Broadway Roundup: ‘Rocky’ Becomes a Musical & ‘All the Way’ Has Bryan Cranston as LBJ

Rocky

Book by Thomas Meehan & Sylvester Stallone; music by Stephen Flaherty; lyrics by Lynn Ahrens Directed by Alex Timbers

Previews began February 13, 2014; opened March 13

Winter Garden Theatre, 50^th Street & Broadway, New York, NY

rockybroadway.com

All the Way

Written by Robert Schenkkan; directed by Bill Rausch

Previews began February 10, 2014; opened March 6

Neil Simon Theatre, 250 West 52^nd Street, New York, NY

allthewaybroadway.com

Seibert and Karl in Rocky (photo: Matthew Murphy)

When Sylvester Stallone created the iconic Rocky Balboa for his captivating, Oscar-winning 1976 movie, I doubt anyone would think the Philly boxing hero would be a candidate for a Broadway musical. Well, these days it seems everything becomes a musical—this season alone, there’s The Bridges of Madison County, Bullets over Broadway, Aladdin and Heathers—so why not Rocky? As this proficient but unnecessary musical makes clear, the real question is: why?

The main problem is that Rocky doesn’t need to be a musical. Anyone remotely familiar with the movie might find it off-putting that the movie is basically reenacted onstage—with the same dialogue—only to be stopped at times for musical numbers that feel shoehorned in from elsewhere. Since director John G. Avildsen’s movie is filled with ordinary people straining to get past their inarticulateness, to suddenly have an onstage Rocky Balboa talk to his trusty turtles then burst into lucid, muscular song, crooning “My Nose Ain’t Broken,” provides a disconnect that continues throughout the show.

There are decent musical moments. The haughtily arrogant champ Apollo Creed seems perfectly at home belting “Patriotic” with a trio of backup singers in tow after he decides to choose a local fighter for the big New Year’s bout. And Adrian, Rocky’s painfully shy girlfriend, has a gentle love song, “Raining,” that’s at least partly in character. But Lynn Ahrens’ banal lyrics are no substitute for the low-class poetry in Stallone’s original movie script: his repeated “yo Adrians” and “you knows” are more authentic than sung lines as “and today’s Thanksgivin’/and I’m sorta free/’cept I got no one but turtles/for company/and I was hopin’ that you’d go out with me.”

It’s a given that “Gonna Fly Now,” the original’s rousing theme song, and “Eye of the Tiger,” Rocky III’s faceless anthem, would appear—the former at the beginning and the latter during the too-long training sequences opening Act II—but what’s surprising is that none of Stephen Flaherty’s songs surpasses them. In fact, Flaherty’s generic power ballads and rockers pale next to Bill Conti’s alternately rousing and intimate movie music—indeed, the show’s most notable sounds feature tantalizing bits of Conti’s score.

Andy Karl’s Rocky adroitly blends Stallone’s original persona with his own take that never steps out of lowly character even while loftily, if incongruously, singing. Margo Seibert’s Adrian is as mousily endearing as Talia Shire, Danny Mastrogiorgio’s Paulie is more an amusing pest than the genuine nuisance Burt Young so memorably was, and if Dakin Mathews’ Mickey can’t hope to equal Burgess Meredith’s charmingly crusty trainer, he comes across with engaging klutziness.

As impressive as director Alex Timbers’ physical production is—utilizing Christopher Barecca’s inventive sets, Christopher Akerlind’s supple lighting and David Zinn’s sensible costumes—it reaches its apogee (or the ultimate in gimmickry) at the end, when audience members in front are herded onto the stage to sit in bleachers as the championship ring is moved into their places, giving everyone a better view of the fight. Steven Hoggett and Kelly Devine’s vigorous fight choreography takes over so completely that, after watching Rocky and Apollo (the excellent Terence Archie) prodigiously fake so many upper cuts and feints—even in slow motion— everyone exiting Rocky will be humming its body blows, not songs.

Cranston as LBJ in All the Way (photo: Evgenia Eliseeva) 

A larger than life figure standing six foot four inches and owning a proudly abrasive Texan personality, President Lyndon Johnson was a formidable political opponent to anyone who got in his way. And in All the Way, Robert Schenkkan’s serious and engrossing play about Johnson’s politicking for the passage of the Civil Rights Act and his own 1964 election, Bryan Cranston’s towering portrayal of LBJ is less a matter of height (the actor, who’s shorter, has two-inch lifts in his shoes) than of precision. Giving a big, blustery performance that teeters on the edge of caricature, Cranston deftly exhibits the crusty personality that tempered LBJ’s good-natured charm, the anchor of an endlessly resourceful portrait of a politician for whom unscrupulousness comes naturally.

Although his play could be seen as a cautionary tale for the current president—who for five years has met a hardened opposition party every step of the way—Schenkkan isn’t interested in mere polemics, for he has a rich subject that not only comprises Johnson himself, but the many people and events that revolve around him during a particularly fraught period of our history. The play begins on November 22, 1963—when Johnson assumed the presidency after JFK’s assassination—and ends on Election Day 1964 when LBJ gets four more years in the White House. What happens is well-known, but it’s how we get there, thanks to Schenkkan’s apposite writing, Bill Rausch’s savvy directing and the performances of Cranston and a large cast, that makes All the Way a sharp and meaty theatrical event.

