Culture Surfing

If you were to hear opera singer David Daniels’ voice before you saw him perform, you might make a mistaken guess as to his gender. Countertenors such as Daniels sing in a vocal range usually associated with sopranos and other classical female singing styles. Daniels’ renowned approach has redefined the countertenor style for a new generation of opera audiences. The first countertenor to give a solo recital in the main auditorium of Carnegie Hall, Daniels sings the role of Orpheus in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo & Euridice at the Atlanta Opera, Nov. 14, 17, 20 and 22.

How young were you when you began singing as a boy soprano?
I think I remember singing when I was 3 or 4 years old. It was probably more like screaming and driving my older brother crazy. He plays the cello, so he’s the only one in my family who doesn’t sing. My mother was a soprano, my father a baritone, and they both taught voice at Converse College. My mother taught me to sing in my “head voice.” I sang professionally as a boy soprano probably from age 9 to 16. Even though my voice changed, I kept the ability to sing this way as a teenager. Now I’m 43, and I still sing this way.

Continue Reading “Speakeasy with David Daniels”

(Photo Courtesy the Atlanta Opera)

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TRANCE-PARENT STORYTELLING: Lyn Cassady (George Clooney, from left), Mahmud Daash (Waleed Zuaiter) and Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) in The Men Who Stare at Goats

The Men Who Stare at Goats begins with a wonderful disclaimer: “More of this is true than you would believe.” Most films use phrases like “Based on a true story” or “Inspired by actual events” as a fig leaf for outrageous liberties with little connection to reality. The real incidents behind The Men Who Stare at Goats indeed seem stranger than fiction, but the demands of formulaic three-act screenwriting sabotage the film’s mission.

Based on the book of the same name by Welsh journalist and documentarian Jon Ronson, the film completely reimagines Ronson as Michigan reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor). Personal crises inspire Wilton to attempt to cover the 2002 invasion of Iraq. While languishing in Kuwait City and envying the embedded war correspondents, Wilton meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). Cassady turns out to be a veteran of the U.S. Army’s First Earth Battalion, which attempted to train psychic soldiers.

Continue Reading “Too baaad Goats falls flat”

(Photo Courtesy Laura Macgruder/Westgate Film Services, LLC.)

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A LIFE IN THE THEATRE: Robert (André De Shields, from left) and John (Ariel Shafir) discuss their lives as actors.

In David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, veteran actor Robert (André De Shields) asks rising newcomer John (Ariel Shafir), “Could you perhaps do less?” in one of their scenes together. Theater professionals and fans will immediately recognize the insult, scarcely disguised by the veneer of politeness.

“Doing less” isn’t a goal of the Alliance Theatre’s production of Mamet’s thorny bouquet to thespians and stage lovers. Challenged to expand an intimate two-actor drama for the Alliance mainstage, director Robert O’Hara turns the show, in part, into a satire of contemporary theatrical spectacle in which more is less. Many scenes take place in the actors’ dressing room, but in this spare-no-expense version, the dressing room set elevates out of the floor.

Continue reading “Spectacle upstages script in Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre“

(Photo courtesy Alliance Theatre)

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Ever since I saw Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, I’ve been trying to think of a quip that riffs on the unwieldy title. If other movies follow suit, will we see such titles as Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End: Based on the theme park ride by Disneyworld? As usual, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane provided the wittiest line:

Please make sure, when you buy a ticket for Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, to pronounce the title in full. I know you will. There was a plan to call it “Push,” until another movie got there first. But why not call the new one “Precious,” and leave it at that? After all, Deborah Kerr didn’t star in The Innocents: Based on the Novella ‘The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and Dustin Hoffman didn’t star in Rain Man: Based on the Overwhelming Desire to Win an Academy Award by Dustin Hoffman, so why the change in rubric?

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Just ahead of this week’s premiere of Hillary Clinton Got Me Pregnant, a one-woman show by the often hilarious Megan Gogerty, Synchronicity Theatre artistic director (and mother of newborn twins) Rachel May has announced the removal of the last two shows of the company’s 12th season:

Due to the financial climate, Synchronicity has had to make some adjustments to our 09/10 season. We will unfortunately be indefinitely postponing the last 2 shows of our season: Dead Man’s Cell Phone and The Brand New Kid. We look forward to programming these shows (with the terrific production teams and casts we have assembled) in future seasons.

The remainder of the Synchronicity’s 12th season (which began with a terrific version of the family show Bunnicula) stays in place, including an updated version of the company’s acclaimed Women + War and the kid’s classic Free To Be You and Me.

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FAMILY JEWEL: Precious (Gabourey Sidibe, from left) and her oppressive mother Mary (Mo'Nique)

Though only 17 years old, Clareece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) suffers enough misfortunes for several Greek tragedies remounted in 1987 Harlem. Precious’ title character endures obesity, illiteracy, a baby with Down syndrome and a sociopathically hostile, selfish mother (Mo’Nique) — and those are just the preliminaries. When Precious gets warmed up, it becomes almost unbearably grim, but its passionate performances raise it above contemporary motivational melodrama clichés.

