes to movies.
Join me tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. for a classic mix of Japanese visual style and American mean streets drama.
(The library is at 1080 Old Post Road in Fairfield Center. The phone number is 256-3155.)

The Sundance Channel is presenting the U.S. television debut of the 2007 documentary, “Confessions of a Superhero,” tonight at 9 p.m.
I watched the film by director Matt Ogens over the weekend and found it to be a fascinating but profoundly depressing look at four rather pitiful would-be actors who work in Los Angeles as panhandler superheros on Hollywood Boulevard, near the Mann Chinese Theatre. It’s like “The Day of the Locust” updated to the early years of the 21st century.
The Hollywood area went through some rocky times in the 1980s and 1990s — when it became synonymous with drugs and prostitution — but now with the arrival of the Kodak Theatre (home of the Oscar telecast), the studios for “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and other improvements, tourists have returned to the Boulevard in droves.
With them has come about 100 folks who dress up like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other movie/TV personalities and who solicit tips for being photographed. They’re the West Coast versions of that “Naked Cowboy” who used to hang out in Times Square in his Jockey shorts around the turn of the century attracting lots of tourist photographers (I haven’t seen him lately).
Although the four people profiled in the documentary present themselves as aspiring actors who are doing the superhero gig until their big show biz break comes along, “Confessions” makes it pretty clear that the chances of Joe McQueen (aka The Hulk), Jennifer Gehrt (Wonder Woman), Max Allen ( Batman) or Christoper Lloyd Dennis (Superman) ever finding success as actors is pretty slim. Ogens follows the quartet to auditions where we see their very limited “talent” and he also includes humiliating clips from the Z-grade movies Allen and McQueen have found work in.
The naive exhibitionists opened the doors of their homes to Ogens and his camera and we get pathetic glimpses of squalid apartments, bad marriages, apparent psychological disorders and lots of delusional behavior. Dennis claims to be the son of the late Oscar-winning actress Sandy Dennis, but her family says they don’t believe his claims, and no evidence is offered to substantiate the assertion (couldn’t Ogens have looked a little deeper into this matter and settled it once and for all?)
Like so many reality TV shows, “Confessions of a Superhero” is compulsively watchable but left me feeling that it was an essentially mean-spirited project that took advantage of four very sad people and their friends and families.

Over the past few days, The Los Angeles Times has been under fire for accepting a page one ad for an NBC show that was disguised to look like a news story.
The same paper is about to publish a movie studio-manufactured insert for the new Robert Downey-Jamie Foxx movie, “The Soloist,” that has been tricked-up to look like it was produced by the news staff.
Hard times for the media seem to be producing boom times for advertisers who want to push the envelope — in terms of content — and who want to carve out new territory in spaces reserved for non-advertising material.
Remember those creepy ad blimps floating over Los Angeles in the futuristic 1982 sci-fic flick “Blade Runner”?
The movie was set ten years from now, but public areas in most cities are already packed with enormous commercial sales pitches everywhere you look — giant fashion ads on the walls of buildings in downtown Manhattan, flashing video promos for TV shows on subway entrance kiosks.
The MTA wants to introduce ads that will flash on the sides of subway cars as they pull into stations.
Soon to go up on walls in the hipper reaches of New York and Los Angeles is the exceedingly weird Diesel sneaker ad that debuted in many of the men’s magazines this month — I ran into it in the April GQ and Details.
Diesel attracted criticism from environmentalists last year with its “comic” global warming fashion ads in which models wearing the company’s jeans and shirts were seen cavorting high above flooded New York and Rio locations.
The new sneaker ad was shot by John Scarisbrick at 1896 Studios in Brooklyn and is, as they say, open to interpretation.
Is the well-dressed young man (model Jon Kartajenera) an assassin who is using his Diesel high tops to strangle the life out of that elderly gent on the floor?
Is the old man on the floor playing slave to the young man’s master in some sort of S&M scenario?
What do the trophies in the background have to do with anything?
Asked to explain himself by a reporter from the fashion trade paper WWD, Diesel creative director Wilbert Das said, “There are no messages, themes or commentary to understand. Our objective is to intrigue and provoke a thought.”
The first “thought” the ad provoked in this viewer was: Will the carefully staged Scarisbrick photo sell sneakers?

The Steven Pasquale debut CD, “Somethin’ Like Love” (ps classics), is a beautiful collection of mostly old tunes brought up to date by the singer-actor featured on the FX series “Rescue Me” and in the just-opened Broadway production of the Neil LaBute play, “reasons to be pretty.”
When they passed around the talent (and the good looks) this guy certainly got more than his share.
The CD will be officially released on April 21, but the collection has already been made available for online downloading at iTunes.
Produced by jazz master John Pizzarelli and his singer-wife Jessica Molaskey, “Somethin’ Like Love” demonstrates Pasquale’s ability to blow the dust off American Songbook standards such as “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” and “My Funny Valentine.”
The only new tune on the CD is the title track — co-written by the producers — but Pasquale makes it sound as much like a standard as the songs that come before and after (“The Lady’s in Love With You” by Burton Lane and Frank Loesser and “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep” by Irving Berlin).
Pasquale’s singing has a mysterious simplicity. He doesn’t over-dramatize the lyrics in the contemporary Broadway belter manner, but somehow the ease of his performance makes every word sound fresh and the smooth Pizzarelli arrangements perfectly complement Pasquale’s vocals. The whole thing has the feeling of a great, late-night set in a New York club.
Pizzarelli writes in the liner notes that he hears echoes of Chet Baker and Bing Crosby and Johnny Hartman in the performer’s voice — “rich legato lines and…a sound that harks back to another time, but still feeling very much of the present. The result is an intimate performance that is rare for an artist’s first solo outing.”
Indeed.
After I put “Somethin’ Like Love” into the CD player, I had the eerie feeling that this was a recording I had been listening to and enjoying for years. The CD went into immediate heavy-rotation with Frank and Ella and it feels right at home there.