Joe's View

This is the first chance I’ve had to report on the mystery festival that was held in Easton and Westport last weekend.
“Murder 203” was co-sponsored by the Easton and Westport libraries and appears to be off to a great start. The dates for the second “Murder 203” have already been announced — April 17 and 18, 2010.
The writers I talked to in Easton on Saturday were very happy with the response and the readers clearly got a big kick out of having a chance to meet and listen to a very potent group of mystery writers, headed up by the charming guest of honor Linda Fairstein (left).
There are already a number of popular mystery events held every year around the country — Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime which move every year, ThrillerFest in Manhattan each July and our own region’s New England Crime Bake held in the fall in Dedham, Mass.
These things tend to take more than year to plan because of the complicated publishing and writing schedules of the novelists. The conferences also seek notable guests of honor as a selling point — Sue Grafton will be doing those honors at the Crime Bake this year and Michael Connelly will be the star attraction at Bouchercon in Indianapolis in October.
So, it was somewhat amazing for the “Murder 203” folks to get the best-selling Fairstein as their linchpin and more than two dozen other top writers to participate in panels and signings in much less than a year’s planning time.
The two panels I moderated on Saturday included Fairstein, S.J. Rozan, Parnell Hall, Reed Farrel Coleman, Jason Pinter, Justin Scott and Rosemary Harris — all personal favorites of this mystery fan.
I’ve attended several Bouchercons and Crime Bakes and I have always been impressed by the graciousness and the warmth of folks who spend their professional lives writing about violent crime and the darkest impulses of humanity.
As writers, Ruth Rendell, Carl Hiaasen, Carolyn Hart, Marcia Muller, Lee Child and Harlan Coben don’t have a lot in common but as people they couldn’t be nicer to visit with at a mystery conference.
Over morning coffee last Saturday I asked one writer — Toni L.P. Kelner from Boston — why crime writers seem so much nicer than the “literary” fiction crowd.
“Maybe we get all of our anger and frustration out in the stories we tell!,” she said with a grin.
(For regular updates on the next “Murder 203” visit the event Web site at www.murder203.com)

The crowd was wildly enthusiastic but, sadly, very small at last night’s terrific show by singer-songwriters Elliott Murphy and Jann Klose at the Fairfield Theatre Company.
I was pulled out of my comfort zone when I was asked to host a Q&A with the two artists in between their sets, but couldn’t resist the offer from Jann and Elliott’s delightful manager-publicist Anne Leighton (who is a reader of this blog).
It was a fun experience for me to question Elliott about his long and fascinating career in music that has included stops along the way as an extra in Federico Fellini’s 1972 extravaganza, “Roma,” and forays into novel writing (he also contributed the liner notes to an early album by the legendary Velvet Underground).
Klose is in the early stages of his career, so it was interesting to hear where the two friends stand on various musical matters (I don’t think Elliott is as big a fan of ABBA as Jann is!)
Murphy has carved out a great life and career as a semi-expatriate musician in Paris with his wife — their son is a student at SUNY Purchase — where Elliott and his French band, The Normandy All-Stars), average 100 shows a year.
Elliott’s band is phenomenal — guitarist Olivier Durand (above, with Elliott), drummer Alan Fatras, and bass player Laurent Pardo.
I was depressed by the small turn-out for such a potent bill but Elliott amiably brushed off my comments before the show, saying he has performed for almost every size and shape of audience in his 40 years in the business. He hasn’t played in the U.S. much in recent years but hopes to re-build his audience here with semi-regular return visits.
Murphy and Klose gave no signs of distress at the size of the house in their high-energy sets that made me very happy to have been asked to attend. Their professionalism — and that of the stellar musicians who played with them — was inspiring.

Elliott Murphy is touring the East Coast and will be stopping at the Fairfield Theatre Company tonight where up-and-coming singer-songwriter Jann Klose will open for him.
Murphy has been in the music business for more than 40 years.
He’s had manys downs and ups — in terms of the business end of music — but has kept writing, performing and recording beautiful songs.
Murphy lives in Paris and is one of those great distinctively American performers — like Dexter Gordon and Josephine Baker — who has, ironically, found a more loyal following in Europe than in his home country.
The latest album, “Notes from the Underground,” gathers 11 gorgeous, cinematic tunes, ranging in subject matter from the Civil War to western movies and the supernatural.
Murphy writes books and magazine articles as well as songs. You can see that diversity of interests and styles in his deeply textured songs. Part of the pleasure in listening to “Underground” is in not knowing where the next song is going to take you.
The performer’s delightful media representative Anne Leighton asked me if I would do a brief Q&A session with Murphy and Klose before tonight’s show. The request was a totally unexpected honor. No songwriter should be pressed to nail down the mysterious creative process of putting words and music together, but it should be very interesting to listen to Murphy and Klose talk about their work and the challenges of maintaining a music career in this wild period of media revolution.
I’ll get off quickly so that the audience can enjoy an evening of what I am sure will be wonderful music.
(Tonight’s show begins at 7:30 p.m. Doors will open at 7. Tickets are $17-$22. For more information call 259-1036 or go online to www.fairfieldtheatre.org.)

