by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a quite interesting Shakespeare Uncovered episode about the play The Taming of the
Shrew, which the narration identified as
Shakespeare’s first play (usually the three parts of Henry VI are regarded as Shakespeare’s first plays, but
there’s quite a lot of scholarly disagreement as to just how much of the Henry VI plays are Shakespeare’s work, and at least in the case of Henry
VI, Part 1 I’m convinced only one scene of
the play we have is by the Bard), and Morgan Freeman, narrating, argued that
Shakespeare was a young man from the sticks of Stratford-on-Avon trying to make
his mark in the big theatrical world of London and that The Taming of
the Shrew was his star-making play. Freeman
got the job of narrating this because in 1990 he appeared in a
Shakespeare-in-the-Park presentation in New York City that relocated the play
to the 19th Century American West. He presents this as if no one had
ever thought of doing that before, which simply isn’t true; in 1971 my junior
college, the College of Marin, presented a Taming of the Shrew production set in the Old West and got an invitation
to take the production to a Shakespeare festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, where
Princess Margaret and her husband attended the last performance. What’s more,
the Petruchio of that College of Marin production went on to an illustrious
celebrity career and, if anything, at his height was probably a bigger star
than Morgan Freeman ever has been: Robin Williams. (Now you know why I was so
irritated when the obituaries on Robin Williams made it seem like he’d been
born full-blown on the stage of the Comedy Store in L.A. in 1975 and utterly
ignored his previous career; I saw him at College of Marin in Shrew and at least two other plays, as the romantic lead
Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night — relocated to 18th century California under Spanish rule —
and as Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.)
What’s most fascinating about this program is that
it mentions Shrew as the template
for virtually every screwball comedy that came out of Hollywood in the classic
era — the show begins with trailers for three movies that allegedly evoke it,
all of them starring Katharine Hepburn: The Philadelphia Story,
Adam’s Rib and The African Queen. (Hepburn would have seemed the perfect actress to
have played Shakespeare’s Katherine, and not just because of the coincidence of
her name — and she did indeed play the part, but only on stage in a performance
that, alas, went undocumented on film or video.) Indeed, it was ironic that
KPBS was showing this on the day of the release of the film version of Fifty
Shades of Grey, since that too could well
be read as a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s tale, complete with handcuffs
and whips (through much of the second half of Shrew Petruchio tries to bludgeon Katherine into
submission by locking her up and starving her), and as I’ve noted in these
pages before Ayn Rand’s novels also feature powerful, domineering women laid
low by even more powerful, more domineering men (almost as offensive as her
political economy is Rand’s insistence that women get themselves sexually
liberated by being raped).
It’s also fascinating to hear modern authorities,
not only actors (including Meryl Streep, who played Katherine to Raul Julia’s
Petruchio in a 1978 performance that fortunately does exist on tape and would seem well worth watching)
but directors and scholars do an awful lot of special pleading to claim that Shrew isn’t the blatant piece of rampant sexism it all too
clearly is — complete with that long final speech for Katherine in which she
apologizes for her entire life to that point and proclaims the need for women
to be obedient to their husbands. Ironically, Shakespeare wrote this hymn to
male privilege and power in a country whose absolute ruler was a woman — I
couldn’t help but recall the marvelous bit of dialogue in the film The
White Angel, with Kay Francis delivering
the performance of her career as Florence Nightingale, in which she muses that
the only woman in her time and
place (19th century England) who was allowed to have a will of her
own and act independently was the Queen — but Elizabethan England was at least
as rampantly sexist as Victorian England in terms of a woman who hadn’t inherited a royal title being able to have a life
independent of men and define her own role in society. One hears talking head
after talking head in this program attempt to redefine Shrew for the modern post-feminist age, to say it’s not
“really” about the need for men to subjugate women (and for women to learn to
love being subjugated), that there’s some subtext in the script modern
performers and directors can use to revamp the piece as a proto-feminist tale
instead — and if there are any such subtexts it’s only because Shakespeare was
too good a writer, and too attuned to the complexities of human nature, to make
Petruchio and Katherine as one-dimensional as the play’s basic plot would seem
to call for, so he inserted them unconsciously. It’s also bordering on the preposterous to suggest
that Shakespeare was drawn to powerful women and was therefore a “closet”
feminist — not only were most of Shakespeare’s strong-willed women villainesses
(like Margaret of Anjou and Lady Macbeth), victims or both (like Cleopatra),
but in his productions they weren’t even played by actual women!
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Monday, February 9, 2015
57th Annual Grammy Awards (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences/CBS-TV, February 8, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s 57th annual Grammy Awards show stretched on and on and on until 11:40 p.m. — what kind of “awards” show is it that keeps going for half an hour after all the big marquee awards have been handed out? — and it was at least the second time I’ve seen Stevie Wonder as the guest presenter of the big award, Record of the Year, on stage with Jamie Foxx (a real-life blind singer-songwriter united with a guy who played a blind singer-songwriter in a movie), with the envelope with the winner’s name printed in Braille so Wonder could read it (and Foxx couldn’t, which was the carefully set-up gag). It’s interesting to chart the changes in the music business that have once again made Record of the Year (for a single song) instead of Album of the Year the key marquee Grammy — Prince presented Album of the Year to Beck (an interesting commonality in that they’re both known professionally by their first names only, though at least Beck didn’t spend years trying to convince us that his “real” name was an oddball self-designed hieroglyphic!) with a preamble saying that, “like books and Black lives, albums still matter.” (This was one of my worst-ever cultural predictions; when CD’s came in I thought that their longer playing time and lack of a side turnover would encourage artists to create more album-length works and concept albums; instead the ease with which listeners could pick out a particular song from a CD led to fewer concept albums and more detachable singles — and the rise of downloading and streaming have returned the business of recorded music to what it was in the cylinder and 78 rpm disc era, in which records are sold one or two songs at a time.)
Beck may have won Album of the Year but Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist all went to Sam Smith, the openly Gay British singer-songwriter who’s made it to superstardom with a hit called “Stay With Me” based on a real-life dysfunctional relationship he had — as he joked during his final acceptance speech, “I’d like to thank the man who inspired this song — he broke my heart but he won me four Grammys!” Smith has a weirdly high-pitched voice, not falsetto but the sort of voice that in a previous era of music history would have made him an Irish tenor — pure, clean, with virtually no vibrato and at the upper edge of the tenor range. (By chance I’d heard earlier in the day a record by the greatest Irish tenor of all time, John McCormack, and though Smith isn’t at McCormack’s level as a technician his vocal timbre is strikingly similar and no doubt adds to the mood of romantic yearning at the heart of his hit song.) Ironically, on the program the Grammy producers had him sing the song as a duet with Mary J. Blige, who actually took the lower line when they sang together! The 57th Annual Grammy Awards telecast was a lumbering monster of a show, though it helped that despite the wild opener — AC/DC doing “Highway to Hell” as pretty much by-the-numbers heavy metal — most of the music presented was at the quieter side of today’s pop, which was fine by me; even Kanye West, ordinarily one of the most repulsive presences in music (if you can call his obnoxious by-the-numbers rapping that), actually sang rather than rapped on the two songs he performed, and he revealed himself to be the possessor of a small, tight but not unappealing little soul tenor. Miranda Lambert did a song called “Little Red Wagon” (not the old blues of that title, alas) that, like quite a few of the numbers, was way overproduced (all those neon-bright lights! All those strobes! All that dry ice!) but also showed off her talents even though I like her on ballads better.
Tom Jones got dredged up from Vegas-lounge hell or however he’s making his living these days to duet on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” (a tribute to the married songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who wrote it), and though the Righteous Brothers’ version remains definitive this wasn’t at all bad (and I say that as a distinct non-fan of the Wailin’ Welshman). Madonna came out and did a song called “Living on Love,” prefacing it with a rap calling for a love revolution; she’s been doing this schtick for three decades now (has it really been that long?), presenting swinging her ass as if it were some sort of political statement, but one has to admire the well-preserved state of her body. Then Ed Sheeran — who’s probably gnashing his teeth in frustration that the rapid rise of Sam Smith has cut short the time he could bask in the limelight as the next new hot singer-songwriter — did something called (I’m guessing here) “’Til It’s 17” with various guest artists, including Herbie Hancock (buried deep in the mix but still adding some tasteful jazz piano) and Questlove, and he hung out for a guest appearance with a reunited Electric Light Orchestra (of all people) on a medley of “She Is a Woman” (once again, I’m guessing at the title) and “Mr. Blue Sky” (that one I remember, even though ELO’s history once Roy Wood left after the first album is a combination of commercial success and artistic devastation — in the late 1970’s I remember playing the LP’s of ELO’s predecessor band, The Move, for friends who swore they hated ELO and were astonished that they liked The Move — but then without the creative tension between Wood and ELO’s leader, Jeff Lynne, ELO was essentially to The Move what Wings were to The Beatles). After that we heard a duet called “My Heart Is Open” with Adam Levine and Gwen Stefani — neither of them great voices but both right for this song — and then an odd song called “Take Me to Church” by someone named Mozier into which Annie Lennox came out and added a second vocal mid-song, which segued into a Lennox cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.” That was fascinating, even though Lennox’ thin 1980’s pop voice hardly delivered the song with Hawkins’ fire and venom — Charles, I think, liked it even less than I did and I joked that the real Hawkins was going to come out of his actual coffin and drag her down to hell with him!
After that Pharrell Williams, looking like a bellboy in a 1940’s movie set in Eastern Europe, led a small army of performers in his song “Happy” — I didn’t think anyone could possibly write a more banal song about happiness than Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but somehow Williams managed it — with a dark Metropolis-style introduction that didn’t at all mesh with the main theme and a bizarre insert by, of all people, classical pianist Lang Lang, pounding a piano as if he were some demented version of Liberace cross-bred with Pete Townshend or Jimi Hendrix and he were going to chop it to kindling when he was done. (Fortunately, he didn’t.) After the next commercial break, the show cut to a film clip of President Obama, of all people, giving one of his typically low-keyed announcements, in his case warning of the dangers of domestic violence and promoting a new Web site, which segued into a presentation by real domestic-violence victim Brooke Axtell and a song by Katy Perry called “By the Grace of God” that turned out to be one of the most moving and emotionally intense pieces on the program even without the wrenching context provided by Obama and Axtell. (After Obama’s speech I had rather sourly joked that the next thing they would present would be a performance by Chris Brown.) Afterwards there was a film clip of the band Imagine Dragons doing “Shot All Over” (another guess at the title) that was presented so oddly it wasn’t clear whether it was a commercial, part of the show or something in between. Then came one of the great moments of the program, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga duetting on “Cheek to Cheek” — their album of that title may be one of the unlikeliest collaborations of all time, but Gaga proved that she’s one dance-music artist who can handle the less strait-jacketed, more swinging rhythm and phrasing for standard songs to work, and she and Bennett were clearly actually improvising on the song instead of churning out an exact copy of their record. After that they trotted out Usher and a harpist to pay tribute to Stevie Wonder (and promote the upcoming Grammy special on Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, scheduled for February 16) with one of Wonder’s most banal songs, “If It’s Magic,” partially redeemed only by a surprising guest appearance by Wonder himself, taking out the song on harmonica.
Next up was the country segment, kicked off by Eric Church doing a song called “Give Me Back My Home Town” — it doesn’t help that both Bruce Springsteen and Chrissie Hynde have done considerably more with this song concept than he did, and it seemed weird that while he was singing the screens behind him were showing clips of racially motivated violence ranging from old Ku Klux Klan lynchings to the more recent incidents in Ferguson, Missouri, but it’s still a competent piece of songwriting craftsmanship and it was nice to hear. Things perked up when Brandy Clark came out accompanied by Dwight Yoakam — he sang enough that it approached duet status but it was still pretty much her show with him backing her — on a song called “A Real Good Time to Hold My Hand” — earlier, during the brief clips of the Best Country Record nominee, Charles had noted that the women in the category, Clark and Miranda Lambert, had sounded genuinely country while the guys had come off like Creedence Clearwater Revival (though I think Lynyrd Skynyrd is a closer parallel to the sound of so many modern male country artists — what in the 1970’s we called “Southern rock”) — and then there was an unlikely “country” threesome with Rihanna, Kanye West and, of all people, Paul McCartney, standing in the back and strumming a big guitar but contributing nothing vocally, on a song whose title I guessed as “Make It Here by Monday” — it was odd, but it worked. After that they went into the Latin segment, with Juanés — whom Charles could remember being hailed as a deathless male sex god decades ago (he’s still a good-looking man but the camera got close enough to show us the crags and wrinkles on his face) — on a song called “Juntos,” followed by someone or something called Sia, who wasn’t there in person but contributed a video of her hit song “Chandelier” which figured various women in body stockings designed to make them look nude, cavorting on a mock-Egyptian set that didn’t seem to relate in any way to the song; the piece sounded like O.K. pop and on its own I might enjoy it, but like a lot of the material on last night’s show it was dragged down by the visual portion of the presentation. After that was a low-keyed duet by Beck and Chris Martin of Coldplay on a song called “Your Heart Is a Dream” — the song was one of the loveliest pieces of music heard all night but there was nothing about it that couldn’t have been done in the 1960’s; indeed, it sounded very much like the sort of record the Everly Brothers were making in the late 1960’s to try to modernize their image and sound hip.
