4/18/24 (Thurs)
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1947 fantasy was based on a female-authored book released two years earlier. I knew the title from the short-lived TV series back in the 1960s, but that played the situation for laughs. The film takes a more romantic approach.
5/11/24 (Sat)
Christopher Nolan, eat your heart out. Czech director Oldrich Lipsky’s time-bending 1967 feature opens with the words “The End” followed by the end titles, some in mirror image. Then a disembodied head jumps out of a basket and reattaches itself to a body slumped over a guillotine as the blade flies upward. The man revives and is led back into jail, and the story begins, or more properly, heads backward toward its beginning.
We learn eventually that, in real life, a butcher has caught his wife with her lover and murdered them, throwing the latter out a window and gruesomely dismembering the woman with a knife. But the narrator – apparently speaking from the dead, a la Sunset Boulevard – relates events only as he sees them: the un-guillotining of the man is his birth, and he is seen putting his wife’s sliced-off parts together and giving her life. Unlike other reversed stories like the later Memento or Betrayal, the film here is actually run backwards, so that a newborn child is shown being sucked back into the womb (the narrator says sadly that the child is dying), or a man thrown from a building is shown rising up to the original spot.
4/21/24 (Sun), Tokyo
A lesser performed but highly entertaining Romeo-and-Juliet type piece with some unusual features. Continue reading
4/9/24 (Tues)
A British adaptation by writer/director Andrew Haigh of the Japanese novel Strangers (1987), which was also filmed in Japanese the following year under the English title The Discarnates. The original Japanese title in both cases, Ijin-tachi no Natsu (偉人たちの夏) is something like “Summer with Strangers”, the latter word (ijin) usually referring to foreigners. Whereas the Japanese film followed the novel closely, Haigh has different ideas.
4/2/24 (Tues), Broadway
A musical still in previews based on a popular 1960s teen novel and 1983 movie of the same name. I seem to be one of the few who never read the book as a high schooler, so I came to this cold. I left the same way. The book felt insincere, the music was canned garbage, and the lyrics were just trite dialogue (“Your body’s wet, you’ll catch a cold”) with musical notes attached, not even attempting to capture the emotions or personality of the singer or the surrounding situation.
3/24/24 (Sun)
I had an advantage over UK audiences seeing this soccer-related show since I had no idea who any of these people are or how the actual games turned out. It’s exactly the kind of show that the NT was made for and has received a fantastic staging.
3/18/24 (Mon)
A satiric look at the black experience in the US via the world of fiction. Continue reading
3/17/24 (Sun), Tokyo
While this work is traditionally attributed to Noh’s founder Zeami, the light narrative style and large cast make it feel like a much later piece. It centers on the famed poet Ono Komachi, but here she is young and vibrant as opposed to the withered old woman longing for her youth in the other of Noh’s seven Komachi works. The piece impossibly brings together some of the Six Great Poets from different eras, making the fantasy element clear.
The vast majority of the UK population, as elsewhere, is right-handed. All else being equal, i.e., no difference in acting ability between left-handers and others, we would assume that left-handed performers on the West End will make up a minority of actors in most cases unless the shows specifically require the talents of such performers (Waiting for Lefty, maybe?).
Thus, when left-handers emerge on stage way above their population levels (around 3% for this subset vs. 31.7% of all West End musical actors (2019)), theatergoers can be forgiven for thinking that the selection process is skewed. As talent is presumably evenly dispersed among the population, these groups are clearly being chosen above the remaining 97% of actors for other reasons. Any idea what that could be?
I see where the stage adaptation of the popular anime film Spirited Away that played in Tokyo a few years back has transferred with the original cast to London, performing in Japanese (with English surtitles). I noted at the time that the Tokyo production seemed a “trial run” for a future production in the more profitable theater worlds of London or New York given the foreign talent involved, starting with director John Caird (whose wife is Japanese). The show appears to have received a rapturous welcome in London by both critics and audiences despite the language barrier and will be playing for an unusually long stay of four months. With London’s recent wonderful English-language staging of that other Japanese anime classic, My Neighbor Totoro (soon headed for the West End), the stage may be set, so to speak, for a flood of other anime adaptations, which have already taken Tokyo by storm in musical, Kabuki and other versions. Here is my take from the Tokyo run.
3/3/24 (Sun)
This 1955 work is Tanaka Kinuyo’s third directorial effort but the first that she started from scratch. (The first two were based on scripts by Kinoshita and Ozu and staffed partly by their assistants.) The film was formerly known in English rather startlingly as The Eternal Breasts, which is closer to the Japanese but makes it sound like a very different kind of film; the Japanese title would probably be rendered better as, “Breasts, Be Forever With Me”. The change in the English in this case was probably for the better. The real-life Fumiko was only famous for four months from publication of her efforts to her early death, but she is considered one of Japan’s three seminal female poets of the 20th century. She passed away only a year before the film. Continue reading
3/2/24 (Sat)
This 1953 work marked actress Tanaka Kinuyo’s debut as director, using a script by Kinoshita Keisuke. This is the first fictional film by a female director in Japan.
sekenbanashi 