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Film Features Film/TV

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

David (Julian Hilliard) wrestles with a demonic waterbed in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.

Ed and Lorraine Warren were a pair of good, old fashioned American hucksters who teamed up as investigators of the paranormal. He was a self-taught demonologist, and she a medium. They ran a museum devoted to occult and paranormal artifacts out of their home in Monroe, Connecticut, which began with a creepy doll named Annabelle, which was allegedly possessed. They made a name for themselves investigating the New York haunted house case that inspired the 1979 frightener The Amityville Horror. 

The ’70s provided the perfect environment for the Warrens’ brand of Roman Catholic-flavored scary stories, thanks to the huge popularity of The Exorcist. One could argue that it was William Friedkin’s 1973 film, not Jaws, that heralded the beginning of the modern blockbuster era. Friedkin’s technique is unstoppable. The arresting combination of the innocent-looking Regan, played by Academy Award nominee Linda Blair, and the deep voice of the foul-mouthed demon who possesses her, is just one example of the tricks that have been endlessly lifted from The Exorcist. But it’s the story’s mining of the deep history of Christian paranoia about demons and witchcraft that helped it resonate so deeply with audiences. 

The Warrens rode the wave of Exorcist-inspired interest in possessions and hauntings to investigate more than 10,000 cases over their career. They achieved another level of fame in 2013 when director James Wan adapted the story of one of their more lurid early investigations into The Conjuring. Wan, who these days is working on his Aquaman sequel, served up watered-down Friedkin to spectacular results. The Conjuring turned into a seven-film, $2 billion franchise for Warner Bros. 

Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as freelance demonologists Lorraine and Ed Warren.

The Devil Made Me Do It, the eighth film in the series, is helmed by Michael Chaves, who directed the sixth installment, The Curse of Llorona. The story cold opens with Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) attending to young David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard), who shows all the Friedkin-inspired signs of possession: a foul mouth, horrible contortionist moves, and the classic blood shower. When the young priest arrives and things get heated, the demon causes Ed to have a heart attack. As he’s fading from consciousness, he sees David’s brother Arne (Ruairi O’Connor) implore the demon to “take me instead!” Protip: Don’t say that to a demon, unless you’re willing to take on a new, very messy tenant in your head. 

David is saved, but Arne starts getting mysterious spirited visitors. Then, when partying with his girlfriend Debbie (Sarah Catherine Hook) and his creepy landlord Bruno (Ronnie Gene Blevins), David blacks out and stabs Bruno 22 times. The Warrens insist that David is innocent by reason of demonic possession, an unorthodox defense anywhere outside of the Salem Witch trials, and set out to discover why these pesky demons are making this wholesome white family do bad things. 

The Devil Made Me Do It resembles nothing more than an overly long, particularly lame episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After finding a “witch’s totem” in the crawlspace of the Glatzel home, they consult a former priest named Kastner (John Noble) who went a little crazy investigating the pseudo-satanic Ram cult. Then, there’s lots of standing before Ed’s conspiracy theorist yarn wall looking for connections that can only loosely be called “clues,” before settling onto a hypothesis that involves, you guessed it, a witch. 

Like all the Conjuring movies, this one is allegedly based on a true story from the Warrens’ archives. But what does “true” really mean with unreliable narrators like these? The Warrens’ brand of demon mumbo-jumbo plays into the need for people to have someone else to blame for the evil that men do. It’s not harmless: In the ’80s, the Satanic Panic ruined thousands of people’s lives searching for child-abusing devil cults that didn’t exist. You can see the echoes of it in the pseudo-religious overtones of the Q conspiracists, who paint their political opponents with accusations of devil-worshipping pedophilia. But there’s no need to resort to demonic possession to explain heart attacks, child sexual abuse, or a drunk guy murdering his landlord who he thought he was coming onto his girlfriend. 

Yes, the Warrens made it up, but so what? Made-up stuff makes for good movies, and truth be told, I would be down with all of it if The Devil Made Me Do It wasn’t such a frightful bore. Wilson and Farmiga are phoning it in at this point, and, with the exception of Hilliard, who conjures a few sparks as the young possession victim, they’re the best actors on the screen. The visuals are lazy Exorcist retreads, and why does it seem to be so hard for big budget movies to get a decent sound mix these day? The Devil Made Me Do It is dreadful, but not in a good way. 

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is now playing at multiple locations, and streaming on HBO Max.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Playhouse On The Square Invites You To The Cabaret

The cast of Cabaret, Playhouse on the Square

“No use permitting some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away
Life is a cabaret, old chum
So come to the cabaret”
— “Cabaret”

I posted some thoughts about Cabaret‘s nearly infuriating relevance last week. It was a kind of preview for Playhouse on the Square’s opening. Only, instead of looking behind the scenes, it went behind the text to ask where all the Nazis came from. And, by extension, I wanted to know where America’s Nazis went when the U.S. entered WWII and the national narrative turned against them.