Then they gave out a few awards — as I noted above, the Grammy Awards have become a giant music variety show (though quite frankly the music is no longer varied enough — they used to acknowledge the existence of classical and jazz by allowing great artists in those fields at least brief segments to strut their stuff in pure form; now they spackle people like Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock into giant pop productions that throw the commercial supremacy of what’s left of the Top 40 into their faces) with a few awards presentations thrown in like confetti — and with the Record of the Year presented but the show having still a half-hour left to go, first we got National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences president Neil Portnow and a couple of other people doing a sententious presentation urging the audience to lobby for strict intellectual-property legislation to protect “the artists” and make sure musicians will still continue to create great songs by ensuring they will be paid for them. Reality check: it’s the people Neil Portnow is representing — the giant music corporations (that, like all other companies, are merging and thereby becoming less numerous, less competitive and more gargantuan) — who have historically screwed actual creative musicians out of the money due them, and more musicians these days are using the new Internet distribution channels Portnow wants to restrict or shut down to get their music to the people without corporate middlemen intervening and taking the lion’s share of the income. That’s one of the reasons I was so glad the year Arcade Fire won Album of the Year — not only do they make great music, they release their CD’s on a label they own themselves and therefore don’t have to share their income with a mega-corporation.
After that came the show’s finale, Beyoncé doing the Thomas A. Dorsey gospel classic “Precious Lord” segueing into Black singer-songwriter John Legend and positive rapper Common (“positive” in the sense that he’s actually trying to communicate good ideals and values through his music instead of glorifying murder, rape, Queer-bashing, capitalist acquisitiveness and the other foul subject matter of the repulsive “gangsta” style) doing their song “Glory” from the film Selma. Though the host, L. L. Cool J (interesting that they picked a rapper to host a show that included very little rap), didn’t mention that “Precious Lord” was the favorite song of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (in 1968 Mahalia Jackson sang it at King’s funeral and in 1972 Aretha Franklin sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral), if nothing else the juxtaposition added the final point to a show that, however unwittingly, demonstrated how all the African-American-based popular music of the last 120 years or so — ragtime, blues, jazz, swing, R&B, rock, soul, even rap — stems from the Black church and the spiritual and gospel traditions. Song after song last night — including Sam Smith’s big hit (he got sued for plagiarism by Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, who clamed “Stay With Me” included material from their song “I Won’t Back Down,” but if his lawyers had been savvier they probably could have found a public-domain spiritual or gospel song that contained that lick and thereby claimed a common ancestor), and Mosier’s song oddly perched between sin and salvation — showed its roots in the Black church, particularly with those great, exalting chords that have powered so much of this music. I can’t help but savor the irony that opponents of rock from the 1950’s to the 1980’s (and opponents of ragtime, jazz and swing before them!) regularly denounced it as “the devil’s music” — which couldn’t have been farther from the truth; however bizarre the connection sometimes, and however perverted its values have become (particularly in the heavy-metal bands’ tributes to Satan and the evil messages of gangsta rap), ultimately this is not the Devil’s music but the Lord’s.
Last night’s 57th annual Grammy Awards show stretched on and on and on until 11:40 p.m. — what kind of “awards” show is it that keeps going for half an hour after all the big marquee awards have been handed out? — and it was at least the second time I’ve seen Stevie Wonder as the guest presenter of the big award, Record of the Year, on stage with Jamie Foxx (a real-life blind singer-songwriter united with a guy who played a blind singer-songwriter in a movie), with the envelope with the winner’s name printed in Braille so Wonder could read it (and Foxx couldn’t, which was the carefully set-up gag). It’s interesting to chart the changes in the music business that have once again made Record of the Year (for a single song) instead of Album of the Year the key marquee Grammy — Prince presented Album of the Year to Beck (an interesting commonality in that they’re both known professionally by their first names only, though at least Beck didn’t spend years trying to convince us that his “real” name was an oddball self-designed hieroglyphic!) with a preamble saying that, “like books and Black lives, albums still matter.” (This was one of my worst-ever cultural predictions; when CD’s came in I thought that their longer playing time and lack of a side turnover would encourage artists to create more album-length works and concept albums; instead the ease with which listeners could pick out a particular song from a CD led to fewer concept albums and more detachable singles — and the rise of downloading and streaming have returned the business of recorded music to what it was in the cylinder and 78 rpm disc era, in which records are sold one or two songs at a time.)
Beck may have won Album of the Year but Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist all went to Sam Smith, the openly Gay British singer-songwriter who’s made it to superstardom with a hit called “Stay With Me” based on a real-life dysfunctional relationship he had — as he joked during his final acceptance speech, “I’d like to thank the man who inspired this song — he broke my heart but he won me four Grammys!” Smith has a weirdly high-pitched voice, not falsetto but the sort of voice that in a previous era of music history would have made him an Irish tenor — pure, clean, with virtually no vibrato and at the upper edge of the tenor range. (By chance I’d heard earlier in the day a record by the greatest Irish tenor of all time, John McCormack, and though Smith isn’t at McCormack’s level as a technician his vocal timbre is strikingly similar and no doubt adds to the mood of romantic yearning at the heart of his hit song.) Ironically, on the program the Grammy producers had him sing the song as a duet with Mary J. Blige, who actually took the lower line when they sang together! The 57th Annual Grammy Awards telecast was a lumbering monster of a show, though it helped that despite the wild opener — AC/DC doing “Highway to Hell” as pretty much by-the-numbers heavy metal — most of the music presented was at the quieter side of today’s pop, which was fine by me; even Kanye West, ordinarily one of the most repulsive presences in music (if you can call his obnoxious by-the-numbers rapping that), actually sang rather than rapped on the two songs he performed, and he revealed himself to be the possessor of a small, tight but not unappealing little soul tenor. Miranda Lambert did a song called “Little Red Wagon” (not the old blues of that title, alas) that, like quite a few of the numbers, was way overproduced (all those neon-bright lights! All those strobes! All that dry ice!) but also showed off her talents even though I like her on ballads better.
Tom Jones got dredged up from Vegas-lounge hell or however he’s making his living these days to duet on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” (a tribute to the married songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who wrote it), and though the Righteous Brothers’ version remains definitive this wasn’t at all bad (and I say that as a distinct non-fan of the Wailin’ Welshman). Madonna came out and did a song called “Living on Love,” prefacing it with a rap calling for a love revolution; she’s been doing this schtick for three decades now (has it really been that long?), presenting swinging her ass as if it were some sort of political statement, but one has to admire the well-preserved state of her body. Then Ed Sheeran — who’s probably gnashing his teeth in frustration that the rapid rise of Sam Smith has cut short the time he could bask in the limelight as the next new hot singer-songwriter — did something called (I’m guessing here) “’Til It’s 17” with various guest artists, including Herbie Hancock (buried deep in the mix but still adding some tasteful jazz piano) and Questlove, and he hung out for a guest appearance with a reunited Electric Light Orchestra (of all people) on a medley of “She Is a Woman” (once again, I’m guessing at the title) and “Mr. Blue Sky” (that one I remember, even though ELO’s history once Roy Wood left after the first album is a combination of commercial success and artistic devastation — in the late 1970’s I remember playing the LP’s of ELO’s predecessor band, The Move, for friends who swore they hated ELO and were astonished that they liked The Move — but then without the creative tension between Wood and ELO’s leader, Jeff Lynne, ELO was essentially to The Move what Wings were to The Beatles). After that we heard a duet called “My Heart Is Open” with Adam Levine and Gwen Stefani — neither of them great voices but both right for this song — and then an odd song called “Take Me to Church” by someone named Mozier into which Annie Lennox came out and added a second vocal mid-song, which segued into a Lennox cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.” That was fascinating, even though Lennox’ thin 1980’s pop voice hardly delivered the song with Hawkins’ fire and venom — Charles, I think, liked it even less than I did and I joked that the real Hawkins was going to come out of his actual coffin and drag her down to hell with him!
After that Pharrell Williams, looking like a bellboy in a 1940’s movie set in Eastern Europe, led a small army of performers in his song “Happy” — I didn’t think anyone could possibly write a more banal song about happiness than Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but somehow Williams managed it — with a dark Metropolis-style introduction that didn’t at all mesh with the main theme and a bizarre insert by, of all people, classical pianist Lang Lang, pounding a piano as if he were some demented version of Liberace cross-bred with Pete Townshend or Jimi Hendrix and he were going to chop it to kindling when he was done. (Fortunately, he didn’t.) After the next commercial break, the show cut to a film clip of President Obama, of all people, giving one of his typically low-keyed announcements, in his case warning of the dangers of domestic violence and promoting a new Web site, which segued into a presentation by real domestic-violence victim Brooke Axtell and a song by Katy Perry called “By the Grace of God” that turned out to be one of the most moving and emotionally intense pieces on the program even without the wrenching context provided by Obama and Axtell. (After Obama’s speech I had rather sourly joked that the next thing they would present would be a performance by Chris Brown.) Afterwards there was a film clip of the band Imagine Dragons doing “Shot All Over” (another guess at the title) that was presented so oddly it wasn’t clear whether it was a commercial, part of the show or something in between. Then came one of the great moments of the program, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga duetting on “Cheek to Cheek” — their album of that title may be one of the unlikeliest collaborations of all time, but Gaga proved that she’s one dance-music artist who can handle the less strait-jacketed, more swinging rhythm and phrasing for standard songs to work, and she and Bennett were clearly actually improvising on the song instead of churning out an exact copy of their record. After that they trotted out Usher and a harpist to pay tribute to Stevie Wonder (and promote the upcoming Grammy special on Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, scheduled for February 16) with one of Wonder’s most banal songs, “If It’s Magic,” partially redeemed only by a surprising guest appearance by Wonder himself, taking out the song on harmonica.
Next up was the country segment, kicked off by Eric Church doing a song called “Give Me Back My Home Town” — it doesn’t help that both Bruce Springsteen and Chrissie Hynde have done considerably more with this song concept than he did, and it seemed weird that while he was singing the screens behind him were showing clips of racially motivated violence ranging from old Ku Klux Klan lynchings to the more recent incidents in Ferguson, Missouri, but it’s still a competent piece of songwriting craftsmanship and it was nice to hear. Things perked up when Brandy Clark came out accompanied by Dwight Yoakam — he sang enough that it approached duet status but it was still pretty much her show with him backing her — on a song called “A Real Good Time to Hold My Hand” — earlier, during the brief clips of the Best Country Record nominee, Charles had noted that the women in the category, Clark and Miranda Lambert, had sounded genuinely country while the guys had come off like Creedence Clearwater Revival (though I think Lynyrd Skynyrd is a closer parallel to the sound of so many modern male country artists — what in the 1970’s we called “Southern rock”) — and then there was an unlikely “country” threesome with Rihanna, Kanye West and, of all people, Paul McCartney, standing in the back and strumming a big guitar but contributing nothing vocally, on a song whose title I guessed as “Make It Here by Monday” — it was odd, but it worked. After that they went into the Latin segment, with Juanés — whom Charles could remember being hailed as a deathless male sex god decades ago (he’s still a good-looking man but the camera got close enough to show us the crags and wrinkles on his face) — on a song called “Juntos,” followed by someone or something called Sia, who wasn’t there in person but contributed a video of her hit song “Chandelier” which figured various women in body stockings designed to make them look nude, cavorting on a mock-Egyptian set that didn’t seem to relate in any way to the song; the piece sounded like O.K. pop and on its own I might enjoy it, but like a lot of the material on last night’s show it was dragged down by the visual portion of the presentation. After that was a low-keyed duet by Beck and Chris Martin of Coldplay on a song called “Your Heart Is a Dream” — the song was one of the loveliest pieces of music heard all night but there was nothing about it that couldn’t have been done in the 1960’s; indeed, it sounded very much like the sort of record the Everly Brothers were making in the late 1960’s to try to modernize their image and sound hip.
Then they gave out a few awards — as I noted above, the Grammy Awards have become a giant music variety show (though quite frankly the music is no longer varied enough — they used to acknowledge the existence of classical and jazz by allowing great artists in those fields at least brief segments to strut their stuff in pure form; now they spackle people like Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock into giant pop productions that throw the commercial supremacy of what’s left of the Top 40 into their faces) with a few awards presentations thrown in like confetti — and with the Record of the Year presented but the show having still a half-hour left to go, first we got National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences president Neil Portnow and a couple of other people doing a sententious presentation urging the audience to lobby for strict intellectual-property legislation to protect “the artists” and make sure musicians will still continue to create great songs by ensuring they will be paid for them. Reality check: it’s the people Neil Portnow is representing — the giant music corporations (that, like all other companies, are merging and thereby becoming less numerous, less competitive and more gargantuan) — who have historically screwed actual creative musicians out of the money due them, and more musicians these days are using the new Internet distribution channels Portnow wants to restrict or shut down to get their music to the people without corporate middlemen intervening and taking the lion’s share of the income. That’s one of the reasons I was so glad the year Arcade Fire won Album of the Year — not only do they make great music, they release their CD’s on a label they own themselves and therefore don’t have to share their income with a mega-corporation.
