Fort Greene storefront, an ad hoc gallery for community artists
Anne Hathaway as the White Queen in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland
Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter
Japanese girls shopping at Ernest Klein supermarket, midnight
Sunday morning
Archive for January, 2010
Photo diary: January 20-24, 2010
January 24, 2010From the deep archives: Kate and Anna McGarrigle
January 23, 2010I’ve been thinking about and listening to the McGarrigles a lot this week, since Kate’s death on Monday from cancer at the age of 63. Alice Playten passed along this link to a lovely interview with Terry Gross on NPR several years ago. And I posted my review for the Boston Phoenix of their third album, Pronto Monto, which came out in 1978 — not as thrilling as their first two, but hey, those were pretty great. As I say in the review, “Their perilously frail songs, their wobbly, imperfect voices, and their loose, sometimes cumbersome accompaniment make them a specialized taste, though in the best way possible; they appeal to people who are instantly engaged by a story that begins, “Just a little atom of chlorine, valence minus one . . .”
Quote of the day: DESIRE
January 23, 2010There is more to desire than just suffering. There is a yearning in desire that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can.
As the well-known contemporary Indian teacher Sri Nisargadatta, famous for sitting on a crowded street corner selling inexpensive bidis, or Indian cigarettes, once commented, “The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.” The left-handed path means opening to desire so that it becomes more than just a craving for whatever the culture has conditioned us to want. Desire is a teacher: when we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.
– Mark Epstein, from “In Defense of Desire,” Tricycle, Spring 2005
Performance diary: As You Like It at BAM
January 22, 2010
January 20 – As You Like It is, strange to say, the only major Shakespeare play I’d never seen onstage before, except indirectly via David Greenspan’s nutty She Stoops to Comedy (in which he played a lesbian actress cast as Rosalind in a regional theater production). So I decided to check out The Bridge Project’s production at BAM. I’ve been a little dubious about this project, a collaboration between BAM and the Old Vic in its second year now of combining American and British actors into one company to do two classical plays in rep directed by Sam Mendes. Their first season last year got pretty good reviews, but I gave it a pass, mainly because Ethan Hawke was in the company, and he wore me out with The Coast of Utopia. Sad to say, this production confirmed my worst fears – an extremely mediocre staging with extremely undercooked performances. First of all, what a weird play, not easy to follow or fathom in the first place. So if you’re gonna do it, how about either a) having some ideas about it or b) at least making it very clear? No such luck on either front.
OK, there were a few ideas. Mendes noticed that the first half of the play is dark, violent, not funny, dramatic in a King Lear-y way, and the second half is lighter, funnier, highly comedic and entertaining. So the production design (sets by Tom Piper, costumes by Catherine Zuber) for the first half is a relentlessly drab palette of browns and blacks, shadows, bare trees for the Forest of Arden; the second half is all colors! and brightness! and fields of tall grass! The cast includes some good New York stage actors not at their best (Christian Camargo, Ron Cephas Jones, Alvin Epstein). The quirkiest role in the play is Jaques, “a melancholy gentleman” whom Mendes makes sure we associate with any number of Chekhov’s anti-heroes, Vanya or Ivanov. He’s played by Stephen Dillane, definitely a wonderful British actor (superb in the Broadway revival of The Real Thing), and when he entered, finally there was a spark of energy onstage. But neither he nor Mendes arrived at anything specific to do with Jaques. When the various characters exiled to the forest gather around the fire to sing songs, Dillane gives Jaques a Bob Dylan croak – and just in case you didn’t get it, he pulled out a harmonica and started playing it. That level of choice is about all we got. When Rosalind (unimpressively played by Juliet Rylance) gets up in drag as Ganymede, she’s dressed to look exactly like Ellen DeGeneres – which is fine if you’re going to really play with the gay implications of the cross-dressing plotline, but nope, it’s just a sight gag. Thomas Sadoski plays the clown, Touchstone, and he grabs at whatever he can get – like fixating on the fishing line that Corin is carelessly flinging around, afraid of the hook – but nothing really coheres. Ugh. I could have done without that three hours in the theater. I’d still like to see a good production of As You Like It – maybe directed by Lisa Peterson?
From the deep archives: John Lithgow
January 22, 2010Inspired by running into him at Fela! last week, I decided to post my interview with John Lithgow from my book Caught in the Act: New York Actors Face to Face. The book, published in 1986, was a collaboration with photographer Susan Shacter, who took the fantastic portraits, including this one, which is one of my very favorites in the book.
A little piece of the interview:
“In movies, an actor has to do a great deal more, because directors aren’t accustomed to worrying about it, and their ideas are usually not very concrete. So especially if you’re going to do anything sort of unusual — use an accent or prosthetic makeup or something like that — I feel much better if I get a big head start. For instance, for Buckaroo Banzai I got these rotting pale green teeth and this shocking wig of bright red hair that I went around astonishing my friends with, and I got together with this very sweet little tailor in the MGM costume department with this fabulous thick Sicilian accent. I sat and talked with him for an hour and tape-recorded the conversation to get his accent down.”
You can read the whole interview here.
another eye opens 