onesmallheart

Addams Family the counter article

2010-04-28T21:54:00.002-04:00

A scene from “The Addams Family,” featuring Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane, which opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater

Published: April 13, 2010

The new Broadway musical “The Addams Family” opened Thursday to the sort of scathing reviews that would bury most shows in the graveyard next to the Addamses’ forbidding mansion.

Skip to next paragraph

ArtsBeat: "The Addams Family," A Critic-Proof Smash, Readers Respond

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A scene from “The Addams Family,” featuring Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane, which opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.

By PATRICK HEALY

Published: April 13, 2010

The new Broadway musical “The Addams Family” opened Thursday to the sort of scathing reviews that would bury most shows in the graveyard next to the Addamses’ forbidding mansion.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Kevin Chamberlin as Uncle Fester and Jackie Hoffman as Grandma performing onstage in “The Addams Family.”

The result: The show sold $851,000 in tickets last weekend on top of a $15 million sales advance, huge figures for a new Broadway run, and all but guaranteeing that it will be hard to snag a pair of good orchestra seats until fall. After five months of well-publicized creative difficulties for the show, this seeming paradox amounts to a theater world version of the golden fleece: the critic-proof smash.

Hollywood, pop music studios and book publishers long ago mastered the art of assembling commercially successful products that critics hate. Theater is different: Only a fraction of shows turn a profit to begin with (about 30 percent on Broadway each year), and expensive tickets, fixed performance schedules and a finite potential audience for most live theater increase the importance of reviews.

Yet “The Addams Family” seems to have cracked a formula that to various degrees made long-running hits of “Jekyll & Hyde,” “Beauty and the Beast,” ”Mamma Mia!” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” after being dismissed by many critics. Such shows have tended to attract audiences already fond of their songs or characters.

That formula for “The Addams Family” includes a beloved brand-name title, a famous star, an inoffensive script, echoes of nostalgia and some savvy commercial judgments. The producers chose a theater with an unusually large number of orchestra seats, many of which they can sell at premium prices that top out at $300 apiece. And, in an unusual move for Broadway, they recruited five regional theaters as producing partners, spreading the financial risk while also having access to their subscribers and to those theaters for a national tour.

While the creators promised to base the musical on Charles Addams’s mordantly sophisticated cartoons in The New Yorker, they ended up adding the theme song of the “Addams Family” television show for the audience to snap-snap along with before the curtain even goes up. In hopes of improving the show between a Chicago tryout and its Broadway run, they also added broad, sometimes goofy touches like a toupee-wearing Uncle Fester and a Grandma dressed like a Red Cross nurse — images that make some people laugh, but belie the darker spirit of the Addams cartoons for others.

The producers also built a marketing campaign that would cover all the bases, using images that would remind people of the cartoons, the television show, and the “Addams Family” movies. And the casting of Nathan Lane to play the paterfamilias Gomez, through at least next March, has been especially important to the musical’s fortunes, according to several theater producers not affiliated with the show, given that he is a popular actor with both theater- and film-goers.

“If Nathan Lane is in anything you already have my money in the till, and I imagine that there are thousands of others who feel the same,” said Michael Ritchie, artistic director of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, which is not associated with “The Addams Family.”

Whether the musical — which cost $16.5 million to mount on Broadway — can flourish without a well-known star like Mr. Lane is among the factors that will determine whether the show endures as critic-proof. Based on 26 major reviews for “The Addams Family,” including one in The New York Times, the theater Web site Stagegrade.com gave the show a median grade of D+. For now, however, the musical has grossed $6.5 million in five weeks — more than current hit musicals like “A Little Night Music,” “Billy Elliot,” “West Side Story” and “Wicked” did in their early weeks — and the producers are already planning a multicity national tour.

“We sought to create a musical that was not only very funny, but also surprised the audience by proving to be touching as well,” Roy Furman, one of the lead producers of the show, said in an interview by e-mail. “We are delighted that audiences have responded so strongly, as evidenced by nightly ovations, and word of mouth, which has sparked advance sales.”

Four years in the making, “The Addams Family” had a pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago last winter, drawing huge crowds but mixed reviews from critics there. Those reviews prompted Mr. Furman and the other lead producer, Stuart Oken, to hire the veteran Broadway director Jerry Zaks to take over the show from its two directors, the Broadway newcomers Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, and ostensibly fix “The Addams Family” before opening in New York.

Mr. Zaks, in fact, did not make many changes in the show, based on two viewings in Chicago and two in New York. The characterizations and pacing remained mostly the same. Most structural changes, meanwhile, came in the first act and were designed to introduce “the family and its eccentricities” more clearly, Mr. Oken said by e-mail.

(Page 2 of 2)

The Chicago opening number, “Clandango,” with the family singing in a cemetery, featured the character Wednesday in a coffin and chorus members holding tombstones as they danced. A new opener for Broadway, “When You’re An Addams,” is more lighthearted and generic, with Mr. Lane giving commands to the dancing family and chorus members: “Bunny hop!” “Do the twist!” “Death rattle!”

song and subplot about the sex life of Gomez and Morticia (played by Bebe Neuwirth) was cut for Broadway, as was an elaborate Act II swordfight between the couple. Additions for New York included a new second-act opening number for Morticia, “Just Around the Corner,” in which she humorously embraces the idea of death. It replaced a song in Chicago called “Second Banana,” in which Morticia bemoaned growing older just as her daughter Wednesday is falling in love — another subplot that struck “Addams” aficionados as un-Morticialike, and was softened for New York.

“Those changes were made to strengthen and deepen the Gomez/Morticia relationship for the audience,” Mr. Oken said. “We also wanted to show Gomez and Morticia as deeply committed parents, who like all parents, are thrown off base when their child suddenly seems to have become an adult overnight and has fallen in love.”

These changes and other elements of the script were derided by some critics as contrary to the sensibility of the cartoons. But following the lead of “Wicked,” Broadway’s biggest hit in years, “The Addams Family” aimed to appeal both to parents and children, thanks especially to its central plot, about the eccentric Addams clan encountering another, more normal family. That plot, too, drew some criticism in Chicago as hoary, but Mr. Oken said it was never considered for elimination for Broadway.

Whether the post-Chicago changes improved the show or amounted to a scratch, “The Addams Family” is selling as well as it did during its tryout. Scott Mallalieu, president of Group Sales Box Office, a major Broadway ticket seller, said in an interview Monday that “The Addams Family” remained the biggest ticket advance of any Broadway show that his company has sold this year. He said that no groups had canceled their tickets since the negative reviews last week.

And executives at the other regional theaters producing the show said that while it was impossible to predict how the musical would do without the popular Mr. Lane, they were optimistic that the title alone would make for a blockbuster.

“Even before Nathan and Bebe were announced, our subscribers were extremely excited just by the idea of ‘The Addams Family’ as theater,” said David Fay, president of the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford, one of the theaters that is producing the show. “Our audiences don’t expect to see a star on the road. What they are sure they will get, with a title like ‘The Addams Family,’ is humor, fun, and delight at being in that Addams milieu.”

Fences

2010-04-28T21:52:00.000-04:00

It’s No More Mr. Nice Guy for This Everyman

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: April 27, 2010

When Denzel Washington talks about challenging death to a wrestling match, you suddenly sense that everything’s going to be all right. Not for Troy Maxson, the character portrayed by Mr. Washington in the vibrantly acted Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “Fences,” which opened on Monday night at the Cort Theater; Troy might as well have “Warning: Explosives” tattooed across his forehead, with “Breakable” stamped on his back.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Original Review: 'Fences' (March 27, 1987)

But all at once you feel that Mr. Washington is going to take Troy Maxson into dark and uncharted places, which is what he has to do for this mid-80’s play to register as more than a conventional domestic melodrama. Delivering that poetic riff, early in the first act, about going mano a mano with the grim reaper, Mr. Washington’s Troy morphs from the salty, genial everyman he’s thus far appeared to be into a much more arresting figure.

There’s an exhilarated craziness in his eyes and a confrontational glint that dares us not to believe him. On the subject of his own life, Troy — a former Negro League baseball star turned sanitation worker, and a man whose name aptly evokes a legendary, ruined splendor — is a first-class mythmaker. Which means he’s also a first-class storyteller and a first-class self-deceiver, and that we’re going to hang on to his words.

Mr. Washington, a two-time Oscar winner, has his own personal specter to wrestle with in this production, directed by Kenny Leon and featuring a magnificent performance by Viola Davis as Troy’s wife, Rose. By starring in the first Broadway revival of “Fences,” which picked up about every major prize on offer in 1987, when it arrived on Broadway, Mr. Washington is stepping into the outsize shadow of James Earl Jones.

Large of frame and thunderous of voice, Mr. Jones has a titan’s presence that invested the embittered Troy with an aura of classical tragedy. He was big in every sense of the word, and there was instant pathos in the spectacle of a giant confined by the smallness of a world hedged in by 1950s racism. Mr. Washington has the fluid naturalness we associate with good screen actors, and when he played Brutus in the 2005 Broadway production of “Julius Caesar,” he often seemed to fade into the crowd of milling revolutionary Romans.

His Troy, not unexpectedly, is smaller than Mr. Jones’s was, but that also means it is on a more human scale and in some ways more intricately drawn. Mr. Washington has to work hard to build his Troy, brick by brick instead of with one overwhelming first impression. But any strain we sense comes not from the actor but the character.

A family man with a roving eye and a solid breadwinner with unsettling memories of a sports hero’s past, Troy is twisted by fiercely contradictory impulses — of love and resentment, gentle judiciousness and brutal irrationality, responsibility and a lust for careless freedom. Registering troubled ambivalence has always been Mr. Washington’s great strength as a screen actor (including in his Oscar-winning “Training Day”), and he uses that gift to redefine Troy on his own terms.

This newly detailed reading allows us to look at Troy with fresh objectivity, and to realize that Wilson created a more complex, layered character than we may have remembered. And in his depiction of Troy and Rose’s marriage, Wilson, who died in 2005, delivered his finest and most credible portrait of a relationship between a man and a woman, brought to complete, aching life by Mr. Washington and Ms. Davis. But without the distraction of Mr. Jones’s Shakespearean grandeur, the play’s flaws, as well as its strengths, are more clearly visible.

“Fences” is part of Wilson’s great decade-by-decade cycle of the African-American experience in the 20th century, largely set (as “Fences” is) in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. It shares with more adventurous works like “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “Seven Guitars” a specific sense of the history that brought its characters to their point in time. That includes handed-down recollections of slavery and more immediate memories of the northward migration from cotton country.

These elements are more in the background in “Fences,” and Wilson’s use of the soaring, aria-like monologue is more restrained. This is both his most accessible and least inventive work, seemingly shaped by dramaturgical blueprints from the era in which “Fences” is set. As a study in the Oedipal conflict between Troy and his teenage son, Cory (Chris Chalk), who is teetering defensively on the cusp of adulthood, “Fences” has tinny echoes of Arthur Miller and William Inge. Nor can Mr. Leon’s expertly fluid direction quite disguise the artificial overuse of some fairly tired symbolic motifs, including baseball and the fences of the title.

But there are scenes as vivid and heartfelt as any on Broadway now. Moving within Santo Loquasto’s exactly visualized urban backyard and Constanza Romero’s pitch-perfect period costumes, the ensemble members remind us of the rich pleasures of good, old naturalistic acting. More than most of Wilson’s plays, “Fences” allows its performers to develop sustained one-on-one relationships.

There’s particular pleasure (and sadness) to be had in following the waning friendship between Troy and his longtime pal, Jim Bono (the Wilson veteran Stephen McKinley Henderson, at the top of his form). Mr. Washington’s face and stance alone provide fascinating (and damning) glimpses into Troy’s attitudes toward his son from an earlier relationship, the 34-year-old Lyons (the excellent Russell Hornsby), and the desperate-to-please Cory (an underwritten part). And while I’ve pretty much had my fill of Wilson’s deranged prophet characters, Mykelti Williamson’s Gabriel is fine as Troy’s mad brother, eliciting a stirring mix of guilt and affection from Mr. Washington.

But Troy’s interactions with Rose are what give “Fences” its moments of genuine glory. Ms. Davis, who won a Tony for her performance in Wilson’s “King Hedley II,” may well pick up another for her work here. Her face is a poignant paradox, both bone-tired and suffused with sensual radiance. Rose has resigned herself to her life in a way Troy cannot, but that doesn’t mean there’s not passionate yearning within.

What Troy rants about, Rose keeps to herself, and Ms. Davis draws extraordinary power from that reticence; you never feel that Rose is any less deep than her husband. You can sense, so palpably that it hurts, why Troy and Rose were meant to be together, and when it looked as if the marriage might be going south at the performance I attended, you could hear horrified gasps in the audience. Mr. Washington and Ms. Davis prove that lovers don’t have to be as young and star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet to generate shiver-making heat and pathos.

FENCES

By August Wilson; directed by Kenny Leon; original music by Branford Marsalis; sets by Santo Loquasto; costumes by Constanza Romero; lighting by Brian MacDevitt; sound by Acme Sound Partners; associate producer, Ms. Romero. Presented by Carole Shorenstein Hays and Scott Rudin. At the Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Through July 11. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Denzel Washington (Troy Maxson), Viola Davis (Rose), Chris Chalk (Cory), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Jim Bono), Russell Hornsby (Lyons), Mykelti Williamson (Gabriel) and Eden Duncan-Smith and SaCha Stewart-Coleman (Raynell).

Addams Family

2010-04-28T21:46:00.000-04:00

Buh-Da-Da-Dum (Snap Snap)

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“The Addams Family”: Tiptoeing through the tombstones at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater: from left, Adam Riegler, Jackie Hoffman, Nathan Lane, Zachary James, Bebe Neuwirth, Krysta Rodriguez and Kevin Chamberlin.

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: April 9, 2010

Imagine, if you dare, the agonies of the talented people trapped inside the collapsing tomb called “The Addams Family.” Being in this genuinely ghastly musical — which opened Thursday night at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater and stars a shamefully squandered Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth — must feel like going to a Halloween party in a strait-jacket or a suit of armor. Sure, you make a flashy (if obvious) first impression. But then you’re stuck in the darn thing for the rest of the night, and it’s really, really uncomfortable. Why, you can barely move, and a strangled voice inside you keeps gasping, “He-e-e-lp! Get me out of here!”

Though encumbered with a Spanish accent that slides into Transylvania, Mr. Lane is in fine voice and brings a star trouper’s energy and polish to one wan number after another. Ms. Neuwirth, whose priceless deadpan manner is one of Broadway’s great assets, here uses it as a means of distancing herself from an icky show and a formless part. Everyone else tries not to look embarrassed, though it’s not easy in a show that relies on a giant squid to solve its plot problems, makes Uncle Fester a cloyingly whimsical sentimentalist (he’s in love with the moon) and transforms Grandma into an old acid head out of Woodstock.

That squid is the work of the wonderful puppeteer Basil Twist, who also whipped up a giant iguana, a regular-sized Venus fly trap and a charming animated curtain tassel. Fans of the “Addams” television show will be pleased to learn that Thing (the bodiless hand) and Cousin Itt make cameo appearances. They receive thunderous entrance applause and then retire for most of the night. They are no doubt much envied by the rest of the cast.

THE ADDAMS FAMILY

Book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice; music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa; based on characters created by Charles Addams; directed and designed by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch; choreography by Sergio Trujillo; creative consultant, Jerry Zaks; lighting by Natasha Katz; sound by Acme Sound Partners; puppetry by Basil Twist; hair by Tom Watson; makeup by Angelina Avallone; special effects by Gregory Meeh; orchestrations by Larry Hochman; musical director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell; dance arrangements by August Eriksmoen; vocal arrangements and incidental music by Mr. Lippa; music coordinator, Michael Keller. Presented by Stuart Oken, Roy Furman, Michael Leavitt, Five Cent Productions, Stephen Schuler, Decca Theatricals, Scott M. Delman, Stuart Ditsky, Terry Allen Kramer, Stephanie P. McClelland, James L. Nederlander, Eva Price, Jam Theatricals/Mary Lu Roffe, Pittsburgh CLO/Gutterman-Swinsky, Vivek Tiwary/Gary Kaplan, the Weinstein Company/Clarence LLC and Adam Zotovich/Tribe Theatricals by special arrangement with Elephant Eye Theatrical. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 West 46th Street, Manhattan; (877) 250-2929. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Nathan Lane (Gomez Addams), Bebe Neuwirth (Morticia Addams), Terrence Mann (Mal Beineke), Carolee Carmello (Alice Beineke), Kevin Chamberlin (Uncle Fester), Jackie Hoffman (Grandma), Zachary James (Lurch), Adam Riegler (Pugsley Addams), Wesley Taylor (Lucas Beineke) and Krysta Rodriguez (Wednesday Addams).

That silent scream rises like a baleful ectoplasm from a production that generally offers little to shiver about, at least not in any pleasurable way. The satisfying shiver, of course, was what was consistently elicited by the gleefully macabre cartoons by Charles Addams that inspired this musical, as well as a 1960s television series and two movies in the early 1990s. It’s a rare American who isn’t familiar with the sinister little clan (which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1938) for whom shrouds are the last word in fashion, and a guillotine is the perfect children’s toy.

This latest reincarnation of “The Addams Family” is clearly relying, above all, on its title characters’ high recognition factor. That such faith is not misplaced is confirmed by the audience’s clapping and snapping along with the first strains of the overture, which appropriates the catchy television theme song. When the curtain parts to reveal a Madame Tussauds-like tableau of the assembled Addamses, there is loud, salutatory applause.

There they are, lined up like tombstones (appropriately, since the setting is a cemetery) and looking as if they had just stepped out of Charles Addams’s inkwell. Shrink these impeccably assembled creatures to a height of 10 inches, and you could give them away with McDonald’s Happy Meals (or, given the context, Unhappy Meals).

This is not an inappropriate thought, since this show treats its characters as imaginative but easily distracted children might treat their dolls, arbitrarily making them act out little stories and situations. The creators of “The Addams Family” — which has a book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and songs by Andrew Lippa — have said they wanted to return to the spirit of the original New Yorker cartoons.

It’s true that the show has moments that quote directly from Addams’s original captions. But those captions were for a limited number of single-panel cartoons. So what to do for the rest of the evening? The answer, to borrow from Irving Berlin, is “everything the traffic will allow.”

A tepid goulash of vaudeville song-and-dance routines, Borscht Belt jokes, stingless sitcom zingers and homey romantic plotlines that were mossy in the age of “Father Knows Best,” “The Addams Family” is most distinctive for its wholesale inability to hold on to a consistent tone or an internal logic. The show, which was previously staged in Chicago, has a troubled past. The original directors, Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch (also the production’s designers), still retain director credit, but Jerry Zaks, identified in the program as a creative consultant, is known to have reworked the show. (The look is Charles Addams run through a Xerox enlarger, though it makes witty use of the classic red velvet curtain.)

Mr. McDermott and Mr. Crouch were responsible for the blissfully ghoulish little show “Shockheaded Peter,” and their darkly precious aesthetic is the opposite of that of Mr. Zaks, a veteran purveyor of Broadway razzmatazz. So a collision of sensibilities was to be anticipated.

