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The men of APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH (1988) clockwise from top left-David Soul, Michael Craig, Nicholas Guest and John Terlesky

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Appointment With Death

When I worked for Turner Broadcasting in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, I got to read “Variety” every week. The festival issues were filled with ads promoting films, some of them never made, and Cannon, then owned by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, had some of the most explosive. So, it was a surprise to see them pushing an Agatha Christie adaptation that extended Peter Ustinov’s tenure as Hercule Poirot after two features from Columbia-EMI and a trio of TV movies. But even with an expert cast including John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall, Piper Laurie and Carrie Fisher, Michael Winner’s APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH (1988, TCM, Prime, Tubi YouTube) is still a Golan-Globus production, meaning it not only looks cheap but is also dead around the edges.

This is the first feature adaptation of a 1938 novel I like better as a play (with a different ending). Poirot (Ustinov) is on vacation traveling from Italy to the Holy Land when he spots a family dominated by former prison warden Piper Laurie, who treats her daughter and stepchildren as if they were criminals under her watch. When she turns up dead in the desert, it seems to be natural causes, but Poirot spots a puncture mark on her wrist that suggests murder. His friend (John Gielgud) who works for the British colonial government gives him two days to wade through a sea of suspects and solve the crime.

This is the same formula as the earlier Poirot features, combining an exotic location with a slew of name actors as suspects and victim. In this case, the exotic location is Israel, where Golan-Globus kept their headquarters and could shoot cheaply, and there are no big-ticket names like Sean Connery, Bette Davis or Maggie Smith. That’s not to put down the cast assembled. They mostly do good jobs, with Ustinov overacting appealingly (his lines are sometimes so good I wondered if he’d written them himself), Laurie breathing fire as the evil stepmother, and Lauren Bacall swanning around as an American who’s married a British Lord and is out-Britting the Brits.

But director Michael Winner can’t seem to find the right style for the production. There are a few expressive camera angles, but most of the time the shots are just there. He gets everybody he needs in frame and captures all the dialog, but there’s nothing imaginative or exciting about most of the visuals. The dialog varies wildly from witty to banal, and instead of having people tell Poirot what we’ve seen happening when he wasn’t around, it keeps replaying past scenes, which starts to throw off what rhythm there is. The film is also burdened with one of Pino Donaggio’s worst scores. In his best work he often seemed to be channeling Bernard Herrmann, but here he seems to be channeling elevator music. There’s no sense of period, and at times the jaunty main theme seems to have been written for another movie. By all accounts, the cast was miserable shooting in the hot Israeli summer, so I guess they had it worse than I did. At least Laurie got to die halfway through and go home.

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Dark Water

Loss is the source of horror in Hideo Nakata’s DARK WATER (2002, Criterion Channel), one of the more thoughtful entries in the J-horror subgenre. If you were turned off by the overly obvious American remake starring Jennifer Connelly, don’t let that keep you from this elegiac picture. Although it’s a very slow-burn, it offers its share of unsettling moments while ultimately moving into a more poetic mood.

Recent divorcee Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) is locked in a fierce custody battle with her ex-husband. Determined not to desert her child (Rio Kanno) as her mother had deserted her, Kuroki moves them into a rundown apartment building near a good kindergarten. That’s when strange things start happening. There’s a leak in the ceiling that grows worse and worse, a red school bag that keeps reappearing even after it’s thrown in the trash and a faceless child who seems to be stalking mother and daughter.

Nakata works subtly here, more subtly than in his previous RING (1998) and RING 2 (1999). His goal is less out-and-out terror than unease. When Kuroki and Kanno are riding the elevator to inspect the apartment, mother takes the daughter’s hand only to discover the child was standing on her other side. The first time Kuroki is late picking her up at school, Kanno glimpses a child in a yellow raincoat and hat across the schoolyard. Later we see the same girl’s picture on a missing child poster.