As musical theater rollouts go, it was a pretty bleak exercise. But even a week ago, I don’t think I could have anticipated the kinds of headlines I’d wake up to on the morning I sat down to write the review. Twitter was full of news about racism, misogyny, drunkenness, sexual exhibitionism and drug use inside Tennessee’s GOP leadership — rot in the head of an organization so grotesque it wouldn’t hear, let alone approve, a 2018 proposal to condemn Nazis and white supremacy. But the headline that really got my attention was this: “Man Patrolling With Border Militia Suggested Going ‘Back To Hitler Days.”
“Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them?”  Armando Gonzalez was quoted as saying. “We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber.”

That’s a lot to deal with at the top of a review, but hard to ignore given Cabaret’s subject matter and Playhouse on the Square’s sometimes very brave and sometimes ragged interpretation of material that stubbornly refuses to become nostalgia.

As taught in schools, history is the story of great men, noble ideas, and the march of progress. But history is a horror show that we live inside and can’t escape. It’s a theme we see even in mainstream entertainments these days, and in that vein, Cabaret director Dave Landis effectively takes us “back to the Hitler days.”  His Cabaret bends the all the weirdness and decadence of Berlin’s club scene toward hallucinogenic nightmare. 

Inspired by I Am A Camera, I’ve previously written how Cabaret, shows three snapshots of Germany during Hitler’s rise to power: a sentimental Berlin, a decadent Berlin, and the Berlin where Nazis multiply and metastasize. The first pictures win out hearts and other parts before the last one comes into focus.

We experience these pictures through the eyes of Cliff (Donald Sutton), a writer visiting Weimar Germany, looking for inspiration. The young American gets more than he bargained for when he comes into the orbit of British expatriate and club singer Sally Bowles. With lighting that lands on the audience like a cutting remark and action that breaks the fourth walls at will, this interpretation of the book borrows ideas from expressionist theater, vintage German agitprop and probably Babylon Berlin, but with a considerably smaller budget.

As Bowles, Whitney Branan is more Lotte Lenya than Liza Minnelli. She lets her voice go ugly, and I mean it in the best way possible. She slings sound like a hammer or a razor. It’s the perfect tool for a character who flourishes in the midst of disaster because she’s more Mother Courage than meets the eye.

Though sometimes incomprehensible as he spits out too many words too fast in a thick German accent, Nathan McHenry’s intentions are never unclear. As the emcee he welcomes the audience like a good horror host, and ushers them back and forth across Cabaret‘s intersecting storylines, on journey all the way to hell. It’s an impressive, athletic performance, but it’s Playhouse stalwart Kim Sanders who emerges from the chorus to deliver Cabaret’s crushing blow. She leads the cast through “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” an infections, inspirational number that begins so sweetly, and ends with the earth shifting hard on its axis. From nowhere so many Nazis emerge. Only they don’t really come from nowhere; they were there all along.

Playhouse On The Square Invites You To The Cabaret

The film version of Cabaret achieves a special kind of clarity. Berlin’s Nazis aren’t hidden at the beginning, they’re just pushed to the margins and not taken seriously. Then suddenly they’re everywhere. They’re everybody. It’s a strong blueprint for negotiating any narrative vagaries in the stage musical’s book.

What it lacks in this level of subtlety, Playhouse on the Square’s production counters with the somnambulant urgency recently described by the Twitter parody/tribute account Werner Twertzog: “Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.”

I sat in a box seat far house left, and so many of this Cabaret’s more intimate moments took place far stage right. That means there’s a lot about this show I really can’t discuss with any authority, because my view was so badly obscured. This won’t be a problem for most audience members, but for me it was enough of an issue to cut the review short. What I saw was thoughtful and provocative. What I couldn’t see at least sounded like a close match.

It’s so easy to fall for Sally Bowles – to buy into her spiel about the short distance from cradle to tomb, and carpe diem, and all that. “Come to the Cabaret,” she belts like a carnival barker, pitching all the attractions. Only Elsie, the former Chelsea flatmate Bowles valorizes in the musical’s title song, didn’t win a prize by dying blissfully ignorant. Nobody won anything by ignoring their prophets of doom, certainly not the people Elsie’s happy corpse left behind in the soup.

I don’t always know why we go to the theater anymore. I don’t think it’s to serve any of the old civic functions, but maybe it is sometimes. It’s certainly not for any kind of meaningful moral instruction or else all those money-printing productions of A Christmas Carol would have fixed us up pretty good by now.

Escapism’s high quality these days, relatively cheap,  and almost always at our fingertips. But if Hamlet’s right and plays really are conscience catchers, many playgoers will see themselves inside the Kit Kat Club when the show’s grimy, accusatory lights come up over audience. That’s the kind of Cabaret this is. But if it doesn’t move them to do more than renew their season subscriptions, we’d might as well start celebrating. Right this way, your table’s waiting.  

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Pressure Wash: “The Clean House” Is a Complicated, Compassionate Joke

Dead. “I’m dead.” It’s a thing we say now, on the internet, when things strike us as being uniquely funny. “I’m so dead,” we say. Maybe we don’t laugh, but it slays us nonetheless, as jokes have slain people throughout the ages in spite of laughter’s reputation for being “the best medicine.” “Dying of laughter” is an old idiom and the language of comedy is largely borrowed from the world of violence,mayhem, and harm. Comics “knock us dead.” Audiences “bust a gut,” and so on. And while I can’t say Theatre Memphis’ production of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House “kills,” exactly, it may stab you in the heart repeatedly with a scalpel. 

