Joe's View

Something very special is going on at The Flea Theater in downtown Manhattan between now and Feb. 26.

The wonderful resident company at the Flea — The Bats — is presenting a five-hour piece called “These Seven Sicknesses” that compresses and updates all seven surviving plays of Sophocles.

The spellbinding performance of the plays by a super-energetic and charismatic company of actors would be more than enough to thrill any theatergoer, but The Flea and director Ed Sylvanus Iskandar have added a second level to the evening by having the cast serve food and drinks during the two intermissions.

Iskandar has also asked the actors to interact personally with audience members during breaks — not in a pushy way, but in the friendly manner of a cocktail party where there are a lot of interesting new people you’d like to meet.

The approach is spelled out in notes that accompany the playbill: “Using the intervals necessary within (Sean) Graney’s marathon play, Ed means to level the playing field between artist and audience by ‘staging’ opportunities for artist and audience to interact, first of all, as friends.”

“Over the evening, his intention asks each audience member to be re-cast as guest and allows each participating performer to take on the additional role of host. With dinner, drinks, and dessert to facilitate these transformations, Ed hopes spending an evening will become as much about the party as it is about the play.”

I’m sure there are uptight people out there who might bristle at the notion of any actor breaking the fourth wall and engaging in conversation, but patrons of the Flea are used to seeing the young actors handling tickets and the bar out front, and enjoying plays in the two intimate performance spaces that often involve up close and personal contact with the cast.

What Iskandar has encouraged The Bats to do before the show and between acts is not some hokey audience-involvement scheme, but a wonderful way to appreciate actors as individual personalities and then to watch their transformation on stage into Sophocles’ larger-than-life characters.

The play is still the thing at The Flea — Iskandar and playwright Sean Graney and The Bats make Sophocles as vivid and as exciting (and as frightening) as the work of any contemporary downtown writer — but the party aspect makes it an experience you won’t find at any other Manhattan theater. Don’t miss it.

(For performance and ticket information, go to www.theflea.org)

Dori Berinstein used her status as a stage producer to make the very revealing 2007 documentary “Show Business” which follows one stormy season on Broadway.

The movie only received limited distribution, but the DVD is superior to the theatrical version because of the high quality of the many deleted scenes on the disc.

Berinstein used the classic William Goldman book, “The Season,” as her inspiration.

Back in the days before he was an Oscar-winning screenwriter, Goldman decided to follow one season on Broadway in detail as the framework for a book about the inner workings of the Great White Way.

Like Berinstein, Goldman had an insider’s advantage — he had worked on shows with his playwright brother James Goldman — so he was able to go places and to talk with people unavailable to the average journalist.

Although Goldman’s account of the 1967-1968 season is now, of course, “dated” in terms of finances and trends-of-the-moment, “The Season” remains one of the very best examinations of the inner workings of Broadway (the accounts of the creation of shows such as “Hair” give the book a wonderful time capsule quality, too).

Berinstein chose to follow the 2003-2004 season on Broadway, with a special emphasis on four musicals that debuted then — “Taboo,” “Wicked,” “Avenue Q” and “Caroline, or Change.”

The film takes us to rehearsals, out-of-town try-outs (“Wicked” had a pre-Broadway run in San Francisco), opening night parties, and serves up interviews with some very excited, very anxious theater artists and the critics who would judge them.

Berinstein lucked into the tremendous drama of Rosie O’Donnell personally producing “Taboo” (below) — and losing $10 million of her own money in the process — as well as one of the biggest Tony upsets in modern history when the underdog show “Avenue Q” took the top prize from “Wicked” (above).

The documentary reminds us that “Wicked” opened to mediocre reviews and was not viewed as a blockbuster-in-the-making by theater insiders.

One of the most amusing aspects of the film is the way it exposes the cluelessness of the New York theater press when it comes to predicting hits and flops and forecasting the Tony winners.

Berinstein shows us several restaurant gatherings of writers such as Michael Riedel of The New York Post, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times and Linda Winer of Newsday who predict that “Avenue Q” will fail to make it on Broadway — after transfering from the off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre downtown — and who dismiss “Wicked” as an over-produced bore. Then when Tony season arrives they all predict that “Wicked” will win the best musical prize!

The film packs an amazing amount of material in, from the recording of the original cast album of “Wicked” to videotapes showing us the earliest backers auditions for “Avenue Q” — almost a decade before it opened on Broadway — when it was also being considered as a cable television series.

The extra footage on the DVD gives us a much fuller account of the sad failure of the off-Broadway hit “Caroline or Change” to survive on Broadway, as well as interviews with several stars who didn’t make the theatrical cut from Donna Murphy to John Lithgow (who shares a poignant anecdote about the early closing of “Sweet Smell of Success”).