The screenplay, by Yoshihiro Nakamura and Kenichi Suzuki from the first story in a collection by Koji Suzuki, does a good job of linking water to dread, pointing to the ghost’s secret. But it also piles on maybe one too many supernatural manifestations. In addition to the ever-present water and the brief glimpses of the ghost, Kuroki has occasional visions from the dead child’s point of view. They’re visually striking, shot with a different color palette than the rest of the film, but they don’t tell us anything we can’t figure out for ourselves. They’ve also made Kuroki’s ex-husband such a monster it sets you up to expect toxic masculinity to be at the root of the haunting. It makes the discovery that the ghost was suffering from maternal abandonment almost a letdown. But the depiction of mother as protector is powerful, and Kuroki and Kanno, who’s quite amazing, offer strong performances that contribute to both the tension and the sense of loss.

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Deep in My Heart

Stanley Donen’s DEEP IN MY HEART (1954, TCM) opens with an on-screen overture. As the camera pans over the orchestra playing a medley of Sigmund Romberg songs, one violinist seems to be scowling. He’s simply not having it. At the end, Jose Ferrer, as an aged Romberg, sits on the conductor’s podium with his wife, Doe Avedon, who, like the other principal women in the film never seems to age. As the orchestra plays “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” they seem particularly forlorn, and who can blame them. The last of MGM’s composer bios, the film features an almost unbearably bad script between often quite good musical numbers featuring an array of cameos by what one critic called everybody who was close to the phone on casting day.

The plot, which seems to have little do with Romberg’s actual life, tries to come up with conflicts: Romberg wants to write classically tinged music, but only tin-pan alley sells; he wants to write operettas, but his producer only wants show tunes; he loves a woman whose family thinks his work vulgar.  That latter is a real trial to sit through, particularly since it makes us wait forever to get from one guest star to the next. Instead, you get not just a dreary meet cute but a disastrous tea party during which Romberg is forced to audition the Al Jolsen musical he’s writing by playing all the parts. It’s meant to be embarrassing to Romberg, but it’s also an embarrassment watching Ferrer indulge in such blatant hot dogging and, at one point, even attempt blackface. You may be tempted to yell, “People are watching this” at the screen.

But the good musical numbers are wonderful, choreographed by Eugene Loring, shot by George J. Folsey in dazzling technicolor and sumptuously designed by Edward Carfagno and maybe Cedric Gibbons. Surrounded by flowering trees, Jane Powell, in a huge white hoop skirt and picture hat, sings “Will You Remember (Sweetheart)” so well you can almost forgive them for making pop-singer Vic Damone attempt operetta. Cyd Charisse and James Mitchell (yes, Palmer Courtland) do an immensely sexual dance to “One Alone” that seems to be about a woman trying to get a man to dominate her and then dumping him because he won’t cuddle afterwards. The show tunes are just as well represented, with Rosemary Clooney dueting with then-husband Ferrer to “Mr. & Mrs.,” Gene Kelly and his brother Fred doing “I Love to Go Swimmin’ with Women” and Ann Miller tapping up a storm in “It” (keep an eye out for the vamp, comically played by a young Julie Newmar). Of course, that’s what these films were all about. The flimsy, historically inaccurate script (The Kellys play vaudeville stars who never existed) is just an excuse for the numbers. You can find most of them on YouTube and save yourself two hours and 12 minutes.

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Waxworks

Critics have argued for decades over whether Paul Leni’s WAXWORKS (1924, Prime, YouTube) is a horror film or a comedy. To my warped mind, it’s more comedy. The only truly horrific sequence is the shortest, and it’s hardly a sequence at all. It’s more like a sketch for a fuller treatment of paranoia. Yet whatever the film is, it’s pretty darned wonderful.

