Broadway Musical Review—“Death Becomes Her” with Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard and Christopher Sieber

Death Becomes Her

Book by Marco Pennette; music and lyrics by Julia Mattison & Noel Carey

Directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli

Opened November 21, 2024

Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 West 46th Street, NYC

deathbecomesher.com

Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in Death Becomes Her (photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

In the far too crowded field of movies turned into Broadway musicals—something going on for decades to diminishing returns—Death Becomes Her is a piece of frivolous fun that neither slavishly imitates the original nor strays too far from the beaten path. If it’s not as outrageously sly as it could be, it does provide consistent entertainment, which is nothing to sneeze at.

I barely remember Robert Zemeckis’ black comedy, which I saw way back in 1992. All I remember is the indelible image of Meryl Streep, as bitchy movie star Madeline Ashton, having her head spun around, Exorcist-style, while catfighting with her nemesis, longtime friend Helen Sharp, played by Goldie Hawn. Bruce Willis was also on hand as Ernest Menville, the nerdy plastic surgeon who leaves Helen for Madeline and becomes the vessel for their attempts at immortality.

The musical follows that plotline, with a few detours that give Broadway audiences what they came to see, like the big, campy opening number, “For the Gaze” (get it?), in which Madeline—now a musical theater star who’s on the road, touring middle America—and her dancers demonstrate how campiness is a huge draw onstage. 

Here and elsewhere, the music-and-lyrics team of Julia Mattison and Noel Carey admit they’re aiming at the lowest common denominator; the laughs are plentiful throughout if hardly gutbusting. The amusement scale fluctuates between the genuinely tart dialogue between the two friends as Madeline is in the process of stealing Ernest from Helen and the ridiculous scene where a nervous Ernest, plied by drink pre-immortal op, is serenaded by his entire basement study in the dopey number, “The Plan.”

The original film introduced the immortality subplot through an enigmatic socialite, Lisle von Rhuman, played by Isabella Rossellini; for the stage musical, Lisle has become a more shadowy figure, Viola Van Horn, played by Michelle Williams, who alternates between stiffness and sultriness. Another difference from the movie is that, onstage, Madeline has an assistant, Stefon, who, as played by Josh Lamon, gets many big laughs with his continued carping commentary on what’s happening.

Mattison and Carey’s serviceable songs get us from scene to scene without unduly overstaying their welcome; likewise Marco Pennette’s book, even if there’s an inevitable letdown when the show drags at the end, tacking on a couple of superfluous numbers. But it’s all been cleverly directed and choreographed by Christopher Gatelli, and the physical production—Justin Townsend’s savvy lighting, Paul Tazewell’s sparkling costumes, Derek McLane’s sharp sets and Peter Hylenski’s skillful sound design—is impressive. 

It goes without saying that the two leads give master classes in how to overact and oversing perfectly in character: Jennifer Simard (Helen) and Megan Hilty (Madeline), pros at being divas, have such a grand time that their battle royale is infectious. Christopher Sieber makes Ernest more sympathetic and funnier than Bruce Willis was in the movie, so much so that Death Becomes Her becomes as much a vehicle for the stalwart Sieber as for the scintillating Simard and hilarious Hilty.

January '25 Digital Week IV

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Swept Away… 

(Kino Lorber Repertory)

In Italian director Lina Wertmuller’s simultaneously hilarious and sad battle of the sexes, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato are at their most bracingly explosive as Gennarino, a Communist worker from the south, and Rafaella, a rich capitalist from the north, who find themselves stranded on a deserted Mediterranean island, where their roles are reversed, as sexual politics takes the upper hand in a mordantly uncomfortable showdown. Wertmuller’s next film—the unforgettable Seven Beauties—is her masterpiece, but this 1974 black comedy (whose full title, Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, is a typically expansive Wertmuller description) shows the director at the height of her considerable powers, unafraid to dissect human behavior, however foolish or self-contradictory, in a masterly fashion.