“One for the Money” opened Friday with two big strikes against it — the distribution company’s decision not to press-screen the film in advance of its premiere and the presence of Katherine Heigl in the starring role.

The absence of critics’ screenings before a movie debuts — particularly something that “opens wide” as “One for the Money” did on more than 2,000 screens — gives a film an aura of damaged goods that usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy among annoyed reviewers.

Katherine Heigl is an actress with talent and considerable camera appeal who has developed one of the most poisonous reputations in show business — deserved or not.

She broke a cardinal rule of her industry by publicly criticizing aspects of two major projects — the series that launched her career, “Grey’s Anatomy,” and the film that made her — for a time — a movie star, “Knocked Up.”

What Heigl said about both vehicles was true, but nevertheless gave her the reputation of being “difficult” and “diva-like” and…you fill in the negative adjectives. She is hated by people within the TV and movie industries and that contempt has filtered down to the press that covers and reviews movies.

You might piss off some very powerful people with a negative review for a highly touted Meryl Streep or George Clooney picture, but no one is going to get hostile feedback in 2012 for blasting Heigl.

The actress has been further damaged by appearing in several ill-advised — to say the least — movie vehicles that have given her critics lots of ammunition and weakened her box office clout.

The reviews that began appearing over the weekend for “One for the Money” were, predictably, bad, but the film got a B- rating from exit polling of moviegoers and came in at number three in the box-office rankings with a gross of over $11 million (as Hollywood pundit Nikki Finke put it, “It came on stronger than the disaster which Hollywood thought it would be”).

What’s sad about all of this bad marketing and bad buzz is that “One for the Money” is faithful to the best-selling 1994 novel by Janet Evanovich about a young Trenton woman — Stephanie Plum — who reluctantly takes a job at her cousin’s bail bond company.

Stephanie surprises her family and friends by becoming good at “skip tracing” (bringing in people who haven’t paid their bail and have failed to show up for their first court date).

Evanovich has gone on to write 15 more novels about Stephanie and the people in her personal life and her dangerous career — the books have been huge bestsellers and inspired many other women writers to break out of the confines of “cozy” mysteries in favor of much sexier, funnier material.

Series mystery fiction about women seems to scare off Hollywood, however.

Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books have been in various stages of “development” for more than 20 years (when I interviewed Demi Moore for “A Few Good Men” in 1992 she spent much of the time talking excitedly about her company producing the first Scarpetta book as a film).

The genre took a huge hit in 1991 with the release of “V.I.Warshawski” based on the great Chicago detective character created by Sara Paretsky in a series of wonderful books. The movie mashed together the plots of several Paretsky stories, featured a woefully miscast Kathleen Turner in the lead, and horrified fans of the novels who watched a would-be franchise go down in flames.

You can debate Heigl as Stephanie — I thought she was convincing enough as a working-class New Jersey woman. But what really impressed me about the movie was the loving care that went into the casting of all the people around Stephanie (who could have stepped right out of the pages of Evanovich’s first novel) and the way that the working class characters and settings were presented without a trace of condescension (which is also true of the book).

We are so used to Hollywood telling us that the only life worth living is a deluxe one that it’s refreshing to see a film that recognizes the value in the lives of the other 99 percent.

The movie Stephanie lives in precisely the sort of apartment Evanovich’s character could really afford, dresses the way that pretty, stylish working class women do, and has made up in street smarts for what she might lack in conventional education.

“One for the Money” sticks close to the plot of the original novel and respects the characters a very funny and very talented writer created, and for that it deserves to be saluted.

Warner Archive has just released a DVD-on-demand version of the 1960 comedy that gave Jane Fonda her first screen role — “Tall Story” — and while it by no means qualifies as a good movie, as a Hollywood and pop culture time capsule it’s fascinating.

Fonda plays June Ryder, a freshman who has enrolled at Custer College for only one reason — to seduce and marry basketball star Ray Blent (Anthony Perkins).

In the opening scene June explains to two of Ray’s professors — played by Ray Walston and Marc Connelly — that she is a home ec major, but wants to enroll in their very challenging science and ethics courses simply to be near Ray.

When the profs ask June why she is in college if she isn’t really interested in studying, she tells them, “I’m in college for the same reason every girl goes to college — if she’s honest — to get married.”

“Tall Story” was directed by Joshua Logan who did some of the prestige films of the 1950s — “Picnic” and “South Pacific” among them.

According to a few film scholars, the director took on this second tier assignment largely as a favor — to launch the screen career of the daughter of his old pal Henry Fonda.

The movie has the look of a rather low-budget affair — shot in black-and-white in generic Southern California settings.

And while the movie was based on a fairly recent Broadway hit by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, “Tall Story” looks and sounds like a campus tale that might have been sitting in a drawer at Warner Bros. since the 1930s. The students sing as they carry conquering hero Ray around campus and while they don’t wear raccoon coats, we do see one group of campus cut-ups exiting a Model T that pulls up at a pep rally.

