Documentary explores life and career of twentieth-century photographer Roman Vishniac
VISHNIAC (Laura Bialis)
Quad Cinema
34 West Thirteenth St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, January 19 quadcinema.com vishniacfilm.com
After screening at the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Laura Bialis’s Vishniac is opening January 19 at the Quad for a one-week run. The documentary tells the story of Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac, who captured Jewish life in shtetls and ghettos in the 1930s while also pioneering photomicroscopy. Vishniac was born in St. Petersburg in 1897, moved to Berlin in his early twenties, and eventually settled with his family in 1940 in New York City.
“He had enormous chutzpah,” his daughter Mara Vishniac Kohn says in the film. “He regarded himself as a mixture of Moses and Superman.”
Bialis first met Kohn at an Elie Wiesel lecture more than two decades ago. “The encounter made a deep impact,” she noted while making the film. “It’s a story that feels more important to me now than ever, in the face of rising antisemitism and fading ties to the Holocaust. As more survivors pass away, we’re losing those who experienced it firsthand. However, one thing we’ll never lose are the faces portrayed in Vishniac’s photographs, faces that could be those of our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. They speak to us across time and space and compel us never to forget.”
Vishniac was written and coproduced by Sophie Sartain and edited by Chris Callister; it combines archival footage and new interviews with many of Vishniac’s sixteen thousand photos and reenactments of scenes from his life.
“Despite Vishniac’s monumental contributions to Jewish history and culture, a full-length, retrospective film about his life and work has never been produced. Our film will be the first,” Bialis said.
Bialis (Rock in the Red Zone,Refusenik) will be at the Quad for Q&As at the 7:15 show on January 19 and, joined by executive producer Nancy Spielberg, the 7:15 screening on January 20 and the 2:45 show on January 21.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Isabelle Cottenceau immerses viewers into the life and career of designer Gaby Aghion in Looking for Chloé
LOOKING FOR CHLOÉ (GABY, THE WOMAN BEHIND MAISON CHLOÉ) (Isabelle Cottenceau, 2023)
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Saturday, January 20, 7:00 www.filmlinc.org thejewishmuseum.org
“Gaby was not a typical fashion designer who simply made clothes. She was someone who really wanted, in a way, to revolutionize society,” Chloé archive director Géraldine-Julie Sommier says about Jewish Egyptian designer Gaby Aghion in Isabelle Cottenceau’s Looking for Chloé. “There’s a quote I love: ‘She wanted to create an attitude through her clothes.’”
Screening January 20 at 7:00 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the thirty-third annual New York Jewish Film Festival — copresented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum — the documentary tells the little-known story of the underrecognized Chloé founder, born Gabrielle Hanoka in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1921. In 1940 she married communist intellectual Raymond Aghion, they moved to Paris five years later, then she started Chloé in 1952, unhappy with the state of women’s clothing.
Aghion was not really a hands-on designer, not making any sketches or drawings, but she knew what she liked; she surrounded herself with talented individuals as she developed the brand, changing the industry with luxury prêt-à-porter. Among the designers she hired were Gérard Pipart, Phoebe Philo, Stella McCartney, and, most famously and successfully, Karl Lagerfeld, who helped put the fashion house on the map. “They understood each other. And it was Karl Lagerfeld who crystallized Chloé’s identity,” researcher Camille Kovalevsky says. However, Aghion points out, “We created Karl. It is not Karl that created Chloé.”
Cottenceau combines archival footage, family photographs, and old news reports with new interviews in the film, which features spoken text by Israeli-Dutch singer-songwriter and composer Keren Ann taken from a rare interview Aghion did in 2012.
“People have never understood how a fashion house called Chloé, a house that had no past, no name, could become so inventive,” Keren Ann narrates as Aghion. “We just opened the door to inventors. I love invention; I love people who stand up and take action.”
Longtime Chloé model Pat Cleveland explains, “Chloé is the essence of freedom, an air of elegance, but freedom at the same time . . . like a vacation for your body.”
