Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for July, 2011

‘Wishful Drinking’: a woman under the influence

Saturday, July 30, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

HBO Video is releasing a DVD of Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show “Wishful Drinking” that appears to have been recorded on an off night last year.

Fisher toured the country in the vehicle about her existence as a child of Hollywood — she made a stop at Hartford Stage early on — and then set up shop at Studio 54 in New York City for an extended run in 2009.

Although she became very well known in 1977 for her work as Princess Leia in the first “Star Wars” movie, Fisher’s career as an actress collapsed a few years later due to her substance abuse (eventually diagnosed as manic depression/bipolar disorder).

In the early 1980s, I attended a promotional party for the long defunct Hartman Theatre in Stamford where Fisher was brought up from New York City to be a luncheon guest along with a host of other bright young performers like Peter Weller and Karen Allen.

Fisher’s behavior at the affair was erratic (and much gossiped about) — shortly thereafter she departed early from the cast of the Broadway show “Agnes of God.”

The actress got her act together and returned to movies as a wry supporting player in films such as “When Harry Met Sally” and “Hannah and Her Sisters.” She also became a successful novelist and screenwriter (famous for her ghost-writing as well as the script for the 1990 screen adaptation of her book “Postcards from the Edge”).

“Wishful Drinking” takes us through the same biographical territory charted in Fisher’s thinly disguised autobiographical novel and movie.

She grew up the daughter of two hugely popular stars — Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds — whose marriage exploded in one of the biggest scandals of the 1950s. Debbie married badly two more times — losing millions of dollars in the process — and took Carrie with her to Broadway in an early 1970s revival of “Irene” that got the star back on her feet and launched the daughter’s career.

After a showy small role in “Shampoo” — as Warren Beatty’s youngest Beverly Hills bed partner — Fisher landed the “Star Wars” role and was on her (rocky) way.

One of the problems with “Wishful Drinking” is that we already know a lot about the writer-performer’s troubled life and she doesn’t dig very deep into this familiar material. Fisher is distressingly glib regarding anecdotes that were presented with much greater force and humor in “Postcards from the Edge.”

Fisher starts with some fairly recent history — a friend who suddenly died of an overdose next to her in bed — which she presents in a rambling manner that gets the show off to a sloppy start.

“Wishful Thinking” takes a long time to recover from this miscalculated opening. There are some wonderful moments, and witty lines, but the show gets bogged down in labored bits like Fisher’s “Hollywood 101” lecture on her family history.

The star is one of the best writers on the Hollywood scene, but she could have used something like the editing and structuring that theater critic-historian John Lahr brought to his work on Elaine Stritch’s “At Large” (perhaps the best of all the one-woman memoir shows of recent vintage).

Also, it’s a shame HBO didn’t capture Fisher earlier in her tour because she looks and sounds fatigued by more than two years on the road — who wouldn’t? — and often seems bored by her own life story.

Rent it now: Adam Rapp’s debut film, ‘Winter Passing’

Friday, July 29, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Adam Rapp is one of the most talented and prolific young playwrights in New York City. Each year seems to bring us one or two new productions of his tough-minded and funny scripts.

Next month, Rapp will be unveiling a new site specific play in a room at the Gershwin Hotel — “Hotel/Motel” — with only 20 audience members at each performance. He is sharing the bill with another terrific New York writer Derek Ahonen.

Because it received only cursory distribution, few people know about “Winter Passing,” the first — and so far only — film by Rapp (above left, with Zooey Deschanel).

In 2005, he pulled together enough financing to make an auspicious film debut, but “Winter Passing” received virtually no theatrical distribution. Because of my admiration for Rapp’s theater work, I made a point to see the movie during the first week of its New York premiere engagement and was shocked to find myself in a nearly empty theater.

Rapp tells a fascinating story reminiscent of the life of J.D. Salinger after he became a notorious recluse. In the movie, Ed Harris plays a legendary writer who has retreated to a home in New England where he lives with a loyal assistant (Will Ferrell) whose main job is to keep people away from his boss.

Meanwhile, in New York, the writer’s daughter (Zooey Deschanel) is struggling to make ends meet as an aspiring artist. She has been more or less estranged from her dad for many years.

An editor from a major publishing house (the wonderful and too little seen Amy Madigan) tracks the young woman down and offers her a considerable amount of money for the correspondence between the writer and the girl’s dead mother.

