Thursday, July 21, 2011
Good news in demand
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Overwhelmed by worries about the US budget deficit and continuing unemployment, this writer has decided to devote more of his and your time on pleasant things, starting with the movies and musicals that have made him feel good in the spring season of 2011.
In theatre, the foremost was a revival of the 1950 Tony Award winner, Guys and Dolls, at the Barrington Stages, a summer theatre since 1990 or so in Sheffield, MA to which we were devoted until they moved to Pittsfield, MA, more of a trip. However, we could not miss G&D, the wonderful musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loeffler, based on two short stories and Broadway characters created by the legendary newspaperwriter Damon Runyon. The book, by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows , deals with the money troubles of Nathan Detroit, proprietor of the permanent floating crap game, who’s run out of locations and cash for bribes. To regain some, he persuades the gamble-on- anything ladies man Sky Masterson to try and seduce the forthright Sergeant Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army to fly to Havana for a night (they do) while he sneaks in to use the mission quarters for a game. Straightened out by love, Sky leads the gamblers back into the mission, to confess, culminated by singing Sit down, Your’e Rockin’ the Boat, led by Nicely-Nicely Johnson. The love ballads If I Were a Bell, My Time of Day, are a joy, and Luck be a Lady, A Bushel and a Peck, and the overture tune, I’ve Got a Horse Right Here, The Name is Paul Revere have the audience singing along, quietly (the high school kids at this matinee must have had an intro lesson) .
Another musical with a mission subject, dating back to 1932, Anything Goes, music by Cole Porter, has a distinguished authorship, by Guy Bolton and P, G. Wodehouse, refreshed for stage by Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsey, without losing any of its goofiness and improbability. A Wall Street novice, Billy Crocker, in love with a debutante heiress Hope Harcourt, who’s engaged to a loony British lord. Billy hides on their ocean liner, bound for London, He is abetted by a chanteuse working the cruise, Rene Sweeney (Sutton Foster, great) and a phony preacher, the gambler Moonface Martin (impish Joel Grey, another perfect match) who also intends to work the cruise, as a gambler. Billy and Moonface are tagged as Public Enemies No1 and 13 and become shipboard celebrities, and Billy and the lord are eventually married by the captain to their respective newfound sweethearts. The plot grows more improbable as we go along, but all the crazinesses are compensated by the great songs, which include You’re the Top, I Get a Kick Out Of You, The Gypsy In Me, and Friendship. We all walked out with songs in our hearts.
In movies the best was Midnight in Paris, another nostalgia miracle, by Woody Allen, about a Hollywood scriptwriter, in the City of Dreams with his shopping minded sweetheart, who gets transported 80 years back at midnight at a certain corner when the churchbell rings, and has nighttime adventures with F. Scott Fitzgerald, his Zelda ( saving her from suiciding), Cole Porter, and meets Ernest Hemingway who passes the screenwriter’s novel manuscript to Gertrude Stein for review. He falls in love with one of Pablo Picasso’s girlfriends (she also had lived with Modigliani). He finds himself described in a book she wrote, which he buys front a Seine-side boquiniste, and tries to move his new artist friends, to change history. The outcome is indefinite, but the movie is a joy.
I also have a warning. My next movie, Bad Teacher, is anything but a joy. It is an excursion into humor by Cameron Diaz, best known for babe roles. You get a clue for her new direction early on, when her character, Elizabeth, confides to an interlocutor that she went into teaching for the best reasons: easy work, no responsibility, no controls, and good pay and free summers. But a rich fiancée dumped her, and we get to see Elizabeth in her true colors, a faker who drinks and takes drugs, shows movies instead to teaching, solicits bribes for grades, blackmails administrators. She fits every worst stereotype one has ever heard about the honorable profession. In this politically paranoid environment one could almost believe that this is a campaign motivated work, justifying the driven politicians who want to save budgets by firing educators. The screenwriters involved formerly wrote for The Office, the TV serial feeding on abuses we encounter at work. Try to stay away from this ostensible exercise in sarcasm; it will make any viewer connected with education sickened.
There’s no space left for concerts, except to mention that hundreds of events take place in our parks; Google NYC and events/concerts. Particularly joyful was a free concert in Rockefeller Park, way south, in hard to access Battery City, put together as part of the River to River Festival by café singers John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey in celebration of Jonathan Schwartz, now 73, the radio personality who for decades has put together marathon classical pop music concerts on Saturdays and Sundays, most recently on WNYC. It brought together volunteer performers, from jazz pianists Bill Charlap and Tony Monte , violinist Aaron Weinstein, to singers Rebecca Kilgore and Tierney Sutton. Schwartz, best known here for his expertise in Frank Sinatra songs, was lauded for putting on the map little known performers of quality. The concert was interrupted by a sudden rain downpour that sent performers and stagehands scurrying to save the venerable concert grand, and pushed most of the two or three hundred enthusiasts under the trees for protection. With some mist still in the air, Pizzarelli brought out his guitar to haul everybody back to seats, with a sing-along potpourri of Pennies from Heaven, I’m John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith and This Land is Your Land. Surprisingly, everybody knew the words.
A final Parks joy: visiting the Pavilion in Union Square Park some afternoon, when you hear Latin music, you may find the tango dancers in action, 30 or so women and men of all ages , races and apparel, seriously practicing the art. It is a polite serious group, of study and pleasure, where people bow to each other. Good manners in public, what a gracious peer group.
Finally, congratulations to the Japanese women, winners of World Soccer Cup. It has been my contention for a long time that it will take the equalization of the status of women for the world to turn normal.
Wally Dobelis thanks a nice lady, Jenny, who lent him her spare collapsible chair at the concert.