Cottenceau (Sous les pavés, la jupe; Éloge de la laideur) paints a wide-ranging portrait by talking with Aghion’s economist son, Philippe, who shares touching remembrances with stark honesty; former creative director Clare Waight Keller; painter and photographer Peter Knapp; fashion exhibition curator Judith Clark; machinist Bayram Kaya; seamstresses Anita Briey and Virginia Da Silva Santos; celebrities atelier assistant manager Nicolas Imberty; personal friend Anita Saada; and FIT Museum curator Dr. Valerie Steele, who will participate in a postscreening discussion with producer Sophie Jeaneau.
Together they emphasize Aghion’s dedication to the freedom of movement, offering women literal and figurative liberation, helping them break out of boredom and social convention. She didn’t take herself too seriously, preferring to have fun and joke around as she remained in the background, her company making clothing that was adventurous, imbued with a spirit of fluidity, simplicity, and optimism for a new open-minded generation.
“She got into fashion with a determination to democratize it,” Aghion’s granddaughter, brand sustainability and development consultant Mikhaela Aghion, says. But Philippe admits her clothing was not inexpensive.
The film is being screened in conjunction with the excellent Jewish Museum exhibition “Mood of the moment: Gaby Aghion and the house of Chloé,” which continues through February 18 and consists of photographs, sketches, personal and professional documents, nearly 150 garments, and other paraphernalia celebrating the life and career of an extraordinary woman, who passed away in 2014 at the age of ninety-three but whose legacy lives on.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Liev Schreiber will speak about Ukraine at Shabbat services at Temple Emanu-El
Who:Liev Schreiber, Michael Goldfarb What: Shabbat services with special discussion Where:Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center, One East 65th St. at Fifth Ave., and online When: Friday, January 19, free with advance RSVP (in-person and virtual), 6:00 Why: In the 2005 film Everything Is Illuminated, which marked the directorial and screenwriting debut of actor and activist Liev Schreiber, Elijah Wood stars as Jonathan Safran Foer (the author of the novel the film is based on), who travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather’s life during the Holocaust. In March 2022, a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, Schreiber, whose maternal grandfather was a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant, cofounded BlueCheck Ukraine, “a collective of humanitarian crisis response experts, entrepreneurs, and filmmakers with decades of experience addressing the needs of conflict-affected populations and documenting solidarity movements countering oppression.” Schreiber has traveled to Ukraine several times and has been outspoken in his support of the nation.
On January 19, the three-time Emmy nominee and Tony winner will attend Shabbat services at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center, joined by fellow BlueCheck cofounder and board member Michael Goldfarb, who previously worked with Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières in such countries as Afghanistan, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Niger, South Sudan, Uganda, and Yemen. Schreiber and Goldfarb will discuss American and Jewish values, particularly as they relate to the war in Ukraine. Admission is free both in-person and virtually online with advance RSVP.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Leslie Odom Jr. stars as the title character in the prescient and uproarious Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
PURLIE VICTORIOUS: A NON-CONFEDERATE ROMP THROUGH THE COTTON PATCH
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through February 4, $58 – $298 purlievictorious.com
Kenny Leon’s revival of Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch was already a special experience; they’re now upping the ante with a series of talkbacks as the show heads into its final weeks at the Music Box Theatre.
The original premiered on Broadway in 1961, with a cast that included Davis as fast-talking preacher-dreamer Purlie Victorious Judson, Ruby Dee as Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins, Sorrell Booke as cotton plantation owner Ol’ Cap’n (Stonewall Jackson) Cotchipee, Alan Alda as his ne’-er-do-well son, Charley, Tony-nominated Godfrey Cambridge as obedient servant Gitlow Judson, Helen Martin as his wife, Aunt Missy, who runs the house, and Beah Richards as Idella Landy, who watches out for Charley.