Surrounding Johnson on all sides of the political spectrum are FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (a subtly squalid Michael McKean), racist Alabama governor George Wallace (Rob Campbell, good and slippery), LBJ mentor and Southern Dixiecrat senator Dick Russell (played by John McMartin, who oozes smugness like nobody’s business), spineless senator and wannabe VP candidate Hubert Humphrey (a cogent portrayal by Robert Petkoff) and civil rights agitator Martin Luther King (a fiery Brandon J. Dirden). As LBJ skillfully makes deals with, ignores or inflames these people, Schenkkan shows how this brilliant tactician combined opportunism and what he believed was the right thing. (Schenkkan’s new play, The Great Society, will take the measure of the man during his second presidential term.)

Standing front and center during this lengthy but riveting drama is Cranston’s LBJ. Sidling up to a crony, mentor or opponent to tell him another profane yarn filled with homespun and hard-won wisdom, Cranston lays bare the brazen duplicity that was Johnson’s weapon: he was your best friend who also stabbed you in the back. And All the Way shows how high risk brought high reward for our 36^th president.

March '14 Digital Week IV

Blu-rays of the Week

The Americanization of Emily

(Warner Archive)

Arthur Hiller’s uneven 1964 satire—from Paddy Chayefsky’s hit-or-miss script—shows how idiotic war is as a skeptical navy man goes ashore on D-Day since his superiors want one of their own to be first to die heroically on Omaha Beach. Acted with gleeful urgency by James Garner, James Coburn, Julie Andrews and Melvyn Douglas, Emily scatters its shots far too widely, which Hiller and Chayefsky would repeat in The Hospital seven years later. The Blu-ray image is good; extras comprise Hiller’s commentary and on-set featurette.

Atlantis

(BBC)

The lost continent has been found in this entertaining retelling of Greek myths and legends, as a group of ancient-world “three musketeers” named Hercules, Pythagoras and Jason deals with the likes of the Medusa, the Minotaur and Pandora’s Box. Although it’s done lightheartedly, the actors look a little embarrassed to be spouting banal dialogue masquerading as wit; but at least there’s the wonderful Juliet Stevenson as the Oracle. The locations—the series is shot in Morocco and Wales—look stupendous on Blu-ray.

Carlos Kleiber—I Am Lost to the World

(C Major)

One of the most renowned 20^th century conductors, German-born Carlos Kleiber was also a major recluse, according to Georg Wubbolt’s first-rate documentary. His  Beethoven and Wagner conducting was sublime, as clips of his work show, and his attentiveness to detail was second to none—as attested to by his many colleagues and friends who are interviewed—but he rarely performed, and if this this doc doesn’t get to the heart of his troubles, it’s still a riveting portrait of a talented artist. The hi-def transfer is decent.

Faust

Werther

(Decca)

German tenor Jonas Kauffmann, the hottest voice in opera today, dominates these 19^th century French opera stagings. He’s a powerhouse in the title role of Charles Gounod’s Faust, dueling with Rene Pape’s equally mighty Mephistopheles, in Des MacAnuff’s entertaining 2011 Met Opera production. Kauffmann is also formidable vocally and dramatically in the title role in Werther, Jules Massenet’s lyrical romantic tragedy based on Goethe’s novel, with fantastic support from soprano Sophie Koch as the woman he can never have. The hi-def video looks fine, while the music sounds strong throughout; Faust extras include brief cast and director interviews.

The Hidden Fortress

Persona

(Criterion)

Fanboys know it—if at all—as the inspiration for George Lucas’ Star Wars (which he readily admits in an included interview), but Akira Kurosawa’s spectacularly entertaining 1958 adventure The Hidden Fortress is a singular B&W widescreen epic seen mainly through the eyes of two nobodies who inadvertently rescue a princess. It works as both a Kurosawa classic and a popcorn movie for anyone to devour; rarely has the Japanese master been so beguilingly light-hearted. 

Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece Persona, one of the most profound studies of human behavior ever captured on film, comprises a character study of immense psychological depth and penetrating acting by two Bergman muses, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. The films’ hi-def transfers are luminous; extras include commentaries and interviews (on both discs), an episode of It’s Wonderful to Create (on Fortress), and on-set footage and documentary Liv & Ingmar (on Persona).

Mysterious Skin

(Strand)

Gregg Araki’s best-known film, which helped launch Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s career in 2004, is an ambitious adaptation of Scott Heim’s book about two friends who deal with sexual abuse at the hands of their little league coach differently. There’s persuasive acting by Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet as the boys and Elisabeth Shue as Gordon-Levitt’s mom, which gives Araki the chance to explore this subject matter with more assurance than in his other films. The Blu-ray transfer is excellent; extras include an Araki intro and commentary, new Gordon-Levitt, Corbet and Heim interviews and deleted scenes.