After that came the show’s finale, Beyoncé doing the Thomas A. Dorsey gospel classic “Precious Lord” segueing into Black singer-songwriter John Legend and positive rapper Common (“positive” in the sense that he’s actually trying to communicate good ideals and values through his music instead of glorifying murder, rape, Queer-bashing, capitalist acquisitiveness and the other foul subject matter of the repulsive “gangsta” style) doing their song “Glory” from the film Selma. Though the host, L. L. Cool J (interesting that they picked a rapper to host a show that included very little rap), didn’t mention that “Precious Lord” was the favorite song of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (in 1968 Mahalia Jackson sang it at King’s funeral and in 1972 Aretha Franklin sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral), if nothing else the juxtaposition added the final point to a show that, however unwittingly, demonstrated how all the African-American-based popular music of the last 120 years or so — ragtime, blues, jazz, swing, R&B, rock, soul, even rap — stems from the Black church and the spiritual and gospel traditions. Song after song last night — including Sam Smith’s big hit (he got sued for plagiarism by Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, who clamed “Stay With Me” included material from their song “I Won’t Back Down,” but if his lawyers had been savvier they probably could have found a public-domain spiritual or gospel song that contained that lick and thereby claimed a common ancestor), and Mosier’s song oddly perched between sin and salvation — showed its roots in the Black church, particularly with those great, exalting chords that have powered so much of this music. I can’t help but savor the irony that opponents of rock from the 1950’s to the 1980’s (and opponents of ragtime, jazz and swing before them!) regularly denounced it as “the devil’s music” — which couldn’t have been farther from the truth; however bizarre the connection sometimes, and however perverted its values have become (particularly in the heavy-metal bands’ tributes to Satan and the evil messages of gangsta rap), ultimately this is not the Devil’s music but the Lord’s.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Lucy (Universal, EuropaCorp, TF1, Canal+, Ciné+, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was one of the best modern movies I’ve seen in quite some time: Lucy, a 2014 movie written and directed by Luc Besson (whose résumé includes credits like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, Léon: The Professional — a movie Besson admitted strongly influenced this one — and the surprisingly good and undeservedly little-known Angel-A) and based on the largely discredited but once very au courant notion that human beings only use about 10 percent of their brain capacity and the other 90 percent represents terra incognita that could turn us all into super-people if we ever figured out a way to tap into it. As I recall, this “we only use 10 percent of our brain” business became really hip in the 1960’s when proponents of LSD and other psychedelic drugs were saying that those chemicals would help us tap into more of our potential brains than we’d been able to manage au naturel. So it’s not surprising that Besson’s script has the remaining 90 percent of his title character’s brain opened up by a drug — specifically CPH-4, a chemical supposedly released by mothers into the brains of their fetuses at six months in order to hasten the final stages of intellectual capacity they will need to cope with life outside the womb. A group of hellaciously unscrupulous Taiwanese mobsters headed by one Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi) has figured out a way to isolate this stuff and make it synthetically, and have accumulated enough to collect four large plastic bags full of it and surgically implant each bag inside the intestine of a person they’ve kidnapped and impressed into service as their mules by researching their backgrounds, identifying all their loved ones and relatives, and threatening retaliation if the poor pigeons don’t go along.
Lucy Miller (Scarlett Johansson) is the slacker girlfriend of an even more obnoxious and useless slacker, Richard (Pilou Asbaek), who’s charged with taking a locked metal briefcase to Mr. Jang but wants to weasel out of it. So instead he gives Lucy the job, and when she begs off he handcuffs the briefcase to her, thereby forcing her to comply or else face the entire wrath of the Taiwanese Mafia on her head. She gets that anyway when they respond by taking her into custody — as an example of her disorientation, none of her captors speak English and to communicate with her they are relying on an interpreter who’s only a disembodied voice on the other end of a computer phone connection. Things get even worse for Lucy when Mr. Jang and his henchmen open the briefcase and we finally get to see what’s in it — the four packets of CPH-4 — and when Lucy undergoes the operation she’s put in a holding cell and chained to a wall, which gives the five male inmates in with her the idea that they can take advantage of her, sexually and otherwise, and she won’t be able to do anything about it. Only one of them kicks her in the stomach repeatedly when she resists, and the kicks break the plastic seal and release some of the CPH-4 into her system. Director Besson intercuts all of this with shots of wild animals interacting — sometimes having sex, but more often fighting (which made me wonder why he was harboring the ambition to be the modern-day Dwain Esper — Esper was a sub-“B” filmmaker of the 1930’s who made bizarre exploitation movies like The Seventh Commandment, Narcotic, Maniac and Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell, and one of his favorite directorial strategies was to fill his movies with stock shots of animals fighting, which was supposed to reflect symbolically the similarly “animalistic” drives of his human characters) — and indeed the opening scene of the movie shows an ape-man reaching out and pointing his finger at the sky, followed by a dissolve to a city scene in which the action is sped up so the cars pass back and forth at a blurry pace: I give him credit for having ripped off both 2001 and Koyannisqatsi before his movie is even a minute old! The other main plot line with which Lucy’s saga is intercut is that of Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman), playing the eminence noir as usual, explaining the theory that humans use only 10 percent of their brain capacity (he says that that’s the highest among land animals but dolphins use 20 percent) to a group of fellow researchers and honors students at a seminar in Paris.
Needless to say, all that CPH-4 in her system is going to turn Lucy (deliberately named after the nickname paleontologists gave to the oldest known human fossil — a shot of the famous statue of the prehistoric Lucy made to show their best guess as to what she looks like of course appears in this film!) into the perfect confirmation of Norman’s theories; she gains a bizarre assortment of superpowers, including ultra-fast movement, telekinesis, the ability to surround herself with a force field so bullets can’t harm her (an important ability since the Taiwanese gangsters are after her big-time and trace her to Paris) and sudden insights like the ability to drive a car and read Chinese. She commandeers a police car assigned to officer Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked) and drives it at an ultra-fast pace, avoiding getting into any crashes herself but leaving a lot of wreckage and mayhem in her wake — indeed, one of the most fascinating Zeitgeist aspects of Lucy is the heedlessness of both the “good” and the “bad” guys to the collateral damage done by their actions. All that tiresome Superman and Spider-Man nonsense about with great power coming great responsibility is so 20th Century! A movie made in the 1960’s about this theme — the first human who unlocks more than 10 percent of their brain power — would probably have presented the person sympathetically and made the villains of the piece the people in the Establishment who didn’t want people unlocking more of their brains because that would jeopardize their ability to run things. The 2014 version presents Lucy as a rather shallow heroine whose only apparent drive is her own survival — until enough of that neural reprogramming kicks in that she realize her whole function is literally to kick-start human evolution, to send herself back in time so she can touch fingers with that ape-man we saw in the opening sequence (à la the famous Sistine Chapel image in which Michaelangelo dramatized the Creation by having God touch his finger to Adam to indicate He was giving him the spark of life, which is actually shown in the film just so we get the point) — and by the end of the film, which is periodically interrupted by titles showing us just how much of her brain Lucy is using now (20%, 30%, 50%, etc.) she turns herself into a set of black tendrils that plugs into the computers at the institute where Professor Norman is giving his lecture, and ultimately she downloads all the knowledge she’s acquired onto a flash drive and, when one of Norman’s colleagues asks where she is, sends a text message to his cell phone reading, “I AM EVERYWHERE.”
In a movie that has so reminiscences to other films — not only the ones mentioned above (including the three films, one of them his own, Besson copped to), but The Man Who Could Work Miracles (an H. G. Wells story in which a boring middle-aged Englishman gets the power to have anything he wishes for happen, and the irony is the contrast between the potential extent of his power and the stupid, banal things he does with it), Flowers for Algernon a.k.a. Charly (the Daniel Keyes story, filmed with Cliff Robertson, in which a retarded man undergoes an operation that turns him into a super-genius, only the effect is temporary and by the end of the story he’s reverted to his original intellectual level), David Brin’s 1991 novel Earth (in which a woman who’s done much of the research and work to build up the Internet ultimately dissolves her consciousness into the Internet and becomes the basis for the next generation of it), and even the old joke about the scientists who built the ultimate computer, fed into it every scrap of human knowledge, and decided to ask it all the questions humans had been debating over the millennia of their conscious existence, so the first thing they ask the computer is, “Is there a God?,” and the computer replies, “There is now” — Lucy works surprisingly well, managing the increasingly rare feat of being both an exciting shoot-’em-up action movie and a film of ideas. Its only recent competitor in that regard is The Hunger Games, and the films in that cycle (of which I’ve seen the first two, the ones that have made it to DVD so far) weren’t as effective at the balancing act as Suzanne Collins in the book. As silly as some of the opening scenes are, and as preposterous as the basic idea is (Universal put on a 10-minute bonus program attempting to establish a real-life scientific basis for the plot, but you can regard the entire premise of Lucy as unscientific hooey and still enjoy the hell out of it), Lucy is an excellent film that benefits from Besson’s decision to keep the running time down to a mere 89 minutes. Probably a lot of modern-day moviegoers, brainwashed by the hyperthyroid releases from most major studios to equate length with quality, were surprised and disappointed by this film’s brevity, especially since it’s carefully arranged not to invite the possibility of a sequel (another unusual play I give Besson major points for), whereas I loved its being so short and returning to the welcome brevity of movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s. About the only thing I could fault Lucy for is that, for all its intriguing engagements with issues of time, space, matter and energy, it’s still an action movie with a hot young woman protagonist — as if Besson were recycling the premise of one of his best-known previous films, La Femme Nikita, and giving Nikita super-powers!
Last night’s “feature” was one of the best modern movies I’ve seen in quite some time: Lucy, a 2014 movie written and directed by Luc Besson (whose résumé includes credits like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, Léon: The Professional — a movie Besson admitted strongly influenced this one — and the surprisingly good and undeservedly little-known Angel-A) and based on the largely discredited but once very au courant notion that human beings only use about 10 percent of their brain capacity and the other 90 percent represents terra incognita that could turn us all into super-people if we ever figured out a way to tap into it. As I recall, this “we only use 10 percent of our brain” business became really hip in the 1960’s when proponents of LSD and other psychedelic drugs were saying that those chemicals would help us tap into more of our potential brains than we’d been able to manage au naturel. So it’s not surprising that Besson’s script has the remaining 90 percent of his title character’s brain opened up by a drug — specifically CPH-4, a chemical supposedly released by mothers into the brains of their fetuses at six months in order to hasten the final stages of intellectual capacity they will need to cope with life outside the womb. A group of hellaciously unscrupulous Taiwanese mobsters headed by one Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi) has figured out a way to isolate this stuff and make it synthetically, and have accumulated enough to collect four large plastic bags full of it and surgically implant each bag inside the intestine of a person they’ve kidnapped and impressed into service as their mules by researching their backgrounds, identifying all their loved ones and relatives, and threatening retaliation if the poor pigeons don’t go along.
Lucy Miller (Scarlett Johansson) is the slacker girlfriend of an even more obnoxious and useless slacker, Richard (Pilou Asbaek), who’s charged with taking a locked metal briefcase to Mr. Jang but wants to weasel out of it. So instead he gives Lucy the job, and when she begs off he handcuffs the briefcase to her, thereby forcing her to comply or else face the entire wrath of the Taiwanese Mafia on her head. She gets that anyway when they respond by taking her into custody — as an example of her disorientation, none of her captors speak English and to communicate with her they are relying on an interpreter who’s only a disembodied voice on the other end of a computer phone connection. Things get even worse for Lucy when Mr. Jang and his henchmen open the briefcase and we finally get to see what’s in it — the four packets of CPH-4 — and when Lucy undergoes the operation she’s put in a holding cell and chained to a wall, which gives the five male inmates in with her the idea that they can take advantage of her, sexually and otherwise, and she won’t be able to do anything about it. Only one of them kicks her in the stomach repeatedly when she resists, and the kicks break the plastic seal and release some of the CPH-4 into her system. Director Besson intercuts all of this with shots of wild animals interacting — sometimes having sex, but more often fighting (which made me wonder why he was harboring the ambition to be the modern-day Dwain Esper — Esper was a sub-“B” filmmaker of the 1930’s who made bizarre exploitation movies like The Seventh Commandment, Narcotic, Maniac and Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell, and one of his favorite directorial strategies was to fill his movies with stock shots of animals fighting, which was supposed to reflect symbolically the similarly “animalistic” drives of his human characters) — and indeed the opening scene of the movie shows an ape-man reaching out and pointing his finger at the sky, followed by a dissolve to a city scene in which the action is sped up so the cars pass back and forth at a blurry pace: I give him credit for having ripped off both 2001 and Koyannisqatsi before his movie is even a minute old! The other main plot line with which Lucy’s saga is intercut is that of Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman), playing the eminence noir as usual, explaining the theory that humans use only 10 percent of their brain capacity (he says that that’s the highest among land animals but dolphins use 20 percent) to a group of fellow researchers and honors students at a seminar in Paris.
Needless to say, all that CPH-4 in her system is going to turn Lucy (deliberately named after the nickname paleontologists gave to the oldest known human fossil — a shot of the famous statue of the prehistoric Lucy made to show their best guess as to what she looks like of course appears in this film!) into the perfect confirmation of Norman’s theories; she gains a bizarre assortment of superpowers, including ultra-fast movement, telekinesis, the ability to surround herself with a force field so bullets can’t harm her (an important ability since the Taiwanese gangsters are after her big-time and trace her to Paris) and sudden insights like the ability to drive a car and read Chinese. She commandeers a police car assigned to officer Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked) and drives it at an ultra-fast pace, avoiding getting into any crashes herself but leaving a lot of wreckage and mayhem in her wake — indeed, one of the most fascinating Zeitgeist aspects of Lucy is the heedlessness of both the “good” and the “bad” guys to the collateral damage done by their actions. All that tiresome Superman and Spider-Man nonsense about with great power coming great responsibility is so 20th Century! A movie made in the 1960’s about this theme — the first human who unlocks more than 10 percent of their brain power — would probably have presented the person sympathetically and made the villains of the piece the people in the Establishment who didn’t want people unlocking more of their brains because that would jeopardize their ability to run things. The 2014 version presents Lucy as a rather shallow heroine whose only apparent drive is her own survival — until enough of that neural reprogramming kicks in that she realize her whole function is literally to kick-start human evolution, to send herself back in time so she can touch fingers with that ape-man we saw in the opening sequence (à la the famous Sistine Chapel image in which Michaelangelo dramatized the Creation by having God touch his finger to Adam to indicate He was giving him the spark of life, which is actually shown in the film just so we get the point) — and by the end of the film, which is periodically interrupted by titles showing us just how much of her brain Lucy is using now (20%, 30%, 50%, etc.) she turns herself into a set of black tendrils that plugs into the computers at the institute where Professor Norman is giving his lecture, and ultimately she downloads all the knowledge she’s acquired onto a flash drive and, when one of Norman’s colleagues asks where she is, sends a text message to his cell phone reading, “I AM EVERYWHERE.”
