“She loves me” a rare theater gem

by Marty and Martha Roth

Happy New Year!
Welcome to 2002 which counts the same forwards as backwards! Non-holiday entertainments were rare last month but we found some: Theater in the Round presented “She Loves Me,” the Jerry Bock/Sheldon Harnick featherweight musical, as part of its fiftieth anniversary season, in newly overhauled space on the West Bank. The show was good clean fun, perfect for outings with adolescent children or elderly relatives and not too painful for anyone else.
You may have seen “She Loves Me” elsewhere as a film: “The Shop on Main Street,” “In the Good Old Summertime,” and most recently “You’ve Got Mail,” but this version goes back to the original source, a Hungarian stage comedy. Set among clerks and patrons of a perfume shop in 1930s Budapest, it features composer Bock’s best Central European waltzes, csardas, and Gypsy rhythms and gave TRP’s costumers license to dress the women of the company in bias-cut rayon frocks and elegant hats. The show’s strengths included delightful choreography from director Randy Winkler, ably performed by the cast. We would like to single out Debra Draheim who sang the show-stopping “A Trip to the Library.” “Loves” is a charming piece of fluff, a bonbon of a show (though it’s interesting to notice what serious readers these shop clerks are—Dante, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann). In honor of the anniversary and its own long-awaited remodeling, TRP mounted a lobby exhibit of Twin Cities theater history from the 1950s to the present, commemorating such past glories as the Firehouse, the Palace, and At the Foot of the Mountain, which made for a nice intermission stroll.
Ten Thousand Things, the local Poor Theater that gives its performances mostly in the shelters, prisons, and day-care centers of these fair cities, just finished a run of Euripides’ “The Furies,” adapted by director Michelle Hensley and Lisa D’Amour. You may remember that “Furies” (or “Eumenides” as it is also called) is the third play in the House of Atreus cycle, the gruesome saga of the cursed family of King Agamemnon, Queen Clytemnestra, and their rotten kids, Orestes, Electra, and hapless Iphigenia.
Iphigenia was sacrified by her father, the Greek king Agamemnon, in order to induce the gods to send favorable winds so that the Greek army could sail for Troy and begin the general slaughter. Clytemnestra never forgave him for the death of their daughter; she killed Agamemnon on his return. To avenge his father, Prince Orestes killed his mother.
Because he has shed kindred blood (the mother not the father), ancient spirits of vengeance are called up in pursuit from the depths of the earth. The Furies are implacable deities, incapable of feeling pity or responding to reason. A desperate Orestes appeals to the young god Apollo, who suggested he kill his mother in the first place. Apollo tries to bluff the Furies in the name of the new dispensation of the Olympian Zeus, but they simply repeat their ancient rights and privileges and eventually both sides agree to accept the judgment of Athena, goddess of wisdom, who convenes the world’s first jury trial to hear the case. When jurors hand in their ballots, she declares a tie which she can then legally break (siding with Apollo, of course). But she also persuades the Furies (Erinyes) to accept her verdict, and in reward installs them in the center of Athens as the Peaceable Ones (Eumenides).
The original play thematized the need for some form of symbolic intervention (in the form of persuasion) in the cycle of revenge which threatens otherwise to go on forever. Hemsley’s production, however, also emphasized the rigging of the election, with its unmistakeable echoes of Bushery. We thought it was one of the best productions of a classic Greek play we’d ever seen, familiarly so since some of the best actors and designers in the Twin Cities work with 10K Things. The Furies, played by Carolyn Goelzer, Barbara Kingsley, Matt Sciple, and Marie-Francoise Theodore, had considerable dignity in their wretchedness, while Luverne Seifert played Apollo as an avatar of Frank Morgan’s Wizard of Oz, alternately placating, bullying, and gloating.
We don’t know how to put you in touch with 10K Things, because they don’t advertise. Their runs are short and most of their performances aren’t public, so you won’t find them in the listings. But they’re there and well worth the effort you make to see them.
We had looked forward to “Ocean’s 11” because we still believe in Steven Soderbergh, but to say it’s better than the original is like saying you’d rather freeze to death than be drawn and quartered; either way you’re dead. Danny Ocean (George Clooney), an ex-con, dreams of knocking over a string of Las Vegas casinos that just happen to belong to the man (Andy Garcia) who’s dating his ex-wife (Julia Roberts). He enlists some old buddies (Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner in a performance so good it’s wasted on the material, and Elliott Gould in a magnificently trashy turn) and finds some new ones (Casey Affleck, Scott Caan), and they set about the job with very low-temperature panache.
