THEATRE REVIEW: David Soul in ‘Mack and Mabel’

Posted on April 11, 2006 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON — Longtime U.K. resident and now British citizen David Soul has matured into a major theatrical star and playing opposite the dazzling Janie Lee (pictured, right) he has a surefire hit in a winning new production of the Jerry Herman Hollywood musical “Mack & Mabel.”

Soul plays filmmaker Mack Sennett, who left the indelible marks of not only the Keystone Cops but also the failed property development name that partly fell down leaving the Hollywood sign as the most famous landmark in Los Angeles.

Sennett was known for spotting talent and among the stars to benefit from his keen eye were Carole Lombard, Bing Crosby and W. C. Fields. In the silent era, he worked with great clowns such as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Ben Turpin and Charlie Chaplin.

Mabel (Lee) was slinging hash in a diner when Sennett found her and turned her into one of the biggest comedy stars of the silent era. Songwriter Herman and book writer Michael Stewart obey the John Ford rule of printing the legend so that while in truth Normand’s life was overtaken by squalid events, here her successes are celebrated and given a happy ending.

First presented in 1974, the show failed to ignite on Broadway but it is in loving hands in the new production, which was developed in the small Watermill Theatre in Newbury, west of London, and has just transferred to the Criterion in the West End.

On a practical but atmospheric set and with most of the actors also playing musical instruments, the show’s simplicity is one of its charms. Mack is gruff and tough, and Mabel is in love. He is demanding but she is willing, and their films please millions.

Hollywood has its way, however, and soon her ambitions lean toward more serious filmmaking, which leads to a liaison with director William Desmond Taylor (Richard Brightiff). Taylor’s fate helped feed the dark legends of Tinsel Town’s early days with his murder the subject of endless speculation.

Herman doesn’t dwell long on such unhappiness, preferring to speed things along to the kind of fantasy that Hollywood does so well. The score is fun and the songs have witty, grownup lyrics. The energetic cast gives full measure and Lee is a delight as Mabel, both in her comedy sketches and her singing.

Soul is in splendid form with just the right touch of regret in his voice on the memorable number “I Won’t Send Roses” and still full of fading optimism for the closing “I Promise You a Happy Ending.”

Venue: Criterion Theatre, runs through July 22; Cast: David Soul, Janie Dee, Matthew Woodyatt, Richard Brightiff, Tomm Coles, Robert Cousins, Michelle Long, Robin Pirrongs, Jon Trenchard, Simon Tuck, Sarah Whittuck; Music and lyrics: Jerry Herman; Book: Michael Stewart, with revisions by Francine Pascal; Director: John Doyle; Designer: Mark Bailey; Lighting designer: Richard G. Jones; Sound designer: Gary Dixon; Arrangements and music supervision: Sarah Travis. A Watermill Theatre Production presented by Laurence Myers, Jon Wilner and Richard Temple.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Photo by Tristram Kenton.

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MUSIC REVIEW: Corinne Bailey Rae at Shepherds Bush Empire

Posted on April 7, 2006 by admin

Corinne Bailey Rae Play Shepherds Bush Empire

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – England’s biggest voices come in small packages and in a swinging set at the Shepherds Bush Empire on April 5 , Corinne Bailey Rae showed that while her debut album, a hit in the U.K., is easy listening, she can easily fill the room and occupy the imagination.

Corinne_Bailey_Rae_(album)A slight figure in a simple white dress, Rae nonetheless commands the stage whether standing at the microphone or sitting on a stool playing guitar. Confident and assured, she wrapped her crisp cadences and sensuous phrasing around a selection of ballads and lively songs that mostly she co-wrote. Backed by a seven-piece outfit with three horns, two guitars, a keyboard player and a percussionist, with two backup singers for some very sweet harmonies, Rae delivered an 11-song set plus two encores, to cover everything on her EMI album.

She kicked off with the engaging “Call Me When You Get This” and moved through some haunting ballads including “Breathless,” “Enchantment” and “Like a Star”.

