Thursday, October 17, 2002
Our big fat Greek celebration week
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Steven Spielberg, Farelly Bros, Coen Bros, eat your hearts out. "My Big
Fat Greek Wedding," a $5M movie released in April has earned $135M, nearly all by word of
mouth, and a friend in NJ tells in serow how the theatre was sold out and his family
did not get in during the last weekend in September, 6 months after release. This old-fashioned movie just speaks to people's desire to see upbeat, regular family themes, stuff you can feel happy about.
If you haven't heard of it, the plot is simple. An aging Greek restaurant owner's daughter
and a shy Wasp schoolteacher fall in live and eventually get married, with all the heartaches,
trials, family resistance, cultural differences and humor that goes with it. As to the funny and
touching portrayal of Greeks as history- proud, clannish, almost tribal, listen to my colleague Jackie, a young Hispanic woman from Astoria who got married to Tony, a Greek Orthodox faithful, about a year ago:
"Unlike Ian in the movie, I did not have to wear a bathing suit and get dunked in a church basin to get baptized before the wedding. Since I'm Catholic, my obligatory Greek Orthodox baptismal (oh, no question about it!) was simple. I wore a white dress and white everything else, and the Archimandrite rubbed holy oil on my wrists, knees and neck.
"When we got married, my mother- in-law gave me a stone to wear, to ward off the evil eye, mati. My girlfriends did not spit on me for luck, although they do a little pft, pft habitually, to ward off evil spirits - you should hear them when someone enthuses over a new baby. [This is an old European superstition, Germans say "unberufen," Jews say "kinehora," some of us knock on wood. Italians give the signal of mano cornuto, index and little finger extended, secretly, against the maloccho, or wear an amulet - although the same symbol stands for cornuto, the betrayed spouse. The Irish wear a shamrock.]
"As to dancing, we had a Greek band (a deejay came on later), and they played the Kalamatino, a circle dance, what I call a twelve step, for 15 minutes continuously, after the ceremony. Tony and I started, then everyone joined in. Even Tony's grandmother, who always wore black (Greek
widows and mothers who have lost sons do, you know) did a turning dance, arms above her head, with everyone else.
"There are lots of different Greek circle dances and steps, you learn them when you grow up in Astoria, even when you are not Greek. Everything is painted blue, also in the church. Greek priests can get married, but that limits their progress in the hierarchy. My Archimandrite was a monk."
A professional movie man who teaches at the Tish School tells me that this movie, best
he's seen in six months, was a fluke that cannot recur. Made for almost no money, in movie terms, and released in March, it died. The producers hoped to make their money back, and not much else. It came about when Tom Hanks's wife Rita Wilson saw a one-person show about a Greek woman's life, written and performed by Nia Vardalos, and asked her to expand it to a script. The Hanks group signed on Joel Zwick, a TV serials director, and went on, withthe author playing the heroine, Toula Portokoulos, Lainie Kazan as her earthly mother, Andrea Martin as explosive Aunt Voula and John Corbett as the milquetoast groom. Michael Constantine in the role of the father, who cures everything, from a scratch to a head cold , with a spray of Windex, gave the performance of his life. The movie, released just before the Greek Lent, when life slows down for the Quadragesimal (forty days), but then it took off slowly, with modest promotion in the Greek communities, city by city.
It sort of gives one faith in the good taste and morality of the American public, noting the
garbage that market research says we like. You do not need total frontal exposure, body bags, horror and weird visual effects for public appeal, clean upbeat funny story and hopeful morality is still part of our lives. Bravo for us!
To complete our Greek week, we saw a revival of a Rodgers and Hart 1938 oldie musical, "The Boys From Syracuse," in a rare revival, at the Roundabout 42nd Street American Airlines theatre. It is based on Shakespeare's "Comedy Of Errors," about a set of twin boys and their twin serving slaves, separated by a shipwreck, and trying to find each other. This is a much broader farce, not truly Greek, livened up by singing and dancing courtesans in Ephesus, a city that executes visitors from competing Syracuse, unless they pay a bounty.
The first act is sort of dull, with two famous tunes, "Falling in Love with Love" and "This Can't Be Love" barely making a difference. But the second livens up, with two lesser melodies, "Come with me where the food is fine and the landlord never calls," a Gilbert & Sullivan-esque paean for life in jail, and the courtesans' "Sing for your supper, and you'll get breakfast, songbirds always eat," another hymn in a series of scenes debunking lies and evasions in married life.
Rodgers and Hart did 15 musicals. Richard Rodgers, subsequently with Hammerstein and some other librettists, was the composer of 40 musicals, a staggering sum. Rossini created 38 operas, with two surviving. Rodgers did a lot better. We too are the better for it. Take a trip to your local theatre, movie or stage, else the terrorists win.
To top off the Greek extravaganza, we visited a typically ethnic Greek diner. Wish I could report on a fabulous calorific ethnic dish, but I chickened out. Had roasted fowl, on a bed of lettuce, for my sins. I'm thinking of a personal dietary Quadragesimal, else the calories win.
