Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for March, 2011

‘Musicality Hour’: radio as theatre at Yale Cabaret

Thursday, March 31, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

You only have five more chances to catch Mike Skinner’s new play “The Musicality Radio Hour” which opened last weekend at Yale Cabaret and will be on again tonight through Saturday.

Skinner is a third year sound design major at the Yale School of Drama who harbors a love of old-time radio — plays and variety shows — and this new show is designed to take audiences behind the scenes at a live broadcast.

“We’re going to show you everything. We have a nine person cast and will be doing live foley (sound effects),” Skinner told me when we talked on the phone Tuesday.

“There will be station identification (WRAD) a couple of commercials and variety bits,” he added.

In keeping with the format, the Yale Cabaret will be streaming the five shows live over the Internet so that home audiences will be able to experience the show with all of their fantasies intact.

“The great thing about radio drama is the way your imagination fills everything in,” Skinner said of the power of purely audio storytelling.

But the fun at the Cabaret will be in the contrast between what is being heard by home listeners and what is being seen in the radio studio mock-up where the show is being done.

“The twist (at the Cabaret) is that you are watching voiceover actors who look nothing like what they are playing,” the writer and co-director (with Lee Micklin) explained.

“The Musicality Radio Hour” is the culmination of several different shows Skinner has been doing for the past 10 years.

Skinner said he grew up in Orange loving theater and music, not knowing that one day he could “have a career that combined both” — designing sound for theatrical performances.

Skinner will be finishing his master’s program this spring and heading out into the professional world; the Cabaret show may be your last chance to be able to say you saw him when.

One of the things that is especially exciting about the Yale Cabaret is that the group presents the freshest material to be seen on any stage in this region.

Run by students of the School of Drama, the institution is able to tap into the excitement of the acting, writing, directing (and sound design) students in one of the finest drama schools in the world.

Because the Cabaret presents a new show every third weekend — in a terrific, ever-changing, informal space (above) where you can have a drink and a meal before a show — it can take chances on material that would be a huge risk for a traditional non-profit theater such as Long Wharf or Hartford Stage.

Check it out.

(For performance times and ticket information on “The Musicality Radio Hour” and a link to the live broadcasts tonight through Saturday, go to www.yalecabaret.org)

Hollywood from A(l Pacino) to (Catherine) Z(eta-Jones)

Wednesday, March 30, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

The new HBO documentary “His Way” tells a great modern Hollywood story — the rise of Jerry Weintraub from talent agent to one of the most important producers in the business.

Like the recent HBO special on Fran Lebowitz, “His Way” has been given the glossy production values of a major motion picture, but it’s the content that makes the special so much fun (it debuts Monday night at 9 p.m.)

Weintraub knows how to tell a story and over the course of two hours we hear anecdotes he has been refining and polishing for decades:

–How he changed the whole concert touring business in the 1970s when he put Elvis Presley into huge sports venues that had never showcased music before.

–How he started in the movie business at the top, joining forces with maverick director Robert Altman to make the 1975 landmark film, “Nashville” (below).

–The seat-of-the-pants brainstorm that led to the live 1974 international telecast of a Frank Sinatra concert that was set up like a heavyweight title fight and called “The Main Event.”

The stories keep coming and they add up to an amazing life and career.

Weintraub’s alliances and friendships extend from Elvis and Sinatra back in the old days to his “Ocean’s Eleven” stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon (without a tight bond between the producer and his stars it seems highly unlikely that they would have reassembled for two sequels).

“His Way” is based on Weintraub’s wonderful memoir, “When I Stop Talking You’ll Know I’m Dead,” and writer-director Douglas McGrath has done a masterful job of boiling down a sprawling narrrative that mixes show biz highlights with the producer’s unconventional private life (he is long marrried to singer Jane Morgan but is just friends with her now and lives with a much younger woman).

McGrath keeps the stories coming and makes them visually interesting by having Weintraub tell them from a variety of locations (and they are fleshed out with fantastic archival footage spanning five decades).