There’s a moment near the top of The Clean House when Lane, a nondescript white doctor in white clothes in her nondescript white-on white-home, tells Matilde the Brazilian maid in her black livery, she’s an “interesting person.” It’s not a complement. The nondescript white doctor, sympathetically revealed by Tamara Wright, didn’t hire an interesting person, she hired a cleaning lady who needs to get to work whitening up the grubby space or get another job.  Ruhl’s heart has never seemed larger than it does in this compassionate piece from 2006, but her metaphors have seldom been more ham-fisted either. Appropriating the kind of magical realism associated with certain strains of South American literature The Clean House essays the relative merits of tidying up. It’s themes are Buddhist adjacent, showing how the noblest desire to order a chaotic world results in sadness. It’s a sly and deceptively poetic play about embracing the messes we make in the hallway between love and death, and maybe a little self-serving in that regard. It’s the kind of work that will likely divide audiences, leaving them delighted and warm on the inside or bored and baffled.

What shouldn’t divide audiences is the solid vision put forward by director Leslie Barker’s creative team, and a remarkable collection of thoughtful, lived-in performances

Ruhl’s work and influence has grown so familiar that her trademark idiosyncrasies barely feel like idiosyncrasies at all. Still, time and quickly evolving perspectives may also make one of the play’s more elegantly prepared storylines, a little hard for some to swallow. Lane’s husband Charles, who’s also a doctor, falls in love with Ana, an older, exotic mastectomy patient. He subsequently undertakes a brutal hero’s quest into the arctic to save Ana’s life and show the purity of his intentions. Although he’s not Jewish, Charles claims personal exoneration from any  wrongdoing due to an esoteric Hebrew law regarding soulmates he heard about on NPR, and sincerely wants his jilted (and not having it) wife to rejoice and share in his newfound happiness. Sweetly portrayed by Chris Cotton, Charles is helpless — swept up in an overwhelming love spell he can’t understand or control. It suits the play’s tone, but tangos at the edge of current sensibilities regarding masculine misbehavior. 

The show revolves around Matilde, the cleaning lady who’s depressed by cleaning. She’s also in mourning for her parents, whose perfect love ended badly. Dad was the funniest man in his village in Brazil, and mom was his equal. When she died laughing at one of his jokes he took his own life. Now Matilde wants to be a comedian, and Ruhl’s play functions like a preview of some future network sitcom she’ll star in. Jaclyn Suffel’s formidable in the role, leading us through the dreamy script like a modern day Sabina, the maid, and most memorable character from Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth. It’s a mature, effortlessly commanding turn in a role that often demands the impossible. I’ll get back to this in a minute.

A lot of The Clean House reminds me of Wilder and Skin of Our Teeth. No dinosaurs come tromping through the theater, but the story’s no less magically weird or mythological in its depiction of family, or its focus on origins and eschatology.  Only this time, for Ruhl, it’s all personal.

Matilde’s inability to clean is balanced by Virginia’s compulsion to straighten, dust, vacuum and organize. Virginia is Lane’s sister. She’s a damaged soul made of right-sized expectations, and she wants a relationship with her busy, distant sibling so badly enters into a bargain with Matilde to do the depressed maid’s work, just to get a toe in the door. Virginia’s tragic cheerfulness is stretched to the point of psychopathy, and Aliza Moran walks a tightrope in presenting a deeply silly character who’s just a little too fragile to laugh at. It’s the show’s dilemma in a nutshell.

The Clean House‘s narrative strategy also reminds me, at times, of some of the more vexing routines devised by stand up comic Andy Kaufman who was always more prankster and performance artist than gag-man. It’s a show about the power of jokes where all the jokes are whispered or spoken in a language most English speakers won’t understand.  “It doesn’t work in translation,” Matilde explains at one point. Honest laughs happen throughout, but the literary force of dangling the play’s jokes just beyond reach doesn’t translate — and that’s okay. Like Kaufman, Ruhl sometimes tests an audience’s patience while she’s resetting their expectations. This is why Suffel’s performance is so key. As the show’s narrator, she frames the important stuff, and ushers us through the rough spots even though she’s sometimes armed with nothing but a brow crinkle or a little weaponized side-eye.

I’ve got to say, it’s nice to see Christina Welford Scott set free, both as Matilde’s mother who dies laughing, and as Ana, the “home wrecker,” who thinks that sounds like a marvelous way to go. I sometimes think Scott — a local treasure if there ever was one — gets cast in some shows because directors see her in great roles, not because they see great roles in her. That’s not to say she doesn’t deliver in serious leading parts that call for lots of seriousness and crying. But Scott’s capacity for real greatness is most evident when the challenges are physical and fun. Get this woman laughing or clowning or dancing lighter than air and she’ll rip your goddamn guts out. Here she’s cast as a classic “mysterious” femme fatale, but with a variety of subtle, deeply satisfying twists.  Her death (not a spoiler) is full of life, and hung all around with joy and agony.

I have a mixed relationship with The Clean House. I get tired of both its sense and its nonsense for long stretches. But the more I think about its individual parts, the more I find to recommend about the whole complicated dust bunny of a play — this morbid joke built on sixes not threes. So, I’m throwing caution away, embracing my messy feelings, and calling it a win for everybody involved. Well, everybody except for the poor guy snoozing on the front row. 

