Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for June, 2009

The prime of Patricia Clarkson

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Although work for many female movie actors starts to disappear as they head north of 40, Patricia Clarkson has been defying the odds for the past decade, with an unusually varied filmography that includes some of the best parts she has played since her screen debut in “The Untouchables” in 1987.

The Yale Drama School grad and stage veteran is one of those all-purpose performers who seems able to play any role she’s given — whether it’s a comedy or a drama. She also displays a real actor’s disdain of the “image” concerns associated with portraying unsympathetic characters.

Clarkson is a flinty New Orleans native who — at the age of 49 — delivers a devastatingly funny (and sexy) performance as a displaced Southerner in Manhattan in the new Woody Allen comedy, “Whatever Works.”

Clarkson gave a solid performance in last year’s Allen hit “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” but it was a small part, with most of the juiciest scenes going to Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

In “Whatever Works” Clarkson is given a series of very funny scenes in which her character is at first horrified by New York City — and what has happened to her daughter there — but then gets into the groove and blossoms in ways she never could have imagined.

Although the film has received some savagely dismissive reviews, I enjoyed seeing Allen deal with new sorts of characters and situations — in his 42nd movie! — including a conservative Southern woman unlike any major character the writer-director has created so far.

Larry David plays an Allen-like New Yorker who hates most of the changes he has seen in the city over the course of his life. In some of the earlier movies, it was easy to tell that Allen sided with the misanthropic urban sophisticates and that he was probably speaking to us through his characters.

The veteran director shakes things up in “Whatever Works,” presenting David’s Boris Yellnikoff as a brilliant and acerbically funny man, but he puts this character’s limited world view to the test, so that our sympathies keep shifting around.

Clarkson plays a key role in this expansion of Allen’s themes and interests and she is absolutely terrific. Let’s hope that the writer-director crafts an even larger and more challenging role for Clarkson soon.

She knows what she’s writing about

Monday, June 29, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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While I was on vacation last week, I got a big kick out of reading “Queen Takes King” (Simon &Schuster), the new novel by Gigi Levangie Grazer.

The book was lumped rather patronizingly into a “chick lit” review column in the Times a few weeks ago, but it is a hard-edged social satire about the power struggle between a super-wealthy, Trump-like real estate developer and his wife, after he has one affair too many and she decides to end the marriage.

“Queen Takes King” is cynical and a bit mean-spirited, but the tone seems to suit the setting and the major players.

Grazer sees the humor in rich old men who really do believe they might live forever — just because they have so much money and influence — and she sees what hard and dangerous work it is to be a woman in this Manhattan shark tank.

Grazer is the ex-wife of movie producer Brian Grazer — the longtime filmmaking partner of director Ron Howard.

“Queen Takes King” could be the best insider novel about clout and romance in the Big Apple since the late great Jay Presson Allen’s “Just Tell Me What You Want” (the brilliant 1978 book that became an equally entertaining — but virtually unknown — Sidney Lumet film two years later).

The scope of Grazer’s novel is broad enough to include the in-fighting on the board of a major ballet company. The author amusingly squishes American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet into her fictional “New York Ballet Theatre.”

Cynthia Power — the soon-to-be ex-wife of Jackson Power — started her New York life as a ballerina but has risen into a major role on the board of directors thanks as much to her own smarts as her philandering husband’s dough.

Cynthia has to go toe to toe with the company’s artistic director to keep rising and she realizes he is a formidable enemy: “…he was canny. He’d survived several board regimes by making himself just useful enough, and just dangerous enough. He knew where the bodies were buried and he could dig them up: overdoses, affairs, bribes, eating disorders, AIDS, theft, alcoholism, kinky sex, extortion. The behind-the-scenes shenanigans at the NYBT would make the Desperate Housewives blush.”

Grazer knows where the bodies are buried, too, and she makes high comedy out of digging them up.

Donations lower, fun quotient still high at Broadway Bares

Sunday, June 28, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Last Sunday night’s charity burlesque show “Broadway Bares 19″ took a slight hit from this terrible recession we are in — raising less for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS than it did last year — but it was still a spectacular evening in which about 200 of Broadway’s best dancers and performers strutted their stuff in front of two packed houses at Roseland.

The show is always a fun capper to the Broadway season — showing the theater community’s heart along with a few other naughtier bits.

