Theater: Vanity Fair

Adapted by Kate Hamill (Sense & Sensibility) from William Thackeray’s masterpiece, Vanity Fair exposes a society that cares more for good birth and good manners than for skill. But Becky Sharp, poor, plain, and devilishly clever, is determined to defy the odds through risky romantic entanglements, shady business practices, and social climbing at any cost; she won’t stop until the world lies at her feet.

From: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/theater/vanity-fair-broadway-review-kate-hamill-eric-tucker.html

From left, Joey Parsons, Debargo Sanyal, Kate Hamill and Tom O’Keefe in “Vanity Fair,” at the Pearl Theater. 

Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Ms. Parsons with Mr. Sanyal; Ms. Parsons plays the self-denying Amelia, who mostly exists to be virtuous. 

Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Film: Pow Wow

Director: Robinson Devor  2016 USA 72 minutes

Robinson Devor (Police Beat, Zoo) returns to documentary after a 10-year hiatus with Pow Wow, a visually striking series of vignettes. Showcasing the many environmental contrasts of the Coachella Valley in Palm Springs, CA, the film has an equally diverse array of subjects, including legendary Las Vegas comedian Shecky Greene, an elderly Austrian heiress, trust-funders, Native Americans, and white golfers who participate in their club’s annual “pow wow” party by wearing feather headdresses. These slices of life gradually come to illustrate the story of Willie Boy, a Paiute youth who escaped a mounted posse on foot across 500 miles of desert in 1908.

Film: Ama-San

Director: Cláudia Varejão 2016 Portugal/Switzerland Japanese with English subtitles 113 minutes

Cláudia Varejão’s intimate documentary focuses on women living in a small town off of Japan’s Shima Peninsula who have carried on the 2,000-year-old tradition of diving for pearls, sea urchins, and abalone. Challenging notions of how Japanese females are supposed to behave, the Ama (“sea women”) dive without scuba gear or oxygen tanks, wearing minimal protection. Like the Ama probing the ocean’s depths, Varejão’s camera examines the minutiae of the women’s day-to-day existence: their hair curlers, the sea salt clinging to their skin, and assorted daily feminine tasks that are all too often taken for granted. Winner of best Portuguese documentary at DocLisboa.

This film was a fascinating look at how an ancient work/fishing profession among Japanese women is integrated with their 21st century lives: these are working women in a modern Japanese community. The details that we see about their daily lives include cell phones and TV, a quiet shack where they sleep beside a fire after diving, singing karaoke and enjoying elaborate feasts of Japanese coastal food. The sea seems to support abundant shellfish harvesting without drawing conflict or competitive emotions from the many fisher-women. Female harmony, self-empowerment and a deepened sense of inter-generational community seem to be the fruits of this ancient fishing tradition.

Theater: A Gambler's Guide to Dying, at 59E59 2017

Gary McNair performs A Gambler’s Guide to Dying

What are the odds of living an extraordinary life?

This is the story of one boy's granddad who won a fortune betting on the 1966 World Cup, and, when diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1998 with weeks to live, gambled all his remaining winnings on living to see the year 2000. An intergenerational tale of what we live for and what we leave behind.

Gary McNair's award-winning solo show opens in New York following highly-acclaimed sell-out runs at Spoleto Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Adelaide Festival and London's Off-West End.

McNair shines in this beautifully-written, deceptively simple, warmly comic piece that accumulates layers of meaning through the act of storytelling itself. Rich and earthily funny--a genuine pleasure. - The Guardian (UK).

The review: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/08/a-gamblers-guide-to-dying-edinburgh-festival-review-gary-mcnair-traverse

The title of the latest one-man storytelling show from Gary McNair has a double meaning. The gambler is the narrator’s grandfather, a man who apparently placed a winning bet on the outcome of the 1966 World Cup. When he was subsequently diagnosed with cancer he placed another bet that, against the odds, he would survive to see the new millennium. But the title refers to us too: we are all gamblers, betting on outwitting death and achieving some kind of immortality through our genes and the stories we spin to our children and grandchildren. 

