Thursday, July 20, 2006
See the Prairie Home Companion movie and meet in person the radio characters you have heard for years
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
This will not go down as one of Robert Altman’s great movies, but it does have a special significance for those of us who have treasured A Prairie Home Companion on Public Radio over the years (32 at last count), both enjoying and sometimes getting peeved with Garrison Keillor, like a smartass [SMARTYPANTS, SNOOT/SMARTNOSE IF YOU HAVE TO EDIT??????] capricious child. Public Radio’s WNYC station is a local favorite, and the station has cared for the neighborhood, notably the Stuyvesant Square area, about which some of us have spoken on the Leonard Lopate interview program.. As to how the PHC author, GK as he is called on the set, feels about the show and the audience, see the movie.
The theme of the movie is that the APHC’s home base, Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota (named for the writer, a native) has been sold to a Texan parking lot investor, and the show must fold. All the regulars are there for the last show. This is a charmer from the getgo, with GK intoning the old mantra, News From Lake Wobegon, “where the women are strong, the men good-looking and the children above average,” and masses of country-style performers flowing about the opening scene, talking over each other, sort of a Nashville thing you’d expect from Altman. Then it parts company from the standard radio format, with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin imposing their own flavor, as a talkative show business singer family, Yolanda and Rhonda, the Johnson Sisters (Streep once tried for opera), pining for their ma and the old days, and Lindsay Lohan as Streep’s bored teenager who writes poems about suicide.
Singing acts follow each other, not losing the tempo when Molly the pregnant stage manager (Maya Rudolph) drops the script portfolio during a commercial for duct tape (a PHC standard) and GK must improvise, involving Tom Keith the show’s sound effects virtuoso, who successfully accompanies the presenter’s imaginary voyage with creaking door, ghost, storm, jungle and animal sounds, until a discombobulated Yolanda (Meryl Streep) takes over and serves up such a farrago of images that the maestro must fold. But by then the script turns up and all is well.
A major player, Guy Noir, a Chandleresque private eye (“it is a dark night in the city that knows how to keep its secrets, where on the 12th floor of the Acme Building a man struggles with life’s everlasting questions”), the show’s security officer (“only temporary, owing to a case of the shorts”) played by Kevin Kline, discovers a strange woman in white (Virginia Madsen) walking through the theatre, an angel, and hopes that she may prevent the closing. But the omens are there, when Chuck Akers (L. Q. Jones), an old-time singer, dies in his dressing room.
Dusty and Lefty the APHC’s philosophical cowboys, a poet and a chaser, played Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly, turn up as singing cowboys, using the occasion of the closing to let fly with their best collection of dirty story songs, much to the discomfort of the stage manager, played by PHC regular Tim Russell, GK’s foil in the radio show’s Dusty & Lefty and Noir/barkeep dialogues, and grand master of accents and impersonations (President Bush, Maurice the snooty headwaiter). Another all-around actor, Sue Scott, who plays the sultriest mezzo-voiced temptress in the Guy Noir episodes, as well as the indifferent wife in the Catchup Advisory Board dialogues with GK, also alternating as his multi – voiced singing duet partner, was hidden as a yenta-ish hairdresser helping the players get their acts together and telling the lumbering GK walking up on the stage to zip up – or was that Molly? The sleep-wandering PHC spirit is catching.
To continue with the show’s regulars hidden in faceless roles - Rich Dworsky is in the background, leading the stage All-Star Shoe Band in perfect music accompaniment, looking like a backwoods Einstein; Pat Donohue the great all-purpose guitarist and sometime vocalist is doing his usual, unidentified, as are the violinist and sax player Andy Stein, bass man Gary Raynor and drummer Arnie Kinsella.
The first half of the show is a total charmer, until the Texan turns up and starts criticising APHC from the sponsor’s box, and the acts start repeating, or so it seems, and the angel pulls its strings. But the theatre does go down, and goodness knows who else, when the angel once more enters the final scene. Roger ZaLeznick, the co-author of the show, was once a writer of an angel serial, so go figure.
Having gone from seeing Meryl Streep as the totally believable chatty and slovenly country singer to the urbane executive terror of the fashion magazine world, in The Devil Wears Prada, just a week later, I am struck by her ability to change her persona. Not unexpected, it is just the suddenness. Both movies stayed with me for days, particularly the latter, because of its recapitulation of life as we know it in the big city. Happily, both were pleasurable and positive, upbeat counterfoils to the depressing real world news.
