THE DEARTH OF MUSIC

 

If you are among those who thought the musical theatre suffered an irreparable blow with the demise of Stephen Sondheim, let me introduce you to This is Me… Now, a visual extravaganza for Netflix, conceived by and starring Jennifer Lopez. It is a major music video that advances the form in at least in one sense… taking it from being a visual interpretation of one “song” to an entire album of “songs.”

Note the quotation marks on “song” and “songs.” I am of the wrong generation for this kind of music… or, for that matter, this kind of choreography.

I am not too old, however, to appreciate J.Lo’s looks, her body, or her sensual approach for this work that she has chosen. It is just the pretense that this whole Superbowl-halftime-thing is an actual art form that has me shaking my head in despair.

Let’s go back. The art direction (meaning, in this case, the sets), spectacular. Decent special effects, an all-star supporting cast in stuff that borders on the silly, and J.Lo, soaking wet, scantily clad, rolling around in the muck and mire. Folks used to get arrested for this kind of thing.

Not too deeply buried in this display is J.Lo’s homage to Hollywood, her childhood fantasies, and her advocacy for psychotherapy. It is an odd movie… even with a lot of credits it only (mercifully) runs for just over one hour. It is a long time to watch anything with one’s jaw open, but I found a remedy for that.

Immediately after completing the 60 plus minutes on Netflix, I quickly switched over to YouTube where for more than an hour and a half I watched film clips from old Hollywood musicals until happily satiated.

Fred & Ginger, Gene Kelly, Doris Day, Rita Hayworth, Cyd Charisse, Robert Preston, Shirley Jones, Debbie Reynolds, Danny Kaye, Fosse & Verdon. Now… that’s entertainment. And a cure for just about anything, including This is Me… Now.

It was NOT the musical that took me on my recent trek to New York City. I went there to see Tyne Daly in Doubt, the play by John Patrick Shanley. Health concerns took my friend and former colleague out of the play but there was no abandoning the trip. My long-time pal, Joe Feury, was displaying his most recent art work as a benefit for Ukraine and I was bound to show up for that. You want to talk about star-crossed… Joey’s beautiful and Academy Award winning spouse, Lee Grant, took a fall at the event and fractured her hip. Not to worry. Lee has been doing Pilates and Yoga for years and, as a result, is recovering faster than any of us believed possible. Of course, dinner at their home had to be canceled so what with no Tyne Daly on stage and no Lee Grant at home there were nights to be filled and, predictably, we chose the musical theatre.

Too bad. It meant missing two apparently great straight play presentations, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and a Shanley play that I have never seen but have been told is terrific, Brooklyn Laundry. It proves, once again, that even so-called pros at the game need to do their homework before launching into the Big Apple.

The musical theatre did allow me to catch up with last year’s Tony winner, Kimberly Akimbo… a worthwhile couple of hours spent in the theatre with a couple of stand-out performances from Victoria Clark and Bonnie Milligan and one of the more understandably dysfunctional families ever presented on stage.

And then there was Days of Wine and Roses… admiration of this (I think) ill-conceived venture may depend on one’s level of musical education. It far exceeded mine, forcing me to now confess my lack of appreciation for the discordant. Remember Henry Mancini’s Academy Award winning theme song from the 1962 motion picture of the same name starring Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon? Well, fuhgeddaboudit. You will find nothing so melodious in this stage version featuring the often-fabulous Kelli O’Hara and the always-reliable Brian d’Arcy James.

Both these folks can sing, and the composer seems to know this by allowing them a pretty note at the end of each “song” which they are allowed to hold long enough for what I suppose is meant to be some kind of dramatic effect. That one final note is the closest you will get to a melody the entire evening.

The play is one hour and forty-five minutes and there is no intermission. The reason for this is at least two-fold: first, it is an easy bet that liquor sales would be way down during any interlude at this show and, I would guess of even greater importance, is the suspicion that if there were an intermission, half the audience would not return for the second act.

