Wuthering Heights

 On Saturday, we went to Berkeley to see Wuthering Heights at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. This presentation was an adaptation by Emma Rice which originated in Britain with the Young Vic of Bristol and a group called Wise Children. She added music and a character identified as The Moors, reflecting that crucial element of Emily Bronte's novel: the Yorkshire moors where she and her sisters and brother grew up and lived most of their short lives.

Wuthering Heights needs some changes from the novel to work onstage. But some aspects of this novel can't really be altered all that much. The critical moment--the climax--comes when Heathcliff returns just as Cathy is going to expire. This classic scene draws the audience in, much as it undoubtedly did in the 1938 movie starring Laurence Olivier in possibly his greatest romantic role, with Merle Oberon as Cathy. It ends the long first act just as it concludes the first half of the novel. 

Everything that comes after it--in the novel, the movie, or onstage--always seems somewhat anticlimactic to me. The novel's story is told by a long-time family servitor, Nelly, who for whatever reason is absent from this production. No great matter--since we really don't need or even want a narrator. One other character I missed was the servant at Wuthering Heights, the house, a scary sort of presence named Joseph. In the novel, he adds to the weird atmosphere of Wuthering Heights.

Many of the cast members played several parts, which was fine. One actor played Cathy's husband, the weak Edgar Linton, as well as Lockwood, the visitor who inspires Nelly to tell the whole story. Both Heathcliff and Cathy were well-played. Heathcliff had the power that is crucial to the character, and Cathy was both strong and weird--then in one line, she lets out that she went and married Linton when Heathcliff disappeared for three years because she thought marrying into that family would make her "a great lady."

She, of course, undervalued the wild and violent love that had grown between Heathcliff and her, as each saw that the other contained something of themself. The second act features the next generation, as well as a Heathcliff who aims to control the actions of everyone else, and the weak Edgar Linton who wants to guide his daughter, also Cathy, away from any involvement with Heathcliff or his slight son Linton, who, though ridiculously slight and weak, exudes determination. 

There's also Hareton, son of Cathy's older brother, Hindley, who when he inherited Wuthering Heights, abused Heathcliff and for his pains, turned to drink, from whhich he dies, after his wife Frances died in childbirth giving birth to Hareton. None of the three new second-generation characters can come close to the power generated between Heathcliff and Cathy.

It's a compelling story and it was exciting to see it onstage, but it remains a highly challenging piece to turn into a successful drama in the theater.

 

The Bay Area Boards

Out here visiting my daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons in the usual Bay Area balmy air with just the slightest bit of cool edge.  We enjoyed a lot of outdoor time, heading to Half Moon Bay for the tree tunnel and then a hike that included visiting the tidepools at maximum low tide to see lots of sealife like stars and anemones and crabs. Another trip was to Rancho San Antonio, with its great trails through fields and forest. A few more parks in Cupertino and Sunnyvale provided more wonderful hours to savor.

As far as indoors is concerned, we made it back to the War Memorial to catch the San Francisco Opera's new production of La Traviata. A chestnut, to be sure, but with three fine principals, a highly impressive one. Pretty Yende, who's been receiving many great notices in the leading houses, was a fine Violetta, and tenor Jonathan Tetelman brought youth and authority to Alfredo, while the veteran Simone Piazzola, whom I'd not seen before (not that I'd caught the others either) handled the tricky role of Giorgio Germont very capably.

I've always felt that Traviata proceeded from the magnificent musical experience of Act I, delightful musically from start to its finish with the last high notes of Sempre libera. Act II is always more complicated, and it became more so because the house needed several minutes to change from the first to the second scene--from Violetta's country place to Flora's decadent party. There's a lot of good music, too, but the flow is entirely different from the first act and a lot longer. Act III, to me, is gen,erally disappointing, and I've never seen any opera company make it work at the level of the first two acts.

Excitement also arrived in the form of a false alarm that emptied the house about a half hour before the curtain was to go up. Handled fairly badly, eventually the proceedings got going only a few minutes behind. A critic once speculated that opera orchestras, in his case, the Met's, know Traviata so well that they could probably perform the score backwards. That does not take away from the delight of the opera--the music and the singing. 

More to follow.