What’s more surprising (given Mr. Brickman and Mr. Elice’s solid collaboration on “Jersey Boys”) is the ragbag nature of the script, which seems to be shaped by an assortment of mismatched approaches. The show begins with the expected milking of classic Addams perversity, in which morbidity is automatically substituted for cheerfulness. But somewhere along the way the plot becomes a costume-party rehash of the proper-boy-meets-girl-from-crazy-family story line that dates back to “You Can’t Take It With You.”

Gomez (Mr. Lane) and Morticia (Ms. Neuwirth), the heads of the family, discover to their alarm that Wednesday (Krysta Rodriguez), their 18-year-old daughter, has fallen in love with Lucas Beineke (Wesley Taylor), a young man from a middle-class all-American home. What’s more, Wednesday has invited Lucas and his parents — Mal (Terrence Mann) and Alice (Carolee Carmello) — for dinner, and insists that the family try to act “normal” for the night.

That directive includes Uncle Fester (Kevin Chamberlin), Grandma (Jackie Hoffman), little Pugsley (Adam Riegler) and Lurch (Zachary James), the towering, taciturn butler. It is clear things will not go well when, as soon as the Beinekes arrive, Mal asks, “What is this, some kinda theme park?”

Of course it is, Mal. This is a 21st-century Broadway musical. Did I mention, by the way, that the Addams homestead in this version is in Central Park? In what appears to be a tourist-courting stratagem, the seeming strangeness of the Addamses is equated with the strangeness of New Yorkers as perceived by middle Americans. (Cue the old New York City jokes.)

But it turns out that all of us are strange in our own ways (even Beinekes), that love conquers all, and that Morticia and Gomez are really just a pair of old softies, who worry about the same things that all moms and dads do, like getting older and seeing their children leave the nest.

sondheim on sondheim

2010-04-28T21:41:00.001-04:00

Hymn to Himself: Something Hummable

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: April 23, 2010

God has spoken on the subject of His existence. And you will be pleased to know that He seems resigned to and amused by the obeisance and sacrifices that are made in His name. Listen, O children of Broadway, to His own words, chanted by a chosen tribe of His disciples at the theater at Studio 54 (once a pagan temple to the gods of disco) as His sardonic image smiles down upon them.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“

Multimedia

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“You have to have something to believe in,” they sing, “Something to appropriate, emulate, overrate. Might as well be Stephen, or to use his nickname: God!”

Thus does the composer of those lyrics address the question of his divinity in a little number called “God” at the top of the second act of “Sondheim on Sondheim,” a genial, multimedia commemorative scrapbook on the life, times and career of you-know-who. The song was inspired by the title of an article featured inside a 1994 New York magazine: “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” And the answer, for those of us for whom musicals are truly a religion, is — now as then — yes. Or to use the language of the common folk, “Well, duh.”

Mr. Sondheim turned 80 last month, and the occasion has already been honored by more tributes than are normally accorded the Yankees when they win the World Series, with more to come. This is not overkill. Mr. Sondheim bears a relationship to his vocation that is unlike that of any artist in any other field.

In the world of American musicals he is indisputably the best, brightest and most influential talent to emerge during the last half-century. Even when his shows have been commercial flops, they are studied, revered and eventually reincarnated to critical hosannas. No other songwriter to date has challenged his eminence, and it seems unlikely that anyone will in his lifetime. It is even possible, if sadly so, that he may be remembered as the last of the giants in a genre that flourished in the 20th century and wilted in the 21st.

But such brooding thoughts have little place in a discussion of “Sondheim on Sondheim,” which opened Thursday night. This is a chipper, haphazard anthology show that blends live performance of Sondheim songs with archival video footage and taped interviews with Himself. Conceived and directed by James Lapine, Mr. Sondheim’s frequent (and, to me, best) collaborator over the years, this somewhat jittery production never quite finds a sustained tone, a natural rhythm or even a logical sense of sequence.

It does, however, have a polished and likable eight-member cast (that includes Tom Wopat, Vanessa Williams and the great Barbara Cook); a savory selection of Sondheim material that never made it to Broadway as well as canonic standards; and heaping spoonfuls of insider dope about the creation of shows like “Company” and “Follies” and the changes they underwent on the road. And then there is Mr. Sondheim, who appears in appropriately larger-than-life form on artistically arranged monitors, typically concealing as much as he reveals in quick takes of self-portraiture.

It is these interviews that provide the shape and, in many cases, the direct cues for the live action onstage. Occasionally this is achieved with a literal-mindedness that is too cute for comfort. Footage of Mr. Sondheim on the Mike Douglas show talking about why he likes to write about neurotics is followed by Ms. Cook and Tom Wopat singing “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” from “Company” (1970).

More often, though, the performers channel their master’s voice in direct, annotative illustrations of what he’s talking about. Three different versions of the opening number in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (from 1962, Mr. Sondheim’s first full Broadway score) are spliced into his accounts of rewriting them. There are similarly illuminating insights into the labor pains of “Follies” (1971), “Passion” (1994) and “Road Show” (2009), the musical formerly known as “Bounce” (2003).

This format has the disadvantage of often giving the performers the status of audio-visual tools. Mr. Sondheim says he’s always most comfortable when he can create for a specific character instead of an abstract type or emotion. And it’s not easy for singers to reflect that specificity in a show like this one. At its least inspired “Sondheim on Sondheim” has the smiley supper-club blandness of previous Sondheim revues, like “Putting It Together” and “Side by Side by Sondheim.”

But there are also blessed if infrequent examples of singers making songs their own. Most often they involve the 82-year-old Ms. Cook, a longtime and exceptionally sensitive Sondheim interpreter. But the vulpine Ms. Williams has her moments too, slithering through the striptease of “Ah, but Underneath” (from the 1987 London production of “Follies”) and singing “Losing My Mind” (from “Follies”) in counterpoint to Ms. Cook’s profoundly wistful version of “Not a Day Goes By” (from the 1981 show “Merrily We Roll Along.”)

As an ensemble the cast — stylishly filled out by Leslie Kritzer, Norm Lewis, Euan Morton, Erin Mackey and Matthew Scott — is strongest in its haunting choral delivery of two songs from “Assassins” (Mr. Sondheim and John Weidman’s dark journey through American history), the grim contemporary relevance of which requires no epigrammatic explanation. And they are well served by a crisp physical production that includes Peter Flaherty’s witty, perfectly synchronized video and projection designs and Beowulf Boritt’s moving-building-block set.

In the autobiographical “Opening Doors” number from “Merrily We Roll Along” (nimbly performed here by Ms. Kritzer, Mr. Morton and Mr. Scott) a young songwriter is told by an old Broadway pro that “there’s not a tune you can hum” in his work. That was a standard complaint about Mr. Sondheim for decades. Yet when you hear many of the numbers in this revue, you’re struck by how they’ve penetrated and stuck in your consciousness in ways deeper than merely hummable songs allow.

Of course there are also songs that have turned out to be surprisingly hummable, like “Send In the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music” (1973), which is here presented in the first act as a hilarious YouTube collage of widely (and wildly) ranging interpreters, professional and otherwise. Then in the second act Ms. Cook takes up the same song and delivers it with a simple, sweet bereftness that breaks your heart.

It’s a lovely reminder that for all his much-touted cleverness, Mr. Sondheim is great not because he’s a wizard with rhyme, rhythm and key changes. It’s because he senses and conveys the darker currents of pain and loneliness that swirl beneath even the shiniest surfaces. He sees inside us. And there is something kind of Godlike about that.

SONDHEIM ON SONDHEIM

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; conceived and directed by James Lapine; musical staging by Dan Knechtges; music direction/arrangements by David Loud; sets by Beowulf Boritt; costumes by Susan Hilferty; lighting by Ken Billington; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; video and projection by Peter Flaherty; orchestrations by Michael Starobin; music coordinator, John Miller; executive producer, Sydney Beers; associate artistic director, Scott Ellis. Presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director; Harold Wolpert, managing director; Julia C. Levy, executive director. At Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, Manhattan; (212) 719-1300. Through June 13. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.

WITH: Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams, Tom Wopat, Leslie Kritzer, Norm Lewis, Euan Morton, Erin Mackey and Matthew Scott.

Rob 's freewill astrology is now on Facebook

2010-04-28T21:38:00.000-04:00

Capricorn Horoscope for week of April 29, 2010

What excites you? What makes you itch with a longing to be surprised? What fills you to the brim with curiosity and an agitated sense of wonder? You may not know even half of what you could potentially realize about these matters. Have you ever sat down and taken a formal inventory? Have you ever dedicated yourself to figuring out all the things that would inspire you most? Do it sometime soon, please; attend to this glorious task. According to my reading of the omens, it's prime time to do so.

sightings

2010-04-28T21:33:00.002-04:00

Sightings: I ran into a woman I met from WW at the Met. She worked there and subsequently had gastric by pass surgery. At the Tribeca Film Festival, I was greeted by

Another woman I knew from WW and then about 1.5 hours later her husband came to join her. I run into my weight watcher people all over the city.

I saw Joan Rivers, Jami Bernard (the NY Daily New TV critic), the cast of Memento at a screening for that film.

I saw Malcom Gladwell and then another woman from WW who is a regular at thursday meeting.

dream

2010-04-28T21:33:00.001-04:00

Dreams:

I had a Natalie Merchant dream that I don’t really remember.

I dreamed that there was a character festival and parade in the street, parade and street fair. I was trying to get through the crowd. I got through the crowd and to get out, I had to go through this stone tunnel with an arch. The sign above the tunnel warned that it was treacherous. I was skeptical and somewhat hesitant. To lure me down the tunnel, the monitors/operators put dollar bills at intervals. I questioned in my mind if the space was large enough for me to go through. I questioned if my back pack could get down the chute. I started down on my back and collected the dollar bills along the way. At the end of the tunnel, I thought that maybe going head first was a better option ( I turned it into a water slide, though it looked like an x-ray of the throat or arteries.) At the end of the tunnel, I saw many silver coins of all sizes, Half dollars, quarters and I took hands full and stuffed my pockets.

I then saw people at the street fair and had to pass them. I told them these fairs happen all the time and saw some characters like Winnie the Pooh- it was paper mache and blue. There were two homemade Winnie the Pooh head and many other home made costumes like the Easter parade.

In the next scene, I knew that I had some minor repairs down in my apartment. I saw one of my cousins who asked me about getting the handyman to do repairs. We were outside and there were small hills, he was going over the hills. I advised him that for minor repairs, things like changing lightbulbs, he was better off to do it himself. If it’s a major thing or may cause damage to the apartment, he can get to the super to do it.

dream

2010-04-28T21:26:00.002-04:00

It was an outdoor dream and I climbed to the top of the steep hill and through a deck entered an department store, like a woolworths or a 5 & dime but it was a target. I was looking around but bought nothing. I had a conversation with someone and they asked if i climbed that steep hill and I said i have done it many times, that this was my 3 or 4th trip. On my trip up, in corner of the deck stood, Paul Simon. The air was misty like a ski resort or a place in the berkshires summer with the mist coming up over the hills. I thought to myself, I have seen paul simon so often on my trips up the hill that I should get his autograph.

Curtain Call - Stephen Sondheim's Birthday Celebration

2010-04-24T21:30:00.000-04:00

Freewill Astrology Capricorn April 1

2010-04-21T06:50:00.001-04:00

Horoscopes for week of April 1, 2010

I'm worried about your ability to sneak and fake and dissemble. These skills seem to have atrophied in you. To quote Homer Simpson, "You couldn't fool your own mother on the foolingest day of your life with an electrified fooling machine!" Please, Aries, jump back into the game-playing, BS-dispensing routine the rest of us are caught up in. APRIL FOOL! Everything I just said was a filthy lie. In fact, I admire the candor and straightforwardness you've been cultivating. My only critique is that maybe you could take some of the edge off it. Try telling the raw truth with more relaxed grace.

No one knows you better tha

Horoscopes for week of April 8, 2010 -Freewill Astrology Horoscope

2010-04-21T06:48:00.002-04:00

Horoscopes for week of April 8, 2010

It would be a good week for you to perfect your ability to crow like a rooster, Aries. I also recommend that you practice your skill at leaping out of bed in the morning fully refreshed, with your imagination primed and ready to immediately begin making creative moves. Other suggested exercises: being on the alert for what's being born; holding a vision of the dawn in your heart throughout the day; and humorously strutting around like you own whatever place you're in

free will astrology Capricorn

2010-04-21T06:48:00.001-04:00

Here's my startling prediction: More Capricorn spiritual seekers will become enlightened in the next five weeks than in any comparable period of history. Hell, there'll be so much infinity mixed with eternity available for your tribe that even a lot of you non-seekers could get a lightning bolt of illumination or two. That's not to say that you have to accept the uplifting revelations, or even tune in to them, for that matter. If you'd prefer to ignore the sacred hubbub and go about your practical business without having to hassle with the consequences of a divine download, that's fine

Capricorn according to Rob Brezney Freewill Astrology

2010-04-21T06:46:00.001-04:00

http://www.freewillastrology.com/

Capricorn Horoscope for week of April 22, 2010

The Weekly World News reported that a blues singer sued his psychiatrist for turning him into a more cheerful person. Gloomy Gus Johnson claimed he was so thoroughly cured of his depression that he could no longer perform his dismal tales with mournful sincerity. His popularity declined as he lost fans who had become attached to his despondent persona. I suspect you may soon be arriving at a similar crossroads, Capricorn. Through the intervention of uplifting influences and outbreaks of benevolence, you will find it harder to cultivate a cynical attitude. Are you prepared to accept the consequences that may come from being deprived of some of your reasons to moan and groan?

Need more help deci

dreams

2010-04-20T20:40:00.000-04:00

dreams

It is not surprising that I had a Natalie Merchant dream as she has a new cd project out and I saw her two times last week. I am obsessed with learning about the poets that make up the project. She has set the poems of writers who have written for children primarily.

Other dreams that I have had in the last two weeks are more vivid and stranger. I wanted to keep a record of them or record them as they unfolded.

I dreamed that some of my work colleagues gave me a birthday present. I was excited that it was a jacket, military style like a Marine’s jacket, long with gold piping and tassels at the shoulders. It was Navy Blue and red. I saw two of my colleagues in the beginning part of the dream ( I don’t generally get on that well with one of them, and the second was her friend so when ices me when they are together.). two more colleagues were in the second part of the dream, where they gave me the jacket. I was surprised that they gave it to me and I thanked them for their thoughtfulness. When I looked at the coat, I realized it had no buttons. I first thought to reject the coat and then thought about how easy it would be to procur buttons and I thought about the gold buttons that I would put on the coat. I thanked them profusely for remembering me and giving me the coat.

I dreamed about the writing of a child’s book. Part Detective story, part Victorian. I saw the cover of the book and knew the lead character’s name was Hunter. I knew that there were many possibilities and knew I had to get my nieces involved in story writing and illustration. There were young adult books, part Nancy Drew, part Twilight

I dreamed of the Flying Burrito Brothers. They were in a old time mining town in the west. There was a velvet curtain and I saw a huge Elephant Trunk come from behind the curtain. In the next scene the Flying Burrito Brothers were in this saloon and they were naked with their penises exposed. They were not conscious of their nakedness, they took off their guitars and sat down at a table to count the money that they had been paid. It was off putting that they were counting their money and smoking cigars in front of the audience members. In the dream there were crushed peanuts and popcorn on the floor and it was a circus like atmosphere.

The final dream was that I was at work and my phone rang and it was my supervisor Lance. He told me that I have been laid off. Later in the dream, I went over to talk to him and I confronted him on his behavior of not being able to see me face to face. I told him that he could see me in a private room or talk to me face to face about being laid off. I didn’t appreciate that he did it by phone. I was sitting in his office, getting more mad at him. I then saw some people that I worked with at St Josephs. One person was the head of the nursing department and the other was a Director of Preventative Services, Independent Living and then Kinship care. I was sorting through things and packing up toys, putting them in plastic garbage bags. I was giving things away with purpose.

flower show outdoors

2010-04-03T10:51:00.001-04:00

2010-04-03T10:50:00.000-04:00

2010-04-03T10:49:00.000-04:00

this and that

2010-04-03T10:39:00.001-04:00

This and That-

Mrs Young- while waiting on the subway platform, I saw a young school age girl and her preschool age brother. Their mother had just picked her up from the local Elementary school. She suddenly became very excited and showed her mother that her teacher, Ms Young had walked by and moved down the platform to join a group of teachers standing there. From where I was standing, I could hear the teachers complaining about school rules, their principle and other school stuff. I also could hear the excitement of the young student. She called to her mother to see Mrs Young and then called out for Mrs Young. One of the women looked towards the student and said nothing. The rest of the three did not even look in the direction of the excited student. The mother of the child, just turned her and moved her towards the oncoming train.

Getting hit again on the train.

The other morning, I was waiting for the train on the subway platform, reading the paper, minding my business when a young man in a suit was reading his paper. The train pulled into the station and doors opened. The man could not make decision which entrance to get into the train. He turned to the right and to the left and then back to right. I said to him “ dude, you have to make up your mind”. I entered the train and a young woman about age 15 hit me on the arm. She said “ ou need to calm down”. I said to her “you need not to hit me.” She repeated again “you need to calm down”. I repeated again “you need not to hit people you don’t know.”

I steamed for a while about this encounter until my co worker highlighted that maybe this young woman lost control.

At the Polls.

I entered the local elementary school to vote for a special election and there was an older woman in her 80s who was to look up my address and direct me to the polling station. I approached the table and she asked me if I had received a Board of Election card. I told her I received that and many other solicitations and robo calls. She said that may not mean I was eligible to vote in this election. I asked her if she wanted me to look up my address. She finally looked it up and continued to tell me I was not eligible to vote. I reminded her that I knew she was getting paid for being at the voting polls.

I told her to please check again because I knew I was in the 64^th district not the 74^th district that she was trying to tell me I was registered in. She continued to ask me for the white cards and I asked another woman to look up my information. In fact, I was registered in the 64^th district. As I was negotiating with this woman, my neighbor, a Russian speaking woman came and offered her ID with her address. I told the Voter worker that the Russian woman was my neighbor after she told her to put her ID away.

The Russian woman followed me to the voting booth. There was no attendant there. As I was waiting, I started to think about how many people were turned away from voting that day due to someone not taking the time to look up the address but asking questioning regarding what was sent in the mail.

The voting poll workers are paid and I find their error rate, lack of ability to do the work and lack of desire is standard in the polling place where I vote. I think they are more of an impediment to the voting process. In the past, I have been told that my vote does not count as much of the borough votes democratic. The voting rights violations are numerous and I have reported the poll workers on numerous occasions.

The Russian woman and I talked about the “right” to vote and exercising that right. In her country she was not allowed to vote. It is a right that I take seriously and preserve. No incompetent poll worker has a right to interfere with the right to vote.

On the Street

I ran into life time politician Mark Green on the street. I also over heard a father and his 7-9 year old son talking and the father was instructing him on “why white is not worn after Memorial day” and society rules around that.

people i run into

2010-03-31T07:03:00.000-04:00

I ran into Mark Green, past public advocate and just looked up and said " hi mark". I also ran into one of my past students from Adelphi on the train.

