Urban Amusements

Penumbra Theater’s season opener, “Love Song for Miss Lydia,” by Don Evans, is conventional in structure and perhaps overly influenced by TV but still had some fresh, poignant things to say about African Americans who made their way up north after World War II. Set in Philadelphia in the mid 1980s, the play looks at four people, now in their 60s, who all made the great migration.
    Miss Lydia (Greta Oglesby) owns her own home and wants to let a room. Mahlon Patterson, a charming stranger, becomes more than just a roomer. As played by Adolphus Ward, Patterson is a smart, under-educated black man, a hustler who swindles Miss Lydia more out of habit than malice. Playwright Evans sympathetically rounds out all the characters, including Lydia’s disapproving friends, but the script held no surprises. The production was up to Penumbra’s high standards with excellent performances, great sound, and an immaculate naturalistic set, under Lou Bellamy’s sure-handed direction.
    Our favorite Bryant-Lake Bowl performers, the Minneapolis Musical Theatre, scored a huge hit with their production of the late Howard Crabtree’s gay extravaganza, “When Pigs Fly.” “Pigs” is a revue, conceived by Crabtree and his partner, Mark Waldrop, with music by Dick Gallagher, in which all the numbers are gay-themed and most are hilarious. Steven J. Meerdink and Kevin Hansen, the powerhouses behind MMT, managed lavish songs, dances, snappy patter, and dozens of outrageous costumes on BLB’s tiny stage. Watch for MMT’s next show, “Weird Romance,” opening in February “Description of the World,” at Theatre de la Jeune Lune is another in the long line of TJL company-created works that dazzle us with showmanship but leave us hungry for dramatic structure. “The Description of the World” is the title that 14th-century merchant and adventurer Marco Polo gave to his memoirs, written with the popular romance writer Rusticello, whom he met in prison. Written by Robert Rosen (Polo) and Luverne Seifert (Rusticello), “Description” is done in workshop/commedia style, with five actors, two women and three men, playing all other roles.
    Rosen looks great as Polo, a 747-year-old freak with long silver hair and fingernails a la Howard Hughes, while Seifert has a good time with his Barnum-like Rusticello. The five modal performers are all terrifically limber and funny, especially Annie Enneking as the City of Venice. Performances are seldom a problem at TJL; it’s structure they lack, and all the gorgeous foolery in the world isn’t going to keep an audience completely happy for two hours when they’ve been promised a play. If you value these gifted performers (and you should; when they morphed into spitting, swaying camels for a trip across the Gobi Desert we could forgive them anything), you have until Nov. 4 to catch them in this act.
    “Merrily We Roll Along” at Guthrie Lab until Nov. 18, is a definite must-see for all who have a taste for Stephen Sondheim. The evening includes some of his best songs, including “Old Friends” and “Not a Day Goes By,” as well as a couple of wildly comic numbers that were new to us: “Franklin Shepard Inc.,” a raking run-down of a pop composer being corrupted by success, and “Bobby and Jackie and Jack,” a hilarious send-up of the Kennedy family that will warm the hearts of all who remember when that dynasty looked unbreachable. It gives us a pang now to remember that those three are all dead, but bittersweet is the flavor of the evening.
    “Merrily”’s action proceeds backward but won’t stymie anyone who survived “Memento.” As the trio of old friends whose personal lives decline while they ascend to professional heights, Ken Barnett, Christa Justus, and especially Jim Lichtscheidel give sterling performances, as do all the other cast members, including Steve Hendrickson, Tony Vierling, Molly Sue McDonald, and Mark Rosenwinkel among others. Even the eccentric staging—the Lab space has been cut in three, with the stage a sort of runway down the middle with nodes at each end—can’t dampen their spirits. Marty thought this decision by director John Miller-Stephany worked terrifically well, but Martha felt the show needed more distance. Whatever you think, see it.

    We managed to catch “Herman USA,” Bill Semans’ film, about which we’d heard good things. Based on the true story of bachelors in a farming town who advertised for marriage-minded women to come down and look them over, it’s well acted, with intelligent dialogue, and beautifully filmed. But some of the characters are flatly unbelievable, especially a trio of black women from Chicago, one of whom stays in Herman with her Edna St. Vincent Millay-quoting farmer beau. It’s also madly heterosexual.

