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Broadway musicals and other diversions

Martha & Marty Roth

The quality of films declines as the world warms. Thankfully, the Twin Cities are also theater towns. In June we enjoyed two Leonard Bernstein musicals, a classic Kaufman & Hart comedy, a Frank Loesser musical and a brilliantly done piece of fluff by A. R. Gurney-not a dud in the bunch.
    Starting at the top, Ten Thousand Things' minimalist production of Loesser's "Most Happy Fella" made us happy fellas. As usual, 10K's director Michelle Hemsley took the script apart and reassembled it to suit her needs. Whatever she did worked-a treat because the play flows and the songs bloom out of the dialogue like wildflowers. Because this company performs in prisons, shelters and adult day centers, with only a few public showings for each of its crisp, fully imagined productions, the sets, props and costumes are fragmentary and evocative. "Fella" takes place in California wine country, and a few flexible structures made perfectly good restaurant tables, vineyards, railroad station, front porch, etc.
    Stephen D'Ambrose, who has often worked with Hemsley, made a touching hero and Aimee Bryant, another 10K veteran, a moving heroine. Signe Albertson, Vera Mariner, Terry Hempleman, Matt Sciple, Marquetta Senters, and a wonderful tenor named Esera Tuaolo all sang, danced and acted with great verve and skill. We are informed that Tuaolo used to play with the Minnesota Vikings before he discovered his true calling, and he made "Standin' on the Corner (Watchin' All the Girls Go By)" into a joyous anthem of youth and pleasure. The musical direction by Peter Vitale and performance by Vitale and Kate Eifrig deserve special mention.
    Second prize for Most Rewarding Musical goes to North Star Opera for a perfect staging of "Wonderful Town," Bernstein's last collaboration with Betty Comden and Adolph Green. They based their book for the show on Ruth McKenney's comic best-seller of the 1940s, "My Sister Eileen," a lighthearted version of the ever popular hick-chicks-from-the-sticks-take-New-York plot featuring aspiring writer McKenney and her sister, an aspiring singer. (The real-life Eileen married writer Nathanael West and died with him in a car crash.) The sisters battle big-city cynicism and eventually find both work and love, while the audience basks in Bernstein's ebullient score.
    Two real-life sisters, Cristina Baldwin Fletcher and Jennifer Baldwin Peden, played Ruth and Eileen, respectively, and they gave glorious performances. Jonathan Rayson made an appealing foil to this duo, and the rest of the cast charmed us as well. Stage director Randy Winkler gave the production real exuberance, which Steven Stucki's musical direction matched. We wish North Star could find a way to perform for more than two weekends, because producer and general director Irma Wachtler has put together a winning team.
    Minneapolis Musical Theater's "Candide" and the Jungle's "Sylvia" tie for next place, but in any ordinary month either of them could have walked away with first prize. "Sylvia" is a chocolate truffle of a play: a delicious experience that's hard to recall in any detail. The four actors were fully present in their roles, Bob Davis and Mary Gant playing a long-married couple with communications problems, Kirsten Frantzich as their dog, Sylvia, tossing her long blonde locks as suggestively as a cocker spaniel's ears, and Fred Wagner keenly distinguishing his three small male and female roles. There was something irresistibly affecting in Frantzich's body making dog moves (future playwrights take note), but Gurney went only so far in his mordant observation of man-dog love, and we wished he had pushed the envelope a little farther. Still, with Bain Boehlke's velvet-smooth direction and the Jungle's usual professionalism, it was one of the highlights of a very good season.
    Minneapolis Musical Theater constantly amazes us with their ability to compress big shows like "Sweeney Todd" or "Candide" into the watch-pocket playing space at Bryant-Lake Bowl, and bring the whole thing off with style and dash. Smart pacing is part of their secret; their singers and dancers have mastered the art of putting over complex lyrics at speed while wearing fancy, inconvenient clothes-in "Candide", a mix of eighteenth-century court garb and contemporary hard-core biker trash. Based on Voltaire's eighteenth-century satirical novel, "Candide" takes a naive hero and exposes him to extraordinary cruelties, drawing the unsmug moral that all a good person can do in this world, really, is to cultivate one's own garden.
    Leonard Bernstein composed an ambitious score and a stellar crew of librettists including Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim and John Latouche wrote lyrics for the two dozen or so songs. But the show has had problems since it opened in 1956 with a script by Lillian Hellman. MMT's version was a later one-act scripted by Hugh Wheeler and staged in 1971 by Hal Prince, and although the score loses some of its integrity, it plays pretty snappily. We look forward to MMT's next production and will try to give you advance notice of it.