No Other Land 

(Antipode Films)

Made by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, this difficult-to-watch Oscar-nominated documentary harrowingly shows how activist Basel Adra, alongside others in his community, fights to save his village, Masafer Yatta, from the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. While recording soldiers blithely destroying his and his neighbors’ homes, Adra becomes friends with Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who takes up the villagers’ cause. The film follows the encroaching occupation over a five-year period, while the unspoken but ever-present subtext is that, despite working together, there’s a huge chasm between Abraham, who can come and go as he pleases, and Adra, who deals with a military presence on a daily basis. Adra and Abraham, with Jamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, have created an enlightened piece of journalistic advocacy.

Inheritance 

(IFC Films)

This globe-trotting espionage thriller is director/cowriter Neil Burger’s attempt at a Steven Soderbergh flick: shot mostly with a jittery handheld camera by ace cinematographer Jackson Hunt, the drama follows a young woman, Maya, reunited with her distant father after her mom’s death, who discovers what he’s really been up to on his foreign travels. She soon finds herself embroiled as well, in a world where lives are not valuable. Phoebe Dynevor plays Maya with an initial naivete that morphs into a hardened shell of determination; she even sells the on-the-nose final scene that explains the title. Burger keeps things moving swiftly over many plotholes, and Rhys Ifans provides solid support as Maya’s shady dad.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Vixen 

(Severin)

The first of big-boob purveyor Russ Meyer’s vixen films, made in 1968, is both the rawest and most ragged as well as the most straightforward and honest, tackling female sexuality, sexism and even racism. In the title role, Erica Gavin, was one of Meyer’s greatest finds, and she plays the irrepressible Vixen to the hilt. The film has been restored and looks good and grainy in hi-def; extras include commentaries by Meyer and Gavin, interviews with Gavin and actor Harrison Page, vintage TV interview of Meyer and Yvette Vickers, and a censorship featurette.

Supervixens 

Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens 

(Severin)

Two more films in Russ Meyer’s “vixen” series are an embarrassment of riches, so to speak, that  are a greatest hits grab bag of jiggly T&A (and occasionally more); 1975’s Supervixens, at 105 minutes, goes on too long, while 1979’s Beneath the Valley, cowritten by reviewer Roger Ebert, is the silliest yet. Meyer always found appealing newcomers to populate his filmic fantasies: Supervixens stars Shari Eubank, who never appeared in another film, and Uschi Digard, while Beneath the Valley features Kitten Natividad, Uschi Digard, Ann Marie, June Mack and Candy Samples. Both restored films have excellent hi-def transfers; extras include Meyer commentaries, interviews with Meyer, Natividad and actor Charles Napier, vintage Meyer TV appearance, 1979 Meyer interview by Tuscon talk show host Ellen Adelstein and a new Adelstein interview.

No Home Movie 

(Icarus Films)

Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s suicide in 2015 came directly following the death of her beloved mother, and the director’s poignant if meandering final documentary explores that relationship in depth. Akerman’s mother Natalia was a Holocaust survivor who was always the daughter’s reservoir of strength, which is shown in the many conversations between them, both in person and via Skype. Although the film, like so many others by Akerman, wears out its welcome before it ends, its tragic real-life epilogue gives it a gravitas missing from much of her oeuvre. A bonus film, I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman, is Marianne Lambert’s documentary portrait of the director, centered around illuminating interviews; both films look good on Blu.

January '25 Digital Week III

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

The Room Next Door 

(Sony Classics)

For his first English-language feature, veteran Spanish director Pedro Almodovar cast Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton to headline a maudlin drama about how the relationship between two women who haven’t seen each other in years is tested when one, stricken by a rare and fatal cancer, asks the other to assist in her suicide. It’s beautifully shot by Edu Grau and Almodovar’s eye is as sharp as ever, but the script is crammed with cliched and occasionally laughable dialogue—still, it’s always worth watching Swinton and Moore do their stuff both together and apart, excepting the wincingly bad sequence when Swinton play her character’s daughter.

Rose 

(Cohen Media)

In actress and screenwriter Aurélie Saada’s pithy 2021 directorial debut, the great Françoise Fabian takes on the title role of the Goldberg family’s matriarch, whose life changes profoundly when her beloved husband of many decades suddenly dies and she must face widowhood and her judgmental adult children. Even if some of what Saada shows of Rose not acting her age is borderline soap opera, but no matter what, Fabian commands the screen as she did as the irresistible Maud in Eric Rohmer’s 1969 My Night at Maud’s—right up until the very last image of Rose (and Fabian) fiercely looking directly at the camera…and us.