The Poet (future director William Dieterle) signs on to write stories about three figures in a carnival wax museum and inserts himself and the museum’s pretty assistant (Olga Belajeff) into them. Some prints change the order, but in Henrik Galeen’s original script, used in the most recent restorations, the first story is about Harun al-Rashid (Emil Janning), an Arabian Nights Caliph who breaks into baker Dieterle’s home to seduce his wife (Belajeff) at the same time Dieterle has broken into the palace to steal the Caliph’s wishing ring. Then Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt) torments victims by poisoning them and presenting them with hourglasses running down what’s left of their lives. He invades Dieterle and Balajeff’s wedding, kidnaps the bride and sends the groom off to be tortured (Dieterle was a matinee idol at the time, and this is the second segment in which his clothes are ripped off).  Then someone presents him with an hourglass bearing his name. In the final sequence, Dieterle dreams that he and Balajeff are being pursued by Jack the Ripper (Werner Krauss), though he’s called Spring-Heeled Jack in the British titles used to reconstruct the film; the name was changed in England to appease the censors.

Leni, who also designed the sets, makes the film a symphony of Expressionist design. This is a more varied use of Expressionism than in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920). WAXWORKS displays the world as seen by a poet rather than a madman. The baker’s house is far from oppressive — it’s even sunny — but the Caliph’s palace is a strange arrangement of corridors and staircases. Ivan’s world is equally oppressive, and the dream is a fascinating mix of paper scenery and double exposures. At one point, images of Krauss seem to surround his intended victims.

But the film is also an opportunity to see two of Germany’s greatest actors strut their stuff. Janning is playful. He’s hidden behind extensive padding and heavy makeup yet still manages to get his character across. It’s a deliciously comic performance as he sets out to seduce the very willing Belajeff. At one point he’s so delighted by her eagerness he flaps his arms like little wings. Veidt seems comic, too, in a more over-the-top way. Where Janning’s segment is funny ha-ha, Veidt’s is funny ironic. His Ivan is a manic figure so eccentric he can’t even walk straight and given to strange attacks of near-mystic extasy. He kept reminding me of Timothy Carey at his strangest. It’s a strong contrast to his most famous performances that underlines what a fine actor he was.

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The Tall Target

A film noir set in the 19th century that isn’t Gothic? Anthony Mann’s THE TALL TARGET (1951, TCM) is full of surprises. It’s a train-set noir before the definitive THE NARROW MARGIN (1952 but filmed earlier) and a film with sound effects rather than a musical score before that film and EXECUTIVE SUITE (1954). And though critics and audiences didn’t get it at the time, it’s now considered one of the best films noirs.

This is also the film in which John Kennedy prevents a presidential assassination, or rather a president elect’s assassination. Of course, this is New York police detective John Kennedy (Dick Powell), who’s uncovered a conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the way to his first inauguration. When Powell arrives for his train ride to intercept the killers, he finds the police inspector who’s holding his ticket dead, an imposter (Leif Erickson) claiming to be him and various other strange characters. Who’s the killer, and who masterminded the scheme? There’s no suspense about Lincoln’s survival (he actually canceled a speech in Baltimore after Alan Pinkerton uncovered a similar plot to kill him there on the way to his inauguration). But there’s plenty about whether Powell will survive his good citizenship.

There are some surprisingly subversive elements in the script. Charming Red hater Adolphe Menjou plays a charming Lincoln hater. Powell can’t trust anybody, not even fellow police officers or members of the Union army. Best of all is Ruby Dee as the slave serving wealthy brother and sister Marshall Thompson and Paula Raymond. Raymond says she’s like a sister to her but slaps her mercilessly when she thinks she’s been unfaithful. And Dee has great line readings, investing her dialog with powerful subtext as she answers questions from an addled abolitionist (Florence Bates) and shares her views on slavery: “Freedom isn’t a thing you should be able to give me, Miss Ginny. Freedom is something I should have been born with.”

