The Sweet and Clever "Seraglio"

Yeah, I wrote this.  I wrote it for you.

A brilliant film - sweet, clever and funny.  This must be a romance writer's fantasy-cum-reality.  I love how Georgia blossoms as a woman, first wearing frumpy overalls, then lovely brown and blue dresses, finally a lush red sweater.

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This short film reminded me of Mozart's "Abduction from the Seraglio." 

"Pullman Porter Blues" is our Story

This rollicking, music-fueled trip back in time takes us into the luxurious Pullman trains of the 1930s, where the hidden lives of African American porters emerge to take center stage and classic Blues favorites—including “Sweet Home Chicago”—come to life. 

It’s June of 1937, and the Panama Limited Pullman Train is speeding from Chicago to New Orleans on the night of the Joe Louis/James Braddock world heavyweight championship. Three generations of Sykes men—African American train porters—wrestle with ghosts of the past and dreams for the future as they eagerly await word of the Brown Bomber’s victory. Set to timeless Blues tunes performed by a live, on-stage band, Pullman Porter Blues is a spirited, music-infused ride you won’t soon forget!

Reference: Pullman Porter Blues.

Working 400 hours, for $12, a month was an inequity in the 1930s.  But porters on the Pullman trains were keen to work and provide for their families, and while they felt the blues, the blues as song uplifted them.  

"Pullman Porter Blues" is quintessentially our story, not just for African Americans, but also perhaps for all the good, the bad, and the ugly that make up our story.

Brilliant Irony of "Weighting"

It's not really about couple, but about time. Look closer: outside, she has a big watch under her arm, which means that time matters a lot for her: no time for birthday (the cake), no time for family (she takes one photo, the other ones fall and break), no time for herself or her couple (the tea), she ONLY wants to run, run fast. She prepares her old age with the walking stick. But she lost someone who wants to go with her. And by going too fast, she even lost a leg! Just take your time, people.

This was a comment by miracoulus on YouTube, and I responded:

I think you're right! It's a sad commentary about the pace of modern day life and relationships. He wants to sit, and talk, and think ... and sip tea (the epitome of slowness). She has longer legs, and a faster gait, and he evidently cannot stop her, even with just one leg (literally and figuratively). Ironically, as much as she wants to run away fast, she's weighed down by what she's ambivalent about: Having a settled-down, domesticated life with him.

Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly in "Annapurna"

Written by Sharr White, directed by SuzAnne Barabas. Out of friends, out of luck, and out of time, Ulysses is resigned to spending the last remaining weeks of his life in solitude with his ungrateful dog and his relentless do-gooder neighbor. That is, until Emma walks in ... much as she walked out on him twenty years ago.

Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly

Word is, the husband and wife above are set to play Ulysses and Emma, in an off-Broadway production of Annapurna, come spring.  I know Offerman and Mullaly more for their comedic talent, so I imagine they'll bring a good amount of this into the drama.

"And Miles To Go" Has Miles To Go

Disadvantaged students. A disheartened administration. A disintegrated infrastructure. In Chad Beckim's AND MILES TO GO, Adele Priam has seen the very best and worst in her 40 years as a teacher in the classroom of a New York City public school. As the Board of Education considers shuttering the school, this teacher and her community will forever be changed. A play about the frailty of life, the legacy we leave, and our broken education system.

Devika Bhise, with Randy Danson

"And Miles To Go" sounds like a very promising play, but it falls short of that very promise.

In the show’s opening monologue, Adele Priam (Randy Danson), coming upon her 40th anniversary of teaching at the school, issues a juddering jeremiad about the intractability of the institution’s problems and the futility of putting “a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”

Then the tone shifts jarringly, the first of what will ultimately be two major mood swings in Mr. Beckim’s herky-jerky script.

If the first act was “Dangerous Minds,” the second is “Breakfast Club,” mostly populated by mouthy, unsupervised teenagers unusually inclined to disrobe on school property and break into locked closets.

Reference: Sounds Like a Haven for Troubled Students. It’s Not.

Writer Catherine Rampell gives away that second major mood swing.  So if you plan to watch the play, and don't want to know what happened in that third act, then hold off on reading her article which I reference above.  But below are the films and the poem she alludes to:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost

Creative and Emotional Power of "Losers"

I have a film concept and project idea on Stop Bullying.  But this short film - "Losers" - is so well conceived and so well done that I am in awe.  I am inspired to draw from its creative and emotional power.  Those whom bullies bully are regular boys and girls.  They are like everyone else.  They hurt like you and me.  So much so that I am reminded of that exchange in William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," where Shylock asks, dripping with pathos, If you prick us, do we not bleed?