Most of the action involves elaborate high-tech set-ups familiar to anyone who likes to watch TV shows and movies about the CIA and other groups that are up to no good. Roberts plays the curator of a Bellagio-like art museum, and despite the presence of a real Jacques Lipschitz sculpture and a real Picasso painting she is about as credible as Cher was in that movie where she played a lawyer. There’s a lot of good men’s tailoring in the film and it has a nice sound track. The last heist film that Soderbergh, Clooney, and Cheadle put together, “Out of Sight,” was out-of-sight good. “Ocean’s” is a slack effort, pretty much sunk by a desire to have as much fun as the original rat-pack did and not take anything seriously. Clooney and Pitt, playing their version of the two coolest guys in the world, don’t help either.
Alas, we don’t even have a kind word to say about “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Wes Anderson’s contribution to this winter’s merriment. It had such promise: gifted comic actors like Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, Bill Murray, Danny Glover, Luke and Owen Wilson, and an original script by Anderson and O. Wilson; but it’s all mouth and no trousers. If you’ve seen the preview (anyone who’s been to a Landmark theater in the past couple of months), then you’ve pretty much seen it all. What we have here is an effortful, unfunny giant set-up for a punchline that never arrives, a shaggy dog story that’s all hair and no dog. There’s also something sadistic about gathering all these actors together and then, with one exception, making their characters too depressed to even shape a line.
Mid-month at the Oak St. Cinema we were glad to catch “Lumumba,” Haitian director Raoul Peck’s feature film about the martyred Congolese leader. The film sticks closely to the incomplete historical record and so (because Lumumba’s betrayal and murder were carefully set up by covert European and North American interests) there are inevitable gaps in the charcters’ motivations and actions. Having said that, however, we found “Lumumba” powerful. Eriq Eblouey gives a strong performance in the title role and Alex Descas is absolutely terrifying as Joseph Mobutu. If Patrice Lumumba had lived, and if his vision of a peaceful socialist future for his vast nation had been realized—well, why not start the new year with a backward look?—the history of Congo, of Africa, and of all ex-colonial nations would have been different.
If the kids liked “Harry Potter,” so be it. We didn’t and the fact that we are grown-ups who never read the book may help to explain that subversive fact. But the film seemed quite limp, wallowing in its own mythical dungeons-and-dragon-ness, without any energetic adventure, comedy or whimsey or whatever.
Don’t despair, however. The season yielded one really satisfying film, Bob Giraldi’s “Dinner Rush,” which played at the Lagoon for only two weeks. Unless the Parkway (or the U Film Society) picks it up, this will be one to rent on video, but its scale is small enough to look fine on your TV screen. Cinematography credit goes to Tim Ives, and by and large he does a wonderful job of rendering the lightning-fast kitchen action in a fashionable trattoria in Lower Manhattan (“Gigino’s”) and the contrasting crush in the dining room where art dealers, food critics, and mafiosi rub elbows with ordinary folk.
Giraldi keeps half a dozen interlocking stories going, and the ending wraps them up nicely. Danny Aiello, as the owner of Gigino’s, is too squeaky clean for a business owner and sometime bookmaker in contemporary TriBeCa, but everybody else is quite realistically dingy around the edges, including Sandra Bernhard as the critic, Mark Margolis as the art dealer, and Edoardo Ballerini and Kirk Acevedo as the star chef and his compulsive-gambler sous-chef, respectively. Summer Phoenix almost steals the picture as Marti, a server who also paints large brooding portraits, but the competition is too stiff and the director too firm and in the end, “Dinner Rush” comes off as a brilliant team effort.   
A word, by the way, about both “Tenenbaums” and “Rush”: cigarettes and other forms of tobacco feature largely in both films. Many characters smoke, and what airlines call “smoking materials” are eroticized and fetishized. As former smokers we understand that cigarettes are erotic fetishes, like most things one sticks in one’s mouth for pleasure. The degree to which coffin nails, cigars, and pipes are dragged in to “Tennenbaums” left us speculating on whether Big Tobacco is investing in films like this. If we’re right, we’re delighted that they picked such a turkey. Keep those “Target Market” ads coming!