Mann directs leanly and, with cameraman Paul C. Vogel, makes effective use of shadows to build suspense. There’s also a great moving camera shot with the camera preceding Powell as he walks through the train and then circling him to reveal Erickson’s holding a gun on him. He’s also assembled a great group of character actors you’ll only find in old Hollywood films — Bates, Katharine Warren, Victor Kilian, Percy Helton, the ubiquitous Regis Toomey and Will Geer, who’s wryly funny as the conductor. Barbara Billlingsley gets in practice for her TV mom role as the mother of an unspeakably rude child (Brad Morrow), but then, if your mother named you Winfield, you’d probably be unspeakably rude, too.

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The great Roy Scheider, whose started with THE CURSE OF THE LIVING CORPSE (1963) before moving into KLUTE (1971), THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971), JAWS (1975) and ALL THAT JAZZ (1979)

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The Curse of the Living Corpse

With its cardboard sets, period time frame and plummy acting, Del Tenney’s THE CURSE OF THE LIVING CORPSE (1964, Prime, Tubi, Plex, YouTube) seems like an expanded episode of DARK SHADOWS. The pioneering horror soap, however, was significantly better.

New England patriarch Rufus Sinclair has left specific instructions for how his death is to be handled to avoid his greatest fear, being buried alive. In addition, his heirs are required to live a year in the family manse (with exteriors shot at the former home of Gutzon Borgum, who carved Mt. Rushmore). Should they fail to save him from premature burial, which they all seem to do, his will states each will die in a manner related to their greatest fears: drowning, fire (how symmetrical), suffocation, facial disfigurement, etc. So, of course, when the murders start, the first victim is a serving girl who was never mentioned in the will but was having an affair with eldest son Bruce (Robert Milli). Then the heirs start falling as predicted, leaving drunken second son Roy Scheider (in his film debut) as the new patriarch, but for how long?

This was the first film directed by Tenney, a stage actor. I suppose that means he can be forgiven gaffes like group scenes in which the camera has to pan to get to the next speaker and doesn’t always arrive on time. Those who did not lose 84 minutes of their lives to this turkey might be inclined to be - forgiving. His script also has such inanities as a police constable who says the first two victims could have died accidentally despite the fact one of them was decapitated (she just walked into that neck-level sword), while a masked Tenney stands in for the killer, who turns out to be a cast member that looks nothing like him. To Tenney’s credit, there are a few good exteriors shot against a clear sky that have the feeling of American landscape painting, and there’s a sequence with runaway horses that’s well edited to disguise the fact the horses aren’t really running away with anybody. And the film is certainly better than Tenney’s second, THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH (1964), with which it played on double bills.

The cast is largely composed of New York stage actors, which means most of them had extensive soap opera credits. In fact, the family lawyer (Hugh Franklin) spent most of his later years as Dr. Charles Tyler on ALL MY CHILDREN. He’s reliably proficient in the role, but others either overact shamelessly or barely register. I don’t think it’s just that I recognized them that made Candace Hilligoss (of CARNIVAL OF SOULS, as Franklin’s daughter, and Scheider stand out. Scheider gets most of what Tenney considers bon mots (“The body is a long insatiable tube — in need of drink and relaxation.”) and delivers them with relish. That and his disdain for his wife (Tenney’s wife Margot Hartman), who seems to be involved with Milli, make his character read gay. In a film this bad, it’s hard to tell if that was Tenney’s intention.

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The Lawless

William H Pine and William C. Thomas, dubbed “The Dollar Bills,” tried to move from action films to social drama by hiring Joseph Losey to direct THE LAWLESS (1950, Criterion Channel), Daniel Mainwaring’s adaptation of his novel “The Voice of Stephen Wilder.” Working with the politically committed Losey gave them a surprisingly trenchant look at small-town bigotry, while working with them gave Losey unending headaches. They forced action scenes on him, kept his budget low and, in true Hollywood fashion, insisted the story’s social message be channeled through a love story. That it works at all is a testament to Losey’s talent and Mainwaring’s intelligent script.