The Past

(Sony Classics)

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who won the 2011 Best Foreign Film Oscar for A Separation, returns with another look at the effects of a crumbling marriage—this time,  on an Iranian husband, his French wife, her children and her Arab fiancée. Farhadi’s script has much to offer, but ultimately—as in the earlier film—there’s less than meets the eye, as the accumulation of details starts to overwhelm his focus. Still, it’s superbly acted, especially by Berenice Bejo, who showed her comedic side in the frivolous The Artist (did that really win Best Picture?) and demonstrates her raw dramatic chops. The Blu-ray looks sharp; extras include Farhadi’s commentary and Q&A and a making-of.

DVDs of the Week

The Big House

(Warner Archive)

George Hill’s 1930 jailhouse drama—which won Oscars for writing and sound—is dated by muted violence and a squeaky-clean look at hard prison life, but some tough-mindedness remains, thanks to the accomplished cast which works within the narrow strictures of the era. For added historic interest, both the French and Spanish language versions of the film are included, shot with different casts by different directors on the same locales and with the same (translated) script.

Camille Claudel 1915

(Kino Lorber)

Even though he’s using a movie star for the first time—the usually luminous Juliette Binoche has been scrubbed down to resemble the famed French sculptress during her lengthy stay in an asylum—director Bruno Dumont has made another typically rigorous and disturbing exploration of extreme behavior. As usual, Binoche holds the screen—and Dumont’s many close-ups—with intelligence, assurance and anything but star-turn theatrics, but Dumont’s method of casting real non-actors to populate the asylum is questionable at best, mitigating the film’s unblinking look at such a sadly illuminating case of an artist whose life took a tragic turn.

Contracted

(MPI)

When Samantha screws a shady guy from a party, she becomes victim to a most insidious STD that turns her by degrees into a zombie in writer-director Eric England’s initially intriguing but ultimately risible horror movie. Despite Najarra Townsend’s charged performance—she makes Samantha’s physical and mental deterioration plausibly frightening—England’s movie relies far too much on shock effects. Extras are two commentaries, a making-of and Townsend’s audition.

Let the Fire Burn

(Zeitgeist)

This devastating documentary recounts the incendiary standoff between Philadelphia police and radical black group MOVE in 1985, which ended with dozens of people dead (including several children) and the destruction of the group’s headquarters and dozens of houses in a conflagration set—and pointedly not controlled—by authorities. Director Jason Osder, who cannily utilizes archival footage from the era, unravels one of the most egregious misuses of power against civilians in our history. As a sad postscript, sole child survivor Michael Ward—shown being interviewed afterwards—mystifyingly died last year in a cruise ship pool at age 40. Extras are a 2002 Ward interview and an insightful Q&A with Osder.

Stradella

(Dynamic)

Belgian Cesar Franck composed this tragic opera when merely 20 in 1842 and it was never performed in his lifetime: receiving its 2012 world premiere in Leige, Belgium, it shows an accomplished, mature musical hand. Film director Jaco van Dormael shows a real affinity for opera with smart pacing and striking visuals, leads Isabelle Kabatu and Marc Laho are strong singers and performers, and Paolo Arrivabeni conducts the opera house’s orchestra and chorus, which sings the extended—and vocally ravishing—finale.

Theater Reviews: "The Bridges of Madison County" On Broadway; "Stage Kiss" Off-Broadway

The Bridges of Madison County

Book by Marsha Norman; music & lyrics by Jason Robert Brown; directed by Bartlett Sher

Previews began January 17, 2014; opened March 20

Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45^th Street, New York, NY

bridgesofmadisoncountymusical.com

Stage Kiss

Written by Sarah Ruhl; directed by Rebecca Taichman

Performances through April 6, 2014

Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42^nd Street, New York, NY

playwrightshorizons.org

Pasquale and O'Hara in The Bridges of Madison County (photo: Joan Marcus)

The Bridges of Madison County has the most thrilling musical curtain raiser in recent memory, for one reason: Kelli O’Hara, who has already cemented her position onstage among a crowded current field of talented singing actresses. Indeed, with such magical voices and personalities as Sutton Foster, Audra McDonald, Sierra Boggess and the two Lauras, Benanti and Osnes, alongside O’Hara, this is truly a new golden age on and off Broadway.

When she walks onstage for the first of composer Jason Robert Brown’s wannabe operatic songs, O’Hara brings a joyful sense of real drama to this melodically and lyrically clichéd introduction to Bridges’ world of the flatlands of Iowa’s farms, where Francesca—Italian-born wife and mother who has spent the last two decades dutifully raising her family far away from Naples, where she met her GI husband Bud during World War II—spills her soul.

Little else in this show about the brief but torrid affair between Francesca and Robert, a National Geographic photographer who happens by after her husband and two teenage children leave for the Indiana State Fair with their prize steer in tow, rises to that level of passion. It’s primarily due to Robert James Waller’s trashy source novel—Clint Eastwood’s 1995 film, starring Eastwood and Meryl Streep, made its protagonists older, providing a melancholic sense of a missed chance at last love—which Marsha Norman’s book cannot overcome.