It’s been a real treat seeing McNair bloom as an artist over the years, and this Gareth Nicholls-directed show is a genuine pleasure – a beautifully written, deceptively simple, warmly comic piece that accumulates layers of meaning through the act of storytelling itself. It’s rich and earthily funny in its depiction of Gorbals in the 1960s, and delicate in its portrayal of the relationship between a grandson and his grandfather, and the desire we all have to be seen as special: the hero or heroine of our own story. 

It is both a celebration of the act of storytelling itself and a sly reminder that fiction and truth are hard to distinguish from each other. Like Sarah Polley’s brilliant movie Stories We Tell, it exposes the unreliability of memory and and the gap between what we know is true and what we want to believe is true. “The details, the facts, they’ve become blurred, like soft focus in an old movie,” says McNair.

This is a light-touch meditation on luck, probability, fate, love and the chances of falling in the Clyde and coming up with a salmon in your mouth. Odds are, audiences who secure a ticket will feel as though they’ve hit the jackpot. 

Theater: Come From Away

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/12/theater/come-from-away-review.html

A thrilling and multi-dimensional performance set in the small town of Gander in Newfoundland. The day is 911 when thousands of airline passengers were diverted/landed/detained in a village of 6,000 inhabitants. For the next five days, there are 16,000 people and the villagers respond with tremendous generosity and care for the emergency conditions required to house, feed and care for this vast number of "guests."  I also deeply appreciated that the show ended with a final musical performance by the musicians - from a fictionalized world, the reality of great music and talented musicians on stage drove the final emotions deftly home.

IRENE SANKOFF AND DAVID HEIN
BOOK, MUSIC, LYRICS

This quote from the review in the NYTimes:

Mr. Ashley and his musical staging director, Kelly Devine, have steered their multicast, 12-member ensemble through a rushing, sung-and-spoken narrative that has them changing parts (and accents) on a Canadian dime.

The performers are required to embody the good citizens of Gander (and nearby villages), a small town with a big airport in Northeast Canada, where 38 planes were forced to land after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The same cast plays passengers and crew members. 

...

“Come From Away,” in other words, is smarter than it first appears. The show starts off in a grating key of deep earnestness, as a chorus of Ganderians step to the edge of the stage to deliver an anthem of hearty regional identity. (“They say no man is an island, but an island makes a man.”)

But as it proceeds, the show — based on interviews with the people who inspired it — covers a vast expanse of sensitive material with a respect for its complexity.

...

Amid the surreal blur of activity, people fall in love, break up, learn of the deaths of loved ones and realize that the world will never, ever look the same again.

Music: Roomful of Teeth at the Ecstatic Music Festival 2017

http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/listen-roomful-teeth-nick-zammuto/
Grammy-winning vocal octet Roomful of Teeth with composer Nick Zammuto, a founding member ofZammuto and indie-rock heroes The Books. The evening will also feature the music of composers Toby Twining and Caroline Shaw.

Film: The Paris Opera - L'Opèra

Jean-Stéphane Bron
2017 France French with English subtitles
110 minutes

This all-access documentary goes behind the scenes of the Paris Opera, following the array of personnel—management, performers, costumers, cleaning crew—who work to bring breathtaking spectacle to audiences night after night. Over the course of a season, director Jean-Stéphane Bron nimbly juggles a dizzying number of storylines, from labor disputes to procuring a live bull for Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron to a PR crisis involving the head of the company’s ballet. Sweeping in scope yet full of intimate human moments, The Paris Opera offers a candid look at everything that goes into operating one of the world’s foremost performing arts institutions.

Film: Mum’s Wrong - Maman a tort

Marc Fitoussi
2016 France/Belgium French with English subtitles
110 minutes

When idealistic 14-year-old Anouk (Jeanne Jestin) embarks on a weeklong internship at her mom’s insurance company, she gets a crash course in the less-than-rosy reality of the corporate world, discovering some unsavory truths about her own mother along the way. An emotionally complex look at parents, children, and the moral compromises we make, Mum’s Wrong adroitly blends workplace satire with a compassionate social-issue message, while its leads Jestin and Émilie Dequenne (Rosetta, Our Children) create a nuanced, wholly believable portrait of a mother-daughter relationship undergoing a crisis.

