By Ray Bennett
For all I know, the late London land baron Paul Raymond might have been the “porn king” of Soho but what I recall is that he published innocuous nudie magazines and ran a strip club called Raymond’s Revue Bar that was pretty good fun. Continue reading
Rory Kinnear as Iago and Adrian Lester as Othello.
By Ray Bennett
Nicholas Hytner’s production of “Othello” at the National Theatre has drawn rave reviews from UK critics and in the theatre it was easy to be consumed by the power of the play and the great acting, but it has diminished a bit upon reflection. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
Dudley Sutton (pictured above) says that although he has done a few, he prefers not to record his poetry and songs, which is a great shame for posterity but makes his performance at the Idler Academy, along with actor Timothy Ackroyd, as precious as it was entertaining. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
When the BBC’s new Director General, Tony Hall, takes up the job in April, the broadcaster will get not only a former BBC News Chief Executive but also the man who has brought financial stability to one of the UK’s most complex arts institutions, the Royal Opera House.
His term since 2001 has included the ROH’s successful move into live cinema screenings of its opera and ballet productions across the country and around the world including the first opera screenings in 3D. In 2007, Hall oversaw the acquisition of DVD production and distribution company Opus Arte. As a result, it has produced a series of DVDs of its productions and those of other arts organizations using high definition technology.
The current season continues with new opera director Kasper Holten’s Covent Garden directorial debut, a new production of Tchaikovsky’s poignant opera “Eugene Onegin” (pictured, in cinemas Feb. 20); Verdi’s “Nabucco” with Placido Domingo (April 29), Rossini’s “La Donna del Lago” (May 27) and Britten’s “Gloriana” (June 24). Ballets include “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (March 28).
The season was given a big launch event in London and Hall says the live cinema season has become increasingly important to the arts organisation: “Cinema in the last 18 months has been absolutely core to what we want to do at the Royal Opera House, we want to take great artists, great art to as many people as we can.”
In a bid to drive awareness of the season, the ROH held similar launch events at other UK cities, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff, Nottingham, Newcastle, Birmingham, Plymouth, Brighton and Cambridge. Hall says, “We want to make sure the message gets across that, wherever you live, this is absolutely for you. Not just at the opera house but around the country and around the world. That is really important.”
ROH Enterprises Managing Director Alastair Roberts says the departing CEO has masterminded most of the innovations at the Opera House: “That’s been a really cool part of Hall’s strategy, to open it up and to build audiences and to get an international profile. Within that, cinema and DVD are really powerful ways to reach audiences. Also, in the current climate it is important to generate new revenue streams and both the cinema and video bring lots of audiences and added revenue. Tony was the architect of all that.”
The ROH stages about 30 productions each year and films about 12 of them with opera slightly ahead of ballet although close to 50/50. It shoots three more for free distribution across its chain of big screens around the nation. Cinemas in countries such as France, Germany, Brazil and Japan carry the films and the DVDs are distributed internationally with four titles now available as digital downloads on iTunes.
Roberts won’t discuss budgets or sales but he says the most obvious titles such as “La Boheme”, “La Traviata” sell “really well” as did Puccini’s “Il Trittico” from last year. “Swan Lake” was the biggest ever in audience figures with well over 20,000 tickets sold for the one night and the “The Nutcracker” in December was right up there. “La Fille Mal Gardee” placed at No. 3 on the UK box office and it remained in the Top 10 in the week it screened while “Romeo and Juliet” was watched by 16,000 people in more than 150 cinemas in the UK.
“When you total it up, it’s a major investment, but we think it’s vital to win new audiences. We want to make people feel more comfortable with opera and ballet. We know some might find them difficult to engage with or they will be intimidated so we put it on a big screen for free and at the local cinema for £10 to break that down,” Roberts says.
The ROH also is very active on Facebook and Twitter with more than 50,000 followers, he says: “At the interval, we encourage audience members to tweet to a hashtag and we put their tweets up on the screens so people see messages from all over the world from Brazil to Spain.”
The 2011 cinema season, which comprised three ballets and seven operas, was broadcast to 700 cinemas in 22 countries, Hall says: “And 40% of our audience is under 45 — that is not a statistic you would expect from the Royal Opera House and the more we reach out the more audiences we will attract and that is good for the Royal Opera.”
Roberts says the 2012/13 season will extend the company’s reach beyond Britain even further: “Our international footprint is expanding more or less on a monthly basis. By the beginning of this season we are in about 32 countries, which takes us to a total of 900 sites around the world, so very close to the magic thousand mark.”
