Who:Paul Kolnik,Wendy Whelan, Linda Murray What:Works & Process illustrated conversation Where: Bruno Walter Auditorium, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza When: Thursday, September 7, free with advance RSVP, 6:00 Why: Chicago native Paul Kolnik saw his first ballet in 1971, at the age of twenty-three, and soon moved to New York City, where he worked as an assistant to New York City Ballet staff photographer Martha Swope before taking his own pictures of the company, under the leadership of cofounding artistic director George Balanchine. In celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of NYCB, Kolnik will sit down for a special Works & Process discussion on September 7 at 6:00 in the Bruno Walter Auditorium with NYCB associate artistic director Wendy Whelan and moderator Linda Murray, NYPL curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Kolnik, who has also extensively photographed Broadway shows and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, has had his work published in such books as New York City Ballet Workout,Dancing to America,The Producers, and Beacon and Call: A Cisterian Monastic Pilgrimage. Admission is free with advance RSVP.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
CLOSE-UP: FILMS ON FILM
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Through September 24
212-660-0312 metrograph.com/film
Americans are so obsessed with movies that we are even obsessed with movies about movies. Metrograph tracks that obsession in the wide-ranging series “Close-up: Films on Film.” Running through September 24, the celebration includes such classics as Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, such foreign favorites as Federico Fellini’s 8½ and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, and such lesser-known gems as Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and Tsai Ming-liang’s The River in addition to works by Robert Altman, Olivier Assayas, Spike Jonze, Tim Burton, Joanna Hogg, and Pedro Almodóvar. Below is a close-up look at seven movies about movies you can catch at Metrograph this month.
Gene Kelly dazzles during unforgettable solo scene in classic MGM musical Singin’ in the Rain
SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952)
Tuesday, September 5, 6:00
Thursday, September 7, 4:00 metrograph.com
The MGM musical Singin’ in the Rain is one of the all-time-great movies about movies, in this case focusing on the treacherous transition from silent films to talkies. It’s the mid-1920s, and the darlings of the silver screen are handsome Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and blonde bombshell Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen). They’re supposedly just as hot offscreen as on, as Don explains to radio gossip host Dora Bailey (Madge Blake, later best known as Aunt Harriet on the Batman TV series) at their latest Hollywood premiere, but in actuality the debonair Don can’t stand the none-too-bright yet still conniving Lina. After accidentally bumping into Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), an independent-thinking young woman who claims to not even like the movies, Don is soon trying to chase her down, determined to get to know her better. Meanwhile, studio head R. F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell) decides he has to capitalize on the surprise success of the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, by turning the latest Lockwood-Lamont movie, The Dueling Cavalier, into a talkie, with initially disastrous results, threatening to bring everything and everyone crashing down.
Cyd Charisse joins Gene Kelly for fantastical Broadway Melody ballet in Singin’ in the Rain
Written by the legendary team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green and directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen (On the Town, Charade), Singin’ in the Rain is an endlessly thrilling and entertaining film, featuring gorgeous Technicolor set pieces photographed by Harold Rosson (the Broadway Melody ballet with Cyd Charisse is particularly spectacular), terrific tunes adapted from previous productions (“Fit as a Fiddle [And Ready for Love,]” “Moses Supposes,” “Good Morning”), and delightful performances by Kelly, whose solo foray through the title song is deservedly iconic; Donald O’Connor as Don’s longtime best friend, Cosmo Brown, who dazzles with a comic Fred Astaire-like turn in “Make ’em Laugh”; and Hagen channeling Judy Holliday from Born Yesterday. (Hagen served as Holliday’s understudy when Born Yesterday hit Broadway in 1947.)
While all the elements come together beautifully (although things do get a little too mean-spirited in the end), this is Kelly’s film all the way, his smile and charm dominating the screen as only a genuine movie star can, so to see him playing a movie star merely doubles the fun. (It’s hard to imagine that Howard Keel was supposedly the first choice to play the role.) Curiously, Singin’ in the Rain was nominated for only two Oscars, with Hagen getting a nod for Best Supporting Actress and Lennie Hayton for Best Musical Score.
Shôhei Imamura questions the concept of the documentary in A Man Vanishes
A MAN VANISHES (NINGEN JŌHATSU) (Shôhei Imamura, 1967)
Friday, September 8, 2:10
Sunday, September 10, 6:50 metrograph.com
Japanese filmmaker Shôhei Imamura blurs the lines between reality and fiction in his cinéma vérité masterpiece, A Man Vanishes. The 1967 black-and-white documentary delves into one of Japan’s annual multitude of missing persons cases, this time investigating the mysterious disappearance of Tadashi Ôshima, a plastics wholesaler who vanished during a business trip. Imamura sends out actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi (The Insect Woman,Intentions of Murder) to conduct interviews with Ôshima’s fiancée, Yoshie Hayakawa, who develops an interest in her inquisitor; Yoshie’s sister, Sayo, who quickly finds herself on the defensive; business associates who talk about Ôshima’s drinking, womanizing, and embezzling from the company; and several people who remember seeing Sayo together with Ôshima, something she adamantly denies despite the building evidence.
Throughout the 130-minute work, the film references itself as being a film, culminating in Imamura’s pulling the rug out from under viewers and calling everything they’ve seen into question in an unforgettable moment that breaks down the fourth wall and explodes the very nature of truth and cinematic storytelling itself. It also explores individual identity and just how much one really knows those closest to them. Originally supposed to be the first of a twenty-four-part series exploring two dozen missing-persons cases, A Man Vanishes ended up being such a challenging undertaking that it was the only one Imamura made, but what a film it is; it would be more than a decade before he returned to fiction, with 1979’s Vengeance Is Mine, which led the way to a spectacular final two decades that also included The Ballad of Narayama, Eijanaika, Black Rain, The Eel, Dr. Akagi, and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge.