Or maybe he was just dead? 

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

1776: Theatre Memphis Makes History With a Solid Revival

“I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace — two are called a law firm — and that three or more become a Congress.” — John Adams opening remarks in 1776. The musical, not the year. 

Like the nation whose birth it celebrates, 1776 is an extraordinary creation — the most delightful musical stuffed inside the most contentious play, wrapped in an endlessly urgent history lesson more truthy than accurate. It’s a miracle, of sorts, famous for containing the longest scene in any musical without singing, choreography, or a single note of music played. Also, like the nation it celebrates, 1776 is complicated, built on enough deception, prioritizing drama over all else, that it’s probably a good thing to knock the dust off from time-to-time and re-evaluate.

Cecelia Wingate’s known for staging monster musical extravaganzas. What surprised me most about her very fine production of 1776 for Theatre Memphis, was just how conventional it is, erring on the side of magnificent. The lush, 18th-Century costumes are so thoughtfully detailed they often say as much about characters as the actors wearing them. That’s saying something given a mostly superb cast. Though it’s hardly palatial in spirit, the gleaming, brightly-lit set works at cross purposes, making the emerging nation seem too solid and formidable — less the worn-out crazy quilt with no chance in hell of weathering the coming storm. We hear it’s “hot as Hell,” in Philly, but take away the fans and complaints, and not much else in the breezy space says so.

It seems critics can’t write about 1776 these days without some comparison to its kindred Tony-winner, Hamilton. I won’t do that, but will say that between the hotly-paced Hamilton and a faintly iconoclastic interpretation of 1776 staged by The Encores! in 2016, one might hope for a touch more currency and self-awareness.

I’m almost afraid to give John Maness another glowing review. People will think he’s paying me. But Maness’s growing reputation as a dramatic actor who vanishes into his characters, obscures the fact that he’s always been a solid musical theater performer as well. When Hedwig and the Angry Inch finally made it to town, Maness took the title role and rocked it just right. Now older, and more furrowed, his John Adams is a firebrand, full of righteous fury — always just at the edge of caning somebody on the floor of Congress.

Adams’ character — a blending of John and his second cousin Samuel — doesn’t quite mesh with reality. Though he had adversaries in Congress (even among allies), the man from Massachusetts wasn’t universally regarded as obnoxious and disliked until after his presidency. Independence was the popular choice in the year of our show, and Adams was a tireless, vocal advocate.  Maness translates the alleged obnoxiousness into impatience at the edge of impertinence, and, excepting turns by Lydia Hart’s’s Mrs. Jefferson and Kevar Maffitt’s Rutledge, he’s seldom the second most interesting thing on stage.

Wingate’s 1776 — a story about uniting the American colonies to declare of independence — struggles a bit with antagonists. Though he has been absent from Memphis for a long time, I know Brian Helm to be a fine and committed actor who relishes physically demanding roles. As Dickinson, a patriot whose intellectual reservations are amplified for dramatic purposes, he’s the face of opposition. As one of the show’s two principal “bad guys,” he makes the case for wealth, tradition, and security over independence, leading Congress’s anachronistic right-wing through the song “Cool, Considerate Men.”

1776 landed on Broadway in 1969, a year after the infamous televised debates between arch-liberal Gore Vidal and arch-Conservative William F. Buckley Jr. On the page, Dickinson’s gravitas mixed with cool certitude calls to mind the latter, who once dryly claimed, “It’s terribly hard to stand carrying the weight of what I know.” Helm’s more scheming and excitable interpretation is more reminiscent of radio pundits like the late Mike Fleming, or a stiffer Rush Limbaugh. It makes the debate at the heart of act one less dynamic, and more shrill than it might be, as he seeks to match and top Maness’s Adams rather than own him. This less poised depiction yields the floor, and principle antagonist role, to the reliably excellent Maffitt,  who delivers a cooler, more self-sufficient vision of Rutledge, the pro-slavery representative from South Carolina whose eerie, musical lesson in triangle trade makes a case that implicates every man in congress with the shameful practice. But does it also implicate itself? The script? 50-years worth of audiences, swept up in light nationalism? 

Theater Memphis serves up charming, humanizing portraits of America’s best known founding fathers like Ben Franklin (Jimbo Lattimore) and Thomas Jefferson (Sean Carter). It does a somewhat better job bringing in lesser known figures like George Washington’s messenger and a hard-drinking representative from Rhode Island who never met an idea too dangerous to talk about. As Abigail Adams and Martha Jefferson, Edna Dinwiddie and Hart show two distinctly different ways to keep the home fires burning while the menfolk, “Piddle, Twiddle, and Resolve.”  The ensemble is built on solid foundations, and the voices collected for this production blend gorgeously, lifted by a tight orchestra.

 When it comes to critique, it’s sometimes said that “everything before the ‘but,’ is BS.” Can’t disagree. I’m sure regular readers sense a “but” coming and, of course, they’re right. See, 1776 makes a virtue of compromise at any cost, and as we know, the cost was human bondage and chattel slavery. As considerate as the script may be, sounding bells over the struggle for common ground feels off in 2019, as the last campaigns of the American Civil War play themselves out in proxy battles over Confederate iconography. Where some may see currency in these debates, I tend to see continuity, and even affirmation. But — and you knew it was coming — I don’t think we need to put 1776 away just yet. If anything, it’s probably not revived as often as it might be. But (yes, another one) we know how the story ends. Furthermore, we know where it goes after it ends and where it goes wrong. So maybe in 2019, it might be more interesting to strip 1776 down than to dress it up.