Leopoldstadt

 I've seen more Tom Stoppard plays than most people have. Jumpers, Travesties, New-Found-Land, Dirty Linen. My wife's favorites, seen many years ago, are the one-acters The Real Inspector Hound and After Magritte. Walking down from those tight balcony seats (not that there's much more room in the orchestra), one remark I overheard was "Stoppard's usually more cerebral." 

Indeed, he usually has been: lots of wit, clever lines, paradoxes. He didn't need any of that in this play, and there was not much of it. At 82, he explored what has been described as his new-found past: he was born in Czechoslovakia, left with his mother in 1938, was adopted by his English stepfather, and says he never knew that his mother's family was Jewish. This was the same basic account given by Madeleine Albright, coming from the same country.

While we tend to be skeptical about anyone who says they never knew about those things, I've seen enough of families maintaining secrets of that kind to accept it at face value. Whatever, Stoppard did change his style for this outing. He even took a much-used model--the large Jewish family, often well-off and in Vienna, coming to realize that assimilation never happened and failing to recognize the impending tragedy.

Yes, this theme is not a new one. Yet Stoppard handles it masterfully. The conversations amid the hubbub and tumult taking place in the main room of the family's apartment present a picture that comes across as real--in 1899, 1909, 1924, 1938, and 1955. All is positive, if not wildly optimistic at the turn of the century, yet some of the leading characters are already seeing the fly in the ointment. By 1909, they come face to face with anti-Semitism. It's coming closer in the 20's and needless to say, by 1938, the knock arrives on the door.

Perhaps the most insightful scene, however, is the mid-50's one. Most of the characters have vanished--their destinations are announced, and they were not good ones. But a returning son encounters one who stayed, and starts to grasp what he never knew because no one desired to tell him. His adoptive father had unsuccessfully warned the assemblage in 1938 but clearly did not want to brief his newly-acquired son about the tragic story he anticipated, witnessed, and tried his hardest to get this family to recognize and act accordingly. 

The production is superb, as, with the same director and production staff, it apparently was in London, where the play premiered in 2020. I recognized some familiar New York theatrical names in the cast here, and everyone seemed to be performing at a high level. It's another of those problem plays, as Shaw would have likely called this one, that you may not want to see but which you will value highly after sitting through the 2 1/2-hour uninterrupted drama.

The Media Blew the Message and the Campaign

The "big foots"--the major media titans who write for the New York Times and the Washington Post and the other papers that garner the most attention in the U.S. blew the 2022 midterm election.  And the rest of the pack--including the TV networks, both the three "legacy" ones and the newer cable ones such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, followed right along and sometimes even led the charge.

They bought hook, line and sinker all the BS that the Republicans cleverly and carefully put out at crucial times in the campaign that claimed that the GOP was riding a "red tidal wave" to massive victory and landslide. Yes, they probably will take the House and possibly the Senate, but there was no wave. There are lots of reasons for this result, but all were downplayed or ignored by Big Media.

First, inflation is certainly always a key issue. Republicans ran on that. Those who pointed out that a lot of it was due to there being a war on in Ukraine which wreaks havoc with farm prices, energy costs, and military budgets. There's also been a supply chain breakdown only beginning to be fixed, which was caused by the pandemic disrupting normal manufacturing processes. It was difficult to get it going again.

Crime was an issue but not anywhere as big as the Rupert Murdoch purveyer of phony news, the New York Post, made it out to be. Crime overall has declined. In some places, including New York, however, murder numbers are up. A.J. Liebling, the greatest press critic, once noted that Hearst sent newsboys out screaming, "Horrible crime! Throw'd a baby off a bus!" about an incident that occurred in Lahore, Pakistan, but which they made sound like it happened in Columbus Circle in New York City.

Democrats were at fault for not taking the issue on and trying to avoid it, along with inflation. There are answers and they are not easy to present, but you get nowhere if you don't try. Yes, the Dems ran a terrible campaign but they still did well, and much more important, they didn't make the Big Media swallow phony Republican polls that said a red wave was upon us. That is the unpardonable crime, that these media outfits that conduct their own polling, accepted the phony stuff and ballyhooed it to the rafters.