Rae didn’t talk much except to thank the audience for being there and for buying her records but, as she introduced an insightful treatment of Led Zeppelin’s “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” she did offer a reminder that she’d once been in a heavy rock band named Helen.

Rae said she likes to write honest songs and aside from their appealing melodies, her tunes stand out with intelligent and cliché-free lyrics. Even “Butterfly”, a pretty song about growing up that she dedicated to her mother, was free of syrup.

A packed crowd responded to Rae’s warmth and cleverly adventurous voice so that by the time she went into her U.K. hit single “Put Your Records On”, they were up and dancing.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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MUSIC REVIEW: Anthony Minghella directs ‘Madam Butterfly’

Posted on April 2, 2006 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Anthony Minghella’s production of Puccini’s “Madam Butterfly,” which is back for a short English National Opera run before it opens the New York Metropolitan Opera season in September, might not please opera purists but it is a spectacular treat for the rest of us.

While admiring the singing, London’s opera critics looked down their noses at Minghella’s ravishing interpretation although it was liked well enough to pick up the Olivier Award for best new opera production and it’s been a smash hit at the Coliseum.

Film buffs curious to know what an Oscar-winning movie director can bring to an operatic classic are well served by Minghella’s approach to the much-loved “Madam Butterfly.” His films including “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Cold Mountain” and the Academy Award best picture winner “The English Patient,” have in common fluidity of movement and production designs that fill the frame and fully engage the eye. Those also are among the strengths he brings to the opera.

“Madam Butterfly” is a simple tale of exploitation set in 19th century Japan. U.S. naval officer Pinkerton (Gwynn Hughes Jones) follows the established pattern of colonialists there in taking a home on a 999-year lease that can be cancelled on a month’s notice. To his delight, he discovers he can make the same arrangement with a wife, and does so knowing he can leave her at any time.

His teenaged bride, Cio-Cio-San (Janice Watson), who had been working as a form of geisha, sees things differently. Not only does she take the marriage ceremony seriously, she also converts to the sailor’s church and views herself as American.

In the tragic way of such things, not only is she then spurned by her family and community, she also faces abandonment by the man she thinks of as her husband. With designer Michael Levine, Minghella chooses not to convey the clamor of the port city of Nagasaki but rather to present the tale as a universal story of loss and loneliness.

Japanese panels slide to and fro to suggest houses, and the sloping stage has a vast mirror as backdrop so that every action and image is magnified beautifully. Han Feng’s gorgeous costumes combine with globe lanterns and multitudes of flowers to fill the stage with color.

Minghella uses Japanese Bunraku puppetry to create the children in the story and the effect is enthralling. Puccini’s music is sublime and played splendidly under conductor David Parry. Watson sings gloriously and she is well matched by Hughes Jones, Jean Rigby as her servant Suzuki, and especially David Kempster as the conscience-stricken U.S. consul Sharpless.

Opera critics may say what they will, but music lovers who appreciate what a master director can create with a cinematic eye will adore this show.

Venue: London Coliseum (in repertory through May 31); Cast: Janice Watson, Jean Rigby, Gwyn Hughes Jones, David Kempster, Alan Oke, Toby Stafford-Allen, Julian Tovey, Philip Daggett, Roger Begley, Suzanne Joyce, Melodie Waddington, Morag Boyle, Stephanie Marshall, Mark Down, Nick Barnes, Finn Caldwell; Composer: Giacomo Puccini; Libretto: Giuseppe Giacosa, Luigi Illica, English translation by David Parry; Director: Anthony Minghella; Associate director, choreographer: Carolyn Choa; Conductor: David Parry; Chorus master: Martin Merry; Set designer: Michael Levine; Costume designer: Han Feng; Lighting designer: Peter Mumford; Puppetry: Mark Down, Nick Barnes, Blind Summit Theatre; An English National Opera co-production with the Metropolitan Opera and the Lithuanian National Opera.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie’

Posted on April 1, 2006 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – One of the most disturbing things about “My Name is Rachel Corrie,” the Royal Court play based on the journals and e-mails of a young American who died in Palestine for no apparent reason, is that it has yet to be seen in the United States.