Reporter Macdonald Carey gives up crusading journalism to get back to his small-town roots by buying the Santa Marta “Union.” But his idyllic memories of smelling burning leaves in the Autumn are crushed when he realizes the town is a hotbed of racism directed at the Mexican American farm workers there. When some local rich kids crash a dance party in Sleepy Hollow, the Mexican quarter, it leads to a fight in which Paul Rodriguez (Lalo Rios) accidentally slugs a police officer. Fearing for his life, he goes on the run, eventually frightening a local girl who accuses him of assault. Carey doesn’t want to get involved, but his growing romance with Sunny Garcia (Gail Russell), who runs the local Spanish-language weekly, motivates him to stand up for Paul in the face of business pressure and mob violence.

For all Losey’s efforts, the film still reflects the Hollywood approach to social relevance and racial issues. The focus often seems less on Paul’s plight than on Carey and Russell’s relationship, and Russell’s skin is darkened so she’ll fit in with the Latinx actors and local amateurs cast in supporting roles. The producers threw in a car crash that Losey would later say he hated filming (though he does it well, and, to Mainwaring’s credit, it’s precipitated by a racist police officer’s beating Rios while he’s in custody). There’s also a score that makes the whole thing sound like a romance. Oddly, the low budget offered Losey one advantage, an inconclusive ending to keep the running time and costs low. It may feel truncated, but the fact that it leaves the principal characters’ fates up in the air is preferable to tying up a complicated situation artificially.

In only his second film, Losey does a capital job of shooting the action evocatively, helped by cinematographer J. Roy Hunt. They use a moving camera for kinetic sequences like the fight at the dance hall and the hunt for Paul, while also shooting through enough deep shadows to earn the picture a reputation as a film noir and capturing some dramatically powerful deep focus scenes. The director also gets solid performances out of his B-level cast. Carey did some of his best work in his two Losey films (the other is 1963’s THE DAMNED), and here he’s strongly connected to the character and his backstory. Russell had trouble getting through a scene because of her alcoholism, but Losey not only got her through the film, but captured some beautiful reaction shots and line readings. The supporting cast includes John Hoyt, surprisingly cast as a sympathetic town leader, Lee Patrick as a sensation-mongering reporter, the lovely Argentina Brunetti as Paul’s mother, a very young Martha Hyer as a bored brunette, Frank Faylen as a lawyer and Paul Harvey as the police chief. If a broad-shouldered blond in the crowd scenes looks familiar, it’s because the film gave Tab Hunter his first credited role.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY by Oscar Wilde, adapted and directed by Kip Williams: For my money, Sarah Snook earned her Tony Award before she put on the first character in Wilde’s tale of a young man who sells his soul so only his portrait will age and reflect his misdeeds while he stays eternally youthful. There is such joy in the way she approaches the prose that you’re transported even before she starts swapping characters.

Her characterizations start simply. At first she uses just a cigarette along with her voice and body to create Lord Henry Wotton and a paint brush to create Basil Hallward. When she introduces Dorian Gray, however, she dons a wig and a period shirt. Before long, she’s appearing in videos that somehow merge with her own projected image to allow interactions in full costums. When Lord Henry sat down at a dinner table populated by five projections of Snood as different characters, I gasped.

This production is very much about images. Both those projected on the various screens that float around the stage and the images the characters create — Lord Henry’s decadent dandy, Hallward’s concerned artist and, most important, Dorian’s seeming innocence. The latter frequently carries a mirror, as if he can’t get over how youthfully beautiful he looks even when age and dissipation should have rendered him grotesque. At one point, Snook even uses the filters on an iPhone camera to switch between the portrait, already an image of decay, and Dorian’s unlined, doll-like face.

