The Cliff Edge

Songwriter Margaret Ann Rich dies

Charlie and Margaret Ann Rich

Country music songwriter Margaret Ann Rich, widow of singer Charlie Rich, died Thursday at her home near Memphis, TN, following a struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease. She was 76.

Charlie recorded several of her songs including “Life Has Its Little Ups and Downs” and “Field of Yellow Yellow Daisies.” Many other artists recorded her work including Tom Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge, Bobby Blue Bland and Ricky Van Shelton, who had a country No. 1 with “Life Has Its Little Ups and Downs.”

Margaret Ann and Charlie were married in 1952 and raised four children in Benton, Arkansas, and Memphis. Known as the Silver Fox, Rich, who died in 1995, always credited his wife for much of his success.

Two of Margaret Ann’s songs, “A Sunday Kind of Woman” and “Nothing In the World”, were on Rich’s platinum selling album “Behind Closed Doors,” which won the Country Music Association Best Album Award in 1973. She also had songs on his album “A Very Special Love Song” that won the same award the following year.

A graduate of the Arkansas State Teachers College, Margaret Ann was a founding member of the Memphis branch of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and a member of the Screen Actors Guild.

She is survived by her brother Jimmy Greene; son Charlie Rich Jr. and wife Teri; daughter Laurie Rich Lee and husband Keith; sisters-in-law Libby Ann Armstrong and Barbara Ann Rivers; grandchildren Maggie Yelverton and husband Brooks, Wesley Karber and wife Bethany, Cole Lee, Erica Rivas, Michael Wittenbach, and Leslie Wittenbach; and great grandchildren Parker and Suzi Yelverton, and Lila and Mabyn Karber.

The funeral will be in Memphis on July 26. 

For 3D at home, it’s bring your own glasses

By Ray Bennett

Technology firm XpanD is marching its active-shutter 3D systems around the world and partnered with several top manufacturers it’s heading into the home with universal glasses.

When you invite your friends over to watch a big game or blockbuster movie on 3D, it won’t be “Bring your own bottle”; it will be “Bring your own glasses!”

That’s what international technology firm XpanD hopes, anyway, and given the inroads they’ve made into the market and their marketing savvy, you wouldn’t bet against them.

XpanD manufactures 3D technology for cinemas and home entertainment using the active shutter system. In August, XpanD will launch its X103 3D universal glasses designed to work with LCDs, DLP and plasma displays.

The firm, which has offices in Slovenia and Los Angeles, has equipped 3,000 screens around the world with active 3D and installed its system in the 3D players hitting the market from Panasonic, Sony, Phillips and other high-end consumer electronics manufacturers.

James Cameron (pictured with wife Suzy Amis) is a big fan of active-shutter technology and XpanD equipped ArcLight Cinemas’ flagship Los Angeles movie theatre, Cinerama Dome, for the launch of “Avatar”. According to XpanD CEO Maria Costeira, the quality proved so popular that ArcLight decided to keep it. Read the rest of this entry »

Rich tale of decadent society in rousing National production

Lauren O’Neil and Richard Lintern in ‘Women Beware Women’ through July 4

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Read more about “Women Beware Women”

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Pretty much everyone dies at the end of Thomas Middleton’s steamy la dolce vita roundelay “Women Beware Women” and in the National’s new production of the Jacobean classic, it happens in a magnificently designed tableau of stabbings, poisonings, murder and suicide.

Set designer Lez Brotherston uses the Olivier stage’s full size for a multi-storey edifice that revolves as the carnage engulfs most of the players at the climax of a saga of lust and greed fuelled by both ambition and callous indifference.

Written in 1622 and set in Florence where the Duke (Richard Lintern) rules through cunning, terror and brutal power, it is a tale of a male dominated world in which smart women might plot and connive but are doomed to suffer the consequences of misogynistic traditions and rules.

The clothes are modern and the music (by Olly Smith) is seductive jazz, but the language is full of “thee” and “thy” and the claustrophobic environment of the Duke’s court is right from the era of James I.

The play follows the fate of two beautiful young women, Bianca (Lauren O’Neil) and Isabella (Vanessa Kirby) and the way they are mistreated by the men in their lives whose wicked designs are enabled by the conniving rich widow Livia (Harriet Walter).

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First rate revival of Tom Stoppard classic ‘The Real Thing’

Hattie Morahan and Toby Stephens at the Old Vic through June 5

This review appears in The Hollywood Reporter. Read more about “The Real Thing”

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” an incisive and funny but warm examination of love, possessiveness and infidelity, cleaned up at the Tony Awards on its two Broadway outings in 1984 and 2000, and the Old Vic’s new production upholds that excellent standard.

Toby Stephens plays Henry, a gifted and sardonic playwright, who likens the art of writing to the way a cricket bat is finely crafted to make a clean and lasting strike. The opening scene is one from a play he has written in which a cuckolded husband cracks increasingly hysterical jokes upon discovering his wife’s unfaithfulness.