In a movie that has so reminiscences to other films — not only the ones mentioned above (including the three films, one of them his own, Besson copped to), but The Man Who Could Work Miracles (an H. G. Wells story in which a boring middle-aged Englishman gets the power to have anything he wishes for happen, and the irony is the contrast between the potential extent of his power and the stupid, banal things he does with it), Flowers for Algernon a.k.a. Charly (the Daniel Keyes story, filmed with Cliff Robertson, in which a retarded man undergoes an operation that turns him into a super-genius, only the effect is temporary and by the end of the story he’s reverted to his original intellectual level), David Brin’s 1991 novel Earth (in which a woman who’s done much of the research and work to build up the Internet ultimately dissolves her consciousness into the Internet and becomes the basis for the next generation of it), and even the old joke about the scientists who built the ultimate computer, fed into it every scrap of human knowledge, and decided to ask it all the questions humans had been debating over the millennia of their conscious existence, so the first thing they ask the computer is, “Is there a God?,” and the computer replies, “There is now” — Lucy works surprisingly well, managing the increasingly rare feat of being both an exciting shoot-’em-up action movie and a film of ideas. Its only recent competitor in that regard is The Hunger Games, and the films in that cycle (of which I’ve seen the first two, the ones that have made it to DVD so far) weren’t as effective at the balancing act as Suzanne Collins in the book. As silly as some of the opening scenes are, and as preposterous as the basic idea is (Universal put on a 10-minute bonus program attempting to establish a real-life scientific basis for the plot, but you can regard the entire premise of Lucy as unscientific hooey and still enjoy the hell out of it), Lucy is an excellent film that benefits from Besson’s decision to keep the running time down to a mere 89 minutes. Probably a lot of modern-day moviegoers, brainwashed by the hyperthyroid releases from most major studios to equate length with quality, were surprised and disappointed by this film’s brevity, especially since it’s carefully arranged not to invite the possibility of a sequel (another unusual play I give Besson major points for), whereas I loved its being so short and returning to the welcome brevity of movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s. About the only thing I could fault Lucy for is that, for all its intriguing engagements with issues of time, space, matter and energy, it’s still an action movie with a hot young woman protagonist — as if Besson were recycling the premise of one of his best-known previous films, La Femme Nikita, and giving Nikita super-powers!
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro (Metropolitan Opera, October 18, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “movie” last night was Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, in a new production by Sir Richard Eyre that updated the setting to the 1930’s but was otherwise blessedly free from some of the horrendous distortions inflicted on classic operas by Regietheater directors at the Met and in Europe. The Marriage of Figaro is an extraordinary opera but one that isn’t easy to produce — the music is lovely, and given a cast of people who can sing it properly (as it got here) it’s going to make some sort of effect, but like a lot of other comic operas it’s hard to stage because it’s hard to decide just how far to push the comic “business.” Eyre’s approach was to do it subtly — though the opera is based on a French farce (in both the literal and the genre senses of the term), and Eyre resorted to a few obvious gags (like Cherubino, the Count Almaviva’s rowdy and randy page boy — he’s supposed to be an ultra-horny straight teenage kid but he’s actually played by a mezzo-soprano in drag — literally turning himself into part of the sofa to hide from the Count, the sort of thing the Marx Brothers used to do), for the most part he kept the humor subtle and dry, which is how I like it. The Marriage of Figaro started as a play by Parisian author Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), described on his Wikipedia page as “playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American).” He wrote three plays in the Figaro cycle and first introduced the two key characters — the Spanish nobleman Count Almaviva and his manservant, barber and factotum Figaro — as an “interlude” he wrote around 1765 called The Sacristan. In 1775 Beaumarchais wrote a full-length play called The Barber of Seville, dealing with Count Almaviva’s infatuation for the young noble girl Rosina and the attempts of Figaro, on his behalf, to defeat the “useless precautions” (also a subtitle for the play) set up by her guardian, Dr. Bartolo (who wants her for himself), and marry her.
The play was an enormous hit, so in 1778 Beaumarchais wrote a sequel, The Marriage of Figaro, and got it performed privately at the French court in 1781 before King Louis XVI slapped a ban on it, which stood until 1784 despite the attempts of his wife, Marie Antoinette, to get him to lift it. Beaumarchais wrote one more play in the Figaro cycle, The Guilty Mother, which premiered in 1792 (post-Revolution) and was also a hit, though it’s hardly as well known because, while The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro were turned into operas almost as soon as they were written, The Guilty Mother wasn’t adapted for the operatic stage until French composer Darius Milhaud did it in 1964. The first opera based on The Barber of Seville was written by the Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello in 1782 and was not only a hit, it had such long “legs” that when Gioacchino Rossini’s version premiered in 1816 it was booed off the stage by outraged fans who thought Rossini presumptuous for daring to compete with the great Paisiello. (Eventually, though, Rossini’s version swept Paisiello’s off the stage and became a standard repertory opera, while Paisiello’s reverted to historical-curiosity status.) In 1786 Mozart had recently been appointed official composer to the Vienna Court Opera — replacing Christoph Willibald Gluck, who had been lured away to Paris by Marie Antoinette (he’d been her favorite composer and she wanted him in Paris to continue to write operas for her court), but only making half the salary Gluck had been paid. According to one version, Mozart was asked by the court to write his own opera based on The Barber of Seville, but begged off because he didn’t want to compete with Paisiello’s version, so he suggested that he compose an opera on The Marriage of Figaro instead — even though the Austro-Hungarian government had banned the play. Mozart promised the court officials that he and the court opera’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, could tone down the original’s anti-aristocratic satire enough to make it politically acceptable, and the opera finally made it to the stage on May 1, 1786. It was a modest success in Vienna but an enormous hit when it was revived in Prague — enough that the Prague Opera asked Mozart and da Ponte to write a work for their company, which became Don Giovanni — and eventually became part of the standard repertory.
One of the most interesting things ever written about The Marriage of Figaro is an article by Joan Bernick in the summer 1983 issue of The Opera Quarterly, in which she attempted by comparing da Ponte’s libretto to Beaumarchais’ original play to reconstruct the decision-making process da Ponte had gone through in his adaptation — and though Bernick didn’t make this point herself, it occurred to me that if she was right, da Ponte had approached his task very much the way a screenwriter does in adapting a novel or play for film: he looked for which elements of the original he could use as they stood, which he would have to leave out, and which he would have to change. (Indeed, Bernick’s article inspired me to analogize the opera libretto and the screenplay, both of which are dependent sorts of writing waiting for another artist — a composer in the case of the libretto, a director in film — to bring them to life. The so-called Schreiber theorists who have attempted to dethrone the director as the auteur of a film and put the writer in his or her place ignore the fact that, unlike a stage play, which is a work of art that exists independently of any particular production, a screenplay is not a work of art itself but the blueprint for one — the final work could not exist without it, but it becomes art only when a producer, a director and a cast and crew breathe cinematic life into it. By my analogy, a director who writes his or her own scripts is similar to a composer, like Wagner or Leoncavallo, who writes his or her own libretti.) Bernick also makes the point that da Ponte made the original far more emotionally intense and moving; he cut out a lot of the social commentary — not only to get it by the Viennese censors but also he was an experienced enough librettist he realized it wouldn’t work on stage — and deepened the raw emotion of a story that, especially in his adaptation, turns (as do his two other libretti for Mozart, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte) on the clash between love and sex, between commitment to a single partner and the pursuit of physical pleasure no matter what the emotional cost, and also the class conflict between the (relatively) honest servants and the corrupt aristocrats who regard servants as little more than furniture.
When the story opens, Figaro is measuring the room the Count has offered him and his betrothed, the Countess’s maid Susanna, to make sure their bed will fit in it. He’s pleased that the Count has given him a room right next to the Count’s own but Susanna, considerably sharper than he, has realized the actual reason; since the rooms are adjoining, it’ll be easier for the Count to slip into the room and have sex with her if both Figaro and the Countess are away. The Count has officially rescinded the jus primae noctis — the once-sacred right of an aristocrat, after the wedding of any of his female servants or serfs, to spend the first night with her himself before turning her over to her husband — but in Susanna’s case he wants his shot at her before Figaro gets it. The Countess, meanwhile, has caught on to her husband’s roving eye (and somewhat lower part), and in a marvelous aria, “Porgi amor,” which begins the second act, she laments her loss of her husband’s love. Meanwhile, the randy page boy Cherubino is at that stage of teenage straight male-dom when he wants to fuck everything that’s alive, human and female, including the Countess, Susanna, and Barbarina (another maid on the Count’s home staff). The Count catches Cherubino in Susanna’s bedroom and as revenge orders him to join the military, though Figaro tells him to hang on for a while. The Countess concocts a plot to gain her revenge on the Count by having Susanna write him a letter arranging an assignation in the garden of his estate; they will then disguise Cherubino as Susanna and send him there in her place. There’s a subplot in which Figaro’s upcoming marriage to Susanna is temporarily derailed when Marcellina, a middle-aged widow, shows up in the company of Dr. Bartolo and the music-master Don Basilio (also a character from The Barber of Seville who carries over) and claims to have a signed contract from Figaro to marry her as repayment for 2,000 silver pieces she previously lent him. But Figaro doesn’t have to marry Marcellina because it turns out she’s really Figaro’s mother — and Bartolo is Figaro’s father — so the wedding of Figaro and Susanna can go on as scheduled. Only it doesn’t because Figaro learns that Susanna agreed to meet the Count for some hanky-panky in the garden, and after a long succession of arias for Barbarina, Basilio, Figaro and Susanna, the “rendezvous” takes place but with the Countess herself disguised as Susanna (and vice versa), so the Count realizes he’s “cheating” with his own wife.
He asks her to forgive him, and she does so — in Beaumarchais’ play that was a simple two-line dialogue exchange but Mozart and da Ponte turn it into an extended final ensemble in which the Count and Countess reconcile, as do Figaro and Susanna, and though we don’t actually see the wedding take place, the “normal” monogamous order of things is restored — at least for now, since in The Guilty Mother (set 20 years after The Marriage of Figaro) the Almavivas have had a son, he’s been killed in a duel, and a young man named Léon shows up at the Almaviva estate and the Countess instantly takes a dislike to him because she suspects he’s the Count’s son by one of his paramours — though it actually turns out that it’s not Léon but his girlfriend Florestine who’s the Count’s child, while Léon is actually the fruit of an affair the Countess had with Cherubino. When the Met’s current Marriage of Figaro started I briefly feared for the worst when director Sir Richard Eyre began with a pantomime scene, taking place during the opera’s magnificent overture (a lovely five-minute piece that’s had an independent life as a curtain-raiser for symphony concerts), that begins with a young woman hurriedly putting her clothes back on after she’s spent time with the Count in his bed, and spirals from there to try as much as possible to expose (so to speak) the characters’ sex lives before the actual opera begins. (I reminded Charles that in 1786 opera overtures were just that — opening music during which the audience members were still filing into the theatre and taking their seats.) The Met did one odd thing to The Marriage of Figaro that surprised me — instead of presenting it in the original four-act structure they combined Acts I and II, then combined Acts III and IV, so instead of four short, compact acts they ended up with two long, sprawling ones. I have no idea why they did this (though I suspect it’s because musicians’ union regulations charge overtime based on the time the musicians have been in the theatre, not how long they actually play, so fewer intermissions probably mean less overtime charges), though they may have justified it because the other two Mozart/da Ponte operas, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte, are both in two acts. It certainly makes an ironic contrast to the 1930’s, when the Met rewrote Wagner’s Das Rheingold to insert an intermission into an opera Wagner had intended to be performed as one long (2 ½-hour) act — they played Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman in three acts, though at least for that work Wagner had created an alternative version for opera houses that didn’t want to stage it as a single continuous act — apparently because their contract with the concessionaire who ran their bar specified that every show at the Met had to have at least one intermission.