The daughter resists at first, but then decides to see if she can find the letters and get her financial house in order.

Rapp tells a tricky family story with great care and insight and shows himself to be a wonderful director of actors. What on paper might appear to be an odd lot of performers thrown together by chance becomes a very tight ensemble (Ferrell gives a strong performance that proves he could cross over from comedy to drama any time he chooses).

“Winter Passing” deserves a second life.

‘Serving Life’: finding redemption instead of hopelessness

Thursday, July 28, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

Most of us have seen so many prison dramas for so many years that we’ve probably all wondered how we would do if someone locked us up and threw away the key.

A maximum security prison may be the closest thing to hell on earth that we can imagine, but a sensational new documentary, “Serving Life,” debuting tonight at 9 p.m. on OWN, introduces us to convicted murderers and sex criminals who manage to find a purpose in their blasted lives.

Director Lisa Cohen (below) spent months in Angola Prison in Lousiana where so many prisoners are nearing the end of life terms that a hospice program has become a major part of the facility.

Angola used to be considered one of the worst prisons in the country, but reformers have made it humane. The hospice is designed both to ease the final days of the terminally ill, and to give other prisoners the chance to do important work while they serve their endless terms.

Cohen takes us into the lives of four prisoners who are approved as hospice workers. We learn about the youthful crimes that got them sentences without a chance of parole — one of the men is serving life for being an accomplice, another for a contract killing he did for his boss — and their hope that they can make themselves useful in the direst of circumstances.

The film is the first entry in the “OWN Documentary Club” and is many cuts above average basic cable non-fiction programming.

Television is jam packed with lurid real-life crime shows, but few programs about the consequences of crime in the lives of criminals.

Oprah Winfrey deserves kudos for sponsoring such a serious and unflinching film that deals with two topics television generally shies away from — the possibility of positive change in the lives of “the worst of the worst” and what we can do to make impending death easier for the terminally ill.

(“Serving Life” will debut tonight at 9 on OWN, with a repeat airing at midnight.)

The ‘get a room!’ school of magazine celebrity profiles

Tuesday, July 26, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

The bizarre recent trend in celebrity journalism of the writer turning an interview into a quasi-date has been popping up in some of the best magazines lately.

GQ has run three embarrasing examples of this style so far this year, including the August cover story on Mila Kunis.

The current New York magazine has another embarrasing example of the bizarre trend — a feature by Jada Yuan on the rising British actor Dominic Cooper.

Instead of finding out much about the acclaimed stage work in “The History Boys” or the string of recent interesting screen roles, we get a detailed account of a dinner shared by Yuan and Cooper at the Los Angeles branch of Soho House.

Yuan actually calls it “a pretend date” at one point:

“We are having fun, but our fantasy date, or his fantasy of our date, isn’t going that well. So we figure we might as well talk about our exes.”

Cooper launches into a vague account of cheating on his non-celebrity girlfriend of more than a decade — Joanna Carolan — with an on-set fling with his “Mamma Mia” co-star Amanda Seyfried (left).

This chatter is interrupted by prolonged discussion of a seafood dish that arrives at the table of the pseudo-daters:

“Ugh, this is really strange. That’s not nice at all. Did you try it?,” Cooper asks Yuan.

“I’ve got a feeling that’s going to make me ill….The snapper’s no good either, is it?”

The piece goes around in circles as the journalist assures the actor that she doesn’t think he was too awful to cheat on his girlfriend so flagrantly: “I tell him maybe a bit, but it also sounded like his relationship with Carolan had been petering out for a while.”

Pretty much lost in the shuffled is the presumed reason for the interview — Cooper’s appearance in the new “Captain America” and a buzzed-about upcoming performance as Uday Hussein and Uday’s body double in the docudrama “The Devil’s Double” (above).

Anyone who interviews show business figures runs the risk of temporarily falling under the spell of a particularly charismatic figure — after spending just a few minutes with Angelina Jolie a decade ago, I was ready to give her my power of attorney — but if you can’t come back with a decent story you should consider another line of work.

Bright young New Yorkers facing the Age of Obama

Monday, July 25, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

There is a long tradition of plays and movies that have captured the lives of bright young people looking for friendship, creative work and romantic excitement as they struggle through their 20s and early 30s.