Lest this sound deadly serious, I should point out that the production has a good deal of humor, both in Lord Henry’s bon mots and the way it pokes fun at itself. When Snook starts appearing as multiple images on a single screen, the audience laughs at the ingenuity of it all. There are also times in which Snook, projected as herself, and the character she’s playing on stage argue over who’s going to take over the narration. It’s almost dizzying, and in the final section, I think she gets a little too frantic too soon. I started losing words, and she really left herself nowhere to go until the end, when things slow down a bit. But it’s still a dazzling piece of theater that justly received not just acting awards, but three curtain calls.

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The men of New York theater, June 2025 edition: clockwise from top left-Hugh Jackman (SEXUAL MISCONDUCT OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES), Taylor Trensch (FLOYD COLLINS), Reggie D. White (GODDESS), Nick Rashad Burroughs (GODDESS), Austin Scott (Goddess), Jason Gotay (FLOYD COLLINS) and center, Jeremy Jordan (FLOYD COLLINS)

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Goddess

GODDESS, book by Jocely Bioh, music and lyrics by Michael Thurber, conceived and directed by Saheem Ali, choreographed by Darrell Grand Moultrie: If I had seen no other play during my current New York theater pilgrimage, I’d be able to go home fat and satisfied. This mythic tale of a goddess escaping her evil mother by coming to Earth and becoming the star singer at a Mumbasa night club is like XANADU with a soul. It reverberates with the rhythms of African jazz.

Marimba (the amazing Amber Iman) refuses to let her mother make her the goddess of war. At the first war she’s to influence, she turns the weapons into musical instruments before fleeing to Earth to hide out in a jazz club under the name Nadira. There she meets Omari (Austin Scott), recently returned from his studies in the U.S.to replace his ailing father in the next gubernatorial election. Scott’s father (J. Paul Nicholas) wants to close the club, and the young man’s fiancée (Destinae Rea) since they were three wants him to marry her quickly to secure his election. But Omari really wants to play jazz saxophone at the club, where he and Iman fall in love. Neither of their parents approve of the union, which can make for some major problems when one parent is a goddess.

From the first notes of music, the production erupts with excitement and pulls the audience right along. Arnulfo Maldonado’s set transforms gracefully from the club to Omari’s home to a fortune-teller’s shrine in the woods to the world of the gods. Marimaba’s mother, Wawamaraka, is represented as a huge puppet at times and at other times as a disembodied head floating above the action. It’s a tremendous effect. And none of this dwarfs the actors, who are all dynamically entertaining. I was particularly struck by Arica Jackson as the bartender, Rashida. The character is written as a standard musical theatre soubrette, but there’s nothing standard about Jackson’s timing or physical comedy. If I have any complaint, it’s that there isn’t more of her musically. I longed for to have a solo or at least a duet with Iman. The leading lady is magical. She has a big powerful voice, but she modulates it so she’s not blasting us out of our seats on every note. Some of her jazz ornamentation sounds almost effortless. And when she cut loose in her big 11 o’clock number, the audience gave her a standing ovation mid-play. She needs the chance to do this play on Broadway. It’s too magical to be confined to a limited run.

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Prince Faggot

PRINCE FAGGOT by Jordan Tannahill, directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Abigail Pickard Price: This provocative play by Canada’s two-time Governor General’s Award-winning playwright is like a gift for Pride. It’s a celebration of queerness at the same time as it demonstrates how queerness can easily be subsumed by the dominant culture.

The play opens with a debate over the on-line fascinating with a picture of England’s young Prince George, second in line to the throne, in a decidedly gay pose, raising questions about the sexualization of children by both gay culture and compulsory world heterosexuality. It then turns into a fantasy in which a now adult Prince George (John McCrea) asks parents Princess Kate (Rachel Crowl) and Prince William (K. Todd Freeman) if he can bring his lover (Mihir Kumar) along for a family vacation. This leads to a series of funny, often embarrassing scenes in which the royal family tries to determine how to handle press coverage of the relationship (with Richard Greenspan hilarious as their female PR consultant) and more serious considerations of the strains royal scrutiny puts on the two. With vivid staging depicting the future king’s eagerness to submit to his more dominant lover, the piece could be subtitled “Red, White and Very Blue.”

