Joe's View

Someone could make a great documentary about the struggles of New York stage actors — the endless auditions, the “day” jobs that slowly turn into alternate careers, the indignity of seeing TV and film personalities landing starring roles on Broadway that they cannot sustain.
“Every Little Step” only scratches the surface of this potent subject — as it follows the casting process for the 2006 Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line” — but the movie seems to work for general audiences. It was a hit at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, was picked up for national release by Sony Pictures Classics and debuted last month in New York and Los Angeles (the film opens at the Avon Theatre in Stamford on Friday).
On Sunday, I hosted a private screening of the movie at the Madison Art Cinemas as part of that theater’s incredible Sunday morning film club.
The theater sells subscriptions to a series of new films that are shown on Sunday mornings before they go into general release. The subscribers don’t know what movies they are seeing until just before the 10:30 a.m. screening begins. The screenings sell out almost immediately and there is an eager waiting list of people who would like to subscribe.
These people are real movie buffs and most of them enjoyed “Every Little Step,” despite the way it plays with the truth.
In two cases where we see actors receiving phone calls telling them they landed jobs in “A Chorus Line” what we are really seeing is re-stagings set up specifically for the cameras of co-directors Adam Del Deo and James D. Stern. (In an unintended irony we get to see what good actors the two performers in question are!)
“Every Little Step” has been sold as a documentary with two elements — the history of the original landmark production in 1975 and the audition process for the 2006 revival. But the material on choreographer-director Michael Bennett and the first production is so sketchy that I spent much of my talk after the Madison screening answering questions about the gaps in the film’s account of how the show originally came together.
Del Deo and Stern barely mention lyric writer Ed Kleban or the two book writers (James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante) who shaped the real stories of Broadway chorus line dancers into a coherent script. Kleban, Kirkwood and Dante shared the Pulitzer Prize with Bennett and composer Marvin Hamlisch (the latter gets lots of screen time in the documentary).
One of the saddest elements of “Every Little Step” is observing the stress-filled months of callback auditions the would-be cast members had to endure for a mediocre revival that really didn’t do much for anyone involved with it.
And then after the show was up and running — and not doing so well at the box-office — Bennett’s original premise of an equally-billed ensemble was violated when TV personality Mario Lopez was brought in and given “star” billing in ads designed to sell tickets to tourists.

I missed “Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio” when it appeared in hard cover last year, but I’m very glad I caught up with the book this week in the new Faber and Faber paperback edition.
Connecticut journalist Alec Foege does a masterful job of laying out the whole tragic story of the forces that have practically killed radio as a vibrant medium in this country.
Foege shows us how the Telecommunications Act of 1992 and the rise of one especially aggressive Texas company led to the current barren U.S. radio landscape where “local” broadcasting has virtually disappeared and the music stations have become so bland that you would think there was a conspiracy afoot to drive us all to iPods and other downloadable music.
The bottom line, of course, is the incredible profits that can be made from owning thousands of commercial radio stations manned by skeletal staffs. Other businesses would be happy with a 20 or 25 percent profit margin. Once the 1992 federal act became law and single companies faced virtually no limits on the number of stations they could own, profit margins went up to more than 50 percent.
“Radio’s the only business in which you can sell widgets without having to produce widgets!,” a Clear Channel general manager — with profit margins of 50 to 55 percent — exclaims at one point.
The sad part of the Clear Channel story is that it all began with a bunch of radio pioneers in the San Antonio area who were running wonderful stations geared to their community. But as the company grew bigger and became more interested in profits than in programming it had catastrophic effects on the medium nationally.
Instead of local talk radio, we began to get national “personalities” like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage who were heard in hundred of markets not so much for the quality of their shows but for the cost effectiveness of replacing hundreds of local announcers with syndicated programming.
On the music front, local radio stations that used to gear their playlists to regional taste started carrying the same music as their sister stations all over the country.
Foege writes about the technological innovations that made it possible for disc jockeys in Texas to record and transmit a few local references to be inserted as between-songs banter, sustaining an illusion that the whole broadcast was being done locally. A single dj can service hundreds of markets this way
“This book is an attempt to explain how two undeniable American traditions — capitalism and creativity — battled to coexist within the confines of one uniquely American media conglomerate,” Foege writes in his preface.
Sadly, the fight was rigged with the help of our own federal government, and creativity didn’t stand a chance.

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” doesn’t seem quite as sturdy an American theater classic as “A Streetcar Named Desire” or “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” — the overt statement of the play’s themes by supporting characters becomes more grating with each viewing of the three-hour tragedy.
Miller gets preachy about capitalism and marriage and fathers and sons. Too often, he tells us what we should be thinking about the various members of the Loman family in a blunt manner that Eugene O’Neill avoided in his masterpiece about the Tyrone clan.
That said, the central role of Willy Loman remains a spectacular vehicle for a stage actor who is up to its tremendous physical and emotional demands. When we meet him, Willy is spiraling downward into madness and suicidal depression but he covers the pain with bursts of energy and anger meant to show us that he was a master salesman for more than 30 years.
At the moment, Charles S. Dutton is shaking the rafters at Yale Rep with his awesome portrayal of the Brooklyn salesman in the final days of his life. The mix of rage and fear in the performance is sometimes almost too much to bear because if a man with this much “life force” is defeated by his circumstances how much hope is there for the rest of us?
After training for the stage at the Yale School of Drama and becoming a Broadway star in the plays of August Wilson, Dutton went off to Hollywood and a long and fruitful career in film and television. The actor said he was done with the stage.
A few years ago, however, Dutton promised his Yale mentor Lloyd Richards (who directed him in his Wilson hits) that he would return to the theater. Richards told Dutton he was wasting his best stage years in Hollywood.
The great Yale artistic director and drama school dean died shortly after the conversation with his former pupil, but Dutton has honored his pledge with a performance that demonstrates the star has lost none of the power and range he displayed on Broadway in “The Piano Lesson” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” It is a thrill to see Dutton back on the Rep stage, tearing his way through a role worthy of his talent.
(“Death of a Salesman” is running through May 23 at Yale Rep. For ticket information go to yalerep.org)

The “summer” movie season started with a thud today — “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” — a picture as clunky as its title.
The movie may prove to be a financial success — although Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke reported yesterday that Fox had cut $5 million from its original $80 million opening weekend estimate — but it’s an example of sequel-making at its worst.
No story to speak of, repetitious action scenes, and a complete waste of star (and co-producer) Hugh Jackman’s considerable talent.
It’s one of the terrible ironies of Hollywood that someone as gifted as Jackman would have to return to this diminishing franchise role to maintain his clout in the industry. Here’s a guy who took London and Broadway by storm with his singing and dancing skills, but who is reduced to growling and flexing his muscles in a fourth outing as Wolverine.
The current summer movie preview issue of Enterainment Weekly reports that the sequel is Jackman’s “first shot at producing a major summer tentpole, a film that centers on a character that made him a star and is still the only way he’s proved himself as a box office draw for U.S. audiences.”
In the story, Jackman talks about trying to achieve a new depth of character in Wolverine and the grueling workout regimen that pumped him back up for the role (the latter effort seems largely wasted since the non-stop CGI action scenes reduce him and the character to a doll-like figure in what looks like a live-action cartoon).
“Wolverine’s fun and cool but I wouldn’t be down for my fourth time doing it if there wasn’t something more interesting to it than just slicing and dicing and smoking a cigar and saying a few cool lines,” the star tells Christine Spines.
But whatever that “something more interesting” might be, it never made it to the screen. And I’m not sure what “cool lines” the star is referring to.