On--or near--Broadway

It was the closest you get to anticipating a sure thing--Mark Rylance and his Shakespeare's Globe company from London doing Richard III--their alternating Twelfth Night was even more joyfully received in New York by the critics. When last in London a couple of years ago, I managed to see Rylance in an English play called Jerusalem: it was only a fair vehicle, and I was very surprised when it was brought to New York, where it was welcomed by critics and only mildly by audiences. But Rylance stood out. He's a fantastic actor, capable of assuming all kinds of roles.

His company adheres to Elizabethan practice--with men in the women's roles, actually in every role. Rylance moves from playing Richard III to Olivia in Twelfth Night. His Richard starts out subdued in the famous opening soliloquy and he continues the low-keyed approach with an occasional whimsical wink to the audience as he proceeds to eliminate everyone standing between him and the throne. You can readily see from Rylance's brilliant performance and concept of the title role how all the other players in the great game to determine who would rule England in the 1480s would not give much thought to Richard--or the danger in being perceived to be an opponent of his ambition--until it was too late. Too late for them to keep their heads--literally.

After that, everything else could have seemed anticlimactic, but Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays, a memoir with a good deal of comedy and some sadness, comes out as a winner and Bruce Norris's Domesticated, a drama about a couple breaking up, was worth seeing to catch two fine performers, Jeff Goldblum and Laurie Metcalf, in the leading roles.  Norris won a Pulitzer and Tony for a play about race I haven't seen, Clybourne Park, but this one apparently hasn't hit that level.

Living in a second-tier movie distribution town, it was also worthwhile to catch a few films on or near their opening dates.  The most fun was one playing near me here in D.C., American Hustle. I do confess a weakness for this kind of picture, as one of my all-time favorites was The Grifters, with Annette Bening, Anjelica Huston, and Peter Cusack, drawn from a Jim Thompson novel. Hustle is a bigger-deal production, and the outstanding performers were Christian Bale, hitherto not well known to me, Amy Adams, and Jennifer Lawrence. There were plenty of other cinematic vets who helped make the picture the winner it is. I particularly liked Adams's performance--based on some good work I'd seen her do before, I figured she'd be good but she rose to a higher degree of acting here.

Another bravura production was The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese's latest, which does a nice job tackling a promoter of penny stocks as a device to relieve working-class folks of their bank accounts. De Caprio is on screen the whole time and contributes a powerful depiction of a superb salesman. The always reliable sidekick expert, Jonah Hill, is enjoyable in that role, too. But as much fun as the pic can be--especially DeCaprio's sales pitches to the trading floor crowd and the subsequent bacchanals at the same venue--the fine editor who cut this from four to three hours could have cut another hour. She might have started with a few of the repetitive sales and party scenes.

A major play, August: Osage County, that won prizes aplenty on Broadway a few years ago, comes now to the screen with major stars--Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, supported by real pros like Chris Cooper and rising ingenues a la Abigail Breslin.  The play of course has been opened up, in classic cinematic fashion, and still works nicely as a drama. I found Roberts the strongest of a fine cast and on the whole, thought the picture a success. Streep has probably been more impressive, which allows Roberts to shine this time.

Exhibit Worth Seeing

Until I visited the Frick Collection in New York today, drawn by the current exhibition of great paintings from the newly-renovated Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, I had forgotten what a superb group of paintings the Frick holds in its permanent collection. The visiting exhibit is entitled Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals, and is impressive.  True, there's only one Vermeer but it's the most famous one and one of the world's most renowned paintings, Girl With a Pearl Earring.  The Rembrandts are excellent and the two Hals portraits have another quality in common with those in the permanent Frick group: Hals clearly was not always painting people with smiles or laughing as in the familiar Laughing Cavalier.

But the Frick is worth visiting because its regular set of paintings adhere to an incredibly high standard. First, there are three fine Vermeers, quite an accomplishment since there are only 36 known ones world-wide. Five others are up Fifth Ave. at the Metropolitan. One of the Frick's, Officer and Laughing Girl, is in my view equal to its pearl-earring relative.



There are also an amazing group of El Grecos, Turners, Rembrandts, Titians, and a roomful of the great British cadre of Gainsborough, Reynolds, Raeburn, and Romney.  Romney's Lady Hamilton shows us how her amazing beauty captivated so many leading Englishmen of the day. The Mauritshuis show also has a wonderful Van Ruisdel landscape, View of Haarlem, and the picture recently made famous by the novel, The Goldfinch, viz., the eponymous Fabritius picture.  It is just a total delight wandering the relatively tight confines of this mansion turned into a museum.

It almost makes you forget that even by the standards of his fellow robber barons, Henry Clay Frick, was a true villain.  He took the lead in bringing in Pinkertons to break the Homestead steel strike, for which admittedly Carnegie likely deserved to be blamed as much as Frick was, but Frick has gone down in history as the principal responsible corporate terrorist of the day.  Even the house video telling the history of the museum concedes that he moved to New York because he was hated in Pittsburgh for his role in violently breaking the strike.

Thus one does feel a sensation comparable to that experienced by those with labor values when contemplating crossing a picket line, any picket line, no matter how unprepossessing the union is which has put the line up.  You face what rarely occurs in or society--you are required to declare which side you are on. Unions, of course, are far from being the factor in our society they once were, and this is a major cause of the lamentable inequality wenow confront in the U.S. The paintings are fantastic and many were acquired personally by Frick himself, but it's still hard to get rid of the sour taste in the mouth that visiting this redoubt of the worst kind of figure in our history produces.