Austin's Old Murder House Theater has mounted a rendition of James Cameron's Aliens — on ice! Jacob S. Hall at movies.com follows up his preview post about the troupe (which has also staged their own versions of Home Alone, Die Hard, Back to the Future, and RoboCop), with a feature review of their theatrical epic:
Anyone who has seen Aliens can follow what transpires over the next 70 minutes or so. It's James Cameron's film on fastforward…and caffeine…and possibly cocaine. The show captures the little details and turns of phrases that fans will know by heart and cast makes creative use of the ice, never standing still when they have to. Ripley's confrontation with the board that accuses her of destroying the ship from the first film is transformed into humorously blunt exchange, with every party involved skating around each other in menacing circles. The colonial marines searching the seemingly abandoned colony of LV421 becomes a showcase for humorously clumsy figure skating. The subtle relationship between Ripley and Hicks becomes gloriously unsubtle when the two share a brief little spin together on the ice.
These guys may not be professional skaters, but they're not bad. Not bad at all. They're certainly not afraid of the ice and they're not afraid of taking risks. When they do stumble, they play it off beautifully and keep moving. They make the "on ice" part of the show look effortless until they make a mistake and then it becomes a newly improvised joke. Using expert skaters as the aliens is a truly inspired choice and seeing the aliens literally skate circles around the clumsy humans is a genuinely thrilling experience.
Next month, Elizabeth and I will be spending a week and a half in London. A pleasure trip with some business mixed in, I hope.
On our itinerary is catching the current production of Dr. Faustus at Shakespeare's Globe. Last night we secured our tickets well in advance. (Good thing too, as those tickets are moving like a bat out of Mephistopheles' front door.) In so doing, we registered a new account at the Globe's website. There I noticed the dropdown list of titles/honorifics you can choose to apply to your name. No big deal, lots of sites have such a list. Yes, they do. Nonetheless, this was their list:
Elizabeth is now, I believe, Countess of Seattle.
Yep, that's Arthur Darvill, Doctor Who's serially deceased "Rory Williams" as Mephistopheles. And may I say, Oh hell yeah.
Speaking of Woody Allen: Onion A.V. Club — Alec Baldwin continues to act, signs on to Woody Allen's next film. (An optimist by nature, I'm still hoping, albeit against evidence, that Woody still has one more really good movie in him before he confirms that death really is worse than the chicken at Tresky's Restaurant.)
Archaeology Magazine — Interview: Werner Herzog on the Birth of Art. Filmmaker Werner Herzog was given unprecedented access to Chauvet Cave in southeastern France to film the site's Paleolithic art. The result is his latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which opens wide in the U.S. later this month. (It's the first 3-D film I've been actually excited about seeing.)
Manohla Dargis at the NYT— Out There in the Dark, All Alone: "Digital technologies have sharpened the image and clouded the question of what is cinema."
Paleofuture.com — In the 1987 issue of OMNI magazine, Roger Ebert predicted a revolution in the delivery and distribution of movies. (Pardon me while I click over to Netflix and iTunes.)
Last night Elizabeth and I attended London's National Theatre production of Frankenstein, directed by Danny Boyle with Benedict Cumberbatch (so splendid in "Sherlock") as the Creature and Jonny Lee Miller as Victor. It was superb in every respect, although upon reflection I do have some quibbles with the script, especially its final third. It's still an impressive work all around. Despite some narrative elisions for timing and flow, the production finally does right by the novel. Fortunately we didn't have to leave Seattle to do it. The jet lag would be a killer right now.
Elizabeth and I spent three days last weekend on a "working vacation" in Portland, OR. We visited old friends (some of whom I've written about here before), enjoyed the city's inherent lovely greenness, ate very well in excellent company, finally caught up with Me and Orson Welles (mostly loved it) and Kraken rum (I make a mean Dark & Stormy), and managed to catch William Hurt in the Artists Rep production of Eugene O'Neill's bleak autobiographical 1956 drama of addiction and family dysfunction, A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Now, being a theater dude I went into Long Day's Journey aware that any company these days has a hard road to hoe in making that particular four-hour Pulitzer Prize-winner fresh and gripping for a modern audience, for whom O'Neill's once-searing and pioneering realism may have been diluted to homeopathic nullity by the intervening decades of "reality" media saturation. While I bear nothing at all against O'Neill's masterfulness — cf. my post about The Iceman Cometh — I predicted that this play in particular is now past its sell-by date and that only an extraordinary and bold production could undo that. This one was neither extraordinary nor bold, plus was riddled with artistic and directorial choices that left me wondering if everyone involved knew they were supposed to be working on the same play.