Film: The Together Project - L'effet aquatique

The Together Project - L'effet aquatique

Sólveig Anspach
2016
France/Iceland English, French, and Icelandic with English subtitles
83 minutes

The final film from the late French-Icelandic director Sólveig Anspach is an irresistibly offbeat aquatic comedy. When gawky construction worker Samir (Samir Guesmi) encounters prickly swim instructor Agathe (Florence Loiret Caille), he’s immediately smitten. But his unconventional plan to win her over—pretending he can’t swim in order to take lessons from her—proves more than a little problematic. Sweet without being cloying, quirky without being grating, this romantic charmer succeeds thanks to the interplay between the two leads and Anspach’s breezy sincerity.

Film: In the Forest of Siberia

In the Forest of Siberia - Dans les forêts de Sibérie

Safy Nebbou
2016 France English, French, and Russian with English subtitles
105 minutes

Based on the award-winning memoir by adventurer Sylvain Tesson, this tale of survival follows Teddy (Raphaël Personnaz), a young Frenchman who leaves everything behind to live in isolation in the icy Siberian taiga. But initial exhilaration soon gives way to the harsh reality of staying alive in a frozen wilderness miles from civilization with roaming bears, life-threatening blizzards, and no electricity. The film captures majestic footage of the unspoiled Siberian landscape, its bleak beauty underscored by jazz trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf’s plaintive soundtrack.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/182543940

Film: Journey to Greenland - Le Voyage au Groënland

Dir. Sébastien Betbeder
2016 France English, Inuktitut, and French with English subtitles
98 minutes

Scruffy, thirtysomething best friends both named Thomas (Thomas Blanchard and Thomas Scimeca) leave behind their struggling acting careers in Paris for an extended sojourn in a remote, snowbound stretch of Greenland. One is there to reconnect with his off-the-grid father, the other for adventure. What ensues is a perceptive, warm-spirited study of cross-cultural misunderstanding and connection, as the two men learn to survive in a place without alcohol, indoor plumbing, or a reliable Internet connection. Director Sébastien Betbeder balances wry, unforced comedy with casual insight into human relationships: between friends, family members, and the strangers who touch your life. A Netflix release.

Theater: Wallace Shawn's "Evening at the Talk House"

From left, Matthew Broderick, John Epperson, Wallace Shawn, seated, and Claudia Shear in Mr. Shawn’s “Evening at the Talk House” at the Pershing Square Signature Center. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

"The banality of evil."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/theater/evening-at-the-talk-house-review.html?_r=0

.......
"I love how Wallace Shawn's writing begins with the simplest premise: people in a context. He cloaks the people with everything familiar to us, the audience, because it's a reflection of the way we live now. He shows us who we are, now. He mirrors the things we think are important; the misconceptions that we promote or hide; the ways that we are, perhaps minutely, cruel to fellow humans. In this same way he begins with a social context equally familiar to our present, even pointing out to us, in Talk House, that we are playing the part of "the audience" and are watching a play. And "this is the way aging actors talk about their careers and their comrades and competitors on the stage."

From familiar turf, Mr. Shawn moves us as smoothly as the ticking of a clock into future time - a future that extrapolates our behaviors as if they have profound future implications if unchecked.

In "Talk House," the dystopian future seems to be only about 10 years from the present. People have become obsessed with the idea of real/imagined threats and personalized danger posed by individuals around the world. Informants have become all-powerful. Distrust of one's fellow human beings has destroyed things like the theater and the former pleasant social club known as the Talk House. Retaliation against undesirable people is extreme: sophisticated poisons and drone-driven micro-bombs are used to commit murder. The job of being a killer has become ubiquitous: any individual with some free time and who needs a part time job can become a paid murderer.