This expansion is hugely important to the future of the Royal Opera House, according to Hall, who notes that while the Opera House is full every night, that is still just three-quarters of a million people each year: “Last year, we got a further 300,000 people watching us in cinemas; we got tens of thousands of people watching us for nothing through our BP Big Screens; we had over a million people watching us live and then recorded on playback when the Royal Ballet decided to throw open the Royal Ballet for a day; we had 4.5 million watching us on ‘Maestro at the Opera‘ — in total around 7.5 million watching us in various forms of broadcast in this country and around the world. That is one hell of an impact from an opera house in the middle of Covent Garden.”
In addition to the commercial aspect, Hall says the cinema screenings have transformed the way people view opera, “The other thing that people love is that you go back stage, you learn a little bit about the artist you are going to see, you learn a little bit more about the characters, you learn something about the background to the piece, and all these things add, I think, to the enjoyment that I see when I go to watch what we are doing in the cinema.”
ROH Music Director Antonio Pappano says the cinema offers something the theatre does not: “It offers you the close-up and it offers you a complexity of experience that is quite wonderful and I think it is very rich and very, very compelling.”
Royal Ballet Principal Edward Watson says the cinema provides a more animated audience experience: “In the theatre people are quieter, in the cinema they are laughing and chatting and they can talk to the person next to them.”
ROH Director Holten notes that close-ups show the extremes of performance: “When a singer sings a high C it is not beautiful, it is extreme. I love that because it reminds me about how opera is an extreme art form that gives us a language to talk about all the extreme things of life, love death, fear, jealousy.”
Royal Ballet Principal Federico Bonelli agrees: “It is almost as if you were sitting high up in the ‘gods’ and in the stalls at the same time, so you can see both perspectives. You can see the whole company altogether in the ensemble scenes and then you are really close up in the ‘Pas de Deux’. It is the best seat in the house.”
Sam Andrews contributed to this story, which appeared in Cue Entertainment.
By Ray Bennett
In 1982, Gregory Peck achieved a lifetime ambition to portray his idol Abraham Lincoln onscreen. It was a cameo appearance in the CBS miniseries “The Blue and the Gray”, which became the subject of a special issue in TV Guide Canada.
I traveled from Toronto to Southern California to interview director Andrew V. McLaglen and members of the cast such as Stacy Keach, John Hammond and, of course, Peck.
In our lengthy interview at Peck’s lovely home in the Holmby Hills in L.A., he spoke at length – unhesitating and in great detail with no resort to a book or notes – about Lincoln and his admiration for the man.
I asked him if TV Guide Canada could run his comments under his name, to which he agreed. He later sent me a note of thanks for giving him his first byline. With the UK release this weekend of Steven Spielberg’s wonderful “Lincoln” starring Daniel Day Lewis, Peck’s words came to mind.
He told me: “I have admired Abraham Lincoln since I was a boy. I learned the Gettysburg Address when I was 12, and recited it in school. I first read Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln” in university, at Berkeley, and I was totally absorbed by it.”
Over the years, he had accumulated something like 200 books about Lincoln, he said: “That doesn’t make me a top-of-the-line collector of Lincolniana; I’m somewhere in the middle. But often, when I have a moment at any time of the day or night, I’ll reach for one of my Lincoln books, open it anywhere and have a visit with him. He is my ideal.”
Peck had always wanted to play him but nobody asked him, and he thought there had not been very many plays or films about him in recent years, at least not one he though amounted to anything in the 40-odd years since Raymond Massey did “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” and Henry Fonda did “Young Mr. Lincoln”.
He said: “He’s a difficult subject to dramatize because he’s a secular saint. You can’t praise him any more than he’s been praised; you can’t heap any more adulation on him. Nothing is more boring than a play that simply rediscovers that a man is good. You have to find a bone of contention, a source of conflict, and with Lincoln that’s not easy to do.”
Most people seemed to think Lincoln was rather dour and glum, and his appearance certainly gave that impression, Peck said, but the man was full of humour: “He liked nothing better than a good old story-telling session; telling jokes and yarns about his rustic days on the frontier and his experiences as a young lawyer on the Illinois circuit.”
Lincoln worked on his address for a couple of weeks before he went to Gettysburg, Peck observed: “It’s a myth that he scribbled it on the back of an envelope on the train. He had worked on it several times at the White House, knowing he had that engagement. In fact, he went to Gettysburg that day, Nov. 19, 1863, with a purpose in mind: not merely to dedicate the cemetery where men from the terrible battle of the previous July were buried, but to restate for the North and for the South what the war was all about.”