Weintraub’s peerless story-telling ability — and the way his Hollywood friends have no doubt savored these tales for years — is wonderfully illustrated when George Clooney re-tells a classic story from the producer’s concert days when he fired an imaginary incompetent employee (“Ferguson”) to stop John Denver from firing him.

Bartlett Sher scores another Manhattan hit with ‘Le Comte Ory’

Monday, March 28, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

What a pleasure it has been watching the hard-working director Barlett Sher become one of the stars of the New York opera and theater worlds over the past few years.

It seems like only yesterday that Sher was an associate director at Hartford Stage who moved on to become company director at the Guthrie Theatre in Minnesota.

Sher returned to Connecticut in 2005 for a brilliant production of the Craig Lucas play “The Singing Forest” and the same duo came back to New Haven in 2007 for the very powerful domestic drama “A Prayer for My Enemy.”

The partnership with Lucas earned Sher his first Tony Award nomination for their beautiful musical with Adam Guettel, “The Light in the Piazza,” and he was nominated two more times for non-musical stagings in New York — “Awake and Sing” in 2006 and “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” in 2009.

Sher scored one of the smash hits of the new century — and a Tony win — for his magnificent revival of “South Pacific” at Lincoln Center in 2008.

In between all of that theater work, Sher had another hit at the Metropolitan Opera in 2006 with his direction of “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.”

Sher returned to the Met last Thursday night for the company’s first-ever staging of Rossini’s “Le Comte Ory” and the benefit premiere crowd went wild for this tale of a count (Juan Diego Florez) who disguises himself as a nun in order to get into the castle of a woman he is mad about but who has sworn off men until her brother returns from war — Countess Adele (Diana Damrau).

The comic piece plays so many games with gender that it feels modern rather than like something that had it its first performance in 1828.

In addition to the sexual shenanigans of the title character, Ory’s page Isolier was written by Rossini as a “pants role” — a male part played by a female singer (in the Met’s case, the stunning Joyce DiDonato).

Sher gives the opera a non-traditional staging that often has the feel of a Broadway production rather than an opera house staple. in the opening scene, we watch a troupe of performers and stage technicians prepare to put on the show in some vaguely defined “long, long ago” time.

The set-up at first seems slightly fussy and distracting, but once Sher brings on his three stars and the story begins, the magic of the music and the sensational singing takes over.

Florez, Damrau and DiDonato each get virtuoso moments that caused the packed house to go wild again and again (although I would give Damrau a slight edge in terms of sheer charisma and gorgeous singing).

Sher brought along his Broadway team of set designer Michael Yeargan and costume designer Catherine Zuber (both of whom won Tonys for their work with the director on “South Pacific”).

“Le Comte Ory” is funny and sexy and runs a rather brisk (for the opera world) two-and-a-half hours; it seems to me that it might be the perfect introduction to opera for a young person or an older one who claims to dislike opera.

(“Le Comte Ory” will be presented Tueesday night at 8 p.m. and there will be six more performances in April. For ticket information, go to www.metoperafamily.org)

Rent it now: The original ‘Heartbreak Kid’

Sunday, March 27, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Successful remakes have a way of getting in the way of the original — “An Affair to Remember” is much more popular than “Love Affair” — but if there’s any justice, the 2007 Farrelly brothers version of “The Heartbreak Kid” is rapidly fading into the obscurity it deserves.

The original 1972 film was an audience divider when it came out and only a modest commercial success — some Jewish moviegoers thought the Elaine May/Neil Simon picture’s view of middle-class American Jews was anti-semitic — but over the years it has become one of my all-time favorite comedies.

I’ve always believed that the line between comedy and tragedy is very thin — in art and life — and few movies demonstrate this fact better than May’s tale of a young New Yorker (Charles Grodin) who rushes into marriage and then falls in love with another woman on his honeymoon in Miami Beach.