We're getting some decent analysis weeks after the damage was done and days after the election was over. Dana Milbank laid it out in the Washington Post today and Monica Hesse showed how abortion and women's rights were right up there in the calculus of decisive issues for the election, while the Big Media poohpoohed it as of minimal concern. Wrong. This issue elected a lot of Democrats. It now seems clear that this issue, which the Democrats campaigned hard on, was a correct one for them to push, and it worked in many places.

The media poobahs and Beltway insiders discounted the significance of Alito's reactionary decision in the Dobbs case because to them, it was old news. Not so for the voters. That's why a lot of the election deniers went down. That and the other maligned issue--the future of democracy when people were running who vowed to disregard the will of the people as expressed by their votes and totally corrupt our elections. And yes, they are still there ready to frustrate the electorate.

Amazingly, people cared about this. The Times is a recidivist violator. They blew up the Hillary Clinton e-mail brouhaha so that it helped Trump win in 2016. Compared to his thousands of lies and corruption, it was a big nothing. They have yet to fess up to the evidence on their hands in that effort to bend over backwards to "be fair" to the GOP liars.  

Likewise, they overemphasized James Comey's disgusting violation of Justice Department policy shortly before the 2016 Election Day by announcing the reopening of the e-mail investigation. Comey also said Hillary should be charged, a decision he is supposed to have nothing to do with--it's the responsibility of the Justice Department lawyers and legal leadership, not him. He's a cop.

Ed Murrow was right way back in the '50s when he took on Senator Joe McCarthy when no one else would. "Cassius was right. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves'" --our society, beginning with the media, built up and communicated McCarthy's phony charges and lies. It now seems that the media, and many of us, learned very little from that now ancient experience. Just as they passed on all of Trump's lies and took years to call them what they were and are, they accepted unquestioningly poll numbers created of whole cloth. There should be no Pulitzer Prizes this year.

'Mr. Saturday Night'

 Very much enjoyed a performance tonight of Mr. Saturday Night, the musical adaptation of the movie made more than two decades starring Billy Crystal. The musical on Broadway also stars Crystal. The other principal from the movie, playing his same role, was David Paymer, who played the lead character's brother. 

Although the musical has taken some of the sharp edges off Crystal's character, a once successful but now almost forgotten comedian named Buddy Young, Jr. Buddy is more interesting once those edges are weakened. In the movie, he becomes so nasty as he declines in respect that you begin to lose interest in him. Although the second act here remains problematic for that reason, it's better conceived than the movie.

Reviews of the musical were less than stellar. The Times generally endorsed it as worth seeing but pointed off some deficiencies, some of which include the ones I mentioned above. I now feel those deficiencies resulted from the problems with the character, not Crystal's performance. 

The musical does a great job at conveying what comedy was like in the Catskills--the "Borscht Belt" of the 1950's. The music will not be confused with scores by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, or Lerner & Loewe, but it was suited to the show and had what the friend with whom I attended the performance called its vaudeville sound.

This was a rare instance for me of appreciating Broadway amplification in it carrying the sound to seats far back in the top balcony. Usually the acoustics of old Broadway theaters diminish the attractiveness of the sound amplification creates in these houses. Crystal was superb, even given the vagaries of the role. Randy Graff played his wife, a new role, very impressively and Paymer, as in the movie, was a strong force for good. Shoshana Bean was excellent as Buddy's daughter.

The insiders through whom my friend secured the tickets downplayed the show and suggested we'd better off seeing Six. I may indeed want to see that show, but neither of us understood the basis for the insiders' dismissive view of this show. The older audience applauded like crazy and got into the show by applauding Crystal's staged shtick in his comedy act. It's only around for another week so I'd recommend it heartedly.

 

Big Trade

 Not everyone pays attention to baseball. It's not even clear that it ever was the national pastime, whatever that is. Oh sure, Ken Burns produced an umpteen-part series on it that was wonderful as well as fun. And it brings back lots of memories--going to the Polo Grounds with my junior high friends when we took several buses and two subways to get there.

I've enjoyed going to a few games a year for a long time though. I went to Fenway Park when I was in law school and when we lived in Boston a few years later. In 1967, I was in the bleachers for the last two games of the Impossible Dream--Bob Gibson showed in the Series that it was indeed impossible for the Sawx. It took them 35 more years to get that first Series win since 1918.

