Joe's View

The 1980s wasn’t a good decade for adult comedies — it was the “blockbuster” era of all the “Stars Wars” spin-offs and variations on “Rocky” such as “Flashdance” and “Footloose” — but Woody Allen wasn’t the only American writer-director who did good work for sophisticated audiences during the period.
The 1982 hit “Tootsie” is one of the funniest comedies ever produced in Hollywood, in my humble opinion, and toward the end of the decade two romantic comedy classics came along — “Moonstruck” in 1987 and “Bull Durham” the following year.
But for every well-written, well-acted comedy intended for an adult audience, there were dozens of “Porky’s” and all of those other interchangeable ’80s comedies designed for kids. The John Hughes pictures were several cuts above “The Last American Virgin” and its ilk, but he wrote about and for teenagers.
Tuesday night, as part of the Fairfield Theatre Company’s Martini and a Movie series I’ll be hosting a free screening of a 1985 comedy that never fails to make me laugh, “Lost in America.”
Albert Brooks pulled off a Woody Allen-style trifecta in this classic — writing it, directing it and co-starring with the brilliant comedienne Julie Hagerty (who gave him the same sort of comic spark that Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow have supplied in their Woody Allen pictures).
Like Woody, Brooks has always projected an urban neurotic Jewish energy that is a turn off in many parts of this country. As a writer-director, Brooks has never had a huge box-office hit, but “Lost in America” has attracted a sizeable cult over the past three decades.
The movie has a strong premise that hasn’t dated much since 1985. A well-heeled Los Angeles couple gets tired of the corporate rat race, decides to cash out, buy a Winnebago and head off “to touch Indians” just like the anti-heroes of the Brooks character’s favorite film, “Easy Rider” (1969)
Of course, being consumerist young Americans of the 1980s the couple wants to be comfortable on their quest; the house-on-wheels is equipped with amazing gizmos like a microwave that can make perfect grilled cheese sandwiches.
The first stop out of L.A. is Las Vegas where the husband finds to his horror that his wife has been carrying an untapped addiction.
While he sleeps, she gambles away all of their cash.
This is when we get Brooks’s justly famous “nest egg principle” speech.
“Please do me a favor,” the man yells at his wife when she refers to their lost nest egg. “Don’t use the word. You may not use that word — it’s off-limits to you. Only those in this house who understand nest egg may use it. And don’t use any part of it either. Don’t use ‘nest,’ don’t use ‘egg.’ If you’re out in the forest you can point. The bird lives in a round stick. And you have things over easy with toast.”
Suddenly, the duo is dumped into lower middle class, middle America, where he ends up a crossing guard and she goes to work at a fast-food restaurant where her boss is half her age.
“Lost in America” is one of the funniest, and most ironic explorations of that intangible “American dream” we are all seemingly programmed with at birth.
Brooks has proven to be a sporadic and wildly inconsistent filmmaker over the past 25 years, but “Lost in America” remains a gem.
(The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. in Fairfield Center. The doors will open for the free screening Tuesday at 7 p.m. and the movie will start at 8 p.m.)

Readers of the big monthly magazines get so used to puff pieces on stars with new movies about to open that it’s always a shock when a glossy does one of its very rare catty cover stories.
Generally, in the magazine business, summer means warmly sympathetic cover treatments of the latest Steven Spielberg and/or George Lucas sequel or a potential blockbuster with Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford or Cameron Diaz or some other superstar.
Has any major magazine ever published anything less than a love letter/cover story dealing with Tom Hanks?
So, it comes as a bit of a shock to pick up a glossy in which the cover figure is subjected to ridicule.
In the new Vanity Fair, Rich Cohen writes himself into pretzel-like twists trying to explain why he was sent to interview the fallen reality TV star/singer Jessica Simpson and why we should spend any time reading about her.
“In short, it’s been a bad time for Jessica Simpson,” Cohen writes of the performer’s last few years. “Flop, flop, country flop, fat picture. And yet, despite it all, she does a radiate a special quality.”
Later in the piece, Cohen uses a fast-food comparison for Simpson and her two famous former “Mickey Mouse Club” co-stars — Britney Spears is McDonald’s Christina Aguilera is Burger King and poor Jessica is Hardees!
Obviously, Vanity Fair was stuck for an A-list June cover figure and decided to do a bit of cultural slumming by hiring fashion photographer Mario Testino to put a high gloss on downmarket tabloid favorite Simpson. Cohen’s job was both to praise and to bury the young woman.
Alex Pappademas was forced to jump through similar journalistic hoops in last month’s GQ where his assignment was to justify a big photo spread and cover on the teen star Zac Efron.
Again, there was an embarrassed tone in the story that accompanied Peggy Sirota’s GQ photo spread. The writer and the magazine seemed to be holding Efron at arm’s length, with tongs — wondering in print if the “High School Musical” star was anything more than “another buffed and pretty face.”
I’m not suggesting that Efron or Simpson should be built up as the next Johnny Depp or Nicole Kidman, but I don’t understand why editors would give lavish cover spreads to people they are so contemptuous of.