This will not go down as one of Robert Altman’s great movies, but it does have a special significance for those of us who have treasured A Prairie Home Companion on Public Radio over the years (32 at last count), both enjoying and sometimes getting peeved with Garrison Keillor, like a smartass [SMARTYPANTS, SNOOT/SMARTNOSE IF YOU HAVE TO EDIT??????] capricious child. Public Radio’s WNYC station is a local favorite, and the station has cared for the neighborhood, notably the Stuyvesant Square area, about which some of us have spoken on the Leonard Lopate interview program.. As to how the PHC author, GK as he is called on the set, feels about the show and the audience, see the movie.
The theme of the movie is that the APHC’s home base, Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota (named for the writer, a native) has been sold to a Texan parking lot investor, and the show must fold. All the regulars are there for the last show. This is a charmer from the getgo, with GK intoning the old mantra, News From Lake Wobegon, “where the women are strong, the men good-looking and the children above average,” and masses of country-style performers flowing about the opening scene, talking over each other, sort of a Nashville thing you’d expect from Altman. Then it parts company from the standard radio format, with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin imposing their own flavor, as a talkative show business singer family, Yolanda and Rhonda, the Johnson Sisters (Streep once tried for opera), pining for their ma and the old days, and Lindsay Lohan as Streep’s bored teenager who writes poems about suicide.
Singing acts follow each other, not losing the tempo when Molly the pregnant stage manager (Maya Rudolph) drops the script portfolio during a commercial for duct tape (a PHC standard) and GK must improvise, involving Tom Keith the show’s sound effects virtuoso, who successfully accompanies the presenter’s imaginary voyage with creaking door, ghost, storm, jungle and animal sounds, until a discombobulated Yolanda (Meryl Streep) takes over and serves up such a farrago of images that the maestro must fold. But by then the script turns up and all is well.
A major player, Guy Noir, a Chandleresque private eye (“it is a dark night in the city that knows how to keep its secrets, where on the 12th floor of the Acme Building a man struggles with life’s everlasting questions”), the show’s security officer (“only temporary, owing to a case of the shorts”) played by Kevin Kline, discovers a strange woman in white (Virginia Madsen) walking through the theatre, an angel, and hopes that she may prevent the closing. But the omens are there, when Chuck Akers (L. Q. Jones), an old-time singer, dies in his dressing room.
Dusty and Lefty the APHC’s philosophical cowboys, a poet and a chaser, played Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly, turn up as singing cowboys, using the occasion of the closing to let fly with their best collection of dirty story songs, much to the discomfort of the stage manager, played by PHC regular Tim Russell, GK’s foil in the radio show’s Dusty & Lefty and Noir/barkeep dialogues, and grand master of accents and impersonations (President Bush, Maurice the snooty headwaiter). Another all-around actor, Sue Scott, who plays the sultriest mezzo-voiced temptress in the Guy Noir episodes, as well as the indifferent wife in the Catchup Advisory Board dialogues with GK, also alternating as his multi – voiced singing duet partner, was hidden as a yenta-ish hairdresser helping the players get their acts together and telling the lumbering GK walking up on the stage to zip up – or was that Molly? The sleep-wandering PHC spirit is catching.
To continue with the show’s regulars hidden in faceless roles - Rich Dworsky is in the background, leading the stage All-Star Shoe Band in perfect music accompaniment, looking like a backwoods Einstein; Pat Donohue the great all-purpose guitarist and sometime vocalist is doing his usual, unidentified, as are the violinist and sax player Andy Stein, bass man Gary Raynor and drummer Arnie Kinsella.
The first half of the show is a total charmer, until the Texan turns up and starts criticising APHC from the sponsor’s box, and the acts start repeating, or so it seems, and the angel pulls its strings. But the theatre does go down, and goodness knows who else, when the angel once more enters the final scene. Roger ZaLeznick, the co-author of the show, was once a writer of an angel serial, so go figure.
Having gone from seeing Meryl Streep as the totally believable chatty and slovenly country singer to the urbane executive terror of the fashion magazine world, in The Devil Wears Prada, just a week later, I am struck by her ability to change her persona. Not unexpected, it is just the suddenness. Both movies stayed with me for days, particularly the latter, because of its recapitulation of life as we know it in the big city. Happily, both were pleasurable and positive, upbeat counterfoils to the depressing real world news.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 11:32 AM 