The time and effort put into this amazing benefit — in between the performers’ regular eight-show-a-week Broadway schedule — is always impressive. The dance numbers on June 21 were as intricate and as fun to watch as anything to be seen in a regular show but with the added bonus of some frank eroticism.

The two biggest guest stars were Allison Janney from “9 to 5″ and Sutton Foster from “Shrek the Musical.” You could see the pleasure they took in being part of this unique show.

Janney received a tumultuous welcoming ovation that stopped the show cold — the actress looked stunned by the reaction her “Broadway Bares” debut elicited from the crowd.

Sutton Foster has generally played “nice” girls in shows such as “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (which won her a Tony in 2001) so it took the packed house a few moments to register that the very sexy gal with mile high hair was Broadway’s sweetheart. That must have been a tad disappointing for the actress after Janney’s entrance roar, but Foster made up for lost time with a very funny routine sending up her image (the jokes were written by Hunter Bell, one of the geniuses behind last season’s cult musical, “(title of show),” who also put together the sketchy but riotous “book” for the evening’s Internet theme, “Click It!”).

“Broadway Bares” has managed to increase donations every year — since it started with an $8,000 night at one downtown bar in 1991 — so it was too bad that the two terrific shows last Sunday “only” earned $808,819 (down from last year’s $874,372). But that is still more money than most Broadway productions earn from an eight performance week.

(Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS sells merchandise from the benefit at the group’s Website all year long — www.broadwaycares.org. A new site devoted specifically to the history of this great benefit is up and running at www.broadwaybares.com)

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Friendship during and after college

Friday, June 19, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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When was the last time you read a novel that you wished was 100 pages longer?

That was my reaction when I reached page 320 of J. Courtney Sullivan’s wonderful first novel, “Commencement” (Knopf). I wanted more of the adventures of Celia, Bree, Sally and April — four very different young women who become the closest of friends during their four years together at Smith College.

Sullivan originally modeled the book on “The Group,” Mary McCarthy’s account of a group of Vassar College women during the 1930s. That popular novel was a much drier and more cynical account of life during and after college — you could feel the slight contempt McCarthy had for the giddy students and then her satisfaction with their various forms of comeuppance.

“Commencement” is a more affectionate look at women in and out of college around the turn of the century. Sullivan satirizes some of her character’s preoccupations but you can tell she likes all of them; perhaps the fact that Sullivan chose to write this book only a few years out of Smith herself makes the identification factor much stronger than it was for McCarthy who had been out of college for three decades when she wrote “The Group.”

Sullivan has fun with some of the stereotypes at Smith: “Lara was what Celia called a conveyor belt lesbian, by which she meant one of the dozens of girls on campus whose sexuality was evidenced through their short, spiky hair, bodies either spindly or massive (never anything in between), and a uniform of white tank tops over cargo shorts, as if they had all been mass-produced in a factory somewhere in New Jersey.”

The social comedy aspects of “Commencement” are mixed with harrowing accounts of date rape and April’s post-graduate life as a feminist fighting sex trafficking. Sullivan manages to mix these elements without ever seeming facile or undermining the book’s very wise account of the special nature of friendships in college and the challenges these bonds face out in the “real world.”

A leftover from pre-recession Manhattan

Thursday, June 18, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

shop I didn’t read Sophie Kinsella’s “Confessions of a Shopaholic” until late last year when a movie tie-in paperback edition landed on my desk.

Since the novel was first published in 2000, I figured it would be a hopelessly dated “Sex & the City” spin-off about single career gals wasting their salaries on designer clothes. But, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the book mixed standard chick-lit elements with a pretty scathing view of the way credit cards have fouled up the lives of upwardly mobile women.

Although the book was written and first published during turn-of-the-century boom times, the underlying message seemed scarily relevant in this recessionary era.

I didn’t have a chance to see the movie version of the Kinsella book when it opened and closed very quickly last winter.

I watched a pre-release DVD screener last night — the official release date is Tuesday — and it was easy to see why this film version of a very popular novel would bomb at the box-office. It’s a pretty terrible movie that trims back the wisest parts of the Kinsella book in favor of a standard pre-recession era “S&TC”-rip-off (down to hiring the costume designer of the iconic HBO show — Patricia Fields — whose work on the movie pushes too hard for funky eccentricity).

