Thursday, November 25, 2010

MSJC's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

After Halloween, MSJC hosted its own haunted weekend. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, an original musical written and directed by Michael Tennant, ran from November 5-7 and November 12-14. Most of Sleepy Hollow's main flaws stem from its writing, but that is also where its strengths lie in wait.

Unfortunately, the first half of Mr. Tennant's Sleepy Hollow is muddled, rushed, and directionless. He's tried to squish too much narrative into the first act, which makes it confusing, plus, there are several flashbacks that aren't clearly delineated as flashbacks. Though this setup is meant to clarify the story, much of it could have been condensed. Additionally, there are several moments which should have been drawn out, but whose beats were cut off, as if the play was rushing off to the next scene -- which was disappointing, because the next scene did not forward the story. For the most part, the musical numbers, though not rushed, did not particularly forward the story or deepen the audience's understanding of the characters. Moreover, the choreography for these numbers was often bland and gestural.

Another problem with the play was its dialogue: many of the conversations were wordy and repetitive, padded by superfluous, cliche lines and As-You-Know-Bob's -- especially in the scenes with Katrina, Ichabod, and Elise. Many of these lines should have been clipped off here and there -- but as they weren't, it's no wonder this play lasted two and a half hours.

Though most of the production's weaknesses were the result of problems with writing, the writing was also one of its strengths. While the first half dawdled along, the second half picked up the pace with more shocking murders, suicides, and revelations that made up for the confusion prevalent in the previous act. The complete plot and back story, once they became clear, were fascinating. This play is not based on either Washington Irving's story, nor the Disney cartoon, nor the recent Tim Burton movie. The only things they have in common are places, character names, and the headless horseman. Tennant's twisting of the tale to include witchcraft, betrayal, and a love curse is suspenseful and satisfying to watch. Besides the surprising murders and suicide, some of the best parts came in the form of comic relief. When Brom Bones (Arthur Baum), Willy (Josh McLendon), Warton (Tory Reynolds) and the schoolchildren (Michelle Browning and Michael McLendon) show up on stage, the dialogue is cut short, sweet, and funny. Brom Bones chats up the ladies and sneaks around in a dress; Willy watches the headless horseman pee in the bushes, and both he and Warton attempt to use Bones's favorite pick-up techniques on the ladies.

Though there could have been some definite improvements in dialogue, clarity, and editing, the second act of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow made up for the first act's shortcomings. Brutal stabbings, headless bodies, hilarious villagers, and a curse that crossed generations of lovers saved this play and made it worth seeing.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

"Nine"




I was surprised to learn that "Nine"'s main premise was about writer's block and losing oneself. Unfortunately, it was not made nearly as well as Rob Marshall's other movie-musical, "Chicago," nor as well as the 2006 writer's block film, "Stranger Than Fiction."

The problem with "Nine" was not that it lacked conflict, but that it lacked rising conflict. The protagonist, Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis), a famous Italian director, is scheduled to start shooting an epic film in ten days -- and he still hasn't written the screenplay. His crew has built sets, sewn costumes, and chosen actors -- all without a screenplay. There could be a lot done with this -- writing a screenplay in ten days is a huge obstacle in itself. Or, the storyline could have began several months before, and the conflict could have risen as the director and audience watch the ticking clock. Instead, the conflict stays level. The film tries to distract the audience with Guido's girl troubles, but this they are not the root of the problem -- rather, they are symptoms. Additionally, they aren't new, fantastic problems, they're the same issues of wife and mistresses that he's been juggling for years. Why show this specific tryst, this specific argument? There's no reason to do so; none of it is out of the ordinary. In fact, it is boring.

Boring, and there's no depth of character. Character, like everything else, is developed through conflict. Without any rising action, the audience never learns anything more about the character than what know from the first few minutes of screen time.


As for the musical numbers, most of the songs are demure and modestly choreographed. One of the larger numbers, "Be Italian," had the potential to be the next "Cell Block Tango" (Chicago); it's got the appropriate score, lyrics, costumes, and color scheme. It's the choreography that disappoints. Most of the song is still; the aggressive, athletic dancing only lasts for a few moments of the song, and when it does show up, it's unoriginal. There are a few interesting moments with chairs and sand, but these parts only come in little bursts that make you ask, "Now why isn't the whole thing like that?" The song itself is great -- it's a shame the film doesn't live up to it.