Instead, Norman’s book wallows in a cutesy middle America, saddling Francesca—and us—with a busybody neighbor and her husband, about whom far too much is made as the affair runs its course. Then there are Brown’s routine lyrics and derivative music: the latter has pretentions to deeper emotions in romantic arias and duets for the adulterous lovers, but they only reach our hearts due to O’Hara and an equally superb Steven Pasquale.

O’Hara, a meltingly lovely actress who makes us fall deeply for this woman yanked from her world to begin a new life only to find an unlikely escape, and Pasquale, an intelligent actor whose powerhouse singing voice hasn’t been heard on Broadway until now, make a winning couple. Although it’s strange that O’Hara decided to sing with her accent (while speaking, she sounds at times like Arianna Huffington, whose Greek homeland is hundreds of miles from Naples), the pair’s passionate duets make Brown’s songs sound more tuneful than they really are.

Hunter Foster—Sutton’s brother—invests the stock character of Francesca’s husband Bud with a pathos unearned on the page, while Cass Morgan and Michael X. Martin are less irritating than they could have been as neighbors with too much stage time. Michel Yeargan’s set, comprising bits and pieces of kitchen furnishings and one of the fabled covered bridges of the title, is cleverly utilized by director Bartlett Sher, as the supporting cast brings the pieces on and off stage. That they sit at either side when not in on the action is a less felicitous directorial decision.

Despite many drawbacks, O’Hara and Pasquale make this lukewarm musical a white-hot, irresistible romance.

Fumusa and Hecht in Stage Kiss (photo: Joan Marcus)

Sarah Ruhl returns with another heavy-handed, shaky mix of comedy, parody, sentimentality and absurdism: Stage Kiss is a wooden and, finally, quite pointless bit of affected whimsy in which two performers, decades after an affair in their younger days, reunite for the revival of a bad play and discover that the sparks they try to produce onstage are being reproduced backstage and fall for each other again.

Though unoriginal, this isn’t bad material from which to extract a funny, even relevant comedy: real life vs. show biz might be an old-hat concept, but one might find small nuggets of truth and hilarity in the interactions of self-absorbed actors, playwrights and directors. Too bad Ruhl finds few of those nuggets in the story of He and She, who re-meet cutely at the first reading of an awful play that’s been unearthed after years of neglect.

We get far more scenes from this play, with intentional howlers in the dialogue and characters, than we should: maybe Ruhl wants her own play to look better by comparison. The trouble is, Stage Kiss isn’t much better than the two fictional plays it lampoons (yes, there’s another in the second act).

After an overlong first act with endless scenes of readings and rehearsals from the fictional play, the second act shows Ruhl briefly finding her footing, with amusingly lively banter among the characters crowded into He’s apartment: namely He’s girlfriend and She’s husband and daughter. However, after silly talk about souls breaks the brief spell, another lousy play that He and She decide to take on becomes the semi-focus of Ruhl’s unfocused play. Groaningly obvious jokes and one-liners abound, and when the play turns serious at the end, it’s a desperate move to find Meaning in what could have made a decent skit with a few chuckles.

Jessica Hecht gives a bizarre performance, with off-kilter line readings that better fit the characters in the plays-within-the-play than they do She, while Dominic Fumusa is a charismatic, winning He, who’s an actor that’s humorously bad at accents. A few seasons back, Ruhl’s Broadway play In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play was a wonderful surprise: after her increasingly less felicitous The Clean House, Eurydice, Dead Man’s Cell Phone and now Stage Kiss, it’s obvious that The Vibrator Play was the exception that proves the Ruhl.

March '14 Digital Week III

Blu-rays of the Week

Beyond Outrage

(Magnet)

By now, we know what to expect from Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano’s modern yakuza crime dramas: sporadic outbursts of operatic ultra-violence compensating for a lethargic grasp of characterization and plotting. This sequel to the tightly-wound Outrage has moments of marvelously delirious mayhem—best is the slow death of a traitor by a baseball pitching machine—yet it seems too familiar and, at times, lazy. The movie does look superb on Blray; lone extra is an hour-long making-of.

Dark House

(Flatiron/Cinedigm)

Here Comes the Devil

(Magnet)

For its first half, Dark House sets up an interesting tale of a young man searching his sordid family history only to find outright horror; too bad the second half—full of ridiculous decisions like the hero head-scratchingly allowing his pregnant girlfriend near the malevolent doings—completely falls apart. No such luck with Here Comes the Devil, which is ludicrous from the start, despite setting up its situation as matter of factly as possible; however artfully done, this devil children flick is risible throughout. Both hi-def transfers look great; extras include making-of featurettes.

Frozen

(Disney)

This formulaic animated feature, from Hans Christian Andersen The Snow Queen, was one of Disney’s biggest hits ever, despite (or because of) its bland “be yourself” mantra: too bad its characterizations and comic relief compare badly with earlier and better flicks from the Disney vault. I’ve never been a fan of computerized animation, and the clunky visuals didn’t change my mind, while the songs, especially the annoyingly anthemic Oscar-winner “Let It Go,” are no better. Oh well: at least the Blu-ray looks top-notch; extras include a cutesy making-of, deleted scenes, music videos and Andersen featurette.