Director P.J. Hogan has been wandering in the wilderness since his last hit, “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” in 1997. His deft handling of the actors in that Julia Roberts comedy is nowhere in evidence in the shrill “Shopaholic.” The star, Isla Davis, is beautiful and talented, but the combination of her garish costuming and the director pushing her into countless over-sized physical comedy sequences kills any hope of centering the dated story on a charming and likeable heroine.

Hogan also pulls off the bizarre feat of wasting three wonderful character actors — John Lithgow, Joan Cusack and John Goodman — in poorly conceived bit roles.

Leading man Hugh Dancy is spared most of the embarrassment inflicted on the other players, but his editor character becomes so bland and so ignorant of what is really going on with the ‘shopaholic’ that he fades into the background. This is basically the same thing that happened to Dermot Mulroney in “My Best Friend’s Wedding” but there Hogan had Rupert Everett filling in the void with his memorable turn as Julia’s gay friend.

I felt bad for Sophie Kinsella as I squirmed my way through an adaptation that does a real disservice to her work.

Out of the Columbia vaults

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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“Flower Drum Song” was a bit of an oddity in the careers of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

The 1958 musical — about the assimilation of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco — was a critical and box-office hit in its day, but over the years it has fallen off the Broadway radar.

The R&H superhits — “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “The Sound of Music” et al — are always being revived somewhere.

“Flower Drum Song” introduced at least one major pop charts hit — “I Enjoy Being a Girl” — but the show has only been revived on Broadway once (unsuccessfully in 2002) and even hardcore show music fans rarely talk about it.

What’s the problem with “Flower Drum Song”?

Well, the show’s once cutting-edge racial tolerance stance now seems a bit patronizing and the pre-feminist view of women is more un-PC here than in any other R&H show. (The lyrics for “I Enjoy Being a Girl” are enough to cause Gloria Steinem to wake up screaming: “I’m strictly a female female/And my future I hope will be/In the home of a brave and free male/Who’ll enjoy being a guy having a girl… like… me.”)

Like Stephen Sondheim’s 1976 flop, “Pacific Overtures,” the R&H musical focused on an Asian cultural demographic that has never shown much interest in Broadway musicals, so “Flower Drum Song” must have been a challenge to market even in its own day.

One sign of the show’s Anglo view of Chinese culture was the fact that most of the star roles in the original company were filled by Japanese-Americans.

Because the show is not very well known, the new expanded CD version of “Flower Drum Song” from Masterworks Broadway will be a revelation for younger show music fans.

I wrote in this space last month about the genius of producer Goddard Lieberson who turned the original cast album into an art form in the late 1950s and on into the 1960s and ’70s. Lieberson was president of Columbia Records and he could have left the grotty studio work to underlings, but he loved Broadway and loved producing recordings that did justice to musical theater. His legacy to us includes the original cast recordings of “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot” and “Gypsy,” among many others

Six days after “Flower Drum Song” opened on Dec. 1, 1958, Lieberson brought the orchestra and cast into Columbia’s 30th Street Studio for a marathon recording session and the result is this magnificent CD which has been beautifully remastered so that it sounds as fresh and as “theatrical” as ever.

The six bonus tracks illustrate the linkage between Broadway and pop music a half-century ago when a good proportion of hit songs came from show scores (let’s not forget that even The Beatles included “Til There Was You” from “The Music Man” on one of their early albums). On the “Flower Drum Song” CD we get to hear a then very young singer named Florence Henderson’s terrific version of “I Enjoy Being a Girl” and show star Pat Suzuki’s pop recording of “Love, Look Away.”

(The new CD is available exclusively through www.ArkivMusic.com)

Down and out on the Lower East Side

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Inspired by a whole host of counterculture gods — ranging from Alejandro Jodorowsky to Terry Southern — the New York theater troupe, The Amoralists, puts on shows it describes as “an honest expression of the American condition…Rollicking, rebellious, and raw, our work will go home with you…Boom!”

The company’s latest offering, “The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side” by Derek Ahonen (above), certainly lives up to that mission statement. Even though the three-act, two-hour-and-45-minute play could use a trim here and there, it’s a funny and illuminating look at the struggles of contemporary Manhattan young people who are trying to hold on to their revolutionary ideals.

The play is being presented at Performance Space 122 on First Ave., not too far from the play’s setting — a bombed-out apartment above a vegan restauarant called The Pied Pipers on Ludlow St. The four young people who share the place wonder how long they can retain their radical politics and sexually adventurous lifestyle in a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying.