Overwhelmed by worries about the US budget deficit and continuing unemployment, this writer has decided to devote more of his and your time on pleasant things, starting with the movies and musicals that have made him feel good in the spring season of 2011.
In theatre, the foremost was a revival of the 1950 Tony Award winner, Guys and Dolls, at the Barrington Stages, a summer theatre since 1990 or so in Sheffield, MA to which we were devoted until they moved to Pittsfield, MA, more of a trip. However, we could not miss G&D, the wonderful musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loeffler, based on two short stories and Broadway characters created by the legendary newspaperwriter Damon Runyon. The book, by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows , deals with the money troubles of Nathan Detroit, proprietor of the permanent floating crap game, who’s run out of locations and cash for bribes. To regain some, he persuades the gamble-on- anything ladies man Sky Masterson to try and seduce the forthright Sergeant Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army to fly to Havana for a night (they do) while he sneaks in to use the mission quarters for a game. Straightened out by love, Sky leads the gamblers back into the mission, to confess, culminated by singing Sit down, Your’e Rockin’ the Boat, led by Nicely-Nicely Johnson. The love ballads If I Were a Bell, My Time of Day, are a joy, and Luck be a Lady, A Bushel and a Peck, and the overture tune, I’ve Got a Horse Right Here, The Name is Paul Revere have the audience singing along, quietly (the high school kids at this matinee must have had an intro lesson) .
Another musical with a mission subject, dating back to 1932, Anything Goes, music by Cole Porter, has a distinguished authorship, by Guy Bolton and P, G. Wodehouse, refreshed for stage by Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsey, without losing any of its goofiness and improbability. A Wall Street novice, Billy Crocker, in love with a debutante heiress Hope Harcourt, who’s engaged to a loony British lord. Billy hides on their ocean liner, bound for London, He is abetted by a chanteuse working the cruise, Rene Sweeney (Sutton Foster, great) and a phony preacher, the gambler Moonface Martin (impish Joel Grey, another perfect match) who also intends to work the cruise, as a gambler. Billy and Moonface are tagged as Public Enemies No1 and 13 and become shipboard celebrities, and Billy and the lord are eventually married by the captain to their respective newfound sweethearts. The plot grows more improbable as we go along, but all the crazinesses are compensated by the great songs, which include You’re the Top, I Get a Kick Out Of You, The Gypsy In Me, and Friendship. We all walked out with songs in our hearts.
In movies the best was Midnight in Paris, another nostalgia miracle, by Woody Allen, about a Hollywood scriptwriter, in the City of Dreams with his shopping minded sweetheart, who gets transported 80 years back at midnight at a certain corner when the churchbell rings, and has nighttime adventures with F. Scott Fitzgerald, his Zelda ( saving her from suiciding), Cole Porter, and meets Ernest Hemingway who passes the screenwriter’s novel manuscript to Gertrude Stein for review. He falls in love with one of Pablo Picasso’s girlfriends (she also had lived with Modigliani). He finds himself described in a book she wrote, which he buys front a Seine-side boquiniste, and tries to move his new artist friends, to change history. The outcome is indefinite, but the movie is a joy.
I also have a warning. My next movie, Bad Teacher, is anything but a joy. It is an excursion into humor by Cameron Diaz, best known for babe roles. You get a clue for her new direction early on, when her character, Elizabeth, confides to an interlocutor that she went into teaching for the best reasons: easy work, no responsibility, no controls, and good pay and free summers. But a rich fiancée dumped her, and we get to see Elizabeth in her true colors, a faker who drinks and takes drugs, shows movies instead to teaching, solicits bribes for grades, blackmails administrators. She fits every worst stereotype one has ever heard about the honorable profession. In this politically paranoid environment one could almost believe that this is a campaign motivated work, justifying the driven politicians who want to save budgets by firing educators. The screenwriters involved formerly wrote for The Office, the TV serial feeding on abuses we encounter at work. Try to stay away from this ostensible exercise in sarcasm; it will make any viewer connected with education sickened.
There’s no space left for concerts, except to mention that hundreds of events take place in our parks; Google NYC and events/concerts. Particularly joyful was a free concert in Rockefeller Park, way south, in hard to access Battery City, put together as part of the River to River Festival by café singers John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey in celebration of Jonathan Schwartz, now 73, the radio personality who for decades has put together marathon classical pop music concerts on Saturdays and Sundays, most recently on WNYC. It brought together volunteer performers, from jazz pianists Bill Charlap and Tony Monte , violinist Aaron Weinstein, to singers Rebecca Kilgore and Tierney Sutton. Schwartz, best known here for his expertise in Frank Sinatra songs, was lauded for putting on the map little known performers of quality. The concert was interrupted by a sudden rain downpour that sent performers and stagehands scurrying to save the venerable concert grand, and pushed most of the two or three hundred enthusiasts under the trees for protection. With some mist still in the air, Pizzarelli brought out his guitar to haul everybody back to seats, with a sing-along potpourri of Pennies from Heaven, I’m John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith and This Land is Your Land. Surprisingly, everybody knew the words.
A final Parks joy: visiting the Pavilion in Union Square Park some afternoon, when you hear Latin music, you may find the tango dancers in action, 30 or so women and men of all ages , races and apparel, seriously practicing the art. It is a polite serious group, of study and pleasure, where people bow to each other. Good manners in public, what a gracious peer group.
Finally, congratulations to the Japanese women, winners of World Soccer Cup. It has been my contention for a long time that it will take the equalization of the status of women for the world to turn normal.
Wally Dobelis thanks a nice lady, Jenny, who lent him her spare collapsible chair at the concert.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 8:15 AM 