Leon has assembled another ace cast for his sparkling adaptation, a prescient play so funny and on point that you’ll be wondering why you haven’t heard about it before — although some will recall the 1970 musical version, Purlie, which featured Cleavon Little as Purlie and Melba Moore as Lutiebell. Leslie Odom Jr. is phenomenal as the title character, who wants to pretend that Lutiebell (a scene-stealing Kara Young) is his cousin Bee so she can collect her late mother’s $500 inheritance from Ol’ Cap’n (Jay O. Sanders) and Purlie can reclaim Big Bethel as his church. Missy (Heather Alicia Simms) is highly suspicious of the plan, while Gitlow (Billy Eugene Jones) doesn’t want to get involved in anything that might upset Ol’ Cap’n. When Charley (Noah Robbins) goes missing, Idella (Vanessa Bell Calloway) is beside herself, but Purlie isn’t about to let anything get in the way of his acquisition of Big Bethel. Meanwhile, Derek McLane’s evolving sets are so fabulous that the last one draws gasps of approval and applause from the audience.
“There’s a whole lotta things about the Negro question you ain’t thought of!” Purlie proclaims to Lutiebell. “The South is split like a fat man’s underwear; and somebody beside the Supreme Court has got to make a stand for the everlasting glory of our people!”
Purlie Victorious must close on February 4; they’ve added a series of “Victorious Talkbacks” that began January 11 with Adrienne Warren and continues January 18 with Moore and January 25 with Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad team up again in Gutenberg! The Musical! (photo by Matthew Murphy)
GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL!
James Earl Jones Theatre
138 West Forty-Eighth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 28, $74-$498 gutenbergbway.com
Lightning doesn’t strike twice for Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, who first teamed up for the nonstop juggernaut The Book of Mormon in 2011, both earning Tony nominations. The dynamic duo is back in the double-exclamation-pointed Gutenberg! The Musical!, which are two bangs too many. It’s scheduled to close January 28.
Written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, the two-act version premiered off Broadway in 2006 with three-time Tony nominee Christopher Fitzgerald and Obie winner and Tony nominee Jeremy Shamos. In this new iteration of the meta-musical, Bud Davenport (Gad) and Doug Simon (Rannells), both from Nutley, New Jersey, have rented the James Earl Jones Theatre for one night to present their show, a musical about fifteenth-century German printer Johann Gutenberg, to a group of producers. They play all the characters, identifying them by putting on different hats, which say “Drunk #1,” “Helvetica,” “Bootblack,” “Trimmer,” and “Gutenberg,” among others.
Directed by Tony winner Alex Timbers, it starts out very funny, particularly as they discuss how they are including a serious issue in order to make sure the show is important — antisemitism — but as the story continues, it gets repetitive, going around in circles (literally and figuratively) as Bud and Doug keep interrupting the musical-within-a-musical to explain what they are doing, and why. The 2006 production was one act and forty-five minutes, and that feels about right; at two acts and two hours, it drags like a Saturday Night Live sketch that doesn’t know when to end.
The night I went, the best moment came when a woman from the audience shouted out to Bud, “You’re hot,” which Gad and Rannells ran with, cracking up themselves and the crowd with some fun improvisation.
There are plenty of good scripted lines — “In an actual production this song would include a gospel choir and lasers,” Doug notes; “I wish I was gay! But I’m just . . . not,” Bud opines — but the laughs dry up like, well, an underused, out-of-date printing press.
SPAMALOT
St. James Theatre
246 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 28, $49-$225 spamalotthemusical.com
Monty Python’s Spamalot is back on Broadway and as hilarious as ever in this updated version gleefully directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes.
With a book and lyrics by Python Eric Idle and music by John Du Prez and Idle, the endlessly punny show debuted on Broadway in 2005, with Tim Curry as King Arthur, Sara Ramirez as the Lady of the Lake, Hank Azaria as Sir Lancelot, David Hyde Pierce as Sir Robin, Michael McGrath as Patsy, Christopher Sieber as Sir Galahad, and Christian Borle as Prince Herbert, garnering fourteen Tony nominations and winning for Best Musical, Best Director (Mike Nichols), and Best Featured Actress (Ramirez). Based on the 1975 comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one of the funniest movies ever made, Spamalot still holds up, skewering everything in its path.
This time around Tony winner James Monroe Iglehart is King Arthur, three-time Tony nominee Christopher Fitzgerald is Patsy, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer is the Lady of the Lake, Tony nominee Ethan Slater is the Historian and Prince Herbert, two-time Tony nominee Alex Brightman has replaced the scene-stealing Taran Killam as Sir Lancelot, and Michael Urie is Sir Robin through January 21, after which he will be replaced by Jonathan Bennett.