The issue was not slavery, Peck said, although morally Lincoln was against it: “He often said that if he could preserve the Union all-free, he’d preserve it; if he could preserve it all-slave, he’d preserve it; if he could preserve it half-free and half-slave, he’d preserve it. Preserving the Union was the primary objective of his administration, and of his life.”
Peck described the Civil War as the most critical event in U.S. history, and the most tragic: “The casualties of 618,000 equalled the number of casualties in all of our other wars including the Revolutionary War, up to the time of Vietnam. It was a horrific slaughter of young men at a time when the total U.S. population was 34 million.”
It was a terrible sacrifice, and Lincoln bore the responsibility for it, he observed: “We’ll never know, but in my mind, it was Lincoln – with his intuition, his talent, his logic, his character and his vision – who took on the full responsibility for that conflict, because he was able to see ahead that if he did not, if someone did not, then the United States might split into two or four or six countries. We might have had the equivalent of the Balkan states on this continent.
“Abraham Lincoln is the American hero. He is what we think we are, or would like to be, in terms of character, shrewdness, intelligence, compassion and humour. He is the greatest American of all time.” ©
By Ray Bennett
Kathryn Bigelow’s taut and exciting “Zero Dark Thirty” tells how a single-minded CIA officer drove the decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden and does not stop for politics or personal lives. Unlike Ben Affleck’s CIA film “Argo”, it does not cater to the audience with anything crowd-pleasing, it simply tells the gripping and thoroughly scary story of how a super-power goes about the elimination of its declared No. 1 enemy.
Jessica Chastain is terrific as agent Maya, who is propelled into the hunt for the Al Qaeda leader following the events known as 9/11 and becomes convinced that only she has the will to sort through a maze of intelligence to find her target. Writer Mark Boal, who won Academy Awards for original screenplay and as a producer of fellow double Oscar-winner winner Bigelow’s 2008 picture “The Hurt Locker”, has turned his in-depth reporting into a story remarkable for its cool detachment. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
Steven Spielberg has done a very bold thing with his film “Lincoln” and elected with Daniel Day Lewis to portray a truly great man over one intense period toward the end of his life rather than attempt a full biography.
They succeed magnificently and create an indelible picture of a profoundly wise and complex man who remains for many the greatest American who ever lived.
It’s one of the best movies about politics you’ll ever see and the infighting in Congress and machinations to find votes over a momentous piece of legislation are riveting. Screenwriter Tony Kushner gives a wonderful cast a full measure of meaty and often funny dialogue to chew on and they do it with panache. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Joaquin Phoenix (pictured) was named best actor and Philip Seymour Hoffman best supporting actor for “The Master” while Ang Lee won as best director for “Life of Pi” as Michael Haneke’s “Amour” picked up three awards including best film at the London Film Critics’ Circle Awards.
Bill Westenhofer won the technical prize for visual effects in “Life of Pi”. Emmanuelle Riva won as best actress for “Amour” while director Haneke picked up the prize for best screenplay although “Rust and Bone” won the best foreign-language award. Anne Hathaway was named best supporting actress for her performance in ‘Les Miserables”.
A list of winners follows: Continue reading
Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Foxx in ‘Django Unchained’.
By Ray Bennett
In all that time Quentin Tarantino spent in his storied video store as a young man, you’d think he would have seen one or two decent films instead of the rubbish he re-peddles. There might be a funny little spoof of ’60s westerns somewhere in “Django Unchained” with all the hammy acting but at 165-minutes, this vile new excretion is bloated, gross, coarse and deeply unpleasant. Continue reading
My picks for the 2013 Academy Awards
By Ray Bennett
Anticipation of this year’s Academy Awards was a pleasure with many great films and terrific performances but then came the nominations for the prizes that lead up to the Oscars and it all went pear-shaped.
Inexplicable awards have been given to films such as “Argo”, “Les Misérables” and “Django Unchained” while prizes for splendid films such as “Life of Pi”, “Lincoln”, and “Silver Linings Playbook” have been hit and miss. Wonderful productions such as “The Master” and “Moonrise Kingdom” have found honours limited while the excellent “Killing Them Softly” was ignored entirely.
It means that tonight’s Oscar show might well turn out to be a major disappointment so many of these selections are made in hope that Academy Awards voters will prove smarter than the others, but history suggests they won’t be. A list of my choices follows: Continue reading →