4/23/22 (Sat)
When you hear that an Orthodox Jew, played by Zero Mostel, is visited by an angel named Levine, you don’t expect to see Harry Belafonte. But that’s the premise in this oddball 1970 work adopted from a Bernard Malamud story about a modern-day Job and an emissary from Heaven sent to save him.
23 April 2022 (Sat)
Martin McDonagh’s mordant The Hangmen has finally reached Broadway after a pandemic delay to near universal acclaim. The NY Times reviewer suggests that the reaction to the play today might not be the same as prior to the pandemic since, in his opinion, people have become more indifferent to death, suffering and unfairness. His memory seems rather faulty; I suspect he would have written the same thing back then. In any event, I loved it on its initial West End run some years back and rerun below my thoughts at that time.
9/3/21 (Fri)
Truffaut’s fantastic 1959 film about a boy effectively pushed into delinquency was his first full-length feature but already feels like the work of a master. It is not a story so much as a slice-of-life sequence of events that follow events in the adolescent’s life. The curious title comes from a French idiom, faire les quatre cents coups, that apparently means “to raise hell”. The film was reportedly released initially as “Wild Oats”, which fits the meaning better, but the title soon reverted to the direct translation, where it has remained since. Still, the English title does work in its own way even devoid of context as a symbol of the seemingly endless vicissitudes that the boy is subject to, the blows being psychological as well as physical. And it sounds better than “The 400 Vicissitudes”.
10/17/21 (Sun), Umewaka Noh Theater (Tokyo)
Talk about determination. Ono no Komachi, the legendary beauty, is stalked by a nobleman not just to the grave but beyond. Continue reading
11/23/21 (Tues)
Elia Kazan’s 1949 film about a light-skinned black returning to her roots. Continue reading
11/23/21 (Tues)
Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film is widely characterized as a gay flick, but the truth is as usual a bit more complicated. Continue reading
11/6/21 (Sat)
Frank Perry’s hallucinatory 1968 diary of a mad has-been. The main character’s precarious mental state is reflected in the odd structure of the film and some bizarre editing. While inevitably a product of its time – not sure if the white, Waspy, nouveau riche setting would be possible today, whether true to the era or not, not to mention a passing reference to “stylish fags” – its unconventional setup has evidently given it a cult following.
11/8/21 (Mon)
Frank Perry’s 1981 gothic portrait of the late Joan Crawford as the mother from hell is well deserving of its reputation as a camp classic. Continue reading
3/20/22 (Sun), Umewaka Noh Theater
The shows today were both cerebral Buddhist-inflected pieces appealing more to Noh lovers than general audiences. The theater was limited to 50% capacity and didn’t even manage to fill that, a sharp contrast with the packed house at the Kanze Noh Theater a week earlier even allowing for Kanze’s more audience-friendly program. I wonder if the undue precautions at some locations actually make audiences more fearful and deter them from coming.
3/16/22 (Wed)
Imamura Shohei’s directorial debut of 1958 is a rather silly comedy about a traveling theater group. Not much of the later provocative Imamura on view here, though he does concentrate on the lower classes in a struggling troupe that mixes popularized versions of classical pieces like Chushingura with titillating girlie shows to bring in unsophisticated rural audiences. In a sign of the future Imamura, it features numerous loud outbursts among the actors and crowds, leering audience members and peeping Toms, pilfering of money and geese, a reference to eating dogs, actors picking their noses, and an impressively vicious catfight between two actresses, among other delights. But this was all in a broadly comic mood.
3/5/22 (Sat)
Imamura Shohei’s hard-hitting 1979 film is based on the case of an actual serial killer in Japan active in 1964 just before the Olympics. The title is taken from Deuteronomy, where it is God who insists on that honor (“Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, says the Lord”). But it is not clear here what the main character is taking vengeance against. Continue reading
3/22/22 (Tues)
Spirited Away, the worldwide anime hit, has been retooled as a major stage show by British director John Caird of Les Mis fame. It’s always a thorny business bringing films to the stage since few producers have the creativity or guts to stray too far from familiar material, as way too many Broadway duds have proven in recent years. This one was particularly tricky since they’re dealing with an animated feature involving supernatural elements. Anime/manga has been a rich vein for producers here to mine, such as the hugely successful Kabuki version of the One Piece epic and a musical rendering of video game phenomenon Token Ranbu. It is now its own genre, known in local parlance as 2.5D shows. But Spirited Away is based not on a series but on a single highly popular film – it reigned for years as Japan’s biggest-selling movie by far of any genre (until eclipsed by another anime last year) – with iconic characters and scenes that its legions of fans will be eagerly awaiting. The trick for a long-running success is how to balance between lovers of the film and audiences less familiar with the material if at all.
That’s not necessarily a problem in Tokyo: the show is only being done here for four weeks (followed by a national tour) and boasts familiar stars. That ensures a full house for the brief run – tickets were quickly snatched up – and the high-for-Tokyo ticket price of ¥14,500 should guarantee a profit despite the elaborate staging (they were going for over 10 times that price on online resale sites). Given the familiarity of the movie and the family-friendly material, I’m at a loss why they didn’t book this for a longer run, especially with the money they’ve put into it. I have to assume they’re aiming for a future production in London or New York considering the creative staff – in addition to director/adaptor Caird, non-Japanese handled the music arrangement, orchestrations, art design and puppetry design (in the land of classic puppet theater). That would make this a trial run of sorts. The Japanese theater world works in strange and mysterious ways.
sekenbanashi 