To summarize: Great voices? Check. Good acting? Check. Profound wig game? Double check. Given Theatre Memphis’s reputation for razzle dazzle, Ellen Inghram’s choreography is uncharacteristically subdued. The acting is top-shelf, from Bill Andrews as John Hancock to Helm, whose questionable use shouldn’t be mistaken for bad work. Songs stuck in my head for decades never sounded better, from the lusty, “He Plays the Violin,” to the mournful “Mama Look Sharp.” Maybe, like the nation whose birth 1776 celebrates, I was just expecting too much.

   

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Lizzie Borden Rocks Theatreworks

CREDIT: New Moon

New Moon

Lizzie & Co.

Rock-and-roll was barely old enough to drink when somebody asked playwright Sam Shepard his opinion about the rock musical. I’ve not been able to run down the exact quote, but the Shepard, who sometimes drummed with The Holy Modal Rounders, thought rock musicals and operas would remain theoretical until somebody composed one that was as “violent” as “a Who concert.” As someone who tends to rate concerts by the degree to which they’ve “ripped my head off,” or “melted my face,” I’ve always agreed with Shepard’s assessment. By that measure, it’s probably fair to note that, in spite of the city’s storied music history, the rock musical didn’t arrive in Memphis until October 2018 when Lizzie — the Lizzie Borden ax-murdering musical — opened at TheatreWorks. I say this as a veteran of Hair, American Idiot, Rock of Ages, Rocky Horror, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and a dozen more electric guitar musicals.  But when it comes to pure rock concert muscle, New Moon’s Lizzie kills the competition. Dead.

Lizzie‘s soundtrack is show-tune aware, but with a punk heart, a goth soul and roots anchored deep in the sisterhood of classic rock. Delivered in an audience-aware, concert-style format, songs like “Why Are All These Heads Off,” and “What The Fuck, Lizzie?” make The Who’s Tommy sound about as quaint and orderly as the collected love songs of Lerner & Lowe. It’s the rare Halloween season treat that should appeal to most traditional theater fans while flirting hard with a quality I’m going to call Goner appeal.

Lizzie Borden Rocks Theatreworks

The story of ax-murderess Lizzie Borden (and her famous 40-whacks) is sung, shouted, and shrieked at the audience by a strong, all-female cast of 4. The book strays far enough from the facts as we know them to qualify as historical fiction, but the details of what actually happened when Mr. & Mrs. Borden were murdered, are beside the point in this bloody portrait of a place where sexual abuse and the status quo walk hand in glove. Director Kell Christie keeps the sex and money elements of the narrative front and center while making the overall experience more like an arena concert than a piece of musical theater. Melissa Andrews’ lights are on point, and Eileen Kuo’s music direction drives hard without sacrificing dynamics.  A nearly perfect ensemble showcases the acting and vocal talents of Christina Hernandez, Annie Freres, Joy Brooke Fairfield, and Jaclyn Suffel.

Lizzie closes Sunday, Oct. 28, so there aren’t many chances left to witness this dreadful tale of horror and woe. You don’t want to miss this one.

Pay-What-You-Can Wed. Oct 24. 

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Newsies Is Good Entertainment: Weekend Theatre Roundup

Newsies at Theatre Memphis.

What does it mean when a musical about newspapers and unions is way more popular than newspapers and unions? I honestly don’t know. And I don’t really know where to start with my review of Theatre Memphis’ production of Newsies other than to say it’s a technically outstanding interpretation of the famously failed Disney film that found a more natural home on Broadway. The ensemble is first rate. The singing soars. The choreography is energetic and stunty. The kids (and baby-faced grownups) playing the “Newsies” are especially good and John Hemphill and Kent Fleshmen make perfect comic and villainous foils.

What’s not to love?

For me, it’s the irony. See, striking newspaper delivery kids were they primary means of distribution for afternoon papers. Their after-school labor helped to make Joseph Pulitzer very rich. Although the strike did win the newsies some concessions, they are all still crushingly poor when the curtain comes down. They’ll be paid no more for their labor. They still have to invest more up front. They still take a hit on every paper they sell. But Pulitzer, knowing a good deal when he hears it, subsidizes their risk and incentivizes productivity by agreeing to buy back unsold issues. Although the result was favorable and the Newsboy strike is an important moment in American labor history, in the post-labor 21st century it’s hard to see Newsies as anything but nostalgia. Or a cynical artifact of American capitalism celebrating values and systems we don’t officially like anymore. Values and systems our elected representatives had been busy starving and stamping out for more than a decade by the time Disney released the original flop film in 1989.

To be fair, Disney grabbed good headlines recently for making $15/hour the new minimum wage in its parks. It’s a good, overdue decision that’s earned praise from affiliated unions that, though diminished, continue to press for better wages and working conditions. Well, from the unions MouseHouse hasn’t stealth-busted, anyway.