The one-woman production starring Megan Dodds had been on its way to the New York Theater Workshop in March when it became derailed. Instead, it’s in a sold-out run at London’s Playhouse Theatre directed, as it was at the Royal Court, by actor Alan Rickman, who fashioned the play with journalist Katharine Viner.

Royal Court Theatre, 2005Rachel Corrie was a seriously earnest young woman from the American Pacific northwest who was born seeking a cause. At 10, she made a speech pleading on behalf of the poor at her school’s fifth grade press conference on world hunger and at 23 she left to take a look at the sharp end of where her country’s tax dollars were spent on things military.

She went to Palestine with an international goodwill movement and there she died, crushed by a U.S.-made bulldozer being used by Israeli forces that were knocking down Palestinian homes.

We meet Corrie in her apartment as she prepares to leave her comfortably chaotic and liberal environment in order to see what was really happening in one of the world’s trouble spots. A slight, blonde chatterbox, she is forever making lists about things to do and people to meet.

Full of middle class anxieties and well-meaning ambitions, she finds herself changed by a free trip to Russia where for the first time she saw poverty and genuine hardship. “It was flawed, dirty, broken and gorgeous,” she writes in her journal.

Flying home over Puget Sound, she realizes that its glorious radiance is not enough to make her feel glad to be home. She is hit hard by the realization that she is destined to live forever in a land of privilege unless she travels. She writes, “I can’t cool boiling waters in Russia. I can’t be Picasso. I can’t be Jesus. I can’t save the planet single-handedly. I can wash dishes.”

And so she journeys to Jerusalem and then to Rafah with a copy of “Let’s Go Israel” under her arm. She states clearly that she sees a distinction between the fate of Jewish people and the policies of the state of Israel. Her role, as she sees it, is to bear witness to what those policies mean for Palestinians.

Rickman and Viner have done a fine job to shape Corrie’s often luminous writing into something that resembles a play and Dodds is exceptionally good as she captures the intense young woman’s scattershot personality and deep desire to do good.

Her death is as random as so many others in that tragic part of the world. She died in Palestine but her writings suggest it could have been anywhere, on any side where the poor die pointlessly because of unreasoning conflict.

Venue: Playhouse Theatre, runs through May 21; Cast: Rachel Corrie: Megan Dodds; Taken from the writings of Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner; Produced with the permission of Rachel Corrie’s family; Director: Alan Rickman; Designer: Hildegard Bechtler; Lighting designer: Johanna Town; Sound and video: Emma Laxton; A Royal Court Theatre Production presented by David Johnson and Virginia Buckley.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Photos by Stephen Cummiskey.

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THEATRE REVIEW: ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

Posted on March 28, 2006 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Alex Kingston has taken a demotion from the doctor’s role she played on “ER” and has a change of uniform, but she’s still very much in charge of things as the domineering Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which is back for another West End run.

The play was a critical and boxoffice London hit two years ago with Christian Slater in top form as the rebellious Randle P. McMurphy, Ken Kesey’s doomed hero made famous earlier by Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson. Slater is among several cast members who return from that production while Kingston steps in for English actress Frances Barber.

Kingston (pictured with Slater) brings the feminine steel that made her a fiery “Boudica” but she sets aside the licentiousness of “Moll Flanders”. Her Nurse Ratched does not have the shivery repressed sexuality that Barber gave the role, but she has more than enough bubbling inside her cruel demeanor to play off the credulous brashness that Slater gives to McMurphy.

Paul Ready does an excellent job as Billy Bibbit, the stuttering boy whose conflicted sexuality and fear of life make him easy prey for the manipulative Ratched.

Katy Tuxford’s clever design is back with ceilings that crackle constantly and make the frightening power of the electrical shock machines in the basement a creature from horror stories. So too is Chris Davey’s clever lighting design and Matt Clifford’s nightmarish music and sound.

Playwright Dale Wasserman’s moving adaptation of Kesey’s novel remains in the capable hands of directors Terry Johnson and Tamara Harvey.