The second big number, Kate Hudson's "Cinema Italiano," is just pointless. The lyrics are superficial; the fringed costumes don't match the rest of the movie; the dancing was nothing more than hip-rolling and hair-tossing -- it would have even made a bad music video. Worst of all, the a few parts of the song are catchy enough that they stick in your head.

"Call From the Vatican," though not a big number, is over-the-top. It's a mediocre song eclipsed by Penelope Cruz's dirty dancing. It becomes not a song, but a pretty intense striptease that adds nothing to the film and is not even fun to watch.

The song that best combines a strong score with strong filming is "Take It All," performed by Marion Cotillard. It starts slow and rises to an emotional climax, while juxtaposing the image of Cotillard's character as a sophisticated actress with her past as a stripper.

I don't recommend "Nine." I do, however, recommend listening to its songs online

Thursday, July 15, 2010

The Corrections




The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, tells the story of the Lambert family from each member's perspective. Enid, the mother, wants everyone to get together for one last Christmas in St. Jude, and she wants everyone to be optimistic. This is troublesome, because Alfred, the father, has lost more and more of his lucidity to Parkinson's and dementia. Their firstborn, Gary, suffers from depression and a wife who can't stand his parents, while Chip, the second son, flies off to Eastern Europe to work for a would-be warlord, and youngest-child Denise can't decide who she is and what she really wants, and ends up losing her job because of it.

Life according to The Corrections is that in order to survive, you need something desperately -- but nobody will give it to you, because for them to survive, they desperately need to do the opposite of what you need. It's possible for you to fix the problem yourself, but that would require you to do the one thing you will never do, the one thing that goes against all your principles, the one thing that you can't do because you'd rather die. So really, it's impossible. So really, we are all in desperate need of something that we will never get. Life in the Lambert family also revolves around fixing mistakes. Not mistakes that need fixing at that moment -- but past mistakes. The novel explores how people live their lives as a correction of other people's lives, or as corrections of decisions made in their previous lives.

In The Corrections, Franzen portrays communication as ulitmately impossible and human relationships as ultimately nonexistent. What people talk to each other about, what people express to each other, is not what they really need. Because of this, nobody actually communicates themselves to anybody else, nobody really knows anybody else, nobody truly understands each other. Relationships are just people masking their desires and interacting with other masks. Families are people holding ten-foot poles, sliding and banging them against other people's ten-foot poles in an attempt to learn about the person on the other end of it. But even if people could bring themselves to express themselves, to ask for what they need most, it would still not help the state of things, because nobody can help anybody else. We are all ultimately alone.

Also depressing is the characters' complete lack of ethics. Alfred thinks he's ethical -- but in reality, he's just guilt-ridden and Puritan. Once, Denise thinks to herself that she's probably doing something wrong, but then she keeps doing it. Without thinking about it or contemplating the ethics of the situation, the other family members continually do and say selfish things that often hurt each other. Franzen himself seems to agree that a lack of ethics is depressing as well as, well, unethical -- most of the time when a character does something wrong, he is actually screwing himself over.

Despite it's darknesses, The Corrections is also really funny at times. The situations that some people get themselves into and the offhand comments that a few of them make are ridiculous, hilarious. But sometimes the comic relief becomes too much -- for example, when there are pages of it in the middle of an especially dramatic, intriguing section. Reading it for a second time, though, would probably fix this problem since the reader could take the time to enjoy the comedy. Other parts that tempt the reader to skip pages include long-winded, confusing accounts of business or financial dealings. However, these passages also show Franzen's breadth.

Franzen shows off impressive knowledge of biotechnology, culinary arts, businesses, finances, high-end clothes, physics, and rail lines. Just the research that all this must have taken is incredible.

The Corrections is 576 pages of voluptious, casual, rambling prose -- at times intriguing, frustrating, touching, and humorous. I recommend it.

Monday, July 5, 2010

"Day and Night"




The charm in Pixar's very original short, "Day and Night," comes from its animation, cleverness and truth. The two characters (Day and Night) are 2-D outlines whose bodies display part of a landscape. When they move around, different parts of the landscape are revealed, as if the audience was scanning a view with a person-shaped telescope. These two characters fight and wrestle when they first meet, jealous of the landscape that the other has within, until they begin to appreciate the good things they see in the other.