While Sir Lancelot doesn’t get to save Sir Galahad from almost certain temptation and no one is asked to answer these questions three to cross the Bridge of Death, you will find just about everything else here, from a killer rabbit, the French taunter, and the Knights Who Say Ni to Dennis’s treatise on the exploitation of the workers, the Plague Village, and Sir Robin’s not-quite-bravery.
There are also tons of self-referential jokes: “We won’t succeed on Broadway / if we don’t have any Jews,” Sir Robin sings. “One in ev’ry show / there comes a song like this / It starts off soft and low / and ends up with a kiss,” the Lady of the Lake explains. “How are we going to put on a Broadway show? Broadway’s a thousand years in the future in a country that hasn’t yet been discovered,” Arthur worries. Also on the menu are “Find Your Grail,” “Whatever Happened to My Part?,” and “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
Annaleigh Ashford and Josh Groban go into devilish business together in Sweeney Todd (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
205 West Forty-Sixth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 5, $89-$435 sweeneytoddbroadway.com
Thomas Kail’s revival of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is devilishly delicious. The dark tale of a mysterious master barber who teams up with a macabre pie maker features memorable music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a delightful book by Hugh Wheeler, based on a 1970 play by Christopher Bond.
The 1979 original Broadway production starred Len Cariou as the title character and Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett and won eight Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Score, Best Leading Actor, and Best Leading Actress. The current third Broadway revival opened last March with Josh Groban as Sweeney Todd and Annaleigh Ashford as Mrs. Lovett, earning eight Tony nods and winning for Best Lighting and Best Sound.
On February 9, Tony winner Aaron Tveit picks up the shaving blade as Sweeney, with two-time Tony winner Sutton Foster taking over baking the pies; an unrecognizable Ruthie Ann Miles continues her Tony-nominated performance as the beggar woman.
The exhilarating Buena Vista Social Club continues at the Atlantic through January 28 (photo by Ahron R. Foster)
BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 28 atlantictheater.org
It would not be surprising if the Atlantic Theater’s world premiere of Buena Vista Social Club soon finds itself on Broadway; in the meantime, the sold-out run continues at the Linda Gross through January 28.
The two-hour musical was inspired by Wim Wenders’s 1999 Oscar-nominated documentary about Ry Cooder and his son, Joachim, traveling to Cuba to record an album with an ensemble known as the Buena Vista Social Club. Book writer Marco Ramirez has created a narrative, based on actual events, that goes back and forth between the 1950s, as the Cuban Revolution is simmering, and the economically depressed Special Period of the mid-1990s. Juan De Marcos (Luis Vega), who serves as narrator, explains early on, “Some of what follows is true / Some of it only feels true.” The real Juan De Marcos is a consultant on the show.
In 1996, Juan is trying to convince legendary singer Omara Portuondo (a sensational Natalie Venetia Belcon, in a gorgeous costume by Dede Ayite) to record an album in a Cuban studio with a band he has put together, including singer Eliades Ochoa (Renesito Avich). The possibility of singing some of her old songs takes her back to her youth, when she (Kenya Browne) and her sister, Haydee (Danaya Esperanza), were singing to tourists at the Tropicana until Haydee is enticed by guitarist Compay Segundo (Jared Machado) and pianist Rubén Gonzalez (Leonardo Reyna as a young man, Jainardo Batista Sterling as the older Rubén) to join them instead at the Buena Vista Social Club, a seedy nightspot in a dangerous part of town run by vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer (Olly Sholotan, although I saw understudy Justin Showell). Decades later, Compay (Julio Monge) seeks out Ibrahim (Mel Semé) to join in the recording, but he has no desire to revisit the past.
