Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for December, 2012

‘Grace’: Broadway gets a taste of edgy contemporary drama

Monday, December 31, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Serious plays have a rough go on Broadway these days because of rising costs and an audience that tends to prefer musicals or star-studded revivals.

While I waited on line at the TKTS booth yesterday, most of the people around me were hoping to snag tickets to “Spider-Man” or “Chicago” or “Wicked.” I was able to get prime orchestra seats for “Grace” about an hour before showtime at half-price (although these days, 50 percent off for a Broadway play means spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $70).

So, it’s good news that Craig Wright’s tough-minded drama about murder and religious faith — “Grace” — is managing to finish up its limited Broadway run on Sunday.

Audiences lured in by three well-known actors — Paul Rudd, Ed Asner and Michael Shannon — are getting the sort of intense, challenging American play that usually opens off Broadway (an earlier Wright drama, the horrifying “Recent Tragic Events,” was an audience-divider at Playwrights Horizons several seasons ago).

With a title that doesn’t tell you much, I was expecting a comedy-drama, but this unsettling piece of theater announces its tragic intentions in an opening scene that shows us Steve (Rudd) murdering Sam (Shannon) and Sara (Kate Arrington).

Wright then literally runs things in reverse to probe — in 90 taut minutes — the circumstances behind a multiple murder. The set-up reminded me of the psychological suspense novels of Ruth Rendell — specifically “A Judgement in Stone” in which the British novelist names the victims and the perp in a multiple murder in the very first sentence, and then moves backward in time to the first meeting of her characters.

“Grace” gets much of its power from the terrific quartet of actors who seem completely committed to the play’s examination of the coincidences and seemingly unrelated events (an allergic reaction to insecticide, a determination to show some kindness to a troubled neighbor) that add up to an explosion of rage and violence.

The play might not fit into the current Broadway scene, but I’m glad that the producers and the actors were willing to take a chance on such a strong piece of material.

‘Saul Steinberg’: the artist who was ‘pop’ before Andy Warhol

Sunday, December 30, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Many of us knew Saul Steinberg primarily as the very witty and very clever cartoonist and cover artist for The New Yorker during its heyday.

Steinberg created a genuinely iconic image for the magazine in 1976 with his cover art showing New York City’s overpowering position in the United States. Whether it was seen as supporting or sending up the way New Yorkers view their city, the beautiful “View from Ninth Avenue” inspired countless posters and who-knows-how-many rip-offs (I have a souvenir refrigerator magnet that tries to apply the Steinberg concept to Philadelphia).

The new biography by National Book Award winner Deirdre Bair — “Saul Steinberg” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) — makes it clear that the artist’s work for The New Yorker was just the tip of a mammoth iceberg that included countless gallery and museum shows of his fine art work, as well as many murals and other public pieces that grew out of Steinberg’s early ambition to be an architect.

The way that Steinberg put popular commercial elements into his art anticipated Andy Warhol and the other “pop” artists of the 1960s by a few decades. Mid-century critics didn’t appear to have any hang-ups about the way the artist juggled advertising assignments with his “real” work.

As the years passed, however, a debate arose over Steinberg’s body of work — Was he merely a brilliant cartoonist passing himself off as an artist, or did his genre-spanning work demand a whole new way of defining art?

Bair is famous for her exhaustive but compellingly written biographies of major cultural figures like Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, but she makes a very strong case for Steinberg being worthy of 600 pages (and another hundred pages of notes and indexing).

The book does a masterful job of juggling the man’s work with a very busy social and sexual life. Although Steinberg found a true life partner and ally in wife Hedda Sterne, he was a major league womanizer who simply couldn’t resist the charms of those drawn in by his offbeat charisma. One of the really wonderful elements of the book is how it shows that a person without conventional good looks can still be incredibly attractive to many members of the opposite sex (Steinberg appears to have been the Woody Allen of the art and magazine worlds).

The relationship between Hedda and Saul is the real core of the book — an artistic and personal partnership that survived countless infidelities. Hedda, who was also a very serious artist, organized Saul’s life and managed his artistic career in a manner reminiscent of Lee Krasner’s handling of Jackson Pollock’s affairs.

“Saul Steinberg” takes us back to a time in the cultural life of New York City when artists and writers and actors seemed to be constantly mingling. There is a Zelig aspect to Saul’s friendships and associations with everyone from Jerome Robbins to Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Michelangelo Antonioni. The facts of one man’s life are all there, but Bair puts them together in a way that results in a terrific read.

Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin in ‘Game Change’

Saturday, December 29, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

The one-shot films produced by HBO rarely reach the same high level as the weekly series presented by the cable giant.

Perhaps because a series can generate so much more revenue than two-hour made-for-TV film, shows like “Sex & the City” and “Game of Thrones” and “Girls” have production values that are as good as most Hollywood films.

The HBO movies have been another story, with many of them shot too quickly and too cheaply for their ambitious subject matter. “Game Change,” which was shown on HBO earlier this year and will be released on DVD next week, is a thrilling exception to that rule — a beautifully produced and expertly acted political drama that would make the grade as a theatrical release (if there was still room in multiplexes for this kind of movie).

The smart thinking that went into “Game Change” began with the decision to focus on only one element in the bestselling book about the 2008 presidential election — instead of trying to cram everything in, director Jay Roach and screenwriter Danny Strong zero in on the gamble the Republican Party took in choosing Sarah Palin to run with John McCain.

Although the right wing media called “Game Change” a hatchet job, I was surprised by how much sympathy I felt for Palin as portrayed in the movie by Julianne Moore (who richly deserved the Emmy she won in the fall).

Roach and Strong show us how desperate Republican operatives struggled to come up with a viable female vice-presidential nominee in a lame attempt to court angry Hilary Clinton supporters after Barack Obama took the Democratic presidential nomination. (The movie never gets into the speculation that the Republicans would have picked a black VP candidate if Clinton had beaten Obama in the run-up to the Democratic convention.)

Palin is not presented in villainous terms in the movie, but as someone who suddenly finds herself way out of her depths. The governor of Alaska has a strong enough ego to want to be a player on the national stage, but events there revealed her lack of preparation (and qualifications) to be one heartbeat away from the presidency.

There is a ghoulish black comedy aspect to “Game Change” as we watch the high-powered campaign aides realize what a disaster Palin is. But we squirm as much for the candidate as we do for the aides in one sequence where it becomes clear Palin has no idea of what the Federal Reserve Bank does.

Moore’s Palin gets tougher as the movie proceeds but there is nothing mean about the performance — the character is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Because so much of the film is set in hotel rooms and on airplanes, we don’t become as aware of the budget constraints as has been true of some of the other HBO features. Roach zeroes in on the characters, almost all of whom find themselves in terrible traps, and the actors supporting Moore are superb (especially Sarah Paulson as the woman who has to coach the governor during the early days of the campaign).

If, like me, you don’t subscribe to HBO and you missed the cable airings, you have a real treat in store with the DVD and digital release next week.

A very late report on the Broadway revival of ‘Evita’

Friday, December 28, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

On Christmas night, thanks to my brother, I finally got to see the revival of “Evita” that has been running on Broadway since last spring.

It’s an enjoyable production — with fine performances by Ricky Martin and Michael Cerveris in the male leads — but it felt like a flashback to a difficult time on Broadway when American musical theater artists went into eclipse, and Brits like Andrew Lloyd Webber basically took over the scene for a couple of decades.

The shows by Webber and other British producers and directors were blockbusters that kept theaters open and actors gainfully employed, but they left little room for that hallmark of American musical comedy — fun.

“Evita” opened in London in 1978 and on Broadway a year later, kicking off a series of hits that would include “Cats,” “Les Mis,” “Miss Saigon” and “Phantom of the Opera.”

These pop operas used eccentric source material — to say the least — but none was as oddball as “Evita,” about Eva Peron, the glamorous wife of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron.

The show got by in the late 1970s on the power of its best tunes — especially “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” — the sensational staging by Harold Prince (coming off a decade of landmark Stephen Sondheim shows), and a star-making performance on Broadway by a virtually unknown Patti LuPone (assuming the role played by Elaine Page in London).

The great Prince/LuPone flim flam disguised the fact that the creators of the show — Webber and lyricist Tim Rice — were so afraid of being charged with glamorizing a very questionable woman that they created the only musical that seems to hate its own subject matter.

Instead of focusing on Eva, the musical is “told” by a narrator — an elaborately costumed and made-up Che Guevara in the original production; in the revival just a handsome guy (Ricky Martin) identified as “Che” in the Playbill — who keeps interrupting the story to tell us what a slut and a thief and a self-mythologizer the title character was.