Dennis Hopper found himself in Hollywood exile after making The Last Movie
Flying high off his international success with Easy Rider in 1969, cowriter, director, and star Dennis Hopper was given carte blanche by Universal for his next film, 1971’s The Last Movie, a controversial picture that, despite winning the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival, led to Hopper’s unofficial exile from Hollywood for nearly a decade. The Last Movie was recently released in a gorgeous 4K digital restoration made by Il Cinema Ritrovata from the original 35mm camera negative, returning to Metrograph on September 9. As documented in Nick Ebeling’s 2017 Along for the Ride and elsewhere, The Last Movie was a longtime labor of love for Hopper and his cowriter, Stewart Stern (who had penned Rebel without a Cause, in which Hopper played a key role), but it ended up being a critical and financial flop. Over the years, there have been occasional rare screenings as the film’s legend grew, and the restoration proves that the mythos was fully justified.
Hopper stars as Kansas, a movie wrangler working on a Western about Pat Garrett (Rod Cameron) and Billy the Kid (Dean Stockwell) in Chinchero, Peru, directed by one of the toughest auteurs of them all, the great, cigar-chomping Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor). Kansas is with former prostitute Maria (Stella Garcia), but he is instantly attracted to the fur-wearing Mrs. Anderson (Julie Adams), the wife of a wealthy factory owner (Roy Engel). Kansas’s best friend, Neville Robey (Don Gordon), wants Mr. Anderson to invest in his gold mine while both Anderson and Maria become jealous of Kansas’s romantic interest in Mrs. Anderson. In addition, following the accidental death of a stunt man during a dangerous scene, the local community of Chinchero blames Kansas and begins making their own movie directed by the vengeful Tomas Mercado (Daniel Ades), using real violence and fake equipment, creating a kind of passion play with Kansas at the center, much to the chagrin of the concerned priest (Tomas Milian), who was never in favor of Hollywood bringing its decadence to his town. It all leads to a stunning, unforgettable finale that questions much of what has come before.
Hopper, who was also a photographer and painter, said about the film, “The Last Movie is something that I made in Peru. I won the Venice Film Festival with it, and Universal Pictures wouldn’t distribute it. You should think about [Jean-Luc] Godard a little when you watch it. I made it because I’d read him say that movies should have a beginning, a middle, and an end — but not necessarily in that order. I was trying to use film like an Abstract Expressionist would use paint as paint. I’m constantly reminding you that we’re making a movie — I’m constantly making references to the fact that maybe you’re just being silly sitting in an audience, being sucked into a movie and starting to believe it — and then I jar you out of it. It’s not a very pleasant experience for most audiences.” But things have changed significantly over the last half-century, and audiences are now more attuned to watching nonlinear, more unorthodox films that merge fiction and reality and challenge them with purposely confusing plot twists and character development. Some scenes repeat, while others might have been lost — several times a title card identifies that a scene is missing, but it is impossible to know whether that is true or Hopper is playing with the viewer yet again. (The film was edited by David Berlatsky, Antranig Mahakian, and Hopper.) In fact, Tomas and the priest regularly refer to moviemaking as a game. It’s also not always clear when we’re watching the film, the film-within-a-film, or even a different film as Hopper explodes genre tropes to continually defy expectations. At one point the soundtrack features Kris Kristofferson singing “Me and Bobby McGee,” but the camera soon finds Kristofferson himself, guitar in hand, warbling away. Thus, when we later hear a song by John Buck Wilkin, we look for him as well.
Beautifully photographed by László Kovács, The Last Movie turns Kansas into a kind of Jesus figure. Both text and image often reference various stories from the Bible, directly and indirectly, including Jesus being whipped, his relationship with prostitute Mary Magdalene, a celebration around a golden calf, Jesus rising from a cave, and Christ being led to the cross. All seven deadly sins — gluttony, lust, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride — enter the narrative. The color red plays a significant role, as if staining the land with blood, from fake movie blood to the color of Kansas’s truck. Everyone ends up guilty of something, with some paying a higher price than others; as the original 1971 production notes explain: “Every character in the film is an innocent. Only as they are tarnished by their participation in the games do they become agents of their own destruction. The dreams that they succumb to are all encompassed in or produced by the American dream. Their sin, however, is the movies.” Hollywood has done them in, as it will Hopper himself, who filled the cast with such nonconventional, mostly non-Hollywood actors as Henry Jaglom, Toni Basil, Severn Darden, Sylvia Miles, Warren Finnerty, Peter Fonda, Clint Kimbrough, John Phillip Law, Russ Tamblyn, and Michelle Phillips, who was married to Hopper for eight days. The two-time Oscar-nominated Hopper went on to direct such films as Out of the Blue, Colors, and The Hot Spot and appear in such works as Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, True Romance, and Speed before passing away in May 2010 at the age of seventy-four. His legacy is now cemented with the restoration of The Last Movie, a masterpiece that finally got the due it, and Hopper, deserved.
Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is in a bit of a personal and professional crisis in Fellini masterpiece 8½
8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
Friday, September 15, 3:15
Sunday, September 17, 2:00 metrograph.com
“Your eminence, I am not happy,” Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) tells the cardinal (Tito Masini) halfway through Federico Fellini’s self-reflexive masterpiece 8½. “Why should you be happy?” the cardinal responds. “That is not your task in life. Who said we were put on this earth to be happy?” Well, film makes people happy, and it’s because of works such as 8½. Fellini’s Oscar-winning eighth-and-a-half movie is a sensational self-examination of film and fame, a hysterically funny, surreal story of a famous Italian auteur who finds his life and career in need of a major overhaul. Mastroianni is magnificent as Guido Anselmi, a man in a personal and professional crisis who has gone to a healing spa for some much-needed relaxation, but he doesn’t get any as he is continually harassed by producers, screenwriters, would-be actresses, and various other oddball hangers-on. He also has to deal both with his mistress, Carla (Sandra Milo), who is quite a handful, as well as his wife, Luisa (Anouk Aimée), who is losing patience with his lies.
Trapped in a strange world of his own creation, Guido has dreams where he flies over claustrophobic traffic and makes out with his dead mother, and his next film involves a spaceship; it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out the many inner demons that are haunting him. Marvelously shot by Gianni Di Venanzo in black-and-white, scored with a vast sense of humor by Nino Rota, and featuring some of the most amazing hats ever seen on film — costume designer Piero Gherardi won an Oscar for all the great dresses and chapeaux — 8½ is an endlessly fascinating and wildly entertaining exploration of the creative process and the bizarre world of filmmaking itself.