Week of March 31

2010-03-31T06:59:00.000-04:00

Capricorn Horoscope for week of April 1, 2010

Supermodel Selita Ebanks is your role model. In accordance with the astrological omens, I recommend that you arrange for the kind of special treatment she enjoys as she's preparing for a runway show. That means getting five stylists to work for hours every day perfecting every aspect of your physical appearance. Please make sure they apply no less than 20 layers of makeup to your butt. APRIL FOOL! I lied. The omens say this is not a good time to obsess on your outer beauty. They do suggest, however, that attending to your inner beauty would be smart. So please do the equivalent of getting 20 layers of makeup applied to your soul's butt.

circus review

2010-03-30T21:06:00.000-04:00

By KEN JAWOROWSKI

Published: March 30, 2010

It’s brash. It’s bold. It’s untamed. It’s the chaos of merchandising that swallows visitors entering Madison Square Garden to see “FUNundrum!,” the new offering from Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. While the show turns out to be the best the troupe has presented in years, to get to it you’ll have to fight through hawkers in the lobby, along the hallways and up and down the aisles, each insistent on selling you (or rather, your children) a reminder of an experience you haven’t yet had, with all the subtlety of an air horn blown into a megaphone.

Enlarge This Image

Chad Batka for The New York Times

Is the fight worth it? Yes. But it’s a shame it has to be fought.

With “FUNundrum!,” the troupe celebrates the 200th birthday of P. T. Barnum by emphasizing the old standards — a stocky strongman, joyful clowns and a spirited ringmaster — alongside modern flourishes like daredevil motorcyclists, a two-tiered trampoline and indoor fireworks. It’s a stellar mix, directed and choreographed with remarkable timing. With some 130 performers and plenty of animals, not a moment of the 2 hours and 10 minutes goes by without a chance to laugh or shriek or cheer.

While each act shines, most breathtaking is a pirate routine, featuring two teams whose members one by one spring each other into the air using oversize seesaws. Some land on another pirate’s shoulders, while others are launched wearing stilts, leading to thousands of simultaneous gasps from the audience. It’s set to an infectious live beat, and that program, as well as a team of wire walkers and a daring trapeze act, are all reminders of the unmatched power of live entertainment.

It takes nothing away from the cast, however, to wonder which executive approved such relentless selling of hand-held spinning lights ($22), snow cones in a collectible cup ($12); stuffed animals ($30) and countless other products at the beginning, middle and end of the circus, and even from the ring, when at intermission the audience is pitched a video game and directed to a Web site for still more attempts at a sale.

That barrage of marketing is especially disconcerting, since the performers themselves are so friendly. “FUNundrum!” opens an hour before start time, allowing ticket holders to meet the cheerful troupe on the floor and snap photos or watch additional skits close-up. Ultimately, that’s where the real memories are made.

RED

2010-03-30T21:03:00.000-04:00

2-Man Cast Shares Stage With a Vivid Character

Published: March 29, 2010

“I wonder,” Mark Rothko muses, staring at one of his canvases. “Do you think they’ll ever forgive me?”

“They’re only paintings,” Ken, his assistant, answers dispassionately.

But the artworks are so much more than that in “Red,” John Logan’s two-man Broadway show that includes that exchange.

“They are the other character,” said Alfred Molina, who portrays the Abstract Expressionist painter. “They’re referred to constantly. The subject matter of the play is their very existence.”

“Those paintings are so inscrutable and have such a powerful emotional content,” he added.

The drama, which opens at the Golden Theater on Thursday, revolves around an episode in Rothko’s life in the late 1950s, when the architects Ludwig Mies van der Roheand Philip Johnson commissioned him to paint murals for the Four Seasons, the fashionable new restaurant in the Seagram Building.

A large abstract canvas is center stage from the start. The rectangular shape outlined in deep red that dominates the painting, a copy of “Red on Maroon,” will probably seem unfamiliar to those who have seen Rothkos in American museums. The painting was one of a group that the artist originally conceived for the Four Seasons but refused to deliver, finding himself appalled by the restaurant’s clientele. He ended up giving nine of them to the Tate Gallery in London in 1969, a year before he committed suicide.

“Very often plays about artists are cursed,” Mr. Molina said one afternoon last week, sipping coffee at the Upper West Side hotel he is calling home during the run. “But what makes ‘Red’ so unique is that here you actually experience the making of the art. You see the paint being mixed, the frame being built, the canvas being stretched, everything being prepped. It creates more of an intensity.”

The set designer, Christopher Oram, said that getting the look of the paintings correct required a great deal of research, but that he knew the Seagram Rothkos in the Tate’s permanent collection from years of museum visits.

“They were in a special room,” he said in a telephone interview from London. “It was an extraordinary space with very low lighting,” which is how Rothko wanted them seen. (The paintings were recently on view at the Tate’s outpost in Liverpool, where Mr. Oram and the actors went to see them.)

By perusing the Tate’s archives and reading several biographies, he also pieced together how the artist worked, and he created onstage the scrappy, insular world of Rothko’s Manhattan studio, a former gymnasium in the Bowery. Mr. Oram reproduced every detail down to the pulley system Rothko used to hoist canvases, the music he played while he worked (Mozart and Haydn, among others) and the 1950s Chock full o’ Nuts cans used to mix the paint. The smell of paint even greets theatergoers as they take their seats.

Mr. Oram sought close but not exact matches for the shades of the Tate canvases. Instead he came up with different recipes of pigments and glazes that deliberately change, along with the lighting, so that the black and red become more or less pronounced as the power balance shifts between Rothko and his assistant, played by Eddie Redmayne.

“There are a different cocktail of dyes and paints for different scenes,” Mr. Oram said.

“Red” first opened in December at the Donmar Warehouse, and for the Broadway transfer, the pigments were imported from London.

“Each batch of paint is made fresh every day,” Mr. Oram said. “It’s like a chemistry set; it’s made early in the day so it can cool down and have the right consistency.”

That mattered in a crucial scene in which the two characters competitively prime a canvas onstage. As in a carefully choreographed dance, they heat up the red paint and pour it into two buckets. (To be sure that the paint never gets dangerously hot, cold water is placed in the buckets before the scene.) The actors then quickly paint the canvas red — Mr. Molina the top, and Mr. Redmayne the bottom — and in the process, themselves. It’s a powerful few minutes.

“We had to make sure we got the theatrical quality of it,” Mr. Molina said. “That dance, that sense of mood.”

They practiced a lot, using 10 or 11 canvases before getting it right. One problem for Mr. Molina that Rothko probably never had was “when the canvas dried onstage, it look streaky, and we couldn’t work out why,” he said. It turned out there was too much distance between the bucket and the top of the canvas; to compensate, he dips his brush in the paint more often than Mr. Redmayne.

Mr. Molina came to the part with no formal art history education. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the Notting Hill section of London — “before Julia Robertsgot there,” he said — and attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London rather than a conventional university.

But Mr. Redmayne, who recently won an Olivier, one of Britain’s highest acting awards, for his performance in “Red” in London, went to Eton and studied art history at Cambridge.

For Mr. Molina, the challenge of playing a complicated character like Rothko has meant immersing himself in the artist’s world. He read everything about Rothko he could get his hands on, toured the Four Seasons to see where the paintings were to have hung and viewed every artwork mentioned in the play, including Matisse’s “Red Studio” at the Museum of Modern Art (a poster of it hangs in his dressing room), Michelangelo’s Medici Library in Florence and Caravaggio’s “Conversion of Saul” in Rome. He even made a day trip to Washington last week to see the Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection and the Rothkos on view at the National Gallery of Art.

“After seeing the canvases in Washington yesterday, already there are lines in the play jumping into my head,” Mr. Molina said. “I’m now informed with something different.”

But he cautioned: “The last thing the audience wants to see is your homework. Hopefully, on some level, you’re just soaking it up, so it becomes part of you. I’m trying to embody him.”

He added of Rothko: “He was so complex. When he rages against the world, against Ken, the rage isn’t just anger, that rage is passion.”

Rothko’s personality was far more intense than that of Diego Rivera, the muralist Mr. Molina played in the 2002 movie “Frida,” about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

“Rivera’s art was so much more narrative,” Mr. Molina said. “There were no mysteries. Although I loved it, I never got emotional over it.”

“But with Rothko,” he added, “I feel incredibly proprietary and defensive. And I don’t know why.

march 4th Capricorn

2010-03-28T12:25:00.000-04:00

In some of the newspapers that publish my horoscope column, my carefully wrought text is buried in the back pages amidst a jabbering hubbub of obscene advertisements for quasi-legal sexual services. For readers with refined sensibilities, that's a problem. They do their best to avert their eyes, narrowing their focus down to a tight window. I think you'll be wise to adopt a similar approach in the coming week, Capricorn. Only a small percentage of information coming your way will be truly useful to you, and it may often be embedded in a sparkly mess of distracting noise. Concentrate hard on getting just the essentials that you want so you won't be misinformed and worn out by the rest.

Carpricorn March 11

2010-03-28T12:24:00.001-04:00

There'll be an abundance of unambiguous choices for you to make in the coming days. I'm not implying they'll be easy, just that the different alternatives will be clearly delineated. To get you warmed up for your hopefully crisp decisions, I've compiled a a few exercises. Pick one of each of these pairs: 1. exacting homework or free-form research; 2. pitiless logic or generous fantasies; 3. precise and disciplined communication or heedless self-expression; 4. grazing like a contented sheep or rambling like a restless mountain goat.

Capricorn March 18th

2010-03-28T12:22:00.000-04:00

I just found out the American shipping company UPS has legally trademarked the color brown. The grass-roots activist in me is incredulous and appalled. But the poet in me doesn't really care; it's fine if UPS owns drab, prosaic brown. I've still got mahogany at my command, as well as tawny, sepia, taupe, burnt umber, tan, cinnamon, walnut, and henna. That's especially important for this horoscope, Capricorn, because I'm advising you to be very down to earth, be willing to get your hands dirty, and even play in the muck if necessary in order to take good care of the basics. But don't do any of that in a boring, humdrum "brown" way. Do it exotically and imaginatively, like mahogany, tawny, sepia, taupe, burnt umber, tan, cinnamon, walnut, and henna.

Capricorn Horoscope for week of March 25, 2010

2010-03-28T12:09:00.000-04:00

Capricorn Horoscope for week of March 25, 2010

In a library in Warsaw, there is a 1,000+-page memoir written by my great-great-great-great grandfather, Leon Dembowski, a close advisor to the last king of Poland. Someday I'll make a pilgrimage over there, photocopy that family heirloom, bring it back to America, and have it translated into English. The task I envision for you in the coming weeks, Capricorn, has a certain resemblance to mine. I think you will have the chance to uncover a wealth of material about where you came from, but it'll take a lot of footwork and reinterpretation.

Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-09T21:37:00.000-05:00

What’s a Nice Girl Doing in This Hole?

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: March 5, 2010

Into the dark you tumble in “Alice in Wonderland,” Tim Burton’s busy, garish and periodically amusing repo of the Lewis Carrollhallucination “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” It’s a long fall turned long haul, despite the Burtonian flourishes — the pinch of cruelty, the mordant wit — that animate the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the porker that slides under her feet with a squeal. “I love a warm pig belly for my aching feet,” the queen tells Alice. Played by Mia Wasikowska, Alice looks a touch dazed: she seems to have left her pulse above ground when she fell down the rabbit hole of Mr. Burton’s imagination.

Mr. Burton has done his best work with contemporary stories, so it’s curious if not curiouser that he’s turned his sights on another 19th-century tale. Perhaps after slitting all those throats in his adaptation of “Sweeney Todd,” he thought he would chop off a few heads. Whatever his inspiration, he has tackled this new story with his customary mix of torpor and frenzy. After a short glance back at Alice’s childhood and an equally brief look at her present, he sends the 19-year-old on her way, first down the hole and then into a dreamscape — unfortunately tricked out with 3-D that distracts more than it delights — where she meets a grinning cat and a lugubrious caterpillar, among other fantastical creatures.

Dark and sometimes grim, this isn’t your great-grandmother’s Alice or that of Uncle Walt, who was disappointed with the 1951 Disney version of “Alice in Wonderland.” “Alice has no character,” said a writer who worked on that project. “She merely plays straight man to a cast of screwball comics.” Of course the character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in “Wonderland” and in the sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,” which means that she’s a straight man to her own imagination. (She isWonderland.) Here she mostly serves as a foil for the top biller Johnny Depp, who (yes, yes) plays the Mad Hatter, and Mr. Burton’s bright and leaden whimsies.

First thought up by Carroll in a rowboat in which one of the passengers was the 10-year-old Alice Liddell, the object of his much-debated love, “Wonderland” (1865) is, among many other things, a testament to glorious nonsense as well as an inspiration for dark thoughts (about Carroll’s feelings for Liddell) and for lysergic works from the likes of David Lynch. It’s a total (head) trip, one that starts and stops and doesn’t fit easily into the mainstream narrative mold, which could explain why the screenwriter Linda Woolverton, borrowing both from “Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass,”has given Alice a back story, a dash of psychology and a battle royal if, alas, not a pool of her own tears in which to swim.

Since narrative momentum isn’t Mr. Burton’s strength, “Alice in Wonderland” probably seemed a good fit for him, and there are moments when his transparent delight in the material lifts the movie and even carries it forward. His Wonderland (here, Underland) isn’t inviting or attractive. The colors are often bilious, though the palette also turns gunmetal gray, bringing to mind “Sweeney Todd.” There’s a suggestively nightmarish aspect to Alice’s journey, as when she steps on some severed heads in the Red Queen’s moat as if they were stones. The queen herself is a horror: Bette Davis as Elizabeth I and reconfigured as a bobble-head doll. Ms. Bonham Carter makes you hear the petulant child in her barbarism and the wounded woman too. She rocks the house and the movie.

And she does, even though the character is a harridan cliché who, smitten with her knave (Crispin Glover) and clutching her power, rules with a boom. (“Off with his head!”) She eventually dukes it out with her rival and sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, gliding like an ice dancer), who enlists Alice’s help. There’s more, including computer-generated flowers, assorted 3-D projectiles and the usual British actors earning their pay, like the “Harry Potter” alumni Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman and Imelda Staunton. Mr. Burton lavishes his attention on the little things in “Wonderland” — the perfectly drawn red heart painted on the center of the Red Queen’s mouth, for instance — perhaps because nothing else claims his attention. He’s very bad with the awkward action scenes, maybe because he’s embarrassed that they even exist.

Mr. Depp’s strenuously flamboyant turn embodies the best and worst of Mr. Burton’s filmmaking tendencies even as the actor brings his own brand of cinematic crazy to the tea party. With his Kabuki-white face, the character seems to have been calculated to invoke Heath Ledger’s Joker, though at his amusing best the Hatter brings to mind a strung-out Carrot Top. But Mr. Depp doesn’t have much to do, which he proves as he wildly flirts with the camera. The only time the character hooks you is in the shivery moment when his gaze turns predatory as he looks at Alice, who, every inch a Tim Burton Goth Girl, from her corpselike pallor to her enervated presence, presents a more convincing vision of death than of sex.

That queasy, potentially rich and frightening moment expectedly fades as fast as the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), which doesn’t leave you with much else to hold onto, Alice included. Mr. Burton’s heroine is a wan figure to hang an entire world on, and Ms. Wasikowska, who’s a livelier, truer presence in the forthcoming “The Kids Are All Right,” barely registers among Mr. Burton’s clanging and the computer-generated galumphing. This isn’t an impossible story to translate to the screen, as the Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer showed with “Alice” (1988), where the divide between reality and fantasy blurs as it does in dreams. It’s just hard to know why Mr. Burton, who doesn’t seem much interested in Alice, bothered.

“Alice in Wonderland” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It is a surprise (or not) that this movie, with its severed heads and Jabberwocky battle, is not rated PG-13, which serves as a warning for parents.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Tim Burton; written by Linda Woolverton, based on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass” by Lewis Carroll; director of photography, Dariusz Wolski; edited by Chris Lebenzon; music by Danny Elfman; costumes by Colleen Atwood; senior visual effects supervisor, Ken Ralston; makeup design by Valli O’Reilly; produced by Richard D. Zanuck, Joe Roth, Suzanne Todd and Jennifer Todd; released by Walt Disney Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.

WITH: Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter), Mia Wasikowska (Alice Kingsleigh), Anne Hathaway(White Queen), Helena Bonham Carter (Red Queen), Crispin Glover (Stayne-Knave of Hearts), Matt Lucas (Tweedledee and Tweedledum), Alan Rickman (Absolem the Caterpillar), Timothy Spall (Bayard the Bloodhound) and Imelda Staunton (Tall Flower Faces).

WITH THE VOICES OF: Michael Sheen (White Rabbit), Stephen Fry (Cheshire Cat), Barbara Windsor (Dormouse), Christopher Lee (Jabberwocky), Michael Gough (Dodo) and Paul Whitehouse (March Hare).

The Miracle Worker

2010-03-09T21:36:00.001-05:00

Taming a Child by Setting Her Free

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: March 4, 2010

Language is exalted as the miracle maker of “The Miracle Worker,” the potential means of salvation for a knowledge-starved deaf and blind girl named Helen Keller. “One word, and I can put the world in your hand,” Helen’s teacher tells her with fervor. Odd, then, that the sadly pedestrian new production of William Gibson’s 1959 biographical drama is by far most effective when it is wordless.

Helen is played by the 13-year-old movie star Abigail Breslin in Kate Whoriskey’s revival, which opened Wednesday night at the Circle in the Square Theater. And she has a distinct advantage over her more than competent co-star, Alison Pill, who plays Helen’s intrepid teacher, Annie Sullivan: Ms. Breslin has no lines to speak.

When this Helen groans, her flailing arms reaching for something she knows she wants but can’t quite identify, you feel the pure, painful thwartedness of a trapped intelligence searching for release. A matching, agonized frustration contorts the features of Ms. Pill’s Annie as she literally wrestles her pupil into submission. But Ms. Pill must also participate in Mr. Gibson’s dialogue, which 60 years on, sounds less than golden.

In truth, “The Miracle Worker” was always best when it got physical. Writing of the 1959 production in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson lamented its “loose narrative technique,” adding that the play, which had begun as a television version on “Playhouse 90,” was “afflicted with embarrassing offstage voices and gratuitous bits of local color.”

But he had only praise for the fierce performances of the original Annie and Helen, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, who won Oscars for repeating their roles in the 1962 film. The visceral charge that infuses the scenes in which Annie and Helen go to the mat is still terrific in that movie. Like the Broadway production, it was directed by Arthur Penn, who transcended staginess by seeming to turn his camera into an adrenaline-infected participant.

There are, of course, no close-ups in theater. Yet surely this production, the first revival of “The Miracle Worker” to come to Broadway, could have highlighted the play’s strengths more effectively. In following the stormy tutelage of Helen that began with Sullivan’s arrival at the Kellers’ Alabama household in 1887, Ms. Whoriskey’s production never finds its focus. Rather than pulling us into a you-are-there intimacy with its two central characters, it keeps pushing us away, opting for a panoramic view that flatters no one.

The Circle in the Square is an in-the-round theater, a geometric fact that seems to have defeated the designers here. Derek McLane’s set has period furniture suspended above the stage, ready to descend for the various scenes, and Kenneth Posner’s lighting design keeps the full stage illuminated for most of the time. It is often hard not to feel as afloat as the furniture. Nor is it always evident where you are meant to be looking, a problem compounded by Ms. Whoriskey’s often keeping the supporting cast of characters on the stage’s periphery.