So, although actors William Hurt and especially Robyn Nevin were several kinds of terrific, I came away needing a palate cleanser and mood lifter. And for me the Marx Brothers have always been a reliable tonic when such needs arise. I reached for their second film, Animal Crackers, in which Groucho riffs on O'Neill's expressionistic play Strange Interlude by stepping forward to address the camera (that is, the audience) and soliloquizing thusly (the 2:20 mark):
Suddenly the world was brighter again.
Among the many things I love about 1930's Animal Crackers (and its 1929 predecessor, The Cocoanuts) is that they are just about our only records of what it was like to see the Marxes performing live on Broadway. The films, shot in Paramount's Astoria studios in Queens, NY, were adaptations of two of their Broadway shows. The Brothers shot The Cocoanuts at the studio during the day, then hot-footed back to Manhattan to perform Animal Crackers on stage in the evenings. It wasn't until their third (and first all-original) film, Monkey Business (1931) that they moved to Hollywood, where they spent the rest of their lives.
The original stage script was pared down for the screen, so as a film Animal Crackers is a rough approximation rather than a full-on reproduction. Still, as an historical document it benefits from unadorned point-and-shoot camerawork, a proscenium staginess, and lack of cinematic flair. A script credited to Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and George S. Kaufman doesn't hurt either, even though showbiz legend has it that Kaufman, backstage during one of the shows he wrote for the notorious ad-libbers, once exclaimed, "Wait! I think I just heard one of my lines!" (I have more to say about the Marxes' Paramount films at DVD Journal.)
So when Groucho quips, "You're very fortunate the Theatre Guild isn't putting this on, and so is the Guild," it's a line that would deliver an extra layer of funny to a Broadway audience, especially since it was the Guild that had recently premiered Strange Interlude for the play's 1928-29 run. The Internet Broadway Database tells me that from Oct. 23, 1928 to February 1929, the Broadway runs of Animal Crackers and Strange Interlude overlapped as they played simultaneously at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and the John Golden Theatre respectively.
Oh, what it must have been like to catch both shows on consecutive nights.
In his current series on the Marx Brothers, Mythical Monkey's excellent blog takes a good look at the Brothers at this stage of their stage-to-film career.
Los Angeles has been communally celebrating with Ray Bradbury Week. As for me, I sent an email to Mr. Bradbury's agent asking about securing the rights to create a new theatrical adaptation of The Martian Chronicles for Seattle's Book-It Repertory Theater.
Like so many people out there, my history with Ray Bradbury starts with devouring The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, R is for Rocket, The Golden Apples of the Sun, Dandelion Wine, and especially The Martian Chronicles when I was in junior and senior high school. Since then I've always kept up with his writings, and carried those old paperbacks with me as I moved here and there and elsewhere across the country for college or career or coastal views. Here in my office I have three different editions of Chronicles. So, yeah, it's one of my touchstone "desert island" books and he's been a writer I've happily grown up with. Even when some of his work has been subpar and his personal proclamations slip into right-wing crankitude like Grandpa Simpson waving his cane, he still occupies special bookshelf space in my heart and his best work remains eminently re-visitable "comfort reading" decades on.
Like me, Bradbury has always possessed a love for the theater, for good stories well-told by skilled, talented people on a stage in front of willing audiences. Not surprisingly then, he has adapted The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, plus a dozen or so of his stories, for the stage.
Years ago, while working on my M.A. in theater, I hit upon the notion of producing and directing a couple of his plays, adaptations of his stories "Kaleidoscope" and "Pillar of Fire." Meanwhile, creatively indulging a long-time love of astronomy, I worked as a show presenter and educator in the local planetarium. So what better place to stage the show than in the planetarium?
Aided by like-minded artists, musicians, and actors, we used the facility's unique visual technologies to place our strong repertory cast — the newly inaugurated Glass Goblin Theater Company — on an audience-encompassing Martian landscape, in a futuristic graveyard, and even adrift plummeting through deep space. All scene changes, plus special visual and audio effects, were as easy as a flip of a switch on the planetarium control console.