Paul Mazursky made one of the best forays into this genre with “Next Stop, Greenwich Village” in 1976 and Joan Micklin Silver explored the same turf the following year in “Between the Lines,” a marvelous film too few people have heard of (let alone seen).

I’m in the middle of reading Julie Salamon’s new biography of Wendy Wasserstein which offers a full account of her wonderful early play “Uncommon Women and Others” which tracked a group of Mount Holyoke women through college and on into their first few years in “real life.”

All of these films and plays ran through my mind Saturday when I caught the last of four workshop performances of Dan Fingerman’s smart, funny and moving first play “The Austerity of Hope,” which follows a really interesting group of young people living in Astoria, Queens, in the period around the election and inauguration of Barack Obama in 2008-2009.

Fingerman has crafted a very specific period piece showing us the excitement and then the tempered disillusion of twentysomethings going through the first presidential election that really meant anything to them.

While the nation is contemplating change, the characters in the play look for decent jobs that will support their creative efforts — two of the characters are would-be journalists who can’t find jobs — and who hope to find lasting sexual and romantic partners.

Fingerman’s gay male characters are a refreshingly wide variety of types — traditionalists who want to get married, sexual adventurers who think monogamy is a square heterosexual idea, and married-to-women guys who are realizing they’ve made a terrible mistake. There’s also a closeted former TV child star who doesn’t think he can restart his career with a (public) male partner at his side.

“The Austerity of Hope” is more than a political play. It uses the election to take us into the lives of a circle of friends who love each other but are deeply divided over whether Obama truly represents something new or is just another canny politician using the optimism of young people for his own ends.

At the center of the story is Simon (Max Rhyser) a smart and charismatic gay man who thinks Obama will just be another Bill Clinton when it comes to real improvements in the lives of gay people. Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, Simon reminds his friends, and also put Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell into place.

While his friends become more hopeful, Simon continues his hedonistic ways, having sex with as many attractive young men as he can. Simon’s life changes when he falls in love with a married man he has been fooling around with in his gym. Fingerman doesn’t try to simplify this very messy romance which is one of the reasons why we believe it when Simon starts to change.

Director Dan Dinero did an amazing job of giving a full production feel to a low-budget workshop, but the real strength of the show was in his just-about-perfect casting of an ensemble of terrific actors who clearly identified with Fingerman’s portrait of young people trying to make a big step forward during a very promising and very scary moment in America.

“The Austerity of Hope” closed up shop Saturday at the Barrow Group Theatre on 36th Street, but if we are lucky we will be seeing this writer and director and ensemble turn up somewhere else — it’s too good a play and too promising a production to disappear.

‘Master Class’: Tyne Daly hits it out of the park

Sunday, July 24, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

“How can you have rivals when no one else can do what you do?,” Maria Callas asks in the remarkably durable biographical drama “Master Class” by Terrence McNally.

It’s a play about ego and stardom and a woman trying to make it in a man’s world.

Ironically, despite what Callas says in the play about her unique attributes, McNally’s script has served as a good vehicle for countless actresses since it debuted on Broadway in 1995.

Zoe Caldwell was the first actress to play Callas and she won a Tony for her efforts, but some said her replacement Patti LuPone was even stronger in the part and second replacement Dixie Carter was also highly praised.

Over the years, touring productions and regional theater stagings have featured Faye Dunaway and Kate Mulgrew, among others.

A few days ago, I saw the new Broadway revival with Tyne Daly and she seemed much funnier and much more physically powerful than my memory of the Caldwell performance.

Caldwell’s Callas was a more intellectual approach to the character than Daly’s from-the-gut portrayal of a great star in eclipse (the play is set in the 1970s after Callas retired from opera).

Daly and director Stephen Wadsworth make the play seem more like a real master class than the original production did — the star’s connection to the audience in the theater is stronger.

The rich humor in the piece is apparent right at the start when there is a burst of entrance applause for Daly and then, totally in character as Callas, she insists that there be “no applause” because we are watching a class not a performance (Ha!).

The Tony-winning star of “Gypsy” often disappears into the persona of Callas — thanks to an amazingly complicated make-up and wig design — but she uses her own formidable charisma as a stage star to hold the audience through a sometimes maudlin and crudely gossipy piece of material.