A Gathering at "La Piattaforma"

"La Piattaforma" is a meditative film by Laura Chiossone.  Life, as it is, happens on this platform.  Curious and oblivious.  Sensuous and erotic.  Playful and relaxing.  That these casual swimmers gravitate to this platform makes it a piazza at sea, and it doesn't matter that it measures only a handful of square feet.

The Talented Mary-Louise Parker on Broadway

Mary-Louise Parker

I was curious, yet not surprised, to read Mary-Louise Parker: 'I'm Almost Done Acting'.  I've always found her to be a beautiful lady, with such underrated acting versatility, that she can sidle from comedic, to seductive, to dramatic quite plausibly.

"I'm not really that into it anymore," she said. "I don't know how many more movies I wanna do. I wouldn't mind doing a TV show again, I'd like to do a couple more plays, but I'm almost done acting, I think."

The reason?

She's fed up with the mean-spirited nature that comes along with being in the entertainment industry.

"The world has gotten too mean for me, it's just too bitchy. All the websites and all the blogging and all the people giving their opinion and their hatred … it's all so mean-spirited, it's all so critical," she said. "It's sport for people, it's fun to get on at night and unleash their own self-loathing by attacking someone else who they think has a happier life -- or something, I dunno."

Admittedly, the negative feedback gets to her.

"I don't know if you can imagine a friend sending you something they thought was funny, that was something mean someone wrote about you and there's like 50 comments from complete strangers across the world about you -- and you can say 'Oh I let it roll off my back' and 'I wouldn't take it personally', but you have no idea until it happens to you. It doesn't feel nice."

I wrote about this very thing in another article - The Artificial Line Between Online and Real Life - specifically regarding "Celebrities Read Mean Tweets":

The best comedy, I think, does two seemingly contradictory things all at once: It makes us laugh, and it makes us sad. This is a stroke of genius on Kimmel's part to humanize the people some of us tweet about and tweet with. Those people who delivered these mean tweets can hide behind Twitter handles, as Couts points out, but in a way Kimmel has 'de-anonymized' them. He moves new media (Twitter) into the tried-and-true old media of TV, which ironically many of us watch on new media (YouTube), and shows us how celebrities took these mean tweets. Many of them were truly good sports about it, and took it in stride with calm confidence or fitting humor.

But some looked hurt, though.

So Kimmel dissolves that artificial boundary between online and real life, not fully of course but sufficiently enough, for us to think twice, I hope, about how we carry ourselves on social media.

Here's the most recent edition of "Mean Tweets":

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The talented Parker is currently on Broadway, and The New York Times does a photo retrospective of her stage performances, dating back to 1990, in Stage Scenes: Mary-Louise Parker.

Memory and Dream in "Some Static Started"

This is a brilliant mind-bending thriller of a short film.  I have a working idea of what is going on in this story, but I'm still mulling it over.  

But here goes:  The wounded man sitting on the make-shift couch talking (Bleeding Man), and the man with the bushy beard who looks at him but doesn't say a thing (Shaving Man) are in the present.  They are the same two men in that motel room, from many years ago, with Shaving Man sitting on the bed and Bleeding Man sitting by the window.  This is Bleeding Man's memory of the past.

The lady walking up the corridor, into the room, then to the bathroom is the same lady in that old motel with the two men.  The Bleeding Man referenced this sequence as a dream.  What I suspect is that Shaving Man, who was sitting on the bed, actually killed her way back then.  Notice that at the start of the film, there were two blood stains on the edge of the bed.  I think the blood is the lady's, as she was killed by Shaving Man, who then sat down on the bed afterwards and placed his blood-stained hands on the sheets.  

The reason she looks the same in the corridor sequence is that she died, and therefore never grew old, in Bleeding Man's mind's eye.  She must've screamed, as Shaving Man was killing her, and this scream was forever embedded in Bleeding Man's psyche.       

Back to the present, Shaving Man stabs Bleeding Man to death, in order to settle an old score having to do with that fateful day in the motel room.  Maybe they were a criminal trio, and the lady and Shaving Man were a romantic pair.  Maybe the lady and Bleeding Man had sex on the side, which Shaving Man found out about somehow while talking to someone on the phone.  So he was not happy, in the least, and must've killed her straightaway.  Which must've pained him terribly, at the same time, and thus tried to reassure her that everything was going to be okay.

As Bleeding Man sat dying, that nightmarish day replayed itself one last time, as a dream, which in some mind-twisted way was now about the lady discovering him, that is, his dead body.  From the look of the two men in the present, the lady may have also "witnessed" the present-day murder.