Best of all, A Night of Delicate Terrors: 2 Plays by Ray Bradbury went live with active cooperation, encouragement, and input from the plays' author. During the rehearsal phase, Ray — he asked me to call him Ray, insert fanboy squeal here — and I exchanged a large amount of mail and spoke on the phone a number of times, with him sending me his thoughts on theater as well as articles he'd written and even his own copies of scripts he'd created.
My goal was to create a kind of theater that was (1) entertaining and meaningful to traditional theatergoers, (2) "modern" in a way that attracted and engaged people who never before had set foot in either a playhouse or planetarium, (3) commercially viable (we made money!), and (4) consistent with Ray's notions and philosophies about an "intimate" theater that provides a physical, elemental experience that's not just three-dimensional TV. We succeeded.
My one regret was that he was unable to join us at the show itself. So afterward I sent him the press notices and a collection of production photos. Much later I was pleased to hear from his publicist that a copy of the show poster hung in Ray's dining room. A framed copy inscribed by Ray in silver ink hangs here in my house. (Just moments ago as I sit here, while Google-searching for the Martian Chronicles image at the top, I discovered that two years ago someone at Wired.com liked that poster well enough to cop-and-crop it for their own Happy Birthday piece on him.)
The show was a hit. It capped my Master's degree in theater, after which we staged another show in the same venue, Lunacy, a seriocomic satire about the history of women in space exploration.
Together those shows opened a door to a (wholly unanticipated) career in the planetarium field with a position as Astronomer Intern at the renowned Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, NY. My boss there, the chief producer, was also a theater man with his own company, so he appreciated the value of enhancing the 60-foot dome with a dash of showmanship when carrying audiences to the stars.
Later, that feather in the cap took me to Portland, OR, where I was hired as the planetarium production coordinator at the big science museum there. It was a job I loved and one that afforded still more creative high points (playing in the Star Trekuniverse among others).
Ray and I maintained our correspondence. He sent me his script to Leviathan '99, a deeply poetic (probably too much so) space-going radio play interpretation of Moby Dick. Along with it was a cassette tape of the BBC production starring Christopher Lee. I pitched hard for it as a new project at my new planetarium job, but the higher-ups wouldn't bite. It put me in the uncomfortable position of having to say no to Ray Bradbury. Crap.
At the console, Strasenburgh Planetarium
I'm not doing planetarium work now, but I miss it and its unique stimulations and creative opportunities dearly. Mr. Bradbury — back to respectful formalities now — and I have exchanged some mail and Christmas cards over the years. In one of them he included one of his poems, "If Only We Had Taller Been," and before I read it I wondered, Is this about me being only 5'4"?
My story, "Great Works of Western Literature," appeared in the Sept. '94 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction along with Bradbury's "From the Dust Returned" (which he later expanded into a novel).
More recently, he and I have shared space in a college textbook, one of those fat Norton-style literature anthologies. It's the 4th edition of Literature and Ourselves: a Thematic Introduction for Readers and Writers (New York: Longman, 2003), for courses in second-semester freshman composition and intro to world literature.
Within the 1500-page collection, among the Virginia Woolf and Geoffrey Chaucer, nestled there between Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Vonnegut, Poe, cummings, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Oates, Eliot, O'Connor, and other deep-hitters, my previously published novelette, "What Dreams Are Made On," was reprinted as part of the thematic section Imagination and Discovery. Its prose fiction segment includes Mark Twain, Woody Allen, Ray Bradbury, me, and Louise Erdrich.
On a preface page kicking off that section, the editors paired us up for some student deep-thinkery:
"...You might choose to explore what Ray Bradbury is implying about our present by showing us one version of the future in 'There Will Come Soft Rains,' or you might ask what Mark Bourne is saying about human nature as he describes people who fill their lives primarily with vicarious experiences...."
My byline appearing near his in a literature textbook was pure kismet; I had no idea what else was going to be in that section until I received my copy of the book. It was both thrilling and humbling, and you bet I sent him a little note about it. My fiction, such as it is, has not again (yet?) been represented in such august company. Oh, and please excuse me while I give another fanboy shout: Woody Allen! Mark Twain! Holy shit!