Once we get into the opera proper (a rather inappropriate adjective), though, Eyre’s direction settled into an effective groove in which the comedy was played simply and without the obnoxious hammery that has marred previous productions — in his treatment Figaro is much more rom-com than slapstick or farce — and the 1930’s setting becomes less bothersome than most similar time transcriptions. Indeed, the main difference having it take place in the 1930’s made was that the singers could wear reasonably familiar-looking clothes instead of the preposterous (to today’s sensibility) outfits of the 1780’s. Where this Marriage of Figaro scored was in Levine’s conducting — he seems to have been working at the Met my entire lifetime (he made his debut there in the 1960’s and became music director in the 1970’s) and he’s acquired a level of experience and calm that makes his performances magisterial — and a quite well integrated cast. I wasn’t that thrilled by the acting of Ildar Abdrazakov as Figaro (I’d really liked him in the title role of Borodin’s Prince Igor in a Met Live in HD presentation Charles and I had actually seen in a theatre, but obviously he’s the sort of actor who’s much more turned on by a dark, conflicted character like Igor than by Figaro) but he sang the part well enough, as did Peter Mattei as the Count — who acted quite well; during one of the intermission interviews host Renée Fleming (who herself has sung the Countess at the Met) asked him if he thought the Count was a villain, and he hemmed and hawed about that one (my answer would have been, “No, he’s not a villain — just a typical male who’s thinking with his dick!”), but his performance portrayed the Count as a bit befuddled himself by his sexual obsession with Susanna and torn between trying to be a decent guy and wanting to get his rocks off no matter how many people he hurts in the process. But it’s the women who really stood out in this cast — as they do in the story; through most of the plot it’s the women who are the voices of sanity in this “day of madness” (Beaumarchais’ subtitle for the original play), at once trying to hold on to their menfolk and deal with their mates’ sexual desires. Both Amanda Majeski as the Countess and Marlis Petersen as Susanna brought young, fresh voices to their roles, and both showed a real understanding of the drama and the emotional lives of their characters.
As for the Cherubino, Walter Legge would have been pleased by Isabel Leonard’s costuming and makeup — he said that part of the appeal of casting a woman as a man (what opera buffs call a “trouser role”) is that there should be a sense that it is a woman; he didn’t think producers and costumers should make the drag look too convincing, and Rob Howell came up with an outfit that made Leonard look credibly butch but still showed a bit of breasts and womanly hips — making the double-drag in which the Countess and Susanna dress Cherubino as a woman (the woman-playing-a-man-playing-a-woman bit has turned up all sorts of places since, including Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier — a work both Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, admitted was strongly inspired by The Marriage of Figaro — and the three films of the Victor/Victoria story) that much more amusing. If the production had a flaw it’s that all the subtlety of Eyre’s direction, Levine’s conducting and the singing made it seem a bit undramatic — the down side of not letting it become hammy is that it also tends to get dull — and I don’t think that combining the acts and thus reducing their number from four to two really worked (100 minutes is a bit long to listen to anything, even the glorious music of Mozart at the peak of his talents!), though at least it wasn’t as insanely unbalanced as the Met’s recent version of Verdi’s La Traviata, which reduced the original three acts to two by combining the two scenes of Verdi’s (and Francesco Maria Piave’s) Act II and Act III into a single 85-minute act (if they had wanted a two-act Traviata it would have made more sense to spot the intermission between the two scenes of the original Act II, which would at least have kept the two acts of roughly equal length). Still, the Met’s Marriage of Figaro was an excellent production of a truly great opera, and Eyre’s revolving set allowed the scene changes to take place in full view of the audience without spoiling the illusion — though I was amused, given the usual practice of having the secco recitatives accompanied by harpsichord, to read on the Wikipedia page for the opera a quote from a review of the Vienna premiere which specified that Mozart himself played them on an early piano!
Our “movie” last night was Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, in a new production by Sir Richard Eyre that updated the setting to the 1930’s but was otherwise blessedly free from some of the horrendous distortions inflicted on classic operas by Regietheater directors at the Met and in Europe. The Marriage of Figaro is an extraordinary opera but one that isn’t easy to produce — the music is lovely, and given a cast of people who can sing it properly (as it got here) it’s going to make some sort of effect, but like a lot of other comic operas it’s hard to stage because it’s hard to decide just how far to push the comic “business.” Eyre’s approach was to do it subtly — though the opera is based on a French farce (in both the literal and the genre senses of the term), and Eyre resorted to a few obvious gags (like Cherubino, the Count Almaviva’s rowdy and randy page boy — he’s supposed to be an ultra-horny straight teenage kid but he’s actually played by a mezzo-soprano in drag — literally turning himself into part of the sofa to hide from the Count, the sort of thing the Marx Brothers used to do), for the most part he kept the humor subtle and dry, which is how I like it. The Marriage of Figaro started as a play by Parisian author Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), described on his Wikipedia page as “playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American).” He wrote three plays in the Figaro cycle and first introduced the two key characters — the Spanish nobleman Count Almaviva and his manservant, barber and factotum Figaro — as an “interlude” he wrote around 1765 called The Sacristan. In 1775 Beaumarchais wrote a full-length play called The Barber of Seville, dealing with Count Almaviva’s infatuation for the young noble girl Rosina and the attempts of Figaro, on his behalf, to defeat the “useless precautions” (also a subtitle for the play) set up by her guardian, Dr. Bartolo (who wants her for himself), and marry her.
The play was an enormous hit, so in 1778 Beaumarchais wrote a sequel, The Marriage of Figaro, and got it performed privately at the French court in 1781 before King Louis XVI slapped a ban on it, which stood until 1784 despite the attempts of his wife, Marie Antoinette, to get him to lift it. Beaumarchais wrote one more play in the Figaro cycle, The Guilty Mother, which premiered in 1792 (post-Revolution) and was also a hit, though it’s hardly as well known because, while The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro were turned into operas almost as soon as they were written, The Guilty Mother wasn’t adapted for the operatic stage until French composer Darius Milhaud did it in 1964. The first opera based on The Barber of Seville was written by the Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello in 1782 and was not only a hit, it had such long “legs” that when Gioacchino Rossini’s version premiered in 1816 it was booed off the stage by outraged fans who thought Rossini presumptuous for daring to compete with the great Paisiello. (Eventually, though, Rossini’s version swept Paisiello’s off the stage and became a standard repertory opera, while Paisiello’s reverted to historical-curiosity status.) In 1786 Mozart had recently been appointed official composer to the Vienna Court Opera — replacing Christoph Willibald Gluck, who had been lured away to Paris by Marie Antoinette (he’d been her favorite composer and she wanted him in Paris to continue to write operas for her court), but only making half the salary Gluck had been paid. According to one version, Mozart was asked by the court to write his own opera based on The Barber of Seville, but begged off because he didn’t want to compete with Paisiello’s version, so he suggested that he compose an opera on The Marriage of Figaro instead — even though the Austro-Hungarian government had banned the play. Mozart promised the court officials that he and the court opera’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, could tone down the original’s anti-aristocratic satire enough to make it politically acceptable, and the opera finally made it to the stage on May 1, 1786. It was a modest success in Vienna but an enormous hit when it was revived in Prague — enough that the Prague Opera asked Mozart and da Ponte to write a work for their company, which became Don Giovanni — and eventually became part of the standard repertory.
One of the most interesting things ever written about The Marriage of Figaro is an article by Joan Bernick in the summer 1983 issue of The Opera Quarterly, in which she attempted by comparing da Ponte’s libretto to Beaumarchais’ original play to reconstruct the decision-making process da Ponte had gone through in his adaptation — and though Bernick didn’t make this point herself, it occurred to me that if she was right, da Ponte had approached his task very much the way a screenwriter does in adapting a novel or play for film: he looked for which elements of the original he could use as they stood, which he would have to leave out, and which he would have to change. (Indeed, Bernick’s article inspired me to analogize the opera libretto and the screenplay, both of which are dependent sorts of writing waiting for another artist — a composer in the case of the libretto, a director in film — to bring them to life. The so-called Schreiber theorists who have attempted to dethrone the director as the auteur of a film and put the writer in his or her place ignore the fact that, unlike a stage play, which is a work of art that exists independently of any particular production, a screenplay is not a work of art itself but the blueprint for one — the final work could not exist without it, but it becomes art only when a producer, a director and a cast and crew breathe cinematic life into it. By my analogy, a director who writes his or her own scripts is similar to a composer, like Wagner or Leoncavallo, who writes his or her own libretti.) Bernick also makes the point that da Ponte made the original far more emotionally intense and moving; he cut out a lot of the social commentary — not only to get it by the Viennese censors but also he was an experienced enough librettist he realized it wouldn’t work on stage — and deepened the raw emotion of a story that, especially in his adaptation, turns (as do his two other libretti for Mozart, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte) on the clash between love and sex, between commitment to a single partner and the pursuit of physical pleasure no matter what the emotional cost, and also the class conflict between the (relatively) honest servants and the corrupt aristocrats who regard servants as little more than furniture.
When the story opens, Figaro is measuring the room the Count has offered him and his betrothed, the Countess’s maid Susanna, to make sure their bed will fit in it. He’s pleased that the Count has given him a room right next to the Count’s own but Susanna, considerably sharper than he, has realized the actual reason; since the rooms are adjoining, it’ll be easier for the Count to slip into the room and have sex with her if both Figaro and the Countess are away. The Count has officially rescinded the jus primae noctis — the once-sacred right of an aristocrat, after the wedding of any of his female servants or serfs, to spend the first night with her himself before turning her over to her husband — but in Susanna’s case he wants his shot at her before Figaro gets it. The Countess, meanwhile, has caught on to her husband’s roving eye (and somewhat lower part), and in a marvelous aria, “Porgi amor,” which begins the second act, she laments her loss of her husband’s love. Meanwhile, the randy page boy Cherubino is at that stage of teenage straight male-dom when he wants to fuck everything that’s alive, human and female, including the Countess, Susanna, and Barbarina (another maid on the Count’s home staff). The Count catches Cherubino in Susanna’s bedroom and as revenge orders him to join the military, though Figaro tells him to hang on for a while. The Countess concocts a plot to gain her revenge on the Count by having Susanna write him a letter arranging an assignation in the garden of his estate; they will then disguise Cherubino as Susanna and send him there in her place. There’s a subplot in which Figaro’s upcoming marriage to Susanna is temporarily derailed when Marcellina, a middle-aged widow, shows up in the company of Dr. Bartolo and the music-master Don Basilio (also a character from The Barber of Seville who carries over) and claims to have a signed contract from Figaro to marry her as repayment for 2,000 silver pieces she previously lent him. But Figaro doesn’t have to marry Marcellina because it turns out she’s really Figaro’s mother — and Bartolo is Figaro’s father — so the wedding of Figaro and Susanna can go on as scheduled. Only it doesn’t because Figaro learns that Susanna agreed to meet the Count for some hanky-panky in the garden, and after a long succession of arias for Barbarina, Basilio, Figaro and Susanna, the “rendezvous” takes place but with the Countess herself disguised as Susanna (and vice versa), so the Count realizes he’s “cheating” with his own wife.
He asks her to forgive him, and she does so — in Beaumarchais’ play that was a simple two-line dialogue exchange but Mozart and da Ponte turn it into an extended final ensemble in which the Count and Countess reconcile, as do Figaro and Susanna, and though we don’t actually see the wedding take place, the “normal” monogamous order of things is restored — at least for now, since in The Guilty Mother (set 20 years after The Marriage of Figaro) the Almavivas have had a son, he’s been killed in a duel, and a young man named Léon shows up at the Almaviva estate and the Countess instantly takes a dislike to him because she suspects he’s the Count’s son by one of his paramours — though it actually turns out that it’s not Léon but his girlfriend Florestine who’s the Count’s child, while Léon is actually the fruit of an affair the Countess had with Cherubino. When the Met’s current Marriage of Figaro started I briefly feared for the worst when director Sir Richard Eyre began with a pantomime scene, taking place during the opera’s magnificent overture (a lovely five-minute piece that’s had an independent life as a curtain-raiser for symphony concerts), that begins with a young woman hurriedly putting her clothes back on after she’s spent time with the Count in his bed, and spirals from there to try as much as possible to expose (so to speak) the characters’ sex lives before the actual opera begins. (I reminded Charles that in 1786 opera overtures were just that — opening music during which the audience members were still filing into the theatre and taking their seats.) The Met did one odd thing to The Marriage of Figaro that surprised me — instead of presenting it in the original four-act structure they combined Acts I and II, then combined Acts III and IV, so instead of four short, compact acts they ended up with two long, sprawling ones. I have no idea why they did this (though I suspect it’s because musicians’ union regulations charge overtime based on the time the musicians have been in the theatre, not how long they actually play, so fewer intermissions probably mean less overtime charges), though they may have justified it because the other two Mozart/da Ponte operas, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte, are both in two acts. It certainly makes an ironic contrast to the 1930’s, when the Met rewrote Wagner’s Das Rheingold to insert an intermission into an opera Wagner had intended to be performed as one long (2 ½-hour) act — they played Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman in three acts, though at least for that work Wagner had created an alternative version for opera houses that didn’t want to stage it as a single continuous act — apparently because their contract with the concessionaire who ran their bar specified that every show at the Met had to have at least one intermission.
