Joe's View

Judith Ivey is back at Long Wharf giving another master class in acting in the Willy Russell play “Shirley Valentine.”

The last time the stage star worked with LWT artistic director Gordon Edelstein — two seasons ago — the result was a revelatory production of “The Glass Menagerie” that moved on to New York City and Los Angeles.

Ivey took the rather worn-out role of matriarch Amanda Wingfield and made it look newly minted.

Russell’s 1988 play about a Liverpool housewife who works up the nerve to take a vacation on her own is obviously not in the same class as the Tennessee Williams play, but the piece gives Ivey another chance to display her awesome talent for bonding with a character and then establishing a direct link to the audience.

“Shirley Valentine” is that riskiest of stage ventures — a solo play — but Ivey makes us believe in Russell’s conceit that Shirley is sharing her life and her dreams with an unseen friend — those of us who are sitting out there in the dark and cozy confines of Long Wharf’s small Stage II space.

Shirley becomes an old friend, telling us funny and poignant stories about her husband, her two grown children and the people who live in her Liverpool neighborhood. Although she has become “Shirley Bradshaw” through marriage, the woman longs for a return to the freedom and hope she felt as the young and single Shirley Valentine.

A potentially life-changing moment arrives when a well-off friend offers Shirley the chance to accompany her on a two-week Greek holiday.

Russell makes dramatic and comic hay out of the 52-year-old woman’s dilemma — would the trip be wasted on her now or is there still a chance for her to live out her youthful dreams of adventure?

Shirley realizes she has spent years leading what she calls “an unused life” — falling into routine and unquestioning acceptance of the way life is lived by the people around her.

The story is specific to England in the late 1980s, but Ivey’s vibrant, funny, moving performance is giving it a universal quality at Long Wharf. The actress and Shirley are in residence through Jan. 2 and they are not to be missed.

I’ve always been a big believer in going outside my comfort zone when it comes to entertainment.

It’s fun to be surprised by something new at the movies or at the theater, so I’m usually up to see almost anything my friends push on me.

“The Pee-Wee Herman Show” — running on Broadway through Jan. 2 — is not something that I would have chosen to see on my own. A much younger friend of mine wanted to see it Saturday night, however, and half-price seats were available at the TKTS booth in Times Square, so there we were at the new and beautiful Stephen Sondheim Theatre.

I don’t have anything against the Paul Reubens character of Pee-Wee, but I didn’t watch his Emmy Award-winning 1980s children’s TV show, and never quite got his freaky cult appeal in the snippets I caught over the years.

The show looked like a bizarre send-up of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” but as the years passed, the character’s enduring appeal to the kids who grew up watching him was undeniable.

The audience Saturday night for the limited run stage show was a lot younger than the Broadway average —  most of the crowd appeared to be in their 20s and 30s — and when Reubens-as-Pee-Wee welcomed us to his “playhouse” the response was galvanizing.

I felt like I was  at a great rock show or maybe in the crowd at a really pumped-up comedy club.

The kiddie-show-on-acid look of the set was startling at first, but as Reubens did his hip-nerd vaudeville act — in which repetition and slightly off-color pauses power a lot of the gags — the explosive laughter in the house proved to be infectious.

I’m not sure what “The Pee-Wee Herman Show” is, but it has been a long time since I’ve been in an audience that was having the rip-roaring time of the group at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre Saturday night.

If you have any friends or family who are Pee-Wee fans, take them — they will be completely blissed-out by the show and I think you might have a good time, too. Give it a shot.

Alex Gibney’s latest documentary, “Client 9,” covers some of the same territory as another 2010 non-fiction film “Inside Job” — the strange personal behavior of the super-rich men on Wall Street who led us to the edge of the abyss two years ago — but the Gibney film is much more personal.

Gibney digs into the way that sex has become another expensive consumer good for men who have more money than they know what to do with (i.e. paying somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000 for an hour with a top-of-the-line escort).