Guides interview the deceased in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life
AFTER LIFE (WANDÂFURU RAIFU) (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)
Saturday, September 16, 12:00 metrograph.com
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s second narrative feature, After Life, is an eminently thoughtful film about two of his recurring themes: death and memory. Every Monday, the deceased arrive at a way station where they have three days to decide on a single memory they can bring with them into heaven. Once chosen, the memory is re-created on film, and the person goes on to the next step of their journey, to be replaced by a new batch of souls. The way station is staffed by guides, including Takashi Mochizuki (Arata), Shiori Satonaka (Erika Oda), and Satoru Kawashima (Susumu Terajima), whose job it is to interview the new arrivals and help them select a memory and then bring it to life on-screen. Some want to take with them an idyllic moment from childhood, others a remembrance of a lost love, but a few are either unable to or refuse to come up with one, which challenges the staff. Twenty-one-year-old Yūsuke Iseya declares, “I have no intention of choosing. None,” while seventy-year-old Ichiro Watanabe (Taketoshi Naito) is having difficulty deciding on the exact moment, reevaluating and reflecting on the life he led. As the week continues, the guides look back on their lives as well, sharing intimate details, one of which leads to an emotional finale.
After Life explores life, death, memory, heaven, and the art of filmmaking
Kore-eda, who previously examined memory loss in the documentary Without Memory and explored a family’s reaction to death in the brilliant Still Walking, interviewed some five hundred people about what memory they would take with them to heaven, and some of those nonprofessional actors are in the final cut of After Life, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. After Life is also very much about the art of filmmaking itself, as each memory is turned into a short movie created on a set and watched in a screening room. In fact, the film was inspired by Kore-eda’s memories of his grandfather’s battle with what would later be identified as Alzheimer’s disease; the director has also cited Ernst Lubitsch’s 1943 comedy, Heaven Can Wait, as an influence, and the Japanese title, Wandâfuru raifu, means “Wonderful Life,” evoking Frank Capra’s holiday classic. But Kore-eda never gets maudlin about life or death in the film, instead painting a memorable portrait of human existence and those simple moments that make it all worthwhile — and will have viewers contemplating which memory they would take with them when the time comes.
Billy Wilder takes audiences down quite a Hollywood road in Sunset Boulevard.
SUNSET BOULEVARD (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Saturday, September 23, 12:15 metrograph.com
“You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big,” handsome young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) remarks to an older woman in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” the former star (Gloria Swanson) famously replies. It doesn’t get much bigger than Sunset Boulevard, one of the grandest Hollywood movies ever made about Hollywood. The wickedly entertaining film noir begins in a swimming pool, where Gillis is a floating corpse, seen from below. He then posthumously narrates through flashback precisely what landed him there. On the run from a couple of guys trying to repossess his car, the broke Gillis ends up at a seemingly abandoned mansion, only to find out that it is home to Desmond and her dedicated servant, Max Von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim). They initially mistake Gillis for the undertaker who is coming to perform a funeral service and burial for Desmond’s pet monkey. (You’ve got to see it to believe it.)
When Desmond discovers that Gillis is in fact a screenwriter, she lures him into working with her on her script for a new version of Salome, in which she is determined to play the lead role. “I didn’t know you were planning a comeback,” Gillis says. “I hate that word,” Desmond responds. “It’s a return, a return to the millions of people who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.” But just as Desmond was unable to make the transition from silent black-and-white films to color and sound pictures, getting Salome off the ground is not going to be as easy as she thinks. Hollywood can be a rather vicious place, after all.
Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) keeps a close hold on screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard.
Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of three — for the sharp writing, the detailed art/set decoration, and Franz Waxman’s score, which goes from jazzy noir to melodrama — Sunset Boulevard wonderfully bites the hand that feeds it, skewering Hollywood while making references to such real stars as Rudolph Valentino, Mabel Normand, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Wallace Reid, and Tyrone Power and such films as Gone with the Wind and King Kong. Actual publicity stills and movie posters abound, in Paramount offices and Desmond’s spectacularly designed home, which was once owned by J. Paul Getty and would later be used for Rebel without a Cause. Cecil B. DeMille, who directed Swanson in many silent films, plays himself in the movie, seen on set making Samson and Delilah. Desmond’s fellow bridge players are portrayed by silent stars Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson.
Meanwhile, before Swanson fired him, von Stroheim directed her in the silent film Queen Kelly, which is the movie Max shows Gillis in Desmond’s screening room. (Swanson herself would go on to make only three more feature films; she passed away in 1983 at the age of eighty-four.) John F. Seitz’s black-and-white cinematography and inventive use of camera placement, from underwater to high above the action, makes the most of Hans Dreier’s sets and Swanson’s fabulous costumes and makeup. Sunset Boulevard is the thirteenth and final collaboration between writer-director Wilder and writer-producer Charles Brackett, who together previously made The Lost Weekend and A Foreign Affair. Wilder and Holden would go on to make Stalag 17, Sabrina, and Fedora together. Finally, of course, Sunset Boulevard concludes with one of the greatest quotes in Hollywood history.