“The Heartbreak Kid” was an outgrowth of May’s work in improvisational comedy with Chicago’s Second City troupe which led to her celebrated parternship with Mike Nichols.

As much an actress as a comedienne, May specialized in sketch comedy that made audiences laugh and squirm because the material was so grounded in real life.

Nichols took what he learned and launched a highly successful career as a stage and film director, winning an Oscar for his second picture (“The Graduate”).

May had a tougher road in Hollywood, perhaps because her films were not quite as slick as the work of her ex-partner and right from the start she produced hard-edged comedies that some moviegoers detested.

“The Heartbreak Kid” has moments that are as funny as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie, but it also contains long sequences in which our “hero” behaves so abominably that we recoil from the screen.

The most famous/notorious sequence shows Lenny dropping the bomb on his completely clueless wife (Oscar nominee Jeannie Berlin, above) in a crowded Miami seafood restaurant. He can’t figure out how to tell the young woman that he wants to annul their marriage and run off with Cybill Shepherd and she can’t understand why he is having such a problem making small talk at their first big dinner out.

The tables are turned on Lenny after he begins pursuing the Shepherd character and faces a self-described “brick wall” in the form of her icy WASP dad (Oscar nominee Eddie Albert, who is simply terrific in the role).

“The Heartbreak Kid” has so many different moods and so many long sequences in which May allows us to study multiple characters that the film rewards repeat viewing.

Believe it or not, a new must-see Nazi documentary

Saturday, March 26, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

For many years, The History Channel has been dubbed “The Hitler Channel” by wags for the seemingly endless programming devoted to Adolf Hitler and World War II.

So, when I received a copy of the DVD version of “The Third Reich” (A & E Home Entertainment) in the mail last week I wasn’t sure if I would bother to watch it.

How many times can I go down that road?, I thought to myself.

But a friend who saw the three-hour special when it debuted on The History Channel last year told me it was extraordinary so I decided to see if I could make it through another account of the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler.

“The Third Reich” is indeed a spectacular piece of work, a new take on Hitler and the impact of the Nazi regime on average Germans (who may or may not have been aware of the evil that was being done in their names).

Directors Nicole Rittenmeyer and Seth Skundrick have built the documentary around newly discovered footage, much of it home movies shot by Germans before and during the war.

The home movies are combined with recently unearthed tourist promotional films — for the 1936 Olympics and other supposed glories of the Hitler regime — that now have a ghastly ironic tone for what they were not saying about what was going on under the Nazi regime.

“The Third Reich” also includes new angles on the filming of two of the most famous Hitler-glorifying documentaries — “The Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” both directed by Leni Riefenstahl — showing us the trickery and stage-craft that helped to embellish the Nazi image.

The documentary is especially interesting on the popularity of the Hitler Youth and the insidious way the Nazis tore apart family life and traditional sexual behavior as they brainwashed kids into believing they were part of a “master race” and were duty-bound to reproduce that species as quickly as possible.

We hear tales of parents who were horrified to learn that teen girls and boys were being pushed into sex so that the girls would become pregnant with “perfect Aryan” babies. When one mother went to a Hitler Youth camp to bring her daughter home, she was told to shut up and go home or face being sent to a concentration camp.

The footage is augmented with letters and other personal documents that are read without much dramatic heightening by actors.

Rittenmeyer and Skundrick were clearly aware that these horrifying first person accounts didn’t need to be hyped.

The film is divided into two parts — “The Rise” and “The Fall” — and it deserves great credit for shedding new light on a topic that I thought had been exhausted by The History Channel.

#fridayreads ‘Slugfest’ by Rosemary Harris

Friday, March 25, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

A wonderful blogger in Arlington, Virginia — Bethanne Patrick — publishes a Twitter feed under the moniker @thebookmaven and every Friday she asks her followers to share what they are reading under the hashtag fridayreads.

It’s always fun to see what several thousand diverse readers around the globe are digging into at the start of each weekend, from frothy romance novels to heavy non-fiction.