The documentary focuses on ex-New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s downfall in the aftermath of the revelation that he was a frequent customer of a very expensive call-girl operation.

The irony here is that Spitzer was using the same escort service that supplied young women to the “masters of the universe” on Wall Street that he went after when he was New York’s attorney general (the platform he used to launch himself into the governor’s mansion).

Spitzer had divided his life up into so many different private and public compartments that he didn’t see the danger in trying to prosecute call girl rings at the same time that he was hiring escorts.

The ex-governor agreed to sit down with Gibney for a new interview and while it isn’t all that revealing, it does give Spitzer the chance to talk about his own self-destructive mix of hubris and horniness.

Spitzer explains why he used escorts and why the practice didn’t really threaten his marriage (from his point of view) — they were purely sexual hours that he never let become anything more than that.

Spitzer wasn’t interested in an affair or romance — he just wanted sex.

Spitzer’s friends and associates express shock about the politician’s “secret life” but it’s only a “secret” to those who don’t really stop and think about the special appeal of the world’s oldest profession to rich and powerful men.

What really killed Spitzer’s career was his hard-driving, self righteous prosecutorial style that made deadly enemies out of Wall Street men with the time and money to do some digging into the governor’s private life. The revelation didn’t fit Spitzer’s public image the way that Monicagate dovetailed with Bill Clinton’s reputation, so the governor had to resign.

“Client 9” is one of the very few films of any type — fictional or non-fictional — to explore today’s world of high-priced escorting in a detailed and fairly non-judgemental manner.

We get to know the lively and funny woman who co-ran the business and who got so far into the notion of providing the best women for the best clients that she was genuinely shocked when the FBI came after her. Who were the “victims” in this “crime”?

It is to the credit of “Client 9” that it allows us to grasp the logic of the madam and Spitzer’s favorite escort (if only during their interviews).

(“Client 9” is still playing theatrically around the country but also is available from cable on-demand services.)

Stamford’s Avon Theatre had me host a terrific event Thursday night, a screening of “Rabbit Hole” followed by an onstage interview with the director John Cameron Mitchell.

The new film is wonderful — with an Oscar worthy performance by Nicole Kidman (below, with her director) — but the real reason I was eager to sign on was to meet Mitchell and use the occasion to re-explore the filmmaker’s previous picture, “Shortbus,” which I happen to believe is one of the most adventurous and entertaining American movies of the past decade.

Mitchell said the 2006 film was a financial success — it made back its $2 million budget — but I would assume most of the profit came from the home video release (many theaters wouldn’t book the picture due to the unusually explicit sexual content).

“Shortbus” is a truly experimental film that was developed in workshops by the musicians and artists and actors that Mitchell brought together to create it.

Frustrated by the way that pornography has more or less co-opted the presentation of explicit sex in movies — with the exception of a handful of mostly dreary modern European films such as “9 Songs” — Mitchell set out to make a movie in which the characters’ sex lives would be integral to the storytelling.

Set in Manhattan bohemia, “Shortbus” is as funny and as wise as it is sexy. Mitchell makes us care about the diverse cast of characters — male, female, straight, gay — as people more than sex objects. It’s the lack of porno physical perfection in the cast that makes the sex scenes so much more interesting than traditional XXX fare.

The intimate moments are just part of a larger tapestry devoted to the struggles of the broke, young, aspiring artists who converge on New York City looking to find creative expression along with romantic and sexual satisfaction.

Some older moviegoer friends of mine were put off by the picture — probably because they had no experience of modern pornographic imagery — but fans of the film were thrilled to see someone take such a big step forward in sex on screen.

In an interview on the Tribeca Film Festival website, Mitchell said one of the reasons he wanted to do “Shortbus” was his realization that “Young people now saw Internet porn before they had sex. So right away, what they’re supposed to do in sex is — I mean, when I was a kid I saw a little bit, friends talking, you had a diversified view, but most of your experience with sex was from having it. You blunder into it. You create it. Now, people see sex first, very young, and I like porn, but if you only learn from that — it has to happen in this order, you have to (have an orgasm) in that way, so how can you enjoy it?”