Thomas (David Hemmings) focuses on Veruschka in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up
BLOW-UP (BLOWUP) (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
Saturday, September 23, 6:30
Sunday, September 24, 9:30 metrograph.com
Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni calls into question everything we see and hear, in photographs, on film, and in real life, in his 1966 counterculture masterpiece, Blow-Up. Antonioni’s first English-language film — part of a three-picture deal with producer Carlo Ponti that would also include the disappointing Zabriskie Point and the quirky existential suspense thriller The Passenger — lets viewers know from the very start that their eyes and ears are going to be tested as the letters of the opening credits frame indecipherable action, frustrating the viewer’s desire to understand what is going on. David Hemmings stars as Thomas, a successful fashion photographer in 1960s Swinging London who is tired of the phoniness and artifice inherent in his profession and instead has ambitions to become a black-and-white documentary photographer, as he and his agent, Ron (Peter Bowles), put together a book focusing on the many ills of society. Of course, he does so while riding around in a Rolls-Royce convertible and in between shooting such models as Veruschka (von Lehndorff), whom he practically makes love to during their session but doesn’t give a hoot about once he puts down the camera. He also gets fed up easily with a quartet of fabulously dressed models (the makeup and clothes come courtesy of costume designer Jocelyn Rickards), telling them to shut their eyes as he leaves, controlling what they see and don’t see, much like a film director. Thomas eventually heads out to lush, green Maryon Park, where he takes pictures of two people, a younger woman (Vanessa Redgrave) cavorting with an older man (Ronan O’Casey), apparently in the midst of a secret tryst. The woman, Jane, rushes over to Thomas and demands he give her the film; he invites her to his studio, where she is willing to do just about anything to get back the negatives. Wondering what was so incriminating about the photographs, Thomas soon makes blow-up after blow-up, examining them closely and ultimately believing that he has captured a murder on film. He also finds out that getting to the truth isn’t going to be easy, especially when he keeps allowing himself to become distracted by his wild lifestyle.
Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) is worried about photos Thomas (David Hemmings) took in Blow-Up
Blow-Up, which was parodied in Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety, reimagined by Brian De Palma as Blow Out, and a direct influence on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, was inspired by Julio Cortázar’s short story about a translator, “Las babas del diablo” (“The Devil’s Drool”), and written by Antonioni and regular collaborator Tonino Guerra (L’avventura, L’eclisse, The Red Desert), with English-language dialogue by poet and playwright Edward Bond. Antonioni dances all over the line between fiction and reality: Thomas’s studio belongs to photographer Jon Cowan; many of Thomas’s pictures were taken by photojournalist Don McCullin; Thomas himself is based on London photographer David Bailey; the abstract paintings by Thomas’s neighbor, Bill (John Castle), are by Ian Stephenson; the band in the club scene is the Yardbirds; and the tennis-playing mimes are husband and wife real mimes Claude and Julian Chagrin. Herbie Hancock’s groovy score is primarily heard when Thomas turns on a radio or puts on a record, ambient sound instead of soundtrack music coming from nowhere. Meanwhile, Antonioni challenges the viewer again and again to think twice about what they see and hear. At one point Antonioni follows Thomas’s gaze up into the trees, but when the camera returns to Thomas, he is looking elsewhere. While Thomas is studying the photos he took in the park, trying to uncover what happened as if editing a film, the wind from the park can impossibly be heard. Thomas is often peering through blinds, not sure of what he is seeing. A pair of wannabe models (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills) tear apart Thomas’s fake photographic background as if breaking the boundaries between the real and the fabricated. When Thomas shows one of the park photographs to Bill’s girlfriend, Patricia (Sarah Miles), she says, “It looks like one of Bill’s paintings.”
And when Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck gets frustrated with one of the speakers behind him, he destroys his guitar as bandmates Jimmy Page and singer Keith Relf continue playing “Stroll On” as if nothing is happening. Meanwhile, the crowd stands still like a bunch of zombies, refusing to stroll on or move at all, until Beck throws the broken neck of his guitar, now an object that can no longer emit sounds, into the audience, where it’s up to others to determine its value. The stagnation also relates to a huge propeller Thomas buys from an antiques store, as if he’s desperate to propel his life forward. Does Antonioni really get that literal? It’s hard to tell, but nearly every shot is ripe for interpretation, every directorial decision a careful choice imbued with meaning. When Thomas drives through an antiwar march, two protesters put a sign saying “Go away!” in his backseat, where the propeller will be put later. Blow-Up concludes with one of the most creative finales in the history of cinema. The troupe of mimes seen earlier returns, playing tennis in the park, but without a ball. Just follow the gazes of the mimes and Thomas, and listen closely as well, then watch what he does with his camera. It ingeniously encapsulates everything that has come before, but without a single word being spoken. It’s an absolutely bravura ending to an absolutely bravura film.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Marcia Cross, Bryan Batt, and Ron Canada star in world premiere of Pay the Writer (photo by Jeremy Daniel)
PAY THE WRITER
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through September 30, $40-$149.50 www.paythewriterplay.com www.signaturetheatre.org
Tawni O’Dell’s Pay the Writer doesn’t do itself any favors. The title of the world premiere play, which opened August 21 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, is both elusive — after having seen it, I cannot figure out why it’s named for one minor line of dialogue — and, unfortunately, misleading through no fault of its own, as it has nothing to do with the current Writers Guild of America strike, which has shut down film and television production. The script is overstuffed with clichés, and the pace is choppy, with slow, awkward set changes. At two hours without a break, it is desperately in need of significant cutting or at least a brief intermission.
So why then am I still recommending it?
Despite all of the above, I had a good time at the show, as did the entire audience the night I went, erupting in a well-deserved standing ovation at the conclusion, cheering on the three excellent leads, Ron Canada, Marcia Cross, and Bryan Batt. While standing ovations have long been de rigueur on Broadway, they are not nearly as obligatory off the Great White Way.
The show is structured as a series of two-character scenes — save for one involving the three leads — that go back and forth in time over forty-five years, from present-day New York City to 2000s Los Angeles, 1990s Paris, and late 1970s Manhattan. It traces the long relationship between gay white literary agent Bruston Fischer (Bryan Batt) and his most famous client, the award-winning Black writer Cyrus Holt (Ron Canada), from their initial meeting outside a bar to Cyrus’s most recent novel. Cyrus has always let Bruston — who serves as narrator, regularly speaking directly to the audience — read his work before anyone else, but he has given his latest manuscript first to his French translator, Jean Luc (Steven Hauck), which has upset Bruston greatly. Bruston is hurt by what he considers a deep affront by a man he calls his friend, while Cyrus seems more concerned that neither of them can find Jean Luc and find out what he thinks of the book.
