Tag Archives: Jack Lemmon

DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES

Kirsten (Kelli O’Hara) and Joe (Brian d’Arcy James) hold on for dear life in Days of Wine and Roses (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 16, $112-$252
atlantictheater.org

There’s no sign of Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini’s lush, overdramatic Oscar- and Grammy-winning title song from Blake Edwards’s 1962 film, Days of Wine and Roses, in the world premiere musical adaptation that opened tonight at the Atlantic. While its inclusion might not have helped, it certainly couldn’t have hurt.

Written by JP Miller, Days of Wine and Roses was initially performed live on Playhouse 90 in 1958, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Cliff Robertson as Joe Clay and Piper Laurie as Kirsten Arnesen, eager young corporate colleagues whose burgeoning love is fueled by the bottle. Miller adapted the play for the screen, with Jack Lemmon as Joe and Lee Remick as Kirsten.

Composer and lyricist Adam Guettel and book writer Craig Lucas, who previously collaborated on the smash hit The Light in the Piazza, which won six Tonys, have now turned Days of Wine and Roses into an all-wet, thorny musical, supremely disappointing especially given its star power, with Brian d’Arcy James as Joe and Kelli O’Hara as Kirsten. It starts off promising, on board a yacht where Joe, a fast-talking New York City PR man, is entertaining male clients by hustling them into a back room and plying them with booze and babes. He assumes that Kirsten is one of his procured good-time girls, but she’s actually the secretary to his boss. A narrow pool of water at the front of the stage casts shimmering reflections across the characters, and a series of movable doors change colors like a mood ring (the set is by Lizzie Clachan, with lighting by Ben Stanton), but a life preserver ring in the corner is a harbinger of their fate.

Despite recognizing him as a player, Kristen agrees to have dinner with him, where he talks her into having her first alcoholic drink ever, a Brandy Alexander. That single indulgence leads them down a dark path of lies and deception as they get married, have a daughter, Lila (Ella Dane Morgan), and struggle personally and professionally because of their alcoholism. While Joe attempts sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous with his sponsor, Jim Hungerford (David Jennings), Kirsten seeks refuge with her strict Norwegian father (Byron Jennings), who never liked Joe. The set opens up to reveal a seemingly impossible greenhouse, where Mr. Arnesen grows plants for sale, but it only spells more trouble for Joe and Kirsten, whose own growth is stunted by the bottle.

Days of Wine and Roses explores love and alcoholism at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

In the show’s first song, “Magic Time,” Joe charmingly sings his dialogue to various people on the boat, including his assistant, Rad (Ted Koch), a client, Delaney (Byron Jennings), and Kirsten. “I’m not here for the fun,” she tells Joe, who replies in song, “Might be why you aren’t having any.” She answers, “Or . . . it might be you.” Their repartee is fast and witty, with sweet music by Guettel, but it quickly devolves after that as the score becomes laborious and the lyrics mundane. “Now I have / all I need / now that I’m your mama,” Kirsten sings to Lila. “There is a man who loves you / as the water loves the stone / and the stone adores the hillside / where the wind has always blown,” Joe sings to Kirsten. “Look, Daddy / Do you see the sun / the circle getting smaller / going to bed now / tucked in safe for the night,” Lila sings to Joe.

Tony nominee d’Arcy James (Into the Woods, Something Rotten!) is excellent channeling Lemmon as the outgoing Joe, but the small theater can’t contain O’Hara’s powerful, operatic voice. Tony nominee Lucas (Amélie, An American in Paris) stuffs too much plot into ninety minutes; the story jumps around, not allowing relationships to be properly nurtured. Tony-nominated director Michael Greif (The Low Road, Dear Evan Hansen) is unable to find enough balance in the characters or the bumpy narrative, which feels like a series of barely related vignettes and repetitive scenes. In addition, the only ones who sing are Joe, Kirsten, and Lila, adding to the arbitrariness.