Tannahill writes some very funny scenes, and his cast performs them very well, with special kudos to Greenspan, who also plays the family butler. Each actor also gets a monolog bringing their personal perspectives and life experiences to bear on the play. I’d be fascinated to see what Tannahill does with these if he publishes the script — whether he would ask future actors to perform as Crowl, Freeman, McCrea, Kumar, Greenspan and N’yomi Allure Stewart putting on the play. There are structural flaws. There’s a secret that, once mentioned, needs to be revealed to the person kept in the dark and a scene in the rain between McCrea and Kumar that goes on rather longer than it needs to and keeps telling us things we’ve already figured out. But the cast performs it all quite well, and Tannahill ends the piece on a high note with Stewart reenacting the kiki performance that won her the title “Princess of the Piers.” Her skills make her more regal than the official Royals depicted.

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Floyd Collins

FLOYD COLLINS, book and additional lyrics by Tina Landau, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, directed by Tina Landua, choreography by John Rua: After watching this revival of the musical tale of the mine explorer whose entrapment in a cave became a national sensation in 1925, I asked, “What does Jeremy Jordan have to do to win the Tony? Cure cancer?” The more likely answer would be that he has to bring half the energy and expertise he displays here to a feel-good musical with hummable tunes.

Landau’s book uses the true story of Floyd Collins’ death to explore the twisted dynamics of the Collins family (bible-quoting patriarch, sensitive step-mother, upwardly mobile brother and fragile sister who’s spent time in a mental institution) and the community’s attempts to capitalize on the attempts to rescue him.  There’s a measured generosity to the work. The cub reporter hoping to make his name out of the situation bonds with Collins, while the engineer from a mining concern out to garner publicity by rescuing Floyd becomes so obsessed that he stays on with Miller to dig in the cave long after the rest of the rescue crew has given up. The play doesn’t go all Pollyanna, however. Even Floyd’s father is shown trying to make a buck out of the situation.

Guettel’s score is difficult for both singers and audiences. In a way he seems to be writing an opera, but he just hasn’t dropped the other shoe by scoring the dialogue scenes. Of course, if this were an opera, we’d lose some of the fine musical comedy voices for which he wrote the male roles (the two principal female characters sing in head voice, so they’d make the transition more easily). He works with leitmotifs for characters and situations that may seem repetitious, though there’s one repeated passage in which Floyd sets up a round singing with is own echo that I found utterly enthralling. He also uses a lot of dissonance, which makes sense in depicting a fractured community but can be hard on the ear.

There’s a lot of good work in this production. Landau stages it sparsely. At times the stage is bare, and she loves putting characters in the background silhouetted against a plain backdrop. I kept thinking of the visuals in Charles Laughton’s THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955). Taylor Trensch as the cub reporter, and Jason Gotay as Floyd’s brother are particularly fine.  And standby Kristen Hahn made the sister’s role seem as if it had always been hers. But the real center of the production is Jordan. He’s stuck in one position for much of the show but still manages to find physical variations. And when he gets out of position during two fantasy scenes, he maintains a stopped posture, as if he were still stuck in that cave. He’s also totally committed to the character’s emotional life, even while wrapping his beautiful voice around that very difficult score. Now if he could just find a role like this that survives to the final curtain and makes us all feel good about ourselves.

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Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes

SEXUAL MISCONDUCT OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Ian Rickson: Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch writes two types of plays: trenchant studies of some major topic explored through character interaction and stories, often ironic and keenly observed, delivered by one or two people. The former, in plays like THIS IS WAR and WHAT EVERY YOUNG WIFE SHOULD KNOW, are among the best works I’ve read in recent years. The latter are maddening. They seem more short stories than plays. In her Governor General’s Award-winning consideration of sexual power dynamics she seems to combine to the two, both beautifully written. There are powerful two-character scenes involving a teacher and his student, along with lengthy passages in which the teacher fills in all manner of details about his past and his activities outside the relationship. Hugh Jackman plays them very well; he’s a commanding performer, but after a while I wanted him to shut up and just interact with Ella Beatty, who’s utterly exquisite as the student.