As I mentioned at the top, earlier this week I wrote to his agent. I did so at the suggestion of his daughter/manager and at the behest of the Book-It Repertory Company, who have been itching to apply their own impressive "Book-It style" to a Ray Bradbury title or three during its twenty years as a mainstay in Seattle's theater scene. They have approached him before, but a deal couldn't be struck. So maybe I can provide a friendly "in" as a liaison between two creative forces I enjoy so much. My hope is that I'm the one who gets to adapt The Martian Chronicles. Wouldn't that be cool?
In the meantime, here's another personal birthday greeting — this one from Rachel Bloom of the Upright Citizens Brigade (oh, to be back in New York again!) — that, boy oh boy, sure has made the rounds this week.
According to this interview with the well-read Ms. Bloom in the Seattle PI's Booktryst blog:
"Writers are thus the pinnacle of intelligence. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don’t know why every person out there isn’t dating a writer."
So, to answer the second obvious (to me) question: Yes, suddenly I have an even greater incentive to finish this novel. In the meantime, Rachel, may I interest you in some of my published short fiction?
While I was putting together Tuesday's post, I wrote that José Quintero had made his name directing Eugene O'Neill's stage dramas, "notably the '56 production of The Iceman Cometh that launched Jason Robards." For hours after I published the post, that mention of the Robards' Iceman kept buzzing in my head. When a song earworms through my brain, the only way to purge it is to actually listen to the damn song. It's not often that I get a video earworm (a videotapeworm?), but I had one now and there was only one way to deal with it.
As an ardent theater-lover with something of a DVD addiction, I went to the span of shelf space dedicated to the Broadway Theatre Archive and reached for the double-wide spine with the little picture of Robards at the bottom. (Doing so, I noticed that I need to dust more often, but that's another day. Deadlines, you know.)
So here I am now, raising a pint to Broadway Theatre Archive, where five decades' worth of great stage performances and some of television's hallowed events are preserved on modern video. And let's raise another to DVDs, which let us watch them without fuss on home screens that — to the original viewers of these productions — would seem ripped from vintage issues of Amazing Wonder Stories magazine. And before we fall face-forward to the scarred hardwood tabletop, raise one more to the Golden Age of televised dramatic works, which in 1960 brought us a powerful adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet, of Quintero's seminal New York Circle in the Square stage production of The Iceman Cometh, the one that made Robards a star.
Robards' virtuoso performance as the glad-handing, doom-ridden Hickey is the role's gold standard, one Kevin Spacey aspired to reach in a strong 1999 revival of Eugene O'Neill's 1939 masterpiece.
Set in 1912 New York, The Iceman Cometh turns the spotlight on the failed lives, empty hopes, and perpetual pipedreams barely propping up the last-ditch community of stewbums, anarchists, and hookers of Harry Hope's seedy saloon. Most gave up on their lives long ago, and the only guarantee they can look forward to is the arrival of their old friend Hickey, a charismatic traveling salesman and everyone's life-of-the-party drinking companion.
But when Hickey shows up for his semi-annual bender, this time he's a changed man. He has sworn off liquor, yet instead of crusading temperance he is on a higher mission — to convince these booze-soaked burnouts that guilt-cleansing "truth" is the only deliverance from "the lie of the pipedream."
On the other side of the argument is aging anarchist Larry Slade, who counters that it's raw truth that beats down men, whose happiness hangs on their desperate need for illusions and pipedreams.
The presence of the evangelical salesman affects everyone. As Hickey's "generosity" painfully strips the masks from everyone he touches, long-held guilts are aired and secrets unlocked, and not everyone is left alive by the closing credits. (Death is the overshadowing "iceman" here.) Naturally, Hickey's own truth is the most revealing unmasking of all, and his 30-minute confessional final soliloquy is still one of the great declamations of modern theater.
The Iceman Cometh is heady stuff, alright, dissecting wasted lives and failed dreams. Like the dive in William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, Harry's shabby saloon is the world in a bottle, its inhabitants' dreams summing up the various forms humanity's illusions take — political, racial, domestic, sexual, intellectual, and religious. And as delivered here it's also funny and wise, compassionate and ruthless.
At the start of its 1960 broadcast to a national TV audience, someone added a preamble by legendary New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, and that's on this DVD. Looking more than a bit uncomfortable, Atkinson tells us that a "mature, sensitive" audience might be prepared for this raw depiction of "the dregs of society" and their "vulgarities." (Was Lumet under pressure from the studio or sponsors to not give all those immature, insensitive TV viewers a case of the fantods?)