Although it does get sidetracked by bits of treacly melodrama, Buena Vista Social Club is splendidly directed by Tony nominee Saheem Ali, with energetic choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck on Arnulfo Maldonado’s inviting two-level set. The band is fantastic, performing such songs as “Silencio,” “Dos Gardenias,” “Veinte Años,” “El Carretero,” and “Y Tu Que Has Hecho?” Each member is worthy of mention: David Oquendo, Avich, and Monge on guitars, Javier Díaz, Mauricio Herrera, and Román Díaz on percussion, Guido Gonzalez on trumpet and flugelhorn, Hery Paz on woodwinds, Gustavo Schartz on bass, and Eddie Venegas on trombone. The performance of “Candela” alone is worth the price of admission, one of the best musical scenes of the year.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE return to the Joyce with Walking Out the Dark (photo by Ernesto Mancebo)
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, a Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 16–21, $52-$72
212-691-9740 www.joyce.org www.evidencedance.com
One of the highlights of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s sixty-fifth anniversary season at New York City Center last month was a new production of Ronald K. Brown’s 2009 Dancing Spirit, a celebration of longtime Ailey dancer and artistic director Judith Jamison. Before and after the December 23 presentation, Brown, who suffered a stroke in April 2021 that almost cost him his life, stood in the back of the orchestra with his life partner, dancer and associate artistic director Arcell Cabuag, hugging, kissing, and shaking hands with friends, colleagues, and well-wishers. Brown still has a lot of work to do, but his progress has been awe-inspiring.
Brown, a Bed-Stuy native, now brings his Evidence company — named after the 1948 Thelonius Monk composition — to the Joyce for its annual winter season. Running January 16–21, the show features two of Brown’s masterworks, 2001’s Walking Out the Dark and 2012’s Torch.
The former, a fifty-five-minute choreographed conversation among mother, brother, sister, lover, and friend dealing with self-examination, ritual, and healing, has an original score by Philip Hamilton (“Freedom”), with text from letters by Brown in addition to songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock (“Oh Death”), Ballet Folklorico Cutumba de Santiago de Cuba, and Toumani Diabate and live drumming by Abou Camara. The cast alternates between Demetrius Burns, Joyce Edwards, Gregory Hamilton, Isaiah K. Harvey, and Cabuag, who is celebrating his twenty-fifth year with the troupe and will take on the “Gratitude” solo four times, and Stephanie Chronopoulos, Austin Warren Coats, Valériane Louisy, Shaylin D. Watson, and Burns (“Gratitude”); the movement is inspired by dance from Benin, Cuba, and Côte d’lvoire.
The latter is a touching tribute to the life and memory of former Brown student and dance enthusiast Beth Young, who passed away in January 2012. The half-hour piece, which focuses on perseverance and self-determination, will be performed by Burns, Chronopoulos, Coats, Edwards, Hamilton, Harvey, Louisy, and Watson, with music by Teddy Douglas and DJ Zinhle featuring Busiswa Gqulu, remixed by Brown.
There will be a Curtain Chat on January 17 and a family matinee on January 20 at 2:00.
In addition, in conjunction with APAP, Brown and Cabuag are presenting an excerpt from Percussion Bitter Sweet, which they are creating for “Max Roach 100”; the sneak peek takes place at the Joyce on January 13 at 4:00 and at Alvin Ailey Studios on January 14 at 5:30.
No company has the kind of dancing spirit Brown and Evidence display, and it should be on full view in this winter program at the Joyce.
Jane Birkin is seen through the eyes of her daughter in Jane by Charlotte
FIAF CineSalon: JANE BY CHARLOTTE (JANE PAR CHARLOTTE) (Charlotte Gainsbourg, 2021)
French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)
FIAF Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 16, $20, 7:30
Series continues through January 30 fiaf.org
Jane by Charlotte is a documentary that only a daughter could make about her mother, a movie about two women who are always being looked at looking at each other. And on January 16 at 7:30, the director, Charlotte Gainsbourg, will introduce a special screening as part of FIAF’s “Being Birkin” series to look even further at her mother, Jane Birkin, a frequent visitor to FIAF who passed away in July 2023 at the age of seventy-six.
In 1988, French New Wave auteur Agnès Varda made Jane B. par Agnès V., in which the director herself was a character in the film, showing London-born French singer, actress, and fashion icon Jane Birkin galivanting through imaginative and playful set pieces as Varda photographed her, with Varda sometimes revealing herself in front of and behind the camera. She had just finished Kung Fu Master, a family affair starring Birkin, her daughters Charlotte Gainsbourg (who also appeared in the documentary) and Lou Doillon, and Varda’s son Mathieu Demy.