The power of the setting in a mental ward with inmates who, with one exception, are there voluntarily seldom fails to grip and the shame of how the system can breed monsters and crush spirits remains deeply affecting.

Venue: Garrick Theatre, runs through June 6; Cast: Christian Slater, Alex Kingston, Paul Ready, Owen O’Neill, Brendan Dempsey, Gavin Robertson, Alex Giannini, Ian Coppinger, Alan Douglas, Simon Chandler, Lizzie Roper, Cornelius Macarthy, Felix Dexter, Rebecca Grant, Katherine Jakeways; Playwright: Dale Wasserman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey; Directors: Terry Johnson, Tamara Harvey; Set designer: Katy Tuxford; Lighting designer: Chris Davey; Composer, sound designer: Matt Clifford; Presented by Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer for Nimax Theatres, Ian Lenegan.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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TV REVIEW: Tom Hardy, Kelly Reilly in ‘A for Andromeda’

Posted on March 27, 2006 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – ‘A for Andromeda’ is a tidy little science fiction picture starring Tom Hardy and Kelly Reilly (above) with a reach well within its grasp that is likely to please both sci-fi fans and those who can usually take it or leave it.

Serious buffs will be delighted to see a remake of the long-lost 1961 series that spooked a generation with its tale of aliens invading earth via a beautiful clone named Andromeda, played by Julie Christie in her screen debut.

The BBC has already resurrected 1950’s show ‘The Quatermass Experiment’ and writer Richard Fell, who did such a fine job on that one, has updated ‘Andromeda’ to exploit all the modern world’s knowledge of deep space and medicine.

Fred Hoyle and John Elliot wrote the original and it has the all essentials of a good nightmare with an enclosed space – a science installation isolated in wintry high country – and mysterious signals coming from a faraway galaxy.

Tom Hardy (‘Gideon’s Daughter’, ‘The Virgin Queen’) plays a temperamental but brilliant scientist named Fleming who has built a computer for the Ministry of Defence that will intercept and analyse communications from far and wide. The MOD wants the installation in order to look at e-mails and phone calls made by allies as well as enemies but when the deep space signals come in, Fleming sets out to decipher them.

With encouragement from his boss, Professor Dawnay (Jane Asher) and help from assistants Christine (Kelly Reilly) and Bridger (Charlie Cox), he decides quickly that a distant intelligence is seeking to make contact with mankind.

The signals feed in at a rapid pace and soon Dawnay is following its instructions to build a special computer that leads to the creation of artificial life. Bridger, however, is leaking the goings-on to a shady American (Colin Stinton) and the MOD, in the form of Gen. Vandenberg (David Haig), soon brings in the army to secure the place.

As such stories require, competing impulses soon lead to conflict with Dawnay keen to use the new computer to rid the world of its major illnesses, Vandenberg determined to put it to use for biological warfare, and Fleming having second thoughts about the whole thing.

When the cloned creature built under instructions from the alien intelligence turns out to look exactly like the beautiful Christine, the fun really begins.

Hardy and Asher have a good time in their white coats with all the scientific jargon and Reilly (‘Mrs. Henderson Presents’) gives her robotic creature the right degree of shivery sex appeal. Director John Strickland sets a lively pace, using Paul Lauger’s nifty production design to good effect, and he balances the tension cleverly with the frightening questions the story asks.

Credits: Cast: Tom Hardy, Kelly Reilly, Jane Asher, David Haig, Charlie Cox, Colin Stinton; Director: John Strickland; Writer/executive producer: Richard Fell; Director of photography: Sean Van Hales; Production designer: Paul Lauger; Editor: Patrick Moore; Composer: Nina Humphreys; Producer: Alison Willett; Executive producer: Bethan Jones; Production: BBC; running time: 90 mins.