Once we get into the opera proper (a rather inappropriate adjective), though, Eyre’s direction settled into an effective groove in which the comedy was played simply and without the obnoxious hammery that has marred previous productions — in his treatment Figaro is much more rom-com than slapstick or farce — and the 1930’s setting becomes less bothersome than most similar time transcriptions. Indeed, the main difference having it take place in the 1930’s made was that the singers could wear reasonably familiar-looking clothes instead of the preposterous (to today’s sensibility) outfits of the 1780’s. Where this Marriage of Figaro scored was in Levine’s conducting — he seems to have been working at the Met my entire lifetime (he made his debut there in the 1960’s and became music director in the 1970’s) and he’s acquired a level of experience and calm that makes his performances magisterial — and a quite well integrated cast. I wasn’t that thrilled by the acting of Ildar Abdrazakov as Figaro (I’d really liked him in the title role of Borodin’s Prince Igor in a Met Live in HD presentation Charles and I had actually seen in a theatre, but obviously he’s the sort of actor who’s much more turned on by a dark, conflicted character like Igor than by Figaro) but he sang the part well enough, as did Peter Mattei as the Count — who acted quite well; during one of the intermission interviews host Renée Fleming (who herself has sung the Countess at the Met) asked him if he thought the Count was a villain, and he hemmed and hawed about that one (my answer would have been, “No, he’s not a villain — just a typical male who’s thinking with his dick!”), but his performance portrayed the Count as a bit befuddled himself by his sexual obsession with Susanna and torn between trying to be a decent guy and wanting to get his rocks off no matter how many people he hurts in the process. But it’s the women who really stood out in this cast — as they do in the story; through most of the plot it’s the women who are the voices of sanity in this “day of madness” (Beaumarchais’ subtitle for the original play), at once trying to hold on to their menfolk and deal with their mates’ sexual desires. Both Amanda Majeski as the Countess and Marlis Petersen as Susanna brought young, fresh voices to their roles, and both showed a real understanding of the drama and the emotional lives of their characters.
As for the Cherubino, Walter Legge would have been pleased by Isabel Leonard’s costuming and makeup — he said that part of the appeal of casting a woman as a man (what opera buffs call a “trouser role”) is that there should be a sense that it is a woman; he didn’t think producers and costumers should make the drag look too convincing, and Rob Howell came up with an outfit that made Leonard look credibly butch but still showed a bit of breasts and womanly hips — making the double-drag in which the Countess and Susanna dress Cherubino as a woman (the woman-playing-a-man-playing-a-woman bit has turned up all sorts of places since, including Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier — a work both Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, admitted was strongly inspired by The Marriage of Figaro — and the three films of the Victor/Victoria story) that much more amusing. If the production had a flaw it’s that all the subtlety of Eyre’s direction, Levine’s conducting and the singing made it seem a bit undramatic — the down side of not letting it become hammy is that it also tends to get dull — and I don’t think that combining the acts and thus reducing their number from four to two really worked (100 minutes is a bit long to listen to anything, even the glorious music of Mozart at the peak of his talents!), though at least it wasn’t as insanely unbalanced as the Met’s recent version of Verdi’s La Traviata, which reduced the original three acts to two by combining the two scenes of Verdi’s (and Francesco Maria Piave’s) Act II and Act III into a single 85-minute act (if they had wanted a two-act Traviata it would have made more sense to spot the intermission between the two scenes of the original Act II, which would at least have kept the two acts of roughly equal length). Still, the Met’s Marriage of Figaro was an excellent production of a truly great opera, and Eyre’s revolving set allowed the scene changes to take place in full view of the audience without spoiling the illusion — though I was amused, given the usual practice of having the secco recitatives accompanied by harpsichord, to read on the Wikipedia page for the opera a quote from a review of the Vienna premiere which specified that Mozart himself played them on an early piano!
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
American Experience: The Big Burn (PBS-TV, produced 2014, aired 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was an American Experience episode on the so-called “Big Burn,” a huge set of wildfires in Montana and Idaho in 1910 that started in separate parts of the recently proclaimed national forests in that area and ultimately converged into a huge firestorm that almost completely wiped out the town of Wallace, Idaho. Apparently this is still the worst fire in U.S. history in terms of the total amount of acreage burned and the property damage — dwarfing such celebrated urban conflagrations as the Chicago fire of 1871 or the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 — and what made this documentary, written and directed by Stephen Ives and based in part on the book The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America by Timothy Egan, especially interesting was how much it was bound up with the overall politics of conservation and in particular the determination of President Theodore Roosevelt and his appointee to head the newly created U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, to set up “national forests” in which logging and other extractive activities would be permitted, but only carefully and sustainably. As I noted before when PBS showed Ken Burns’ documentary The Roosevelts, the idea that a U.S. President — and a Republican President, at that — would take such an interest in preserving nature seems almost science-fictional today (as I was writing the above I got an e-mail from the Audubon Society pleading with me to make a donation to help stop logging of old-growth trees in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, indicating that the Obama Administration is well to the right of T.R. on this issue); the tradition of Republican environmentalism that began with Teddy Roosevelt and ended with Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the other big environmental bills of 1969-70 into law and he and Ford appointed people to the Environmental Protection Agency who were genuinely concerned about protecting the environment) was definitively repudiated by Ronald Reagan, who in his 1980 campaign publicly aligned himself with the so-called “Sagebrush Rebels” who wanted all restrictions on logging and grazing Western lands removed so they could exploit them for short-term profit.
Pinchot was the founding director of the U.S. Forest Service and inspired so much loyalty in his men that they nicknamed themselves “Little G.P.’s,” and even when he was forced out of that position by Roosevelt’s far more reactionary successor, William Howard Taft, he pleaded with his people to remain and continue to fight the good fight to protect America’s natural resources against predatory development. The Big Burn is one of those documentaries that suggests a great fiction film waiting to be made from the material — not only the spectacle of the fire itself (though I suspect most of the footage of fire comes from later blazes because it looks too photographically clear to be from 1910) but the genuine heroism of Ed Pulaski, the forest ranger who set off into the wilderness with a band of men armed with nothing more than shovels and hoes to try to stop the blazes by clearing firebreaks. If nothing else, The Big Burn vividly dramatizes how difficult it is to stop a forest fire, and how much harder it was in 1910 when you couldn’t see it from the air (Pulaski and his men frequently had to walk through the wilderness just to find what parts of it were burning!) and the technology of human flight was just seven years old and hadn’t got anywhere near the ability of planes to “bomb” a fire with fire-retardant chemicals that we take for granted today. (And even with that technology it’s harder than hell to control a really big forest fire — imagine what Pulaski and Richard Greeley had to go through with nothing more than axes, shovels and hoes — indeed, the last part of the show indicates that after 1910 Pulaski continued to live in the Montana wilderness and work on new fire-fighting technology, including a device that combined an ax on one end and a hoe on the other and is still in use today and known by firefighters as a “Pulaski.”)
One of the things that fascinates about this program is that, though the firefighting technology of 1910 seems ass-backwards to us, the political debates are the same — including the intense opposition to forming the U.S. Forest Service at all by some of the same forces that want to get rid of virtually all environmental protection now, including giant corporations making money off uncontrolled environmental exploitation and the politicians who either come from the ranks of the corporate rich themselves or depend for their continuation in office on contributions from those who do. One fascinating detail mentioned in the show is that many of the forest fires of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were caused by sparks from the combustion that powered steam locomotives — and the railroad owners basically told the forest rangers, “Not our problem.” There were also the same familiar plaints from the big logging industries that enforcing controls to preserve the forests would cost loggers their jobs and destroy whole regional economies, and the usual calls for zero regulation of the environment and attempts by the corporados and their handmaidens in Congress to put the Forest Service out of business by starving its budget and cutting its staff. At a time when the takeover of the U.S. government by modern-day anti-environment, anti-labor, anti-middle class, pro-corporate rich Republicans is virtually complete — they now own both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, and only the presidency stands between them and complete control — there’s a sense of tragedy in a program like this, a sense that the idea that the natural resources of the U.S. are a trust we need to use wisely and hold for our heirs is as obsolete and quaint as the one that government (i.e., we, collectively, through our tax money) has a social and moral obligation to pay for the poor, destitute and old.
Like the Ken Burns series The Roosevelts, The Big Burn comes off as much a requiem for a certain vision of social trust as anything else, even though filmmaker Ives tries at the very end of his show to drag in the later criticism of the U.S. Forest Service that by defining its mission as putting out all forest fires, they were unwittingly contributing to the problem by accumulating so much combustible material on the forest floor that when a fire ultimately broke out, it would be that much worse. “I think the fundamental dilemma with the fire suppression policy that Pinchot advocated was, in the end, it was the wrong policy for the land,” historian Chris Miller says towards the end of the program. “It might have been the right policy for the agency, but it’s the wrong policy for the environment.” Yet Timothy Egan, whose book formed part of the basis for the program, says, “By putting out every fire for a hundred years, they created indirectly, what are now some of the greatest wildfires. But imagine now, if this fire had not happened. They might have killed the Forest Service. And with it would’ve gone the idea that’s so embraced by a majority of Americans today, that we have more than 500 million acres that is all of ours, that belongs to each of us. By saving the fledgling idea of conservation, then only a few years old, this fire did save a larger part of America.” Actually I think Egan is wrong — the idea “that we have more than 500 million acres that is all of ours, that belongs to each of us” has become quite unfashionable; it may still be “embraced,” more or less, “by a majority of Americans today,” but the people who are actually being elected to public office today — and the corporate rich who are funding their campaigns — either openly or secretly regard the 1880’s, the peak years of the robber barons, as the American ideal to which we should aspire to return, in which the owners of giant corporations were free to do almost anything they wanted and the whole idea of “the public interest” didn’t exist as a political concept.
The show was an American Experience episode on the so-called “Big Burn,” a huge set of wildfires in Montana and Idaho in 1910 that started in separate parts of the recently proclaimed national forests in that area and ultimately converged into a huge firestorm that almost completely wiped out the town of Wallace, Idaho. Apparently this is still the worst fire in U.S. history in terms of the total amount of acreage burned and the property damage — dwarfing such celebrated urban conflagrations as the Chicago fire of 1871 or the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 — and what made this documentary, written and directed by Stephen Ives and based in part on the book The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America by Timothy Egan, especially interesting was how much it was bound up with the overall politics of conservation and in particular the determination of President Theodore Roosevelt and his appointee to head the newly created U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, to set up “national forests” in which logging and other extractive activities would be permitted, but only carefully and sustainably. As I noted before when PBS showed Ken Burns’ documentary The Roosevelts, the idea that a U.S. President — and a Republican President, at that — would take such an interest in preserving nature seems almost science-fictional today (as I was writing the above I got an e-mail from the Audubon Society pleading with me to make a donation to help stop logging of old-growth trees in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, indicating that the Obama Administration is well to the right of T.R. on this issue); the tradition of Republican environmentalism that began with Teddy Roosevelt and ended with Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the other big environmental bills of 1969-70 into law and he and Ford appointed people to the Environmental Protection Agency who were genuinely concerned about protecting the environment) was definitively repudiated by Ronald Reagan, who in his 1980 campaign publicly aligned himself with the so-called “Sagebrush Rebels” who wanted all restrictions on logging and grazing Western lands removed so they could exploit them for short-term profit.
Pinchot was the founding director of the U.S. Forest Service and inspired so much loyalty in his men that they nicknamed themselves “Little G.P.’s,” and even when he was forced out of that position by Roosevelt’s far more reactionary successor, William Howard Taft, he pleaded with his people to remain and continue to fight the good fight to protect America’s natural resources against predatory development. The Big Burn is one of those documentaries that suggests a great fiction film waiting to be made from the material — not only the spectacle of the fire itself (though I suspect most of the footage of fire comes from later blazes because it looks too photographically clear to be from 1910) but the genuine heroism of Ed Pulaski, the forest ranger who set off into the wilderness with a band of men armed with nothing more than shovels and hoes to try to stop the blazes by clearing firebreaks. If nothing else, The Big Burn vividly dramatizes how difficult it is to stop a forest fire, and how much harder it was in 1910 when you couldn’t see it from the air (Pulaski and his men frequently had to walk through the wilderness just to find what parts of it were burning!) and the technology of human flight was just seven years old and hadn’t got anywhere near the ability of planes to “bomb” a fire with fire-retardant chemicals that we take for granted today. (And even with that technology it’s harder than hell to control a really big forest fire — imagine what Pulaski and Richard Greeley had to go through with nothing more than axes, shovels and hoes — indeed, the last part of the show indicates that after 1910 Pulaski continued to live in the Montana wilderness and work on new fire-fighting technology, including a device that combined an ax on one end and a hoe on the other and is still in use today and known by firefighters as a “Pulaski.”)
One of the things that fascinates about this program is that, though the firefighting technology of 1910 seems ass-backwards to us, the political debates are the same — including the intense opposition to forming the U.S. Forest Service at all by some of the same forces that want to get rid of virtually all environmental protection now, including giant corporations making money off uncontrolled environmental exploitation and the politicians who either come from the ranks of the corporate rich themselves or depend for their continuation in office on contributions from those who do. One fascinating detail mentioned in the show is that many of the forest fires of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were caused by sparks from the combustion that powered steam locomotives — and the railroad owners basically told the forest rangers, “Not our problem.” There were also the same familiar plaints from the big logging industries that enforcing controls to preserve the forests would cost loggers their jobs and destroy whole regional economies, and the usual calls for zero regulation of the environment and attempts by the corporados and their handmaidens in Congress to put the Forest Service out of business by starving its budget and cutting its staff. At a time when the takeover of the U.S. government by modern-day anti-environment, anti-labor, anti-middle class, pro-corporate rich Republicans is virtually complete — they now own both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, and only the presidency stands between them and complete control — there’s a sense of tragedy in a program like this, a sense that the idea that the natural resources of the U.S. are a trust we need to use wisely and hold for our heirs is as obsolete and quaint as the one that government (i.e., we, collectively, through our tax money) has a social and moral obligation to pay for the poor, destitute and old.