Henry is much smoother in his own adultery, leaving one actress for another in the belief that his second choice is the love of his life, the real thing. No surprise, then, when she betrays him, but with typical skill Stoppard spurns the obvious and delves into the whys and wherefores of fidelity and ramifications of betrayal.

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West End theatre thrives on excellence and originality

Shaftesbury Avenue in the centre of London’s theatre district

This story appeared in The Hollywood Reporter

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – If all the world’s a stage, then it never has been more true than in the British capital right now. The nation’s economy is in dire straits, but that hasn’t stopped theatergoers from flocking to the West End, where attendance last year topped 14 million and boxoffice revenue hit a record £500 million ($775 million).

“It’s been an extraordinary year of hits, with very few misses,” says producer Nica Burns, chair of the Society of London Theatre, which represents all 52 of the city’s playhouses. “We’ve just had an outstanding time.”

Hits have included classics from Beckett (“Waiting for Godot”) and Chekhov (“Ivanov”) to Shakespeare (“Hamlet”, starring Jude Law, pictured below) and Tennessee Williams (“A Streetcar Named Desire”, starring Rachel Weisz, pictured below); new plays dealing with a modern English family (“Jerusalem”), U.S. capitalism (“Enron”) and World War I (“War Horse”); such long-running musicals as “Les Miserables,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Mamma Mia!”; and new tuners including “Sister Act” and “Priscilla: Queen of the Desert.”

And they keep coming.

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Wonderful hilarity in National’s ‘London Assurance’

Richard Briers, Fiona Shaw, Simon Russell Beale, Mark Addy, Paul Ready, Michelle Terry at the National through June 2 PHOTO: Catherine Ashmore

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – First produced on the West End stage in 1841, Dublin-born playwright Dion Boucicault’s hilarious farce “London Assurance” is given its full measure in an uproarious production at the National Theatre that makes most modern comedies pale by comparison.

Set in the fanciful world of highfalutin and preposterous English life readily identifiable from the later works of Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh, it combines great verbal wit with physical comedy of a high order delivered by a cast of sublime comedy actors.

Simon Russell Beale is at his incomparable best as Sir Harcourt Courtly, a rich, fat and flamboyant society peacock with a seldom-seen son named Charles (Paul Ready) whom he believes to be sober and industrious but is in fact a heavy-drinking wastrel.

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Donmar’s ‘Polar Bears’ is gripping but not hopeful

Richard Coyle and Jodhi May at the Donmar through May 22

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – British writer Mark Haddon, whose 2003 novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” told of a boy with Asperger syndrome, turns his attention to a young woman with bipolar disorder for his first play, “Polar Bears,” with mixed success.

Directed with startling simplicity by Jamie Lloyd at the Donmar Warehouse on a set overlooked by a ceiling with jagged tears in it much like the woman’s mind, the play is insightful but in seeking resolution to an insoluble problem it opts for depressing pessimism.

The play’s characters never learn that attempts by a loved one to help someone whose mental state resembles the physical one of a burn victim mean that the expression of love and caring is received like a well-meant but searing caress on burned skin.

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Wit and insight dead in Gervais’ ‘Cemetery Junction’

Christian Cooke, Jack Doolan, and Tom Hughes

This review appears in The Hollywood Reporter

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have somehow contrived to leave behind all the acute observation and wit of their TV hits, “The Office” and “Extras,” in “Cemetery Junction,” their first feature film as writers and directors.

Gervais takes a secondary role and Merchant makes one brief appearance in the film, which tells of three restless lads itching to get away from a dull and predictable English suburban community in 1973.

Sadly, the film also is dull and predictable with the youthful rebels embarrassingly feeble when compared to such cinematic icons as James Dean, whose name is shamelessly invoked, or Albert Finney, whose character in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” would bounce these guys like a basketball. Boxoffice prospects on home territory appear slim — and even slimmer internationally.

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Jackie Collins’ ‘Paris Connections’ in new release plan

Nicole Steinwedell as Madison Castelli with Anthony Delon in ‘Paris Connections’

This story appears in the April edition of Cue Entertainment

By Ray Bennett

Take veteran top-level Hollywood producers, add the UK’s leading supermarket and mix with some of the most popular novelists in the world and you have Amber Entertainment, which founder Ileen Maisel describes as a new paradigm for bringing entertainment to a mass audience.

Amber is a production company making a series of movies that will be sold exclusively on DVD online and in-store at Tesco. Beginning in early summer with “Paris Connections” by Jackie Collins, the films will have bright stars, exotic locations and expensive production values, Maisel says.

The former New Line executive says that budgets for the films will range from £1 million to £3 million but the money will all be on the screen. “Our pitch to Tesco was that they will smell, taste and look like feature films,” she says.

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‘It’s like picking up Rupert Murdoch’s dropped wallet’

Panel of young consumers speaking candidly at the PEVE conference

This article appears in the April edition of Cue Entertainment

By Ray Bennett

Lots of so-called experts claim to know what young people think about entertainment these days, but a panel at Screen Digest’s recent PEVE Digital Media Conference in London provided some genuine insight. Describing how they consume screened entertaintment, six anonymous twentysomethings left the industry audience intrigued, surprised and appalled.

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