So far two musicals back-to-back and I cannot remember two notes that could be strung together from either or both combined. That was also true for our third musical, but at least Water For Elephants had its moments of promise… not so much in the musical idiom… but it was, I thought, staged beautifully, and performed expertly. Kudos to the director, especially with the stampede sequence near show’s end. Unlike the movie of the same name, this newly opened show is a fine theatrical tribute to the excellent Sara Gruen novel of the same name.

Finally, my wife and her gal pals all but dragged me to The Notebook… based on the super sentimental motion picture starring Gena Rowlands, James Garner and a then very young, and new to all of us, Ryan Gosling. I never read the book, but I remember the movie had its impact even on someone who usually thinks of this kind of thing as rather treacle-like.

There are no great songs. No “Some Enchanted Evening” or “If Ever I Would Leave You”… and that is a shame because they would really work here. Still, the music that is there serves the show and its characters well even if it will not make the “Ah, yes, I Remember it Well” song list a few years hence. It is okay. The show works. And there is not a dry eye in the house (including either of mine).

It was a good night in the theatre and a lovely surprise for me. The first actor on the stage, the show’s leading man… is Dorian Harewood, one of the stars of my long-ago series, The Trials of Rosie O’Neill. I have not seen Dorian in over thirty years, and it was a thrill to find him back on Broadway.

There was another self-serving benefit for this old guy. For years I could not go to a Broadway show without seeing an actor up there on the stage that I had worked with either on Cagney & Lacey or some other show of mine. The mini bios in the Playbill almost always had a mention or two of an actor’s credits which included a show produced by me. That hasn’t happened in a long time… one of the disadvantages of living too long.

I confess, it made me feel a lot more relevant to see the bio of the number one actor in the play… there in the number one position in the Playbill… and among the listed credits of which he was proud, The Trials of Rosie O’Neill.

After the show, the crowd at The Notebook’s stage door proved too difficult for me to navigate and so I missed congratulating Dorian in person. On the plus side, there was, in that sizable and enthusiastic crowd, proof positive just how entertaining this show is.

What a concept. But apparently it is not as obvious as one would think. The very basic, fundamental thing… no matter who you think you are now… is to make sure that if nothing else, a show must be entertaining… should be on page one of every producer’s notebook.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

HAIL TO THE VICTORS

If you laid some money down on this year’s Academy Award presentations you had to walk away with most of the cash in the betting pool… assuming your ballot was based on what was written here.

To begin with there was Robert Downey Jr., Emma Stone, Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer, and Poor Things, followed by the skunking of Scorsese’s ode to a partial history of the Osage Indians in Oklahoma’s early 20^th century (Killers of the Flower Moon), and the Leonard Bernstein flick, Maestro.

One-trophy winners from the ultra-popular (and successful) Barbie, The Holdovers, and American Fiction validated the under-achieving mentions they were given in this space over the past several weeks.

Finally, it must be conceded that Zone of Interest far exceeded my expectations with a win for best sound and “Best International Feature Film.” Honest, it wasn’t… no matter what my granddaughter Greer has to say to the contrary.

The Academy show, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, was good, not too long, and Ryan Gosling all but stole the show with his Ken bit from Barbie. I could go on, but there is an empty suitcase that needs to be packed for tomorrow’s trip to the Big Apple and a few Broadway shows about which I have yet to get excited.

More on all of that to come once I return to the balmy breezes of my warm island.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

LIFE AND ART

In the grand cosmos of filmdom, if asked about a movie portraying one of history’s horrific tyrants, readers of these columns might well gravitate to Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Perhaps Broderick Crawford’s Willie Stark in All The King’s Men, maybe Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, or Ian McKellen’s Richard III.

Here in Miami, what many refer to as the capital of Latin America, it could readily be understood if the despot who came to the forefront in such a poll was Augusto Pinochet and his nearly 17-year reign of terror that visited Chile in the last century.

