Les Parents Terribles at Quad Cinema

I did not set out to go to Les Parents Terribles at the Quad Cinema. I was on my way to Strand Books and as I walked past the Quad I saw it was on. The  existence of this film was revealed to me while searching for Les Enfants du Paradis at the Performing Arts Library, and I simultaneously learned that the print is available almost nowhere. It seemed too good to be true to have it lying in wait for me, as it were, and in I went.

There was some sort of celebrity event going on, with a backdrop labeled with sponsors' names and a
velvet rope and a hoard of photographers displaying symptoms of high anxiety, and the cinema employees were loudly complaining about the handful of us who were waiting to see an obscure French film of the 1940s, as though we were pieces of furniture that needed to be moved out of the way. An ancient Francophile drew himself to his full four feet nine and a half inches and accused the management of "being quite brutal", and as a consequence we were all offered  free popcorn and handed into our seats as if we were treasured objects of great fragility. This certainly didn't hurt and in no time we were staring at the blunt opening credits as Jean Cocteau's signature rose on the screen before us, accompanied by the unapologetically melodramatic music which plays throughout the film, and we were off.

It would be quite inadequate to say that only the French would write such a script wen the ancient Greeks wrote such stuff all the time, to public acclaim. However it is possible that in the twentieth century only Jean Cocteau would write such a script and get away with it.  Two doting parents observe that their handsome son has spent the night away from home. The husband’s sister enjoys torturing the infatuated mother with details of the affair that the son is no doubt having with a woman somewhere. The son returns to enjoy the discomfort of his jealous mother which is resolved by a fairly rough yet intimate amount of physical contact in the mother's bed. The husband’s sister, who is having "a thing" with her brother, the husband and father, insists that they all meet the new lover, knowing that the son's new conquest is the mistress of her brother and that the inevitable crisis will serve to draw her brother closer. This wish is fulfilled when the son renounces his family, the mother kills herself, the husband turns for consolation to the sister and the sister gloats.

Les Parents Terribles first appeared in 1938 as a play and it also works brilliantly as the film which Cocteau directed himself in 1948. Naturally, the script has its critics and it has even been deplored. However it is fairly truthful to observe that everything that can happen often does happen, as was usually the case with Jean Cocteau. He was merely observing the facts of life which, for him, were never lacking in drama.

Fat Asses, The Musical, at Theater for the New City

It would never have occurred to me that anyone would write let alone produce a musical about the form of vicious discrimination commonly referred to as fat shaming but they did and not only that but it's been performed to packed houses, over and over and it is now a cult, part of the established repertoire of established off off off Broadway, which is the next step above the Fringe, where anything goes.

It's quite refreshing that a play which so obviously ignores the tedious restrictions of the politically - correct theatre going society of New York, or anywhere else, has escaped much of the critical commentary it might attract had it not so clearly reviewed the matter of being fat from the point of view of those most immediately affected.

The plot is fairly straightforward: three friends are expelled as failures from a weight loss center (named Excess Baggage) which is owned by the prevailing fashion magazine ("Gaunt"), so they team up with a politically radical, butch lesbian with sociopathic and indiscriminately violent tendencies to lay siege to the "Gaunt" establishment, and most particularly to its managing editor - who naturally bears no resemblance, deliberately or coincidentally, to anyone who might immediately come to mind. All of the successful aspects of a hit musical are vibrantly present: hilarious script, bouncy, memorable tunes, fast pace, attractive, complex heroine (fat) characters, evil, complex, (thin) villains, conveniently packaged stereotypes (butch lesbians and gun toting men) the support of Actors Equity and a track record of success.

Only one actor wore a "fat" suit and the writer, Peter Zachari, is himself someone who might identify as being of ample girth, and there is no question that the play sets out to reclaim the means by which thin, mostly white, people choose to objectify and alienate those who do not look or behave like them. It is undoubtedly satire, irony, parody, and it self reflectively sends up every shibboleth imaginable. The satirical intention is not only obvious but much reinforced with every punchline about french fries, every tilt at waistline measurements, every rousing, sardonic chorus of hilarious hate jokes and each well-ridden cliche about non-heterosexual people.

The problem is, despite all intentions, the performance was also an evening of jolly musical fat fun about fat women, the thrill of violence and relentless mockery of lesbian and gay stereotypes, and it was was evidently enjoyed to the maximum by an audience of (predominantly) thin white people. Who knows how many of us left the theatre feeling more uplifted by the endorphins aroused by having had a good laugh at the expense of so many others rather than burdened by the weight of the ghastliness of fat shaming? The dividing line seemed barely evident, which is probably why this musical is such a success and also why it remains on off off off off Broadway, where anything goes.