Like the Ken Burns series The Roosevelts, The Big Burn comes off as much a requiem for a certain vision of social trust as anything else, even though filmmaker Ives tries at the very end of his show to drag in the later criticism of the U.S. Forest Service that by defining its mission as putting out all forest fires, they were unwittingly contributing to the problem by accumulating so much combustible material on the forest floor that when a fire ultimately broke out, it would be that much worse. “I think the fundamental dilemma with the fire suppression policy that Pinchot advocated was, in the end, it was the wrong policy for the land,” historian Chris Miller says towards the end of the program. “It might have been the right policy for the agency, but it’s the wrong policy for the environment.” Yet Timothy Egan, whose book formed part of the basis for the program, says, “By putting out every fire for a hundred years, they created indirectly, what are now some of the greatest wildfires. But imagine now, if this fire had not happened. They might have killed the Forest Service. And with it would’ve gone the idea that’s so embraced by a majority of Americans today, that we have more than 500 million acres that is all of ours, that belongs to each of us. By saving the fledgling idea of conservation, then only a few years old, this fire did save a larger part of America.” Actually I think Egan is wrong — the idea “that we have more than 500 million acres that is all of ours, that belongs to each of us” has become quite unfashionable; it may still be “embraced,” more or less, “by a majority of Americans today,” but the people who are actually being elected to public office today — and the corporate rich who are funding their campaigns — either openly or secretly regard the 1880’s, the peak years of the robber barons, as the American ideal to which we should aspire to return, in which the owners of giant corporations were free to do almost anything they wanted and the whole idea of “the public interest” didn’t exist as a political concept.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Beautiful & Twisted (Silver Screen Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Lifetime, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Beautiful & Twisted — the ampersand is part of the original title, though imdb.com lists Beautiful and Twisted as an alternative title — directed by someone named Christopher Zalla from a script by Teena Booth (essentially Lifetime’s go-to writer when they can’t get Christine Conradt that week), Stephen Kay, Inon Shampanier and Natalie Shampanier — I’m assuming those last two are a married (straight) couple and I can only hope their real-life relationship is better than the one they wrote about! Beautiful & Twisted is based on an actual story, the murder of hotel heir Ben Novack, Jr. (Rob Lowe) by his wife Narcisa “Narcy” Veliz (Paz Vega — an ironic first name given the morals, or lack thereof, of her character!), Narcy’s brother Cristobal (Hemky Madera) and a couple of hit people in Cristobal’s posse. Ben Novack, Sr. built and ran the famous Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, where Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy all stayed, and though his business eventually went south and he had to sell the hotel (and died a few years later), at the time this story opens his wife, Bernice Novack (played by Candice Bergen in one of those step-aside-youngsters-and-let-the-old-pro-show-you-how-it’s-done performances that essentially steals the movie), is still alive in the big house her husband’s money bought them, with a living room the size of an Astaire-Rogers movie set whose centerpiece is a grand piano given the Novacks by Frank Sinatra.
The film is narrated by Rob Lowe’s character in a posthumous flashback — a gimmick that’s been used in great movies like Sunset Boulevard as well as lousy ones like Scared to Death and that I recall on seeing on at least one previous Lifetime film, The Two Mr. Kissels (about two rich kids done to death by their grasping, gold-digging wives) — as he explains the weird upbringing he had: he lived with his parents in a 17th floor suite at the Fontainebleau and literally never saw any kids his own age. The only women he ever met were dancers and showgirls at the hotel, so naturally when he grew up and came of age sexually dancers and showgirls were the only women he was attracted to — which meant that when he wasn’t pursuing his own business as a convention planner (unlike most of the spoiled rich kids on shows like this, he actually made his own way and achieved business success in his own right) he was hanging out strip clubs and paying handsomely for lap dances. He meets Narcy at one such club, and finds that she’s not willing to leap into bed with him at her first glance at his bankroll — she’s a single mom working as a dancer to raise her daughter May (Soni Bringas), and she’s making a pathetic attempt to shield May from the sordidness of what she does for a living even though the girl is on to her and knows exactly how her mom is keeping the proverbial roof over their heads. Ben falls for Narcy big-time and insists she quit her job and marry him — which is just fine with her — and she’s shown in the film as a full-blown femme fatale in the classic noir manner, keeping Ben (and every other male she encounters, it seems) hopelessly hooked by throwing her sexual wiles at them. (In the opening scene, actually set after Ben’s death, she’s shown flashing her huge silicone-enhanced breasts at a bank clerk and thereby gaining access to the cash he has stashed in his safe-deposit box and transferring it to her own.) The other aspect of Ben’s character that provides interest is he’s a huge devotée of superhero comic books in general and Batman in particular — he boasts that he owns the second-largest collection of Batman memorabilia in the world and he even has a working version of the Batmobile used in the 1960’s Batman TV show — and he compares himself to Batman and Narcy to Catwoman. He rescues her from a drunken club patron who’s trying to rape her in the parking lot (though even before he arrives she’s done such a good job fighting the guy off she hardly seems to need rescue!) and the relationship spirals from there, as in “out of control.”
Apparently he’s into playing the sub role in S/M because handcuffs and whips feature prominently in their sexual sessions, and at one point she actually has her two pet thugs put a hood on him, tie him up, punch him out and hold a gun to his head, threatening to kill him unless he gives her the combination to his basement safe — and, amazingly, she’s later able to convince both him and the cops that he consented to this and it was just an elaborate S/M scene. She’s also a girl with a plan, and the plan is to knock off everyone standing between her and the Novack fortune, starting with Bernice — she slips her poison and she collapses but survives, later she has one of her hit guys club her to death in the parking garage below her home and the cops rule the death an “accident” even though Bernice managed to claw her way into the main house and leave blood all along the trail before finally expiring. A few months after she knocks off Bernice she goes after Ben and finally offs him, slipping out of his room in the wee hours of the morning (they’re at a hotel in upstate New York where his company is putting on a convention) and letting in her brother and the two hit guys, who bludgeon him to death. What she doesn’t reckon with is her own daughter May, whom Ben was about to adopt legally and make her his heir — and who’s since grown up and is now played by Seychelle Gabriel — who manages to get Ben’s assets frozen so her mom can’t run through them and party-hearty on her late husband’s money. She plots to have May killed as well, but the cops arrive just in time, catch her hit man and arrest her. Right after this film Lifetime showed a Beyond the Headlines documentary on the real case, which featured some macabre details not used in the movie — like that one of Ben’s kinks was that he liked to have sex with amputees (there’s a scene in the film in which she blackmails him into dropping charges against her over the kidnapping incident by threatening to release photos of his sex scenes — in the movie we just assume they’re S/M hijinks between the two of them but in real life they were shots of his trysts with amputees), or that when he was killed, not only was he first tied up with duct tape so he couldn’t resist, but his eyes were gouged out with a utility knife (a detailed that sickened even our usually unflappable friend Garry, who was watching this with me), which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that one of Narcy’s hired killers had only one eye.
Beautiful & Twisted is one of those frustrating movies that could have been considerably better than it is — I kept thinking of Double Indemnity throughout, also a story about a decent but weak man entrapped into a murder plot by a sexually aggressive and irresistible femme fatale, and also narrated, if not literally from beyond the grave, at least by a character knocking at heaven’s (or hell’s) door (the narration in Double Indemnity is dictated onto a Dictaphone machine by Fred MacMurray’s character as he is mortally wounded), and wondering how 1940’s people like James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder could get this story so triumphantly right while Christopher Zalla, Teena Booth and the rest of her writing committee got this version … well, not really wrong but also falling far short of the story’s interesting potential. As sleazy as the “documentary” version shown after the main program was, it also indicated a lot of really twisted, kinky directions in which the film version could have gone and didn’t (I’m especially fascinated by the business of Ben liking sex with amputees — including the mechanics of how he would find them, especially in the pre-Internet age!), and either a to-the-max bit of modern kinkiness (which would probably have rendered the film unsuitable for Lifetime) or a more restrained classic noir treatment would have been better than the attempt to thread the needle between them we actually got. Part of the problem is Rob Lowe; given that the biggest off-screen thing anyone remembers about him is his sexual shenanigans in a hotel room during a Democratic convention, it’s almost inevitable that he get cast in things like this and Drew Peterson: Untouchable (in which he was the killer, and he acted considerably better than he did as the victim here!), but there’s something superficial about him, something too light-hearted to make him work as the driven Ben Novack, Jr. Fred MacMurray wasn’t any great shakes as an actor, either, but Wilder got a laconic, emotionally restrained performance out of him that works far better for this type of story than Lowe’s almost terminal charm — it’s as if Lowe and his director and writers desperately wanted us to like this guy and see him as a pathetic victim of a sexual snare, but he’s too much of a sleazepit to make it work and instead we end up thinking through most of the movie that these two deserved each other!
The film was Beautiful & Twisted — the ampersand is part of the original title, though imdb.com lists Beautiful and Twisted as an alternative title — directed by someone named Christopher Zalla from a script by Teena Booth (essentially Lifetime’s go-to writer when they can’t get Christine Conradt that week), Stephen Kay, Inon Shampanier and Natalie Shampanier — I’m assuming those last two are a married (straight) couple and I can only hope their real-life relationship is better than the one they wrote about! Beautiful & Twisted is based on an actual story, the murder of hotel heir Ben Novack, Jr. (Rob Lowe) by his wife Narcisa “Narcy” Veliz (Paz Vega — an ironic first name given the morals, or lack thereof, of her character!), Narcy’s brother Cristobal (Hemky Madera) and a couple of hit people in Cristobal’s posse. Ben Novack, Sr. built and ran the famous Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, where Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy all stayed, and though his business eventually went south and he had to sell the hotel (and died a few years later), at the time this story opens his wife, Bernice Novack (played by Candice Bergen in one of those step-aside-youngsters-and-let-the-old-pro-show-you-how-it’s-done performances that essentially steals the movie), is still alive in the big house her husband’s money bought them, with a living room the size of an Astaire-Rogers movie set whose centerpiece is a grand piano given the Novacks by Frank Sinatra.
The film is narrated by Rob Lowe’s character in a posthumous flashback — a gimmick that’s been used in great movies like Sunset Boulevard as well as lousy ones like Scared to Death and that I recall on seeing on at least one previous Lifetime film, The Two Mr. Kissels (about two rich kids done to death by their grasping, gold-digging wives) — as he explains the weird upbringing he had: he lived with his parents in a 17th floor suite at the Fontainebleau and literally never saw any kids his own age. The only women he ever met were dancers and showgirls at the hotel, so naturally when he grew up and came of age sexually dancers and showgirls were the only women he was attracted to — which meant that when he wasn’t pursuing his own business as a convention planner (unlike most of the spoiled rich kids on shows like this, he actually made his own way and achieved business success in his own right) he was hanging out strip clubs and paying handsomely for lap dances. He meets Narcy at one such club, and finds that she’s not willing to leap into bed with him at her first glance at his bankroll — she’s a single mom working as a dancer to raise her daughter May (Soni Bringas), and she’s making a pathetic attempt to shield May from the sordidness of what she does for a living even though the girl is on to her and knows exactly how her mom is keeping the proverbial roof over their heads. Ben falls for Narcy big-time and insists she quit her job and marry him — which is just fine with her — and she’s shown in the film as a full-blown femme fatale in the classic noir manner, keeping Ben (and every other male she encounters, it seems) hopelessly hooked by throwing her sexual wiles at them. (In the opening scene, actually set after Ben’s death, she’s shown flashing her huge silicone-enhanced breasts at a bank clerk and thereby gaining access to the cash he has stashed in his safe-deposit box and transferring it to her own.) The other aspect of Ben’s character that provides interest is he’s a huge devotée of superhero comic books in general and Batman in particular — he boasts that he owns the second-largest collection of Batman memorabilia in the world and he even has a working version of the Batmobile used in the 1960’s Batman TV show — and he compares himself to Batman and Narcy to Catwoman. He rescues her from a drunken club patron who’s trying to rape her in the parking lot (though even before he arrives she’s done such a good job fighting the guy off she hardly seems to need rescue!) and the relationship spirals from there, as in “out of control.”
Apparently he’s into playing the sub role in S/M because handcuffs and whips feature prominently in their sexual sessions, and at one point she actually has her two pet thugs put a hood on him, tie him up, punch him out and hold a gun to his head, threatening to kill him unless he gives her the combination to his basement safe — and, amazingly, she’s later able to convince both him and the cops that he consented to this and it was just an elaborate S/M scene. She’s also a girl with a plan, and the plan is to knock off everyone standing between her and the Novack fortune, starting with Bernice — she slips her poison and she collapses but survives, later she has one of her hit guys club her to death in the parking garage below her home and the cops rule the death an “accident” even though Bernice managed to claw her way into the main house and leave blood all along the trail before finally expiring. A few months after she knocks off Bernice she goes after Ben and finally offs him, slipping out of his room in the wee hours of the morning (they’re at a hotel in upstate New York where his company is putting on a convention) and letting in her brother and the two hit guys, who bludgeon him to death. What she doesn’t reckon with is her own daughter May, whom Ben was about to adopt legally and make her his heir — and who’s since grown up and is now played by Seychelle Gabriel — who manages to get Ben’s assets frozen so her mom can’t run through them and party-hearty on her late husband’s money. She plots to have May killed as well, but the cops arrive just in time, catch her hit man and arrest her. Right after this film Lifetime showed a Beyond the Headlines documentary on the real case, which featured some macabre details not used in the movie — like that one of Ben’s kinks was that he liked to have sex with amputees (there’s a scene in the film in which she blackmails him into dropping charges against her over the kidnapping incident by threatening to release photos of his sex scenes — in the movie we just assume they’re S/M hijinks between the two of them but in real life they were shots of his trysts with amputees), or that when he was killed, not only was he first tied up with duct tape so he couldn’t resist, but his eyes were gouged out with a utility knife (a detailed that sickened even our usually unflappable friend Garry, who was watching this with me), which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that one of Narcy’s hired killers had only one eye.