There are lots of reasons not to take the Oscars seriously, but here’s a really good one:
Mia Farrow has not only never won an Academy Award, she’s never been nominated!
People often assume she was nominated early on for her amazing performance in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) but the Oscar attention that year went to the zany supporting player Ruth Gordon for her comeback as one of Rosemary’s devil cultist neighbors at the Dakota.
During her rather astounding decade-long collaboration with Woody Allen, Farrow gave one distinguished performance after another — in comedies and dramas written and directed by her companion — but again the Oscar voters looked to co-stars such as Dianne Wiest and Michael Caine who both won Academy Awards in 1986 for “Hannah and Her Sisters” while Farrow’s anchoring role went unrecognized.
Tonight at 7 at the Fairfield Theatre Company I’m hosting a free “Martini and a Movie” showing of one of my favorite Allen-Farrow pictures, the hilarious 1984 show biz comedy, “Broadway Danny Rose.”
Farrow was cast wildly against type in the role of the tough-talking Mafia widow Tina Vitale and scored what might be the biggest coup of her career to date.
There are perils in personal relationships between directors and actors — a filmmaker can be blinded by his passion and indulge in disastrous casting decisions — but there can also be unexpected triumphs when a director sees something in his muse that no one else has (yet).
Allen knew that although Farrow was often type-cast as rather delicate creatures, she had lots of personal experience with ladies like Tina from her Las Vegas days with first husband Frank Sinatra. The writer-director took a chance on Farrow playing a rather crass moll and the result was nothing short of spectacular. The part released new down-and-dirty comic elements in the actress and also gave her a tougher edge in the comedy byplay with co-star Allen.
The Allen-Farrow partnership eventually exploded in one of the biggest public scandals of the early 1990s, but they left behind a large and unique body of collaborative work.
(Doors will open at 7 tonight at the Fairfield Theatre Company, 70 Sanford St. The movie will start at 8. Admission is free.)

I had a great time last night at the Ars Nova performance space in Manhattan hearing a live sneak preview of Daniel Zaitchik’s in-the-works debut album, “Summer of the Soda Fountain Girls.”
Zaitchik was part of the ensemble of the Long Wharf Theater production of the Craig Lucas play “Prayer for My Enemy” in 2007. That was a non-singing job, but when I interviewed the performer he said music came first and acting was second.
We talked about his efforts to make one of my favorite movies of the 1970s — Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) — into a musical play.
The piece had a staged reading at Lincoln Center shortly after “Prayer” closed.
Last week it was announced that “Picnic” will be one of the two new musicals that will be worked on at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford this summer. Other shows that have gotten a big boost from this Connecticut showcase include “Avenue Q,” “(title of show)” and “Nine,” so Zaitchik would appear to be well on his way to a full production of this ambitious musical play.
Zaitchik is a wonderfully quirky songwriter.
One highlight last night was a tune inspired by his inability to finish “Jane Eyre.” Zaitchik apologized for the preponderance of songs about water and not wanting to get out of bed. The composer-performer brought three terrific guest musicians on stage with him — vocalist Emily Walton, cellist Lauren Riley Rigby and Ariana Rosen on the violin.
Zaitchik didn’t race through the songs, but kept his patter to a bare minimum, so the preview lasted less than hour (he joked that at earlier gigs he gabbed so much between tunes that some reviewers called them “cabaret” shows).
Still, the guy’s stage presence was very strong, living up to an amusing program note someone filed on an earlier Ars Nova gig that said the artist is “known for causing men, women and children to swoon with the simple clearing of his throat.” There were more than a few swooners in the house last night.
“Summer of the Soda Fountain Girls” should be a very interesting album.