Giselle at American Ballet Theater

Hounding Jilters

American Ballet Theater

The best thing about the ABT's Giselle last night was when Misty Copeland fell over half way through act one. She didn't merely trip, she went head over heels from a full arabesque into being laid out flat on the floor, arms twisted and legs akimbo. I know it sounds awful, but it was actually a positive experience for the audience which howled their support for her and subsequently gave her a huge ovation whenever she appeared. As for Misty, she literally took it in her stride, patiently remaining where she lay while she regained her composure, then rising in a suitably beautiful balletic manner before throwing herself into a frenzy of perfect technique and exquisite style that rivaled the most officious Moscow ballerina whose nostrils well knew the threatening scent of sulphuric acid. Act One of Giselle doesn't matter anyway. All that happens is that Giselle dies after a lively peasant romp around some grand ladies adorned with their familiars. The substance is in Act Two where the corps de ballet outshines everything else. After all, the Willis are the most compelling act in any ballet. Nothing beats a group of ghosts who, dead from the agony of unrequited love, spend eternity pursuing jilters and hounding them to death. Nothing beats that.

Shelf Life: New Works Made from the Archives

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

The Price of Public Funding 

In January the Library of Performing Arts gave some insight into the value it adds by giving six
composers, performers and writers unrestricted access to the archives and asking them to come up with something new. The results were performed at Lincoln Center on Monday night in "Shelf Life: New Works Made from the Archives". They included three new substantial musical compositions (including a drum concerto based on NY street noises in the sound archive), a one act play with music about Eva LeGalliene and Edward Molyneux, a multimedia performance piece about the passing of time and an illustrated song cycle about genocide and dispossession. The audience seemed not only awestruck by this outpouring of creativity, but also dazzled that all this could be brought about for the meagre price of public library funding.

The Politics of Gender at Theater for the New City

Theater for the New City

I feel as though I am discovering an entirely new realm of New York actors. As with almost anything beyond the Pale of Broadway, it was worth going to see "The Politics of Gender" because of the cast whose professional capabilities could not be hidden in a small theatre where the audience sits three feet from the stage. Two long-standing professionals on the O-O-O-O-B theatre world shone in this production: Taylor Graves, whose technique was as strong as her presence; she is a literally luminous beauty who acts with her eyes as much as anything else and brings her character fully into being in the most literal sense, and Linus Gelber a brilliant Danny De Vito lookalike, who has been in everything, for years, who was cast as Lady Bracknell before it became common to put a man in the role and is a star of the continuing theatre soap opera "It's getting Tired Mildred". The play, a dated Italian thriller, was as amusing as it was predictable. The killer was who I thought it was and not the main suspect who turned out not to exist. Even so, it was fun to see a production which opened with a corpse being removed from the scene of the crime (though the lucky cast member with that roll-off role was not actually credited on the playbill) and the "film noir" script was only enhanced by the sounds of street life going on outside on 10th Street: cops yelling, radios blaring, sirens wailing, all of which was so pertinent that at first I thought it was a sound track until the inevitable irruption of a cellphone inside the theatre made me realise that all that noise was but the intrusion of the real world.

Britannicus at Theatre for the New City

Racine, 1669 

There was a time when all and sundry could enjoy a play in New York without taking out a home equity loan on their already voracious mortgage. Now that Times Square is essentially the fulcrum of the country's consumer debt, to which each American adult perpetually owes an average of $8,000, the exorbitant ticket prices hardly register to the punch drunk as they scan their monthly statements, so Broadway is reportedly doing very nicely out of the general malaise of usuary and Off Off Off Broadway seems to have vanished along with affordable rent and the $5 diner. Except, it hasn't, as evidenced by the eponymous and  (word for a thing that is what it sounds like) Theatre of the New City, down in what is left of the East Village, where new and old work is performed without let or hindrance from either banker nor property developer, and talent young and old can be seen performing a huge range of work, seven nights a week. On Thursday I went to a riveting performance of Racine's "Britannicus" (written in 1669) which was presented with conviction, professional skill and complete absorption in the text without compromising a highly realistic and engaging experience for the audience. In particular, the legendary Andrew R. Cooksey and Irvina Ruth, both veterans of American theatre with countless achievements who are greatly well-known but enjoy almost no fame as it might be conventionally understood, grounded the cast in decades of experience and capability, while all of the younger cast members demonstrated the powerful combination of youth, aptitude and training having been recently graduated from college acting schools in the New York area. Stehen Kime as the insane young Emperor Nero had a chilling sense of madness in his eyes and a malevolent stance which made the audience shudder at his every entry, and Tyler Austin's exacting standards as the sixteen year old Britannicus were matched only by his exemplary pulchritude which will no doubt serve him well in years to come should he ever reconcile his interest in drag, saxophone playing and the classics into some cogent form accessible to the masses who, for now, are sending themselves broke by paying up to $1,500 for a ticket to much less rewarding shows on the great White Way.