The play is sprinkled with humor as we laugh at ourselves, our foibles, our penchant for verbal punishment of friends and foes alike. The theater is dead for a reason in this dystopian future: it is no longer safe to be oneself and to express oneself. In this new world, kindness itself becomes the greatest human flaw."  --dp

Theater: WHITE GUY ON THE BUS @ 59E59

Delaware Theatre Company presents WHITE GUY ON THE BUS Written by BRUCE GRAHAM Directed by BUD MARTIN With Robert Cuccioli, Jessica Bedford, Danielle Lenee, Susan McKey, Jonathan Silver A fearless new play by Bruce Graham (the writer behind 59E59 Theaters sold-out hit shows Any Given Monday and The Outgoing Tide) that unravels a complex web of moral ambiguity, revenge, and racial bias. A wealthy white businessman and a struggling black single mom ride the same bus week after week. As they get to know each other, their relationship sparks a candid and surprising look at racial and economic divides.

Music: Philip Glass, Songs and Poems for Solo Cello

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=wendy+sutter+song+i&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgFuLSz9U3MK4oLzYrUwKz04xMio0stESzk630c0uLM5P1E3OSSnOtivPz0osBqFYJ1jEAAAA&*

Music: Arooj Aftab at the Ecstatic Music Festival 2017

Arooj Aftab processes the Sufi tradition through an open-minded approach to sonic matter, reminiscent of jazz improvisation, and a contemporary production that does not shy away from incorporating subtle electronic undertones. With this method, the Lahore-born, Brooklyn-based artist completely reworks classical Pakistani and North Indian forms, like thumri, khayal, and kafi. With those broad inspirations, she creates a fascinating mix of sounds and cultures.

Listen to the concert on Q2 music:

Leo Genovese, piano
Nathan Ellman-Bell, drums
Yusuke Yamamoto, synths

https://www.facebook.com/aroojaftabmusic/

Music: Dadan 2017

http://www.bam.org/music/2017/dadan-2017

In Dadan, Japan’s preeminent taiko ensemble showcases the spectacular sonic possibilities of these time-honored instruments, supplemented with cymbals, xylophone, and more. Led by Kabuki theater luminary Tamasaburo Bando, the members of Kodo (Kodo One Earth Tour: Mystery, 2015 Winter/Spring) summon decades of training to exalt the drum in this tightly choreographed pageant of percussion.

Film: Sophie's Misfortunes

About the Countess of Ségur:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countess_of_S%C3%A9gur

“Sophie’s misfortunes” In this new adaptation of the Countess of Ségur’s iconic books, film director Christophe Honoré brings back to life, with nostalgia, Sophie’s misadventures. The Countess of Segur remains to this day France’s best-selling children’s author. Sophie is a naughty little girl living in a castle, in nineteenth century France. She simply cannot resist disobeying her mother and engaging in mischievous pranks, accompanied by her cousin Paul. When her parents announce the family moving to America, Sophie is thrilled. One year later she comes back to France with her horrible step-mother, Madame Fichini. But Sophie can rely on her two friends, the Good Little Girls, and their mother, Madame de Fleurville, to help her from falling into the awful lady’s clutches.

Film: I am Not Your Negro

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_am_not_your_negro

Art Gallery: photographer Richard Mosse, Heat Maps

Photographer Richard Mosse is using a military thermal radiation camera to capture detailed photos of refugee camps. His ongoing series is titled Heat Maps, shown at the Jack Shainman Gallery, in New York.

Film: Heal the Living

Trailer on Youtube

Director: Katell Quillévéré
2016 France/Belgium French with English subtitles
103 minutes

 A medical drama of unusual depth and sensitivity, Heal the Living charts the disparate lives touched by a tragedy. Following a car accident, 17-year-old Simon (Gabin Verdet) is left brain-dead, setting into motion a chain of events that affects everyone from his family to the hospital staff to a mother of two (Anne Dorval) in need of a heart transplant.

 Director Katell Quillévéré weaves together the multistrand narrative with consummate grace, abetted by a remarkable ensemble cast (including Emmanuelle Seigner and Tahar Rahim), elegant camerawork, and a striking score by Alexandre Desplat. The result is an enormously affecting study of human interconnectedness that finds a silver lining of hope in a wrenching situation. A Cohen Media Group release.