On the surface, the new British drama “Made in Dagenham” looks like a somewhat quaint period drama about the dawn of modern workplace feminism in 1968 England.

The delightful Sally Hawkins (of the 2008 Mike Leigh movie, “Happy-Go-Lucky”) stars as a woman who works in the upholstery department of the Ford Motor Company factory in Dagenham, England.

Rita O’Grady is content to bring home an income that is significantly smaller than what her husband earns at the same factory. She seems to be in that pre-feminist mindset of brushing off sexual discrimination along with sexual harrassment.

But when a union contract comes up for renegotiation and the women’s jobs are termed “unskilled” Rita and her co-workers are furious because they know it takes real skill to sew leather pieces together so that they fit properly in a new car.

The dispute energizes the women and then when a male union official points out the huge salary discrepancy between male and female workers, Rita turns into a British Norma Rae.

Hawkins makes each stage of Rita’s slow-dawning enlightenment interesting and believable. The actress has a down-to-earth quality — and off-beat attractiveness — slightly reminiscent of the 1960s era British star Rita Tushingham (who often played working class heroines).

Director Nigel Cole and writer William Ivory draw us into the story with a vivid recreation of the fashions and music of 42 years ago.

What starts off looking like a lively nostalgia piece turns into gripping drama as Rita suffers the consequences of standing up for herself and her female co-workers. The men in the factory, who always counted on the support of the female work force in any strike action, become annoyed when they are asked to step up to the plate for wage parity.

“Made in Dagenham” develops a poignant and troubling undertone as we ponder the fact that so many of the factory jobs of the late 1960s depicted in the film have vanished from both England and the United States — devastating once vibrant communities — and that women still earn significantly less than men on both sides of the Atlantic.

(“Made in Dagenham” opens today at the Garden Cinemas in Norwalk and the Bow Tie Criterion in New Haven.)

A clueless protester was shouting “Close it down!” outside the Lyceum Theatre on Sunday before the next-to-last performance of “The Scottsboro Boys.”

The premature closing had more to do with today’s Broadway economics than with the protesters who have claimed the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical’s minstrel show format is “racist.”

Sadly, a challenging and star-less musical seems to be a non-starter in a contemporary Broadway marketplace where more than 50 percent of the tickets are bought by tourists who are generally looking for spectacle and/or actors they’ve heard of from film and television appearances.

For a show to be known by the transient tourist crowd it has to hang around quite a while, generating good word of mouth and a few Tony awards at the end of a season (ala “In the Heights”).

Like another show set to close after a run of only a few months — “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” — the Kander and Ebb musical was a critical and audience hit off-Broadway, but couldn’t come close to filling a much larger Broadway theater eight times a week.

The off-Broadway to Broadway move is a tricky and mysterious process.

Some unlikely shows, such as “Rent” and the sexy puppet musical “Avenue Q,” were hits downtown and uptown, but many other terrific off-Broadway shows (like “Caroline or Change”) have quickly died after being transferred to Broadway.

Something tells me “The Scottsboro Boys” will have a long afterlife in regional theaters around the country and perhaps years from now will be revived on Broadway in a more welcoming time.

The show is packed with the same sort of killer-diller song-and-dance numbers that made earlier Kander & Ebb musicals like “Cabaret” and “Chicago” into long-running smashes. But the show’s portrait of enduring American racism — illustrated in the story of nine black men accused of raping two white women in Depression era Alabama — is not something a lot of people want to see in this era of sweeping black-white tensions under the rug.

The packed house at Sunday’s matinee greeted each number with tumultuous applause and then didn’t want to let the actors leave at the curtain call. It was sad to let go of this dazzling, confrontational musical in which everyone involved was working in peak form.

The home team scores a touchdown on PBS tonight.

