theater Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Rebel Without A Cause; SIX

Divorced, beheaded, survived

I haven’t attended enough cultural/entertainment events for my tastes of late. While I did go to the reopening of the Spectrum Theatre on April 24, I haven’t been able to get there since, and I want to soon.

I saw Rebel Without A Cause, the first James Dean movie I ever viewed. Experienced with a 21st-century lens, Jim Stark (Dean) seems less a rebel than, in the words of ScreenRant, “a troubled youth struggling to find his place in a society he sees as hypocritical and devoid of meaning.”

Indeed, it is the high school clique that almost immediately scorns him without much provocation who are at least as broken as he. The knife fight between Jim and Buzz (Corey Allen), a few years before West Side Story, is said to reflect the “social pressures of male teenagers.”

Surely, Jim is frustrated by his ineffectual father Frank (Jim Backus), who allows Jim’s mother Carol (Ann Doran) to uproot the family at the first sign of difficulty.

Control

Jim’s one male friend, Plato (Sal Mineo), is a real outsider, abandoned by his parents, needing “to assert some control over a world in which he feels powerless and invisible.”

Jim’s classmate Judy (Natalie Wood, later in West Side Story) evolves from her disregard for Jim as her classmates did, while missing her old relationship with her father (William Hopper from Perry Mason), to Jim and Judy becoming surrogate parents to Plato.

Indie Wire makes the case that Plato is the first gay teenager on film while avoiding getting stopped by the restrictive Hays Code

It’s an interesting slice of life, with Ray (Edward Platt from Get Smart), the cop specializing in dealing with youth a sympathetic character. Even if it is “overwrought and cloyingly melodramatic,” I still appreciated the chance to see it on the big screen.

Famously, the three leads all died too soon. In a gallery of Lost Photos From a Legendary Hollywood Archive, Dean is captured just a month before he died in a car crash at the age of 24 on 9/30/55, even before the film premiered. Natalie Wood drowned at sea in 1981 at the age of 43. And Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976 at the age of 37.

Divorced, beheaded, died…

SIX, which my wife, daughter, and I saw at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady I don’t think is that compelling a book. I had listened to the music beforehand. But for what it is, it does the thing extremely well. It was an 80-minute rock show with a sextet of Henry VIII’s queens.

The Times Union review by Katherine Kiess is about right. “Styled as a ‘Renaissance Idol’ belt-off…they compete in a glamor-coated trauma Olympics to see whose marriage was the worst.”

You can tell it was a rock show because they namechecked “Schenectady!” a half dozen times before the “LED wall panels and cathedral windows that become everything from a church confessional to a dating app screen.”

The four-piece band, the Ladies In Waiting, cooked. And the singers were excellent. So it’s perhaps not great theater but, as the Los Angeles Times noted, it is “unapologetically revisionist. That’s why it’s successful.” And entertaining enough.

Spectrum movie theatres are back!

mint brownies

Since I publicly mourned its closing on February 24, I’m happy – nah, ECSTATIC! – that the Spectrum movie theatres are back!

Per the press release: “Spectrum 8 Theaters first opened in 1983 by two couples who previously had owned and operated an independent movie theater, the Third Street Theatre, in Rensselaer.” I used to attend the Third Street. “For decades, the Spectrum has been synonymous with independent, upscale programming of avant-garde, foreign, independent, and widely-released features.”

Scene One Entertainment and its CEO Joe Masher is promising to “restore the selections that made the Spectrum’s concession stand a treasure: locally-sourced cakes, pastries, cookies, gluten-free delights, real butter on fresh, hot popcorn, and mint brownies.” Many of these elements disappearted during Landmark’s seven-year operation at 290 Delaware Avenue.

“The old new Spectrum” has installed an exhibit titled ‘Looking Back, Heading Forward’ featuring 12 local artists with a nod to the past and to the future showing portraits and people gathering together around the arts.