Memory and dream, one murder and a second murder, all collide and become fluid in a surreal nightmare for the wounded man.

Promoting "Carrie" with an Awesome Prank

What if telekinesis was real? How would you react? Our hidden camera experiment captures the reactions of unsuspecting customers at a New York City coffee shop as they witness a telekinetic event.

I know that not everyone likes this prank, but I think it is so.freaking.awesome.and.hilarious.  This is a very clever way to promote the third adaptation of Stephen King's iconic 1974 novel - "Carrie."

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"Carrie" is due out on October 18th 2013.

Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Baines Johnson

Bryan Cranston, as President Lyndon Baines Johnson

The play begins with the Kennedy assassination and depicts the first year of Johnson’s presidency, focusing mostly on his leadership savvy in brokering passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Among the other major characters in “All the Way” are Martin Luther King Jr., J. Edgar Hoover, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace. 

Written by the Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Schenkkan (“The Kentucky Cycle”), the production runs three hours, which will make it one of the longest plays on Broadway in recent years.

Reference:  Bryan Cranston is Headed to Broadway.

The shift from sold-out performances in Cambridge, to a yet-to-be-determined theater on Broadway, is no small production.  Not only is it a real-time evolution of dramatic art  - Schenkkan is rewriting parts of the script - but also it calls for a $3.5 million budget.  Producer Jeffrey Richards is counting on Cranston's "Breaking Bad" star power - and no doubt his acting, three-time Emmy Award-winning, talent as well - to draw more ticket sales.  

"Bengal Tiger" and the Abu Ghraib Prison

The titular big cat in Rajiv Joseph's distinctive drama “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” is a laconic, fatalistic type, whom we first meet inside a cage in the bombed-out Baghdad Zoo guarded by an edgy pair of U.S. Marines scared by what they've experienced as part of their ill-defined mission to Iraq and unsure whether their job is to liberate or loot.

“Bengal Tiger” is about many things: the war in Iraq, of course; the impact of conflict on soldiers; the difficulty of surviving with your body and your dignity attached; and the horrors of destroying an ancient culture (the zoo is, in many ways, a metaphor for all the Iraqi assets, be they antiquities or living people, in great peril).

Reference:  At Lookingglass, a tiger tale set in Iraq.

I discovered this play in the Theater in Chicago community on Google+, and it looks to be quite an intense drama.

I was traveling between the US and the Middle East, where I was actively consulting, in the lead-up to the Iraqi War; the tragicomic "Mission Accomplished" pronouncement by then-President George Bush; and the repeated atrocities in post-combat Iraq.  In particular, I was managing a project for Saudi Aramco in Bahrain when the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture surfaced, and shamed the US and the victims of its abusive soldiers.

I was conducting a program briefing, when one of the Saudi managers made a catty remark.  I must've smiled, thinking it was a joke.  It was not, as he repeated his remark twice more, and while his tone was never harsh, he was clearly very angry about the Abu Ghraib incident.  Forthrightly I kept all of us focused on the briefing, and kept going.  Thankfully the gentleman stopped, and there were no issues over the four-day program.

JJ Phillips, as Kev, and Anish Jethmalani, as Musa

At the start of the evening, our narrator, played by Troy West, makes the ill-considered decision, being hungry and all, to bite off the hand of one of his guards (played, sturdily, by Walter Owen Briggs). That leads the other, younger guard (the lively JJ Phillips) to blow the tiger away. But the beast is only killed in one layer of reality. He continues to pad his way through the soldiers' dreams.

A Tender Friendship in "Let Me In"

I like "The Twilight" saga for its breath-taking cinematography and popularity, but not so much for its story or acting.  I also like "Blood and Chocolate" for its drama (somewhat), but more for looker Agnes Bruckner in the lead role.

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Enter:  "Let Me In."

For decades, Hollywood has tapped the vampire well.  But only a couple, among the many variations on a theme, stand out for me.  For the bullying a 12-year old boy has to withstand and for the loathsome, lonesome life a 12-year girl has to live, "Let Me In" manages to make a most unlikely friendship happen.  The on-screen chemistry between Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloë Grace Moretz is one to behold.  Of course, it helps to have a well-scripted plot and to dialogue with words that are true to preteen language and manners.  It is a love story that does not devolve into platitudes or affectation.  There is such beautiful intimacy that grows slowly on us as the audience.

While "Let Me In" is intimate, "Bram Stoker's Dracula" is epic.  The first reminded me of the second.  I love both for their love story.