Cinevolve will release the DVD version of the 2007 documentary “The Town That Was” on Tuesday.
It’s a gripping and very sad account of a little town in Pennsylvania coal country called Centralia that had the life sucked out of it after an accident caused coal deposits under the town to smolder for more than 40 years.
A thriving community of about 1,600 residents — with a history going back 100 years — was reduced to the handful of people who live there now.
The fire began in 1962 but residents hung on until the 1980s when it became clear that the fumes and the increasingly soft earth were becoming life-threatening. A major road through Centralia (above) was also closed during this period when the heat and the fumes made it a traffic hazzard.
The problem began Memorial Day weekend in 1962 when the town leaders decided to burn the piles of trash in the town dump to prepare for the annual holiday festivities held adjacent to the site.
The fire burnt down into the anthracite coal deposits under the dump and the leaders in Centralia didn’t act quickly enough to stop the fire from spreading into other coal reserves under the town.
Co-directors Chris Perkel and Georgie Roland spent four years working on the film and the result mixes a history of the role of coal-mining in Pennsylvania with a mind-boggling civic disaster that is like something out of a Stephen King novel.
“The Town That Was” shows how people’s ties to their hometown become almost unbreakable. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s residents got used to the smoke that would waft out of cracks in the landscape — little venting pumps were also installed all over Centralia to allow the gases to escape.
Even though carbon monoxide monitors placed in homes delivered readings that were “off the charts,” in the words of one health official, people didn’t want to leave the town their immigrant ancestors had created out of nothing in the mid-19th century.
It wasn’t until a boy nearly died when he fell into one of the fissures that people started to see the mounting danger. The state and federal government started paying for people to be relocated to nearby towns and the exodus began
As each block and business was abandoned, the buildings were demolished, so that a decade later you wouldn’t know there had ever been a vibrant community of miners and their families.

After a marvelous excursion into experimental mystery fiction last year — the supernatural whodunit “Ghost at Work” — Carolyn Hart takes us back to her fictional South Carolina sea island Broward’s Rock for “Dare to Die,” the 19th novel in the writer’s “Death on Demand” series.
Hart is a master practitioner of the traditional mystery in the Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart vein, combining wonderfully constructed plots with brilliant insights into human nature.
The “Death on Demand” novels follow Annie and Max Darling, a couple who manage to exude plain old-fashioned niceness without ever seeming saccharine.
The Darlings are well aware of the darker elements of this world — in the new book, they are still recovering from the emotionally devastating false murder charges Max faced in “Dead Days of Summer” — but they also know how short and precious life is, so they keep moving forward, appreciating their good fortune in having each other and living in such a beautiful place.
Annie runs the mystery book store that gives the series its title; this allows Hart to share her love of the genre and individual writers with us.
Independent bookstores might be on the endangered species list these days, but Death on Demand remains a vital part of the Broward’s Rock scene. Hart presents the store so vividly — with its changing displays of books and art and delicious new additions to the coffee bar — that it feels like I place I have visited many times.
“Dare to Die” is a quintessential Hart mystery, combining the writer’s great faith in the essential goodness of most people with a deep understanding of the evil that can lie just under the surface of even the most idyllic place.
The new book opens with Annie and Max planning a party to celebrate moving into their new home — characteristically, the Darlings go forward with the party even after sudden water damage makes it impossible for them to move in on time.
The event location is switched to the pavillion in town where a beautiful spring evening ends with the murder of a young woman who left Broward’s Rock under a cloud a decade earlier and had only just returned (for purposes unknown).
Annie befriended Iris just a few hours before the party so she is shocked both by the suddenness of the violence and the fact that the crime must have been committed by someone she knows.
“I write mysteries because we live in an unjust world,” Hart notes in an interview on her Web site (www.carolynhart.com).
“Mystery readers and writers long for a world where justice is served, goodness admired, and wrongs righted. We don’t find that world in our everyday lives and that’s why we revere mysteries, both reading and writing them.”
Amen.
Annie is put to the test once again in “Dare to Die” but comes out the other end in a way that is both believable and deeply satisfying.
Hart and her “Death on Demand” books are one of the continuing glories of the mystery genre.