LuPone was so strong in the original New York production that she rolled right over the absurd caution of Webber and Rice, becoming an astounding “monster” in the tradition of Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate.” When in the second act Eva is struck down by cancer, LuPone made audiences weep during her reprise of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.”

The revival features an Argentinian actress Elena Roger, who plays Eva the way Webber and Rice see her, as a hard little number who pulled the wool over the eyes of an entire nation.

Roger looks tiny on the vast stage of the Marquis Theatre and her high-pitched singing is not easy on the ears. As the performer strutted around the giant sets, supposedly scaring and intimidating everyone around her, I kept thinking of that great line George Sanders delivers to Anne Baxter during one of her nastiest moments in “All About Eve” — “You’re too short for that gesture.”

When Roger’s cancer-ravaged Eva delivers her reprise of the show’s big number, you almost expect one of the peasants to shout, “Who the hell is crying?”

Say what you will about Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe, but they never created self-hating musicals.

Rent it now: ‘La Ceremonie’ – Ruth Rendell via Claude Chabrol

Thursday, December 27, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Ceremonie

Luckily for us, there are not too many moments of pure horror in movies — images and scenes that cannot be shaken no matter how hard you try.

The hacks who make most shockers don’t have the intelligence or technical skill to truly unsettle us, so most of us can brush off junk like the “Saw” and “Hostel” pictures. The more graphic the violence in these pictures, the more we tune out. And nine times out of ten, the characters in B-horror movies are dopes who walk right into their fatal traps.

If you are in the mood for a great but really frightening melodrama you’ve got to check out the 1995 Claude Chabrol film, “La Ceremonie.”

In 2008, I hosted a screening of the picture at the Fairfield Library and was pleased to see that Chabrol’s adaptation of the Ruth Rendell novel, “A Judgement in Stone,” had lost none of its power.

Rendell has always been more interested in how crimes happen than in the traditional whodunit. She likes to examine the forces that push seemingly ordinary people to violent eruptions.

“A Judgement in Stone” is one of Rendell’s finest novels, with a much-discussed first sentence that gives away the ending of the story. The author names the perp and the victims flat out and readers who aren’t familiar with Rendell might wonder how she can keep us turning the pages toward a pre-ordained finale.

Instead of diminishing the suspense, Rendell increases it by making us wonder and wait to see how things could possibly end so badly for a group of people with no history of violent crime.

Chabrol made one major change in the Rendell book by omitting that opening declaration. He just tells the gripping story of how horrific things transpire after a bourgeois French family decides to hire a rather aloof but very hard-working young maid.

I think even viewers who have never read the novel feel a sense of dread very early on, when it becomes apparent there is something wrong with the maid. So, the film generates the same sort of suspense as the novel — we wonder what terrible things are going to happen.

Sandrine Bonaire (above left) gives a very understated performance as the maid, allowing us to draw our own conclusions about what is going on under a series of rather blank expressions.

The trigger for the events of the final third of the story arrives in the form of a discontented postal worker who dislikes most of her customers and matches the maid in terms of loneliness and emotional repression. The French call this sort of unhealthy pairing a folie a deux.

Chabrol regular Isabelle Huppert (above right) plays the part of the postal clerk with a subtly subversive humor that allows us to share her character’s resentment of the comfortable country lives of the wealthy Parisians who own lavish weekend getaway estates outside her village.

Chabrol turns the screws by making the rich family (below) sympathetic — despite their being oblivious to the lives of the underclass people all around them. Jacqueline Bisset plays the working wife and mother — she runs an art gallery — who is so grateful for her new maid’s work ethic that she doesn’t pay much attention to the young woman’s simmering anger.

The final 15 minutes of “La Ceremonie” are as creepy and as shocking as any horror movie finale without resorting to graphic displays of violence. It’s a movie most people remember long after the credits roll.

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‘Leo’s Room’: a coming of age story with a difference

Wednesday, December 26, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Hollywood so often takes a one-crisis-per-customer approach to personal dramas that it is refreshing to see the ambitious little movie “Leo’s Room” give its protagonist a more lifelike series of challenges.

On the surface, this 2009 film from Uruguay is yet another coming of age story about a young man struggling to figure out if he is straight or gay.

The movie opens provocatively with a late night cafe argument involving college students over the question of whether men see “love” simply as a way of getting sex.

One barrroom philosopher says that nearly every dating interaction by men is simply part of an endless search for the next orgasm.