The star casting is the real fascination of “Tall Story” — watching Fonda in such a retrograde role and seeing Anthony Perkins in the film he made just before Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” changed his image, turning his career upside down (he went from being a teen heartthrob to being typecast as a wacko).

It’s fun to see some good actors in the supporting roles, including Anne Jackson and Murray Hamilton (the latter would be part of the cast of the revolutionary 1967 film “The Graduate”).

“Tall Story” also has some oddball delights, such as seeing Tom Laughlin show off considerable light comedy skills as an oversexed married college student. A decade later, Laughlin would become famous for scowling his way through the “Billy Jack” pictures.

“Tall Story” now is startling and amusing as a demonstration of the vast changes Hollywood and Jane Fonda would go through between 1960 and 1969 — by the end of the decade, Fonda would be an Oscar nominee for “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and one of the most controversial political activists in the country.

Tonight’s “Lifetime Original Movie” — “The Pregnancy Project” airing at 8 p.m. — is a bizarre based-on-fact soap opera about a Washington State high school student who pretended to be pregnant for her senior class project.

Gaby Rodriguez (played by Alexa Vega) said she wanted to explore the treatment and stereoptyping of high school girls who get pregnant.

Rather than do research and interview other students, however, she fooled all but one of her friends and many members of her own family into believing she was actually pregnant.

It’s a story for the age of social networks and reality television where people are so eager to be famous — or notorious — that they often don’t stop to think about the downside of narcissism and self-generated sensationalism.

Gaby’s stunt caused her to lose friends — and who knows what the parents and family of her boyfriend thought of the ruse to which he was a party? — but it also won her a guest shot on “Today,” a Simon & Schuster book deal, and now tonight’s Lifetime dramatization.

Perhaps we are all too quick to judge girls who get pregnant in high school, and what the future might hold for them and their children, but in some scenes Gaby carries on as if she should be congratulated for not thinking about birth control (and/or insisting that her boyfriend wear a condom).

Is it wrong for the people around the high school student to think that her young life has just gotten much more complicated — and difficult — and that she might not be able to juggle a job and college and caring for her kid at the age of 18?

The Lifetime movie would have us believe that a lot of the hostility Gaby faces is just mean girl-style nastiness and, of course, we get to share her obnoxious morally superior stance because — unlike most of the people around her — we are in on the trick she is pulling.

It’s hard to believe that Gaby’s teachers and the school administration would go along with her idea and its potential to cause the girl so much emotional harm. Gaby is, in a sense, on an undercover spy mission in her high school — something that could have disrupted her own studies and charged the atmopshere around her.

“The Pregnancy Project” is slickly produced and well acted by the entire cast but I spent the whole movie wondering what Gaby really expected to learn from her senior project and why the school leadership went along with what she did to her friends, family and acquaintances.

Emmy Rossum has been knocking around in movies for several years — she was the ingenue opposite Gerard Butler in “Phantom of the Opera” and was lost in the ensemble shuffle of “The Day After Tomorrow” — without making a very strong impression one way or the other.

That’s why it is so sad that the Philadelphia-shot indie, “Dare,” fell through the cracks after it debuted at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Rossum gives a terrific performance as a high school senior who is determined to become an actress.

Alexa is the most committed actress in her class, but is drawing on almost no life experience.

When a successful stage actor friend of her teacher comes to Philly, Alexa gets a wake-up call when the actor tears apart her scene work as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Alan Cumming plays the merciless actor who tells the girl to go out and start taking risks in her own life so that her acting won’t be just an academic exercise.

Alexa decides to see what might happen between her and Johnny (Zach Gilford), the surly fellow student who was pressured into playing Stanley by the teacher.

On the sidelines is Alexa’s best friend, Ben (Ashley Springer), who realizes he is attracted to Johnny as well.

Writer David Brind and director Adam Salky explore this situation with humor and taste (and more than a little eroticism).

Rossum anchors the film with one of the most believable coming-of-age performances in recent movies. She seems to grow up right in front of our eyes. Acting younger than your actual age is very tough and projecting believable “innocence” is even tougher, but Rossum does both things expertly.

The Image Entertainment DVD has above-average extras — including Rossum’s rather amazing screen test and the short film by Brind and Salky that inspired “Dare.” It’s fascinating to watch the way the key scene between Johnny and Ben (below) was played in the short — the unknown Philly actors who did the original film are very good, but Gilford and Springer take the scene to a higher level.

It’s hard to think of another arts documentary like “Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance” — one that digs so deeply into the personal and financial challenges of keeping an arts organization alive over several decades, as funding sources dry up and artistic relationships buckle.