Kill Your Darlings

(Sony)

This intriguing investigation into the Beat writers before they became the Beats is not only a first-rate character study but also a thoughtful précis of America’s postwar literary scene, before Allen Ginsberg, Williams S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac became famous (or infamous). John Krokidas’s assured direction and the unshowy acting by Daniel Radcliffe (as Ginsberg), Ben Foster (as Burroughs) and the rest of the cast give the film an authenticity that makes the killing at its center more than a mere plot twist. The Blu-ray transfer is excellent; extras comprise an audio commentary, deleted scenes and interviews with Krokidas, Radcliffe and others.

Mandela—Long Walk to Freedom

(Anchor Bay/Weinstein Co)

This biopic of one of the 20^th century’s great men is earnest to a fault, but perhaps director Justin Chadwick and writer William Nicholson cannot be faulted for being so reverent to Nelson Mandela’s eventful life, although there are nods toward the complexities of a man who was no saint and his equally human wife Winnie. What is unequivocal is Idris Elba’s towering portrayal of Mandela, which is a performance for the ages; Naomie Harris is nearly his equal in the smaller but pivotal role of Winnie. The Blu-ray looks splendid; extras include a Chadwick commentary and featurettes.

Saving Mr. Banks

(Disney)

Director John Lee Hancock’s handsome-looking biopic details the squabbling between Mary Poppins creator PL Travers and Walt Disney himself over how her beloved nanny would be transformed into a movie: with songs and animation, to her eternal chagrin. This sturdy if sentimental recounting is halfway between a warts-and-all portrait and a Disney whitewash, with Tom Hanks an OK Walt and Emma Thompson a deviously prickly Travers, making for an unfair fight. The hi-def transfer looks quite good; extras are deleted scenes and featurettes.

Swerve

(Cohen Media)

Set in the picturesque Australian outback, this inferior thriller from the Body Heat school of Hitchcock knockoffs follows a loner who finds himself embroiled with a lonely wife and her dangerously unbalanced (and crooked) husband. Director Craig Lahiff, despite the right sordid atmosphere, omits plausible (or, at least, not risible) plot points, limping to a fizzled-out conclusion; Emma Booth, an Aussie Jennifer Lawrence, makes the wife more complicated (and sizzling) than she is on paper. The Blu-ray image is stellar; extras comprise several interviews.

DVDs of the Week
Above Suspicion—Set 3

(Acorn)

Kelly Reilly—who got her big break stateside in Flight, and who stars in a new TV series Black Box, in April—again lends her unique presence to another gripping mystery as a DI who teams with her former boss (an always terrific Ciaran Hinds) to solve the murders of a promiscuous young actress and her drug buddies. Reilly and Hinds’s offbeat chemistry is delicious to watch, so it’s too bad that this well-scripted, superbly-acted series of mysteries has now run its course. Maybe one day we’ll get a follow-up feature film—or another series—with these two characters.

Girl Rising

(Cinedigm)

Nine touchingly humane stories of remarkable young women from around the world demonstrate how important it is to educate females in such countries as Afghanistan, Egypt, Napal and Pakistan, which contributes to ending poverty and illiteracy. With several celebrities providing voiceover narration—ranging from Kerry Washington, Meryl Streep and Frieda Pinto to Anne Hathaway and Liam Neeson—Richard E. Robbins has made a worthy film on a worthy subject. Extras include a director’s welcome, outtakes and behind the scenes and location vignettes.

Rogue—Complete 1^st Season

(e one)

This DirecTV original series follows Grace, an undercover detective who tries solving the brutal murder of her young son, looking for a traitor in the midst of the sordid underworld in which she works. Although the drama’s 10 episodes are fast-paced and action-packed, at the center of it all is a great, gritty Thandie Newton as our complex heroine: I for one have been waiting for this kind of performance from her since she came to our attention in Australian John Duigan’s films of the ‘90s like Flirting and The Leading Man.

Show Boat

(Warner Archive)

Frankenstein director James Whale’s 1936 film version of Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II’s legendary Broadway musical is dramatically uneven and occasionally draggy, but the songs—in strong performances by Paul Robson (“Ol’ Man River”) and Allen Jones and Irene Dunne (“You Are Love”), among others—remain indelibly stamped in one’s memory. Overall, it’s stylish, effective entertainment which also shows that Hattie McDaniel (later immortalized in and stereotyped by Gone with the Wind) was a multi-talented actress, comedienne and singer.

Vikings

(BBC)

This isn’t the action-adventure series with a plethora of sex and violence on the History network; instead, it’s an intelligent if (mostly) unsexy documentary featuring archeologist Neil Oliver, who goes beyond the usual Norsemen clichés for a nuanced examination of their voyages of exploration and battle, as well as their complex legacy. The three one-hour episodes—which include visits to far-flung sites as Russia, Scandinavia and Greenland—provide new insights into an unfairly maligned historical group.