In a word, it's riveting. There are more guts and humanity here than in a summer's worth of Hollywood blockbusters. If nothing else, there's great pleasure in just witnessing extraordinary actors at the top of their craft bringing life to one of the great American plays. Robards is astonishing in his career-making performance, and he went on to be hailed as the authoritative interpreter of O'Neill's linchpin characters.
The Iceman Cometh's superior ensemble also showcases other familiar faces as O'Neill's consciously colorful characters — Myron McCormick (as Larry Slade), Tom Pedi, James Broderick (Matthew's dad), and there's no missing boyish 24-year-old Robert Redford in an early major screen appearance as poor, pitiless Don Parritt, who gets the last word (even if it is a thump! on the sidewalk outside his window). According to his IMDb.com filmography, 1960 was Redford's screen debut year, and a big one with nearly a dozen appearances on shows such as Perry Mason and Playhouse 90.
For TV, the production was sensitively directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Fail-Safe, Network, and on and on). I can't tell while watching it, of course, where Quintero's original stage directing ends and where Lumet's TV directing begins, other than the movements (and close-ups, etc.) of Lumet's television cameras. On some of the other Broadway Theatre Archive DVDs, it's clear that experienced studio directors such as Kirk Browning deftly respected a production's theatrical origins while simultaneously making terrific television, and we can assume that Lumet preserved Quintero's directorial instincts while also adding his own. Lumet fully employed his simple but effective camera setup, floating within long continuous takes that cut only for O'Neill's scene breaks. The long takes are extra impressive nowadays: where else can as we observe actors on a screen, big or small, displaying their art and craft to this extent and this vulnerably?
As Variety wrote at the time, this production was "a landmark for the video medium, a reference point for greatness in TV drama." Even at three-and-a-half hours spread across two discs, it reminds us of how good theater faithfully restaged for television can be.
Boy, I sure wish we could see this kind of theater-for-TV presentation more often, not just occasionally on PBS. (That said, when I was able to pick up the 2007 Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company on Blu-ray, that's when I knew the new format had truly settled in and put its feet up to stay a while.)
This Broadway Theatre Archive DVD preserves as closely as possible the original audio and visual components. However, because now it's digitally remastered (from the original 2" videotape) the resolution also preserves the limitations of 1960 TV technology. Expect some video blooming and black-and-white imagery that's contrasty and not nearly as sharp as modern technology allows. Nonetheless, it all looks remarkably good given its years of inattention, and the audio comes through strong in 1.0 mono.
There's also a DVD edition of the 1973 John Frankenheimer movie version starring Lee Marvin as a coarser, less likable Hickey alongside Fredric March, Robert Ryan, and Jeff Bridges taking over for Redford. YouTube provides a bit of the 1999 Kevin Spacey performance as well as Al Pacino giving Hickey's big speech a quiet, nearly mumblecore interpretation. And it goes without saying that The Iceman Cometh, the dreadful 1989 Hong Kong action fantasy with Maggie Cheung and Biao Yuen ("Un remake idiot de 'Highlander', said a French magazine) is, like, so not O'Neill.
Music: Marc Seales, "Highway Blues" Near at hand: a tiny Yoga for Dummies book
A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been updated for the 21st century with seven small robots playing fairies alongside carbon-based co-stars.
Beyond being a cool thing to do, researchers saw bringing bots to the Bard as a chance to introduce robots to the public and see how people interact with them. Their findings could influence how robots are designed and how they’re used in search-and-rescue operations.
I would love to be there to see this in progress. Then again, I suppose I could be, given that it's open to tourists at £12.50 for a look-see (plus "£11.50 for concessions"). Long way from Seattle to Stratford, however.
A further trench will explore the area thought to have been his pantry and brewery, and one quarter of the 19th Century knot garden will be dug – into what would have been Shakespeare’s backyards. This is where archaeologists believe they might find defunct wells, filled in with refuse and waste when they ceased to be used.
The notion of Shakespearean coprolites is a tad unnerving. Although that may finally reveal, whether we like it or not, what the great man did with those missing pages of Cardenio.
Music: Sondheim, Company (2007 revival)
Near at hand: Shakespeare bobblehead doll