My current book is “The Death Instinct” by Jed Rubenfeld — which I plan to tell you about when I finish it (so far, so good) — but last week my Friday read was the delightful “Slugfest” (Minotaur Books/St. Martin’s Press), by Rosemary Harris.

Harris works in what is called the “cozy” genre of crime books — books that go light on profanity, sex and gore — but her novels are so sophisticated and are put together so beautifully that she shouldn’t be lumped with all of those books that read like spin-offs of “Murder, She Wrote.”

“Slugfest” is the fourth in a series of novels Harris has written about a Fairfield County woman named Polly Holliday, who runs a gardening business in the Stamford area.

Like the author, Polly has roots in New York City that give her a witty and slightly jaundiced view of the world — the protagonist’s observations of the life going on around her are as entertaining as the amateur crime solving she gets sucked into.

If you are going to stick labels on books, the Harris novels have as much in common with the “chick lit” genre as they do cozies.

The stories mix Polly’s work with her struggles to make time and space for potential new men in her life and she has a tight group of friends that includes the globe-trotting New Yorker Lucy and the neo-counterculture Connecticut diner operator Babe Chinnery (think Elaine Kaufman in the burbs).

The “Slugfest” plot gets rolling because of a favor Polly does for Babe, agreeing to man a booth at the Big Apple Flower Show to sell elaborate scrap iron garden sculptures by a pal of Babe’s.

Lucy is out of town, so Polly crashes at her downtown Manhattan apartment.

Harris has great fun setting the scene at her fictional flower show, which is like a road company version of the venerable Philadelphia Flower Show (one of the few big annual events that New Yorkers will take the time to visit in a city they otherwise tend to snobbishly disdain).

An eccentric young man who doesn’t have the credentials to get into the flower show asks Polly to stow his knapsack at her booth and then goes missing.

The plot is laid out smoothly and compellingly but the real fun in “Slugfest” derives from the eccentic (and sinister) characters Polly meets as she tries to fulfill her pledge to Babe while figuring out why somebody would want to eliminate an apparently harmless young man.

Harris introduces us to a whole host of wonderful new characters, led by the classic New York type J.C. Kaufman, a neighbor in Lucy’s building who is at first suspicious of Polly but soon becomes a key ally in the amateur sleuthing.

“Slugfest” will be officially published on April 12 and deserves a spot near the top of any mystery reader’s warm weather book pile.

Elizabeth Taylor R.I.P.: pop culture revolutionary

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

The first phrase that popped into my head when I heard about the death of Elizabeth Taylor this morning was “erotic vagrancy.”

That’s what the Vatican charged the actress with while she was conducting her flagrant extramarital affair with co-star Richard Burton on the set of “Cleopatra” in 1962.

20th Century Fox feared that worldwide press accounts of Taylor’s shenanigans would hurt their ultra-expensive movie, but for the first time, a sex scandal actually enhanced a star’s aura.

“Liz & Dick” would go on to become the most talked-about movie couple of the 1960s.

Little more than a decade earlier, the announcement that the married Ingrid Bergman was pregnant by a man other than her husband caused that actress to be run out of Hollywood for several years.

The “Cleopatra” scandal helped to launch the sexual revolution of the 1960s. If Liz could go toe to toe with the Vatican — and triumph — it meant that the days when religious leaders could dictate public sexual behavior were over.

A few years later, Taylor and Burton (and director Mike Nichols) changed movies forever with their collaboration on the film version of the Edward Albee play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Many people thought the foul language in Albee’s play would never make it to the screen intact, but they underestimated the clout of Elizabeth Taylor. When she decided to do the movie and picked Mike Nichols to direct it, a seismic shift occurred.

The duo was determined to be true to Albee and they got Jack Warner (then head of Warner Bros.) to agree to their plan.