Leo (Martin Rodriguez) says there’s got to be more to life than that — what about all of the various forms of love that have no sexual component?

A scene later, we find out why the argument struck a nerve. We watch Leo failing to perform sexually with his girlfriend and not for the first time. He apologizes, she suggests, kindly, that he see a therapist friend of hers.

The next scene shows Leo in an Internet sex chat room, looking for a hook-up. He goes out to meet an anonymous date at a bus stop but when the guy shows up, Leo brushes him off with a lie.

The movie is on one level literally about the rented room Leo spends so much time in, wondering and worrying about the life he might find outside those four walls. Can his reality ever live up to his overheated fantasy?

The student begins therapy, but pretends in his early sessions that he is strictly heterosexual, even as a gay Internet connection becomes more than a one night stand.

Running parallel to Leo’s wrestling with his sexuality is a subplot that keeps moving into the foreground — the student meets a woman he went to grade school with and starts flirting with her at a series of casual meetings.

Leo is drawn to Caro (Cecilia Cosero) as a friend but also wonders if there might be a sexual component to the attraction. She is seriously depressed about something, but her meetings with Leo appear to be getting her out of her shell.

The relationships in “Leo’s Room” get more complex with each new scene and writer-director Enrique Buchichio was fortunate in assembling a strong cast capable of mining the many silent sequences as well as the juicy dialogue exchanges.

At the end of the movie, Buchichio has enough confidence in Martin Rodriguez to include a long close-up shot of Leo happily driving a borrowed car into a not yet defined future (it’s an ending/gift similar to the one Quentin Tarantino gave to Pam Grier when they made “Jackie Brown”).

What at first appears to be just another earnest coming out drama designed for the LGBT festival circuit breaks out of that genre into a label-less realm.

The story we think we are heading toward after the first few scenes is not the one that plays out. The movie ends on a note of what might be described as hopeful ambiguity — Leo has finally gotten out of his room and is willing to risk what might happen next.

“Leo’s Room” is part of the growing library of international films supported by The Global Film Initiative, a non-profit based in San Francisco which acquires and distributes films that it believes “‘promote cross-cultural understanding through cinema.” The GFI has a theatrical release component as well as a DVD distribution platform, but it also awards 10 to 15 grants to filmmakers around the world. For more information on GFI films and programs visit www.globalfilm.org.

Merry Christmas!

Tuesday, December 25, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

‘Looking at Christmas’ gets second life via Channel 13

Monday, December 24, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

You would have to be a major league Grinch not to be charmed by the holiday show produced by The Flea Theater, “Looking at Christmas,” which is being telecast by Channel 13 tonight at 10 p.m.

Directed by the Tribeca theater’s artistic director Jim Simpson, the Steven Banks show is a terrific vehicle for the venue’s resident company of young actors, The Bats.

Every year, Simpson hires a new group of just-graduated actors to work on some of the shows and to help out around the theater. (It’s fun to be served a drink by a nice person in the lobby and then find out he or she is one of the leads in that night’s show.)

The Flea uses stars in its major productions, but some of the best shows I’ve seen at the theater have been played by The Bats.

“Looking at Christmas” is a sharp contemporary New York holiday story, set on the streets of the city, where just-fired would-be novelist John (Michael Micalizzi) runs into an exuberant young waitress/actress from the Midwest — Charmian (Allison Buck) — who has only been in town for a few months but is determined to be “the next Meryl Streep.”

It’s Christmas Eve, and Charmian is out to see all of the department store windows — she talks John into joining her.

As these strangers get to know each other, we follow them to Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s and Barneys, where they see depictions of Christmas stories running the gamut from “A Christmas Carol” to “The Little Match Girl.”

In each case, after John and Charmian leave, the window figures come to life and comment sardonically on their role in holiday mythology. The result is a delightful mix of sentimentality and cynicism that is the perfect representation of Christmas in Manhattan.

Buck and Micalizzi are wonderful company for 90 minutes and the support they get from their fellow Bats is phenomenal with each of the actors playing multiple parts with tremendous zest and humor. The supporting ensemble consists of Brett Aresco, Crystal Arnette, Holly Chou, Jack Corcoran, Christian Adam Jacobs, Raul Sigmund Julia, Betsy Lippett, Turna Mete, Briana Pozner and John Russo, all of whom are a joy to watch.

If you’re looking for a holiday show with a slight edge, you will love “Looking at Christmas.” It has the feel of a new Christmas perennial.

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