WilliamM

Culture Desk The New Yorker Grace Jones, Donna Summer, and the Power of Disco By Michael Schulman 4:00 P.M. Donna Summer, called the Queen of Disco, performs onstage, circa 1975. Photograph from GAB Archive / Redferns / Getty Disco may never overcome the collective yearning for the “classic” rock era it supposedly ruined. Synthetic, tacky, decadent, dead—disco’s had plenty of invective hurled at it, even as it persists in the form of late-night infomercials and books of louche Studio 54 photographs. It’s easier to snort at the processed cheese of disco’s end than to celebrate its jagged beginnings, buoyed largely by gay, black, and Latino audiences who found a second home (or a first) on the dance floor. This spring, two projects revisit two of disco’s reigning queens, with mixed success. One overexplains its subject, and the other explains too little. In the broad outline, Donna Summer and Grace Jones had plenty in common: both are black women who made music careers in the seventies, translating their bold sexuality to the dance floor. Both were molded by European men (for Summer, the music producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte; for Jones, the French director-photographer Jean-Paul Goude). Both grew up in the church, though Summer became a born-again Christian at the height of her fame, and Jones never looked back. Both weathered physical abuse, record-industry greed, controversy (more on that soon), and the decline of disco, the genre that catapulted them to fame. “I definitely had one foot in the 54 world, but not really for the music—more for the theatre of the place, the combination of people craving spontaneous excitement,” Jones writes in her autobiography, “I’ll Never Write My Memoirs.” “Musically, I was going with the flow along with the DJs who were resisting disco as a trend, as a headline, a dead end.” Summer, who died in 2012, also tried to go with the flow, pivoting to pop songs such as “ ” in the eighties, but she didn’t share Jones’s flair for reinvention, and “Queen of Disco” became her permanent honorific. “For the longest time, people had me convinced there was something wrong with this music,” she tells us at the beginning of “Summer,” a new Broadway bio-musical at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. “ ‘Dance music.’ Like the term was some kind of insult.” The layered rhythms of her 1977 hit “ ”—a precursor to today’s electronic dance music—pulse in the background, as Summer (LaChanze) is joined by a chorus of women in John Travolta drag. “Once we found that bass line, it was a whole new world,” she continues. “A world of mystery and androgyny, blurring all the lines.” Soon we’re off to the races, with no less than twenty of Summer’s infectious hits (ending, inevitably, with “Last Dance”) shoehorned into a Wikipedia account of her life. In the late sixties, Summer moved from Boston to Germany, to be in a production of “Hair.” There, she teamed up with Moroder and Bellotte and recorded her breakout hit, “Love to Love You Baby,” which was extended into a seventeen-minute dance track. The story of the recording session—Summer turned out all the lights and lay on the floor, making orgasmic noises—is, naturally, recreated onstage. If Summer was the Queen of Disco, the director Des McAnuff is the King of Slick. McAnuff, who helmed “Jersey Boys,” uses many of the same tricks in “Summer”: familiar melodies building with anticipatory excitement, glittering scenery that never stops moving, and multiple narrators whisking the action along. Since there were four Jersey Boys but only one Summer, McAnuff splits her into three, played at different ages by LaChanze, Ariana DeBose, and Storm Lever—each of them dynamite. There’s almost enough stagecraft to make you overlook the fact that the show never finds a coherent story to tell. Incidents from Summer’s life fly by, from her childhood cameo in a murder case to her religious reawakening, strung together with truisms such as, “Once you’re on a roller coaster, it’s real hard to get off.” McAnuff is counting on it. Least convincing is the musical’s treatment of Summer’s reported homophobic comments at a 1983 concert (“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”), which cost her many of her ardent fans. She later apologized, but denied reports that she had called aids a divine punishment. Toward the end of “Summer,” she sits at a piano, surrounded by vintage photos of gay men, and explains that the “Adam and Steve” comment was a “bad joke.” Then she declares that “God made Adam and Steve and Eve and Louise.” It’s a cheap applause line, and the musical’s attempts to fashion a “woke” Donna for 2018 miss an opportunity to interrogate her contradictions: the born-again Christian who was also a gay icon. (When she died, Hilton Als wrote about Summer’s queer appeal.) Grace Jones performs at the Carré Theatre, in Amsterdam, on September 23, 1981. Photo by Rob Verhorst / Redferns / Getty Grace Jones is a gay icon, too—still hula-hooping topless in her late sixties—but her controversies stemmed from her outrageousness, which is exactly what we want from her: the will to be herself. In 1980, she the British talk-show host Russell Harty live on the air, because he had been ignoring her. The present-day Jones recounts the incident midway through “ ,” a new documentary by Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph). “I don’t mind Russell, except the fact that he died—but I didn’t kill him!,” Jones says backstage, when someone asks for his own souvenir slap on the cheek. She then tells a garbled version of the story, but Fiennes doesn’t cut to the videotape, sticking rigorously to cinema-vérité pretensions: no talking heads, no archival images. Instead, the camera follows Jones driving around Jamaica, putting on makeup, and catching up with Goude, her onetime collaborator and lover. (“You’re the only man who made me buckle at the knees,” she tells him.) Nothing about Jones is boring—she’s one of the world’s great eccentrics—but Fiennes is too lax in shaping our understanding of her. It would be helpful, for instance, to know how Jones’s fiercely androgynous look made her a groundbreaking fashion model in the seventies; how her 1977 disco version of “ ” from the first of her three albums produced by Tom Moulton, made her an international star; how, with the producers Alex Sadkin and Chris Blackwell, she moved from disco into her own brand of reggae-infused New Wave; or how she played off her scary-exotic persona in films such as “A View to a Kill” and “Vamp.” Still, it’s understandable to want to focus on the present, which Jones compulsively uses to make trouble. (A few years ago, I got to interview her in New York, and we promptly got kicked out of a hotel spa together—a career high.) The documentary comes alive, though, when Jones performs, usually in headgear that defies geometry. Her vocal ability was always more limited than Summer’s, but her art was her ferocious presence—captured by Goude in his indelible photographs or in the 1982 concert film “One Man Show.” Here we get the older Jones, sweating in a corset as she delights her audiences with the double-entendre-laden “Pull Up to the Bumper” (“Pull up to my bumper baby / In your long black limousine.”) One thing the documentary gets right: Grace Jones is funny. We know she’s got a temper; in the film, she describes her disciplinarian stepfather, called Mas P, and her later epiphany that she had repurposed his forbidding stare onstage. Her diva antics are absurd, but she’s more or less in on the joke. Her book includes her complete tour rider, which requires two dozen oysters be supplied to her dressing room—unopened, because “Grace does her own shucking.” In one scene in the documentary, she complains that her lingerie-clad backup dancers make her seem like a “madam in a whorehouse.” The dancers are dismissed. Perhaps Jones defies explanation, at least as long as she’s around to entertain us, even as she perpetually slips through our fingers. It’s impossible to imagine a jukebox musical like “Summer” reducing her to platitudes, because she subverts anything resembling a life lesson. Donna Summer found God; Grace Jones demands our worship.