Those characters are not, to put it kindly, delicately drawn. They include Captain Keller (Matthew Modine), Helen’s Southern-gentleman father; Kate Keller (Jennifer Morrison), her mother; and James (Tobias Segal), Captain Keller’s grown son by a previous marriage. A by-the-numbers subplot has James struggling to stand up to his neglectful dad, while the Captain’s blustery but soft-centered persona becomes the stuff of jokes that might have been lifted from a 1950s sitcom.

It doesn’t help that Mr. Modine, an appealingly quirky actor on screen, plays his role with Pa Kettle irascibility, at the top of his voice. Attired in Paul Tazewell’s handsome period costumes, everyone appears to have been directed to speak loudly and in italics, as if the audience itself might be hearing-impaired. (The estimable Elizabeth Franz, as Helen’s exasperated aunt, is an exception.)

While good diction is usually a blessing, it is perhaps best not to flag the dialogue here by over-enunciation. It is said of Helen, for example: “She is like a little safe, locked, that no one can open. Perhaps there is a treasure inside.” Or here’s James on what he wants from his father: “My God, don’t you know? Everything you forgot when you forgot my mother.”

Ms. Pill has the bulk of the most inspirational speeches and invocations. And their preachier aspects are underscored by this gifted actress’s electing to portray the combative, outspoken 20-year-old Annie with a touch of the New England spinster. (I occasionally thought of Katharine Hepburn being wry and withering.)

I understand the choice; it suggests the hard-won self-restraint and self-denial of a girl who grew up amid privation and tragedy. And it is certainly nothing like Bancroft’s more openly intense interpretation. But an over-the-top ferocity may be necessary to camouflage the clichés of what Annie has to say. Contained passion makes psychological sense for Annie, but it does the play as a whole no favors.

Ms. Breslin, best known for her Oscar-nominated performance in the 2006 film “Little Miss Sunshine,” is now probably a tad mature for the role of Helen, who was only 6 when Annie came into her life. You feel that this tantrum-prone girl is big enough to do serious damage when she goes on a tear. But the largeness of this vital, angry Helen is not symbolically inappropriate to a child whose presence overwhelms a household.

The mano-a-mano battles between Annie and Helen remain the play’s most compelling sequences, even if they are undercut by the overall diffuseness of the mise-en-scène. And for the big, wondrous climax, when Helen first comes to grasp what language is while working a pump in the yard, water flows in more ways than one.

How can you not cry, knowing that this breakthrough moment will lead to one of the most astonishing and admirable careers in American history? You are likely to feel, though, that the tears haven’t been truly earned by a production that delivers full emotional frissons only in its final, fail-safe scene.

THE MIRACLE WORKER

By William Gibson; directed by Kate Whoriskey; sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Paul Tazewell; lighting by Kenneth Posner; music and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen; hair design by Charles LaPointe; physical coaching and movement by Lee Sher; executive producer, Red Awning; associate producers, Rosalind Productions Inc., Patty Baker/Anna Czekaj and Goode Productions. Presented by David Richenthal, Eric Falkenstein, Randall L. Wreghitt, Barbara and Buddy Freitag/Dan Frishwasser, Joe and Kathy Grano, Mallory Factor, Cheryl Lachowicz, Martha Falkenberg, Bruce J. Carusi and Susan Altamore Carusi, David and Sheila Lehrer and Lynn Shaw, in association with Connie Bartlow Kristan and Jamie deRoy/Remmel T. Dickinson. At the Circle in the Square Theater, 235 West 50th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Abigail Breslin (Helen Keller), Alison Pill (Annie Sullivan), Jennifer Morrison (Kate Keller), Elizabeth Franz (Aunt Ev), Matthew Modine (Captain Keller), Tobias Segal (James), Daniel Oreskes (Doctor/Anagnos), Michael Cummings (Percy), Simone Joy Jones (Martha), Yvette Ganier (Viney) and Lance Chantiles-Wertz (Jimmie)

when the rain stops falling

2010-03-09T21:29:00.000-05:00

Fish Soup and Bad Weather, Across the Decades

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Published: March 9, 2010

The forecast is continually gloomy in “When the Rain Stops Falling,” a sorrow-sodden family drama by Andrew Bovell that opened on Monday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. Nobody in Mr. Bovell’s time-skipping saga, sensitively directed by David Cromer (“Our Town”), is ever far from an umbrella, making this Lincoln Center Theater production entirely apposite for the city’s long, strange and soggy winter.

Enlarge This Image

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“When the Rain Stops Falling,” a drama with Michael Siberry, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.

ArtsBeat: Five Questions About 'When the Rain Stops Falling'

Times Topics: Lincoln Center Theater

Enlarge This Image

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Richard Topol, Mary Beth Hurt, center, and Kate Blumberg in “When the Rain Stops Falling,” which opened on Monday.

The heavy weather doesn’t stop at the precipitation of the title. Fractured marriages, accidental deaths, disappearing children, suicide and a chart-topping horror that it’s best not to give away all make appearances in this fitfully moving but diagrammatic play about the long legacy of unnatural acts.

The play opens in the future, the year 2039, as a big fish falls from the sky in Alice Springs, Australia, where the desperate Gabriel York (a fierce Michael Siberry) has just been wondering what to serve his son, Andrew, for lunch. Gabriel has not seen his son in many years because he abandoned the family when Andrew was just a boy.

“I know why he is coming,” Gabriel confesses, his searching eyes bright with remembered shame. “He wants what all young men want from their fathers. He wants to know who he is. Where he comes from. Where he belongs. And for the life of me I don’t know what I will tell him.”

Certainly it is a complicated story. The play jigsaws across the better part of a century, moving between London and various locations in Australia as Mr. Bovell charts the bound fates of two families and several generations. As illuminated by an ensemble cast that infuses these disturbed and sometimes disturbing characters with soulful, affecting depths, the relationships eventually emerge with an emotional clarity that the play’s elliptical structure works against.

Although it moves back and forth among the decades, with characters from disparate eras sometimes sharing the stage, the tale essentially begins in London in 1959, where the middle-class marriage of the bookish Henry and Elizabeth Law (Richard Topol and Kate Blumberg) shows strains when odd incidents begin to befall Henry after the couple’s son is born.

Henry’s confession that he inadvertently began “pleasuring” himself on the commuter train strikes me as rather blithe for the era — or any era — as does Elizabeth’s shrugging reception of this news. “No wonder you forgot your umbrella,” she sympathetically observes. Worse is to come, but piecing together the puzzle takes time, as the play also shows us glimpses of the alcoholic Elizabeth some years on, now played by Mary Beth Hurt, entertaining her frosty 28-year-old son, Gabriel (Will Rogers), over the same fish soup that she was preparing for his father many years before.

Gabriel’s truculence stems from a stewing dissatisfaction over his father’s mysterious disappearance when Gabriel was 7, a subject about which his mother has remained stubbornly reticent. This unease will ultimately send him on a journey to Australia, where he will meet a lonely young woman with her own legacy of familial woe: Gabrielle York (Susan Pourfar), as she is coincidentally called, lost both her parents in the aftermath of a tragedy involving her brother’s disappearance.

Mr. Bovell is big on coincidences and on recurring motifs, even recurring bits of dialogue. Across the generations, fish soup is prepared and served. Across the generations, characters make wry jokes about the weather, noting that people are “drowning in Bangladesh.” Across the generations, the channels of communication between children and their parents are stymied by the secrets of the past.

But Mr. Bovell’s elaborate structure tends to keep us at a cool distance from the characters. Noting the patterns, absorbing the repeated imagery, diagramming the genealogy in your head — not to mention wondering at the obsession with fish soup — you may find it hard to fully immerse yourself in the destinies of the people onstage. This is despite terrific work from Mr. Cromer’s astutely assembled cast, which infuses the schematic storytelling with regular jolts of powerful emotion.

The actresses playing the younger and older Elizabeth and Gabrielle offer nicely matched portraits. Ms. Pourfar’s young Gabrielle is tense with yearning but also wary of committing herself to an affair with the affable young Gabriel, haunted as she is by the shadows of the past. These have darkened considerably in Victoria Clark’s moving portrait of the older Gabrielle. Further losses and afflictions have turned her into a ghostly, tormented figure at war with both the memories of her younger self and her long-suffering husband, Joe (Rod McLachlan).

Ms. Blumberg, as the young Elizabeth, blends a 1950s wifely warmth with a crisp intelligence. (She counters Henry’s rather weird bits of trivia about weather history with learned notes about cultural events taking place at the same time.) The shocks of life have drained the warmth from the Elizabeth played with a hard asperity by Ms. Hurt, leaving behind just the tough-minded mother closed off from an open relationship with her son by the secrets she refuses to divulge.

The men are likewise fine, with Mr. Rogers touchingly awkward as Gabriel; Mr. McLachlan endearing as the devoted but neglected Joe; and Mr. Topol imbuing his portrait of the disturbed Henry with an unsettling mixture of bourgeois academic rectitude and nervous, possibly sinister idiosyncrasy. Henry Vick rounds out the cast in the small role of the son expected for lunch in the opening scene.

The production’s crepuscular design befits the overriding tone of mysterious images emerging behind a rain-covered windowpane. The lighting by Tyler Micoleau discerns innumerable shades in drizzly grays. Fitz Patton’s smart sound design and Josh Schmidt’s moody music work together to heighten the sense of portent. And David Korins’s minimalist set, a circular moving platform set within another, on which a few key pieces of furniture are placed, effectively echoes the play’s swirling structure.

Mr. Cromer’s staging finds the sad poetry in the patterns as characters from past and present circle one another unknowingly or sometimes stand vigil before their younger selves, frozen in sorrow or regret. The gloom can become oppressive at times, but the shadowy mise-en-scène echoes the darkness through which the characters struggle to discern a way forward, or at least find a way to escape the past.

WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING

By Andrew Bovell; directed by David Cromer; sets by David Korins; costumes by Clint Ramos; lighting by Tyler Micoleau; sound by Fitz Patton; music by Josh Schmidt; stage manager, Richard A. Hodge; general manager, Adam Siegel; production manager, Jeff Hamlin. Presented by the Lincoln Center Theater, under the direction of André Bishop and Bernard Gersten; by arrangement with Jean Doumanian and Freddy DeMann. At the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 239-6200. Through April 18. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

WITH: Kate Blumberg (Younger Elizabeth Law), Victoria Clark (Older Gabrielle York), Mary Beth Hurt (Older Elizabeth Law), Rod McLachlan (Joe Ryan), Susan Pourfar (Younger Gabrielle York), Will Rogers (Gabriel Law), Michael Siberry (Gabriel York), Richard Topol (Henry Law) and Henry Vick (Andrew Price).

2010-03-03T11:33:00.002-05:00

2010-03-03T11:27:00.000-05:00

2010-03-03T11:23:00.000-05:00

2010-03-03T10:58:00.001-05:00

2010-03-03T09:44:00.000-05:00

2010-03-03T09:29:00.001-05:00

2010-03-03T09:08:00.001-05:00

february 25th horoscope

2010-03-03T08:58:00.000-05:00

Everyone alive has some kind of learning disability. I know brilliant physicists who are dumb about poetry. There are fact-loving journalists whose brains freeze when they're invited to consider the ambiguous truths of astrology. My friend John suffers from dyslexia, while I myself am incapable of mastering the mysteries of economics. What's your blind spot, Capricorn? What's your own personal learning disability? Whatever it is, this would be an excellent time, astrologically speaking, to work with it. For the next few months, you will be able to call on what you need in order to diminish its power to limit you.

Capricorn Horoscope for week of March 4, 2010

2010-03-03T08:49:00.000-05:00

Capricorn Horoscope for week of March 4, 2010

The Orphans' Home Cycle Part Two at the Signature Theater

2010-02-21T20:23:00.000-05:00

The Orphans' Home Cycle Part Two at the Signature Theater

By Elyse Sommer

I am no orphan, but I think of myself as an orphan, belonging to no one but you. I intend to have everything I didn't have before. A hose of my own, some land, a yard, and in that yard I will plant growing things, fruitful things. . .and I do believe I might now have these things, because you married me.— Horace, in Act 3: Valentine's Day.

Maggie Lacey and Bill Heck
(Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Two years have passed since The Orphans' Home Cycle's first part ended with Horace Robedeaux's unhappy visit to the Houston home of his mother and hostile stepfather. It's 1912 and Horace is about to come closer to achieving the sense of belonging he lost at age twelve when his father died.

The more upbeat story we're about to witness is launched with another of the stunning opening scenes that director Michael Wilson has created to stitch these former stand-alone plays into a big, beautiful, finely shaded patchwork. We again see Horace (another deeply felt performance by Bill Heck) wandering across the stage as a series of moving panels spell out the title. That suitcase symbolizes the loneliness and yearning that haunts fatherless men. To establish the more hopeful part of this epic journey, Horace is surrounded by pairs of dancing ensemble members.

The story of Horace's short-lived romance with the beautiful young widow, Claire Ratliff (Virginia Kull), and his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Vaughn (Maggie Lacey) is, like the entire Cycle, propelled by subtle details and ordinary conversations rather than any explosive or suspenseful plot developments. It is Horton Foote's ability to engage us in the very ordinariness of these lives that makes these stories as riveting as any play full of edge-of-the-seat action and suspense.

The delicate shading of Foote's storytelling and the nine plays' thematic connection is smartly underscored by the way the actors are cast to play a variety of roles. To give just one example, the opening act of Parts One and Two are smartly linked together by the fact that Virginia Krull plays both Horace's widowed mother in the first part and the young widow he's smitten with in the second, and that Dylan Riley Snyder metamorphoses from Horace at age 12 to the Widow Claire's son Buddy (in another standout performance).

We thus have two different women played by one actress faced with and settle for pragmatic choices and we see Horace and Buddy linked by the multiple role casting as they share the pain of losing a father at an early age that can never quite go away. There's yet another variation on saga's invisible and unerasable scar of experiencing a father's death at a young age (and so accounting for the plural of the title's Orphans): Horace's initially antagonistic father-in-law Mr. Vaughn (James DeMarse) was also half-orphaned at age twelve which makes you understand his over-protectiveness of his daughter which initially makes him come across as smug and dictatorial. DeMarse makes a tour-de-force transition from a drunken character in the somewhat gothic Convicts of Part One to the successful business owner and family man Horace yearns to be. As Lauren noted when she reviewed this segment in Hartford, the bond that forms not only between Horace and Elizabeth but between him and her family makes for some powerfully moving moments.

For audience members who see Part two without having seen Part 1, the program includes a handy summary and I assume this will be true for Part three which will take us forward to the next decade of life in Harrison, Texas. Naturally, no summary can do justice to seeing Horace's epic journey unfold on stage and watching stellar ensemble members like Hallie Foote, Annalee Jefreys and Pamela Payton-Wright amaze us once again with their persona changing virtuosity.

With the concluding triptych of the Cycle titled 1918 it seems inevitable that Harrison's citizenry wil be affected by the Spanish flue epidemic and the first World War. It might not be a bad idea to come with plenty of tissues. Serious challenge

Part One: The Story of a Childhood: 1902-1910 Prologue and Act 1: Roots in a Parched Ground 1902-1903. . .Act 2: Conficts 1904. . .Act 3 Lily Dale 1911
Part Three: The Story of a Family 1918 . . . Cousins . . . The Death of Papa - reviewed at Hartford Stage

Capricorn Horoscope for week of February 18, 201

2010-02-21T20:22:00.001-05:00

Capricorn Horoscope for week of February 18, 2010

Being scrupulously ethical can be taxing and time-consuming. It involves high levels of ongoing self-examination, which many people are too selfish and lazy to bother with. On the upside, pursuing a path with integrity ultimately reduces one's suffering. It also attracts the kind of assistance that is most likely to aid and abet one's quest for liberation. As a bonus, it makes it unlikely that one will be a cockroach in one's next incarnation. I'm bringing this up, Capricorn, because I'm sensing that you're about to be tempted to be less than your best self. Please don't succumb.

Shane Koyczan Slam poet Opening Ceremony poem

2010-02-21T20:20:00.000-05:00

A transcript of the poem is below, or you can watch Koyczan performing the poem here.

We Are More

When defining Canada
you might list some statistics
you might mention our tallest building
or biggest lake
you might shake a tree in the fall
and call a red leaf Canada
you might rattle off some celebrities
might mention Buffy Sainte-Marie
might even mention the fact that we've got a few
Barenaked Ladies
or that we made these crazy things
like zippers
electric cars
and washing machines
when defining Canada
it seems the world's anthem has been
"been there done that"
and maybe that's where we used to be at
it's true
we've done and we've been
we've seen
all the great themes get swallowed up by the machine
and turned into theme parks
but when defining Canada
don't forget to mention that we have set sparks
we are not just fishing stories
about the one that got away
we do more than sit around and say "eh?"
and yes
we are the home of the Rocket and the Great One
who inspired little number nines
and little number ninety-nines
but we're more than just hockey and fishing lines
off of the rocky coast of the Maritimes
and some say what defines us
is something as simple as please and thank you
and as for you're welcome
well we say that too
but we are more
than genteel or civilized
we are an idea in the process
of being realized
we are young
we are cultures strung together
then woven into a tapestry
and the design
is what makes us more
than the sum total of our history
we are an experiment going right for a change
with influences that range from a to zed
and yes we say zed instead of zee
we are the colours of Chinatown and the coffee of Little Italy
we dream so big that there are those
who would call our ambition an industry
because we are more than sticky maple syrup and clean snow
we do more than grow wheat and brew beer
we are vineyards of good year after good year
we reforest what we clear
because we believe in generations beyond our own
knowing now that so many of us
have grown past what used to be
we can stand here today
filled with all the hope people have
when they say things like "someday"
someday we'll be great
someday we'll be this
or that
someday we'll be at a point
when someday was yesterday
and all of our aspirations will pay the way
for those who on that day
look towards tomorrow
and still they say someday
we will reach the goals we set
and we will get interest on our inspiration
because we are more than a nation of whale watchers and lumberjacks
more than backpacks and hiking trails
we are hammers and nails building bridges
towards those who are willing to walk across
we are the lost-and-found for all those who might find themselves at a loss
we are not the see-through gloss or glamour
of those who clamour for the failings of others
we are fathers brothers sisters and mothers
uncles and nephews aunts and nieces
we are cousins
we are found missing puzzle pieces
we are families with room at the table for newcomers
we are more than summers and winters
more than on and off seasons
we are the reasons people have for wanting to stay
because we are more than what we say or do
we live to get past what we go through
and learn who we are
we are students
students who study the studiousness of studying
so we know what as well as why
we don't have all the answers
but we try
and the effort is what makes us more
we don't all know what it is in life we're looking for
so keep exploring
go far and wide
or go inside but go deep
go deep
as if James Cameron was filming a sequel to The Abyss
and suddenly there was this location scout
trying to figure some way out
to get inside you
because you've been through hell and high water
and you went deep
keep exploring
because we are more
than a laundry list of things to do and places to see
we are more than hills to ski
or countryside ponds to skate
we are the abandoned hesitation of all those who can't wait
we are first-rate greasy-spoon diners and healthy-living cafes
a country that is all the ways you choose to live
a land that can give you variety
because we are choices
we are millions upon millions of voices shouting
"keep exploring... we are more"
we are the surprise the world has in store for you
it's true
Canada is the "what" in "what's new?"
so don't say "been there done that"
unless you've sat on the sidewalk
while chalk artists draw still lifes
on the concrete of a kid in the street
beatboxing to Neil Young for fun
don't say you've been there done that
unless you've been here doing it
let this country be your first-aid kit
for all the times you get sick of the same old same old
let us be the story told to your friends
and when that story ends
leave chapters for the next time you'll come back
next time pack for all the things
you didn't pack for the first time
but don't let your luggage define your travels
each life unravels differently
and experiences are what make up
the colours of our tapestry
we are the true north
strong and free
and what's more
is that we didn't just say it
we made it be.