Miller named the play after a line in the 1896 poem “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,“ in which Ernest Dowson writes, “They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, / Love and desire and hate; / I think they have no portion in us after / We pass the gate. / They are not long, the days of wine and roses: / Out of a misty dream / Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream.” The title of the poem comes from an ode by Horace: “The brief sum of life denies us the hope of enduring long.” Guettel and Lucas’s adaptation lacks the poetry of its inspirations. In order for the story to work, you have to believe in the love between Joe and Kirsten, beyond their dependence on drink, but in this case it’s hard to make that connection.

Kirsten (Kelli O’Hara) and Joe (Brian d’Arcy James) get lost in the darkness of alcoholism in Days of Wine and Roses (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

In the show, Kirsten is reading Draper’s Self Culture, a 1907 educational series that her father started her off on when she was a child. She’s up to the fourth volume, Exploration, Travel, and Invention; in the introduction, Tufts president Frederick William Hamilton writes, “Exploration, Travel, and Invention are three phases of man’s unceasing search for the unknown. One of the most remarkable of human instincts, one of those also which most sharply differentiate man from other animals, is this constant desire to penetrate the unknown, to solve the mysteries which lie all about us. Humanity has never learned to be quiescent in the face of mystery.”

Theater is all about exploration, travel, and invention, taking audiences on journeys of the heart, mind, body, and soul, penetrating the unknown and confronting life’s endless mysteries. Unfortunately, Days of Wine and Roses turns out to be a haphazard trip, with the main mystery being why it needs to be a musical at all.

SOME LIKE IT HOT

Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee star in Some Like It Hot on Broadway (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

SOME LIKE IT HOT
Shubert Theatre
225 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave
Tuesday – Sunday through September 3, $94-$278
somelikeithotmusical.com

Call it “Some Like a Plot.”

Fifty years ago, Tony-winning composer Jule Styne, five-time Tony-nominated lyricist Bob Merrill, and two-time Tony-winning book writer Peter Stone turned Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning 1959 comedy, Some Like It Hot, into the Broadway musical Sugar, which ran for more than a year and was nominated for four Tonys. In 2002, Tony Curtis, who played Joe in the film, portrayed Osgood Fielding III in a national road tour revival.

Lighting does not strike thrice with the latest Broadway adaptation, titled Some Like It Hot, a lukewarm show scheduled to run at the Shubert into September. Among other things, book writers Matthew López and Amber Ruffin fiddle with the original plot so much that it ends up insulting the film as well as the audience, updating the story to supposedly make it more palatable for modern times.

The basic narrative is still intact. It’s 1933, and saxophonist Joe (Christian Borle) and stand-up bassist Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee) are having a difficult time making ends meet in Depression-era Chicago. After witnessing a gangland killing, they need to get out of town fast, and they disguise themselves as women — Joe as Josephine, Jerry as Daphne — to get jobs with Sweet Sue’s all-woman Society Syncopators, who are on a train trip heading to a big gig. Spats Columbo (Mark Lotito) and his goons are on the two men’s trail, with Detective Mulligan (Adam Heller) not far behind, tracking down Spats for racketeering, loan sharking, bootlegging, and now murder. Meanwhile, Joe has fallen madly in love with the lead singer of the Society Syncopators, Sugar Kane (Adrianna Hicks), and creates a fake male character in order to win her affections, while an older millionaire, the goofy but charming Osgood Fielding III (Kevin del Aguila), has taken an immediate shine to Daphne. Mistaken identity, slapstick comedy, clever dialogue, and more than a touch of misogyny ensue in the film, but the musical shoehorns in themes of race and gender identity that are as inconsistent as they are disrespectful to the original and the themes themselves.