It's at this point that they come across a radio broadcast of an Einstein quote about fear of the unknown. In th end, Day experiences a sunset while Night experiences a sunrise -- revealing that what each of them originally feared and disliked in the other is actually part of them, too. "Day and Night" is a fun, silly short that is also quite successful at presenting a moral and showing a truth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZcKPxDhQcs

Sunday, July 4, 2010

"The Family Stone"

"The Family Stone" is a disappointing movie. Where it aims for humor, it ends up painful and awkward. When it tries to twist, it turns predictable. While it wants to portray depth and layers, it dishes up shallow, cliche characters.

The plot centers around a Stone Christmas celebration, to which one of the Stone sons brings his girlfriend, Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker). She and the Stones immediately clash, and things only get worse when Everett (Dermont Mulroney) tells his parents that he plans to propose to Meredith on Christmas morning. The audience is supposed to believe that the cause is the conflict is because Meredith is conservative and uptight, and that Everett's family is just relaxed, quirky and liberal. Not so.

Meredith gets drunk at a bar, smokes pot, and later sleeps with Everett's brother -- what's uptight or conservative about any of these things? Her interactions with the Stones are awkward not because she is uptight, but because she is usually polite, uncomfortable, nervous, and doesn't get the family's humor. The Stones, though they are liberal (and might be quirky -- none of them are ever developed well-enough to show this), are also ridiculously rude, unkind, ungrateful, and unwelcoming. So much so that it's hard to believe these adults behave this way -- and it's hard to feel for them.

It's hard to feel for most of the characters. None of them have any depth: they rely on stereotypes, misconceptions, and cliches. All the audience knows about Everett is that he's successful and he likes Meredith; all the audience knows about Ben (Luke Wilson: another Stone, another love interest), is that he loves his mom, he thinks Meredith is hot, and he likes to relax and smoke pot.

Even Meredith: all the audience knows about her is that she works hard, is fashionable, successful, polite, nervous, and rude to gays. This last characteristic makes her less endearing to the audience at a time when she seems the most hackneyed -- and needs our empathy the most. "I'm not a racist bigot," she says. "I know that's what you see, but I'm not a racist bigot." However, there's no evidence beyond her own word that proves she is not. Thus, the audience's only conclusion is that she is, in fact, a racist bigot. This -- after the plot gives away all the secrets and Meredith relaxes and lets her hair down by drinking at a bar and actually letting her hair down. Very winning, very original. And this is before all the usual flip-flopping-partner-swapping starts.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Movements and Mountains

MSJC, May 7-9 2010

MSJC's annual spring dance concert was, as usual, a pleasure to attend. The night consisted of mostly lyrical and modern pieces, with tap and talented belly dance to break up the routine. Though the student-dancers obviously feed off each other and follow the same trends, their pieces, for the most part, still hold one's attention. Also, the concert is helped a lot by the faculty's dances, which are mature and creative.

The four lyrical pieces featured good performers, but each of these dances were either melodramatic or didactic. Themes included domestic violence and troubled or unrequited love. The choreography was very angst-ridden and adolescent, with lots of pushing and pulling, doubling-over, hands to faces, and whipping of the hair. "Untitled" and "The Path We Lay Before Thee" stood out for starring more talented dancers, and debuting a somewhat more original movement vocabulary. "Vice Versa" included a few good holds, but otherwise the men in these lyrical pieces had very little actual dancing to do. The costumes for these dances were also all the same: flow-y, knit tops paired with black spandex shorts. This costuming aims for a casual look crossed with dancing clothes, but because of its ubiquity, it ends up looking unoriginal and dated.

Sue Roginski, who holds an MFA in dance from UCR, presented one of those artistic not-sure-you'll-ever-get-it improv pieces. It featured dancers shape-shifting in lines, building choreography one move at a time, and walking and running while matching their paces to their fellow dancers.

"One More Time" was entertaining and fast-paced, but somewhat inconsistent in its internal logic. Leaders emerged from the group at certain parts of the song, but then they melded back in and nobody else replaced them. Also, there was supposed to be variety in the costumes, but it didn't work. Two outfits were very similar in style, and another one was drastically different (sort of a green bikini with strips hanging off the bottom) -- these choices distracted from the piece.