Smith packs a punch as Ali

by Dwight Hobbes
One could scarcely conceive an odder couple than Will Smith and Michael Mann pairing up for a film about Muhammad Ali. Long, lean rapper-cum-comedy star cum action-flick icon Smith, despite being personally approved by Ali, is just about the last one anybody would visualize as pulling this part off with so much as a modicum of dramatic value. Mann is renowned for applying an air-tight touch to the suspense thriller “Manhunter,” cops-and-robbers shoot-em-up fest “Heat” and the intriguing drama “The Insider”—none of which place him at the top of a list to direct a bio-pic. On top of everything, discerning minds have to ask why is a white director doing this movie instead of Bill Duke (“Deep Cover”), Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”), John Singleton (“Shaft”) or, at least ostensibly, celebrated hack Spike Lee? As it’s said, the good Lord works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform: “Ali” is a sterling accomplishment.
Stephen J. Rivele’s and Chris Wilkinson’s fluid script spans the decade from a living legend’s fiery ascendance as Cassius Clay to his comeback upset of George Foreman as Muhammad Ali. It not only showcases the highlights but keenly illustrates the peril and soul-trying toll of the period when Ali stood alone at his lowest, on the brink of being reduced to a could-have-been. Stripped of his title, broke, expediently and spitefully abandoned by the same unconscionably opportunistic Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad who similarly betrayed Malcolm X (ably portrayed by Mario Van Peebles), Ali was jail-bound. His refusal to be drafted into the Army on religious grounds as a devout Muslim, underscored by his objection to the Vietnam War on the principle that “No Vietcong ever called me nigger” left him a hero-worshipped symbol of race-pride on one hand and literally destitute on the other. Sensitive treatment of this struggle shrewdly foreshadows the film’s celebratory climax.
From opening to closing reel, this flick is a popcorn-munching, soda-slurpping, eyes glued to the screen must-see.
Smith makes a profound leap from merely being charismatic to demonstrating appreciable skill. He authentically inhabits the character. Even the jury-rigged, so-called Academy of Arts and Sciences should have enough sense to give Jon Voight a Supporting Actor Oscar award for his flawless reincarnation of adroit, marvelously bombastic sports television journalist Howard Cosell who didn’t give a damn about being politically correct, and steadfastly accorded Ali due respect. Were it not for Smith’s credibility and constant screen-time, Voight, the least likely casting choice of the year, would have not just stolen the movie but walked off with it tucked under one arm. Jamie Foxx follows his impressive turn in Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday” with a convincing portrayal of Ali’s intermittently coherent morale booster Dundini Brown. Having now worked with both Stone and Mann, he shows signs of enough development to stand center screen in a dramatic vehicle of his own.
Michael Mann expertly directs. With seamless continuity and compelling empathy, he subtely crafts evocative cinema.
On the downside, venerable veteran Ron Silver as key figure Angelo Dundee gets appreciable screen time but has roughly ten words of dialogue. There isn’t the merest hint of a relationship between an enduring Ali and trainer Dundee, the master motivator and ingenious cornerman who saw this great athlete through some of his toughest fights. Mann should’ve shaved some of the slightly overlong romantic scenes to at least offer an inkling that Dundee was more than wallpaper. Had a black trainer and crucial component of an immortal white boxer’s career been given such short cinematic shrift, accusations of blatant racism would ring to the rafters.
Aside from this glaring gaff, “Ali” is a fitting tribute to a magnificent historic figure.

Opened Christmas Day.

Back to Top