Auditioning for a nightclub manager, Joe is furious when the man rejects Jerry because he’s Black, leading into the song “You Can’t Have Me (If You Don’t Have Him),” in which Joe actually sings, “Yes, he’s my brother through and through / Like the Marx, the Wrights, the Grimm! / Yeah, you can’t have ‘tea’ without the ‘two’ / And you can’t have me if you don’t have him.” Jerry: “You can’t break up a winning team.” Joe: “Like that crutch and Tiny Tim.” Jerry: “And you can’t have ‘ah’ without the” — Joe: “‘choo!’” It’s not exactly Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier on the run, shackled together in The Defiant Ones. Meanwhile, most people won’t get the inside joke when the manager and Jerry refer to Jerry as Houdini, a role Curtis played in a 1953 biopic.

The big show that Sweet Sue believes will make or break the band is in California instead of Florida as in the film, perhaps because California is a more liberal state and Florida is no favorite of the LBGTQIA+ community and allies. The casting is not race-blind; sometimes it’s important that a character is Black, and sometimes it’s not, which left me scratching my head more than once. Meanwhile, instead of Joe impersonating an oil scion who sounds like Cary Grant in order to woo Sugar, as in the film, in the musical Joe pretends to be screenwriter Kiplinger Von Der Plotz, who speaks in an insensitive fake-German accent (referencing the Austrian Wilder), saying such things as “Ah! Break a leg! Or, as we say in Vienna, ‘Brekken . . . ein lekken . . . gedorf.’”

Classic Hollywood film is transformed into a lukewarm musical at the Shubert (photo by Matthew Murphy)

One major new twist does work, and that involves Jerry’s transformation into Daphne, a change that the character embraces, even if it does screw around with the finale, one of the most famous final lines in Hollywood history, delivered by Joe E. Brown.

Faced with movie roles created by Curtis as Joe/Josephine, Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne, Marilyn Monroe as Sugar, George Raft as Spats, Joan Shawlee as Sweet Sue, and Pat O’Brien as Agent Mulligan, the cast tries its best to make us forget about those actors, but it’s a mountainous task. Ghee (Mrs. Doubtfire, Kinky Boots) is wonderful as Jerry/Daphne, using his long, lithe body to challenge preconceptions and prejudices about race and gender. Unfortunately, Borle (Little Shop of Horrors, Something Rotten!) appears to be in a completely different show, lost in vaudeville shtick that even he doesn’t understand. In addition, while Ghee’s transformation into Daphne is both delightful and believable, Borle always looks like himself as Josephine, with nary an adjustment of voice or movement.

Hicks (Six) gives more agency to Sugar, famously played by Monroe as a dumb blond with a heart of gold, but she still has to sing such lines as “Tell the boys in the band Sugar’s giving up sax / I’m California bound / Cause I’m safer in the long run with an all-girl band / And it’s time to say adieu to every one night stand.” NaTasha Yvette Williams (Chicken & Biscuits, Porgy and Bess) nearly brings the house down whenever Sweet Sue McGinty belts one out, but a surprise revelation diminishes what was previously an intelligent, dedicated character. Lotito is hamstrung as Spats, but Del Aguila (Frozen, Rocky) has fun as Osgood.

Director and choreographer Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, Mean Girls) cannot leave well enough alone, turning nearly part of Scott Pask’s set into a prop for a dance, no matter how improbable; a late scene with rows of doors drones on and on and on and was better done in Bugs Bunny cartoons. There’s also an inordinate amount of tap-dancing by Joe and Jerry as the Tip Tap Twins, which sent my tap-dancing-fan friends into paroxysms of joy but brought the narrative to a screeching halt every time for me. The music, by Marc Shaiman, and the lyrics, by Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who have previously collaborated on such Broadway musicals as Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, are unmemorable.

Turning movies into Broadway musicals is often problematic, especially when adapting a beloved, star-studded Hollywood classic. While changes and updates are often necessary and welcome, they are ideally done within the spirit of the original, or at least make sense and don’t feel haphazard. As Sue says in the musical, “Our entire future depends on this show being perfect.” But as we know from the film, “nobody’s perfect.”