Charlotte, the actress and singer who is the daughter of Birkin and French pop star and heartthrob Serge Gainsbourgh, now picks up the camera to delve into her complicated relationship with her mother in another family affair, Jane by Charlotte. It’s a deeply personal film in which mother and daughter share intimate details of their lives together, the good and the bad, while also avoiding certain topics as they head toward milestones, with Jane approaching seventy-five and Charlotte fifty.
Daughter and mother take a break in bed by Jane by Charlotte
“Filming you with a camera is basically an excuse to just look at you. That’s a brief explanation of the process, OK?” Charlotte tells her mother, who has been looked at most of her life. Birkin has been a public figure since she was a teenager as an international model in the 1960s, her name immortalized in the treasured Hermés Birkin bag. She’s released some twenty albums and appeared in such films as Blowup,Je t’aime moi non plus,La Belle Noiseuse, and Death on the Nile. Charlotte is no stranger to the limelight either, starring in such films as Lars von Trier’s Antichrist,Melancholia, and Nymphomaniac, Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, and Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep and releasing five records of her own.
Cinematographer Adrien Bertolle follows Jane, Charlotte, and, occasionally, Charlotte’s young daughter, Jo, as they roam from Paris and New York City to Brittany, visiting the beach, a Manhattan rooftop, and, for the first time in many years, the home Jane and Charlotte lived in with Serge, who passed away in 1991 at the age of sixty-two. They are shown rehearsing a duet at the Beacon for the touring concert “Birkin Gainsbourg: Le Symphonique,” performing Serge’s song “Ballade de Johnny-Jane.” The soundtrack also features snippets of Birkin’s “F.R.U.I.T.,” “Max,” and “Je voulais être une telle perfection pour toi!” and Charlotte’s “Lying with You” and “Kate.”
Jane often poses for her daughter, who takes still shots and movies of her mother, who speaks openly about her aging as Charlotte snaps close-ups of her mother’s wrinkled face, arms, and hands. They lie together in bed, all in a heavenly white, as Jane talks about her insomnia and her longstanding near-addiction to sleeping pills.
Jane had one child with each of her major relationships: She had Kate with her husband, conductor and film composer John Barry, in 1967; Charlotte with Serge, who she never married, in 1971; and singer, actress, and model Lou with director Jacques Doillon in 1982. But mother and daughter carefully avoid several details. They discuss Jane’s recent illness without ever naming it as leukemia. And although they often mention Kate, they never speak of her as being dead; a fashion photographer, Kate died in 2013 at the age of forty-six, perhaps by suicide. Both Jane and Charlotte divide their lives into two segments, before and after Kate, a haunting presence who hovers over them.
Charlotte Gainsbourgh and Jane Birkin stroll through Paris in intimate documentary
Jane has come to terms with getting older. “We don’t have much of a choice, you know,” she says. “I’m very lucky.” She also admits to making mistakes with Charlotte and in other parts of her life. “I never wanted to do wrong in regards to you,” she tells her. “You were so private, and so . . . secretive. I didn’t have any clues.” Later, sitting in front of projections of home movies, Jane confesses, “I think I’m always tormented by guilt. I often wonder if it was all my fault, if I should have done differently, in regards to everything.”
Ultimately, in her directorial debut, Charlotte makes some confessions of her own, revealing what she still needs from her mother. It’s a poignant and emotional, wholly French finale, evoking Truffaut as we watch Jane on a beach, her hair blowing in the wind. The two of them then hug as if they never want to let go, Charlotte’s Bolex camera dangling over her shoulder.
The series also includes Serge Gainsbourg’s 1976 I Love You, Me Neither (Je t’aime moi non plus) on January 16 at 4:00 and Birkin’s 2007 Boxes on January 30 at 4:00 and 7:30.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
HAMLET | TOILET
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 10-13, $35 japansociety.org
To go, or not to go? That is the multilayered question asked in Yu Murai and Kaimaku Pennant Race’s absurdist, scatological HAMLET | TOILET, continuing at Japan Society through January 13 as part of the Under the Radar festival.
