First came Bruce. Then: theatre. After that: television. And now, finally, to finish the Write All Nite quaternary: film.
Continue reading “CINEMA CAPSULES: An Introduction and ‘The Magnificent Seven’”
Author: Steven Strauss
The Nobels They Are a-Changin’
Unless you’ve been living under a cultural rock for the last week, you’ve probably heard about the hullabaloo created by the Nobel Prize for Literature being awarded to Bob Dylan. I’ve mostly avoided getting involved in the subsequent raging debates – which have basically focused on whether or not a songwriter should be eligible for a literature prize, a question that seems to have been predominantly posed by prose writers trying to protect the pure legitimacy of one of the few prestigious prizes bestowed upon their artistic medium of choice – but an impassioned Facebook post that popped up in my newsfeed this morning inspired me to join the fray. Its author – responding to this article in The Guardian about Dylan’s refusal to accept or deny or even comment on this distinction – had this to say:
Cameron Mackintosh (and Louis C.K.?) Say No to This
Leave it to a Brit to find a (potential) solution to a problem that has long plagued the theatre community.[1]
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I – and Now Tony – Told You So…
A majority of what I wrote regarding the disappointing current Broadway revival of Cats focused on its creative team having the lazy gall simply to re-stage basically their same work from the original 1982 production. I’m not going to take a page from their book and just re-hash what I wrote in that piece, but I did want to call your attention to this little bit of news:
ALL THE WAYS TO SAY I LOVE YOU: Please, Sir, I Want Some More
Neil LaBute has spent the majority of his career deconstructing the societal taboos that most people mindlessly adopt with nary a thought to their validity. With All the Ways to Say I Love You – the first play of MCC Theater’s 30th anniversary season, of which Mr. LaBute is the playwright-in-residence – he sets his sights on exploring the morality of the hot-button issue of teachers forging “inappropriate” relationships with their underage students. Those textual air quotes are basically the crux of the play: even though almost everyone would immediately write-off such a relationship as immoral and thus inappropriate, this one-woman show strives to understand the psychology that drove the female teacher at its center to engage in such near-universally agreed upon immorality. This understanding will hopefully elicit empathy for a visibly tortured soul whose perspective they never even considered, which has long been one of the foundational goals of drama since its origins in Greek tragedy.
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CATS: Don’t Let the Memory Live Again
I spent much of the duration of the current Broadway revival of Cats pondering not what the felines prowling around on stage in front of me were doing but rather the Great White Way-wide implications of this production’s chosen tagline:
OCTOBER SKY: A Launch with No Landing
80% of all Broadway musicals fail to make money, which is only a fraction of the total number of musicals that fail to even make it to Broadway at all.
This statistic has absolutely nothing to do with the new musical adaptation of October Sky, currently playing a self-labeled pre-Broadway tryout at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, one of the most prestigious regional theatres in the world that has shepherded such recent fare as Bright Star, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels to the Great White Way. Even so, I feel the need to open this review with this little factoid because it’s essential to understanding why October Sky exists, because almost nothing that audiences can actually see and hear on the Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage in this tolerable-at-best musical justifies its excessively familiar existence.
SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS (Theatre Capsule)
I know that I’m excessively late to this party, but holy cow I’d be surprised if I see five better plays this season than Small Mouth Sounds. It’s a prime example of what happens when you actually present the work of young, diverse voices – in this case, two women: playwright Bess Wohl and director Rachel Chavkin. Hopefully this boosts the careers of these two phenomenal talents in the same way that Circle Mirror Transformation enhanced the profiles of Annie Baker and Sam Gold (pretty lofty company!). If you can see it by Sunday, DO SO. If you can’t, I’m sure that it will – as it should – be produced in so many regional theatres all across the country in the near future. If it comes to your city, do yourself a favor and purchase a ticket – very few other plays in recent memory so encapsulate the special human alchemy of live theatre.
The HIGHly Bearable MAINTENANCE of Being
Previous defenders of High Maintenance – one of HBO’s newest television series – have made sure to classify it as neither a show about marijuana nor a marijuana show; instead, they’ve tried at every juncture to clarify that though the main character is a drug dealer, he and his demonic green stuff is only tangentially related to the far more dignified, existential focus of creators Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair (who also plays the character of the dealer, named simply “The Guy”). Though that assertion may sound valid after a peripheral examination of the pilot, such an archaic separation between the bafflingly still illicit drug and the philosophic, thematic underpinnings of the series fails to convey the depth of thoughts that the husband-and-wife team of Blichfeld and Sinclair are trying to communicate regarding the relationship between marijuana and the everyday angst of everyday people simply trying to get through their everyday lives with their sanity intact…or rather, highly maintained. High Maintenance is very much a marijuana show about marijuana, but like all superb art, the series simply uses its misunderstood subject as a jumping off point to explore the common struggles of being in the 21st century. Through that commonality of shared experience, we – smokers and non-smokers alike – should find comfort in knowing that we can rely on the lives of others to help us through our own, which is one of the foundational tenets of all great art. And High Maintenance, not so much despite of but rather because of its seemingly quotidian subject matter, is great art.
CAT STEVENS: There’s a Million Things to Be
When I told my father that I was lucky enough to snag a ticket to Cat Steven’s second of two nights at New York City’s legendary Beacon Theatre, he asked, “Are you sure you won’t be seeing Yusuf Islam?” That question encapsulates this once-brilliant artist’s troubled modern legacy, and probably echoes the reservations of many of his fans debating whether or not to catch A Cat’s Attic: Yusuf/Cat Stevens 50 Year Anniversary Tour 2016. Though that mouthful of a name may not answer the question, I’m happy to report that if you’re lucky enough to live in a city where the tour plans to stop, then you’re promised a night that predominantly features the songs that we all know and love by the artist whose name appears on the latter half of that slash.
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