“You’re still mad at me,” Cyrus says. Bruston replies, “I’m always the first person to read your work. I don’t understand why you chose to send it to someone else before me.” Cyrus curtly says, “I have my reasons.” Bruston responds, “And to send it to that . . . that . . . ridiculous, arrogant, narcissistic . . .” To which Cyrus explains, “He can’t help any of that; he’s French.”
One night Cyrus, a Vietnam veteran who has won two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for a novel about racism in the military during the war, accidentally calls his first wife, the white Lana (Cross), with whom he has two children, Leo (Garrett Turner, who also plays the young Cyrus) and Gigi (Danielle J. Summons). Lana, who he hasn’t seen in two decades, shows up unexpectedly at a restaurant where Cyrus and Bruston are having dinner, and she and Cyrus go at it, arguing over their parental skills, Lana giving up her dreams to raise the kids, and Cyrus’s drinking and philandering. But underneath it all is an obvious connection that cannot be broken.
“Believe it or not, those crazy kids were in love once. I think, on some level, they still are,” Bruston tells us. “Cyrus continues to sit blazing in the center of Lana’s orbit while she struggles to break free from his gravitational pull. She’s his Venus; the most beautiful of planets but not necessarily the easiest one to inhabit.”
Cyrus (Garrett Turner) and Bruston (Miles G. Jackson) meet outside a club in Pay the Writer (photo by Jeremy Daniel)
Cyrus is ill, but he doesn’t want to make a big deal about it, keeping it from Lana and their kids, who he thinks don’t care about him. But he’s soon face-to-face with each one of them, confronting harsh realities about his legacy as a husband and a father.
Canada (The Invested,Lights Up on the Fade Out) is terrific as a tough-minded, unapologetic man with a big ego who shifts between his serious ethics as a writer and his loose morals as a human being; it’s a hard character to make likable, but Canada pulls it off. Emmy nominee Cross (Desperate Housewives,Melrose Place), a Juilliard graduate making her return to the stage, shines as Lana, rising above some tepid dialogue to portray a strong woman who has overcome the mistakes of her past. And Batt (Mad Men,Jeffrey) is charming as Bruston, who shares his own personal problems while managing those of others. “Divorces. People have to pick sides,” Lana says to Bruston, who responds, “You got custody of Leo and Gigi, and I got custody of Cy.”
Director Karen Carpenter (Harry Townsend’s Last Stand; Love, Loss, and What I Wore) strains to find a flow to O’Dell’s (When It Happens to You,Coal Run) narrative, which can resemble a Lifetime movie made from a melodramatic novel while taking on homophobia and racism. In fact, O’Dell has written six novels including Back Roads, which was an Oprah Book Club selection that O’Dell adapted into a film.
David Gallo’s sets and David C. Woolard’s costumes are functional (although Lana’s dresses are divine), as are the lighting by Christopher Akerlind and sound by Bill Toles. The supporting cast, including Turner, Summons, Hauck, Miles G. Jackson as the young Bruston, and Stephen Payne as a homeless man in a completely unnecessary scene, is inconsistent, unable to keep up with the leads.
Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out the title of the play, which is essentially about a writer who has to pay for what he has wrought in the end.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Renée Elise Goldsberry is sensational as Prospero in Public Works musical adaptation of The Tempest (photo by Joan Marcus)
THE TEMPEST
Central Park, Delacorte Theater
Through September 3, free, 8:00 publictheater.org
In 2013, the Public Theater inaugurated its Public Works program, which partners with community organizations throughout the five boroughs, with a musical adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, featuring music and lyrics by Todd Almond, who played Ariel alongside Laura Benanti as the Goddess, Norm Lewis as Prospero, Carson Elrod as Caliban, and some two hundred nonprofessional actors from such local groups as the Fortune Society, the Brownsville Recreation Center, the Children’s Aid Society, DreamYard, and Domestic Workers United.
In 2015, Michael Greif directed a nonmusical Shakespeare in the Park version with Sam Waterston as Prospero, followed in 2019 by Laurie Woolery’s streamlined Mobile Unit adaptation with Myra Lucretia Taylor as the sorcerer.
Woolery is back in charge for the latest iteration, a brand-new lighthearted Public Works interpretation with music and lyrics by Miami native and Columbia grad Benjamin Velez in his full-fledged New York debut. Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis promised in his introduction we will all be able to boast, “I was there” as Velez’s career takes flight.
Ariel (Jo Lampert) orchestrates drama with the help of her minions in The Tempest (photo by Joan Marcus)
Tony winner Renée Elise Goldsberry (Hamilton,As You Like It) is sensational as Prospero, the rightful duke of Milan who has fled to a remote island after her brother, Antonio (Anthony Chatmon II), usurped her crown with the help of his friend Alonso, the king of Naples (Joel Frost), twelve years earlier. Living with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Miranda (Naomi Pierre), she now rules over dozens and dozens of spirits in addition to her slave, the deformed Caliban (Theo Stockman), and her indentured servant, the sprite Ariel (Jo Lampert).
In the thrilling opening number, a vengeful Prospero declares, “I call upon the skies, the eyes of justice watching over / There sail my enemies, I send the breeze their way / I summon every cloud to be a shroud on those who wronged me / They took my life so now I vow to make them pay! . . . I’ll finally be free / of the tempest in me.”
The shipwreck brings Antonio and Alonso to the island, along with Sebastian (Tristan André), Alonso’s brother; Ferdinand (Jordan Best), Alonso’s son; Gonzalo (Susan Lin), Alonso’s councilor; and the comic relief of Stephano (Joel Perez), the king’s butler, and Trinculo (Sabrina Cedeño), the king’s fool. Prospero sends out Ariel, who can make herself invisible, to create mayhem with her trusted spirits; meanwhile, Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love.