Westport documentary filmmaker Perry Miller Adato’s new movie, “Paris The Luminous Years — Toward the Making of the Modern,” is receiving its national premiere at 9 p.m., and it’s a beautiful piece of work.

Adato takes us back to Paris in the years between 1905 and 1930 to show us how a group of struggling painters and poets and musicians — that included Pablo Picasso, Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein — supported and sparked each other to create “modern” art.

The film is designed to answer the question, “Why Paris?”

The basic answer is that recurring theme in bohemian migrations, affordable real estate producing a growing, copacetic community of like-minded people.

The Parisian art boom began in Montmarte (below), then a fringey, rural area, removed from the madding crowd of the city itself. Housing was dirt cheap, as was good studio space, and one thing led to another.

Adato shows how the young Picasso (right) was a key player, moving into Montmarte very early on, and producing work that got fellow artists buzzing.

The poet Apollinaire played a key role, serving as a brilliant critic of sorts, with the ability to see what was happening with the new painters, because he was on the artistic side of the critic-artist equation.

Adato mixes great archival footage of major players like Aaron Copland, Janet Flanner and Jean Cocteau with new interviews with a host of artists and art historians, along with gorgeous new film shot in Paris.

Once the artists began assembling, Adato points out, the Paris cafe culture reinforced what was going on in Montmarte by giving artists roomy and reasonably priced recreational space for their intense conversation and debate. The painters and poets paved the way for the adventurous writers (and publishers) and the fervent collaboration between composers like Igor Stravinsky and the ballet impressario Diaghilev.

Adato keeps the material lucid and entertaining and the result is another strong documentary in the tradition of her movies on Eugene O’Neill, Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary Cassatt.

I usually wait to write my annual Golden Globe screed until the awards ceremony itself, but a few of today’s nominations took us back to the glory days of the early 1980s when Pia Zadora was named “newcomer of the year” — over Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat” — in this annual Hollywood Foreign Press Association travesty.

It is said that the assembled multitudes at today’s crack-of-dawn announcement of the nominations burst into shocked laughter when they were told that Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp were both nominated in the acting division for the close-to-universally-panned “The Tourist.”

“The Tourist” was also nominated for best picture, along with “Burlesque” (!)

Movie awards have become so devalued in recent years — and are so much about getting a bunch of stars to show up at your (televised) event — that I guess no one should be surprised by the foreign press group’s shamelessness.

One can imagine Johnny Depp laughing himself silly when he heard the news — he has to know that his work in “The Tourist” is, let us say, off — but will he have the nerve to show up?

When it comes to the Golden Globe, it has always been tough to figure out who in the equation is more cynical — the overseas “journalists” who give them or the Hollywood folk who receive them.

The group was at one time viewed as so corrupt that the TV show was dropped by a broadcast network — fearing FCC or FTC intervention — and left to basic cable.

TV networks are so desperate for low-cost, celebrity-filled programming these days that all sorts of awards shows have come out of the woodwork.

TV’s need for cheap programming neatly dovetails with the lead-up to the Oscars in Hollywood. Even the classiest performers (i.e. Meryl Streep) feel the need to work the award show circuit to lock up their Academy Award nominations (which bolster careers and the DVD rentals and cable licensing fees of cited films).

The starry turn-out for the Golden Globe awards dinner has become so impressive that NBC has been holding its nose and devoting three hours of prime time to the awards show for the past decade.

It’s a weird event, even by Hollywood standards: one where the hosts are openly mocked by the guests.

Last winter, Sandra Bullock was not alone in making a reference, in her acceptance speech, to the people who “bought” her award for “The Blind Side,” a reference to years past when the producers of movies such as “Scent of a Woman” have spent small fortunes on the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

In 1992 Universal gave the HFPA a free weekend in Paris where they were given access to the press- shy Al Pacino, who went on to win the best actor in a drama prize (setting the stage for his Oscar win a month later).

This year, the HFPA was flown to Las Vegas to see “Burlesque” star Cher’s nightclub show.