Theatre Memphis’ Newsies got a well-deserved standing ovation opening night, but looking around at all the gray hair, pale faces, conservative suits and Marsha Blackburn supercuts, I couldn’t help but wonder what this demographic was clapping for. It couldn’t possibly be for a story about disruptive, production-choking protest. The Newsboy strike famously shut down a bridge, after all, and we all know how Memphis’ privileged classes feel about that sort of thing. Maybe they were just applauding the unpaid talent sweating guts out to entertain? Or depictions of the use of law enforcement as the strong arm of big business, quelling dissent and making compromise more appealing? Or the plebe-appeasing triumph of capital inherent in the musical’s happy ending? Or maybe it was just habit.

See, in the current political and economic environment a proper telling of this story shouldn’t entertain, it should incite.

Allow me to double down on my opening comments. Theatre Memphis’ Newsies is perfect and polished in the ways musicals at the East Memphis playhouse often are. Fans of the film, and earlier iterations of the stage show won’t be disappointed. Voices are strong, the acting is professional and featured dancers (high) kick ass. Costumes are appropriate and scenic and lighting elements serve the material well. Even if the book and music underwhelm, the production may yet inspire.

That’s not nearly enough, but I’ll take it.
Junk continues…

For a different take on business in America, Junk continues its run at Circuit Playhouse. From the Review…

To build on an idea put forward by addict/philosopher William S. Burroughs, Junk needs swagger like a junkie needs junk. It also needs the raw, biological urgency of addiction. Though Ayad Akhtar’s script is a trope-eschewing, drug-free zone compared to most mythic tales of corporate greed in the 1980s, Circuit Playhouse’s earnest production joneses hard for the wild eyes and religious fervor so vividly described in the play’s opening moments.

We’ve seen stories like Junk before. Salesmen, The Maysels Brothers 1969 documentary about door-to-door Bible peddlers, was a study in the rich, racist language of predatory business in America. That inspired David Mamet’s prescient real estate drama, Glengarry Glen Ross. The Wolf of Wall Street was a blurry, sweat and semen-drenched Polaroid of excess and, in a similar post-party vein, The Big Short was quirky, disruptive, and as entertaining as it was educational. On stage, there’s been Enron and Serious Money and I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention Gordon Gekko’s succinct “Greed is good,” monologue from 1987’s Wall Street, an original period artifact that’s still as quotable as it ever was. But Junk, the story of game-changing junk bond king Robert Merkin, has no use for quirk, color, or succinctness. It’s all sprawling sincerity and shades of gray with one thing logically following another with all the intrigue and suspense of a single-file domino tumble. Junk‘s script leans on narration, biasing “tell” over “show,” and Circuit’s translation from page to stage does little to correct the imbalance.  (Continue reading).

Hattiloo takes a look at the “school to prison pipeline” with the play Pipeline.

From press materials: 

“Nya, an inner-city public high school teacher, is committed to her students but desperate to give her only son Omari opportunities they’ll never have. When a controversial incident at his private school threatens to get him expelled, Nya must confront his rage and her own choices as a parent.”

•The popular musical Nunsense opens at Germatown Community Theatre.
•Emerald Theatre Co. presents Gaydar, its third annual original 10-minute play festival
Gaydar.
•Tennessee Shakespeare opens Two Gentlemen of Verona. This is also the best bargain in town thanks to Tennessee Shakespeare’s Free Shakespeare Shout-Out Series which kicks off this month with 11 performances in nine different indoor and outdoor locations. It’s a 75-minute show and no tickets or reservations are required.
•Quark Theatre opens The Typographer’s Dream at Theatre South. You can read the preview here. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Get Out

In his 1983 HBO comedy special, Delirious, Eddie Murphy had a bit about why the protagonists of horror movies are always white. Black people, he said, would just run at the first sign of supernatural trouble. He imagined a black couple inserted into the Amityville Horror scenario, buying a house that turned out to be haunted. “Oh, baby, this is beautiful. We got a chandelier up here, kids outside playing, the neighborhood is beautiful. …”

Then a spectral voice whispers “Get oooout.”

“Too bad we can’t stay!”

I don’t know if that’s where Jordan Peele got the name for his killer new horror flick, Get Out, but it makes sense. Both Murphy and Peele are black comedy geniuses in the vein of Richard Pryor, so Peele almost certainly remembers Murphy’s routine. Get Out runs with Murphy’s basic premise — that the black guy is never the protagonist in mainstream horror movies — and teases out the full implications. On the surface, the joke is that white people act stupid in horror movies, and that black people would be smarter in those situations. Ha ha, my team is better than your team. But the deeper joke is that white people are so swaddled in privilege, they can’t imagine anything bad could really happen to them when the house whispers “Get out!,” but black people, who get the shaft every day, are rightfully more paranoid.

Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya star in Jordan Peele’s new horror film, Get Out.

For the younger crowd reading, yes, Eddie Murphy was once a cutting-edge stand-up comedian with something to say, not just the Nutty Professor. Peele is in the same place in his career that Eddie Murphy was in 1983: trying to successfully manage a transition from TV to the movies. Murphy morphed into an action-comedy leading man, while Peele seems much more interested in being behind the camera. If Get Out is any indication, this is a wise move.