Velez’s songs, with playful orchestrations by Mike Brun, range from the bouncy “Vibin’ on to You,” in which Miranda and Ferdinand proclaim their affection for each other, to “A Crown Upon Your Head,” a chance for Sebastian and Alonso to scheme to take over, although the number is hampered by overpreening choreography (by Tiffany Rea-Fisher) at the end; from the fun but too long “A Fool Can Be a King,” in which the Three Stooges–like trio of Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban imagine Stephano ruling the island, to Caliban’s mostly unnecessary “The Isle Is Full of Noises.” Goldsberry brings down the house with the rollicking, hilarious “Log Man,” in which Prospero considers the love between Miranda and Ferdinand, singing, “Innocence flies like the last gasp of summer / Childhood dies in the arms of a lover / Nobody tries to hold on like a mother / But one day you have to let go / When she meets her log man.”
Alexis Distler’s set repurposes Beowulf Boritt’s design for this summer’s earlier Hamlet, with the six-piece band playing in part of a house that is sinking into the ground, next to the gutted main section. Wilberth Gonzalez’s costumes are based in water and earth colors and textures, with unique headpieces for most characters; Ariel’s transformation is a highlight, as are Caliban’s ratty, chainlike vestment and Prospero’s goth steampunk dress. David Weiner’s lighting and Jessica Paz’s sound expertly incorporate the large cast, with as many as eighty-eight performers onstage at once.
Sone classic lines get cut and plot points get condensed across one hundred minutes, and the finale is anticlimactic, but the spirit of the show is intoxicating. It’s a joy to see established actors working with first-timers and regulars from the Brownsville Recreation Center, the Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education, the Center for Family Life, the Children’s Aid Society, DreamYard, Domestic Workers United, the Fortune Society, and the Military Resilience Foundation, including Brianna Cabrera, Patrick O’Hare, Vivian Jett Brown, and Edwin Rivera as Spirit Ancestor lead singers.
This Tempest bids a fond farewell to the Delacorte as we know it, as the sixty-one-year-old theater begins a two-year renovation after the show ends its one-week run September 3. As Antonio usually says, but not in this version, “What’s past is prologue.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Douglas Dunn’s Garden Party is back for a return engagement (photo by Jacob Burckhardt)
GARDEN PARTY
Douglas Dunn Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts., third floor
September 6-10, $20 floor cushions, $25 chairs www.douglasdunndance.com
This past April, Douglas Dunn + Dancers presented the world premiere of Garden Party at the company’s third-floor Soho loft studio. The sixty-minute piece is now returning for an encore run September 6-10; tickets are $20 for floor cushions or $25 for a chair.
Longtime Dunn collaborator Mimi Gross designed the colorful costumes and scenery, bathing the space in lushly painted trompe l’oeil walls and ceiling and a long horizontal mirror covered with pink, yellow, and green flowers, plants, trees, clouds, raindrops, and other natural elements. The work is performed by Dunn, Alexandra Berger, Janet Charleston, Grazia Della-Terza, Vanessa Knouse, Emily Pope, Paul Singh, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Timothy Ward, and Christopher Williams, with lighting and projections by Lauren Parrish, sound by Jacob Burckhardt, and preshow live music by guitarist and composer Tosh Sheridan.
The soundtrack consists of pop and classical tunes (Robert de Visée, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Bach, Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris, more), birdsong, and poetry (by John Keats, Anne Waldman, Molière, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Milton, Stephanie Jacco, and others, read by Dunn, Waldman, Jacco, and Della-Terza). In an April twi-ny talk, Dunn noted, “The feel of this evening was clear to me the day the title hit me (about three years ago, the pandemic postponing the project). The lavish beauty of Mimi’s set completely fulfills my initial intuition . . . as if she’d read my dancing mind.”
Tickets are limited; the show sold out its April premiere, so don’t hesitate if you want to be part of this intimate experience.
“There is no longer any scent of what was. Thankfully, though, there is Barbara G. Mensch, whose images are like the conjuring rain,” journalist and author Dan Barry writes in the foreword to Barbara Mensch’s latest photography book, A Falling-Off Place (Fordham University Press, September 5, $39.95). “She is the Brooklyn Bridge of the New York imagination, linking the now and the then. She sees the incremental turns in the city’s inexorable evolution, the obliteration of the past by gentrification, the irreversible dominion of profit over preservation.”
The Brooklyn-born Mensch initially took up drawing and worked as an illustrator at Ms. magazine after graduating from Hunter College. She soon found that photography was her calling, documenting a changing New York City. She has spent nearly fifty years using a Polaroid SX70, a Rolleiflex, and now an iPhone, focusing primarily on Lower Manhattan. During the pandemic, she looked through her archive of unlabeled boxes of photos and gathered together black-and-white shots of the Fulton Fish Market, Chinatown, Peck Slip, and the Bowery, of demolition and decay, of a different era. She added shots of 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy to construct a powerful narrative.
“They became my personal visual timeline,” she writes in the introduction to the book, a follow-up to 2007’s South Street and 2018’s In the Shadow of Genius: The Brooklyn Bridge and Its Creators. “What did the passages of decades reveal to me? What dynamics were at play in my images of the same streets that I walked repeatedly for years? What fell off as the old was swept away by the new?”
A Falling-Off Place is divided into three chronological sections: “the 1980s: making a living on the waterfront,” “the 1990s: setting the stage for a real estate boom / fires, floods, and neglect,” and “the new millennium: managing change / anxiety, optimism, and the uncertainty of historic preservation.” There are photos of the old Paris Bar, a dilapidated section of the FDR Drive, the Beekman Dock icehouse, and Pier 17 being torn down, along with portraits of such characters as Mikey the Watchman, Mombo, Vinny, and Bobby G., supplemented with quotes from Jane Jacobs, fishmongers, a retired boxer, and Robert Moses.
