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29 apr '00
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29 apr '00

Washington Ballet, "The Young Lions Roar," Terrace Theatre, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington

Androgynous costuming featured in two of the evening's pieces. First up was Septime Webre's "Fluctuating Hemlines" (1995), perhaps the only time that dancers wear pointe shoes and 50's big hair at the same time on stage. They soon strip out of their trapeze dresses into boyish singlets. One is reminded, just a bit, of Paul Taylor's take on modern mores, "Cloven Kingdom." Webre's duets are inventive, as we've come to expect. The percussive score was composed while the dance was being set, so that sometimes the two work together, and sometimes not.

The most beautiful dance of the evening was by Kirk Peterson, "The Eyes that Gently Touch," danced first in 1990 to Phillip Glass's "Mad Rush" for solo piano. It's about that feeling of being so much in love that you want to drum your toes on the ground and stretch up to the sky at the same time.

The second cast danced Jirí Kylián's "Nuages" (1976), and the evening closed with the premiere of "Pomp," by Dwight Rhoden. Here, the men wear colorful bra tops and shorts like their women counterparts. As much as I like electronica, I found Antonio Carlos Scott's score of deconstructed Rameau annoying; and the stage machinery, stylized architectural flourishes form which the men hang, Cirque de Soleil-style, is distracting.

The Shooting Gallery's most recent release, Croupier, is a snappy thriller that is perhaps not a clever as it thinks it is.

Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Blue Flower is an exhaustively researched historical novel of Friedrich von Hardenburg (later Novalis) at the opening of the 19th century. For the most part, the period detail sucks all the air out of the room, leaving nothing for the people to breathe. But a scene between Friedrich and his mother is affecting, as is the closing chapter.

In Enchanted Night, Steven Millhauser's novella, the Moon goddess dances with Pierrot on an August night in suburban Connecticut. Paradoxically, it's a little snow dome of a story, just a bit precious.

As part of my work with Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, I had the pleasure of taping the complete text of Aeschylus' Oresteia, in a new translation by Ted Hughes. The words are scrumptious and chewy, and yet Hughes keeps Aeschylus' timeless themes, like the good for the greatest number, in the forefront. Heck, he manages to make the static courtroom scene of The Eumenides compelling.

Hortense is Abducted, a novel by Jacques Roubaud, translated by Dominic Di Bernardi

A giddy, silly, self-conscious novel by one of the members of France's Oulipo. The plot, setting, and characters are nothing but an armature to which Roubaud affixes an ersatz murder mystery, which he interrupts with rantings against his publisher for the commercial failure of his previous work. Roubaud as narrator sometimes falls into a comic repetitional redundancy like the Power Puff Girls' arch-villain Mojo Jojo. That is, when he's not setting faux logic problems like Raymond Smullyan -- "There are Poldevians, Redheaded Females, and Silicates" -- or wielding Bertrand Russell's barber's razor. In a book where most of the cats speak, is is any wonder that Hamlet's father's ghost makes an appearance as a dog?

Even if this book doesn't swing all the time, there are some very funny bits:

At the verge of the woods there was a sign: YOU ARE ENTERING A FOREST. BE CAREFUL! ONE TREE CAN HIDE ANOTHER!

16 apr '00

My favorite entry in this year's Filmfest DC is Dev Benegal's Split Wide Open, a remarkable film about haves and have-nots in contemporary Mumbai. Its central story is a poor neighborhood dependent on a local mafia for access to drinking water. There is a film-within-the-film: a television series, also called Split Wide Open, a fast-paced exposé show hosted and produced by the bemused Nandita, who has a talent for documenting the obvious.

When she encounters KP, a water seller and small-time hustler, a dialectic develops: KP tells his genuine, wrenching story to Nandita's camera, and thereby puts Benegal's political case; yet the glossy, commercialized realities of television ironically challenge the idea that media (TV or film) can be an effective means of economic change. The tension in the mixed Hindi/English script is also effective.