When I moved to D.C. way back when, I shared a short series at the Orioles. They had won lots of titles but these were the fading days of the glory era. Cal broke Lou Gehrig's record and Eddie Murray always was good for some decent hitting. When Angelos acquired the franchise, that was the sign that the good days were over. Very rarely, they got into the playoffs; lately, they've not even done that.

So when Washington, after 33 years, got its team back, I was delighted. I've had tickets ever since they moved into Nats Park and was lucky enough to have good seats and get them for the playoffs and the Series. Heck, I even gave the Series tix to my daughter and son-in-law. Crazy Series it was in 2019--neither team won a home game. But even though the Nats never got the full run of Series champion because Covid did a number on the 2020 season, for while, it was heaven.

The most heralded pitching prospect of the decade, Stephen Strasburg, showed his best stuff in the Series, and Max Scherzer, Patrick Corbin, Anthony Rendon, Trey Turner, and many others did their best and pulled off all kinds of heroics. The youngest was Juan Soto, and he played a major part, getting hits and homers when it counted.

By the 2019 Series, the Nats had already lost Harper. Rendon was likely to go since it was rumored that he always wanted to be in California. Then the Nats sold off everyone, or just about everyone but Soto last July at trading deadline time: Scherzer, Turner, Schwarber, you name them. And now they've done it again--Soto being the most incredible and Josh Bell, to whom I'd warmed once I saw him make key plays and hits.

They talk about prospects but it any two of the mob they got last year and this year really materialize, it'll be a lot. It's going to be pretty gloomy down there for a while, and on the day after the last housecleaning, I have the dubious honor of having a ticket this afternoon (4:05 start) against the Mets. The Nats managed to pull one rabbit out of the smashed hat yesterday--they beat the Mets when Jacob deGrom started his first game of the season. Of course since starters only go 5, 6, or at most 7 innings--both deGrom and the Nats starter went five, the game gets decided by the mid-game relievers and maybe the closers.

I still believe, however, that you don't build a team by letting truly great players slip through your fingers. The Nats could've kept Harper, Turner, and Soto. They still had 2 1/2 years of Soto but who knows if they could've kept him after that. The team was still likely to be rebuilding. But Turner was lost because they wouldn't be serious about dealing with him the year before his free agency ran out. The next season he blew off the tent top--became one of the best players of the year and they would have had to come up with plenty more to sign him. The year before they likely could have had him. 

One writer said they could have gone over the top to sign Soto--when you take account of the whole situation, what would another $60-70 mill  have been? 

So maybe rebuilding and great prospects is the way to go. I'm not sure I'm all that interested in being there though. All the negatives come into play when a team is rebuilding: the ridiculous ticket prices, the even more ridiculous concession prices, the blaring music and I'm not referring to the batters' walk-up music. The screening to get into the park. When a team is winning and is in contention, all that stuff can be lived with if not loved. But not any more.

Where the Crawdads Sing

 Had the chance to see Where the Crawdads Sing at the beach movie house mid-afternoon. Several friends, including Eileen, had read the novel and the great reviews this picture had received. I usually don't read a lot of movie reviews except for one-showing, off-the-beaten-path films; instead, I rely on word of mouth and it usually works out fine.

Hadn't seen any of the actors in this picture except for David Strathairn, who gave his usual fine performance as a country version of Perry Mason, which might give something away but not all that much. The scene of the movie is the marshes of North Carolina (filmed in Louisiana).

Kya, the lead who is on screen  for the entire picture, is played by Daisy Edgar-Jones (and at least two other actresses, I think, at stages of her growing up) as a "marsh girl" who is progressively abandoned by all of her family members, first her mother and then her siblings, who cannot deal with living amid the terror provided by their father in the somewhat run-down house deep in the marsh.

She avoids human company and manages to live and support herself alone until two prospective boyfriends turn up seriatim by taking their small boats deep into the marsh where they encounter her. The movie follows the three of them as they mature and also focuses on Kya's developing talent as a nature artist who renders amazing drawings of what she knows--the birds, shells, and other denizens of the marsh. The two guys in her life are played by Taylor John Smith and Harris Dickinson. As always with Hollywood, they're wildly good-looking but that has to be assumed.