The Brooklyn filmmaking couple who debuted with the 2006 Ryan Gosling vehicle “Half Nelson” — writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck — are back with a very strong second film, “Sugar,” set in the world of young Domician baseball players with dreams of playing professionally in this country.
Boden and Fleck researched the subject and came up with a movie that blends documentary elements with carefully shaped drama.
Like the Italian neo-realist directors of the 1940s, the filmmaking duo use real people in most of the major roles and yet there is nothing amateurish about the performances.
One can only imagine the care with which Boden and Fleck guided their neophyte “star” Algenis Perez Soto (above) through his remarkable work in the film’s title role. Soto was cast for his actual prowess in baseball but comes through with a very moving and very subtle performance.
Miguel “Sugar” Santos has already been spotted as a potential pitching star when the film opens. He is part of a Dominican Republic farm team operated by a (fictional) U.S. major league baseball team.
Since I am not a baseball fan this particular slice-of-life was brand new to me — I heard this morning on the National Public Radio show “The Takeaway” that a sizeable percentage of the players on American teams are Dominicans who come up through the system we see in the movie.
Sugar gets tapped for a minor league team in Iowa and the picture shows us his rough transition to living and working in a place that might as well be Mars. Few of the people around him speak Spanish. There is a running joke about the Dominican players ordering French toast at a diner every morning because it’s the only breakfast dish they know how to say in English. (“The food is so sweet here!,” the ballplayer complains in a phone call to his girlfriend back in the DR).
Although baseball is a world unto itself in American culture, “Sugar” is as much a classic tale of immigration as it is a sports story. Much of the movie is about how the language barrier and the culture shock work against Sugar’s success in Iowa.
(“Sugar” opens today at the Bethel Cinema, the Garden Cinemas in Norwalk, the Criterion in New Haven and the Bow Tie Plaza 3 in Greenwich.)

Two nights ago I saw a preview of the new Broadway musical version of the 1980 movie “9 to 5” for feature story research purposes (I’m working on a piece for the “Go” section set to run early next month).
It wouldn’t be kosher to “review” a show that won’t officially open until April 30, but I can report that the musical is in great shape and played to a tremendous audience response throughout (and the crowd didn’t appear to contain too many “friends” of the show — there were four tourist ladies from England sitting next to me and they were very vocal in their approval of “9 to 5” right from the start).
I have seen some real bummers in the movie-to-stage-musical genre in my time — “Urban Cowboy” and “Legally Blonde” among them — but “9 to 5” has been very cannily adapted by book writer Patricia Resnick and songwriter Dolly Parton.
The high points of the movie are all in the musical — many in the audience started to laugh in anticipation of their favorite lines from the film — but much of the source material has been improved in the transfer to the stage. The minor movie character of the office snitch Roz has been transformed into a really juicy role for Kathy Fitzgerald whose big fantasy number, “Heart to Hart,” is one of the best moments in the show.
The three leads — Allison Janney, Stephanie J. Block and Megan Hilty — are terrific in the office worker roles played by Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton in the film.
Janney and Block have been given some leeway to reinterpret their characters, but Hilty does a spot-on impression of Parton that is smashingly effective (Hilty gets the biggest laughs in the show and sings the hell out of several of the new tunes Parton wrote for the musical).
Director Joe Mantello and the adapters have retained the late 1970s time period of the movie which is used for some very amusing costume and hair designs.
“9 to 5” is pitched straight to the females in the audience — the male characters are either boobs or dreamy idealizations — and the women around me screamed their approval. I have a hunch the show will be a hit no matter what the reviewers might say on April 30.

The thriller fiction genre is bursting with talent these days — Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Daniel Silva, and Andrew Gross are a few of my book-a-year favorites.
Last night I finished “No Survivors” (Viking) by newcomer Tom Cain which is definitely worthy of comparison with those best-selling fellows I just mentioned.
Cain does a terrific job of reviving many of the elements that made Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels so much fun all those years ago. Cain’s hero Samuel Carver is a British agent with the same sort of larger-than-life foes and sensationally attractive (but possibly duplicitous) bed partners who used to be featured in the 007 novels.
But, Cain attaches his hero to a more realistic vision of the modern world; he also views global politics with a slightly satiric eye that recalls the thrillers of Richard Condon (in particular “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Winter Kills”). The feeling of slightly jaundiced realism in “No Survivors” might stem from the fact that Cain is the pen name of British journalist David Thomas
Cain begins the book with a preface “These are the facts…” and ends the book with a postcript, “This much is also true” that grounds his story in a sensational mix of late 1990s news events — the death of Princess Diana, the theory that the Soviets had planted “suitcase nukes” all over America before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war on the West.
He also throws the FBI’s “Project Megiddo” into the pot — a “long-term investigation into fundamentalist Christian cults who ‘believe the year 2000 will usher in the end of the world and who are willing to perpetrate acts of violence to bring that end about.’”
The less you know about Cain’s deliriously paranoid plot the better. If you enjoy espionage fiction you won’t want to miss “No Survivors.”