As you enter Japan Society, you are greeted by a different kind of step and repeat; instead of posing in front of a show logo, you can snap a selfie with a glitteringly white Japanese Toto washlet on a red platform, a fancy toilet with such special features as a heated seat and a bidet. It sets the mood for what is to follow, ninety minutes of controlled chaos involving more flatulence than the beans scene in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles.
Murai has previously reimagined works by William Shakespeare in Romeo and Toilet and Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, wildly unpredictable tales that incorporate dance, music, strange props, and bizarre costumes. HAMLET | TOILET sits comfortably within that oeuvre. The production takes place in and around a three-stall installation, an open cube with a back wall and no doors. The three actors, Takuro Takasaki, G. K. Masayuki, and Yuki Matsuo, are dressed in unflattering white body-hugging latex suits reminiscent of the spermatozoa in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).
The essence of the Bard’s tragedy is in there, somewhere: Hamlet’s (Takasaki) uncle, Claudius (Masayuki), has killed Hamlet’s father, married his mother, and become king. Hamlet is in love with Ophelia (Masayuki), whose brother, expert fencer Laertes (Matsuo), is not a Hamlet fan. Hamlet’s besties, Horatio (Masayuki) and Marcellus (Matsuo), have encountered the ghost of their friend’s father, who tells his son that his murder must be avenged. To do so, Hamlet has to face his conscience, which is not lodged in his brain or heart but in his painful belly — the load he is carrying is an intensifying bowel movement that his multidimensional constipation will not allow him to release.
For much of the show, the actors are in the middle stall, trying to take dumps, either squatting by themselves or sitting on a cushiony human bowl formed by the other two actors. They gleefully pass gas that is projected in colorful animation by Takashi Kawasaki, accompanied by the appropriate sounds. The characters discuss aspects of making number two in ways that no play or novel that I know of ever has; no bathroom subject or feces joke is off limits, regardless of how silly or lowbrow. Nobody can find relief, not even from Ophelia’s headdress, which consists of dozens of rolls of toilet paper.
Amid deep dives into the shape, consistency, aroma, and chocolatey nature of human waste, Murai also delves into cowardice, sanity, suffering, and revenge. The dialogue is similarly mixed; Hamlet veterans will appreciate such real Shakespearean lines as “That adulterate beast won to his shameful lust . . . my queen,” “Never make known what you have seen [and heard] tonight,” “[I am going to] put an antic disposition on,” and “I should have fatted all the region kites / With this slave’s offal: bloody, bawdy villain!”
Purists might grimace at the more coarse language, such as “Something must be born that will trace a single line / like a magnificent line of feces / straight through all of this wonderful society,” “Please, just this once / couldn’t it be soft and gently flow like water,” “You must cleanly and completely defecate me!” and “In a world that is moved by the strict laws of almighty God / that which should not have moved has passed / That’s why my movement will not pass!” Even the subtitles themselves are in on the fun, changing the spelling and capitalization of nec-ASS-arily and BUTT (instead of but).
The three actors occasionally break out into song and dance; the music is by DJ and hip-hop producer Tsutchie from Shakkazombie, with hilarious choreography by Shinnosuke Motoyama. There’s far too much repetition, as numerous jokes spew out like the preparation for a colonoscopy, and in one scene the play makes fun of that itself as repeated statements fill up the subtitles monitor in ever-smaller type. But just when you think the production is merely a fart-fantasy concocted by Eric Cartman or Beavis and Butt-Head, Murai slips in something ridiculously clever so you won’t lose your appetite; it’s not merely Shakespeare as bathroom reading, although that’s in there too. Murai is not claiming that Shakespeare, or theater in general, is full of shit, but it might be in need of a thorough cleansing.
Which brings us back to the original question: To go, or not to go? HAMLET | TOILET is certainly not for everyone; some gags were met with laughter and applause, while others received random chuckles or guffaws — or silence. If you do get a ticket — the January 12 performance will be followed by an artist Q&A — be sure to use the facilities, which have several washlets, in addition to doors to ASSure your privacy.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