"Covert Operations," by Julie Freeman, also a graduate of UCR's dance department, was partially performed before at another concert. This vivacious, athletic piece is worth seeing again. "The jacket piece" features a group of women wearing sports jackets and sunglasses, running around the stage, sliding the glasses down their noses to check something out, leaping into a crouch, and stripping off slacks to reveal primary-colored capris! Occasionally, a man on a scooter glides by for laughs.

"Spotlight," the sole tap piece, combined three drastically different songs and styles. The first part featured country tapping to "I Feel Like a Woman." This piece was more low-key than the others, and unfortunately its music was played softer than the other sections; this subtracted from the overall piece. The second was a jungle-y, wild tap-dance to a song from the "TARZAN" soundtrack. The third was section was a pure hip hop solo, in tap shoes, on grating. This wonderful performance stole the piece from the other sections and performers.

"Dinner for Two" was also a different kind of dance; its dancer-choreographers created a piece with a cool, original blend of Latin and modern dance. Besides the great movement vocabulary, this piece also had talented dancing on its side.

Overall, the original moments outweigh the students' cliched choreography. MSJC's dance concert is a great event for people to attend if they are hunting for art in the San Jacinto Valley.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Blankets, by Craig Thompson




Blankets is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel set in the Midwest that follows the story of a young man -- Craig -- through the traumas of childhood, the throes of first love, and the confusion that accompanies searching for his faith.

This huge graphic novel -- 592 pages -- is beautiful and complex. Craig is a believable, likeable character with intriguing thoughts. They're not witty, but insightful, as well as earnest, and sweet. The story itself is quiet, but paced very well: it's still a page turner.

Though Craig's interiority is the strength of the narrative, this is also where its main problem lies. After Craig's thoughts are transcribed for the whole of 500 pages, they're suddenly withheld at the climax. The result is that the reader feels distanced during the most emotionally intense, important part of the story. Writing interiority for an intense scene is hard even if the book is not semi-autobiographica; side-stepping it, however, was still authorial cheating.

Whether or not the interiority accompanies it, Thompson's animation is beautiful. It's clean and angular, looking like a black and white version of Disney's Hercules or Sleeping Beauty.

Blankets, despite its flaw, is a good read.






Sunday, April 18, 2010

The Fantasticks

Without a hurt the heart is hollow.

Mt. San Jacinto College performed The Fantasticks these past two weekends. Written by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmitt, it is the longest-running off-Broadway musical (though it’s now on Broadway); this shouldn’t be surprising, as it’s the story of Romeo and Juliet—minus the double suicide.

MSJC’s production was directed by Darren De Priest, who has recently done The Spitfire Grill and Blithe Spirit. In the lead were Carmina Manley (The Tempest), Danny Guererro (The Mystery Plays), and Ashley Henley (Little Women). The two men who had been cast as The Narrator/El Gallo dropped out, so Ms. Henley took on the part just two weeks before opening night.

Louisa and Matt (Manely and Guererro) are neighbors whose parents want them to marry. But because children only do things “the minute that you say no,” their fathers have built a wall and feigned a feud so Louisa and Matt will fall in love. Unfortunately, once married, they’re not as content with each other as they thought they’d be. Consequently, Matt leaves to see the world while Louisa takes up with the rogue El Gallo, and they only reunite when they learn that “without a hurt the heart is hollow.” Among the themes explored are love and pain, reality and illusion.

Though the whole cast had lovely voices, I enjoyed Ms. Henley’s performance the most. The Narrator/El Gallo (oddly enough) is the deepest, or most multi-faceted character in the musical—and Ms. Henley did justice to the part with her charismatic performance. El Gallo was always fresh and captivating. Also funny was Kevin Quam’s version of Mortimer, or The Man Who Dies, as an Indian with a cockney accent. On the other hand, Ms. Manley occasionally felt monotonous—she used the same frilly hand gesture for the length of the play, and Arthur Baum, as Henry, was both unconvincing and hard to understand.

In addition to their singing, the actors danced well, and the fathers were especially funny in their restrained-yet-silly step dancing. Besides the fathers’ numbers in which they sympathize with each other about the contrariness of children, the best choreography showed up in the campy abduction scene.

Costumes, lighting, and set design (from the “Prop Box”) were delightfully minimal and eclectic, with kind of a home-made feel. These choices added to the silliness and allowed Mortimer, at one point, to wear a purple paper pirate hat.

The Fantasticks was definitely one of MSJC’s better performances.