I’m a firm believer that if you can do comedy, you can do anything. Comedy is just technically harder than drama; so much depends on precise timing, crisp delivery, and a perfect reveal. These are also the tools of horror, so I wonder why it’s taken so long to see a comedian make the genre move. Peele is going to be the biggest boost for the horror comedy genre since the coming of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. But Raimi’s idea of horror comedy is anarchic slapstick, while Peele is following his own race relations muse.

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is getting ready for a trip to rural New York to meet his girlfriend Rose’s (Allison Williams) parents. Since Chris is black and Rose is white, his friend, Rod (LilRel Howery), warns him to not to go. Obviously, this upper-class white girl’s parents are going to freak out when they find out she’s dating a black guy. But Chris and Rose are quite smitten with each other, and he feels like he’s got to get over this hurdle in their relationship. Besides, Rose urges, her parents are totally cool. Her dad, Dean (Bradley Whitford), is a doctor, and her mom, Missy (Catherine Keener), is a psychotherapist. They’re educated professionals, so they’re naturally liberals. Dean, Rose assures Chris, would have voted for a third term of Obama if he could! Later, when Dean repeats the same line to Chris, it sounds rehearsed — one of the many red flags that slowly raise Chris’ paranoia level past the “GET OUT!” threshold. Turns out, Rod was right: Chris shouldn’t have gone home to meet the parents, but not for the reason Rod thought. He envisioned a nightmare weekend of microagressions and racist sneers for Chris. Instead, our hero finds himself in a nest of gaslighting hypno-slavers with dashes of Re-Animator and Being John Malkovich for existential seasoning.

From the John Carpenter references (Rose’s last name is Armitage, which was Carpenter’s pen name for They Live) to the finely tuned tonal clashes that make an innocuous garden party into a skin-crawling creepshow, Peele shows his total control of the proceedings. By working on both the level of social satire and scary horror flick, Get Out is one of the finest directorial debuts in recent memory.

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Passengers

Douglas Adams said it best. “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”

Combine that really impressive bigness with Einstein’s hard speed limit, and that means f you want to get anywhere in space, it’s going to take a long time. Storytellers who want to write stories that take place on other plants have come up with all sorts of work arounds, like hyperspace and warp drive, to let people get from one star to another in a human lifetime, but there’s little evidence such things could work in real life. Therefore, the other option is to extend the human lifespan by putting passengers into extended hibernation, so you go to sleep on Earth and wake up on the exoplanet of your choosing a century from now.

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers.

That’s the departure point for Passengers. The starship Avalon’a 5,000 colonists and 200 crew are barreling towards the planet Homestead II with  at half the speed of light when the ship hits an unexpected swarm of space rocks. The impact causes a power surge that wakes one of the passengers, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), from cold sleep. The problem is, the ship is only 30 years into its 120 year journey, meaning Jim is going to die of old age long before the ship makes it to Homestead. He is destined to spend the rest of his life alone.
The good news is, he’s alone in a kilometer-long luxury hotel staffed by robots. Soon, he befriends Arthur (Michael Sheen), the bartender droid whose establishment bears a striking resemblance to the bar of the Overlook Hotel where Jack Nicholson went insane in The Shining. This is probably not a coincidence.

Passengers is a story in the tradition of “The Cold Equations”, a pulp sci fi story adapted into a Twilight Zone script that highlighted ethical problems posed by the limitations of long distance spaceflight. It’s rare for being good sci fi that doesn’t involve zapping things with ray guns. It’s a story about how technology sometimes puts people in impossible situations that no human has ever been faced with before. (Before now, no generation has had to ever learn Instagram etiquette.) Jim is on his own in deep space, and it seems to be impossible for him to get back into hibernation without the help of a whole lot of specialized equipment and a team of doctors. Should he wake someone up to get help? Or maybe just for company? Faced with a totally unique moral dilemma, he does the only logical thing and starts drinking heavily.

Eventually, he makes the worst possible decision and wakes up a fellow passenger named Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), not because she can help out with the situation, but because he thinks she’s cute. Pratt’s lonely agonizing over the decision to basically commit slow murder by waking Aurora up 89 years early is the best part of Passengers.

Writer John Spaihts wrings as much drama and pathos as he can out of the impossible situation, carefully throwing new wrinkles into our heroes paths at regular intervals. The script for Passengers floated around Hollywood for years, and was at one point going to be produced with Keanu Reeves for $30 million instead of the $100 million that Sony spent on this production. Frankly, that might have been a better move. The production design on Passengers is top notch, but it doesn’t really add much to the interesting part of the story, even after the ship starts to break down and Jim and Aurora have to try to fix it with the help of a reanimated crewman named Gus (Lawrence Fishbourne). In the third act, the film’s courage suddenly fails as it tries to fit its unconventional story into a happy (or at least, happy-ish) ending. But hey, at least they were trying! If the preview audience I saw the film with was any indication, it still works, and will very likely provoke some extended conversations on the way home.

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Don’t Breathe

Judging from this year’s crop of horror films, Americans must be longing for escape from something. I would say three films is officially a trend, and the three best horror movies of 2016 are all about being trapped in a claustrophobic space with someone — perhaps several someones — up to no good. First we were locked in a bomb shelter with John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane, then neo-Nazi Captain Picard wanted to burn down our punk rock party in Green Room, and now we’re trapped in a house with a psychotic blind man in Don’t Breathe.