Girls Town 

(Film Movement Classics)

Jim McKay’s low-budget, fiercely independent study of a group of high school girls debuted at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and now returns in a new transfer; it was rehearsed extensively by the cast, written by McKay and shot in suburban New Jersey. The result has a pleasing authenticity of place and character, but the situations and dialogue remain on a superficial level. Still, Lily Taylor, Anna Grace and Bruklin Harris make a forceful trio—and Aunjanue Ellis, seen at the beginning, is equally good—letting us care about these young women.

In-Theater/Streaming Release of the Week

Night Call 

(Magnolia Pictures)

When young locksmith Mady answers an evening call in a Brussels apartment, he finds himself mixed up with violent thug Yannick, whose money was taken from the place and who blames Mady—the locksmith spends the rest of the night trying to track down the cash and clear his name, all while the city bursts with violent protests and civil unrest. Michiel Blanchart’s tautly made thriller is quite exciting, but the chase scenes—like a ridiculous one after our hero steals a bike—become risible. Still, setting the action during a single night works well, and with a charismatic lead performance by Jonathan Feltre as Mady and a forceful turn by Romain Duris as Yannick, Night Call’s 95 minutes fly by.

Streaming Release of the Week 

La Pietà 

(Film Movement Plus)

Spanish writer-director Eduardo Casanova’s surreal journey into the toxic relationship between smothering mother Libertad and her teenage son Mateo has its arresting moments but provides diminishing dramatic returns as it splinters into plots that follow Mateo’s dying dad Roberto and his pregnant wife as well as a family in Kim Jong-Il’s Korea. The latter subplot feels dragged in for reasons known only to the director, who also introduces a sympathetic psychiatrist and a brain tumor, both triggering more horrible actions from Libertad for unearned shock value. Ángela Molina, who plays Libertad, also starred in That Obscure Object of Desire, the final film of surrealist master Luis Buñuel, to whom La Pietà may be an homage, but Casanova’s own powers of provocation are stretched beyond endurance.

Blu-ray Release of the Week

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock 

(Cohen Media)

Outside of Steven Spielberg, there’s not a more familiar filmmaker than Alfred Hitchcock, instantly recognizable in his film cameos and the distinctive voice and dry humor heard in interviews. Director Mark Cousins uses those traits for his latest idiosyncratic documentary, with British actor Alistair McGowan giving an uncanny voice impression. The problem is, though it sounds like Hitchcock, it’s enough not like him to sound just off each time you hear it. Otherwise, Cousins provides a master class in focusing on thematic strands in Hitchcock’s imposing body of work (more than 50 feature films, from the 1920s silent era to 1976’s Family Plot), divided into six chapters mainly as an excuse to dazzle viewers once again with some of the most celebrated sequences in film history, including Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Psycho and The Birds. The Blu-ray looks terrific; extras include an alternate trailer with Cousin’ narration, McGowan’s voice test, a Cousins interview and Cousins’ intros for Hitch’s Notorious, Rope and Saboteur.

CD Releases of the Week 

Grażyna Bacewicz—Orchestral Works, Vols. 2 and 3 

(CPO)

The first Polish female composer to earn recognition for her original, startlingly expressive scores, Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-69) is yet another accomplished classical artist who is earning belated but justified praise, as no less than two labels are in the process of recording and releasing her music. Chandos put out its first volume in 2023, comprising her superlative third and fourth symphonies. The enterprising CPO label has now just added to its series with the second and third volumes of Bacewicz’ orchestral works—the discs are anchored by the brilliant first and second symphonies, respectively, but also contain other formidable works like the Concerto for Large Symphony Orchestra and the Musica sinfonia in three movements. The WDR Symphony Orchestra under the able baton of Lukasz Borowicz performs this music as pointedly and vigorously as the BBC Symphony Orchestra did on the Chandos disc. Let’s hope that both of these superb editions continue to put a spotlight on Bacewicz’ masterly music.