Little Night Music

2010-02-03T07:00:00.001-05:00

A Weekend in the Country With Eros and Thanatos

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: December 14, 2009

The night itself is said to smile at the escapades of the addled lovers in “A Little Night Music,” Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s erotic waltz of a show from 1973. But the expression that hovers overTrevor Nunn’s revival, which opened Sunday night at the Walter Kerr Theater, feels dangerously close to a smirk.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“A Little Night Music”: Catherine Zeta-Jones, foreground, stars in Trevor Nunn’s revival of the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical, at the Walter Kerr Theater.

Multimedia

Audio Slide Show

Finding Fredrik

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Angela Lansbury plays an aging courtesan in “A Little Night Music.”

It is a smirk shrouded in shadows. An elegiac darkness infuses this production, which stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, in a lively Broadway debut, and the indomitable (and invaluable) Angela Lansbury. But the behavior of the characters who wander through a twilight labyrinth of passion in early-20th-century Sweden has the exaggerated gusto of second-tier boulevard farce, of people trying a little too hard for worldliness.

The possibility of its affect turning from that of a feathery tickle to a nudge in the ribs has always been present in “A Little Night Music,” which charts a tangled web of romances centered on the ravishing actress Desirée Armfeldt (Ms. Zeta-Jones). Adapted from the Ingmar Bergman movie “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955), Mr. Wheeler’s book has always had a coarse side at odds with the intricacy and delicacy of Mr. Sondheim’s score, which sets a deep-blue wistfulness to three-quarter time.

Yet when the original production opened, directed byHarold Prince, the perception was that a fine balance had been achieved between Broadway sex appeal and Sondheim cerebralism, with Mr. Wheeler (and Mr. Prince) playing Ginger Rogers to the composer’s Fred Astaire. “Good God! — an adult musical!” wrote Clive Barnes, the critic for The New York Times, who had never been a Sondheim champion but who found the show “heady, civilized, sophisticated and enchanting.” The production, which starred Glynis Johns as Desirée, ran for 601 performances, making it one of the few Sondheim shows to become a fat, popular hit. (It even had a breakout pop song, “Send In the Clowns.”)

Mr. Nunn’s “Little Night Music,” the first full Broadway revival of the show, may well be a hit too, though not because of any artistic finesse. It has what is a producer’s favorite form of insurance these days: stars known to the public from movies, television and tabloids, of whom people can later say things like “She’s even more beautiful in person” (as they surely will of the lustrous Ms. Zeta-Jones) or “She’s amazing for her age” (in reference to the 84-year-old Ms. Lansbury).

In addition to being drop-dead gorgeous in David Farley’s wasp-waisted period dresses, Ms. Zeta-Jones brings a decent voice, a supple dancer’s body and a vulpine self-possession to her first appearance on Broadway. This Welsh-born Hollywood actress appeared in West End musicals in her youth and won an Oscar for the film of the musical “Chicago,” as the man-killing chorine Velma Kelly. Her Desirée, to be honest, is much like her Velma: earthy, eager and a tad vulgar, though without the homicidal rage and jealousy. (Imagine Velma after a regimen of antidepressants.)

Such traits lend a not always appropriate edge of desperation to the droll Desirée, who has tired of touring and longs to be reunited with her former (now married) lover, Fredrik Egerman (Alexander Hanson). Ms. Zeta-Jones delivers her big ballad, “Send In the Clowns,” with an all-out emotionalism that I suppose makes sense but doesn’t jibe with the character’s amused urbanity. And swapping arch banter, sung or spoken, doesn’t come naturally to Ms. Zeta-Jones.

Though Mr. Hanson turns in a suitably suave, measured performance as the middle-aged lawyer hoping to reclaim his youth, many of the other cast members exaggerate their characters’ defining traits to the bursting point. As Anne, Fredrik’s 18-year-old, enduringly virginal bride, Ramona Mallory is all breathless fluster, squeaks and squeals. Hunter Ryan Herdlicka brings a loud, cartoonish angst to Henrik, Fredrik’s dour, censorious son.

Aaron Lazar is refreshingly understated, if not terribly memorable, as Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm, the swaggering dragoon who is having an affair with Desirée. It is at least a novelty to have the role of his much put-upon wife, the Countess, played (by Erin Davie) as a teary hysteric instead of a dispenser of withering witticisms. (For the record, Ms. Davie and Ms. Mallory turn down the histrionics for an appealing performance of the bewitchingly bitter duet “Every Day a Little Death.”)

Leigh Ann Larkin, as the earthy maid Petra, oversells the 11 o’clock number “The Miller’s Son,” a hymn to sex as a life force, with autoerotic gestures that suggest an audition for a pole-dancing position. And almost everyone has an unfortunate penchant for the kind of artificial, neck-elongating laughter associated with bad drawing-room comedy. (As Desirée’s mother, the courtesan Madame Armfeldt, Ms. Lansbury is quite delicious, so I am saving her for dessert.)

This production was incubated at the tiny and prodigiously fertile Menier Chocolate Factory in London, with a cast that included Mr. Hanson. The Menier was also the birthing place for a splendid revival of Mr. Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” (which transferred to the West End and, last year, to Broadway) and for the Broadway-bound “Cage Aux Folles.” Inventive use of limited means is the Menier’s signature, so it should come as no surprise that this “Night Music” is sparing on furniture and heavy on shadows, though the original is remembered for its visual lushness.

Multimedia

Audio Slide Show

Finding Fredrik

Mr. Farley’s set, dominated by walls paneled in clouded glass, and Hartley T A Kemp’s crepuscular lighting evoke a world perpetually in the gloaming, a past remembered, fondly and regretfully, through a haze. And with a scaled-down orchestra at lugubriously slowed-down tempos, Mr. Sondheim’s score more than ever suggests — and not always desirably — echoes from a distant era. (The show is punctuated by the choral commentary of five lieder singers, who are always asking, “Remember, darling?”)

Even if it deprives us of a knock-’em-dead rendition of the great first-act finale number, “A Weekend in the Country,” this somber, less-is-more approach could be effective were the ensemble plugged into the same rueful sensibility. But there is only one moment in this production when all its elements cohere perfectly.

That moment, halfway through the first act, belongs to Ms. Lansbury, who has hitherto been perfectly entertaining, playing Madame Armfeldt with the overripe aristocratic condescension of a Lady Bracknell. Then comes her one solo, “Liaisons,” in which her character thinks back on the art of love as a profession in a gilded age, when sex “was but a pleasurable means to a measurable end.”

Her face, with its glamour-gorgon makeup, softens, as Madame Armfeldt seems to melt into memory itself, and the wan stage light briefly appears to borrow radiance from her. It’s a lovely example of the past reaching out to the present, and vice versa, enriched of course by our own knowledge of Ms. Lansbury’s storied past as an actress.

“Where’s discretion of the heart, where’s passion in the art, where’s craft?” Madame Armfeldt sings in lamentation. Looking at the production she appears in, I’d say she has a point. On the other hand, looking at Ms. Lansbury just then, I would say that those virtues still have their avatar in an actress who survived six decades in show business without losing either the craft or passion in her art.

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by Hugh Wheeler, suggested by a film byIngmar Bergman; originally produced and directed on Broadway by Harold Prince; directed by Trevor Nunn; choreography by Lynne Page; music supervision by Caroline Humphris; sets and costumes by David Farley; lighting by Hartley T A Kemp; sound by Dan Moses Schreier and Gareth Owen; wig and hair design by Paul Huntley; makeup design by Angelina Avallone; production stage manager, Ira Mont; associate director, Seth Sklar-Heyn; associate choreographer, Scott Taylor; music direction by Tom Murray; orchestrations by Jason Carr; music coordinator, John Miller; general manager, Frankel Green Theatrical Management; technical supervision by Aurora Productions; associate producers, Broadway Across America, Dan Frishwasser, Jam Theatricals and Richard Winkler. Presented by Tom Viertel, Steven Baruch, Marc Routh, Richard Frankel, the Menier Chocolate Factory, Roger Berlind, David Babani, Sonia Friedman Productions, Andrew Fell, Daryl Roth/Jane Bergère, Harvey Weinstein/Raise the Roof 3, Beverly Bartner/Dancap Productions Inc., Nica Burns/Max Weitzenhoffer, Eric Falkenstein/Anna Czekaj, Jerry Frankel/Ronald Frankel and James D. Stern/Douglas L. Meyer. At the Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes.

WITH: Catherine Zeta-Jones (Desirée Armfeldt), Angela Lansbury (Madame Armfeldt), Alexander Hanson (Fredrik Egerman), Erin Davie (Countess Charlotte Malcolm), Leigh Ann Larkin (Petra), Hunter Ryan Herdlicka (Henrik Egerman), Ramona Mallory (Anne Egerman) and Aaron Lazar (Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm)

Time Stands Still

2010-02-03T06:54:00.002-05:00

What’s Really Fair in Love and War?

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Published: January 29, 2010

Sarah Goodwin, the complicated woman at the heart of “Time Stands Still,” seems to thrive on conflict, at least professionally. A photojournalist who covers wars and global strife, she keeps chaos at arm’s length by trapping it in the camera lens, exerting a fierce control over moments of horror by fixing them in Ms. Linney, an actress of unusual economy and seemingly innate grace, does not shy from depicting the thorny aspects of Sarah’s personality: her impatience with views opposing her own, the leftover anger from witnessing her parents’ unhappy marriage, the emotional reserve and the sense of detachment bred in her by her work. But she also reveals the reserves of tender feeling beneath the ample defenses. We sense Sarah’s growing fear that her need to live life on her own terms cannot be reconciled with the path James sees for their future. Ms. Linney’s tough but gently shaded performance honors the character’s seeming contradictions.

Mr. d’Arcy James, a remarkably versatile actor equally at home in splashy musicals like “Shrek” and the chiaroscuro delicacies of Conor McPherson’s “Port Authority,” has never been better than he is here. James’s anguish and guilt over his failure to protect Sarah are conveyed with touching warmth. The darker feelings that reside just below his congenial surface — envy of Sarah’s career success, rage at a betrayal he at first chooses to ignore — eventually burst forth, in scenes to which Mr. d’Arcy James brings fierce, raw anger that sets the stage crackling with currents of powerful feeling.

The loving but uneasy relationship between Sarah and James is contrasted with the effortless companionship of Richard and Mandy, drawn with a lighter but not less convincing sense of truth by Mr. Bogosian and Ms. Silverstone. Although “Time Stands Still” is deceptively modest, even laid back in its structure and sensibility, consisting of a handful of conversations among just four characters, the range of feeling it explores is wide and deep.

Sarah and James have spent much of their lives bearing witness to horrific violence, but Mr. Margulies’s quietly powerful drama illustrates just how much pain and trauma are involved in the everyday business of two people creating a life together, one that accommodates the mistakes of the past, the reality of the present and the changes that the future may bring.

TIME STANDS STILL

By Donald Margulies; directed by Daniel Sullivan; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Rita Ryack; lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; sound by Darron L West; music by Peter Golub; fight director, Thomas Schall. Presented by the Manhattan Theater Club, Lynne Meadow, artistic director; Barry Grove, executive producer; by special arrangement with Nelle Nugent/Wendy Federman. At the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, 261 West 47th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Through March 14. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.

WITH: Eric Bogosian (Richard Ehrlich), Brian d’Arcy James (James Dodd), Laura Linney(Sarah Goodwin) and Alicia Silverstone (Mandy Bloo.

But the flux of Sarah’s own life cannot be manipulated so easily, as she learns with growing sorrow in this thoughtful drama by Donald Margulies that stars Laura Linneyand Brian d’Arcy James, giving performances of complementary sensitivity and richness. Conflicting needs cannot be held at a cool distance; the wounds of the past cannot be filed away like old negatives; the change that experience brings is not reversible.

“Time Stands Still,” which opened Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in a flawless Manhattan Theater Club production directed by Daniel Sullivan, is handily Mr. Margulies’s finest play since the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Dinner With Friends.” Like that keenly observed drama about the growing pains of adulthood, the new play explores the relationship between two couples at a crucial juncture in their lives, when the desire to move forward clashes with the instinct to stay comfortably — or even uncomfortably — in place.

As the play opens, the challenges facing Sarah and her partner, James Dodd (Ms. Linney and Mr. d’Arcy James), seem clear enough. James has just brought Sarah home from a hospital in Germany, where she was recuperating from severe injuries suffered while she was covering the war in Iraq. Antsy and unused to the burdens of repose, Sarah rebuffs James’s constant efforts to cushion her from the bumps and bruises of recovery. His anxiety is amplified by a lingering sense of guilt: a reporter himself, he had suffered a breakdown in Iraq and returned to the United States shortly before Sarah’s accident, which has left her with a bum leg and scarred face.

Just how much has changed since Sarah was on assignment is brought home when they receive a visit from their good friend Richard Ehrlich (Eric Bogosian), Sarah’s former flame and mentor from many years before who is the photo editor at a newsmagazine. Richard has a new, much younger girlfriend in tow, Mandy (Alicia Silverstone), whose introduction of a pair of tacky silver balloons into James and Sarah’s funky loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, telegraphs just how markedly her sensibility differs from theirs.

Sarah accepts this absurd gift with devastating cool, as she greets all Mandy’s efforts to ingratiate herself. These include Mandy’s announcement that she has been praying for Sarah’s quick recovery. “It’s weird ’cause it’s not like I believe in God or anything,” Mandy adds, chirping away obliviously.

Ms. Silverstone, whose Broadway debut came in the dreary stage adaptation of “The Graduate,” gets a happy chance at redemption in a tricky role to which she brings warmth, actorly intelligence and delicate humor. She achieves the lovely feat of allowing us to laugh at Mandy’s shallowness even as we are charmed by her good-heartedness.

When Mandy disappears into the bathroom, Sarah and James blandly profess to find her “adorable” and “darling,” in tones that make this anodyne praise sound damning. Richard has been running conversational interference in an attempt to minimize Mandy’s missteps, a process that the terrific Mr. Bogosian illustrates in precise comic detail, as Richard’s romantic ardor wars with intellectual mortification.

Eventually Richard becomes righteous, insisting that the relationship isn’t just a matter of a middle-aged guy chasing younger women. Sarah’s withering reply: “There’s young, and there’s embryonic.”

Mr. Margulies is gifted at creating complex characters through wholly natural interaction, allowing the emotional layers, the long histories, the hidden kernels of conflict to emerge organically. His dialogue throughout “Time Stands Still” crackles with bright wit and intelligence, but it is almost always an expression of the characters’ personalities, not a function of the author’s need to dazzle and entertain. (A few lines feel false or glib, as when Sarah says, “War was my parents’ house all over again, only on a different scale.”)

He also folds into the writing a few trenchant debates about the moral ambiguities of journalists’ role in covering atrocities. In the play’s premiere production, at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles last year, these sometimes felt tacked on, but Mr. Sullivan, who also staged that version, and his largely new cast have mostly smoothed out any lumps in the writing. The heart of “Time Stands Still” resides in the gently evolving relationship between Sarah and James, which develops troubling new ripples in each scene.

Ms. Linney, an actress of unusual economy and seemingly innate grace, does not shy from depicting the thorny aspects of Sarah’s personality: her impatience with views opposing her own, the leftover anger from witnessing her parents’ unhappy marriage, the emotional reserve and the sense of detachment bred in her by her work. But she also reveals the reserves of tender feeling beneath the ample defenses. We sense Sarah’s growing fear that her need to live life on her own terms cannot be reconciled with the path James sees for their future. Ms. Linney’s tough but gently shaded performance honors the character’s seeming contradictions.

Audio Slide Show

'I'm Taking Their Picture'

ing.

TIME STANDS STILL

WITH: Eric Bogosian (Richard Ehrlich), Brian d’Arcy James (James Dodd), Laura Linney(Sarah Goodwin) and Alicia Silverstone (Mandy Bloom).

Capricorn Horoscope for week of February 4, 2010

2010-02-03T06:52:00.001-05:00

Capricorn Horoscope for week of February 4, 2010

"The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired," wrote music critic Ernest Newman, "but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration." I think what Newman said applies to those working in any field where creativity is needed -- which is really just about every field. Given your current astrological omens, Capricorn, it's especially apropos for you now. This is an excellent time to increase your mastery of the kind of discipline that spurs inventive thought and surprising breakthroughs.

Horoscopes for week of January 21, 2010

2010-01-30T21:51:00.000-05:00

Take what you really need, Capricorn, but don't take what you just sort of want. That's my advice to you. Haggle with life, yes, but insist only on the specific essentials and forgo irrelevant goodies. A similar principle applies as you seek the information you crave: Formulate precise questions that will win you the exact revelations that are necessary to help your cause and that won't fill your beautiful head up with useless data.

crazy heart

2010-01-30T21:36:00.000-05:00

By Kirk Honeycutt, November 29, 2009 07:00 ET

"Crazy Heart"

Cast: Jeff Bridges (Bad Blake), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Jean Craddock), Robert Duvall (Wayne), Tom Bower (Bill Wilson), James Keane (Manager), William Marquez (Doctor), Ryan Bingham (Tony), Paul Hermann (Jack Greene), Rick Dial (Wesley Barnes)

Bottom Line: Jeff Bridges is terrific but the movie only ordinary.

Fox Searchlight's sudden decision to toss "Crazy Heart" into the heat of December and therefore the Oscar competition casts a brighter spotlight -- and greater scrutiny -- on what is a modest, rather conventional depiction of an aging and alcoholic country musician on a lengthy downward spiral. Had this film appeared later at Sundance, you would have the pleasure of discovering a fine performance by Jeff Bridges in an otherwise unremarkable movie. But with his best actor candidacy already announced, you start to notice his uncanny resemblance to Kris Kristofferson and speculate about how much this performance derives from Rip Torn's still-memorable turn as a ruthlessly self-absorbed country singer in the 1973 film "Payday."

Make no mistake: Bridges more than delivers the goods for Oscar eligibility. He is the mesmerizing, dangerous, unpredictable heart of "Crazy Heart." He is a damn good reason to see the film, and Maggie Gyllenhaal and the ever-mysterious, shockingly beautiful New Mexico desert are a couple of others.

But even with a more upbeat ending given to this adaptation of Thomas Cobb's downbeat novel, some 22 years out of print, "Crazy Heart" might struggle for an audience. Whether a drunk recovers or not, you still have to pass time with a guy you know will screw up just about every opportunity coming his way.

Bridges' Bad Blake earns his name. He can't always get through a set without having to go backstage to vomit. Even so, you figure cigarettes might kill him before the booze does. Either way, it'll be a tight race.

Once a genuine star, he now plays with teenage pickup bands and performs at bowling alleys. Women slip him phone numbers, though, so he has something other than a bottle to get him through the night.

