Tuesday, July 27, and Wednesday, July 28, SummerStage, Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, $35, 6:30
Wednesday, July 28, Terminal 5, 610 West 56th St., $35, 10:00
There’s Dan, and he plays guitar. There’s Patrick, and he plays drums. And they’re the Black Keys, the super-hot back-to-basics blues rock band out of Akron, Ohio. After shuffling through many releases in which their sound was deemed too-close-for-comfort to the White Stripes, they put out RUBBER FACTORY (Fat Possum, September 2004), a powerful, garage-stomping record full of tight blues songs. Whether it was Dan Auerbach’s desperate wail on “Grown So Ugly” (“I got up this morning/put on my shoes/tied my shoes/ went to the mirror/but I combed my hair”) or Patrick Carney’s militaristic drumming on the hit single “10 A.M. Automatic,” the duo revealed a knack for writing damn good songs. Following RUBBER FACTORY, they released the Danger Mouse-produced ATTACK & RELEASE (Nonesuch, 2008), further exploring their R&B impulses, and now their latest disc, BROTHERS (Nonesuch, May 2010), which effectively combines the qualities of the past two albums. It will be interesting to see which sound is more prominent as they play a pair of SummerStage benefit shows at Central Park this Tuesday and Wednesday with the Morning Benders, followed by a late-night show Wednesday at Terminal 5 with Lee Fields & the Expressions and the Whigs. Even though all three concerts are sold out, fans can still gather round Rumsey Playfield to hear the SummerStage shows; be sure to get there early to check out San Fran quartet the Morning Benders, who are on the road in support of BIG ECHO (Rough Trade, March 2010) and won’t be back in the city until November 18 for a date at Webster Hall.
In a small Texas town, Deputy Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) has been charged with kicking out local prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), but something happens to him when he meets her, leading to a violent sexual affair. The soft-spoken, easygoing cop suddenly goes bad, jeopardizing his relationship with girlfriend Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson), his job, and just about everything and everyone he comes into contact with. Based on Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp noir classic that Stanley Kubrick called “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered” (Thompson worked with Kubrick on the scripts for THE KILLING and PATHS OF GLORY), Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of THE KILLER INSIDE is cold and heartless, a lurid, exploitative film that captures little of what made the book so special. Despite staying close to Thompson’s narrative and including voice-overs taken straight from the book, Winterbottom (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, WELCOME TO SARAJEVO) concentrates too much on making the characters realistic and believable, inserting his impressive documentary skills and taking the book far too literally. It’s one thing to have Ford describe a brutal beating in the novel; it’s quite another to show him pulverizing a woman’s face into a bloody pulp. Also, whereas in the book Ford talks about “the sickness” inside him developed from childhood abuse, the film tries to hide that, burying it in a handful of brief flashbacks that add nothing but confusion. This new version of THE KILLER INSIDE ME, which was previously filmed in 1976 by Burt Kennedy with Stacy Keach, Susan Tyrrell, Tisha Sterling, and Keenan Wynn, is a major disappointment.
Clive Staples Lewis was a staunch Christian apologist in such parables as the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. In 1942 he published THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, an epistolary novel about the battle between heavenly good and eternal damnation. In 2008, Max McLean and Jeffrey Fiske adapted the short work for the stage, and after successful runs in Washington, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities, it is now playing at the Westside Theatre on 43rd St. McLean stars as His Abysmal Sublimity Screwtape, a well-dressed demon who is exchanging letters with his nephew, Wormwood, as they discuss the ultimate fate of an unnamed “patient” whom Screwtape is preparing a special place for in hell. In his underworld office — Cameron Anderson’s superbly designed slightly elevated and slanted rhombus with one ladder going up and another leading down, as well as a funny pneumatic tube that sends and receives the letters — Screwtape dictates to his minion, Toadpipe (Karen Eleanor Wight), a demonic Harley Quinn who creeps around on all fours and never speaks, instead emitting strange sounds. Although McLean, who also codirects with Fiske, clearly delights in the role, he overplays the part, coming off as too buffoonish (hammier than thou), especially when he continually pops the “p” at the end of his name as he verbally signs off each missive. Although the letters contain occasional witty lines and clever wordplay, they get lost in repetition and didacticism, and McLean inexplicably takes pauses at the wrong parts of sentences. The play does contain pleasurable, insightful moments, but just not enough of them, which is perhaps why it’s not exactly filling the small theater; in fact, on the night we attended, it was rather annoying as people jockeyed for different seats and the ushers tried to move everyone around because of all the empty rows. The walk-in music, however, was excellent, several Bob Dylan songs about good and evil (“Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”) as well as the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”