It is well-paced, though some might feel it to be slow, but carefully depicts her growing up and having to deal with an increasingly present outer world beyond the marsh. She is aided by a Black couple who run a country store and help her at critical times. Strathairn appears throughout the pic as a country lawyer and brightens the screen with his portrayal. Needless to say, he gets his chance to star in the dramatic courtroom scenes.

This is the opposite of an action movie, although there are a few fights and violence. It pulls you in and I easily found myself drawn to the characters. There's also a terrific twist at the end which leaves you speculating about what you've seen and not seen. Terrific summer movie, but excellent at any time of the year.

 

Summer Reading

 [This blog has not been maintained so as to be refreshed regularly by me, who is ostensibly in charge of operations. Regard this as a promise that new posts will appear much more frequently from now on.]

We've been doing a lot of traveling this month. After trips to the Bay Area in California, central Connecticut, and Fredericksburg, Va., we're now at the beach--Middlesex Beach, which is a small sector located between Bethany and South Bethany in Delaware. We've been here quite a few times over quite a few years, from back when my daughter Vanessa was growing up, and this is the 3rd or 4th time we've taken the same beach house.

This is when we catch up on purely recreational reading. I'm in the middle of two mysteries that have been enjoyable in totally different ways: John LeCarre's last novel, Silverview, published posthumously, and The Bounty, by the much-published Janet Evanovich, with Steve Hamilton.

If you're a LeCarre fan, as I have been for a long time, this novel is fun. It is shorter than the usual length of his work and since I'm about three-quarters of the way through it, I know I'm likely to be disappointed at not having the opportunity to spend more time with the many compelling characters he has introduced so far. Normally, it took him several hundred pages, well, at least 350 or 400, to pull it all together. 

I like his writing because he captures so much about life and attitudes, as well as speech, in Britain. Much of his slang may be dated, but then, so is mine, since I lived in England quite a few years ago and my trips there since then have been less frequent. Nevertheless, his ear for different speech patterns--not accents, which he doesn't aim to present--based on class and locale is superb.

His characters are often complex and of course, as the novel proceeds, different aspects of each appear. As always, the differing outlooks of the several members of "the Service" are well-drawn and differentiated. When he passed away, I didn't expect any more to read and enjoy but this so far has been a pleasant surprise.

Janet Evanovich has always been a favorite of mine--to pick up in airports or other places when I need something snappy and uncomplicated to take my mind off all the usual challenges of the day. Her novels are not complex or searching; probably the most fun comes from seeing how her lead character, Stephanie Plum, a retrieval agent for a bail bond office run by her cousin, will get the bad guy into cuffs when in the argot of the trade, h,,e "fails to appear." 

But this is not one of the approximately 24 Stephanie Plum novels. It's the latest--4th or 5th, I think, in a Fox and O'Hare series. The principals are Nick Fox, a thief turned professional adviser to the FBI, whose handler is FBI Agent Kate O'Hare. This is sort of a chase novel--similar in some ways to the several of that kind by Daniel Silva--where the characters who form a team in search of what Alfred Hitchcock labelled the "McGuffin"--the object everyone--the team, the bad guys, and the cops are all after.

The authors have researched some famous places--the Vatican, the Eiffel Tower, Schoenbrunn Palace--to add some verismilitude to the fast-paced tale. I usually lose interest in the Plum novels when Evanovich indulges in allowing a couple of characters inserted to lighten the atmosphere get too much time of stage: a one-time prostitute who has become a sidekick to Stephanie, and Stephanie's eccentric grandmother.

On the more serious side, I am thoroughly entranced by a history of historians I'm reading: Making History by Richard Cohen. This is an effort to tell the story of history itself, beginning with the Greeks--Herodotus and Thucydides--and proceeding through the Romans, the Bible, the Medieval era, and now I'm as far as Gibbon in the 1700s. So far I've learned a lot to enhance my knowledge of the great historians of all time.

I really hadn't wanted to concentrate this travel spell during late June and July, after having traveled minimally during the pandemic since March 2020. As a result, though, I'll be home during all of August, which is when I've always wanted to be on the beach. Travel these days will likely become easier come the fall, which I'm definitely looking forward to arriving.