http://www.burbujasdeseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Philippe-B%C3%A9langer-Burbujas-De-Deseo-06-600x800.jpg http://www.burbujasdeseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Philippe-B%C3%A9langer-Burbujas-De-Deseo-03-600x800.jpg

http://attheloft.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ecca8b98833017d417e88c6970c-pi

The Theatre May 7, 2018 Issue Eugene O’Neill’s Unhappy Hour The New Yorker In George C. Wolfe’s staging of “The Iceman Cometh,” too much of the talk is sacrificed to keeping the action going. By Hilton Als Illustration by João Fazenda Although there are many performers in George C. Wolfe’s staging of Eugene O’Neill’s phenomenal 1946 four-act and nearly four-hour drama, “The Iceman Cometh” (now in revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs), there is only one actor, and his name is Austin Butler. Most performers want to be seen at any cost, but actors—at least, those as good as Butler—are both determined and relaxed in their ambition to do justice to the playwright’s text while contributing to the life of the story. Butler, making his Broadway début as Don Parritt, an eighteen-year-old lost boy who takes up residence at Harry Hope’s dive bar and hotel on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, illustrates, the moment he takes the stage, the difference between the two. Tall, with fair hair and light-colored eyes, he conveys, through economy of movement and facial expression, what many of his castmates try to show by shouting and grandstanding: his character’s inner life. It’s the summer of 1912, a couple of years before the start of the Great War. The object of Don’s admiration is Larry Slade (David Morse), a handsome and well-built sixty-year-old who has lived at Harry’s for what feels like a long time. Although Larry spends half his waking hours at the bottom of a bottle, he hasn’t gone soft in the middle—or in the mind. The rotgut he swills does little to sweeten his jaundiced outlook on life. When the curtain rises, he’s the only patron who’s even half awake at Harry’s, which is populated by the lowest of the low—dipsomaniacs, they used to be called. Sprawled across wooden tables and chairs, Larry and his fellow-drinkers look like shipwrecked creatures in a murky sea. (Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer’s lighting is thick with atmosphere, sometimes too thick.) Larry is ruminating with the bartender, Rocky Pioggi (Danny McCarthy), who has a little side business: he’s a pimp, but he doesn’t like being called one; the label doesn’t fit his conception of himself. And that’s the rub of life, isn’t it—that we exist somewhere between who we really are and how we’d like to be perceived? Certainly, Larry feels that way, though it’s sometimes hard to understand what he’s saying, as Morse lays on what must be someone’s idea of turn-of-the-century New Yorkese. (The majority of the cast is similarly affected. And the acoustics of Santo Loquasto’s awkward, voice-muffling set don’t help.) When Larry says he’ll pay for his drinks tomorrow, he knows he’s lying, but there’s no comfort in the truth. What he and his barmates share is a belief in the redemptive quality of fantasy: it keeps you from yourself, whoever that may be—you can figure it out tomorrow. Larry says to Rocky, of his pals, “They’ve all a touching credulity concerning tomorrows. It’ll be a great day for them, tomorrow—the Feast of All Fools, with brass bands playing!” Carried away by the hooch, he adds: Their ships will come in, loaded to the gunwales with cancelled regrets and promises fulfilled and clean slates and new leases! . . . What’s it matter if the truth is that their favoring breeze has the stink of nickel whiskey on its breath, and their sea is a growler of lager and ale, and their ships are long since looted and scuttled and sunk on the bottom? To hell with the truth! Alcohol isn’t the only thing that gets Larry going. He’s a moralist, the play’s Greek chorus. But he’s grown weary of his sense of right and wrong in a world where no one else distinguishes between the two. Drinking helps him construct lyrics in the air. (As with all the fascinating male characters in O’Neill’s late plays—from the cast of his beautiful, ghastly chamber drama “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” to Jim in “A Moon for the Misbegotten”—getting high frees the poet within.) Still, it was Larry’s strong ethics, and his kindness, that Don loved as a kid. Larry was his mother’s boyfriend back then; they were anarchists. Now Don, stuck between boyhood and manhood, has come looking for answers. He betrayed his mother, but did she deserve it—or was his betrayal a way of holding on to Larry, whom he sees as his only hope for redemption? Most of the cast could have taken a hint