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TV REVIEW: Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt in ‘Gideon’s Daughter’

Posted on March 23, 2006 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – No one does preoccupied better than Bill Nighy and playing to his strength as a serenely detached public relations guru just about saves writer/director Stephen Poliakoff’s ponderous story of family alienation, “Gideon’s Daughter.”

gideon's daughterThe film is connected to the filmmaker’s recent glossily vacuous “Friends & Crocodiles” by one character, a gossipy writer named Sneath (Robert Lindsay), who narrates Gideon’s story to an agency temp for his latest book. The device is a puzzle as while it might have been used profitably to add some grit and spice to the spin-doctor’s story, instead Poliakoff tells it in his own fanciful manner.

We learn that Gideon was a nuts-and-bolts flack for comedians before evolving into a major manipulator of truths and images for big-time corporations and politicians. Along the way, he bedded many women, lost his wife to cancer and apparently lost the love and trust of his beautiful daughter Natasha (Emily Blunt).

Poliakoff makes Gideon a sort of Chauncey Gardiner so that, just like the character in “Being There,” he spouts vague nonsense and his clients believe he’s solved their problems. These include anything from opening movies to launching restaurants to planning the Labour Party’s Millennium celebrations.

Gideon can show up accidentally two hours late for a vital meeting with an Italian media mogul only to find that the tycoon was deliberately late for the same amount of time and somehow he has won a power race he didn’t even know he was in. Almost fully detached from the work that has made him rich, Gideon can tune out the pitches and entreaties of his clients and still give the right answer.

All of this is to show that Gideon doesn’t listen and loves his daughter too much because he feels she has never forgiven him for his affairs nor for being absent when her mother died. While the affairs of London’s media world swirl about him, Gideon is silently falling apart until he is caught by an unconventional woman named Stella (Miranda Richardson), who is grieving over the loss of her young son who was killed in a road accident.

As is inevitable in such screen treatments, the wealthy sophisticate is able to get back in touch not only with his lower middle-class roots but also with his true feelings about his daughter.

Nighy can do this stuff in his sleep and it’s to his credit that he does so much more, and it takes all of Richardson’s extraordinary acting range to make her tiresome character interesting. Blunt has little to do other than look beautiful and sulky, which she does very well.

Poliakoff appears to be striving for important themes in his story but he strikes the same notes as in the earlier film, with empty people at a lot of prettily decorated but meaningless functions. He has a fascination for 24-hour stores, eateries at the end of the London bus route, and author George Simenon’s love life, none of which add up to much, but then neither does the film.

Airs: Saturday March 25 BBC America; Cast: Bill Nighy, Miranda Richardson, Emily Blunt, Robert Lindsay, Ronni Ancona, Tom Hardy, Tom Goodman-Hill, Joanna Page, David Westhead, Samantha Whittaker, Kerry Shale; Writer/director: Stephen Poliakoff; Director of photography: Barry Ackroyd; Production designer: James Merifield; Editor: Clare Douglas; Music: Adrian Johnston; Producer: Nicolas Brown; Executive producers: Peter Fincham, David M. Thompson; TalkBack Thames, part of the FremantleMedia Group for the BBC.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: ‘Period of Adjustment’ by Tennessee Williams

Posted on March 17, 2006 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – “Period of Adjustment” was a rare stab at comedy by Tennessee Williams but whatever humor there might be in the dialog is lost in the Almeida’s current revival, which depends on exaggerated Southern accents for its laughs.

The American South boasts as wide a range of accents as Henry Higgins ever found in England but you wouldn’t know it from this production, in which everyone speaks with a generic Dee-yeep Say-yowth drawl.

It wouldn’t matter so much if the play were classic Williams, but it’s not and so the attention wanders to how many syllables Lisa Dillon (pictured), as newlywed Isabel, thinks she can cram into the word “bag” and what sound Jared Harris, as her husband’s best friend Ralph, will make for the word “of” in the play’s oft-repeated title phrase – “period uh adjustment” or “period o’ adjustment.”

The play brings together two army buddies whose track record with “the ladies” was never much to speak of and whose marriages are now in states of disrepair.

period x325Ralph is at home alone on Christmas Eve – his wife Dorothea (Sandy McDade) having departed after he announced he had quit his job working for her father – when George (Benedict Cumberbatch, pictured, left, with Harris) shows up unexpectedly with his new bride.