 

 

The Hacks Own the Supreme Court

The right-wing hacks finally won their years-long struggle to take over the Supreme Court. A Pyrrhic victory perhaps but one that will cause untold pain--in this case to poor women most of all. But turning back the clock was the theme of this latest bit of hypocrisy. As Maureen Dowd noted in a brilliant column Sunday [May 9, 2022], this was also the biggest victory for Puritanism since Massachusetts Bay colony expelled Roger Williams.

Laurence Tribe pointed out that few instances exist of justices changing their votes from their original position at the conference. Wordsmithing--yes.  Little changes in wording that only a pedant would care about--yes. So we might as well recognize that in this case, the first draft will be the heart--if it had one--of this decision, when it finally emerges from its dank sewer to the light of day.

Needless to say, we have the two theories of why it was leaked. Only the Republicans want to make leaking the major issue. Anything rather than confront the real subject: the future of any liberties this court chooses to place outside the realm of protection. Formalism, it's called--a more accurate descriptor than originalism. One so-called scholar at the Bush I White House once told me how important formalism was. It just means designing a system of precepts that accomplishes whatever you want but dressed up as worthy of Aristotle or Aquinas. 

I much prefer Groucho's perception of this: "I have principles. If you don't like them, I have other principles." The right says some leftist clerk did it; the left says that a conservative did it to lock in one of the fearsome five who might surrender to reason and reality. In the end, it takes down the image of the Supreme Court so that now all our major government institutions have been profaned.

Yes, Barrett, J., you are political hacks. Beginning with Scalia's perversion of history dressed up as the opinion in the Heller gun case, they have ignored real history and the real world. His other greatest crime was the Citizens United farce. Protect the free (paid, paid big-time) speech of corporations. Empower money even more as the governor of our politics. The late Justice Stevens, who had been a real lawyer, unlike all of them except the late Thurgood Marshall, wrote a magnificent dissent that charted the true history of gun rights and the 2nd Amendment. Scalia was a windbag of a fraud. A so-called law school across the river in Virginia named itself after him--excuse me, its reactionary dean at the behest of himself and the major donors named it after him.

This sordid episode has put paid to the mystique of the Supreme Court. They are as close to being priests of the law as the high priest Ramfis and his bald-pated crew were in Aida. RBG turned out to be a decent judge but like most of them, her ego got in the way so she wouldn't leave even after she had fought off cancer on numerous occasions. 

The court has been reactionary for most of its existence. Dred Scott, Plessey v. Ferguson, Lochner v. New York--the list of atrocities goes on. Nobody except pedants today remembers the four horsemen: Van Devanter, Butler, Sutherland and McReynolds. The last--McReynolds--was a total bigot who wouldn't sign the message of condolence on the death of Brandeis.

But we do remember the first John Marshall Harlan and not all the rest on the winning side in Plessey. His descendant of the same name was a mostly principled conservative. You don't get any of them anymore. You get a guy like Alito who could never grow out of his cloistered background, and that was before Princeton and Yale Law. Kavanaugh regaling the Senators with his love of beer guzzling. Gorsuch, out of a family that produced his mother, who tried to murder the EPA. Thomas, for whom Biden to his everlasting shame allowed the GOP to run rings around him and let them trash Anita Hill, only telling the truth about his weirdness. Barrett, proclaiming she isn't a hack, the surest indication that that's exactly what she is.

Lawyers understood when the unholy Trump trio dissembled about their regard for Roe v. Wade. The general public and most of the media took their b.s. at face value; lawyers know about weasel-wording: they never directly said they wouldn't trash Roe. The Democrats always ignored the importance of Supreme Court nominations and now they suffer the consequences. It is nothing but a nest of hacks and right-wing nut cases. At least no one should have any illusions any more.

 

Acting Worth Seeing

 A movie I saw recently gives me a great opportunity to revive this blog. I've been totally negligent in not writing here for lengthy spans of time. So here goes on a new regime.

The film I saw was The Outfit, and it features several fine actors but two stand out, perhaps because they may be the best dramatic actors working now. They are Sir Mark Rylance and Sir Simon Russell Beale. Rylance is best known in the U.S. for his Academy Award Supporting Actor performance as Russian spy Col. Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies. I first saw him in London twelve years ago in Jerusalem and then in New Yrk several years ago in Farinelli and the King.