Steven Spielberg, Farelly Bros, Coen Bros, eat your hearts out. "My Big
Fat Greek Wedding," a $5M movie released in April has earned $135M, nearly all by word of
mouth, and a friend in NJ tells in serow how the theatre was sold out and his family
did not get in during the last weekend in September, 6 months after release. This old-fashioned movie just speaks to people's desire to see upbeat, regular family themes, stuff you can feel happy about.
If you haven't heard of it, the plot is simple. An aging Greek restaurant owner's daughter
and a shy Wasp schoolteacher fall in live and eventually get married, with all the heartaches,
trials, family resistance, cultural differences and humor that goes with it. As to the funny and
touching portrayal of Greeks as history- proud, clannish, almost tribal, listen to my colleague Jackie, a young Hispanic woman from Astoria who got married to Tony, a Greek Orthodox faithful, about a year ago:
"Unlike Ian in the movie, I did not have to wear a bathing suit and get dunked in a church basin to get baptized before the wedding. Since I'm Catholic, my obligatory Greek Orthodox baptismal (oh, no question about it!) was simple. I wore a white dress and white everything else, and the Archimandrite rubbed holy oil on my wrists, knees and neck.
"When we got married, my mother- in-law gave me a stone to wear, to ward off the evil eye, mati. My girlfriends did not spit on me for luck, although they do a little pft, pft habitually, to ward off evil spirits - you should hear them when someone enthuses over a new baby. [This is an old European superstition, Germans say "unberufen," Jews say "kinehora," some of us knock on wood. Italians give the signal of mano cornuto, index and little finger extended, secretly, against the maloccho, or wear an amulet - although the same symbol stands for cornuto, the betrayed spouse. The Irish wear a shamrock.]
"As to dancing, we had a Greek band (a deejay came on later), and they played the Kalamatino, a circle dance, what I call a twelve step, for 15 minutes continuously, after the ceremony. Tony and I started, then everyone joined in. Even Tony's grandmother, who always wore black (Greek
widows and mothers who have lost sons do, you know) did a turning dance, arms above her head, with everyone else.
"There are lots of different Greek circle dances and steps, you learn them when you grow up in Astoria, even when you are not Greek. Everything is painted blue, also in the church. Greek priests can get married, but that limits their progress in the hierarchy. My Archimandrite was a monk."
A professional movie man who teaches at the Tish School tells me that this movie, best
he's seen in six months, was a fluke that cannot recur. Made for almost no money, in movie terms, and released in March, it died. The producers hoped to make their money back, and not much else. It came about when Tom Hanks's wife Rita Wilson saw a one-person show about a Greek woman's life, written and performed by Nia Vardalos, and asked her to expand it to a script. The Hanks group signed on Joel Zwick, a TV serials director, and went on, withthe author playing the heroine, Toula Portokoulos, Lainie Kazan as her earthly mother, Andrea Martin as explosive Aunt Voula and John Corbett as the milquetoast groom. Michael Constantine in the role of the father, who cures everything, from a scratch to a head cold , with a spray of Windex, gave the performance of his life. The movie, released just before the Greek Lent, when life slows down for the Quadragesimal (forty days), but then it took off slowly, with modest promotion in the Greek communities, city by city.
It sort of gives one faith in the good taste and morality of the American public, noting the
garbage that market research says we like. You do not need total frontal exposure, body bags, horror and weird visual effects for public appeal, clean upbeat funny story and hopeful morality is still part of our lives. Bravo for us!
To complete our Greek week, we saw a revival of a Rodgers and Hart 1938 oldie musical, "The Boys From Syracuse," in a rare revival, at the Roundabout 42nd Street American Airlines theatre. It is based on Shakespeare's "Comedy Of Errors," about a set of twin boys and their twin serving slaves, separated by a shipwreck, and trying to find each other. This is a much broader farce, not truly Greek, livened up by singing and dancing courtesans in Ephesus, a city that executes visitors from competing Syracuse, unless they pay a bounty.
The first act is sort of dull, with two famous tunes, "Falling in Love with Love" and "This Can't Be Love" barely making a difference. But the second livens up, with two lesser melodies, "Come with me where the food is fine and the landlord never calls," a Gilbert & Sullivan-esque paean for life in jail, and the courtesans' "Sing for your supper, and you'll get breakfast, songbirds always eat," another hymn in a series of scenes debunking lies and evasions in married life.
Rodgers and Hart did 15 musicals. Richard Rodgers, subsequently with Hammerstein and some other librettists, was the composer of 40 musicals, a staggering sum. Rossini created 38 operas, with two surviving. Rodgers did a lot better. We too are the better for it. Take a trip to your local theatre, movie or stage, else the terrorists win.
To top off the Greek extravaganza, we visited a typically ethnic Greek diner. Wish I could report on a fabulous calorific ethnic dish, but I chickened out. Had roasted fowl, on a bed of lettuce, for my sins. I'm thinking of a personal dietary Quadragesimal, else the calories win.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:30 PM 