Beautiful & Twisted is one of those frustrating movies that could have been considerably better than it is — I kept thinking of Double Indemnity throughout, also a story about a decent but weak man entrapped into a murder plot by a sexually aggressive and irresistible femme fatale, and also narrated, if not literally from beyond the grave, at least by a character knocking at heaven’s (or hell’s) door (the narration in Double Indemnity is dictated onto a Dictaphone machine by Fred MacMurray’s character as he is mortally wounded), and wondering how 1940’s people like James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder could get this story so triumphantly right while Christopher Zalla, Teena Booth and the rest of her writing committee got this version … well, not really wrong but also falling far short of the story’s interesting potential. As sleazy as the “documentary” version shown after the main program was, it also indicated a lot of really twisted, kinky directions in which the film version could have gone and didn’t (I’m especially fascinated by the business of Ben liking sex with amputees — including the mechanics of how he would find them, especially in the pre-Internet age!), and either a to-the-max bit of modern kinkiness (which would probably have rendered the film unsuitable for Lifetime) or a more restrained classic noir treatment would have been better than the attempt to thread the needle between them we actually got. Part of the problem is Rob Lowe; given that the biggest off-screen thing anyone remembers about him is his sexual shenanigans in a hotel room during a Democratic convention, it’s almost inevitable that he get cast in things like this and Drew Peterson: Untouchable (in which he was the killer, and he acted considerably better than he did as the victim here!), but there’s something superficial about him, something too light-hearted to make him work as the driven Ben Novack, Jr. Fred MacMurray wasn’t any great shakes as an actor, either, but Wilder got a laconic, emotionally restrained performance out of him that works far better for this type of story than Lowe’s almost terminal charm — it’s as if Lowe and his director and writers desperately wanted us to like this guy and see him as a pathetic victim of a sexual snare, but he’s too much of a sleazepit to make it work and instead we end up thinking through most of the movie that these two deserved each other!
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Shakespeare Uncovered: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (BBC-TV, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched an episode of Shakespeare Uncovered, a quite interesting British TV series for which so far imdb.com lists only one season (and the PBS Web site is even less helpful; instead of offering printed transcripts, cast and crew lists, all they seem to have for their shows these days is video links so you can stream the program itself — hey, guys, I’ve already seen it; now, how about some of the honest-to-goodness information your site used to provide in the days before social media?) but there is a second one, and this episode featured British actor Hugh Bonneville (who, blessedly, pronounced the “t” in “often”!) expounding on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and talking about three recent productions of it as well as reminiscing about his professional acting debut in a 1968 production at an open-air theatre in London (called, simply and directly, “Open-Air Theatre”) understudying the role of Lysander, the principal romantic lead, for another actor who went on to an even more illustrious career than his: Ralph Fiennes. There were brief clips from the first film ever made of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — a one-reel American silent from 1909 — as well as the first talking version, produced by Warner Bros. in 1935 and directed by Max Reinhardt (based on his famous stage production of the play) with the incidental music composed by Felix Mendelssohn in the 19th century and adapted here by Erich Wolfgang Korngold for his first job in films. Ironically, Bonneville’s narration argued that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s best-constructed plays while I, in my blog post on the Reinhardt film, felt the other way about it: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most charming plays but also one of his least well structured; the three interlocking plots — the battle of Athenian prince Theseus (Ian Hunter, a British actor who delivers the Shakespearean dialogue idiomatically enough but seems so hammy he practically glues himself to the lens) to get the bride he’s forced to marry him, Amazonian queen Hippolyta (the Athenians have just defeated the Amazons in battle and she’s his prize for the victory), to love him; the interlocking romantic intrigues of Lysander (Dick Powell, pushing his naturally high voice even higher than usual and responding to the challenge of acting Shakespeare by speaking as if he sucked on helium before each take), Hermia (Olivia de Havilland), Demetrius (real-life Bisexual Ross Alexander, who looks so queeny in this one you wonder why he and Powell don’t pair up and leave the women alone) and Helena (Jean Muir); and the intrigue among the fairies and also the proletarian players who are anxious to win the lifetime pension offered to anyone who performs a show at Theseus’ and Hippolyta’s wedding — don’t really reflect each other that well and often get in each other’s way.”
Where the show was strongest was in exploring the performance tradition of the play, including its virtual disappearance from the British stage for 200 years (all theatre was banned in Britain under the Taliban-like rule of “Lord Protector” Oliver Cromwell in the 1650’s but most of Shakespeare’s plays returned to British stages after the Restoration), explained mainly due to producers’ and audiences’ discomfort about the supernatural elements: fairies, love potions, a human turned into a donkey, and the like. Even when it was performed it was frequently done in mutilated versions in which at least one of the three separate levels of characters — the ordinary people in and around the Athenian court, the fairies and the so-called “Mechanicals,” the proletarians putting on a play about star-crossed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe (quite obviously a Shakespearean self-parody of Romeo and Juliet!) — were removed. I remembered the Reinhardt film as sometimes magnificent and sometimes maddening, but the clips from it shown in the Shakespeare Uncovered episode — particularly of James Cagney’s great performance as Bottom (his edgy combination of masculine toughness and quirky vulnerability absolutely blew away all the prissily “correct” British actors we saw clips of from later productions!) — were welcome. A Midsummer Night’s Dream might be considered the first (or one of the first; Christopher Marlowe’s and Samuel Rowley’s Doctor Faustus also might be counted if it weren’t so obviously the work of two separate people, with Marlowe’s magisterial language in the first and last acts and mostly Rowley’s comic-relief prose in between) examples of a post-modern play (well, Shakespeare invented so many of the conventions of the modern theatre, why shouldn’t he be credited with inventing post-modernism as well?), with its wrenching gear shifts in tone and genre and its overall impression of a work almost terminally at war with itself. Shakespeare is believed to have written it not for a production at the Globe Theatre, his usual stamping ground, but for a private performance at the second wedding of the Earl of Oxford’s mother (you know, Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford, who some contentious goons regard as the “real” author of Shakespeare’s plays with the Man from Stratford serving merely as “front” — as opposed to the people who think Christopher Marlowe was the “real” Shakespeare, both theories that have a lot of ’splainin’ to do about how new Shakespeare plays continued to appear after both DeVere and Marlowe were dead), which makes it odd that he should have written a script that was so cynical about love (it’s the source of the famous cliché about how “the course of true love never did run smooth”) and in which the long-term married couple, fairy King Oberon and Queen Titania, are the biggest butts of the jokes.
Like most of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is greater than any one production of it — it’s been chopped, channeled and run through the modern meatgrinder of Regietheater, including one abominable-looking production we get clips of by Peter Brook in 1970 which dispensed with real forests (or the usual stage simulacra thereof) and had the action staged in front of a backdrop of geometric lines with the actors suspended above the stage like performers in Cirque du Soleil (which, to Brook’s credit, didn’t yet exist when he did this production). What comes through most from this show is how sophisticated a writer Shakespeare really was — when the four fairy-crossed lovers meet in the woods after the love potion has scrambled their affections, Shakespeare writes first in rhyming couplets and then switches to blank verse as the emotional mood grows darker and more “serious” — and this play just adds to the Shakespeare enigma, that an author from a relatively humble background who may not even have been able to read or write (I’ve long suspected that one reason we have no original manuscript pages from Shakespeare’s plays and few documents bearing his signature is he may never have learned to read or write and may have written the plays by dictation) could create such works not only of everlasting linguistic beauty but structural literary complexity as well. What, one wonders, did the groundlings at the Globe make of these plays when they were new? Did they realize they were watching something special, or did they just sit through them the way modern moviegoers sit through an action film, waiting through the exposition for the big effects scenes to happen?
I watched an episode of Shakespeare Uncovered, a quite interesting British TV series for which so far imdb.com lists only one season (and the PBS Web site is even less helpful; instead of offering printed transcripts, cast and crew lists, all they seem to have for their shows these days is video links so you can stream the program itself — hey, guys, I’ve already seen it; now, how about some of the honest-to-goodness information your site used to provide in the days before social media?) but there is a second one, and this episode featured British actor Hugh Bonneville (who, blessedly, pronounced the “t” in “often”!) expounding on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and talking about three recent productions of it as well as reminiscing about his professional acting debut in a 1968 production at an open-air theatre in London (called, simply and directly, “Open-Air Theatre”) understudying the role of Lysander, the principal romantic lead, for another actor who went on to an even more illustrious career than his: Ralph Fiennes. There were brief clips from the first film ever made of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — a one-reel American silent from 1909 — as well as the first talking version, produced by Warner Bros. in 1935 and directed by Max Reinhardt (based on his famous stage production of the play) with the incidental music composed by Felix Mendelssohn in the 19th century and adapted here by Erich Wolfgang Korngold for his first job in films. Ironically, Bonneville’s narration argued that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s best-constructed plays while I, in my blog post on the Reinhardt film, felt the other way about it: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most charming plays but also one of his least well structured; the three interlocking plots — the battle of Athenian prince Theseus (Ian Hunter, a British actor who delivers the Shakespearean dialogue idiomatically enough but seems so hammy he practically glues himself to the lens) to get the bride he’s forced to marry him, Amazonian queen Hippolyta (the Athenians have just defeated the Amazons in battle and she’s his prize for the victory), to love him; the interlocking romantic intrigues of Lysander (Dick Powell, pushing his naturally high voice even higher than usual and responding to the challenge of acting Shakespeare by speaking as if he sucked on helium before each take), Hermia (Olivia de Havilland), Demetrius (real-life Bisexual Ross Alexander, who looks so queeny in this one you wonder why he and Powell don’t pair up and leave the women alone) and Helena (Jean Muir); and the intrigue among the fairies and also the proletarian players who are anxious to win the lifetime pension offered to anyone who performs a show at Theseus’ and Hippolyta’s wedding — don’t really reflect each other that well and often get in each other’s way.”
Where the show was strongest was in exploring the performance tradition of the play, including its virtual disappearance from the British stage for 200 years (all theatre was banned in Britain under the Taliban-like rule of “Lord Protector” Oliver Cromwell in the 1650’s but most of Shakespeare’s plays returned to British stages after the Restoration), explained mainly due to producers’ and audiences’ discomfort about the supernatural elements: fairies, love potions, a human turned into a donkey, and the like. Even when it was performed it was frequently done in mutilated versions in which at least one of the three separate levels of characters — the ordinary people in and around the Athenian court, the fairies and the so-called “Mechanicals,” the proletarians putting on a play about star-crossed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe (quite obviously a Shakespearean self-parody of Romeo and Juliet!) — were removed. I remembered the Reinhardt film as sometimes magnificent and sometimes maddening, but the clips from it shown in the Shakespeare Uncovered episode — particularly of James Cagney’s great performance as Bottom (his edgy combination of masculine toughness and quirky vulnerability absolutely blew away all the prissily “correct” British actors we saw clips of from later productions!) — were welcome. A Midsummer Night’s Dream might be considered the first (or one of the first; Christopher Marlowe’s and Samuel Rowley’s Doctor Faustus also might be counted if it weren’t so obviously the work of two separate people, with Marlowe’s magisterial language in the first and last acts and mostly Rowley’s comic-relief prose in between) examples of a post-modern play (well, Shakespeare invented so many of the conventions of the modern theatre, why shouldn’t he be credited with inventing post-modernism as well?), with its wrenching gear shifts in tone and genre and its overall impression of a work almost terminally at war with itself. Shakespeare is believed to have written it not for a production at the Globe Theatre, his usual stamping ground, but for a private performance at the second wedding of the Earl of Oxford’s mother (you know, Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford, who some contentious goons regard as the “real” author of Shakespeare’s plays with the Man from Stratford serving merely as “front” — as opposed to the people who think Christopher Marlowe was the “real” Shakespeare, both theories that have a lot of ’splainin’ to do about how new Shakespeare plays continued to appear after both DeVere and Marlowe were dead), which makes it odd that he should have written a script that was so cynical about love (it’s the source of the famous cliché about how “the course of true love never did run smooth”) and in which the long-term married couple, fairy King Oberon and Queen Titania, are the biggest butts of the jokes.
Like most of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is greater than any one production of it — it’s been chopped, channeled and run through the modern meatgrinder of Regietheater, including one abominable-looking production we get clips of by Peter Brook in 1970 which dispensed with real forests (or the usual stage simulacra thereof) and had the action staged in front of a backdrop of geometric lines with the actors suspended above the stage like performers in Cirque du Soleil (which, to Brook’s credit, didn’t yet exist when he did this production). What comes through most from this show is how sophisticated a writer Shakespeare really was — when the four fairy-crossed lovers meet in the woods after the love potion has scrambled their affections, Shakespeare writes first in rhyming couplets and then switches to blank verse as the emotional mood grows darker and more “serious” — and this play just adds to the Shakespeare enigma, that an author from a relatively humble background who may not even have been able to read or write (I’ve long suspected that one reason we have no original manuscript pages from Shakespeare’s plays and few documents bearing his signature is he may never have learned to read or write and may have written the plays by dictation) could create such works not only of everlasting linguistic beauty but structural literary complexity as well. What, one wonders, did the groundlings at the Globe make of these plays when they were new? Did they realize they were watching something special, or did they just sit through them the way modern moviegoers sit through an action film, waiting through the exposition for the big effects scenes to happen?
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