Thanks to the late great Columbia Records president (and producer) Goddard Lieberson (1911-1977), the art of the Broadway musical became less ephemeral in the 1950s when he made the recording of original cast albums one of his top priorities.
Show music was already popular on records when Lieberson came along but he took the format to new heights in beautifully produced recordings of such key shows as “My Fair Lady,” “West Side Story” and “South Pacific.” The producer knew how to simultaneously capture the spirit of a show and also create a stand-alone listening experience — his cast albums were among the biggest selling records of the 1950s and early 1960s.
Last week, Sony Masterworks released a 50th anniversary edition of Lieberson’s cast album for the original production of “Gypsy” starring Ethel Merman.
Although the show has been revived very successfully over the past half century — Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone all won Tonys for their takes on Merman’s role — the original recording remains unsurpassed.
Of course, the quality of the 1959 “Gypsy” recording rests on the songs by composer Jule Styne and lyricist Stephen Sondheim and the performances of Merman, Jack Klugman, Sondra Church (above) and the other cast members. But the artists’ work was boosted by the electric quality of Lieberson’s production of the album which captures much of the excitement of a theatrical performance.
Lieberson never recorded “live” performances in the theater. What he would do was gather the cast and the orchestra in a studio on their first day off after opening night and record the songs in marathon sessions that would often extend to 12 hours or more.
Lieberson knew exactly where to place the microphones and which take best captured the performer and a song. He was a stickler about trimming dialogue and slightly reworking pieces so that a listener wouldn’t need to have the seen the show to appreciate the recording.
As president of Columbia Records, Lieberson also had the power to record the scores of “flops” that he decided were worth saving. Thanks to Lieberson’s taste and clout, we have the great cast albums for Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” and Sondheim’s “Anyone Can Whistle,” both of which would eventually become highly esteemed Broadway scores.
The new edition of “Gypsy” sounds better than ever. Reissue producer Didier Deutsch went back to the original studio recordings and added moments that were cut for the time limits of a two-sided LP. The bonus tracks include Merman singing demos of songs that had their lyrics reworked by the time the show opened on Broadway. There also are two cut songs — “Nice She Ain’t” and “Who Needs Him?” — and a brief Michael Feinstein interview with Jule Styne about the pleasure of having Sondheim do the lyrics for his songs.
The new “Gypsy” CD is a treat from start to finish.

There are so many plays running on Broadway this spring that Chicago director Robert Falls’s awesome interpretation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” appears to be in danger of not making it to the end of its “limited engagement” originally set to run until July.
The house was far from full at the matinee at the St. James Theatre on Saturday, but the audience was clearly hooked by this judiciously edited (in terms of the text) but spectacularly scaled staging of O’Neill’s 1924 drama about the emotional eruption between a New England father and son over the father’s much younger new bride.
When the curtain rises, Walt Spangler’s magnificent but stark set design at first looks more suited to a Beckett revival. There are no elms to be seen in Spangler’s bleak farm landscape which consists mostly of mammoth piles of rocks, but O’Neill never intended “Desire” to be a “realistic” play. The first production was in 1924 when the great writer was still exploring slightly surreal American takes on Greek tragedy, such as “The Hairy Ape” and “The Great God Brown” (I can still remember the wonderfully stylized set that Boris Aronson designed for director Harold Prince’s staging of the latter play in 1972).
It wasn’t until a decade after “Desire” that O’Neill began writing the more realistic plays that would culminate in his posthumously produced masterpiece, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
Spangler’s huge set for “Desire” is perfectly scaled for the over-sized emotions of patriarch Ephraim Cabot (Brian Dennehy), his new wife Abbie (Carla Gugino) and Ephraim’s bitter son Eben (Pablo Schreiber).
(I love the way the giant farmhouse is, at times, lifted high above the stage, hanging over the heads of the Cabots,and threatening to crush a whole family that is fighting for ownership of the property.)
Falls and Dennehy have already established themselves as our foremost interpreters of O’Neill — in Chicago at the Goodman Theatre, they’ve worked together on “The Iceman Cometh,” “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “Hughie,” among other other scripts (the Falls-Dennehy “Hughie” opened the current Long Wharf Theatre season in New Haven last fall).
Ephraim is the oldest O’Neill character Dennehy has taken on — the man is 76 — but the actor plays him as an unstoppable force of nature, making us believe Ephraim’s assertion that he will live to 100 (foiling Eben’s scarcely concealed hope that his hated father will be dying soon).
Schreiber and Gugino (above) really turn up the heat on the passion that develops between Eben and Abbie — the trigger for the tragic finale.
The strong erotic charge between the two unlikely lovers is about more than the nudity that would have shut down the 1924 premiere — the two actors make us believe it when these two enemies find themselves giving in to their desire.