NYC’S MOVIE RENAISSANCE 1945 – 1955

New Yorkers should be flocking to see The Naked City and other Big Apple flicks at Film Forum

NYC’S MOVIE RENAISSANCE 1945 – 1955
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through February 10
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In his July 2021 book “Keep ’Em in the East”: Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Renaissance (Columbia University Press, $40), film historian Richard Koszarski details how New York City came to be a haven for making movies. “Fiorello La Guardia was the first New York mayor to realize the full significance of the motion picture industry to the city’s economic well-being. The few hundred jobs directly at stake in the late 1930s were not unimportant, but ever since the turn of the century, the movies — along with broadcasting and publishing — had also been doing something else for New Yorkers. Where the twentieth century had begun with a range of great American cities competing for world and national attention, it was now clear that modern America was no longer so flat a landscape. Now there was New York — and all those other places. Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco were all great cities, but New York was the city.”

Tony Curtis and Richard Jaeckel are two of the toughies in Maxwell Shane’s City Across the River

New York City native Koszarski will be at Film Forum to talk about a few of the films in “NYC’s Movie Renaissance 1945 – 1955,” a two-week series consisting of two dozen flicks that take place in and around Gotham, released in the ten years beginning around the end of WWII. The diverse selection ranges from noir and romcoms to musicals and courtroom dramas, psychological studies and cop stories with car chases. Among the many stars you’ll encounter are Joseph Cotten, Jennifer Jones, Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Sainte, Richard Conte, Judy Holliday, Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Coleen Gray, Richard Widmark, Thelma Ritter, Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller, Vittorio Gassman, Gloria Grahame, John Garfield, Moms Mabely, and Victor Mature.

Earl McEvoy’s The Killer That Stalked New York is among the many surprises in Film Forum series

Familiar classics such as Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, Henry Hathaway’s The House on 92nd St. and Kiss of Death, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s On the Town, and William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie are joined by such lesser-known works as George Cukor’s The Marrying Kind, Maxwell Shane’s City Across the River, Earl McEvoy’s The Killer That Stalked New York, Maxwell Shane’s City Across the River, Josh Binney’s Boardinghouse Blues, cinematographer extraordinaire Ted Tetzlaff’s The Window, and Bernard Vorhaus’s incarcerated women tale So Young, So Bad with Rita Moreno and Anne Francis.

Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss is part of Film Forum series about the renaissance of NYC-set flicks

Koszarski writes about Fletcher Markle’s Jigsaw, “Interesting suggestions of widespread corruption involving the mafia, right wing vigilantes, and political power brokers who operate out of Manhattan penthouses. . . . Most of the cast consisted of unfamiliar New York faces, but Markle and [Franchot] Tone did convince quite a few of their friends to pop up in oddball cameos.” And he explains about Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley’s absolute gem Little Fugitive, in which a young boy goes on a Coney Island adventure, its “simplicity was itself a great part of its appeal: no pointed moral, no dramatic character arc, no allegorical references to corruption, intolerance, World War II, or nuclear disarmament. Instead the audience is led on by the film’s uncanny sense of observation — not just in terms of photographic imagery but in the way ordinary New Yorkers relate to one another, solve their little problems, and go about the mundane details of their everyday lives.”

Moms Mabely stars in Josh Binney’s Boardinghouse Blues

Koszarski will introduce Joseph Lerner’s awesomely titled Guilty Bystander, featuring Zachary Scott as an ex-cop house detective, on February 2 at 6:40. Master Film Forum programmer Bruce Goldstein will introduce Jules Dassin’s genre-defining The Naked City on February 5 at 7:50, accompanied by his short personal documentary, Uncovering The Naked City, and Susan Delson, author of Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time (Indiana University Press, December 2021, $35-$85), will present “Soundies: America for a Dime” on February 10 at 6:50, focusing on “movie jukebox” clips from Duke Ellington, Nat “King” Cole, Dorothy Dandridge, Fats Waller, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and others.