Wyatt (Matthew Pilieci), Billy (James Kautz), Dear (Sarah Lemp) and Dawn (Mandy Nicole Moore) call themselves a “tribe” and maintain an open relationship in which they are all sexually available to each other.

The quartet’s 1960s-style idyll is interrupted and then pulled apart by the two other characters in the play — Billy’s oafish younger brother Evan (Nick Lawson) who arrives for a visit and the rich pseudo-bohemian owner of the building Donovan (Malcolm Madera) who suddenly announces he has sold the place.

There is a Cassavetes feel to the long, meandering documentary-style scenes in which laughter and explosions of rage seem to come out of nowhere but are always true to the characters we are observing. The acting could not be much more vividly realistic.

The fly-on-the-wall feeling we get sitting in the very intimate theater is bolstered by set designer Alfred Schatz’s all-too-realistic dump of an apartment and Ricky Lang’s perfect costumes. More than once an audience member in the front row could be seen recoiling from action that looked like it was about to include him.

The first scenes in the play seem to endorse the quartet’s extremely progressive values but then the playwright puts these people to the test when they are brought up short by the realization that their low-cost, highly hedonistic lives are dependent on the whims of the rich Donovan (played with a scary, darkly comic edge by Madera).

The day after I saw the play, I read a story about the controversy over a downtown Manhattan Calvin Klein billboard (below) that depicts a glossier version of the menage in the play. In a joke worthy of Derek Ahonen, some folks are saying the image should be banned because it is ”inappropriate” for the neighborhood.

(“The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side” is running through June 28. For more information, visit www.ps122.org)

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Coming of age in the Village

Monday, June 15, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

next Paul Mazursky is almost always given short shrift when critics and historians write about the movies of the 1970s.
The actor-turned-writer-turned-director never made a landmark film on the order of “The Godfather” (1972) or “Taxi Driver” (1976) — and he didn’t get embroiled in the juicy sex/drug chaos that added to the legends of Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola — but Mazursky did make a series of highly personal and highly entertaining pictures that are now a valuable time capsule of the era.
After “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” put him on the map in 1969, Mazursky suffered a major misstep with with the expensive flop “Alex in Wonderland” (1970).
“Blume in Love” (1973) turned things around for Mazursky, however, with its dead-on portrait of marriage and feminism at the start of the “Me Decade.”
The writer-director went on to make a critical and audience hit, “Harry & Tonto” (1974), that also demonstrated Mazursky’s skill with actors by netting Art Carney a best actor Oscar for his against-type casting as an aged Upper West Side intellectual who is kicked out of his apartment and then goes on a cross-country road trip.
The success of “Harry & Tonto” launched a very good period for Mazursky because he gained control of his work thanks to the support of 20th Century Fox production chief Alan Ladd Jr. (Ladd gave Mazursky the same sort of artistic freedom that Woody Allen found at United Artists during the 1970s).
The Fox partnership would result in the zeitgeist-defining 1978 hit, “An Unmarried Woman,” but my favorite film from this period is the autobiographical comedy, “Next Stop, Greenwich Village,” which opened to wildly mixed reviews and poor box-office in 1976, but has gone on to become a minor coming-of-age classic.
Mazursky looked back to his own halcyon days as a struggling actor living in the Greenwich Village of 1953. A wonderful 30-year-old stage actor named Lenny Baker (who would become an early casualty of AIDS in 1982) plays the Mazursky stand-in Larry Lapinski. Cabaret singer and actress Ellen Greene (who would go on to star in “Little Shop of Horrors” on stage and on screen) was cast as Larry’s first big love, Sarah, whose conflicted views of sex and romance reflect the 1970s as well as the 1950s.
To play Larry’s lively and funny and desperate circle of friends, the filmmaker gathered together an amazing ensemble that includes Christopher Walken, Lois Smith and Jeff Goldblum. Mazursky also managed to elicit an incredibly poignant (and hilarious) performance from Shelley Winters as Larry’s super-possessive Brooklyn mother during a period when the actress was resorting to self-parody in most of her movie and TV roles.
Like that other funny-but-unsentimental memoir film — Barry Levinson’s “Diner” (1982) — “Next Stop, Greenwich Village” hasn’t “dated” because it was already a period piece when it came out.
Join me Tuesday night at 7 for a free screening of the movie at the Fairfield Theatre Company as part of its “Martini and a Movie” series.

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