    Least of our theater experiences was the Guthrie's "Once in a Lifetime," a 1930s farce from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart about a trio of vaudevillians who are languishing for lack of bookings. They seize the moment at which sound changes the movies to travel out to far Hollywood to open a voice school that will teach the tinny, low-class silent stars how to speak dialogue. While the production was lavish, genial, and mostly very well performed, we know the story all too well: "Singin' in the Rain," among many other films and plays, immortalized the situation (remember Donald O'Connor and Gene Kelly singing "Moses Supposes His Toeses Are Roses but Moses Supposes Errone-ous-ly"?). A more serious problem is that the play depends upon our identification with a well-remembered form of East Coast snobbery in regard to Hollywood lush barbarism, and it simply won't work any more (hasn't for ages, really). That lush, barbaric culture has swept the world and virtually eradicated difference; Broadway is doing stage adaptations of cinematic originals (like "42nd Street"). We were disappointed in the cast on the night we saw it, though New York imports Lewis J. Stadlen and Richard Kind amused us.
    Knowing what we know about summer movies, we chose with care but still can't really recommend anything. "The Golden Bowl" is-like the objet d'art of the title-seriously flawed although as with most Merchant-Ivory films the sets and costumes are so fascinating that if the plot and dialogue bore you, you can have a good time admiring the set of a sleeve or the pattern of a lace guimpe. The greatest flaws from our perspective were the casting of Nick Nolte as Adam Verver, "America's first billionaire," a connoisseur of precious paintings and drawings who marries his daughter's best friend, and Uma Thurman as Charlotte, the best friend, well bred, poor, and in love with her friend Maggie Verver's husband. The husband is an Italian prince who needs the Verver money to restore his ancient family's crumbling palazzo.
    As far as we could glimpse the Henry James novel through Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay, James manipulates the strings of this foursome with delicate ribaldry, hinting at various sexual treacheries while maintaining an exquisite surface. Jeremy Northam, as Amerigo, the prince, does a beautiful job of lounging in elegant trousers, reading the papers and navigating the narrow straits of his life. James Fox and Anjelica Huston, as Charlotte's great friends Lord and Lady Assingham (really!), give the film some brief life, but mostly it languishes.
    James Fox must need money desperately; it's the only reason we can think of why he allowed himself to be cast as a caddish industrialist in "Sexy Beast," a film whose sole reason for being or being seen is Ben Kingsley's charged performance as a psychotic thug. Ray Winstone, an actor new to us, plays a cuddly yobbo named Gal who has retired from his London life of violent crime and now lolls on the terrace of his Spanish villa, joking with the pool boy, making love to his ex-porn-star wife and going out for calamari. Then Kingsley turns up with an offer that can't be refused, and several lacerations later we find Winstone wearing a SCUBA mask and breaking into a high-tech vault through a nearby steam bath, wearing the same marigold swim trunks we saw him wear by his Spanish pool. Get it? We didn't. "Beast" is pretty ham-fisted and thuggish itself and its dialogue consists mainly of people repeating things that have been said to them, with the added expletives: "What did you say?" "What did I stuffin' say? You're stuffin' asking me what I just stuffin' said?" "Yeah, I'm stuffin' askin' you what the stuff you just said."
    Which brings us to the best of this month's sparse crop of film: a curious period piece made from an early Nabokov novel, "The Luzhin Defense," starring Emily Watson in a role that at last allows her to be intelligent as well as charming and John Turturro in one of his great eccentric turns as a Russian chess genius. The film is set mostly on the grounds of a magnificent Italian hotel where a chess tournament is taking place; many hopeful mustachioed men in striped trousers and morning coats lose matches to Turturro's Luzhin. His only real opponent is a Fellini-like Italian grandmaster who must then face him in a final competition. We'd been looking forward to this film because director Marleen Gorris has turned out such consistently interesting work, from "A Question of Silence" to "Antonia's Line." But she-or scenarist Peter Berry--cheated; we never get to see the chess moves and must take Luzhin's brilliance at second hand. An even more serious problem is Turturro's performance: Luzhin is written as an emotionally crippled idiot savant, which makes Watson's love for him deeply touching. Turturro is a master of eccentric performances, but somehow, the multiplication of excess by excess in this instance leaves the character beyond the pale of communication. Still, enough of Nabokov's quirkiness survives so that we enjoyed the film. And if you don't like it you can always look at the details; Gorris takes James Ivory-like care with fabrics, tailoring, gems, and furniture.
    Well, maybe the summer movies aren't always awful. "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" is an entertaining piece of hi-tech, super-saturation, boom-blasting nonsense, an omnipotence extravaganza Instead of just a girl who has everything, Angelina of the bee-stung lips plays a girl with everything who can do anything. The film has no big names other than Miss Jolie, except some ghostly visitations from her father, Jon Voigt, a big mistake. The visuals, however, are pretty impressive, especially a loud fade in which an ancient Cambodian temple morphs into the canals of Venice. "Time to save the universe again!" her sidekick says to Lady Lara, and save the universe we do, with flair and chic.
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