Though she can barely read, Precious exhibits a talent for math. When she becomes pregnant for the second time, a kindly teacher secures Precious a chance to enroll in an alternative school called Each One, Teach One. Under the tough but kindly tutelage of crusading Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), Precious bonds with her boisterous female classmates and begins to respect herself.

Continue Reading “Grim Precious treasures passionate actresses”

(Photo Courtesy Lionsgate)

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LEARNING CURVES: Jenny (Carey Mulligan, from left) and David (Peter Sarsgaard) in An Education

The establishment seems more firmly established in England than anywhere else. Two terrific new British films depict prodigiously intelligent characters who challenge entrenched English institutions and nearly outsmart themselves along the way. The protagonists of the soccer movie The Damned United and the coming-of-age romance An Education fit in the rebellious, angry young man tradition of English drama — although Michael Sheen’s Brian Clough isn’t exactly young, and Carey Mulligan’s Jenny is most definitely not a man. Both learn the lesson that pride goeth before a fall.

The Damned United ostensibly recounts the David-and-Goliath rivalry between soccer division cellar-dwellers Derby County and England’s crowning team, Leeds United. Rather than focus on triumph-of-the-underdog clichés, screenwriter Peter Morgan cuts back and forth between Clough (Derby’s manager) leading the team from obscurity to soccer glory beginning in 1968, to Clough, flush with victory, taking over as Leeds’ manager in 1974. Morgan wrote The Queen and Frost/Nixon (which also starred Sheen) and ignores biopic stereotypes in lieu of small but telling historical tipping points.

Continue Reading “Damned United and An Education pit youthful smarts against English establishment”

(Photo Courtesy Kerry Brown/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

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THE PAINS OF BEING RAW AT HEART: Willem Dafoe as He (from left) and Charlotte Gainsbourg as She in Antichrist

I can’t truly say I enjoyed watching a man nail his penis to a wooden board in the 1997 documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. I can’t even truly say I saw more than brief glimpses before I averted my eyes, as if confronted by a solar eclipse. Nevertheless, the close-up atrocity summed up the obsessions and life experiences of a self-punishing performance artist with a fatal case of cystic fibrosis and a surprisingly tender marriage.

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist eventually reveals how unguarded genitalia hold up against carpentry utensils, but without the justification of Sick’s humanism or thematic clarity. An instantly notorious award-winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Antichrist proves to be an alternately draggy, repellant and opaque cinematic experience, while clearly representing devoted efforts from several master screen artists. Were Antichrist a piece of hackwork, so to speak, it’d be easy to dismiss.

Continue Reading “Antichrist canonizes genital mutilation”

(Photo Courtesy Trust Nordisk ApS/An IFC Films release)

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John Lithgow as "Trinity" (second from right): Killer knows best

A side effect of the Trinity plot on this season of “Dexter” is that it makes the new remake of The Stepfather, starring Dylan Walsh, seem even more superfluous than it already was. The original Stepfather offered a dark satire of suburbia and the 1980s cult of family values, with a terrific performance by Terry O’Quinn (these days zipping between life and death on “Lost”) as a Ward Cleaver-wannabe who butchers his families whenever they, inevitably, reveal human flaws.

The PG-13 remake of The Stepfather seems to be vanishing with barely a trace, while John Lithgow’s Trinity killer, a.k.a. Arthur Mitchell, offers a vivid, fresh portrayal of an upstanding, all-American middle-aged male who happens to be a homicidal monster. This week’s episode, “If I Had a Hammer,” fills in the outline of Trinity’s life (I’ll call him “Trinity” for convenience sake) as husband, father of two, high school teacher, deacon at “Sacred Fellowship” church and organizer of the community home-building project called “Four Walls, One Heart.” “If I Had a Hammer” opens not with the Pete Seeger/Lee Hays protest song of the same name but the hymn “Are You Washed in the Blood?” The blood symbolism isn’t exactly subtle, but the song gives Lithgow a chance to zestfully sing an old-school church song.

Continue reading “‘Dexter’: Season 4, Episode 6″ »

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Somehow I missed Drag Me to Hell when it played in theaters earlier this year, but I caught up with it last night. It’s smart and nasty in all the right ways, while being totally icky — it could just as easily had the title Don’t Put Stuff in My Mouth. Director Sam Raimi seems to be having more fun plaguing Alison Lohman’s loan officer than he did in all three Spider-man movies combined. This weekend it’s playing at GSU’s Cinefest if you’d rather see it on a big screen in a dark room for Halloween.