from Michael Emerson, who was unforgettable as Willie Oban, the Harvard law student turned drunk, in the 1999 Broadway production, when he said, “Drunks of long standing don’t display the intoxicated mannerisms you see in bad plays. . . . Our drunks are in their natural state, and it takes a lot to get them staggering or slurring.” But Butler’s look of expectation, need, and guilt—his hands pulling slightly at his trousers as the men wait for their friend Theodore Hickman, or Hickey (Denzel Washington), a travelling salesman, to turn up and share a laugh about the outside world—illuminated things about the play that I hadn’t understood before, despite having read it and seen it many times. The way Butler conveyed Don’s tentativeness and his nuanced speech made it clear to me that the character was a stand-in for the playwright’s younger self—that striking boy, consumed by destructive, loving thoughts about his own troubled, morphine-addicted mother. That realization led to another: many of the characters—from the broken-down British officer Cecil Lewis (Frank Wood) and the dilapidated Piet Wetjoen (Dakin Matthews) to Willie (Neal Huff), who drinks, in part, to forget how he has failed his father—inhabit the same story about masculinity, in which Hickey stars as the ultimate fantasy: a nonjudgmental dad. Of course everyone loves Hickey; he’s a salesman who knows how to sell your dreams back to you. When he arrives this time, however, he lacks his usual brio, and he isn’t interested in sharing lies; he wants the men to face the truth not only of who they are but of what they might do beyond these walls. (The only bar patrons who move between Harry’s and the outside world with any frequency are three prostitutes, including Cora, played by Tammy Blanchard, who exposes many wounds in a role that’s often buried under stereotypical tart behavior—lots of squealing and high-pitched antics.) Hickey wants to know what life would be like if stripped of male bravado and self-deception. What his friends don’t notice, because their expectations far exceed their grasp on reality, is that, behind his huckster’s smile, he is descending into madness. The son of a preacher, he knows that Jesus is a con, too, so why can’t he be the world’s—or his world’s—savior? “The Iceman Cometh” is really a novel in speech, and, as with the works of James Joyce, another Irishman in love with language and play, it takes repeated readings and viewings to find the humor mixed in with the disillusionment. Start with the title, which is a reference to Hickey’s joke about his wife getting it on with the iceman while he’s out of town. If the iceman cometh, that means he has cum, and what’s done is done. But you won’t necessarily get the subtleties of O’Neill’s language, those incredible flights upward and then down into the gutter, in this production, because so much of the talk is sacrificed to incomprehensible diction and to keeping the action going. Nothing happens in “The Iceman Cometh.” Then again, everything happens, as Hickey tries to exorcise damage. But what if damage is who you are? The play was first produced thirteen years after Nathanael West published “Miss Lonelyhearts,” another tale about a guy with a Christ complex, and I wonder how much O’Neill drew on that novel when he was shaping Hickey, who personifies the insanity of errant machismo, at once broken and self-glorifying. In his stage work, Washington has sometimes risked letting unpleasantness—a kind of pushiness and inconsolability—show, as he did when playing Troy Maxson, in the 2010 revival of August Wilson’s “Fences.” But Hickey requires something both more and less than that—a searching, lost quality masquerading as a certainty that he himself can’t define. The other big problem with Washington’s performance is that there’s no madness in him. He gets some of Hickey’s church rhythms right, but he uses them to sound more black and less O’Neill. When his Hickey speaks, at the end of the play, of how intolerable his wife’s love was to him, he isn’t consumed by sickening guilt and the stink of his shitty nerves; instead, he sits back in his chair, putting his jacket on, then taking it off again, like a star doing what he has to do to remind audiences that, after all, he has won two Oscars. It’s always a pity when an actor cynically sticks to what he knows will work and leaves it at that. It’s an ungenerous impulse not to try harder than one has to, and it pinches the spectator’s heart. But Butler is the opposite of cynical. He wants to do right by O’Neill, his director, and his fellow-players. And, no matter how much they bray around him, he stands his ground, reacting to what may be pure in them, as performers, with his own purity, the wellspring of his work, which is that of a potentially great artist.