The theater is now “hiring for all positions here at the Spectrum. Be part of the comeback story in Albany’s Delaware Avenue neighborhood.” A very small part of me is tempted, but no.

My first film…

I’m enough of a geek that I feel as though I should go to the grand reopening. I’ve seen Amelie, Cinema, March of the Penguins, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, all at the Spectrum. I also watched The Wizard of Oz at the Spectrum in 2022, and even if you’ve seen it on television, I’m recommending that you view it on the big screen.

And I saw Polyester at the Third Street Cinema! They will be offering the ODORAMA CARDS, which you obviously need.

Still, I’m going to opt for a film I’ve never seen, which meanseither The Bodyguard or Rebel Without A Cause. Having seen NONE of Jamres Dean’s films in a cinema, I’ll probably opt for Rebel.

I still don’t kno what “regular” film I will see. The rrailers have often helped me to decide, and except for Covil War, I don’t know much about the current films.

Musical

My wife and I saw the Spring Awakening at Cohoes Music Hall on Saturday. As this review in Nippertown notes, it is excellent. You should know that it deals with mature and intense themes.

It’s playing one more Thursday through Sunday. A member of the cast and one of the musicians attend our church, and another musician sold us our house back in 2000; I knew about the actor but not the musicians beforehand.

We saw a production of this musical back in 2010. while the set in the new profduction wasn’t as snazzy, I thought this production flowed better than the earlier one.

Weird; Godspell; The 39 Steps

Day By Day

Here’s a roundup of some entertainment I’ve seen recently.

The first and only thing I’ve gotten around to seeing on my newish Roku set is the movie Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, starring the unlikely but oddly convincing Daniel Radcliff. I’m a big Weird Al fan, owning at least 90% of his work on LP or CD.

I imagine that familiarity with not only the music but the backstory of the creation of the songs and the launching of this career would enhance the appreciation of the storyline. The movie was written by Al and director Eric Appel, and it is a parody of biopic films about musicians.

It’s often funny, definitely silly, and inevitably excessive, especially in the second half, featuring Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood), when the pace sags for me.

The pool scene featuring Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson), Wolfman Jack (Jack Black), and several well-known icons is my favorite. I also liked the resolution involving Al’s father (Toby Huss). And Al is convincing s the record producer who wants to have nothing to do with Weird Al.

The film sometimes seems rushed, probably because of its 18-day shooting schedule, but I’m glad I saw it.

Theater!

My wife and I had said in the spring that we might see three or four shows at Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, NY, over the summer. Suddenly, it was Sunday, August 13, and the final day of the third or fourth show. She said, do you want to go see Godspell?

I love Godspell. In 1976, I was in a production in New Paltz. I’ve seen the movie starring Victor Garber.

But this Godspell was sublime. Check out this review: ” This Godspell, this gospel according to [director Trey] Compton, is an edgy, piercing, gritty, brilliant piece of theatre… “

This is how the show starts: “Cue the Gospel. As the ensemble cast of eight enters, each clutches a cell phone in his or her hand as if they are the last lifelines to their very existence. The soon-to-be disciples are quite literally separated one from another by virtue of Compton’s sharp and intentional staging, scattered about the theatre like the wandering souls they are at this moment.

“Looking for all the world like a world-weary crowd gathered on a dark subway track awaiting the last train of the day, they begin to deliver the Prologue/Tower of Babble, a number not always included in every production, but thankfully included here…

“[It] is a truly unique, brilliant, thought-provoking, cutting-edge work of theater art.” That says it all.

Hitchcock

My wife wanted to know if I wanted to go to the Spectrum Theatre to see the film The 39 Steps (1935). I had never seen it, so absolutely.

What I liked is that the protagonist, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a Canadian vacationing in London, didn’t believe the mysterious agent Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim) and her fanciful tale about an international spy ring involving something called the “39 steps.”

That is, until Smith ends up dead in Hannay’s apartment, with him as the only suspect. Hannay has to elude those chasing him while trying to figure out the truth behind the secret. His life becomes entangled with Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), his unwilling accomplice, who doesn’t believe Richard any more than Richard initially believed Annabella.