For scares at your local multiplex, you can still find ultra-violent Zombieland and the lo-fi sleeper hit Paranormal Activity (which outgrossed Saw VI last weekend). Two other lesser-known horror flicks have been highly touted, but I can’t vouch for them (yet). Critics like the 80s-retro bloodfest The House of the Devil, which hasn’t yet opened in Atlanta. A cult following surrounds the Halloween anthology flick Trick ‘r Treat, which was long-shelved but has recently been released on DVD:

Nearly every horror film that’s off-beat or extreme in some way has champions, even dreadful ones, so it’s hard to separate the superior from the shlock. Here’s a list of more chilling choices from the darker corners of the video store, as well as intriguing ones that I’ve been meaning to see.

Continue reading “13 Days of Halloween: Which (obscure) scary movie to see?” »

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About five years ago, the Alliance Theatre asked me, possibly due to a clerical error, to take part in a panel discussion with the winner and runners-up in its first Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition. The clear winner for “funniest person in the room” that day was Megan Gogerty, whose Kendeda contender Love Jerry was produced — to no little controversy — at Actor’s Express in 2006. Gogerty returns to Atlanta to perform her one-woman show, Hillary Clinton Got Me Pregnant, at Synchronicity Theatre Nov. 5-22. A professor at the University of Iowa, she recently recorded an album of songs about “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

What are the origins of the show?
It’s a sort-of true story. I take some liberties with my life. It’s about two things. The first is my journey as a Democrat wandering through the Bush years, which coincides with a personal narrative about me deciding to have a family. It began when I was in Iowa City at a theater company that does a monologue festival. I performed one that I’d written a while back about meeting Hillary Clinton at a book signing. It went over super well. I used to do stand-up years and years go, so I thought maybe I should expand the monologue. Riverside Theatre said, “Do it! Great!” It had a short turnaround time, so I came up with a generic title, Megan Gogerty Loves You Very Much, which is true. I am Megan Gogerty and I do love you very much. And I decided to do Hillary Clinton.

Continue Reading “Speakeasy with Megan Gogerty” »

(Photo © 2009 Megan Gogerty)

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Long ago Tina Fey’s sitcom “30 Rock” established that resident hayseed-naif Kenneth the Page (Jack McBrayer) hails from Stone Mountain, Ga. “Stone Mountain” provided the title of last night’s episode, in which Fey’s Liz Lemon and Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaughey traveled to the Bible Belt to find a new “TGS” cast member with appeal for Middle American viewers. McBrayer was born in Macon and raised in Conyers, but it’s not surprising that “30 Rock’s” notion of Stone Mountain — located in “Western Georgia” — bears virtually no resemblance to the suburb found East of Atlanta. At one point a Stone Mountain newscaster announces that a local funnyman “has been hired by a Catholic to appear on ‘TGS’ with a black fella.” One gets the impression that “30 Rock’s” creators think that people actually live on Stone Mountain. It’s good for a few chuckles, though:

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Zombies have become so popular that the corridors of our pop culture resound with ravenous moans for “Braaaiinns!” White Zombie, screening Saturday at the Plaza Theatre’s Silver Scream Spook Show, offers a kitschy reminder that the living dead weren’t always the decomposing cannibals of George Romero.

Follow the trail of body parts back a few decades, and you’ll find the origins of zombies in Haitian folklore. White Zombie shouldn’t be mistaken for a documentary about voodoo traditions, though. Filmed in 1932 to ride the horror trend established by Frankenstein and Dracula, White Zombie fudges the detail as to whether zombies are walking corpses or living people enthralled by drugs and hypnotism.

Victor Halperin’s film begins with a painfully white engaged couple, Neil and Madeline (John Harron and Madge Bellamy), stumbling across a burial ceremony shortly after their arrival in Haiti. They plan to marry as soon as possible at the estate of their new, wealthy friend Charles Beaumont (Robert W. Frazer), having forgotten the old adage, “Don’t talk to strangers because they might try to zombify your fiancée and raid her coffin.” Desperate to steal Madeline for himself, Charles enlists the aid of a sinister plantation owner with the nefarious name of Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi, of course). Though Madeline seems to die on her wedding night, she’s actually become enthralled by Legendre.

Continue Reading “Campy White Zombie harks back to pre-Romero living dead”

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For sheer literary merit and respectability, Frankenstein has cast a shadow over all horror novels published over the two subsequent centuries. Picking Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic seems like an easy out, though, which ignores more recent landmarks of the genre like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. The new century has already seen some excellent horror novels, including Dan Simmons’ huge, Victorian-era chillers, The Terror and Drood, Scott Smith’s disturbing vacation-from-Hell The Ruins (hey, anyone see the movie?) and China Mieville’s genre-busting Perdido Street Station.

Still, evaluating the scariest of everything for the 13 Days of Halloween series has reminded me of the subjectivity of fear-based entertainment and the fact that the most lingering scares date back to youth. For the novel that scared me most, I have to back to vintage Stephen King, who penned several heart-stopping books before I was old enough to drive. Salem’s Lot and The Stand would be satisfying choices, not to mention his “Monkey’s Paw” homage Pet Sematery). His novel that scared me most, though, wasn’t even a novel.

Continue reading “13 Days of Halloween: The scariest novel” »

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