Judy Gold examines her life through her favorite sitcoms in new one-woman show (photo by T Charles Erickson)
DR2 Theatre
103 East 15th St. at 20 Union Sq. East
Extended through October 22, $65
www.judygold.com
Newark-born comedian Judy Gold was raised on sitcoms, and there’s nothing she’d like more than getting a sitcom of her own. She’s tried over the years, without success, as detailed in her charming, entertaining one-woman production, The Judy Show: My Life as a Sitcom. On a stage that mimics a sitcom set — with the addition of hundreds of images from famous sitcoms lining the walls and ceiling — Gold enters through a door like so many sitcom characters do, then directly addresses the audience for the next eighty minutes, taking occasional interludes to play snippets of famous sitcom theme songs on the piano. Gold tells the very funny story of her life from her early days in Clark, New Jersey, raised by an overbearing, Nazi-obsessed mother and a calmer father, through her college days, the emergence of her sexual orientation, her relationship with Schwendy (Gold’s first long-term girlfriend refused to give her permission to use her real name in the show), and her current home life, living with Sharon Callahan, a Jewish therapist from Rochester whom she met in a magazine singles column, and Gold’s two children with Schwendy. While Gold thinks a sitcom about a six-foot-three Jewish lesbian mother of two boys is, well, comic gold, she has yet to convince any network, represented here by a disembodied male voice. Gold talks about many of her favorite shows, including The Brady Brunch, Room 222, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, and The Facts of Life, as she shares the facts of her life and elicits continued audience response, becoming playfully angry if they don’t get a particular joke or reference. She supplements her tale with family photographs as well as images from the sitcoms she’s talking about and an endless supply of tsouris. Written by Gold and Kate Moira Ryan and directed by Amanda Charlton, The Judy Show, which has just been extended through October 22 at the DR2 Theatre in Union Square, is a whimsical, wonderfully self-effacing evening of theater, filled with good times and happy days, just taking life as it comes, one day at a time, with no commercial breaks. And maybe, just maybe, she’s gonna make it after all.
Michelangelo Antonioni shows that being rich and fancy-free on the Italian Riviera ain’t all it’s cracked up to be in this fascinating study of a group of friends out on a yachting adventure. When Anna (Lea Massari) disappears, Claudia (Monica Vitti), Giulia (Dominique Blanchar), and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her but can’t find her. Slowly life goes on, with Sandro and Claudia falling for each other as the mystery of Anna fades away. Aldo Scavarda’s beautiful cinematography adds beauty to this captivating, unusually told story of ultimately empty souls. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, where it was also booed, the existential L’Avventura, the first of a trilogy by Antonioni that also includes La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), is screening September 1 & 7 as part of MoMA’s “Hot and Humid: Summer Films from the Archives” series, which continues through September 7 with such seasonal dramas as Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and Adolfas Mekas and Pola Chapelle’s Going Home.
When this film first came out, there was a huge push under way to make Tony Jaa the next martial arts action hero, following in the footsteps of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li. It’s going to take a much better vehicle than this silly, repetitive, unimaginative film for the Thai warrior to make a name for himself. Jaa stars as Ting, a young country villager who has learned the contemplative ways of Muay Thai from his master, Pra Cru (Woranard Tantipidok), a Buddhist who once killed a man during a rope fight. When bad boy Don (Wannakit Siriput) steals the head of Ong Bak, the town’s deity, Ting heads to the big city of Bangkok to get it back, hoping he won’t have to use his massive physical skills. There the quiet fish out of water meets George (Thai comic Petchthai Wongkamlao), a former villager who has changed his name and hangs out with minor-league gangsters and gamblers in his quest to make lots of dough. In order for Ting to get close to those who have Ong Bak, George brings him to a fight-club-like dungeon where Ting must either battle ridiculously overwrought cartoon-like characters or return to his village with just his tail between his legs. Ong-Bak has a good heart and means well, which makes it more difficult to point out how intrinsically inane it is, amateurish, barely at the level of the worst of Jackie Chan, sort of a Karate Kid 7 meets Gymkata 3 by way of Don “the Dragon” Wilson’s Bloodfist XII. There was a lot of hoopla back in 2003 surrounding Jaa because all of his stunts in the film are genuine — there are no wires, CG special effects, or trick camera angles. While that does make for some fun individual scenes, it does not hold up in a lame story that lasts a very long hundred minutes. Director Prachya Pinkaew did a lot better with his 2008 martial arts movie, Chocolate, starring the awesome Yanin “Jeeja” Vismistananda. Ong-Bak is screening August 31 at 4:30 & 9:30 at BAM, concluding the “10 Years of Magnolia Pictures” series, which also included Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson, Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us, James Gray’s Two Lovers, and other cool flicks from the great indie house.