To be fair, the three “heroes” in Fede Alvarez’s new horror film pretty much deserve what’s coming to them. Rocky (Jane Levy), Money (Daniel Zovatto), and Alex (Dylan Minnette) are a trio of burglars, kind of like a Detroit version of The Bling Ring, enabled by Alex’s access to keys and info from his father’s security service. Alvarez, an Uruguayan filmmaker whose last project was a remake of Sam Raimi’s classic Evil Dead, concentrates on building sympathy for Rocky, who lives in an abusive situation with her alcoholic mother and longs to buy her and her little sister passage to California. After a less-than-successful job, they learn of a sure thing: the last inhabited house in a dying neighborhood, where a blind Gulf War veteran (nameless, but played by Stephen Lang) is believed to be sitting on a huge stash of cash from an insurance settlement. After a little persuading, Alex agrees to help with one last job.

Dylan Minnette (left) and Stephen Lang in Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe

From the slavering Rottweiler guarding the house to the four locks on every door, the signs are that there’s something worth guarding in this home, a relic of Detroit’s better days. Once they’re inside, our sneak thieves discover that the Blind Man is hiding more than just a stack of bills.

Alvarez’s greatest strength lies in his eye for moody photography. He uses strategically placed light sources to paint Rocky and the Blind Man in chiaroscuro tones. When Alex and Rocky are trapped in a darkened basement, Alvarez uses the opportunity to crank the image contrast down as low as it will go, evoking claustrophobic feelings with only vague, moving gray shapes. He is also a master of timing, getting a lot of mileage out of opening doors at the perfect moment.

Don’t Breathe can best be described as a series of steadily escalating variations on a theme. From being trapped in a ventilation duct with a rabid dog to slowly inching across broken glass, Alvarez is evoking the feeling of wanting to flee, but seeing your options for escape slowly dwindling. The effect is chilling enough to overcome a late-film flurry of false endings and the occasional disbelief-killing logical stretch. You may find the feeling of getting squeezed strikes an unexpectedly familiar chord.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Nice Guys

Shane Black made his bones in Hollywood by writing Lethal Weapon, which is still considered one of the quintessential buddy-cop movies. Superman director Richard Donner’s pairing of Mel Gibson as the borderline insane adrenaline addict Martin Riggs and Danny Glover as the veteran detective who is getting too old for this crap proved that people not named Eddie Murphy could mine the genre for thrills, laughs, and big box office. Black went on to become one of the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood history, deconstructed the strongman action genre with 1993’s Last Action Hero, and then knocked around Hollywood for more than a decade before getting his first shot at the director’s chair with 2005’s cult classic Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. That led to him getting tapped by Marvel for the hugely successful Iron Man 3.

Black’s latest film, The Nice Guys, represents something of a return to his buddy-cop roots. It’s the kind of movie you get to make when your last venture is No. 10 on the list of all-time highest-grossing pictures. Ryan Gosling plays Holland March, a private eye trying to make a living for himself and his daughter, 13-year-old Holly (Angourie Rice) by solving banally sordid cases for a client base of easily swindled old ladies. He’s the kind of guy who laments the drop off in his business caused by California’s adopting no-fault divorce laws. As usual for Los Angeles film detectives since Humphrey Bogart was slapping around gunsels, he stumbles into the biggest case of his life: The aunt of recently deceased porn star Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio) thinks she’s still alive and that a girl named Amelia (Margaret Qualley) knows where she is.

Amelia quickly catches on to Holland’s clumsy attempts at detective work and pays thug-for-hire Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) to dissuade him from continuing. Jackson is the rare knee-breaker who takes pride in professionalism. He’s a white-knuckled teetotaler and only administers the exact amount of violence necessary to complete the job. As a professional courtesy, he explains to Holland what kind of fracture he’s about to receive before breaking his arm. That’s why Jackson is appalled at the sloppy thugmanship displayed by a pair of heavies (one of whom is played by the immortal Keith David) who break into his house and, in the process of interrogating him about his connection to Amelia, kill his two tropical fish. Vowing revenge for the piscine slaughter, he turns around and hires Holland to find out why Amelia is so important to so many people. The mystery that unfolds takes the unlikely pair of fast friends on a tour of the Los Angeles underworld during the high decadence of the 1970s. Black bounces his dim-witted duo off of the fading remnants of ’60s political radicals, a corrupt Justice Department official played by Kim Basinger, and a psychotic killer who looks like John Boy from The Waltons.

Gosling and Crowe are, perhaps unsurprisingly, naturals at this kind of material, and Black supplies them with some good gags, such as a memorable hallucination with a talking bee and a Richard Nixon cameo. The production designers clearly had a ball recreating disco-era L.A., and the highlight of the film is a porn star party where the band is a digitally recreated Earth, Wind, and Fire. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that something’s a little off. Jokes don’t land, the continuity is confused, and the rhythms are inexplicably jerky. Here’s a lesson: If you want to make a throwback to ’70s cop shows like The Rockford Files, don’t hire the editor of Transformers. Grumpy Gosling and growling Crowe are fun, but they can’t save The Nice Guys from feeling shoddy.