CDs of the Week

Anne Akiko Meyers—The Four Seasons/The Vivaldi Album

(e one)

Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, a dazzling virtuoso and formidable interpreter, brandishes her 1741 “Vieuxtemps” Guarneri instrument to give a dynamic take on one of the most overplayed showpieces ever written, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Along with making Seasons sound fresh and full of feeling, she also performs a richly textured account—doing all three solo parts—of Vivaldi’s Concerto for Three Violins and, as a nice throw-in, Arvo Part’s Baroque-inspired Passacaglia.

Gustav Holst/Frederick Delius  

(Halle)

Francis Poulenc—Stabat Mater

(Harmonia Mundi)
Three astonishing choral/vocal works by two unheralded 20^th century English composers—Holst’s The Hymn of Jesus for chorus and Delius’s Sea Drift for baritone and choir and Cynara for baritone—receive stirring performances by Halle’s orchestra and choirs, with Roderick Williams an emotive soloist, all under the baton of Sir Mark Elder. Poulenc’s masterly religious compositions—topped by his opera Dialogues des Carmelites—also include his 1950 Stabat Mater and 1959 Sept Repons de tenebras, both given expressive readings by soprano Carolyn Sampson, Cappella Amsterdam, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Daniel Reuss.

Prokofiev—Piano Concerto No. 3/Symphony No. 5

(Mariinsky)
Sergei Prokofiev is one of the few composers whose most crowd-pleasing works are also among his best—and this recording has two of his most popular masterpieces, courtesy of the indefatigable conductor Valery Gergiev and Mariinsky Orchestra. Peerless Russian pianist Denis Matsuev scintillatingly plays the solo part in the masterly Third Piano Concerto, which combines dexterous technical workouts with those unforgettable melodies which came so easily to him. Gergiev also leads his forces through the Fifth Symphony, whose deft, light touch is anchored in brilliant orchestration. There’s a bit of a messy Fifth finale, but that’s the only slip-up here.

Mark Rivera—Common Bond

(Red River)
For his debut solo album, Mark Rivera—saxman extraordinaire best known for Foreigner and Billy Joel hits, along with being longtime music director of Ringo’s All-Starr Band—shows off his multi-instrumental prowess on guitar, percussion, flute and keyboards, and a pleasant voice that carries him through such pop-rock tunes as “Loraine” and “Turn Me Loose.” When Rivera lets go—both singing and tooting his way through a rollicking cover of Hendrix’s “Spanish Castle Magic” (with Joel on keyboards) and crooning a piano ballad, “Rise”—it makes you wish he’d do it more often.

Music Review: Berg & Strauss Operas @ Carnegie Hall

Vienna: City of Dreams

Through March 16, 2014

Carnegie Hall, 7^th Avenue & 57^th Street, New York, NY

carnegiehall.org

Barkmin (left) as Salome (photo: Chris Lee)

Highlighting Vienna: City of Dreams—Carnegie Hall’s celebration of the Austrian capital’s vast artistic and cultural heritage, which included many events in other New York City institutions—were concert performances of two one-act operatic masterpieces,  both associated with the Vienna State Opera and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra: Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Richard Strauss’s Salome.

Admittedly, these were safe choices as far as 20^th century operas go—if someone had asked me (no one did for some reason), I would have chosen a lesser-known Strauss work like Daphne and Berg’s unfinished Lulu—but they were obviously picked for their relative brevity (each under two hours, perfect for a concert) and, perhaps most importantly, their ability to show off the Vienna Philharmonic as the finely-tuned instrument it is. And both evenings did just that.

Wozzeck might sound earsplittingly atonal to those used to more soothingly melodic Mozart or Puccini, but Berg’s gripping musical version of Georg Buchner’s tragedy about an ordinary man driven to murder and suicide by an uncaring world tautly tightens its dramatic noose until the haunting—and downright draining—final notes. Credit the orchestra, and Franz Welser-Möst’s sensitive conducting, for bringing out the opera’s contrasting brutality and beauty.

Matthias Goerne, who has made Wozzeck a specialty—stepping in recently at the Met for Thomas Hampson—sang the title role with emotive power, while Evelyn Herlitzius made his promiscuous girlfriend Marie compelling and sympathetic. If there was a blemish, it was the orchestra overpowering some singers, also a problem during Salome.

Of course, Salome is much more raucous, so an onstage orchestra drowning out singers isn’t surprising. But even if conductor Andris Nelsons didn’t always control the racket, big-voiced soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin never had any trouble—hers was a volatile, deeply unsettling Salome, which is what Strauss (and playwright Oscar Wilde) surely wanted for their teenage anti-heroine. And Nelsons did drive the orchestra through this brilliantly bombastic score for all it was worth, right up until its soul-shattering final chords.

Vienna: City of Dreams concludes with Vienna Philharmonic concerts on the 15^th and 16^th, the festival’s closing night. Schubert and Mahler make up the first concert, followed by a celebratory program encompassing the wide variety of styles (including Korngold's golden Violin Concerto played by Gil Shaham) in this most glitteringly musical of cities.