A standard “American Masters” approach to the late choreographer/artistic director Robert Joffrey (below) would probably focus almost entirely on the ballet company he created in New York City 50 years ago and the breakthrough work he went on to do with such key choreographers as Twyla Tharp.

The documentary doesn’t stint on the artistic end of the Joffrey Ballet, but it also presents the terrible day-to-day struggle to meet payroll, plan tours and compete with other companies for an ever-dwindling pot of funding.

Director Bob Hercules has made a fascinating movie that you don’t have to be a ballet fan to enjoy — it’s about the remarkable survival of a non-profit arts organization which was declared dead more than once.

Joffrey was determined to build an “American” ballet company in New York City — as opposed to what were then the two big Eurocentric Manhattan troupes, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre.

With his artistic and personal partner Gerald Arpino, Joffrey brought modern dance styles and choreographers into the world of ballet at a time when that was something of a heresy.

As the 1960s became more politically and socially volatile, The Joffrey Ballet was able to reflect those changes in dance pieces set to rock music and with the sort of costuming and lighting that might have caused riots at NYCB or ABT.

In addition to facing moments when his funding simply dried up, Joffrey became a target of much critical vitriol for the chances he took. Younger audiences responded very positively to the new work, but traditionalists hated many of the contemporary pieces.

A major turning point came in 1973 when Joffrey brought in Twyla Tharp — who was then considered part of the downtown avant garde — to choreograph one of her first large-scale pieces “Deuce Coupe” (above), set to the music of The Beach Boys. (In the early performances, graffiti artists were brought in to create the backdrop during the performance on a giant scroll.)

Critics embraced Tharp’s piece and within a few years she was working at ABT with Baryshnikov on a total merging of ballet and modern dance in “Push Comes to Shove.”

“Joffrey: Mavericks of Dance” also explores the devastating impact of the AIDS crisis on the New York dance community, with Joffrey claimed by the disease in 1988.

Arpino picked up the baton, however, and kept the company going despite another financial crisis that ended with the Joffrey Ballet being forced to leave New York City and restart in Chicago.

“Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance” is receiving its U.S. premiere Saturday at theaters all over the country where moviegoers will be able to participate in a question-and-answer session after the film, simulcast live from Lincoln Center.

In Connecticut, the Bijou Theatre in Bridgeport will be hosting this event Saturday at 1:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.thebijoutheatre.com

Walker and Company is publishing a smart little book next month — “The Accidental Feminist” — in which the cultural critic M.G. Lord shows us how Elizabeth Taylor became an unlikely political barrier breaker both on screen in the roles she played and off-screen with her turbulent, unconventional personal life.

Lord makes a good case for Taylor as a pre-Women’s Liberation era movie star who laid some of the groundwork for the explosion of feminism in the 1970s.

Although many female stars of the 1930s and 1940s became feminist icons because of the power of their screen personalities — Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis foremost among them — during their peak years those two women faced the restrictions inherent in being studio contract players who frequently had to bow to the wills of their bosses.

The Hepburn and Davis images also suffer from movies in which their strength was mocked or turned against them — it’s painful to watch Hepburn making breakfast for Spencer Tracy near the end of “Woman of the Year” or seeing Davis as the neutered magazine writer in the ghastly “June Bride.”

Taylor was lucky to escape the clutches of MGM when she was still a very young actress — the studio system collapsed around her — and to emerge in the 1960s as one of the most powerful stars (male or female) in Hollywood.

As Lord points out, the actress suffered from the censors in such key roles as Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Gloria Wandrous in “Butterfield 8.” But Taylor became a major force in turning over the Motion Picture Code with the 1966 landmark “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which included language and sexual situations that were expressly forbidden until the actress and her director (Mike Nichols) used their clout to push the material through.

Some of the fun in Lord’s book comes from her quirky taste and judgement.

The author writes up a storm in favor of “The Sandpiper” (below), the mid-1960s soap opera in which Taylor plays a bohemian artist and Richard Burton is the married Episcopal minister who questions his own faith and morality after an affair with the artist.

For me, the movie has always been an entertaining bit of scenery-chewing camp — something in the same ballpark as “Valley of the Dolls” — but Lord pulls out all stops: “‘The Sandpiper’ with all its flaws, seemed a feminist ‘Citizen Kane.’”

As if that statement isn’t over the top enough, the author goes on to compare the Taylor character with Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.”

In the last third of the book, Lord shows how Taylor moved on to real political activism after her screen popularity dimmed in the 1970s and 1980s — becoming a major force in AIDS activism at a time when other celebrities (and the President of the United States) ignored the “gay plague.”

“From 1985 until her death, Taylor fought consciously — not accidentally — for social justice,” Lord writes.

“I believe her final role in life was influenced by the movies with feminist content that she had starred in as a younger woman. Actors both shape and are shaped by their parts. They bring aspects of themselves to their characters and they take aspects of their characters away.”