Festival Roundup—New York Jewish Film Festival 2025

New York Jewish Film Festival

Through January 29, 2025

Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center

filmlinc.org

The films I saw at this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival—the 34th annual edition, co-presented by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center—were, with one notably memorable exception, all based on real people and true stories, whether dramatized feature or documentary accounts.

Midas Man

The festival opener was Midas Man, a long-gestating biopic of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, directed by Joe Stepehenson and written by Brigit Grant. It hits the usual beats: managing his dad’s record store in Liverpool, Brian sees the Beatles at the Cavern Club, changing his and the band members’ lives, and he guides the lads to a record contract with Parlophone through producer George Martin and onto The Ed Sullivan Show and worldwide Beatlemania, all while his messy personal life is filled with drugs, alcohol and casual sex with other men. While this familiar tale is told in a familiar way, there are compensations. With no Beatles songs on the soundtrack, only covers (it’s cheaper, obviously), someone else is at the center of their universe; Jacob Fortune-Lloyd is a charismatic Brian, even selling the hoary device of speaking directly to the camera. The actors playing the Fab Four are decent without being caricatures, but Jay Leno’s bizarre casting as Ed Sullivan is a headscratcher. Epstein died at 32 of an accidental overdose, which the filmmakers wisely keep offscreen, giving Brian his own Abbey Road cover moment for the final shot.

The Glory of Life

Also dying far too young was Czech writer Franz Kafka, who succumbed to tuberculosis a month shy of his 41st birthday; Georg Maas and Judith Kaufmann’s The Glory of Life takes the measure of the artist as a dying man, vacationing near the Baltic Sea for rest, but meeting and falling in love with Dora Diamant, who would accompany him through his final days. The filmmakers flirt with but manage to skirt soap opera thanks to a lack of hysteria and a pair of pitch-perfect portrayals by Sabin Tambrea (Franz) and Henriette Confurius, whose Dora is full-bodied and immensely sympathetic.

Ada—My Mother the Architect

A trio of documentaries chronicled three audacious lives. Yael Melamede’s touching and intensely personal Ada—My Mother the Architect is a first-person look at Ada Karmi-Melamede, an important Israeli architect who was even more importantly Yael’s mother. We get the sense of Ada as a creator of brilliantly conceived buildings alongside her loving relationship with her daughter, shown through touching discussions between them. 

The Spoils

In The Spoils, a tragic and complex story is told of Jewish art dealer Max Stern, whose impressive gallery holdings were broken up, as were so many others by the Nazis, although he did escape to London and later to Canada. Jamie Kastner follows the trail of the ongoing attempts at repatriating his works alongside documenting the German city of Düsseldorf’s decision to pull the plug on a Stern museum exhibit in 2017, nominally over the provenance of a single artwork. The morality and legality of restitution is argued—especially by a Dusseldorf lawyer aptly named Ludwig von Pufendorf, whose pronouncements skirt anti-Semitism. For highly contentious subject matter, Kastner navigates the many sides and players with intelligence and clarity.

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival

The title tells all in The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival, which is Julie Rubio’s informative if chatty portrait of the singular Polish artist who was famous in her circle in her lifetime but has become far more renowned now, nearly four decades after her death. For those with little or no knowledge of Lempicka’s artistry and legacy, Rubio has created a good primer, and her interviews with Lempicka’s granddaughter and great-granddaughters provide a welcome personal touch.

Blind at Heart

The lone fiction feature I saw, Blind at Heart, was in many ways the most remarkable. Based on Julia Franck's prizewinning novel Die Mittagsfrau (The Blindness of the Heart), Barbara Albert’s arresting and formidable feature follows Hélène, a young Jewish woman who arrives in Berlin in the midst of the liberal Weimar Republic hoping to become a doctor and hiding her identity—when the Nazis come to power, she makes decisions that will change the course of her life. Albert tells this intimate story about extraordinary resilience on an appropriately epic scale, and it’s centered by the tremendous performance of Mala Emde, whose Hélène is an unforgettable creation.