Put that story in the hands of an inventive filmmaker who elects to tell this tale in a stylized motion picture, making the dictator even more of a monster than first realized. Imagine: what if Pinochet were a 250-year-old vampire… one who quite literally and figuratively was sucking the blood out of his countrymen?

You could then, if you were enough of a visionary, amplify all of that by taking on the cinematic styling of the films of the German expressionists of the silent era, then bring it all up to date with the reveal that the mother of this horrific monster is none other than the Iron Lady, England’s Margaret Thatcher. Do all that, and you will find yourself smack in the middle of El Conde… one of the more surprising motion pictures of this… or any other year.

Do not make of this review more than it is. This picture is not for everyone. Still, it is a lot more than I ever thought I was getting into when I naively sat in that darkened room to see Pablo Larrain’ s brilliant piece of political satire.

You may know of Larrain from such Academy nominated films as Neruda, Jackie, Spencer, or No, but you will have to wait a long time to see him top this latest work. El Conde can be screened on Netflix in the original Spanish; steel yourself.

Also from Latin America is the Academy nominated feature, Society of the Snow… the story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed while attempting to cross the Andes mountains. This is a true story of heroism, sacrifice, and the will to live, magnificently and emotionally recreated by director J.A. Bayona and his wonderful ensemble of young actors. Once again the viewer finds himself in Chile, this time with a straightforward narrative that emulates a great documentary. Once again, your Netflix subscription proves its worth.

Golda, a motion picture starring Helen Mirren, presents this reviewer with some problems of objectivity and memory. It was not that many years ago that I hoped to produce the play Golda’s Balcony by William Gibson with actress Annette Miller. Someone else got the privilege of mounting the play in New York with Tovah Feldshuh where it had a record-breaking run. There was also the version of the same events written by my friend Renee Taylor in her An Evening with Golda Meir.

Both Renee’s version and playwright Gibson’s were, in my judgment (and to the best of my memory), far superior to this motion picture, directed by Guy Nattiv from a screenplay written by Nicholas Martin.

The failure here is one of simple storytelling. There is a vast amount of stuff that makes up the life and times of Golda Meir and this skimpy flick doesn’t even attempt to scratch the surface.

The film focuses on events in and around the Yom Kippur War of 1973. It assumes, more than fifty years after the fact, that its audience will know who Moshe Dayan is/was, and what this once dashing figure meant to millions of Jews all over the world. “The fog of war” takes on even greater significance in this overly confusing depiction of events. None of this, I hasten to add, is Helen Mirren’s fault.

Ms. Mirren is always interesting, and I will forever be grateful to her for the kind words she has often shared with her public about the influence of my series, Cagney & Lacey, on her own career. It is not because of her that this movie is as flat as it is. Even great actresses need dialogue and, if memory serves, both Ms. Taylor’s one woman show, and Gibson’s play relied heavily on memoir material that is in the public domain and therefore available to screenwriter Martin. Some of that material could have been… should have been… in this movie.

Golda Meir was one fascinating woman but most of that came through her great wit… unfortunately, little of that comes through in the screenplay of this motion picture which, if you must, you can see on Amazon Prime or Hulu.

As to wit and political savvy, nearly two years before he died in a Siberian prison camp, a documentary was produced featuring Alexei Navalny, the Russian opponent of Vladimir Putin. It is also on Amazon Prime and Hulu and you should see it.

The 98-minute documentary clarifies… assuming you had some doubt… just what it was Mr. Putin had to fear from this charismatic, camera-ready individual who believed his destiny was to confront the current corrupt regime in “Mother Russia” and to ultimately engage the country in a debate about its future.

The film also reveals shocking details of the plot to assassinate Navalny… shocking, not only in its purpose but in the stupidity of the perpetrators. It also predicts (naively) a brighter future… one, which we now all know, Navalny did not live to see.

True, the film does not go so far as to show Putin, cape unfurled, flying over Moscow in a quest for blood before sunrise, but this is, after all, a documentary, not  political satire. Besides, who among us really knows what happens in the Kremlin after dark?

 

Barney Rosenzweig