He meets a cute, very young journalist (Gyllenhaal), to whom he grants an interview. So the interview gives you his backstory -- four marriages and a son he hasn't spoken to in years -- while these two fall into a high-risk relationship. It's especially high risk for the reporter, who has a 4-year-old son.

The question in movies about abusers is where exactly will rock bottom be and when will he hit it? One pretty much knows it will have something to do with that young boy, especially when Gyllenhaal says she couldn't live without him.

Bridges gives Bad Blake a rough charm that sees him through hard situations and attracts the occasional friend like Robert Duvall's compassionate tavern owner. As he rumbles to one-night stands throughout the Southwest in a battered car, he has his mood swings, but one senses what really keeps him going is the music. It matters to him. He connects his life to his music and lives his songs onstage and off. Bridges is not a bad singer, either, thoroughly convincing one that he once could have been a headliner.

There is a smart subplot involving a younger country star, well played by Colin Farrell. Once his protege, Bad Blake now feels the sting of his success. But when they meet, the singer clearly does not emulate any of Bad Blake's self-destructive ways. The star tries very hard to help his old friend and begs him to write songs for which he will pay grandly.

Actor Scott Cooper makes his debut as a writer-director, but he's working with tired material. As it is, Bridges and the cast perform wonders to make "Crazy Heart" seem as fresh as it does. But an ex-star out of control and the self-destructive drunk is a cross between types with too many antecedents in other movies.

"Crazy Heart" is the second salvage job by Fox Searchlight in as many years. The film was made for about $7 million by Country Music Television, a unit of Viacom. When Paramount was about to throw it into the scrap heap of a video release, the film was purchased by Fox Searchlight. Unlike that unit's rescue of last year's "Slumdog Millionaire" from Warner Bros., "Crazy Heart" lacks that spark of originality. So what Fox Searchlight has salvaged essentially is a highly watchable performance by Bridges, one of many he has furnished throughout a long career.

Opens: Wednesday, Dec. 16 (Fox Searchlight)

Nine a review by Marshall Fine

2010-01-30T21:35:00.000-05:00

December 17, 2009

‘Nine’: Actually, only about a 5

Forget the provenance of “Nine” for a moment and consider it solely as a movie unto itself.

Rob Marshall’s musical is a dreamy, sometimes nightmarish journey by a single man – movie director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) – whose muse has deserted him, though its female embodiment (or the plural thereof) is grabbing at him from all sides.

Indeed, the women in Guido’s life, who have served as his inspiration in the past, now seem to be draining him without even realizing it. Even as he struggles to figure out what his next movie is going to be about (it’s supposed to start shooting in a week), the women are pawing at him for attention, for favors, for time.

“Nine” is a tour of Guido’s imagination and memory, writ large as a musical. Not a musical comedy; there aren’t many laughs in the script by Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella (though it’s not a straight drama, either). But it’s a musical, nonetheless, in which the songs seldom serve the plot but, rather, are used to delineate character.

Each character in this adaptation of the Maury Yeston-Arthur Kopit Broadway musical is given one song (two for his wife), which reveals who she is and what she wants. But because they are all singing in Guido’s mind, their numbers mostly take place on the faux Coliseum set, backed by scaffolding, that has been erected for his still unwritten film on a soundstage at Cinecitta Studios in Rome.

Fans of the original musical may be disappointed that a large chunk of the original score has gone by the wayside as Marshall and crew put together their adaptation. Marshall pays much closer attention to the musical’s original source: Federico Fellini’s ground-breaking 1963 film, “8½,” the Italian maestro’s autobiographical paean to the magic of film-making.

Marshall’s visual style here (in the cinematography of Dion Beebe) mixes color and black-and-white, lavish studio production values with gritty handheld moments. He homes in Fellini’s original notion: that the entire adventure is happening as much in Guido’s mind as in his life.

As played by Day-Lewis with a panache that is all Italian charm and guile, Guido is a man who doesn’t know his own mind and can’t make a choice. He loves his wife, Luisa (Marion Cotillard, heartbreaking here) – but consistently betrays her with his lover, Carla (a smoking-hot Penelope Cruz). And he is drawn to his long-time star Claudia (Nicole Kidman, who pops up long enough to sing Yeston’s most haunting song, “In a Very Unusual Way”).

And there are more: He dallies briefly with a reporter from Vogue (Kate Hudson) – and turns for counsel to his longtime wardrobe designer (Judi Dench). He even consorts with ghosts: of the local prostitute Saraghina who fascinated him as a youngster (Fergie), and, of course, of his late mother (the timeless Sophia Loren).

The acting here is not the problem. Day-Lewis captures the dry-well sense of a man aching for inspiration and not finding it. His agony is palpable each time he realizes that one of these women – who he has hoped will light his fuse for the inevitable explosion of creativity – instead is draining him of vital energy without sparking anything in return.

Marion Cotillard matches him, bringing a simmering anger to the loving wife whose patience is at an end – who finally sees Guido for who and what he is. Her pain comes at the realization that Guido can’t see his own flaw: his inability to make any change in himself, despite his utter willingness to promise a total transformation. Cruz is also strong as the passionate mistress who is childlike in her willingness to disrupt Guido’s life for her own needs.

But “Nine” offers mostly lackluster music, offered in elaborately staged numbers that seem neither organic nor joyously artificial – just artificial. Marshall does his best to pump up the energy, but his images don’t illuminate. Indeed, in Saraghina’s song, in which Fergie and back-up dancers keep sifting handfuls of sand – or throwing it about – all I could think about was how gritty they all must have felt afterward and how glad they must have been to be done with it.

Yet, without the music, “Nine” would be that absolutely unnecessary object: a remake of “8½.”

Does that make “Nine” an unnecessary object as well? Not really – this is not a beloved entry in the Broadway musical canon, so a rethinking is not out of order. After all, the original production was about the imaginative staging by theater wizard Tommy Tune (and whatever happened to him?); the revival was about star-power casting of Antonio Banderas.

But this movie version doesn’t seem to have any mojo going for it, despite strong showings by its cast. “Nine” ultimately doesn’t give you a compelling reason to root for it.

‘The Orphans’ Home Cycle’

2010-01-30T21:28:00.001-05:00

Life, Death and Family in Foote’s Texase

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: January 27, 2010

Nobody in Harrison, Tex., needs to ask for whom the bell tolls. Not, at least, in 1918, the year that gives the title to the opening work in the reverberant final installment of Horton Foote’s “Orphans’ Home Cycle” at the Peter Norton Space on West 42nd Street.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Time

Maggie Lacey and Bill Heck in the final installment of Horton Foote's “Orphans' Home Cycle,” about the residents of a small town in Texas.

‘The Orphans’ Home Cycle’

Audio Slide Show

A Father's Legacy

Theater Review | 'The Orphans' Home Cycle': An Insignificant Riddle and the Other Women in an Orphan’s Life (December 18, 2009)

In Dramatic Cycle, a Foote Family Tree (December 13, 2009)

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“The Orphans’ Home Cycle: Part 3 — The Story of a Family”: From left, Maggie Lacey, Bill Heck and Hallie Foote at Peter Norton Space. e

Again and again, the iron tongue clangs from the church steeple, and people in town realize that the flu has taken another victim, most likely someone they’re acquainted with. Odds are they’ll know the name of the deceased — and the time and place of death — before the tolling stops.

As anyone realizes who has become addicted to Foote’s serial narrative through the first two parts of this cycle (each part consists of three one-act plays; all three parts are now being performed in repertory), death was never a stranger to Horace Robedaux, who lost his father and his home when he was 12. But in “1918,” the seventh of nine plays that trace Horace’s life from boyhood to the edge of middle age, the reaper moves in as a permanent guest, settling into the bedroom, the parlor, the porch.

“Death, if I don’t think of you, you’ll vanish,” says Horace (Bill Heck), now a husband and father. But a part of him knows that death never vanishes; it’s people who do.

The three short dramas that make up “The Story of a Family,” which opened on Tuesday night, are both the starkest and most sentimental of this lovingly painted life-and-times portrait, directed by Michael Wilson in a co-production of the Hartford Stage and the Signature Theater Company. (The production may move to Broadway in the fall.) The characters of Horace and his wife, Elizabeth (Maggie Lacey), were inspired by Foote’s parents, and they emerge here, in their integrity and fortitude, as the subjects of a son’s hand-colored valentine.

But the family warmth that emanates from this marriage never dispels the more pervasive coldness waiting in the night, something that Americans could hardly pretend to ignore in 1918, when World I was still being fought, and the great flu pandemic raged at home. The sight of family members gathered in mourning at the house of his aunt inspires an outburst of anguish from the usually stoical Horace: “How can human beings stand all that comes to them? How can they?”

That’s a question that Foote, the author of “The Trip to Bountiful” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Young Man From Atlanta,” posed throughout a career that spanned seven decades. And while his plays offer no comforting denial of life’s ruthlessness, they are infused with an admiration for human resilience in the face of death that recalls another, very different 20th-century playwright, Samuel Beckett. The often-cited declaration from Beckett’s novel “The Unnamable” — “I can’t go. I’ll go on.” — would serve nicely as an epigraph for “1918” and its companion pieces, “Cousins” and “The Death of Papa.”

Few works of theater have ever presented this dogged spirit with the literal-mindedness of “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” which was written in the 1970s but is only now being staged in its entirety. These plays are packed with quotidian detail and small talk, often among people with small minds.

“But nothing happens,” a friend of mine complained after seeing the first two installments. That’s not true. Murders, madness and mortal illness occur in every one of these plays. It’s just that Foote weaves his melodrama into the plain cloth of everyday events. He knows life’s natural littleness doesn’t cease when big events happen.

That organic balance between things great and small is less assured in “The Story of a Family” than it is in the two earlier groupings, “The Story of a Childhood” and “The Story of a Marriage.” All the plays had to be trimmed — each to roughly an hour — to make the cycle’s presentation possible. And given the steady stream of momentous occurrences in this last section, the telescoping effect can start to feel surreal, with birth, death, disgrace, departure and reunion all happening within absurdly brief stage time. You wish that the poor characters (and sometimes the poor audience) were given at least a chance to catch their breath between deaths.

The advantage of the editing (begun by Foote, who died last year, and finished by his daughter Hallie and Mr. Wilson) is that Foote’s themes emerge with undisguised clarity. And it is perhaps appropriate that the production takes on a rushed momentum, the way life seems to move faster the older you get. More than its predecessors, “Family” brings home the sense of how tenuous existence was in western America in the early 20th century, and how desperate it could become. Small wonder that people

Throughout the cycle, and particularly in “Cousins,” there is much confusion among the characters about who is related to whom, and how. And yet they all keep insisting on tracing the lines of kinship until they get it right. Otherwise, they might be forced to the conclusion of Horace’s embittered Cousin Minnie (Virginia Kull): “A family is a remarkable thing, isn’t it? You belong. And then you don’t. It passes you by.

Ms. Kull is so good as the festering spinster Minnie that you might not recognize her as the beautiful small-town temptress from “The Widow Claire” in the second section of the cycle. One of the pleasures of repertory is watching how actors become different characters. Here, under Mr. Wilson’s gliding direction, this is usually achieved with a simple, restrained grace, acknowledging that the canvas matters more than the figures within it.

That said, allow me to commend a few performers who have stayed the course with particular style and conviction: Annalee Jefferies, who brings an astutely measured blend of guilt and denial to the continuing character of Horace’s weak-willed mother; James DeMarse and Hallie Foote as Horace’s convention-straitened in-laws; and Ms. Lacey, who presents a delicate portrait of beleaguered goodness, suggesting the ambivalence within a supportive wife.

And could someone pin a medal on Mr. Heck, who appears in the cycle’s first and last scenes and so many of those in between? Mr. Heck has the mild, clean-lined handsomeness of an all-American Everyman of an earlier age, which well serves his role. But he also registers, subtly but affectingly, the toll time takes on a man whose greatest goals are to put a tombstone on his father’s unmarked grave and create a home to call his own. Simple wishes, but it says much about Foote’s depiction of our layered relationships with the dead and the living that neither ambition is easily or fully achieved.

THE ORPHANS’ HOME CYCLE

Part 3 — The Story of a Family

By Horton Foote; directed by Michael Wilson; sets by Jeff Cowie and David M. Barber; costumes by David C. Woolard; lighting by Rui Rita; music and sound by John Gromada; projections by Jan Hartley; wig and hair design by Mark Adam Rampmeyer; choreography and movement by Peter Pucci; fight director, Mark Olsen; vocal and dialect coach, Ralph Zito; associate director, Maxwell Williams; production stage manager, Cole P. Bonenberger; associate artistic director, Beth Whitaker; general manager, Adam Bernstein; production manager, Paul Ziemer. Presented by the Signature Theater Company, James Houghton, artistic director; Erika Mallin, executive director; and Hartford Stage, Michael Wilson, artistic director; Michael Stotts, managing director. Playing in repertory with Parts 1 and 2 at the Peter Norton Space, 555 West 42nd Street, Clinton; (212) 244-7529. Through March 28. Running time: 3 hours.

WITH: Devon Abner (Pete Davenport), Mike Boland (Monty Reeves), Pat Bowie (Nurse/Eliza), Leon Addison Brown (Sylvester Malone), James DeMarse (Mr. Vaughn), Hallie Foote (Mrs. Vaughn/Lola Reeves), Justin Fuller (Dr. Greene/Gordon Kirby), Jasmine Amii Harrison (Gertrude), Bill Heck (Horace Robedaux), Henry Hodges (A Boy), Annalee Jefferies (Mrs. Boone/Corella Davenport), Virginia Kull (Bessie Stillman/Minnie Robedaux Curtis), Maggie Lacey (Elizabeth Robedaux), Gilbert Owuor (Sam Goldman), Jenny Dare Paulin (Lily Dale Kidder), Pamela Payton-Wright (Inez Thornton Kirby), Bryce Pinkham (Brother Vaughn), Stephen Plunkett (Will Kidder), Emily Robinson (Irma Sue), Lucas Caleb Rooney (Lewis Higgins), Dylan Riley Snyder (Horace Jr.) and Charles Turner (Walter).

Capricorn Horoscope for week of January 28, 2010

2010-01-30T08:52:00.000-05:00

It's a good time to take inventory of all the stories you allow to pour into your beautiful head. Do you absorb a relentless stream of fear-inducing news reports and violent movies and gossipy tales of decline and degeneration? Well, then, guess what: It's the equivalent, for your psyche, of eating rotting bear intestines and crud scraped off a dumpster wall and pitchers full of trans fats from partially hydrogenated oil. But maybe, on the other hand, you tend to expose yourself to comedies that loosen your fixations and poems that stretch your understanding of the human condition and conversations about all the things that are working pretty well. If so, you're taking good care of your precious insides; you're fostering your mental health. Now please drink in this fresh truth from Nigerian writer Ben Okri: "Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world."

Capricorn Horoscope for week of January 14, 2010

2010-01-14T06:49:00.001-05:00

Capricorn Horoscope for week of January 14, 2010

The number of bacteria per square inch on a toilet seat averages about 50. Meanwhile, your telephone harbors over 25,000 germs per square inch and the top of your desk has about 21,000. I'd like you to use this as a metaphor that you can apply more universally. According to my analysis, you see, you are over-emphasizing the risks and problems in one particular area of your life and underestimating them elsewhere. Spend some time this week correcting the misdiagnoses.

dream

2010-01-11T06:04:00.002-05:00

i was looking at a conference brochure and decided that I would attend this conference. I was on the phone with my friend, mentor Barb telling her about going to the conference in franklin NJ. in the next scene Barb and I were shopping at a CVS, Rite AID Duane Reade, convenience store pharmacy while settling in her daughter Becky who recently graduated college and was getting her own apartment. My cart had muffins for me, Cookies for people at work, cleaning stuff and assorted toiletries. There was lots of internal noise in my head about buying the muffins, calories, really wanting or needing them, giving them away..

The people in the dream, barb and her daughter both commented about the muffins too. They were the type of upscale always watching everything they put in the mouth, and what everyone else does too.

We then went to Beckys new apartment. There were other twenty somethings across the street who were explaining how one person moved out and in the group across the street and that freed up the apartment for Becky. They were looser, more hippy in style and commented on how Becky even secured the windows so now one would move them or take them. It was a neighborhood that needed some work but was up and coming. it was what a first time apartment dweller would move into. Becky was more concerned about getting the curtains up to close off then to open herself to these people or to establish a relationship with them.

I woke up thinking the dream was about about transitions.

dream

2010-01-10T09:06:00.002-05:00

i had a dream that there were many dumpsters and there was a dumpster full of nickels and quarters. I reached in and grabbed some handfuls and filled up my pocket with these coins. There were some other people and when I went back to get more coins, They had covered the dumpster with a tarp made of some paste material. It was like mucous and cloudy so you could not see the coins.

Capricorn Horoscope for week of January 7, 2010

2010-01-09T09:47:00.001-05:00

Capricorn Horoscope for week of January 7, 2010

"You are what you love, not what loves you," says the character Charlie Kaufman in the film, Adaptation. (Kaufman is played by Nicolas Cage, who has three planets in Capricorn.) I urge you to work hard to make that perspective your own, Capricorn. Ideally, it will become a permanent addition to your philosophy of life. But please at least try to install it as your primary words to live by for the next three weeks. To do so will smooth out a distortion in your energy field, making it easier for people to love you.

dreams

2010-01-09T09:18:00.001-05:00

I dreamed that I was playing some sort of gaming, slots but it was an intricate type of machine. I thought I was playing a 25 cent machine and won, the ticket came out like a grocery store receipt and i realized that I won 0ver 3000 dollars. I turned the slip in and was told to come back later for the money. I continued to play other machines and won over 300 dollars. I went back to get the money and they said it was ready. I was waiting and thought they did a direct deposit, and realized due to the amount, they wrote a check. I was waiting for instruction on how to pick up the money.

Broken Embraces

2010-01-02T09:28:00.000-05:00

Emilio Pereda & Paola Ardizzoni/El Deseo, via Sony Pictures Classics

Penélope Cruz and Lluís Homar watching television in a scene from Pedro Almodóvar’s “Broken Embraces.”

November 20, 2009

Almodóvar’s Happy Agony, Swirling Amid Jealousy and Revengese Linkedin

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: November 20, 2009

Can there be such a thing as exuberant melancholy? I can’t think of another way to describe the spirit of “Broken Embraces,” Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, the title of which carries a telling hint of paradox. It is grave and effervescent, tender and cruel.

Penelope Cruz in “Broken Embraces.” More Photos »

The story might seem simple at first — a film noir potboiler of jealousy and revenge — but as it unfolds, the narrative reveals an intricate and enigmatic structure, full of twists and reversals. The visual and aural textures are lush and sensual, as we’ve come to expect from Mr. Almodóvar, and yet the rich colors and deep sonorities somehow illuminate an unusually austere emotional terrain.

Like “All About My Mother,” “Talk to Her,” “Bad Education” and “Volver” — not a bad decade’s work, by the way — “Broken Embraces” leaves the viewer in a contradictory state, a mixture of devastation and euphoria, amusement and dismay that deserves its own clinical designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a syndrome from which some of us are more than happy to suffer.