But, Olivia de Havilland is still alive, and she was in "Gone with the Wind" more than a decade before "I Love Lucy" let alone "Golden Girls."

http://www.neuegalerie.org/sites/default/files/beckmann.jpg?1524183064

‘BEFORE THE FALL: GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN ART OF THE 1930S’ at Neue Galerie (through May 28). An exhibition in the form of a chokehold, the third of the Neue Galerie’s recent shows on art and German politics pushes into the years of dictatorship, with paintings, drawings and photographs by artists deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis — as well as by those who joined the party or who thought they could shut out the catastrophe. (You will know the dissidents, like Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka; the fascists and sellouts are less known.) Gazing at macabre still lifes of dolls and dead flowers, or dreamy landscapes in imitation of an earlier German Romanticism, you may ask to what degree artists are responsible for the times in which they work. But then you see “Self-Portrait in the Camp,” by the Jewish German painter Felix Nussbaum — made between his escape from a French internment camp and his deportation to Auschwitz — and you know that there can be no pardon. (Farago) 212-628-6200, neuegalerie.org Comment: Neugalerie is a wonderful small art museum in New York City

I saw Barbara Harris in 1965 in "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" She was wonderful. Ms. Harris had Merman's talent, but not her drive and ambition. From the New York Social Diary: http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/i/fasten.gif http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/i/partypictures/05_08_17/301523.jpg Barbara Harris with Alan Alda and Larry Blyden in “The Apple Tree.” http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/i/fasten.gif One night in the Spring of 1966, at the end dinner hour about 8:15,Warren Beatty came in alone. Since I was the only standing near the maître d’s desk and wearing the wine red Sardi’s blazer, he asked me if I’d seenBarbara Harris. At that moment, Barbara Harris was starring in a musical directed by Mike Nichols called “The Apple Tree”directly across the street at the Shubert. You could see it from the Sardi’s entryway with her name up in lights. Barbara Harris, a name all but unknown now, was at that moment a big Broadway star and considered one of the greatest talents of her generation. So I told Warren Beatty, who was obviously her boyfriend at the moment – and who was my height (6’4”), and handsomer than he appears on screen -- that Barbara Harris was across the way in the show. He then said that he knew that but she had just been onstage performing a song when she stopped and told the audience she couldn’t do it, and walked off the stage and out the stage door and went missing. Where? No one knew. Everyone later learned that she had walked off the stage and directly out the stage door and down 44th Street where she got on a Seventh Avenue bus and went home. Somehow that theater exit marked a life did not get better for Miss Harris. I don’t know her ending but she was nevertheless a remarkable talent which was both endearing and as vulnerable as antique lace. Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane had written the musical “On A Clear Day You Can See Forever” for her).