Tag: Julia Roberts

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We Saw You: Pretty Woman The Musical at the Orpheum

"Pretty Woman The Musical" cast members receive a standing ovation on opening night at The Orpheum. Photo by Michael Donahue.

My sister and I were trying figure out our Top 10 list of shows we’ve seen at the Orpheum. I included Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with Richard Thomas, the recent Jesus Christ Superstar, and a production I saw years ago of Hello, Dolly! with Michele Lee. As a bonus that night, I got to meet the down-to-earth Lee, who I really liked.

But I added a new one this week: Pretty Woman The Musical, which I saw opening night, October 11th. It’s just great. The cast is amazing. The show is upbeat. It’s one of those feel-good shows in every respect.

One way I could tell I wasn’t the only one who left the theater feeling positive about life was the way everybody was being so nice to each other. They were cheerfully asking me what I thought about the play. A lot of smiles. It seemed like the majority of people out on the sidewalk were grinning and chatting away as they were about to embark in their vehicles. Nothing wrong with that.

I saw and liked the movie version of Pretty Woman starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts when it came out in 1990,  but I don’t remember much about it.

Of course, you’re going to compare the movie stars to the stage actors in the same roles. But the good thing is nobody is copying off of anybody else in the stage adaptation. Adam Pascal, who plays the uptight, money-hungry, unscrupulous, afraid-of-heights Edward Lewis, isn’t Gere. He seems more patrician, more of an old-money-looking guy than Gere’s portrayal. Both were great.

And Jessie Davidson was equally fine as Vivian Ward, the streetwalker who knows she’s supposed to be walking another path. She just doesn’t know what that path is.

The night I saw the musical was Davidson’s first official performance in the role. During the show’s standing ovation, Davidson was given flowers like her character was given flowers at various times in the show. But this time she didn’t toss them away.

Two of my favorites in Pretty Woman The Musical were the extraordinary Kyle Taylor Parker, who pops up as all different types of characters during the musical. If I’m not wrong, he got the strongest applause during the standing ovation.

It seemed like most of the cast members played a multitude of roles, changing from street people to Rodeo Drive dress shop employees to La Traviata opera singers.

I especially liked Keyonna Knight, who played the tough, funny, and tender streetwalker Kit De Luca the night I saw the musical.

And Trent Soyster, who played the “Giulio” the bellboy, made the show with every expression on his face as he reacted to whatever was going on — whether it was dancing with a mop or just realizing exactly what went on in the hotel room with Edward and Vivian the night before. He got a big round of applause, too.

Pretty Woman The Musical runs through October 16th.

Carla Davidson and Jonathan Elyashiv at “Pretty Woman The Musical” at The Orpheum (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Rachel Maxann at “Pretty Woman The Musical” at The Orpheum (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Gia Gates, June Orr, Monique Larocque, Layanna Willis at “Pretty Woman The Musical” at The Orpheum (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Diane Vescovo and Mike McLaren at “Pretty Woman The Musical” at The Orpheum (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Alice Kerley and Meggie Carrier at “Pretty Woman The Musical” at The Orpheum (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Ross Devlin and Caryn Hawkins at “Pretty Woman The Musical” at The Orpheum (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Kim Thomas and Eso Tolson at “Pretty Woman The Musical” at The Orpheum (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Ryan and Neely McDurmon at “Pretty Woman The Musical” at The Orpheum (Credit: Michael Donahue)
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Money Monster

The 2008 financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession will be remembered as the moment capitalism lost the mantle of inevitability that had kept the philosophy beyond questioning since the end of the Cold War. The financial crisis meant millions of people lost their jobs, their homes, and their dignity, and very few people really understood why. The promise of the meritocracy was that if you got a good education and worked hard, you would be rewarded with, if not always material gain commensurate with your abilities, at least stability and freedom from want. In the financial crisis, normal people who worked hard and followed the rules got punished because bankers who reward themselves hundreds of millions of dollars each year for their stewardship of the sacred markets failed to appease the dark gods of capital. I’m sure there are many wonks out there who have very good explanations for what happened, but from the ground level, it was as invisible and mysterious as black magic.

Even now, two Obama terms later, the question “Why did that have to happen?” still lingers in the American consciousness. It’s behind both the rise of Bernie Sanders and, perversely, Donald Trump, and it’s the question on the mind of Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell) as he sneaks into the studios of the Financial News Network with a pair of suicide bomb vests and an automatic pistol. Neither one of the vests are for him. They’re intended for the host of the FNN show Money Monster, Lee Gates (George Clooney) and the owner of Ibis Global Capital, Walt Camby (Dominic West), who is the scheduled guest on today’s show. Kyle lost all of his money on a “safe” investment in Ibis recommended by Gates, and now he wants to know why.

Gates is a flamboyant cable host in the mold of CNBC’s Jim Cramer. He opens every show by dancing his way into the studio with a couple of fly girls, before dispensing the latest in financial news and daily segments like “Stock Pick of the Millennium.” Gates is the kind of guy who sets a producer named Ron (Christopher Denham) off to get a tip on the FDA approval of an erectile disfunction cream, then orders Ron to try it out to see if he should recommend it on the air.