He has often been heralded as today's best actor and he gives a compelling lead performance in The Outfit as a seemingly introverted controlled tailor who has emigrated from London to Chicago. As the film opens in his shop, we learn soon that for some reason his shop serves as a mail drop for gangsters.

The movie holds your attention, mainly to watch Rylance work. The story unfolds with several surprises, almost all of which are credible. In a late scene, Simon Russell Beale turns up as the don of the gang that Rylance's character has become involved with. There's a fine scene between the two of them, along with Johnny Flynn as a young gang member intent on advancing and Zoey Deutch, as Rylance's assistant in the shop who has higher ambitions as well. 

Watching Rylance and Beale, however, is super enjoyable. It's two masters making you entirely entranced into the scene. Both are physically ordinary-looking and far from prepossessing. This is not Gielgud and Olivier, except for the incredible quality of their acting.

Late last year I saw Beale in The Lehman Trilogy on Broadway where, with two other fine actors, he played several different roles in a history play, making all these characters come to life.  (See my blog for December 9, 2021, for much more on The Lehman Trilogy.)After I saw Rylance for the first time in Jerusalem in London, in which he played the leader of a bunch of doped, drunken outcasts camped on the edge of an English town, the vast extent of his range as a performer came clear. 

This was also the case when he starred as King Philip V of Spain in Farinelli and the King. He shared the stage with two alternating countertenors playing the famed Farinelli, a castrato who ruled the London stage in Handel's day. 

Beale is even less physically powerful than Rylance; he seems short and round, yet he can inhabit characters who loom large and imposing. He's on the scene only briefly in The Outfit but he always maintains his pull on your attention. 

In sum, The Outfit is totally worth seeing if only for Rylance and Beale. But all the performers are good and the screenplay is better than average, with, to my mind at least, only one major plot theme that is a stretch.

 

A Revived West Side Story

Yesterday we went to see the new West Side Story movie, a Stephen Spielberg extravaganza. It turned out to be very good. The reviews were mixed, but once I watched the film, it became clear to me that most of the skeptics had agendas. I should begin by noting that I hadn't been a huge admirer of the 1961 Richard Beymer-Natalie Wood movie, for which George Chakiris and Rita Moreno won Best Supporting Actor and Actress Oscars. This was in part because I saw the show, in 1957: it was my first Broadway musical.

Suffice it to say that I have always loved the show. After all, the duo of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, the latter writing his first Broadway lyrics, was a dream team. And then bring in the amazing Jerome Robbins to make it a major dance show. Carol Lawrence, the original Maria, was a star for a time, but the only performer in the show who went on to have a long-lasting and major Broadway career is Chita Rivera, now in her 80s. Larry Kert, who played Tony, had one more big show--Company--and remained the answer to a quiz question.

I thought of Chita Rivera because "America" remains the huge brassy production number of the show and Ariana DeBose was a terrific Anita. The song features the best dancing that takes place on a huge public street space. The dancing in the rest of the pic is also excellent and exciting, in the way the show was. Both leads--Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler--have good voices, not that one ever minded Natalie Wood's being dubbed. The one performer from 1961 who was better than anyone else in his role as Riff, the Jets leader, was the late Russ Tamblyn, hired, I learned recently, for the movie because he could do a back flip.

What makes this production different is how Spielberg takes advantage of not only "opening up" the show but really maximizing what the film medium can do. The shots focusing in and out of scenes as well as the great sets and locations--it looked from the credits that many street shots were done in Newark and Paterson, N.J.--provide the backdrop for the action and the dancing.

Rita Moreno was involved in this movie in major ways: the part of Doc, who has the drugstore and candy shot and soda fountain where the Jets hang out, was changed to Valentina, his widow, who runs the joint now.  Her acting and her singing--this time she gets to sing "Sometime, Somewhere" in a soft voice, and it worked. Of course, at 90, she's not in a position to lead "America" as she did in the 1961 movie. But now she's listed as the lead executive producer as well.

Much has been made by critics of the casting, which features Puerto Rican and Hispanic actors as the Sharks and their girls. I don't think in the '50s and '60s we were aware that many white actors played these roles in "brownface". Certainly a good improvement and in today's milieu, doubtless a mandated one. However, the plentiful use of Spanish, while realistic,  could have benefited from subtitles as the picture is presumably intended for a general audience in the U.S. 