The chase is a bit improbable, as the pursuers are mainly inept. It’s also a very humorous and early rom-com.

Incidentally, I did see The 39 Steps before, but it involved shadow puppets.

The theater and other diversions

Some Like It Hot; Hadestown; Gordon Parks

While filling out one of those quizzes, I realized I must be missing some other diversions. I’m not watching much television. The movies I see (primarily) get reviewed here. So what else have I been doing?

My wife and I went to the Albany Institute of History and Art and saw “Gordon Park: I, too, am America” in early February, just before the exhibit closed. I loved his work, which I remember from the pages of LIFE magazines in the 1960s. He exposed the disparity of American life with his camera. A reviewer called the installation “incomplete but still rewarding.” The description of the works in one medium-sized room and a tiny annex seems accurate.

I realized that I related to Parks as a singular figure, the only black photographer I knew of, just as Arthur Ashe was the sole black male tennis player in my awareness.

Theater

My wife and I have season tickets to musicals at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady. The first one scheduled was Aladdin in October 2022. Unfortunately, that was the timeframe when my spouse was experiencing her leg injury.

I could have gotten the money credited to our theater account, but at that late date, Proctors wouldn’t fill those seats. Instead, I posted my issue on Facebook; I got a taker – a guy and his very enthusiastic mom – and our digital tickets could be used, which made me happy.

Thus, the first show we saw was Hairspray in January. I’d seen the original 1988 movie, written and directed by John Waters. The iteration we saw was more moving than a previous production I had seen, especially when Motormouth sings I Know Where I’ve Been.

The best part of going to a Thursday matinee at Proctors is that a few actors will come to a smaller theater and talk to the audience. They told their stories of putting on a production in the midst of COVID. One performer was cast two years earlier, while another auditioned online on a Thursday in Mississippi and was in NYC the following Monday. That first rehearsal involved practicing the exhausting finale. You Can’t Stop The Beat.

Hell, you say

In March, we saw Hadestown. The Tony winner still plays on Broadway but also has a touring show. The musical by Anaïs Mitchell tells a variation of an ancient Greek myth about Eurydice, a young woman desperate for something to eat. She ends up in “a hellish industrial version of the underworld. Her poor singer-songwriter lover Orpheus comes to attempt to rescue her.” The tour will continue through May of 2024. Well worth your time.

My wife and I saw Rent at UAlbany in March; some great performances. Ditto Sister Act at the newly refurbished Albany High School, where our daughter, home from college, joined us. Some difficulties with the sound marred both shows.

Norma Jeane

My wife and I also saw the movie Some Like It Hot (1959) at the Spectrum in Albany. While I had seen a movie ABOUT Marilyn Monroe, this was the first film I saw that she starred in.

The movie was very good. Indeed, it has been “voted one of the best films ever made in polls by the BBC, the American Film Institute, and Sight & Sound.”

Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play two musicians on the run from the Chicago mob in 1929 who dress up as women and join an all-female band heading to Miami. Marilyn as Sugar Kane is more than another “dumb blonde,” even though the band’s singer describes herself that way.

I had heard about her clashes with director/producer/co-writer Billy Wilder, with her demanding many retakes. Ultimately, Wilder acknowledged: “Anyone can remember lines, but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did!” She won a Golden Globe for Best Actress.

My wife and I thought that the lighting made Marilyn seem to be topless in a couple of nightclub scenes, though she was wearing clothing.

There is a bit of mob violence in Some Like It Hot. But fortunately, it wasn’t like seeing a Scorcese or Coppola film.

Also, I imagine that they should ban the movie in Kentucky. Lemmon and Curtis are in drag. And Joe E. Brown’s famous last line just nails that down.

Mac-Haydn: Next To Normal, The Full Monty

THEATRE!

Mac-Haydn In this review of Next To Normal, Marc Savitt of Broadway World describes the wonder that is a local theater that he’s been to.