Mr. Almodóvar’s characters tend to be stricken with their own versions of the malady — subject to strong and confused longings, surprised by pain in their pursuits of pleasure. When we first meet him, Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), the central male figure in “Broken Embraces,” seems to have found a cure. A writer and former film director, Harry is blind as the result of a long-ago car accident and skilled at using his disability as a tool of seduction. He is looked after by Judit (Blanca Portillo), who used to be his production assistant, and by her son, Diego (Tamar Novas), and generally appears content to live in a sunny present tense of casual sex, steady work and easy friendship.

Mr. Almodóvar has a gift for happy beginnings. But the law of narrative (and the law of desire, to cite one of his early titles) mandates trouble, and Harry’s curious English pseudonym, evoking both “The Third Man” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” is a premonition of lurking shadows. Harry’s current life, it turns out, is an edifice of willed forgetting and strenuous denial. His past is a secret he is trying to keep, above all from himself. But circumstances conspire to pry open the vault, and Harry is compelled to tell the tragic story of the man he used to be.

Reviewers are frequently cautioned against ruining the end of a movie. In the case of Mr. Almodóvar, whose plots thicken and explode according to their own peculiar logic, we risk spoiling the middle, so I’ll try to be circumspect when it comes to further summary.

At the same time, though, the tale framed by Harry’s reminiscence is so strange and beautiful, so perfectly realized, that no exposition could damage it. The word flashback hardly does justice to the episode from Harry’s old life — when he was a dashing, sighted cinéaste named Mateo Blanco — that lifts “Broken Embraces” into the company of Mr. Almodóvar’s other recent masterworks.

Back then, 14 years before the bright, blinded present, Mateo, whose surname connotes both innocence and blankness, embarked on an ambitious film project — a comedy called “Girls and Suitcases” — and also on a headlong, perilous affair with an actress. Her name was Lena, and she was the mistress of an industrialist named Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez), who was the film’s main financial backer. Let the past tense in that sentence stand as an indication of how it all ended. The fact that Lena is played by Penélope Cruz may tell you everything else you need to know.

Or maybe not. Ms. Cruz has become Mr. Almodóvar’s link to the glorious movie-star traditions of the past. In “Volver” he made her an incarnation of melodramatic maternity, evoking the wounded resilience of Anna Magnani and Joan Crawford without sacrificing her natural comic verve. Here she adopts a more haunted and haunting persona, that of a woman trapped by circumstances and by her own choices in a wrenching professional and romantic dilemma.

But since Mr. Almodóvar’s sympathy gravitates naturally toward women, Lena is much more than a static image of female suffering or an object of male hunger. Shadows of past screen goddesses may still flicker across her face and form — Audrey Hepburn, Gloria Grahame, Simone Signoret — but she seems at once freer and more vulnerable than they were.

Mr. Almodóvar’s engagement with the great traditions of movie melodrama is never merely nostalgic. In the phase of his career that began in 1995 with “The Flower of My Secret” he has drawn particular inspiration from Hollywood directors of the 1950s, including Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, all of whom used relatively new techniques of color cinematography to discover fresh and uncanny registers of feeling. The unsettled intensity that was Ray’s particular specialty — the sense, so vivid in his best films, of wild emotions obeying their own dangerous logic — infuses the middle section of “Broken Embraces,” much of which takes place on the windswept volcanic island of Lanzarote.

But the most direct and striking dialogue the movie conducts with a filmmaker from the past is with Pedro Almodóvar himself. Aficionados will recognize “Girls and Suitcases,” bits of which turn up in “Broken Embraces,” most powerfully at the end, as a replica of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Mr. Almodóvar’s marvelous madcap comedy from 1988. Its appearance is not vanity or clever self-quotation. Rather, the director’s pastiche of his early, funny work becomes, in the context of this somber new film, a poignant reflection on aging and loss. To catch a glimpse of “Women” in the mirror of “Embraces” is to see how cinematic images can be both tangible and ghostly.

And also — literally in the case of Harry Caine and “Girls and Suitcases” — invisible to their maker, who is no longer the man he was. He has lost so much over the years. Every one of us has, and if Mr. Almodóvar has grown wise enough to understand that art is a dreadfully inadequate compensation, he is still generous enough to offer it to us anyway.

“Broken Embraces” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sex, nudity and adult sorrow.

BROKEN EMBRACES

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar; director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto; edited by José Salcedo; music by Alberto Iglesias; art director, Antxon Gómez; produced by Agustín Almodóvar and Esther García; released by Sony Pictures Classics. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes.

WITH: Penélope Cruz (Lena), Lluís Homar (Mateo/Harry Caine), Blanca Portillo (Judit), José Luis Gómez (Ernesto Martel), Rubén Ochandiano (Ray X) and Tamar Novas (Diego).

found check

2010-01-01T20:24:00.001-05:00

I found a check in the subway last night. It was made out a woman named Jane and it was worth 500.00. The check was from two people in Maryland with the same last name. Their check had an address on it. The note read " for clothing and other stuff". I put the check in an envelope with a note that stated I found it in the subway and was returning it to them...

Seem to be a life theme here... returning lost objects found in the subway.

dream

2010-01-01T20:22:00.000-05:00

I had a dream where i was given a money but the money was on beige paper. There was a crudely drawn white house. I knew that i was given money that was not authentic but i didnt feel cheated. In the dream, I thought i better get it to the bank. it was crude and was not genuine. The first piece was wrapped around my red target credit card. I woke up and went back to sleep and dreamed about that same dollar bill. I could see the crude drawing of the white house on the front.

Capricorn Horoscope for week of December 31, 2009

2009-12-30T22:10:00.000-05:00

Capricorn Horoscope for week of December 31, 2009

"I am a man of fixed and unbending principles," said American politician Everett Dirksen, "the first of which is to be flexible at all times." That's the kind of playful and resilient spirit I urge you to aspire to in 2010, Capricorn. I think you're most likely to have a successful year if you regularly explore the joys of improvisation. The more empirical and less theory-bound you're willing to be, the better you'll feel. Practicing the art of compromise doesn't have to be galling, I promise you; it may even turn out to be more fun and educational than you imagined possible.

What hidden factors will be massaging your destiny in 2010? Could you use some hints about how to prepare for the adventures awaiting you in the next 12 months? This week and the next two weeks, my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES will feature long-range, in-depth explorations of your destiny in 2010. Each part of this three-part report is between 6 and 10 minutes long. Tune in to Part One! Get started on creating a master plan for the coming months.

dreams

2009-12-27T10:31:00.002-05:00

i dreamed about acquiring a new cat. I was holding a new 6 month of little grey tabby. It was a composite of a tabby but resembled my cat in color and spirit. I stated three or four reasons why I didnt want a new cat, travel, space etc. How i didnt want a new cat. The cat was in my arms and when i put it down, it curled up on the carpet and fell asleep, totally at home.

dreamed I was in Las Vegas, I was with my parents, they were leaving and I was staying but had to change hotels. I tried to check into the next hotel and there were brunette receptionists, one wore a hat that said Probable Allowance. There were some discussion and issues about taking a shower. I offered my hotel room in the other hotel but the offer was politely refused. I was wondering about the cost of the hotel that I had to move into and why I had to move hotels and not just stay. I believe it had to do with rate of hotel. I was curious but didnt ask. In the next scene of the dream, and I started to check into the second hotel but had to check out of the first hotel .

I wanted to continue the dream and fell back to sleep. Again, I saw the hat Probable Allowance.

Up in the Air

2009-12-26T19:37:00.000-05:00

Neither Here Nor There

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: December 4, 2009

For most people there’s no joy in sucking down recycled oxygen while hurtling above the clouds. The free drinks and freshly baked cookies in business might be nice. (I wouldn’t know.) For most of us, though, air travel largely invokes the indignities of the stockyard, complete with the crowding and pushing, the endlessly long lines, hovering handlers, carefully timed feedings, a faint communal reek and underlying whiff of peril. The skies rarely seem friendly anymore, but to Ryan Bingham, the corporate assassin played by George Clooneyin the laugh-infused stealth tragedy “Up in the Air,” they’re so welcoming, he might as well be home.

Enlarge This Image

Dale Robinette/Paramount Pictures

Mr. Clooney as a “career transition” counselor and Anna Kendrick as his colleague.

Multimedia

Interactive Feature

Anatomy of a Scene: 'Up in the Air'

And so he is. Like many high-altitude border crossers who sometimes seem alone in keeping the airlines aloft, those business types with the corrugated brows, juggling BlackBerrys and double-shot lattes, Bingham lives in between here and there, home and away. The difference is, he loves interstitial living, finds comfort and more in all the spaces associated with airports and airplanes or in what Walter Kirn, in his novel that inspired the film, calls Airworld. “To know me is to fly with me,” Bingham says in the film, like an airborne Descartes. It’s as if as a child he had heard — and heeded — the call of the female attendants for National Airlines who, in the gilded flying age, used to purr, “Fly Me.” Back when flying meant soaring.

That was then, this is now, and this is here, meaning the crash-and-burn-baby-burn America in which one man’s economic crisis is another’s golden opportunity. This is our moment, enthuses Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman, pitch perfect), the unctuous pragmatist for whom Bingham works if rarely sees in person. Some men hunt heads, others — like Bingham — lop them off. A “career transition” counselor, he crisscrosses the country firing employees whose bosses won’t pull the plug themselves. Racking up scalps and miles might seem like a tough way to make a living. Yet it suits Bingham, a solo act for whom no hotel room is too depressing or crowd too lonely, which makes him ripe for the dramatic picking.

The young director Jason Reitman initially takes a hard-sell approach to Bingham, putting the character — and of course Mr. Clooney — front, center and under flattering light, as if he were selling a luxury car or diamond watch, which in some ways he is. In fighting trim, Mr. Clooney looks suitably sleek, even when dressed in the generic business clothes he’s soon packing into a suitcase, a task that’s captured in a series of precisely framed, rapid shots. Expressive of both efficiency and a routinized existence, this sequence is itself an economic narrative device (one Mr. Reitman repeats). But it also comes across as glib, a shortcut to character, making it hard to know if it’s Bingham who’s the slick one here or Mr. Reitman.

The answer is both, though Mr. Reitman is working harder than it first appears and more than he did in either “Juno” or “Thank You for Smoking,” his only other features. The son of a funnyman (his father, the producer-director Ivan Reitman, helped bankroll this movie), the younger Mr. Reitman seems to have been weaned on screwball comedies — he likes women and teasing patter — and classic Hollywood is in his blood. “Up in the Air” is an assertively, and unapologetically, tidy package, from its use of romance to instill some drama into the narrative (the book introduces disease instead) and the mope-rock tunes that Mr. Reitman needlessly overuses. When you have Mr. Clooney and Vera Farmiga on camera, you don’t need some professional emoticon mewling away on the soundtrack.

Ms. Farmiga enters the picture, legs and intelligence flashing, just around the time you think that nothing much is going to happen with Bingham. (A crash? a terrorist strike?) As Alex, a fast-moving businesswoman, Ms. Farmiga bats around the double-entendres effortlessly and brings out real warmth and palpable vulnerability in her co-star. To watch them together — particularly during their later scenes, when they visit Bingham’s hometown — is to realize just how much alone time Mr. Clooney clocks in his movies. It says something about the dearth of strong female stars in American cinema that he hasn’t been this well matched with a woman since Jennifer Lopez in the 1998 caper film “Out of Sight.” (In the years since, Brad Pitt has been playing Rosalind Russell to Mr. Clooney’sCary Grant in the “Ocean’s” movies.)

One of the pleasures of “Up in the Air” is that its actresses — including Anna Kendrick, who plays Bingham’s colleague Natalie — share the frame with Mr. Clooney as equals, not props. The ferocious Ms. Kendrick, her ponytail swinging like an ax, grabs every scene she’s in, which works for her go-getter (go-get-him) character, who is sent out on the road with Bingham as part of an efficiency campaign. She’s a monster for our times: a presumed human-resources expert who, having come of age in front of a computer, has no grasp of the human. By contrast Bingham, who fires people face to face with a small smile and pat speech, comes across as the good guy, though only if you forget what he does for a living.

Mr. Reitman successfully exploits the seeming disconnect between his star (whom we can’t help but like) and the character he plays (whom we want to like, simply because he’s played by Mr. Clooney), so much so that it takes some time for you to notice the approaching darkness. Mr. Reitman certainly hints at the trouble to come: however bright Mr. Clooney’s smile, there is something terribly off about Bingham’s blithe attitude both toward his own existential reality and his profession. Instructively, it is how Mr. Reitman circles around the character, showing how Bingham’s actions affect not just him, but also those around him — including the people he fires — that deepen the movie if not its peripatetic center.

There are different ways into “Up in the Air,” which can be viewed as a well-timed snapshot of an economically flailing America, appreciated as a study in terminal narcissism or dismissed as a sentimental testament to traditional coupling. A wedding subplot, for one, involving Bingham’s sisters (Melanie Lynskey and Amy Morton), which brings him closer to Alex, threatens to swamp the story in sentimentality. Yet to put too much stock in this detour (which also involves Danny McBride) is to flatten a film bristling with contradictions. Certainly you can fall for Bingham, maybe even shed a tear for him, though don’t get carried away (as he does) or mistake him for some kind of hero. The truer tragedy here, as the repeated images of fired men and women suggest, doesn’t belong to him.

“Up in the Air” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Adult language and partial female nudity if not (alas) male.

UP IN THE AIR

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Jason Reitman; written by Mr. Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn; director of photography, Eric Steelberg; edited by Dana E. Glauberman; music by Rolfe Kent; production designer, Steve Saklad; produced by Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman, Daniel Dubiecki and Jeffrey Clifford; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

WITH: George Clooney (Ryan Bingham), Vera Farmiga (Alex Goran), Anna Kendrick(Natalie Keener), Danny McBride (Jim Miller), Jason Bateman (Craig Gregory), Melanie Lynskey (Julie Bingham), Amy Morton (Kara Bingham), Sam Elliott (Maynard Finch), J. K. Simmons (Bob), Zach Galifianakis (Steve) and Chris Lowell (Kevin).

Avatar

2009-12-26T19:36:00.000-05:00

A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: December 18, 2009

With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.

The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama“Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW.

The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake (Sam Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of “The Matrix.”

Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with “Avatar,” also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The Matrix,” which owes a large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung heavily over both SF and action filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its slo-mo death waltzes and leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick to the gut that might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely utopian.

It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero of the “Matrix”series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself an avatar because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake unusual is that he has been tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a puppeteer, from its head to its prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation that’s intent on extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and politics.

The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks — takes him from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with supermodel dimensions (slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to mind the markings on mackerel tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious state, is at first a giddy novelty and then a means to liberation.

Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run, leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the constraints of his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually and existentially, to the base camp, where he works for the corporation’s top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing), even while taking orders from its head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of masculinity, Quaritch strides around barking orders like some intransigent representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director). It’s a favorite Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man gorging on steak.

Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer. (He has sole script credit: this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters) seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay demographic who might find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier, feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of which kick in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen only in slinky Na’vi form).

Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming.

The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has discovered Eden.

An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many theaters are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2), an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn’t the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing you into the movie with the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you.

After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does. On the face of it there might seem something absurd about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely out of zeroes and ones (and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.

If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.

Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.

“Avatar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Gun and explosive violence, death and despair.

AVATAR

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by James Cameron; director of photography, Mauro Fiore; edited by Mr. Cameron, John Refoua and Stephen Rivkin; music by James Horner; visual effects supervisor, Joe Letteri; production designers, Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; produced by Mr. Cameron and Jon Landau; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes.

WITH: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoë Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine), Stephen Lang (Col. Miles Quaritch), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Carter Selfridge), Joel David Moore (Norm), C C H Pounder (Mo’at), Wes Studi (Eytukan) and Laz Alonso (Tsu’Tey).

ITs Complicated

2009-12-26T19:33:00.002-05:00

A September-September Romance

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: December 25, 2009

In the pleasurable, daffy if at times daft “It’s Complicated,” Meryl Streep plays Jane Adler, a successful restaurateur who’s about to nest happily alone in an upscale Southern California coastal community, or so it seems. Divorced with three adult children who enjoy her company (the middle one is just moving out), Jane lives in a large house on a lush sprawl surrounded by trees and no visible neighbors. It’s such a bucolic vision you half expect a few deer, a couple of bunnies and the bluebird of happiness to swing by for a visit and a quick song. Instead you get Rita Wilson trilling support as one of Jane’s close friends.

“It’s Complicated” was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, a Hollywood filmmaker who makes female-specific indulgences that, at their irresistible best, are testaments to the power of fairy tales. Like her finest film, “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003), this new one revolves around a woman in late middle age, who, after years of going it alone in bed and out, suddenly becomes sexually and romantically involved with two very different men. What kinks up “It’s Complicated” ever so slightly is that one of the two suitors here is Jane’s former husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin), an unreconstructed womanizer now married to the much-younger Agness (Lake Bell), a hard-bellied beauty with abs and smiles of steel.

Those intimidating abs are as important to Agness’s outsider status in the story as the kooky spelling of her name, which stands out next to the reassuringly ordinary Jane, Jake and the fourth wheel, Adam (Steve Martin), who also catches Jane’s eye. Agness enters belly first, sashaying into the opening scene as the camera and Jane both fix on Agness’s stomach, an image that underscores her fertility while also reducing her to a body part (and lopping off her head). “Something’s Gotta Give” opens on a similar thematic note with images of sylphlike young beauties striding across the screen, their legs slicing the frame. We have met the enemy, Ms. Meyers seems to be suggesting, and she is firmer — and younger.

Younger, perhaps, but never better, at least in Meyersland. One of the most interesting things about Ms. Meyers’s romances is that they are pitched at a niche demographic, by which I mean women over 40. Ms. Streep looks sensational, but she and her crinkles also look close enough to her real age (60) to reassure you that she hasn’t resorted to the knife. That may sound grotesque and petty. But in an industry in which actresses whittle themselves down to nothing so they can have a little screen space only to fade away once they hit a certain age, there’s nothing trivial about a movie that insists a middle-aged woman with actual breasts and hips and wrinkles can be beautiful and desirable while also fully desiring.

Jane’s lust (and lustiness) kicks in after she and Jake land in New York to attend the college graduation of their youngest, Luke (Hunter Parrish). After a coincidental meeting at a bar, the parents end up drinking and dancing the night away, capping their giddy evening with an off-screen bout between the sheets. Afterward a grinning Jake enthuses over the encounter, a recap that a stunned-looking Jane answers by vomiting. But if Jane has doubts, which she shares through Ms. Meyers’s customary stream of babble, the heart or maybe the head wants what it wants. Whatever the case, Jane and Jake continue their affair back home, sneaking around while their children, as well as Agness and Adam remain oblivious.

Ms. Meyers and her interviewers like to invoke the comedies of Ernst Lubitsch (“The Shop Around the Corner”) as one of her inspirations. But watching a Grand Prix race doesn’t make you a Formula One champion. Her cinematographers tend to be first rate (John Toll shot this one), yet Ms. Meyers doesn’t have her own visual signature. What she does have is a kind of upmarket taste and the means to translate it onto the screen. Here, as in the other films she has directed, the camera is little more than a machine that takes nicely lighted pictures of the designer items, the actors included, which she has amassed and, with the exacting attention of an interior decorator, prettily arranged inside the frame.