Many of the photos can also be seen in Mensch’s site-specific permanent installation, “The Nobility of Work,” in the restored and rehabilitated Tin Building on South St., which was originally built in 1907 on the space where the Fulton Fish Market began in 1835. The market moved to Hunts Point in the Bronx in 2005; the new Tin Building, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary in September, was commissioned by the Howard Hughes Corporation and features a 53,000-square-foot high-end food court and marketplace run by chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
On September 6, Mensch will be at the powerHouse Arena, in conversation with culinary documentarian Daniel Milder (Chef’s Table,Street Food Asia); she will also be leading an Untapped Cities tour on October 7. Below she discusses living downtown, being a woman in what was a man’s world, upcoming projects, and more.
twi-ny: When you first began photographing at the Fulton Fish Market, the men there were suspicious that you might be a government plant. What was that like?
barbara mensch: Well, what can I say? When I first began taking photos in the early 1980s, it was horrible. I would be taking photos and lo and behold, sharp (and I mean very sharp) pieces of ice would repeatedly be hurled at me. The fishmongers would use ice to preserve the seafood as it was stored in crates, and later in the early hours of the morning in coolers. I remember that the sharp pieces of ice could really hurt if thrown with tremendous velocity. Also, in the beginning there were many threats to my life, which were at the time palpable. Although the origins of this project were challenging, where I photographed the Fulton Market and the East River waterfront below the Brooklyn Bridge, I was intrigued and kept going forward.
As a side note, I was always very competitive with men and wanted to prove my worth. As a result, in the male-dominated world of the waterfront, the challenge was provoking. In order to create this project, a sense of gradual time had to be taken into consideration. Convincing men, who were hardened and determined to make a living within a certain number of hours in the harshest of conditions and had no room for me or my pictures. Working in this environment was a daunting task that was only achieved with a gradual, mutual feeling of trust. That came with years of interaction.
twi-ny: You have a permanent, site-specific exhibition at the Tin Building; how did that come about?
bm: After the Howard Hughes Corporation, which operates the new Tin Building, considered several different major artists for the space, they determined that I had the best understanding of the area and the strongest commitment in my pictures to the historical record.
twi-ny: The photos there and in your new book are both quintessentially New York and at the same time universal. Which photographers inspired you? Do you seek that dichotomy when you peer through the lens?
bm: My influences as an artist are vast and consequential. Although I am a photographer and have worked hard to perfect the art of printing and creating images, there are truly so many “heroes” that I have come to know over the years and try to follow their practices. One of my mentors was my friend Bruce Davidson, a legendary photographer who influenced me with his extraordinary wisdom into the creative process.
And I have also been influenced by countless other artists, primarily filmmakers, including Ingmar Bergman, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and more. Each artist, in his or her masterful way, chose to depict humanity in a raw and gritty reality. Rudy Burkhardt also comes to mind as a painter, photographer, and filmmaker whose images evoke a sense of New York as it passed into a new era. Many of these artists continue to resonate with me.
twi-ny: It’s hard to believe some of those pictures go back only forty years; things now seem so different from then. I can’t get the 1999 photograph of a security guard on Schermerhorn Row out of my head; it looks like it’s from a 1940s British noir. What kind of image instantly catches your eye?
bm: To answer your question, I always shoot “reflexively.” When I saw the security guard walking back and forth, blanketed in smoke and fog, I believe my unconscious was at work. Cinematic art has deeply influenced my work, so Frank Capra’s film Lost Horizon and Michael Powell’s captivating films where mystery is created in light and shadow impacted me greatly and often influence my work.
twi-ny: At the end of the book, instead of you being interviewed, you interview someone who tracked you down because of your photographs. What made you want to reverse the tables?
bm: Well, just to be clear, she found me. I thought that interviewing an individual who had some inside perspective on mob activities during the Giuliani investigations against organized crime during the 1980s would be provocative.
twi-ny: It certainly is that. In that interview, the two of you discuss gentrification and land grabs as well as Rudy. At one point, your subject says, “Men’s egos and thirst for power drove us off a cliff. That is the real ‘falling-off place.’” Do you see us ever climbing back from that? You spend much more time photographing deconstruction than reconstruction. Are you worried about the future character of the city itself?
bm: Photographing “deconstruction” for me was unconscious. I was merely trying to capture the beauty inherent in many of the images that I made of the places that we lost.
twi-ny: You’ve lived downtown for forty years. How have the myriad changes affected your daily life in the neighborhood, outside of your work?
bm: Well, New York is . . . New York! It is the quintessential experience of life in a great metropolis. As one walks down the street, we have a blending of cultures, of aspirations, and of course the “zeal” in which new commerce replaces the old.
twi-ny: Can we ever have another Fulton Fish Market in New York the way it was, with the same kind of fishmongers and overall feeling, or has the time for that passed?
bm: Unfortunately, I think that time has passed. Sorry if I sound cynical.
twi-ny: You’re a lifelong New Yorker. Your previous book was about the Brooklyn Bridge. So many people leave New York; what are some of the things that keep you here, besides your photography?
bm: Honestly, I love my loft, which is situated in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. I have gained so much inspiration by exploring the bridge’s origins. But as it has been said, “All things must pass.” That means I, too, think about the future and wonder what’s next. Looking out at the Brooklyn Bridge, however, keeps me forever engaged.
twi-ny: You are so inextricably tied to New York City. When you travel, what kinds of places do you like to go to? Do you take color photos like a tourist, or is it always a busman’s holiday?
bm: If you are a serious artist, every place you go on the globe warrants an intense “staring contest” between you and your vast subject matter. I find stories everywhere I go. The problem is finding the time to put them all together. Art and photography are a serious business, and each project one does merits intense thought and consideration, and of course the consequences of making it available to the public.
Recently I have been making trips to South America, to Colombia. It is a country struggling to emerge from years of violence and corruption. I traveled to Chocó province on the Pacific, where rainforests and jungles remain uninhabited and many of the locals are among the poorest in the country.
I have embraced the iPhone, and once I am away from New York, shooting in color seems natural!
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor who used to live near the Fulton Fish Market and shares a birthday with the Brooklyn Bridge; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Richard Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman), Robert Shaw (Ian Shaw), and Roy Scheider (Colin Donnell) find plenty of downtime in The Shark Is Broken (photo by Matthew Murphy)
THE SHARK IS BROKEN
Golden Theatre
252 West Forty-Fifth St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 19, $58-$215.50 thesharkisbroken.com
The first two adult books I read were Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, when I was in fourth grade. (I discovered only when I was in college that the latter was actually the Reader’s Digest Condensed version; I should have realized that by the opening sentence, which was “Call me Ish.”) A few years later, I devoured Peter Benchley’s Jaws, at least in part because the novel took place on Long Island, where I had spent most of my childhood. Not yet a teenager, I then saw the movie, which was actually filmed on Martha’s Vineyard, when it was released in the summer of 1975. It scared the hell out of me, and I loved every second of it.