It turns out that George has also just quit his job and the new business of marriage is not turning out quite as expected by either party, as Isabel explay-yains at length when her husband dumps her at Ralph’s place and drives off. Both he and Sandy return in due course so that all four can explore their mutual predicaments.

It’s a measure of the playwright’s lack of form that the play’s setting is in a suburb of Nashville called High Point in a house built over a cavern. It’s jerry-built and crumbling but hanging in there, much like the marriages of the two couples.

Williams displays affection for addled characters usually but here he appears to be laughing at them and perhaps that prompted director Howard Davies and the performers, all skilled actors, to make their voices such objects of fun.

Whatever Williams might have been trying to say about the homo-eroticism of male friendship and the difficulties of marriage gets lost in a mish-mash that has more twangs than a George Jones concert but is nowhere near as real.

Venue: Almeida Theatre, runs through April 29; Cast: Jared Harris, Lisa Dillon, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sandy McDade; Playwright: Tennessee Williams; Director: Howard Davies; Design: Mike Britton; Lighting: Mark Henderson; Music: Paddy Cunneen; Sound: Paul Groothuis; Presented by special arrangement with the University of the South, Sewanee, TN, in association with Robert Fox and Tom McKitterick.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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FILM REVIEW: Julia Taylor-Stanley’s ‘These Foolish Things’

Posted on March 10, 2006 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Like a romance-novel version of one of Michael Palin’s “Ripping Yarns,” Julia Taylor-Stanley’s costume picture “These Foolish Things” has a dewy-eyed heroine, two rivals for her affection, kindly aunts, dastardly villains, and irony-free dialogue guaranteed to provoke laughter. Sadly, the film is a drama.

A fable about English stage folk in the period leading up to World War Two, it’s a handsome production featuring appealing players but the jaw-dropping clichés come so thick and fast that its attempts at heartwarming drama dissolve in hilarity. Given a royal premiere on Wednesday and released in the United Kingdom Friday, wide distribution will depend upon finding forgiving audiences.

Diana Shaw (Zoe Tapper) is an aspiring actress who wishes to follow in the footsteps of her celebrated mother Lily (Charlotte Lucas), who died tragically young while taking a standing ovation. Forced to be brought up in luxury in the country surrounded by insensitive cousins, Diana saves her pennies so that one day she may go to London and audition for something, anything really.

No sooner has she arrived than she bumps, literally, into a young playwright who, would you believe, spills the pages of his new play onto the ground. It is as they bend to pick up these pages that the youngsters gaze into each other’s eyes and you know the rest.

Handsome and ambitious, the young man, Robin (David Leon, pictured with Tapper), soon has Diana ensconced in a nicely furnished room at the boarding house where he lives too. Their landlady is a woman of Scottish descent, Mrs. Abernathy (Julia McKenzie), who not only keeps theatrical posters on the walls of her home but also doesn’t mind at all when the dreamy-eyed young people fail to pay the rent. And she serves a fine pot of tea by the fire when it’s wet.

Robin is desperately keen to have his play produced and Diana is just as keen to star in it. This requires a producer, of course, and that can only mean the flamboyant American rich person Lottie Osgood (Anjelica Huston), who squanders her piles of inherited cash on any old rubbish.

To gain her attention, the sweethearts decide they need a star name and since nasty old cousin Garstin (Leo Bill) is best friends with matinee idol Douglas Middleton (Mark Umbers), that’s who they turn to. This is despite the fact that Garstin is a cast-iron Victorian swine of the first order who would twirl his mustache if only he had one.

As for Middleton, he turns out to be a gay blade with designs not on the nubile young Diana but on her vulnerable suitor, and soon they’re all up to their elegantly posed elbows in schemes and wicked wheezes that would make a stage doorman grin.

In fact one does, an elderly chap named Albert played by Joss Ackland who gets to tell Lauren Bacall, in a cameo as an ageing English actress named Dame Lydia, how beautiful she remains. She does too.