If this sounds solemn, the flick is anything but. Benegal finds jewel-like images in the line of water taps that serve the neighborhood; in an extreme high angle, his camera lingers on a children's board game (something like marbles) played with flat stones. KP and Nan are very personable, and KP's protector, Brother Bono, adds a cutting wit. The ambivalently hopeful closing sequence is memorable, as the persons of the movie appear on film, then video, and then dissolve in a blur of meaningless pixels.

There are a few chuckles to be found in the satire Beresina, or the Last Days of Switzerland. How disconcerting to view Geraldine Chaplin dubbed into German and then subtitled back into English.

After a promising start, the wheels come off the stylish thriller The Wisdom of Crocodiles. Key points of plot explanation are garbled or non-existent, while other plot lines go nowhere. Anne's profession (structural engineer) is tacked on to her character, perhaps to set up a gratuitous bit late in the picture, in which Anne is on the scene for a construction accident and performs an emergency tracheotomy with a biro. They didn't teach that in my engineering curriculum.

The Big Kahuna is a good vehicle for Kevin Spacey's flavor of crackling, sarcastic humor, but it proves to be a bit more. Danny DeVito -- I never thought I'd write this -- squeezes a tear out of me in his closing monologue about "character." Spacey produced this adaptation of Roger Rueff's play Hospitality Suite, and John Swanbeck directed. Rueff's screenplay only lightly tinkers with the three-act structure of the stage play, which takes place in a convention suite hosted by three industrial lubricant salesmen. Swanbeck keeps everyone in the scene, being generous with reaction shots. The play's climax, a showdown between Spacey's jaded veteran and Peter Facinelli's Christian evangelist newbie, is thought-nagging. But whose idea was it to roll the closing credits over the Baz Luhrmann/Mary Schmich "Kurt Vonnegut" commencement address?

Coppola watch: Graham Fuller signs in with a puff piece on The Virgin Suicides in today's New York Times.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Eisenhower Theatre, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington

"Summerspace: A Lyric Dance" is a sun-dappled piece from 1958. There are beautiful, fast two-footed chaîné turns that make the dancers resemble so much spin-art, or perhaps photons racing about. Cunningham's amazing technical demands on the dancers are leavened with just enough classical movement to make us gasp in recognition.

"Summerspace" and "Pond Way" (1998) remind me of a remark about Ellsworth Kelly's severe abstractions, that he painted no forms but those that appeared in nature. In the later dance, the hard-edged movement of the dancers contrasts with the liquidly flowing costumes, modified harem pants. In one notable floor crossing, a female dancer is "partnered" by a series of male dancers who do not support her, but rather serve to accent her positions.

The evening closed with the premiere of "Interscape," a rather prickly piece. It is set to John Cage's One⁸, a solo cello composition that sounds like a nagging thought, a house mouse scratching behind the sheetrock. (Program notes indicate that it can also be danced to Cage's 108 for that many musicians.) The dance is all about balances and pressing ever so slowly from one pose to the next, as exhibited by a great solo for a male, and a tender pas de deux. It's like a game of freeze tag gone horribly wrong. But I fear the piece is a trifle too long, and in Saturday's performance one of the dancers, breathless, would have agreed with me. Cunningham collaborator Robert Rauschenberg contributes a suggestive rebus of a drop.

8 apr '00

Early returns from Filmfest DC: Tube Tales is an entertaining collection of nine film sketches by young directors (many of them accomplished actors), linked only by the common theme that each takes place in the London Underground railway system. If some of the films try to do too much in ten to twenty minutes (like the cumbersome "Steal Away") and others are little more than one dirty joke ("Mr Cool," and "Horny," featuring the tasty Denise Van Outen), there is some genuine risk-taking going on here: two of the refreshing selections are told virtually without words ("Bone" and "A Bird in the Hand"). In "Mouth, " a stylish woman tosses her cookies, underscored by the Bruckner Ninth Symphony. The filmmakers seem to see a lot of humor in the Underground's practice of inspecting the tickets of exiting passengers.