The writers and others who participated in a New York Times panel discussion of the film lauded the use of Spanish without subtitles. To me, that just shows how out of touch the "woke" New York cultural world is with the real world, and they probably don't care if it turns off the mass of Americans who don't speak Spanish.

A major accomplishment of the film is the re-imagining by Garrett Peck of the choreography originally created by Jerome Robbins. The Robbins name appears in the credits with the others responsible for the original show--Bernstein, Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents, the stage veteran who did the book. Robbins and now his estate demanded that every production of West Side Story contain the "entire production created, directed, and choreographed by"...him. Appearing in that one spot was perfectly done. Peck's work was superb, definitely equal to Robbins's original: accepting the dance medium for the gangs remains a leap of comprehension for viewers, but it comes off as natural, or as natural as it can seem.

When interviewed when the film opened, Sondheim, who at that date was the sole survivor of the original four creators, hardly surprising since he was so much younger and it was his first show--he died about a month ago, aged 93--said that he now thought "I Feel Pretty" was the one song he didn't feel fit. Its placement in the film appeared entirely right to me.

All in all, the new West Side Story comes off as an excellent rendition of the piece. My usual skepticism of any remake proved totally unjustified in this instance. Conceptions of what movies can be has grown and deepened in the 60-plus years since the old movie was shot, not to mention the show. I felt that this movie has more in common with the original Broadway production, which brought many innovations to the stage: a musical with a tragic ending, for one thing, and a musical about gang violence, albeit based on the timeless Romeo and Juliet.

 

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New Year--New Program

It's a new year, 2022,  and as I look outside, the first snowfall is in progress this Monday morning. They called off school and closed the government; this time, the precautions are likely to be justified. Even accounting for how nuts Washington gets with a dusting of snow, a likely 4-6 inches is major. It was warm right through the end of last year. Now I suppose it may not be.

Life was just starting to "normalize" (in quotes because it's hard to say what that means any more) when suddenly the pandemic got new energy. Everything was canceled and making plans was postponed. Staying inside means watching way too much tedious television. We start to watch some streaming series that someone has recommended and usually, it's fair and that means that after two episodes, we've had it.

More reading becomes a refuge. The new Churchill book by Geoffrey Wheatcroft provides a judicious corrective to the hagiography that developed especially in the U.S. The Andrew Roberts biography was good but mostly passed over the many low points, actually decades, of his life. Wheatcroft, in contrast, agrees that he shone during the five World War II years, even with many problematic acts. He was the man of the hour and deserved the acclaim. Most of the rest of his career before and after was far less successful. He did oppose appeasement and predicted the disasters of British foreign policy in the 1930's, but had little impact.

The rest were often disastrous, although one of his surprising defenders about Gallipoli was an officer who was in uniform there, Clement Attlee, who defeated Churchill in the 1945 election that showed that the British public knew that a different leader was needed in peacetime. 

Churchill was an unabashed imperialist, racist according to the standard outlook of the British upper classes, and tone-deaf to horrors like the killer London fog. His second stretch as Prime Minister in the early 1950's was undistinguished. 

It's when he is put up against the prewar Tory powers like Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, appeasers at best, that he comes off as a roaring success. Boothby and especially Beaverbrook became real war assets, but Attlee's cabinet--Bevan and Bevin, Morrison, and many others--were able to bring real change to the hidebound institutions of the U.K. Only a true right-wing revolutionary, Thatcher, could undo a great deal of the reform.

Churchill was always able to write--he admitted that he would make sure the world knew of his accomplishments during World War II because he would write the history, and he did just that.  In contrast to his World War II six-volume set, he  did better with his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. It is out of fashion today, largely because any work with that title offends too many and omits too much, but there's much good in it, told entertainingly.

Many of his quirks that seemed positive then--the huge cigars and the booze--seem less impressive today. He was far from a good parent--several of his children led sad, disastrous lives. 

Yet the oratory, which to me still works, and although it might not be effective today, was just what was needed then. He understood that there was no way to negotiate with Nazi Germany, especially from a position of weakness. He also realized early on that he would take advantage of his partially American parentage to build a good working relationship with FDR, who also grasped that despite their many differences, was the right man for the time.