THE LINE KING’S LIBRARY: AL HIRSCHFELD AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Al Hirschfeld’s long relationship with the New York Public Library is explored in exhibit at Lincoln Center

Al Hirschfeld’s long relationship with the New York Public Library and the arts is celebrated in exhibit at Lincoln Center

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
Exhibition continues through January 4
Film screening: Bruno Walter Auditorium, 111 Amsterdam Ave., Monday, November 18, free, 6:00
212-642-0142
www.nypl.org/lpa

Twelve years ago, New York celebrated the life and eighty-plus-year career of legendary artist Al Hirschfeld with a major retrospective at the Museum of the City of New York and an exhibit of his celebrity caricatures at the New York Public Library’s main branch; in addition, Abrams released two books of his work, one focusing on New York, the other on Hollywood, and Hirschfeld made appearances to promote the publications. Nearly eleven years after his passing in January 2003 at the age of ninety-nine, the New York Public Library is honoring Hirschfeld again with a lovely exhibit at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, “The Line King’s Library: Al Hirschfeld at the New York Public Library.” Visitors can first stop by a re-creation of Hirschfeld’s work area, complete with his drawing table and barber chair, which is on permanent view at the library entrance. The exhibition is straight ahead, consisting of more than one hundred color and black-and-white drawings and lithographs, posters, books, letters, video, newspaper and magazine clippings, and various other ephemera, divided by the discipline of Hirschfeld’s subjects: theater, music, dance, and film, in addition to a section on those artists who influenced the man known as the Line King.

Oscar-winning documentary on Al Hirschfeld screens for free at NYPL on November 18

“My contribution is to take the character — created by the playwright and acted out by the actor — and reinvent it for the theater,” Hirschfeld once explained, and the evidence is on the walls, including works depicting Jack Lemmon in Tribute, Lee J. Cobb in Death of a Salesman, Christopher Plummer in Macbeth, Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady, Alan Cumming in Cabaret, and Jackie Mason in The World According to Me, among so many more. There are also caricatures of Marcel Marceau, S. J. Perelman, George Bernard Shaw, Leonard Bernstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Dizzy Gillespie, Katharine Hepburn, and a dazzling, rarely shown 1969 print of Martha Graham. Another highlight is the original drawing for “Broadway First Nighters,” along with a key identifying the dozens of celebrities gathered in a packed room, and paraphernalia from Hirschfeld’s musical comedy Sweet Bye and Bye, a collaboration with Perelman, Vernon Duke, and Ogden Nash. And for those fans who have spent years trying to find all the inclusions of “Nina” in Hirschfeld’s drawings, “Nina’s Revenge” features his daughter holding a brush and smiling, the names “Al” and “Dolly” (for Dolly Haas, her mother and Hirschfeld’s second wife) in her long hair. In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be a free screening of the Oscar-winning 1996 documentary The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story, introduced by the director, Susan W. Dryfoos, on November 18 at 6:00 in the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

ALL ABOARD! TRAINS ON FILM

Jack Lemmon doesn’t mind being a bit squeezed in with Marilyn Monroe aboard a train in SOME LIKE IT HOT

The High Line
14th St. Passage
Friday, September 23 & 30, free, 7:00
www.thehighline.org

The beautiful design of the spectacular park along the High Line pays tribute to its history as a an elevated railway. That history is also being honored by “All Aboard! Trains on Film,” a screening series that began last week and continues tonight with the Billy Wilder comedy classic Some Like It Hot, in which Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress up as women and join a band to escape the mob and wind up falling for singer Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately for Lemmon, Joe E. Brown falls for him. The film will be shown in the 14th St. Passage at 7:00, while next Friday night features Alfred Hitchcock’s tense psychological thriller Strangers on a Train, in which Robert Walker hatches a crazy plot in which he will kill someone for Farley Granger in exchange for Granger killing someone for him. Little does Granger realize that Walker is dead serious.