Nothing better illustrates the rise of the “industrial musical” (to borrow a phrase from Patti LuPone) than the three-way Tony nomination for the boys who alternate in the title role of “Billy Elliot, The Musical.” The show received a record-tying 15 Tony nominations on Tuesday (achieving the same number of nominations as the previous musical record-holder “The Producers”).
One of the big problems with giving out prizes for live theater events is that producers have to provide free tickets for voters and voters have to maintain the illusion that they’ve seen all of the eligible plays, musicals and performances. It’s a lot easier to send out DVDs — ala the annual Oscar race — than to distribute hundreds of expensive tickets and expect voters to commit many evenings to attending Broadway shows.
“Billy Elliot, The Musical” is a big hit with the challenge of a title role that has to be filled by a young boy. To avoid working a single minor to death, the producers have cast three young actors in the role — David Alvarez, Trent Kowalik and Kiril Kulish (above) — who play only a few performances each week.
The posters on the heated “All That Chat” blog have been making claims that the “Billys” aren’t all equal — each young actor has partisans — but the Tony nominating committee made the decision to lump the three actors in one slot in the category for best performance by a leading actor in a musical.
While this saves the producers the cost of forking over three sets of tickets for each voter, the three-way nomination seems like an appalling negation of the unique qualities that each individual actor is supposed to bring to a role in a live theatrical event.
The Tony committee’s decision helped the producers of the other Broadway musicals by leaving four category slots open for other performances — Gavin Creel in “Hair,” Brian d’Arcy James in “Shrek, The Musical,” Constantine Maroulis in “Rock of Ages” and J. Robert Spencer for “Next to Normal.”
The decision to treat the three Billys as interchangeable little acting robots makes good business sense, but it’s an unfortunate endorsement of depersonalization in the modern Broadway musical.

The Tony Awards show on June 7 might be the “official” end of the 2008-2009 Broadway season, but the unofficial finale — and an event that is a lot more fun than the Tony show — will take place two weeks later when the theater charity Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS puts on its annual “Broadway Bares” extravaganza.
More than 200 of the best dancers on Broadway — and several guest stars — will join forces at Roseland Ballroom on Sunday June 21 for two very entertaining and very sexy shows at 9:30 p.m. and midnight.
This will be the 19th edition of a show that Jerry Mitchell created when he was still a chorus dancer in “The Will Rogers Follies.” In that Tommy Tune musical, the young performer did a near-naked Indian dance atop a drum eight times a week.
Mitchell decided he would put together a classy strip show for BC/EFA donations with bunch of his fellow dancers at a downtown club — on their one night off — and they were stunned to come away with $8,000 for the charity.
The show has gotten bigger each year — and it boosted Mitchell into a career as one of the top choreographers on Broadway — with incredibly elaborate dance routines that include tastefully racy nudity (i.e. no frontal displays).
Tickets recently went on sale for next month’s show which has the theme “Click It!,” promising lots of Internet-related fun on the Roseland stage (last year’s show, “Wonderland,” followed an Alice character as she went from one show-stopping through-the-looking-glass number after another; the guest stars included Nathan Lane and Andrea Martin).
Tickets for “Broadway Bares” start at a very reasonably priced $55 — and the view is good from almost anywhere in the ballroom — but those who wait until the week of the show often have to fork over a lot more money to get in.
After the cheap tickets are sold, you have to spring for “priority” tickets (priced up to $650) that come with extras like free bar privileges, balcony seating and extremely close proximity to the stage.
“Broadway Bares” has grown from one bar crowd in 1992 to an event that played to more than 5,500 people at the two Roseland shows last June. The one-night event has raised close to $6 million for BC/EFA.
In many seasons, the show at Roseland turns out to be more entertaining than any of the musicals on Broadway.
Fans have urged BC/EFA to extend the run of “Broadway Bares” for more than one night or to create a “best of…” show that could play an extended run, but almost all of the dancers in the show are already committed to working on a Broadway show six days a week.
(For ticket information, go to www.broadwaycares.org or call 212.840.0770 ext. 268)