And that’s the kind of movie Money Monster is: boner cream jokes are mixed in with serious and complex economic subject matter. There’s an absurdist comedy lurking deep inside Jodie Foster’s would-be hostage thriller, giving it the same kind of schizophrenic tone as the classic film it was clearly inspired by: Network. Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 masterpiece walks the line between office romance and black-as-coal satire, but it’s the latter parts that will always live in cinematic history because they quickly came true. If anything, Money Monster is better at balancing its two competing halves, largely because of the charisma of Clooney and Julia Roberts, who plays Patty, Gates’ long-suffering producer who talks him through the hostage situation via in-ear monitor. Foster is clearly an actor’s director, as everyone gives lively performances. Roberts is tighter and more engaged than in any film in recent memory. O’Connell is sympathetic and a little dim, and Clooney walks his buffoonish anchor through the stages of fear into a heightened self-awareness and eventually a kind of heroism.

Foster and company seem to delight in putting up a cliche solution to the intractable problem of a live TV hostage situation and then shooting them down. As it wears on, it veers too far into allegory and away from the credible, but it’s still a worthy and surprising ride, and at a taut 98 minutes, it never outstays its welcome.

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Secret In Their Eyes

It’s no secret that there’s a dearth of juicy roles for women over 30 in Hollywood. Given the experienced, talented actresses available and the fact that female led films have done extremely in the box office the last few years, the only reason this inequality persists is down to the biases of the old men in charge.

Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor try to figure out what the hell is going on in Secret In Their Eyes

Unfortunately, the roles Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts get in Secret In Their Eyes may sound juicy on paper, but in practice, they’re not doing anybody any favors. Kidman plays Clare, a Los Angeles district attorney who accessorizes her business suits with clenched jaw and no-nonsense gaze. Roberts plays Jess, a high ranking police detective haunted by the death of her daughter. Their male counterpart is Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is on a leave of absence from his job as the head of security for the New York Mets.
The story takes place in two time frames. We enter in roughly the present, when Ray returns to L.A. After a 13 year absence to tell Clare and Jess he’s had a breakthrough in the cold case of the murder of Jess’ daughter Carolyn (Zoe Graham). Then we flash back to 2002, when Ray, Clare, and Jess were co-workers on the police counterterrorism squad, survieling a mosque populated by dangerous radicals. Carolyn’s body is found in the dumpster behind the mosque, which complicates the circumstances of the investigation, especially when the prime suspect turns out to be an FBI informant.

The film’s bifurcated structure is the most interesting thing about Secret In Their Eyes, but it can’t save the incredibly ham handed script. This is an adaptation of a 2009 Argentine film that won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and the adjustments to the story necessary to transport it from the days of the 1970s military junta to contemporary America render the story largely nonsensical. It’s supposed to be about three good cops whose worldviews are shaken and ethics tested when a horrible crime hits too close to home, but instead it comes off as the story of three cops who are very bad at their jobs, but keep getting promoted anyway. In an inexplicable middle passage where Ray and his old pal Bumpy (Dean Norris, playing off his Breaking Bad character) descend into a buddy cop comedy, the alleged hero of the piece completely blows the investigation by breaking into the suspect’s house without a warrant and stealing his possessions, which are then rendered inadmissible as evidence.

The strangely baseball-obsessed script takes pains to remind us that Kidman’s character is from Philadelphia, but yet she slips in an out of an Aussie accent. Ejiofor seems to be channeling Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Roberts has one note: bottomless depression, punctuated by fits of lashing out and crying. By the time we got to the first of two—count ‘em, two!—big twist endings, the audience I saw the film with was openly laughing, which I don’t think was the emotional response director Billy Ray was trying to evoke. It’s never a good sign when my notes for a movie include the word “shitshow” with two underlines, but it certainly applies here. 

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Cibo Pizza’s Mystery Sign

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In the March issue of Memphis magazine, I gathered the children around me and told them the beautiful, inspiring, and ultimately heartrending tale of Cibo’s Pizza. The story was so compelling that now Hollywood has come a’calling, and I’m presently reviewing several scripts for a movie to be called Searching for Cibo, with Johnny Depp slated to play the lovelorn chef, and … well, I won’t give it away. But let’s just say that Julia Roberts was such a hit in Mystic Pizza that it seems (to me, anyway) a natural career move for her to star in another pizza movie. It can only help her.

For those of you who have yet to to read the March column, Cibo was a short-lived pizza chain in Memphis, and in my typically thorough telling-you-more-than-you-asked manner, I even tracked down the addresses of all the branches in town. According to old telephone directories, one of them was located at 4495 Summer, close to Perkins. But they all closed years ago.

So what am I to make of this photograph, submitted by my pal Pat Rohrbacher, showing a genuine old Cibo’s sign mounted on a pole behind Grahamwood Cleaners, close to the intersection of Summer and Graham, which is quite a long way from Perkins? As far as I know, no Cibo’s was ever located here. Furthermore, the sign isn’t even visible from either Summer or Graham.

Now, just as soon as I can borrow a quarter for the pay phone, I’ll call the folks at Grahamwood Cleaners to see what they know about it. I’m pretty sure I dropped some change in the sofa here . . .