March '14 Digital Week II

Blu-rays of the Week

Big History

(Lionsgate/History)

Bryan Cranston narrates this immersively offbeat mini-series on nature and civilization’s inexorable linkage that shows, through an innovative blend of science and history, how events on our earth billions of years ago still marks our present-day survival. Each half-hour episode uncovers relationships among historical events like the sinking of the Titanic and today’s ubiquitous cell phones, or explores mysteries like ancient empires, with nothing in common, built shrines in the shape of pyramids. Dazzling special effects and animation give the programs cutting-edge visuals to complement the heady ideas.  The Blu-ray imagery looks fantastic; extras include bonus footage. (Release date: March 11)

Eugene Onegin

(Deutsche Grammophon)
Peter Tchaikovsky’s 1879 masterpiece remains the greatest Russian opera ever—elegant and emotive without being shamelessly sentimental—and Russian conductor Valery Gergiev leads the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus in a splendidly romantic reading of the glorious score. Deborah Warner’s mediocre but not disastrous staging is sparklingly sung by its stars, Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien (Onegin) and Russian soprano Anna Netrebko (Tatiana, his lost love). The Blu-ray has a high-quality sheen and the music sounds amazingly clear; extras include between-acts interviews. (Release date: March 11)

In Fear

(Anchor Bay)

A couple driving through the rural Irish countryside is terrorized by a merciless and shadowy specter in Jeremy Lovering’s tightly-constructed but increasingly preposterous horror movie. Despite good use of cramped quarters and eerie darkness, Lovering loses control when the story spirals away from him: if you have no qualms with the silly, copout ending, then you may enjoy the whole thing. The Blu-ray image looks sharp; lone extra is a behind the scenes featurette. (Release date: March 11)

Iron Sky—Director’s Cut

(e one)

This lunatic sci-fi fantasy—which imagines a Sarah Palin-alike in the Oval Office who starts a war with Nazis living on the moon since WWII—is even more demented now that it’s longer via director Timo Vuorensola’s extended cut. The plethora of easy Hitler and Palin jokes is partly offset by a relatively restrained performance by blonde bombshell Julia Dietze as an idealistic Nazi. The Blu-ray transfer looks tremendous; lone extra is a making-of featurette. (Release date: March 11)

Mademoiselle C

(Cohen Media)

Watching Carine Roitfeld quit French Vogue to start her own fashion magazine isn’t exactly scintillating drama, but the engaging 57-year-old editor has none of the egotistic self-love of, say, Anna Wintour, so Fabien Constant’s fly-on-the-wall documentary is never less than entertaining. Among the so-called beautiful people of New York, Paris and London, Roitfeld comes off self-aware, intelligent and unpretentious; an end title tells us that she’s back in the fashion world, now working at Harper’s Bazaar. The hi-def transfer is stunning; lone extra is Paris premiere footage. (Release date: March 11)

The Who—Sensation: The Story of ‘Tommy’

(Eagle Rock)

Pete Townshend, always engagingly chatty, pulls no punches discussing the genesis of and reaction to the Who’s seminal 1969 double-album rock opera in this straightforward  look back at a true rock classic. There’s input from Roger Daltrey, producers Kit Lambert and Glyn Johns, and—via archival footage—John Entwistle and Keith Moon, but Townshend’s integrity and honesty is at this documentary’s core. Bonus footage of a 1969 performance of Tommy songs is included; the Blu-ray image and sound are first-rate. (Release date: March 11)

DVDs of the Week

Crimes of Passion

(MHz Networks)

Based on crime novels by popular Swedish author Maria Lang, this engrossing mini-series follows a literature student, her fiancée and their detective friend embroiled in mysterious murder plots in what seems to be bucolic small-town Sweden. Set in a beautiful postwar countryside, these six 90-minute films comprise flavorful characterizations and simmering, Ellery Queen-type mysteries. Tuva Novotny, Linus Wahlgren and Ola Rapace make a formidable investigative trio. (Release date: February 25)

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—Fifty by Four

(Pride)

Eric Clapton—the 1970s Review

(Sexy Intellectual)

These unauthorized biographies, combining vintage footage and new interviews with (mainly) peripheral players, present solid 2-1/2 hour overviews of these rock legends’ careers. The CSNY doc covers the several decades-long, off-and-on musical reunions of the legendary harmony trio (and occasional quartet); the Clapton one—examining his solo career after stints in supergroups Cream, Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominos—chronicles a superstar’s nearly fatal slide into drugs and irrelevance. (Release date: March 11)

The FBI—Complete 7^th Season

(Warner Archive)

The 1971-72 season of this popular TV drama (comprising 26 episodes) follows Bureau agents Efram Zimbalist Jr., William Reynolds and Philip Abbott pursuing criminals of all stripes, from robbers and kidnappers to attempted assassins. As always with such “classic” series, the guest-star roster is even more impressive than the shows themselves: everyone from then-unknowns like Lindsay Wagner, Meg Foster and Martin Sheen to established veterans like Bradford Dillman, Dabney Coleman and Vic Tayback  show up. (Release date: February 25)

Inside Llewyn Davis

(Sony)