From Argentina, Mercedes García Guevara, also an experienced actor, makes her directing debut with the modest, successful Rio Escondido (aka Hidden River). Her story of a Buenos Aires wife who begins her life again in the high plains relies a bit too much on the river as metaphor. But the film's views of the looming mountains are beautiful. And, in a moment of duress when Guevara's heroine is trying to choose between present family and new life, the choice to underscore the scene with the sound of a child's toy (Buzz Lightyear!) is terrific.

Elsewhere on the movie circuit: Southpaw is the latest item released as part of the Shooting Gallery's cycle of six movies. It's a dull, muddled documentary of an Irish amateur boxer. It doesn't end so much as run out of funds.

Stanley Tucci glazes 1940's New York with nostalgia in Joe Gould's Secret, another fact-based film. The story is the relationship between Joseph Mitchell (Tucci), a courtly perfectionist writer for The New Yorker, and Joe Gould, a scruffy never-was, folk-art writer, and hanger-on of the bohemian set, played with gusto by Ian Holm. Tucci the director is making deliciously long takes involving food (here it's Mitchell at the family breakfast table) a trademark.

Top Five Reasons why High Fidelity is worth your eight bucks:

1. The production design and costuming. Rob (John Cusack) hardly wears the same cool band t-shirt twice.
2. The performances of Jack Black as Barry and Todd Louiso as Dick, the record geeks who spent high school getting smacked on the back of the head.
3. The film's respect for North Side Chicago geography. Rob gives a monologue about Laura from an overpass over the Chicago River, while a drawspan looms over his head. Much of Rob's discourse with the audience is given from CTA North-South and Ravenswood trains. (And there's a quick shot of the NU Evanston campus!)
4. The killer hypereclectic soundtrack.
5. Cusack, who literally flings himself into the role of Rob.

Boy, the advance word on Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides is pretty deadly. I can't imagine that the picture is that bad. Well, yes, I can.

Houston Ballet, Dracula, music by Franz Liszt, choreography by Ben Stevenson, Opera House, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington

Act I: Whose scenario is this? Where is Van Helsing? Where is Lucy? Dracula looks a bit silly: his theme is the Dies Irae and the back of his cape makes him look like a cecropia moth.

Flying the brides with Foy gear is a bad idea. The idea of ballet is that the dancer makes the viewer believe that she can fly.

Now the brides are seated in a circle and it looks like a game of Duck Duck Goose. Renfield is the only one who has anything interesting to do here.

Act II: Much better. The corps has some ethnic dances, the ladies dressed with scarves and skirts the color of paprika. Carlos Acosta (as Frederick) (who?) ends with a rousing sequence of tours.

Act III: A reprise of Act I's melodrama.

Like last year's Killer Joe, the trailer-park/motel set and crepuscular neon lighting add a lot to the mood. In the intimate Woolly space, director Milam has a perfect ear for the awkward stop-and-go rhythms of the text. In the first half, Eric Sutton shines in his restraint of playing the semi-psychotic man-child Peter, and Kate Norris as biker/party girl R.C. is fun to watch. In the second half, Deborah Hazlett's Agnes gives plausibility to Peter's delusions. The effects in the closing scenes of the play are ambitious for W.M., and they work. But Letts has to find a way to end a play without opening bloodpacks.

The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, directed by Donald Hicken, Round House Theatre, Silver Spring, Maryland

A serviceable vehicle for Tana Hicken as Amanda Wingfield. The effects are executed with a light touch. The menagerie is on a small, low, curio stand down left, lit with a special pin spot directly overhead. A rumble of thunder is laced with the tinkle of glass from the menagerie. Maia DeSanti hits her stride in Laura's scene with Jim, the gentleman caller.

Much of the work in the Ebsworth Collection, on view at the National Gallery of Art, is second-rate stuff, but there are some bright spots:

• Wayne Thiebaud's impasto-luscious Bakery Counter from 1962
• the enigmatic Gray Rectangles (1957) of Jasper Johns, with a color texture of galvanized metal
• Chop Suey, featured in the show's publicity, a sublimely poised work from 1929 by Edward Hopper

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