Meanwhile. Actually there are several meanwhiles. One of them involves Christopher Lovell (Andrew Lincoln), an actor turned director who, if you last that long, turns out to be a Battle of Britain pilot.

Another has Terence Stamp in a baffling role as a World War One veteran who used to be rich but lost his wealth in the great stock market crash and now works as a butler but is also Lottie Osgood’s showbiz advisor, musical director and possible lover.

At least the two of them appear to be enjoying themselves.

Opens: UK: March 10 (Swipe Films); Cast: Anjelica Huston, Zoe Tapper; Charlotte Lucas, David Leon, Julia McKenzie, Andrew Lincoln, Terence Stamp, Lauren Bacall, Mark Umbers, Joss Ackland,  Roy Dotrice, Haydn Gwynne, Leo Bill, Eve Myles, Jamie Glover, Nickolas Grace; Director and writer: Julia Taylor-Stanley; Director of photography: Gavin Finney; Production designer: Chris Townsend; Editor: David Martin; Art director: Ben Smith; Music: Ian Lynn; Producers: Paul Sarony, Taylor-Stanley; Executive producers: Carola Ash, Neil Dunn, Keith Northrop, Michael Whyke; Production: Presented by Swipe Films and Porpoise Productions in association with Micro Fusion 2004 4 LLP; UK rating: 12A); running time, 106 mins.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Arthur Miller’s ‘Resurrection Blues’

Posted on March 3, 2006 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Still full of mischief after all these years, maverick director Robert Altman’s iconoclastic touch does wonders for Arthur Miller’s last play, “Resurrection Blues,” a clunky political satire that is having virtually its world premiere at the Old Vic.

Oscar-winning actor Maximilian Schell (pictured top with Jane Adams and below with James Fox) has a ball playing a batty old dictator in an unnamed, corrupt and poverty-stricken Latin American country who decides to crucify a much-loved rebel, who says he’s the son of God, and sell the event for worldwide television.

resurrection-blues-3-x325Stars from Altman films – Neve Campbell (“The Company”), Jane Adams (“Kanas City”) and Matthew Modine (“Short Cuts”) – join James Fox (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) in the main roles as an American TV advertising crew descends on the dictator’s bunker in the mountainous nation to film the crucifixion.

An early version of the play was produced in 2002 at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, but Miller did a substantial rewrite and knew of Altman’s planned production when he died in 2005.

While one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century, Miller wasn’t known for a lot of humor in his plays and so “Resurrection Blues” marks what he no doubt intended as a sting in the tail of his exceptional career.

Lampooning politics and the media is something that Altman knows all about and its hard to think of another director who could have mined so many ironic laughs from what is a fairly labored piece of work.

Schell’s dictator is a terrific invention, a pantomime Pinochet whose taste for authoritarian rule is tempered by his need for a good dentist and visits to see his analyst in Miami. He’s also impotent, so when TV director Emily (Adams) decides she’ll go to bed with him if he’ll let the rebel go, it’s not an easy decision.

Producer Cheeseboro (Modine), having paid a fortune for the rights to the crucifixion, is keen for the execution to take place while guilt-ridden rich man Henri Schultz (Fox) argues that killing the rebel will cause chaos and his suicidal daughter Jeanine (Campbell) sees the rebel as a Christ figure.

The play makes a good stab at confronting issues such as fundamentalist religion, pious socialism, and crass commercialism but without Altman’s gift for being a professional smart ass, it would probably fall flat.

Altman was at the Old Vic for opening night and he flies to Los Angeles Friday to be at Sunday’s Academy Awards presentation where he will receive a long overdue Oscar.

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Venue: The Old Vic, runs through April 22; Credits: Cast: Maximilian Schell, James Fox, Jane Adams, Matthew Modine, Peter Brooke, Sarah Mennell, George Antoni, Neve Campbell, Peter McDonald; Playwright: Arthur Miller; Director: Robert Altman; Producers: Scott Griffin, David Liddiment; Set designer: Robin Wagner; Lighting: Rick Fisher; Sound: Matt McKenzie.

Photos: Manuel Harlan

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