January '25 Digital Week II

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

The Mother and the Whore 

(Criterion)

French director Jean Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece may be the greatest film his compatriots Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer or Jean-Luc Godard never made—its mammoth length (3 hours and 40 minutes) belies the simplicity of its subject and execution: it’s a look at a narcissistic young man’s relationships with his live-in lover and a new woman in his life. Although it’s nearly all talk, since it’s Eustache’s script—with supposedly no improvisation—it’s emotionally direct and honest. This is by far Jean-Pierre Leaud’s best performance, and Bernadette Lafont and Francoise Lebrun equal him as his eponymous lovers. The photography and editing are sublime, and the shattering ending reminds one of Ozu, which is high praise indeed. The B&W film looks stupendously sharp in UHD; extras comprise new interviews with Lebrun and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin; archival interviews with Eustache, Leaud, Lafont and Lebrun; and a restoration featurette.

In-Theater/Streaming Release of the Week

Wicked 

(Universal)

It starts with an ugly, CGI-drenched opening and ends more than two and a half hours later with the showstopper “Defying Gravity”—which is only the end of the first act of Steven Schwartz’s blockbuster Broadway musical. That means we have to sit through another two-plus hours next holiday season to finish this thing. So is it all worth it? Not really—it’s a mighty slog to get through, the songs are mainly negligible, the story isn’t as clever as it should be, and only Cynthia Erivo has the requisite vocal chops and acting prowess to make Elphaba soar into the stratosphere. Ariana Grande also has a powerhouse voice, but when she tries to act, she’s laughably inadequate. Further, Bowen Tang, Jeff Goldblum, and Michelle Yeoh are wincingly hammy, while Jon M. Chu’s direction consists of making things bigger, louder and more garish without settling on a consistent tone or style.

In-Theater Release of the Week 

Every Little Thing 

(Kino Lorber)

Sally Aitken’s heartwarming documentary is an intimate portrait of author Terry Masear, who diligently and lovingly rehabs hummingbirds out of her California home, taking in those that were orphaned or injured and meticulously nurses them back to health. Aitken’s camera follows Masear, who founded Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue 20 years ago and wrote the book Fastest Things on Wings in 2016, and also provides stunning views of the birds themselves—as Maseur notes, hummingbirds flap their wings 50 times a second, something that seems impossible to contemplate even as Aitken records it.  

Streaming/Blu-ray Release of the Week

Touristic Intents 

(First Run)

Prora, which was a huge resort complex on Germany’s Baltic Sea, was built but left unfinished by the Nazi regime, and Mat Rappaport’s informative and thoughtful documentary explores its postwar life: the East German government continued its construction, using the place for military operations as well as housing for conscientious objectors. Then there are the lasting implications of its history—through insightful interviews and on-location footage, Rappaport raises important questions exploring the dissection of tourism and politics. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer.   

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

Mozart—Mitridate re di Ponto 

(Unitel)

One of Mozart’s early operas, a tragedy about a king and his two sons who are all in love with the same woman, comes off as stately and often static in director Satoshi Miyagi’s 2022 Berlin State Opera staging, despite Mozart’s often melodious music. The cast, led by Pene Pati, Ana Maria Labin, Angela Brower, Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian, Sarah Aristidou and Ken Sugiyama, is impeccable, while the Les Musiciens du Louvre under conductor Marc Minkowski provide solid support. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

DVD Release of the Week

Sisterhood 

(Distrib Films US)

Although the French title, HLM Pussy, gets right to the point—if too rudely for some, obviously— Nora El Hourch’s trenchant character study dramatizes how a close-knit group of teenage female friends becomes partially estranged when one calls out her brother’s best friend for sexual harassment. Bringing “MeToo” into a different arena, El Hourch finds space for sympathy and understanding as well as justified rage, and she has assembled a perfect cast of mostly unknown performers—I only recognized the elegant Berenice Bejo, who plays the mom of one of the teens—for a clear-eyed, truthful study that’s all the more remarkable for being El Hourch’s debut feature.

CD Release of the Week 

Ruth Gipps—Orchestral Works, Vol. 3 

(Chandos)

Englishwoman Ruth Gipps (1921-99), like many women composers of the 20th century, was automatically considered second class, despite having gotten a doctorate and showing the facility to write sophisticated works. Now, decades after her death, her works are have been justly resurrected, as this third volume in a series by conductor Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic of her orchestral works rewardingly shows. There are three shorter pieces: Coronation Procession is a sparkling opener, followed by the wistful Ambarvalia and the passionate pastoral Cringlemire Garden, whose lovely string writing is reminiscent of Gipps’ teacher Vaughan Williams. The two major works are Gipps at her most original: the Horn Concerto has a lyricism that soloist Martin Owen brings to the fore, while Gamba and the orchestra give the superb first symphony a vigorous workout in its first-ever recording.