“Tucked away in the town of Chatham, NY, The Mac-Haydn Theatre has been producing regional productions of Broadway Musicals for over 50 years. The theatre was founded in part to preserve musical theatre as the one individually American theatre form…

“Mac-Haydn truly is a ‘hidden-gem’ that presents a series of 8-10 productions each summer. Strolling between the wooden buildings on the campus, I have often thought of it as a sort of hybrid that would occur if you combined summer camp with summer-stock. They do great work, and the program attracts seasoned professionals, and up-and-coming performers, along with newbies often young and from the local area. Readers may be slightly aware of one such youngster named Joe then. He is now better known as Nathan Lane.”

My family has been attending shows there for over a dozen years, though not during the worst of COVID. This summer, we saw four shows, A Chorus Line in June, Urinetown in July (mentioned here), Next To Normal, and The Full Monty in August.

What IS normal, anyway?

I knew next to nothing about Next To Normal, which was likely true of the theater-going public in the area where this was the regional premiere. The audience was about 40% smaller than most shows I have seen there.

I had heard about Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s work because I tend to watch the Tonys. “It is considered a ‘rock musical’ the likes of Superstar or RENT.” Per Wikipedia, “The musical addresses grief, depression, suicide, drug abuse, ethics in modern psychiatry, and the underbelly of suburban life.”

The cast of six includes Beth Kirkpatrick is Diana, the “mother who struggles with worsening bipolar disorder and the effects that managing her illness has on her family.” Eric Van Tielen is her husband, Dan, trying to be supportive. They’ve both appeared on Broadway and are making their M-H debuts. They are excellent.

So is the rest of the cast, who are returning performers. Amber Mawande-Spytek as daughter Natalie, Kylan Ross as son Gabe, Andrew Burton Kelley as Natalie’s friend Henry, and Gabe Belyeu as Dr. Madden; he’s been at M-H off and on for at least a decade.

Next to Normal won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The reviewer noted: “Prepare yourself to be overwhelmed by the raw and exhilarating reality of what it means to care for yourself and one another.”

Unemployed in Buffalo

I saw the 1997 movie The Full Monty in a movie theater. “The film is set in Sheffield, England, during the 1990s and tells the story of six unemployed men, four of them former steel workers, who decide to form a male striptease act (à la the Chippendale dancers) to make some money.” The Rotten Tomatoes consensus reads, “Cheeky and infectiously good-natured, The Full Monty bares its big beating heart with a sly dose of ribald comedy.”

The 2000 musical Full Monty is a musical with the book by Terrence McNally and score by David Yazbek. “In this Americanized musical stage version…six unemployed Buffalo steelworkers” are in similar straits and decide on the same solution.

Jerry, who initiates the plan, is played by Xander James, who was back at M-H last year after a decade hiatus. Gabe Belyeu (Harold, the former factory foreman), Kylan Ross (Malcolm), and Andrew Burton Kelley (Ethan) also appear here. Tezz Yancey (Noah “Horse” Simmons) and Dean Marino (Jerry’s best friend Dave) are making their M-H debuts.

Holly Lauren Dayton (Pam, Jerry’s ex), Julia Hajjar (Georgie, Dave’s wife), and Erin Spears Ledford (Vicki, Harold’s wife) are strong, as are many of the other women.

Back in the spotlight

But the highlight is Monica Wemitt, who returns to the Mac-Haydn stage for the first time in three years, though working there behind the scenes as COVID compliance officer. Her Jeanette is “a perhaps second-rate, over-the-hill pianist who happens into the rehearsals and accompanies the gentlemen on their journey to show time. Jeanette is a no holds barred, tell ‘em what you think out loud, funny, self-deprecating bleach blonde with hair that is too big, even for the times, character.”

Despite being a ribald comedy, The Full Monty “also touches on serious subjects such as unemployment, fathers’ rights, depression, impotence, homosexuality, body image, working-class culture, and suicide.”

The Full Monty runs through September 4.