At the same time there’s no doubt that she is an auteur, in that the films she has directed, including “What Women Want” and “The Holiday,” express a personal vision. Being an auteur isn’t simply a matter of what you do with the camera and why; among other things, pacing also counts (and Ms. Meyers has very good comic timing when it comes to banter) as do the performances. The movie’s best moments may be, to borrow a thought from Andrew Sarris, appreciated as exquisite whimsy (he was talking about a 1935 romantic comedy), but even in such whimsy, Mr. Sarris reminds us, a director’s touch can be “immortalized as a figure of style.”

Ms. Meyers’s vision can be maddeningly narrow and not only because her movies take place in cosseted, largely white worlds where the help is discreetly out of view. Both “It’s Complicated” and “Something’s Gotta Give” center on an independent woman whose life, despite all its personal and professional markers, immediately expands — even as it shrinks — once a man starts rocking her bed and head. Before her first adulterous night with Jake, Jane is a melancholy solo act, whether she’s weeping in her kitchen after her daughter moves out or trading somewhat desperately raunchy sex jokes with her girlfriends. Jake’s attentions give Jane snap, vibrancy, some color in her cheeks and, most important, a comic foil. Jake, in other words, turns her into a Nancy Meyers character.

In “It’s Complicated” Ms. Meyers transforms a divorced couple into a romantic couple, which suggests a belief in love enduring even after a marriage dies. That sounds wonderfully romantic or a prescription for pathology, maybe both. Whatever the balance between madness and madcap, classic screwball comedies involve a woman and a man meeting on the battlefield or in a newspaper office and sparring their way into coupledom. Ms. Meyers wants, as her title implies, to complicate that formula. But no matter how liberating some of her conceits, notably the older heroine, her embrace of sexist stereotypes, including male characters as agents of narrative change, keep her and her female characters down.

And yet ... much as Diane Keaton did in “Something’s Gotta Give,” Ms. Streep, mugging wildly if winningly, takes this character and makes you love her, just as Mr. Baldwin does with Jake, who, with his shark smiles and thrusting gut, beautifully conveys male vanity in its twilight. Jane may be too perfectly dressed, coiffed and housed to be plausible. But Ms. Streep makes you believe in Jane, or rather makes you want to believe in her, from her casually chic wardrobe to the indulgent smiles she bestows on her children and lovers, all of whom need nurturing. The truth is that everyone needs a little coddling, which could be the key to Ms. Meyers’s peculiar talent: She pampers her audience shamelessly.

“It’s Complicated” is rated R. (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.) Some tame nuzzling and a little pot smoking.

IT’S COMPLICATED

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by Nancy Meyers; director of photography, John Toll; edited by Joe Hutshing and David Moritz; music by Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira; production designer, Jon Hutman; produced by Ms. Meyers and Scott Rudin; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes.

WITH: Meryl Streep (Jane), Steve Martin (Adam), Alec Baldwin (Jake), Lake Bell(Agness), John Krasinski (Harley), Rita Wilson (Trisha), Mary Kay Place (Joanne), Alexandra Wentworth (Diane) and Hunter Parrish (Luke).

Invictus

2009-12-26T19:21:00.001-05:00

Final Score: Future 1, Past 0

Published: December 11, 2009

It may not seem obvious at first, but Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus,” a rousing true story of athletic triumph, is also that director’s latest exploration of revenge, the defining theme of his career. It is hard to think of an actor or a filmmaker who so cleanly embodies a single human impulse in the way that Mr. Eastwood — from “Pale Rider” to“Mystic River,” from Dirty Harry to “Gran Torino” — personifies the urge to get even.

He has also, of course, taken a critical view of the drive for vengeance, investigating its tragic roots and terrible consequences. A movie like “Unforgiven,” most famously, suggests that violent revenge is regrettable. But rarely, in the world of Mr. Eastwood’s films, is it avoidable.

“Invictus” is to some degree an exception, a movie about reconciliation and forgiveness — about the opposite of revenge — that gains moral authority precisely because the possibility of bloodshed casts its shadow everywhere. The film, based on John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy,” takes place in South Africa in the mid-1990s, just after Nelson Mandela’s election as the country’s first black president. Many of the whites in the film — most of them Afrikaner nationalists still attached to a system that kept their black compatriots poor, disenfranchised and oppressed — brace themselves for payback as Mandela assumes power. Quite a few of the president’s black supporters expect it, too, as their due after decades of brutality and humiliation under apartheid.

But Mandela, played with gravity, grace and a crucial spark of mischief by Morgan Freeman, knows that score-settling would be a disastrous course for a new and fragile democracy. Passing by a newsstand on the morning after his victory, he spots a headline in Afrikaans. He has shown that he can win an election, it says, but will he show that he can govern? His bodyguards bristle at a pre-emptive low blow from a hostile press, but Mandela shrugs. “It’s a fair question,” he says.

And a perennially urgent one in any democracy. Mr. Eastwood and the screenwriter, Anthony Peckham, are too absorbed in the details of the story at hand to suggest historical analogies, but “Invictus” has implications beyond its immediate time and place that are hard to miss. It’s an exciting sports movie, an inspiring tale of prejudice overcome and, above all, a fascinating study of political leadership.

But much of the ingenuity in Mr. Freeman’s performance lies in the way he conveys that idealism and the shrewd manipulation of symbols and emotions are not incompatible, but complementary. Taking power a few years after being released from 27 years of incarceration, Mandela is already a larger-than-life figure, an idol in South Africa and around the world. His celebrity is something of a burden, and also an asset he must learn to use; his moral prestige is a political weapon.

But he is preoccupied, to the dismay of loyalists in his movement, with finding some kind of concord — not friendship, necessarily, but at least a state of non-enmity — with the people who hate and fear him: the whites who see him as a terrorist, a usurper and a threat to their traditions and values. Mandela’s overtures to the Afrikaners — starting with his refusal to dismiss white members of the presidential staff and security detail — arise partly out of Gandhian principle, and partly out of political calculation. They are a powerful force in the army, the police and the South African economy.

Mandela’s aides — in particular Brenda Mazibuko (Adjoa Andoh) — are baffled when he takes up the cause of the South African rugby team, a symbol of stiff-necked Afrikaner pride despised by most blacks. The team’s Springbok mascot, named for a kind of gazelle, and its green-and-gold uniforms are nearly as loathsome as the apartheid flag, and when Mandela insists that the colors be retained, it seems almost like a betrayal of his life’s cause. South Africa, a pariah in the world of international sports for a long time (“the skunk of the world,” as Mandela puts it), is preparing to host the Rugby World Cup, and Mandela decides that if the nation is to find unity and self-respect the underachieving Springboks must win the championship.

And so an alliance develops between the president and François Pienaar, the Springbok captain, played with crisp, disciplined understatement (and utter mastery of a devilishly tricky accent) by Matt Damon. Pienaar’s struggle to keep control of his team, and also to persuade them to accept some perplexing new social realities, is a microcosm of Mandela’s larger project. And he quietly accepts Mandela, who shares with Pienaar the Victorian poem that gives the movie its title, as a mentor.

Beyond the politician, Mr. Freeman and Mr. Eastwood allow us glimpses of a complicated and somewhat melancholy man, carrying the loneliness of his long imprisonment with him and estranged from much of his family. He is gracious and charming in small groups, a stiff but compelling public speaker and a boss whose authority is buttressed by a phalanx of devoted, sometimes skeptical aides.

But if “Invictus” is predominantly an absorbing character study of one of the most extraordinary characters of our time, it is also fleshed out with well-sketched minor players and subplots that illuminate the progress of racial rapprochement in its comic human dimension. The black bodyguards and their white colleagues proceed from hostility to wary tolerance to guarded warmth in a way that is pointed without being overstated. And that, for the most part, characterizes Mr. Eastwood’s direction, which is always unassuming, unhurried and efficient. In this film he tells a big story through a series of small, well-observed moments, and tells it in his usual blunt, matter-of-fact way, letting the nuances take care of themselves.

And once again, as in “Letters From Iwo Jima” — a tragic rather than heroic inquiry into the nature of leadership — they do. “Invictus” is more sprawling than that film, and more willing to risk hokiness. That is a chance Mr. Eastwood is often happy to take, and no genre is more susceptible to it (or earns it more honestly) than the victorious-underdog team-sports movie. That the sport is as alien to most Americans as it is to black South Africans presents its challenges, but by the end you might care about rugby more than you thought you would, even if it remains harder to understand than politics.

The convergence of the two provides an occasion for some potent, intelligent filmmaking — a movie that hits you squarely with its visceral impact and stays in your mind for a long time after.

“Invictus” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some swearing, the threat of violence and brutal sports action.

INVICTUS

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Anthony Peckham, based on the book “Playing the Enemy” by John Carlin; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach; music by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens; production designer, James J. Murakami; produced by Mr. Eastwood, Lori McCreary, Robert Lorenz and Mace Neufeld; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. WITH: Morgan Freeman (Nelson Mandela), Matt Damon (François Pienaar) and Adjoa Andoh (Brenda Mazibuko).

Bye Bye Birdie

2009-12-26T19:17:00.000-05:00

If you get a chance, send a few dozen get-well cards to Henry Miller’s Theater, the new, handsomely renovated outpost of the Roundabout Theater Company empire. Flu season has arrived, and an especially mean virus appears to have attacked the cast of the revival of “Bye Bye Birdie,” which opened Thursday night.

Enlarge This Image

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

"Bye Bye Birdie," with John Stamos, left, Nolan Gerard Funk (as Conrad Birdie) and Gina Gershon, in the revival at Henry Miller’s Theater.

50 Years Older, ‘Birdie’ Returns to the Nest (October 11, 2009)

White Way Gets a ‘Green’ Theater (May 4, 2009)

Times Topics: Roundabout Theater Company

Original Review: 'Bye Bye Birdie' (April 15, 1960) [pdf]

Enlarge This Image

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Nolan Gerard Funk as the honestly sincere rock ’n’ roller Conrad Birdie, with his fans.

Enlarge This Image

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Gina Gershon and John Stamos in "Bye Bye Birdie."

Enlarge This Image

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In the little apple: From left, Allie Trimm, Dee Hoty, Bill Irwin and Jake Evan Schwencke in the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “Bye Bye Birdie” at Henry Miller’s Theater.

I don’t think it’s the swine flu that has flattened Robert Longbottom’s production of this popular 1960 musical about rebel rock ’n’ roll versus small-town America wholesomeness. The symptoms in this case include tin ear, loss of comic timing, uncontrollable jitters and a prickly disorientation that screams, “Where am I?” and “What am I doing?” Theatergoers may feel an empathetic urge to rush home and bury their heads in their pillows.

Clearly this is the sort of bug that could jeopardize the health of any red-blooded musical. For the silly, hokey “Bye Bye Birdie,” a show that just wants to have fun and be tuneful, it proves close to fatal. Directed and choreographed by Mr. Longbottom (“Side Show”) — with a cast led by John Stamos, Gina Gershon and Bill Irwin — “Bye Bye Birdie” may be the most painful example of misapplied talent on Broadway since the Roundabout’s production of “Hedda Gabler,” starring Mary-Louise Parker, last season.

Though long a favorite of high school theaters and summer stock, “Bye Bye Birdie” hasn’t been revived on Broadway since its first production, which starred Dick Van Dyke andChita Rivera. (A 1963 film featured Mr. Van Dyke and a sexually overcharged Ann-Margret as its teenage heroine.) Despite a catchy score by Charles Strouse, with blithely jokey lyrics by Lee Adams and a book to match by Michael Stewart, the show seemed square even when it first opened.

Its title character, Conrad Birdie (played here by Nolan Gerard Funk), may have been inspired by Elvis Presley and the clamor surrounding his being drafted into the Army. But the show introduced Birdie and the electrified music he embodied only to renounce them. “Bye Bye Birdie” was always proudly old-fashioned at heart, promising that it was the happy book musical — and not rock ’n’ roll — that was here to stay.

This makes “Birdie” a particular challenge for those hoping to sell it to New York theatergoers who have since embraced “Hair,” “Rent,” “Spring Awakening” and even “Billy Elliot.” Send up “Birdie,” and you kill its melodic friendliness; play it straight, and it just looks quaint.

Mr. Longbottom — who did admirably by “Side Show,” the daring and difficult 1997 musical about Siamese twins — has lost his sense of direction in trying to chart a path between those extremes. Designed by Andrew Jackness (sets), Gregg Barnes (costumes) and Ken Billington (lighting), the show’s shiny pastel (and willfully synthetic) appearance may be meant to capitalize on the currency of the hypnotically slick “Mad Men,” the multi-award-winning television series set in the same era. (Incidentally, the film version of “Birdie” figures in this season of “Mad Men.” What a hall of mirrors is American nostalgia.)

But the look and attitude of this “Birdie” — which follows the messy public-relations appearance of Conrad in a tidy little town called Sweet Apple, Ohio, just before he goes into the Army — are more evocative of an old Old Navy or Nick at Nite ad, the kind in which visual clichés of the late Eisenhower years were presented in stylistic quotation marks that rechilled yesteryear’s cool. This sensibility is (or was) tasty enough in 30-second spots. But stretched over two hours it does not create a world that actors, trying to create even semi-real characters, can inhabit comfortably.

Consider, for example, that the different families of Sweet Apple are color-coded, dressed in largely identical styles with a different bright hue per clan. Is this a statement on the conformity of the period? Or a means of distinguishing largely interchangeable cast members? Or just campy interior decorating?

Whatever the reasons behind these aesthetic choices, the show also betrays them. Black-and-white photographic projections (by Howard Werner) of frenzied teenagers (like those seen in the Life magazine coverage of the firstBeatles concerts in the United States) offer a jolting contrast to the willfully artificial whimsy onstage. And the show’s leading performers are equally inconsistent in their approaches.

It’s true that many of them present themselves as cartoons, animated by physical slapstick, but they’re all from different comic books. As the mother-smothered Albert Peterson, the showbiz agent who manages Birdie’s career, Mr. Stamos affects an adenoidal speaking voice and a clownish body language (perhaps meant to recall Mr. Van Dyke’s) that make him seem the same age as Conrad’s fans. (Jayne Houdyshell, an immensely likable actress, seems out of her element as Albert’s dragon mom.)

This Albert, pencil-thin and skittish, is no match for his fed-up secretary and girlfriend, Rose Alvarez, played by the luscious Ms. Gershon. Bringing to mind the physical ripeness of Ava Gardner at her peak, Ms. Gershon also seems to share the lack of confidence in her part that Gardner often projected on screen.

Of course it’s unfortunate that Mr. Stamos and Ms. Gershon, who carry the burden of some of the show’s most hummable songs (“Put On a Happy Face,” “An English Teacher,” “Rosie”), tend to slide distractingly off key — not violently, but just enough to make you want to hit your ear.

They have more passable singing voices than Mr. Irwin, a dazzlingly talented big-time mime who in recent years has shifted successfully to serious dramatic parts (including last season’s “Waiting for Godot”). Mr. Irwin plays Harry MacAfee, a Sweet Apple paterfamilias whose daughter, Kim (Allie Trimm), a Conrad Birdie Fan Club member, is selected to be kissed by her idol on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

This means that Mr. Irwin leads Kim and the rest of his family (Dee Hoty as his wife and Jake Evan Schwencke as his son) in the peerless satiric tribute to television worship, “Hymn for a Sunday Evening.” This requires four-part harmony, and with Mr. Irwin participating, the results are not pretty. Perhaps to compensate, Mr. Irwin lapses into his familiar neo-vaudevillian shtick, trying on disconnected funny postures and voices that make you wonder if Dad hasn’t gone psycho. (Watch out, Kim!)

Led by Ms. Trimm’s Kim (more Hannah Montana than Sandra Dee), the chorus of high school students sing shrilly and dance anxiously. Strangely enough, Mr. Funk, who missed several previews because of tonsillitis, seems more at ease onstage than anybody else. Closer to a Back Street Boys alumnus than Elvis, he’s not really right for the part. But he sings on key and appears to be enjoying himself. It’s nice to think that somebody is.

BYE BYE BIRDIE

Book by Michael Stewart; music by Charles Strouse; lyrics by Lee Adams; directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom; music supervisor/vocal and dance arrangements by David Chase; orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick; sets by Andrew Jackness; costumes by Gregg Barnes; lighting by Ken Billington; sound by Acme Sound Partners; projection

2009-12-20T18:25:00.001-05:00

Lorrie Moore of the Liberty

2009-12-20T18:15:00.001-05:00

2009-12-20T18:09:00.000-05:00

2009-12-20T18:02:00.001-05:00

2009-12-20T17:55:00.001-05:00

Rutgers Women at Maggie Dixon Classic

2009-12-20T17:44:00.001-05:00

onesmallheart

Addams Family the counter article

Related

Fences

It’s No More Mr. Nice Guy for This Everyman

Original Review: 'Fences' (March 27, 1987)

Addams Family

Buh-Da-Da-Dum (Snap Snap)

sondheim on sondheim

Hymn to Himself: Something Hummable

Multimedia

Rob 's freewill astrology is now on Facebook

sightings

dream

dream

Curtain Call - Stephen Sondheim's Birthday Celebration

Freewill Astrology Capricorn April 1

Horoscopes for week of April 8, 2010 -Freewill Astrology Horoscope

free will astrology Capricorn

Capricorn according to Rob Brezney Freewill Astrology

dreams

flower show outdoors

this and that

people i run into

Week of March 31

circus review

RED

2-Man Cast Shares Stage With a Vivid Character

march 4th Capricorn

Carpricorn March 11

Capricorn March 18th

Capricorn Horoscope for week of March 25, 2010

Alice in Wonderland

What’s a Nice Girl Doing in This Hole?

The Miracle Worker

Taming a Child by Setting Her Free

when the rain stops falling

Fish Soup and Bad Weather, Across the Decades

Related

Times Topics: Lincoln Center Theater

february 25th horoscope

Capricorn Horoscope for week of March 4, 2010

The Orphans' Home Cycle Part Two at the Signature Theater

Capricorn Horoscope for week of February 18, 201

Shane Koyczan Slam poet Opening Ceremony poem

Little Night Music

A Weekend in the Country With Eros and Thanatos

Multimedia

Multimedia

Time Stands Still

What’s Really Fair in Love and War?

ing.

Capricorn Horoscope for week of February 4, 2010

Horoscopes for week of January 21, 2010

crazy heart

Nine a review by Marshall Fine

December 17, 2009

‘The Orphans’ Home Cycle’

Life, Death and Family in Foote’s Texase

Theater Review | 'The Orphans' Home Cycle': An Insignificant Riddle and the Other Women in an Orphan’s Life (December 18, 2009)

In Dramatic Cycle, a Foote Family Tree (December 13, 2009)

Capricorn Horoscope for week of January 28, 2010

Capricorn Horoscope for week of January 14, 2010

dream

dream

Capricorn Horoscope for week of January 7, 2010

dreams

Broken Embraces

Almodóvar’s Happy Agony, Swirling Amid Jealousy and RevengeseLinkedin

found check

dream

Capricorn Horoscope for week of December 31, 2009

dreams

Up in the Air

Neither Here Nor There

Multimedia

Avatar

A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic

ITs Complicated

A September-September Romance

Almodóvar’s Happy Agony, Swirling Amid Jealousy and Revengese Linkedin