January '25 Digital Week I

4K/UHD Release of the Week 

Seven 

(Warner Bros)

Although at times quite gruesome, David Fincher’s 1995 serial-killer classic remains an intelligent, witty and unsettling drama 30 years on, eschewing the crassness of many films of its genre. The plot hinges on two cops brushing up on their Dante and Milton to ferret out a “deadly sin” murderer, and Fincher’s impeccably stylish directing keeps things on track until the genuinely—and logically—creepy denouement. The performances by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are authentic and stabilizing, while Kevin Spacey enters in the last act and provides his customarily brilliant portrayal as the killer. Darius Khondji’s spectacularly moody cinematography looks superb in the UHD transfer; extras include four commentaries, deleted scenes, alternate endings and several featurettes. 

In-Theater Releases of the Week

The Brutalist 

(A24)

In Brady Corbet’s would-be American epic about a Jewish Hungarian architect who emigrates to the U.S. after surviving Dachau, the hero is named László Tóth—which has to be some kind of in-joke, since it’s also the name of the Hungarian geologist who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta in 1972—and he is put through physical and emotional ringers that leave him as scarred as by what he endured in Europe. Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s script is crammed with big gestures, little subtlety and empty platitudes, but Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley’s trusty camera dresses up the outsized dramatic ambition in gorgeous images, albeit often hackneyed or borrowed from better filmmakers. As Laszlo, Adrien Brody gives a towering performance, and he is sensitively supported by Felicity Jones as his physically frail wife Elszabet. But poor Guy Pearce, who starts out hammily amusing as the antagonist, millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren, is saddled with the most ludicrous dialogue and character arc, and he wears out his welcome long before the film ends with a ridiculously unnecessary epilogue that risibly sums up the preceding 3-1/2 hours—including intermission.

The Damned 

(Vertical)

Director Thordur Palsson’s brooding, slowburn horror film fashions many familiar tropes—isolation, darkness, xenophobia, madness—and into a stew that’s distinctly unnerving but not fully cooked. Set during winter in a cutoff Arctic outpost, the drama builds around a self-sufficient settlement that must deal with the moral issues of intervening when a ship sinks off the coast, knowing there aren’t enough foodstuffs to supply survivors. While enacted intensely by a cast led by Odessa Young as a widow, Palsson’s film never takes off, leading to a pseudo-Twilight Zone twist ending to cover up its shortcomings.

Hard Truths 

(Bleecker Street)

Mike Leigh has been making semi-improvised contemporary character studies for decades but, with a few exceptions (High Hopes, Life Is Sweet), I prefer his historical epics like Topsy Turvy, Mr. Turner and Peterloo. His latest is a disappointingly shallow study of Pansy, a middle-aged wife and mother whose anger—at her husband, son, family members, even store employees and customers—masks deeper psychological issues. Leigh and actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s second collaboration gets the particulars right but plausibility in characterization and relationships goes out the window whenever Pansy starts yelling…and yelling. The best scene, between Pansy and her loving but exasperated sister Chantelle (a pitch-perfect Michele Austin) at their mother’s gravesite, works beautifully because it is so understated. Too bad Leigh couldn’t maintain that restraint for the rest of the film.  

The Last Republican 

(MCDC)

Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman who voted with Trump 90 percent of the time while both were in office, was lauded by right-thinking people when he joined the January 6 committee and voted for Trump’s impeachment in 2021. Steve Pink’s chummy documentary portrait further humanizes Kinzinger as he and his wife go through her pregnancy while he’s preparing to leave office in 2023 after being primaried by a vengeful Trumpian party. Pink gives us a sense of how otherwise unbridgeable differences between Kinzinger and, say, Liz Cheney on one side and Democrats on the other are closed by a need to save democracy. But despite such good vibes, we all know how it turned out: Trump is back, and things look worse than ever. So who really won?