McNally faced a formidable task in trying to tell the life story of Callas in the context of her teaching a trio of young students. The two big flashbacks were a little bumpy in the original production; the current director Stephen Wadsworth makes them much more theatrical and Daly manages to make the vulgarity of Callas’s lover (and some would say destroyer) Ari Onassis much more amusing than it was in the hands of Caldwell.

The star receives strong support from the singer-actors who play the student victims — Sierra Boggess, Clinton Brandhagen and Alexandra Silber — but it is hard to take your eyes off Daly as she gives a double meaning to the play’s title by presenting her own master class in stage acting.

Elin Hilderbrand puts herself in Ruth Madoff’s position

Thursday, July 21, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

“Silver Girl” (Little, Brown) tells an engrossing story about two old friends trying to reconnect at a beach house in Nantucket, but it also allows the author to pull off a remarkable display of empathy.

Elin Hilderbrand deals in fiction, but her character Meredith Delinn is clearly modeled on Ruth Madoff and the writer manages to make us think long and hard about what it must have been like to have a life of privilege — and your whole family — swept away by a scandal.

When the novel starts, Meredith is in precisely the position Ruth Madoff was in when the New York Times published a story with the headline, “The loneliest woman in New York.”

Meredith’s husband has been sentenced to 150 years in jail, her two sons are being investigated as accomplices and Meredith faces possible jail time for making a $15 million transfer right before her husband’s Ponzi scheme was revealed.

The woman has no one to turn to except childhood friend Constance Flute. Meredith and Constance had a falling out — over Meredith’s extravagant lifestyle — but when the besieged woman turns to her old friend for help, she finds an escape from the New York City apartment where she has been held captive by paparazzi and the hatred she feels wherever she goes.

Constance sneaks Meredith out of the apartment and they head off to Nantucket.

The women still have a lot in common — Constance is grieving for the husband two died two years earlier and Meredith is grieving for a whole way of life her husband destroyed.

Both women also have serious problems with their grown children.

Hilderbrand shows us how returning to a beloved beach resort and the ocean can be both a source of comfort and painful nostalgia involving all of the people who are no longer sharing vacation time with you. The ocean is an ever-present reminder of mortality — the sea’s eternity vs. the very brief time we are allowed to contemplate it.

Hilderbrand deftly flashes back to the origins of Melanie and Constance’s friendship and the life paths that moved them apart.

The writer understands the sad horror that can come of a smashed friendship: “…that was how the world worked. It wasn’t the bogeyman in the closet you had to fear; the people you liked and cared about could hurt you much worse.”

“Silver Girl” is both literally and figuratively a beach book, but it’s a beach book with real emotional depth.

What’s Hugh Hefner doing on Lifetime tonight?

Tuesday, July 19, 2011 by:Joe Meyers

I know that Lifetime has given up its slogan “Television for Women” but it still seems odd for the cable network to present something like tonight’s special “Hef’s Runaway Bride.”

The show is a spin-off of the E! series “The Girls Next Door” which has chronicled Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner’s adventures with his live-in Bunnies at the Playboy Mansion in Hollywood.

A few weeks ago, MPI Home Video sent me the “Season Six” DVD and it had enough low camp value for me to speed through three episodes before I knew what hit me.

The fascination of the series lies in the way it avoids the most obvious question of whether or not the girls are required to have sex with their 85-year-old landlord.

Is the Mansion just a glorified model house for the girls the Playboy corporation is grooming?

Or is Hugh Hefner the dirtiest old man in America?

We never find out.

Producer Kevin Burns aims for a whacked out “wholesome” vibe that tries to make living in Playboy’s legendary den of iniquity seem comparable to a freshman girls’ college dorm circa 1962, with Hef as the RA.

Watching those three episodes of “The Girls Next Door” DVD made me curious to check out the advance screener I was sent for the Lifetime show set for tonight at 10 p.m.

I hadn’t been following the adventures of Hef’s fiance Crystal Harris — who took off a few days before the wedding — but I thought Lifetime might serve up a more objective view of the Hef/Bunny situation than the E! series.

“Hef’s Runaway Bride” turns out to be a bizarre hour in which the former “Television for Women” network takes the Playboy publisher’s side as an abandoned bridegroom (albeit one who lives with a housefull of nubile blondes who are young enough to be his great grandchildren).

Crystal Harris gets very little time to explain how and why she came to her senses and left the Mansion, but the more the show tries to put us on Hef’s side the more sensible the runaway Bunny seems.

It’s a very, very weird TV special.

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