Unerring recreation of the early ‘60s folk scene notwithstanding, the Coens’  comedy-drama about a cynical, anti-social singer who may or may not change how he lives his life—he’s beaten up at the beginning and end of the film—is another crudely constructed bit of obviousness that fails to find any complexity in its typical Coen anti-hero. Bruno Delbonnel’s burnished photography, the finely-detailed set design and a delightful cat far outweigh 100 minutes of cleverness posing as insight. The lone extra is a 50-minute making-of. (Release date: March 11)

The Patience Stone 

(Sony Classics)

As she says in the making-of featurette, the excellent actress Golshifteh Farahani endured her own psychological hardship enacting the difficult role of a young Middle Eastern woman, standing watch over her comatose older husband, who confesses to hidden secrets—including one that makes us reexamine their relationship—in front of his prone body. Director Atiq Rahimi (who adapted his own novel with Jean-Claude Carriere) subtly transforms the story’s confined spaces into a powerful metaphor for his heroine’s mental anguish. (Release date: March 18)

Theater Reviews: 'A Doll’s House' at BAM; 'Ode to Joy' Off-Broadway

A Doll’s House

Written by Henrik Ibsen, English version by Simon Stephens; directed by Carrie Cracknell

Performances through March 23, 2014

BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY

bam.org

Ode to Joy

Written and directed by Craig Lucas

Performances through March 30, 2014

Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street, New York, NY

rattlestick.org

Morahan and Rowan in Ibsen's A Doll's House (photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

Now considered conventional, Henrik Ibsen’s masterpiece A Doll’s House was controversial, even shocking in its day: one can imagine its reception in 1879 by its initial audiences—and critics—who were taken aback by heroine Nora Helmer leaving her home, her husband Torvald and her three young children to begin anew in a world to which she has never conformed.

Carrie Cracknell’s production, for the most part intelligent and lucid, takes the play at face value and assumes that the audience does too: there’s little tampering done with the familiar story and characters, with the exception of Nora herself—that famous bundle of contradictions—whom Cracknell and leading lady Hallie Morahan turn into an unfortunate barrelful of tics and mannerisms, the likes of which haven’t been seen on BAM’s stage since Cate Blanchett’s irritating Hedda Gabler some years back.

In an effort to encompass Nora as both shrewd, proto-feminist manipulator and flitting, subordinate “hamster” (in Simon Stephens’ English version), Morahan acts up a storm, never standing or sitting still, hands and arms constantly aflutter, signaling her distress by theatrically lowering her voice. Regrettably, her jumbled assemblage of individually brilliant moments never coheres.

What truly distinguishes this Doll’s House is designer Ian McNeil’s magnificent rotating set, which not only spatially lays out the Helmer house but also places Nora’s to-ing and fro-ing in what looks uncannily like a life-size doll house, providing reverberations that, if they don’t always illuminate the play, at least they never obscure it.

Dominic Rowan’s excellent Torvald never becomes the cardboard character he’s often presented as, making a formidable and believable man of his times. Since she has physicalized Nora so much, Morahan appears most at ease as a whirling dervish doing the heavily symbolic tarantella at Act I’s end; if the play itself doesn’t end on a subtler grace note than Nora’s final door slamming, it still retains its power 135 years after it was written.

Hope and Erbe in Ode to Joy (Photo: Sandra Coudert)

In Ode to Joy, playwright Craig Lucas works through intense personal demons through his heroine, Adele, an artist whose addictions—physical, emotional and artistic—are overwhelming her. Lucas, whose recent works have been diffuse and overstuffed, here takes the opposite tack: there’s a nagging sense that he’s hacked at his play until it is merely dramatic and psychological shards, typified by Adele telling her story in fragmented flashbacks.

We meet her today, then return to 2007 when she cutely meets Bill, a cardiac surgeon who recently lost his own wife, in a deserted Village bar. They quickly fall in lust, then apparently love, spending several years together on and off (mainly off, it seems). We then backtrack another nine years to Adele meeting Mala, who comes to her apartment to buy a painting. That intense relationship lasts more than a year, until a blowup over Adele’s worsening drug addiction during the Y2K scare at New Year’s 2000.

Adele’s relationships with Bill and Mala are less organic than designed to map her travels of self-discovery—a final scene which brings all three characters together for a semi-happy ending is the play’s weakest—but, despite not being as contrived as Lucas’s lackluster, cluttered Prayer for My Enemy and The Singing Forest, there’s an opportunity missed because Lucas obviously has affection for her.

But much of what would make Adele fascinating is elided or omitted outright: at the end, Adele mentions almost in passing that she and Bill married, divorced, remarried, redivorced, and have a young son Justin. Why do such obviously important events go undramatized? That Adele’s relationships and art are never probed too deeply keeps things frustratingly on the surface, particularly when the characters speak in risible greeting-card platitudes (Adele actually says to Bill right after they meet, “I like that you cried. That’s attractive to me.”)  

Lucas—who directs with a sure hand—is helped immeasurably by Arliss Howard, who makes Bill more real onstage than on the page; Roxanna Hope, who unerringly navigates churning waters of the underwritten Mala; and, most especially, the quietly forceful yet winning Kathryn Erbe, who humanizes Adele—that trove of addictive self-loathing—while enacting her painful and bemusing journey.