Nickel Boys 

(Amazon MGM)

Colson Whitehead’s absorbing novel about two Black boys, Elwood and Turner, who met and bonded at a racist Florida boarding school in the early ‘60s has been made into a frustratingly diffuse film by first-time feature director RaMell Ross, who obviously struggled to come up with a visual equivalent to the book’s omniscient narrator and second half plot twist. Using the camera for the pair’s POV works in theory but not dramatically, as it keeps us at a remove from the characters; it also cheats, since camera movements are not the same as a person’s real POV and so several scenes, especially those that are intimate or shocking, play out choppily. When he cuts to one of the boys, now an adult and living in New York City, Ross uses an even more tortured form of POV in a desperate attempt to hide the twist’s inevitable shock. There are moments of power and emotion, and Ross brings his documentary skills to the fore in the final montages that juxtapose actual history with Elwood and Turner’s lives. Ethan Herisse (Elwood) and Brandon Wilson (Turner) are rarely onscreen, while others—like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Hattie, Elwood’s beloved grandmother—play to the camera in an unnatural way, something that prods Hamish Linklater to give a cartoonish portrayal of the school’s corrupt and racist administrator.

Broadway Play Review—“Eureka Day” with Bill Irwin and Amber Gray

Eureka Day

Written by Jonathan Spector

Directed by Anna D. Shapiro

Through February 2, 2025

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com

The cast of Eureka Day (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Homing in on California antivax parents isn’t Swiftian satire, Jonathan Spector’s play Eureka Day proves despite moments of inspired hilarity. 

The setting is the Eureka Day private school in Berkeley, where the school board is dealing with a student’s case of the mumps. The meeting is led by the 60ish Don and includes 30ish parents Eli and Meiko—who are having an affair they think is masked by their children’s playdates—along with longtime board member Suzanne and the newest member, Carina, whose son attends the school.

As the group’s discussions start civilly but turn more argumentative, Spector raises the specter of ultraliberal parents acting selfishly under the guise of “protecting the kids” as well as dangling the threat of fascism due to stringent school rules. While funny, the play often resorts to obviousness, underlined in its most celebrated scene, an online town hall meeting in which the board members—and especially the bumbling Don—try but fail to preserve decorum as comments from parents keep popping up, exploding from mild disagreement to nastiness and conspiracy theories, even dropping the “n” word (Nazi) amid pointing out others’ ignorance.

In Anna D. Shapiro’s lively production, set on Todd Rosenthal’s skillfully decorated school library set, we read the comments scrolling by on a large screen above the five board members, who talk among themselves. It’s certainly amusing, like a decent Saturday Night Live sketch, but goes on too long as Spector tries to one up himself to diminishing returns. (Audiences don’t agree—they were practically falling out of their seats, as if the ushers had passed out laughing gas.) It also points up the fact that these five characters are bland stereotypes who literally fade into the background during this sequence. 

A couple of scenes do help humanize them. The first has Eli and Meiko at his son’s hospital room after contracting a severe case of the mumps, likely from Meiko’s daughter, which lays bare the adults’ tangled relationship, as when Meiko shows Eli texts his wife sent her: the word “whore,” over and over. (“She probably just like cut and pasted,” he weakly retorts.) In the second, Suzanne tells Carina about a long-ago family tragedy that forever colored her view of vaccines. It’s a commendable attempt by Spector to give Suzanne—fast becoming the play’s villain—a reason for her rejection of science, but it comes off as too neat and pat.

Shapiro’s savvy direction couches the increasingly surreal lunacy over vaccines in a much needed reality, and she stages Spector’s final, easy jokes—one visual, one verbal—with an economy that helps them land effectively. Too bad the overacting of Bill Irwin (Don), Thomas Middleditch (Eli) and especially Jessica Hecht (Suzanne) undermines the jokes, although it’s always fun seeing Irwin’s physical adroitness get a laugh when Don hesitantly follows Meiko after she storms out of a meeting. 

Happily, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz (Meiko) and especially Amber Gray (Carina) give focused, grounded performances that serve the comedy instead of themselves, keeping Eureka Day afloat.