I might not have loved every second of The Shark Is Broken, the Broadway play that goes behind the scenes of the making of the film, but I enjoyed enough of it to make it more than seaworthy.
English actor Ian Shaw was four years old when his father, Oscar-nominated actor, novelist, and playwright Robert Shaw (From Russia with Love,A Man for All Seasons) was on set alongside eventual two-time Oscar nominee Roy Scheider (The French Connection,All That Jazz) and soon-to-be Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss (American Graffiti,The Goodbye Girl). Robert died in 1978 at the age of fifty-one, when Ian was only eight. In 2017, Ian read his father’s drinking diary, which, he explains in an online letter, he found “painful and very brave.” That was the impetus for The Shark Is Broken, which he cowrote with Joseph Nixon and premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe.
There is no curtain at the Golden Theatre, where the play opened August 21. Onstage is a cross-section of the Orca, the ramshackle lobster boat owned by salty shark hunter and WWII veteran Quint, Shaw’s character. Scheider (Colin Donnell) is playing new police chief Martin Brody, a former New York City cop who has moved to the supposedly much quieter beach community with his family. And Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman) is portraying oceanographer Matt Hooper, who has been brought in for his expert advice.
The three men sling testosterone around for ninety-five minutes as they wait for Bruce, the mechanical shark, to be repaired yet again; it keeps breaking down, giving the actors time to talk about their careers and for Shaw and Dreyfuss to lace into each other, with the cool and calm Scheider as referee.
The Shark Is Broken goes behind the scenes of the making of Jaws, storms and all (photo by Matthew Murphy)
The neurotic, Jewish Dreyfuss, who is from Queens, declares, “What a god-almighty fucking waste of time! This whole thing is a disaster.” New Jersey native Scheider, who spends most of the downtime reading the newspaper and catching rays, closely following the Nixon-Watergate story, says, “Well . . . it’s not the time it takes to take the take that takes the time. . . . It’s the time it takes between the takes that takes the time to take the take.” Dreyfuss responds, “How much time did that take you?”
Complaining about the way Steven Spielberg is directing the film, shooting on the ocean and constantly making changes to the script, Dreyfuss argues, “Jews should stay away from water. Nothing good ever happened to any Jew on the water.” Scheider asks, “Didn’t Jesus walk on water?” Dreyfuss concludes, “Yeah! Look what happened to him!”
Meanwhile, Shaw preys on Dreyfuss’s lack of worldly knowledge. “You’re a philistine, boy!” he declares. When Dreyfuss admits he has never heard of Damon Runyon, saying “You can’t expect me to know everything,” Shaw barks back, “I think our mistake is expecting you to know anything.” A few minutes later, Dreyfuss asks, “What, you think I’m an idiot?” to which Shaw replies, “I presume that’s a rhetorical question.”
The interplay among the three is like the scar scene in the film, when the three men show off their scars and share other intimacies, including discussing their relationships with their fathers, ultimately bonding if not exactly becoming best buds. Shaw has hidden bottles all over the boat, Scheider can’t get enough of the blazing sun, and Dreyfuss is a young, highly ambitious nervous wreck. Certain that he was a failure in American Graffiti and that his lead role in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz will not get him the respect he craves, Dreyfuss yearns to do Shakespeare and Pinter, just like the grizzled Shaw has done, all the while both seeking Shaw’s approval and desperately wanting to best him.
The structure of the play, directed with a loose hand by Guy Masterson (Morecambe,One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), is as rickety as the Orca; the narrative centers around the most poignant moment in the film, Quint’s speech about having survived the July 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the ship that delivered components for Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But the scene doesn’t involve Bruce at all, so it is never quite clear why they are waiting around for the mechanical shark to be fixed before proceeding with the shooting. Jaws is essentially a character study constructed around greed, from the Amity mayor’s refusal to close the beaches as the great white attacks continue during the profitable July 4 weekend to humans’ belief that they have any power at all over the natural world. The Shark Is Broken is a vastly entertaining character study as well, but there’s not a whole lot more meat on its bones. In the play, Dreyfuss asks, “What do you think it’s about?”; he’s referring to the movie, but the same can be said of the show.
Ian Shaw cowrote and stars as his father, Robert Shaw, in The Shark Is Broken (photo by Matthew Murphy)
In addition, the dialogue is filled with bons mots that wink at what happened after the film; some of them are funny, but others are too obvious. “One thing’s for certain — if there is a sequel, I will not be in it,” Scheider says; he was back for Jaws 2. Reading the paper, Scheider remarks, “Christ! There will never be a more immoral president than Tricky Dicky,” a cheap laugh no matter what you think of 45. And when the three men talk about their families, Scheider asks Shaw about his children (the English actor had ten with three wives), “Do any of yours want to be actors?” Shaw replies, “Christ, I hope not! It’s a shrivelling profession, isn’t it?,” a sly reference to Ian.
Duncan Henderson’s set and costumes put the audience right on board the cutaway Orca, surrounded by Nina Dunn’s effective projections of the sea and storms, enhanced by Jon Clark’s lighting and Adam Cork’s sound and interstitial music.
Donnell (Anything Goes,Love’s Labour’s Lost) is steadfast and hunky as Scheider, who is a calming influence among the three actors. Brightman (Beetlejuice,School of Rock) is uncanny as Dreyfuss, looking and sounding so much like him that you will sometimes forget it isn’t Dreyfuss himself. And in his Broadway debut, Ian Shaw (War Horse,Common) pays wonderful tribute to his father, capturing his essence in every word and move while depicting his virtues and his flaws.
“There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men,” Ishmael says in Moby-Dick. It’s a line that also relates to a trio of actors portraying three very different men, each with his own unique form of madness, hunting a mechanical shark in a make-believe Hollywood movie.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