    Well produced and boldly acted, Michael Cuesta’s “L.I.E.” belongs with “Happiness” and “American Beauty” to a new sub-genre of films we might call Get to Know Your Neighborhood Pederast. Privileged teenagers lead empty lives in Long Island suburbs (the title stands for Long Island Expressway, the ribbon of road that connects The City with The ‘Burbs) and go in for casual housebreaking. One night they make the mistake of breaking in on Big John Harrigan (played by Brian Cox), a flamboyant Irishman who may have worked for the CIA, whose license plate reads “BJ,” and who is singing, when the break-in takes place, the George M. Cohan ballad “Harrigan”—”It’s a name that a shame never has been connected with, Harrigan, that’s me”—while two-stepping with his aged mother.
    Big John is the local pederast, helpless in the grip of his compulsions but widely known and respected in what passes for a community out on the L.I.E. Complex and beautifully played, Big John is a loving and nurturing man. After he has propositioned a boy his simple-minded lover tells him, “You ought to be ashamed,” and he answers, “I am. Always,” with a rueful smile that lets us know shame is part of his pleasure.
    “Zoolander” is a silly movie that jerked a lot of laughs out of us. Ben Stiller and his father Jerry make a beautiful working team, a Jewish Abbott & Costello. As an empty-headed male model and his sleazy agent, father and son add some solid hilarity to a thin script about a fashion-industry plot to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia because he has promised to end the child labor that produces fashionable gear. Ben Stiller’s ordinary looks make him even funnier as a top male model, and as his major rival, the acid-tripping, globe-trotting “Hansel,” Owen Wilson gives a performance to equal his star turn in the mostly unfunny “Meet the Parents,” where he also played across from Stiller. As an evil fashion magnate, imprisoned in a curly white wig and mascara thick as wrought iron, Will Ferrell gets to throw some high-class tantrums but we thought his talents were largely wasted.
    Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s internationally praised “A Taste of Cherry” screened at the Parkway, a local treasure-house of neglected films. “Taste” is slow, beautifully restrained and minimally plotted. A man wants to find someone who will bury him after he kills himself, and in the course of a day spent driving around the dirt roads of a Tehran subdivison he decides maybe he doesn’t want to die after all. The film ends with a brief sequence shot on videotape in which the dun desert landscape bursts into green and fertile bloom, and on the soundtrack Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary Blues” plays behind a platoon of young soldiers giggling like schoolgirls and pelting each other with flowers.
    We thought the new John Dahl thriller, “Joy Ride,” was a pretty straight teen horror flick, featuring a cross-country car trip with middle-of-the-night stops at run-down service plazas, a drawling sheriff who has nothing but contempt for “college boys,” a villain who cannot be destroyed, and a couple of screaming young women. It also, because Dahl is a gifted and original filmmaker, has some elegant touches, like the red stripes on the CB readout when a sinister trucker comes in range looking for a girl named Candy Kane, and a funny sequence in a rough bar. Steve Zahn gives a sharp reading as the self-destructive older brother, nicely setting off Lewis Thomas as the younger. As the coed who is too cool to scream until things get really hairy, Leelee Sobieski manages to look, in Dorothy Parker’s words, as new as a peeled egg. The film grazes self-respecting themes from time to time: gender transgression (the young brother is pulled into the gag of pretending to be the seductive “Candy Kane”) and class conflict (the scene in the bar), but mostly it’s “Oh, no! Look out! Here he comes AGAIN!”
    University Film Society will be showing Allison Anders’ new film, “Things Behind the Sun,” a deliberate Womens-Studies look at an alcoholic female rocker. The singer’s chart-topping songs about sexual violence lead a young journalist to suspect that they stem from personal experience, and as he follows her around and tries to get an interview we’re shown how her drunkenly indiscriminate sexuality is indeed a form of acting out. Martha found it fascinating, Marty less so although he admits that Kim Dickens gives a strong performance in the starring role. The supporting cast includes Don Cheadle, Rosanna Arquette, and Elisabeth Pena.