The studio invested $6 million in the movie — an unprecedented amount for a black-and-white film at that time — and when it was completed in the spring of 1966, a battle erupted between Warner Bros. and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The MPAA had never given its seal of approval to a film with such harsh language (and sexual situations) but Warner was determined to release the movie without cuts.

Of course, the studio had the advantage of fighting for a terrific film — even industry insiders who hated the sex content acknowledged the picture’s high quality — and so Warner was able to cut a deal with the new head of the MPAA Jack Valenti.

The studio agreed to release the movie with a label in all advertising that suggested the film not be seen by anyone under the age of 16 (guess who snuck in to see it at the age of 14?).

The movie went on to be a critical and audience smash and opened the door to much more adult content in the late 1960s.

Valenti used the movie — and Warner’s agreement to label it “adults only” — to create the movie rating system that went into effect in 1968. The new R and X tags enabled Hollywood studios to release films such as “Midnight Cowboy” and “Easy Rider” which would have been impossible to screen before the “Virginia Woolf” battle.

Elizabeth Taylor was a wonderful actress — and a fabulous humanitarian — but we should never lose sight of her role as a key barrier breaker of the 1960s.

Gearing up for Broadway’s sexiest night of the year

Tuesday, March 22, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

There was good news from Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS last week — director-choreographer Josh Rhodes is returning to stage this year’s “Broadway Bares” benefit which is being called “Masterpiece.”

After dancing in a few of the shows over the years, Rhodes took over the whole shindig for the 20th anniversary performance last June and it was an unforgettable night of bawdy/erotic entertainment by some of the best performers on Broadway.

The show has gone upscale in recent years, with more elaborate dance numbers and slicker promotional materials by the event’s house photographer, Andrew Eccles.

The New York photographer spends most of the year shooting celebrities and ad campaigns (he also does terrific dust jacket photos for writers such as Sandra Brown). For “Broadway Bares,” Eccles gets the chance to cut loose and the results have been preserved in a series of popular calendars and a coffee table book.

The New York Times profiled Eccles last week when some of the “Masterpiece” pictures were officially unveiled (below).

After a dip in the proceeds in 2009, the show raised more than $1 million last year for BC/EFA, setting a new record.

Rhodes’ theme was ‘Strip-opoly” which was fleshed out with a series of very amusing (and very sexy) numbers including “Boardwalk” in which the antics of the “Jersey Shore” crew became Broadway show dancing crossed with soft core porn.

Rhodes also convinced Vanessa Williams and Kristin Chenoweth to take part in the spectacular opening scene (above).

“Broadway Bares” was invented by choreographer-director Jerry Mitchell — whose latest show “Catch Me If You Can” is now in previews — who still oversees the event as executive producer.

Mitchell was working as a chorus dancer in “The Will Rogers Follies” when he was hit by the brainstorm of a strip-tease charity for BC/EFA (this happened one night while he was doing a near-naked American Indian dance atop a giant drum).

Mitchell and a few of his friends went to the Chelsea club Splash on their night off — raising $8,000 — and “Broadway Bares” has gotten bigger and better each year.

Everyone involved volunteers their time – with the performers fitting rehearsals in between their work on Broadway shows. Last year more than 200 Broadway dancers took part. For the finale, Mitchell donned the Willa Kim Indian costume he wore all those years ago and stopped the show (for more than sentimental reasons).

I’ve talked to several Broadway fans who have heard of the show but feared it would be “too much” for them. That’s too bad because Mitchell and the director-choreographers who have followed in his footsteps never go full frontal (it’s an R-rated evening, not NC-17).

“Masterpiece” will be presented on Sunday, June 19 at 9:30 p.m. and midnight at Roseland Ballroom.

BC/EFA offers a variety of VIP packages for the show, ranging from $250 to $750, but the cheap seats — $60 general admission — are fine. Make that the “cheap floor space” — there are no seats in the club space (but the show only runs about 70 minutes).

For more information, ticket sales, and a great archive of material from past benefits, visit www.broadwaybares.com

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