Jackman is a famous author who teaches at a university. His third wife has left him, and he is gradually becoming obsessed with a female student (Beatty). She’s thrilled to have him pay attention to her, and before long they’re engaged in an affair. It’s all great sexual fun at first. He’s excited by her and impressed by her writing talent. She’s thrilled to be involved with an older man who knows what he wants sexually instead of the younger men she’s dated in the past. But the inappropriate power dynamic and outside events make any long-term relationship impossible.

It’s fascinating that I saw this play after JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN. This is another piece with which that play could be performed in repertory. Moscovitch tries to be as fair as she can to the male character. She even tells the story from his point of view. He’s a clear success as both a writer and a teacher. His encouragement of Beatty’s writing has a positive effect on her artistic development. And the writing makes it clear this is the first time he’s crossed the line with a student. But the relationship is still inappropriate, something from which the writing does not shy. It’s a very provocative theatrical piece, despite its structural flaws.

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John Proctor Is the Villain

JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN by Kimberly Bellflower, directed by Danya Taymor: Some plays create an instant, almost electrical connection to their audience because they deal with the right subject at the right time. It can happen with bad plays that find a receptive audience despite their flaws.  When it happens with a good play, the results are particularly thrilling. This is a good play, well performed and beautifully directed.

In a small-town Georgia high school, the students in honors English are studying THE CRUCIBLE. Nothing to see here until Shelby (Sadie Sink) returns after an extended absence following her having sex with her best friend’s boyfriend. She’s determined to do well and comes to class more prepared than their teacher (Gabriel  Ebert) might prefer. When she starts pushing the students to think outside the box and look at John Proctor as a misogynistic abuser, it leads to a revelation that made the woman next to me gasp.

That’s the kind of effect this play has on its audience. It starts out dealing with women’s issues almost comically as the students grapple with feminist theory and the birth of the #metoo movement. Even when one girl’s father is caught in an affair with his secretary and faces accusations from a former employee, things are fairly light. Bellflower manages to capture the foolishness of young minds trying ot grapple with a world for which they’re not prepared (Most of the students go to the local Southern Baptist church. ‘Nuff said?), yet she also maintains an affection for them. And though their grappling with abuse issues can be comical, the issues themselves are given the seriousness they deserve. Taymor stages this all expertly, with strong compositions, expressive movements and a final class presentation that sums up not just the issues, but the play’s balance of comic and serious. By the evening’s end the audience was responding vocally to subtle gestures and movements, and cheering characters who are starting to understand what’s really going on around them. My only quibble would be that the cast doesn’t hold much for laughs, so I missed some lines. Fortunately, I picked up the script at The Drama Book Store.

I’d love to see this play in rep with another work in which it is in conversation. You probably wouldn’t play it with THE CRUCIBLE, a play it pretty much decimates. I wouldn’t want to make any more money for David Mamet, so OLEANNA is out. But I think it would make a fascinating pairing with HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE with the schoolteacher also playing Peck and Shelby as L’il Bit.

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Gypsy (Round 2)

A few reactions to revisiting GYPSY on Broadway:

The production holds up beautifully. It’s expertly performed, and the new layers of racial consciousness added by making the Hovick’s a black family are just as effective when you know to expect them.

Jordan Tyson, who originated the role of Dainty June in this production, was an improvement over the stand-in I had seen earlier, partly because she was playing her own choices and partly because she achieved more variety in her final scene, when she complains about her mother before joining Louise to sing “If Momma Was Married.”

I still have a problem with Joy Woods’ choices in the final confrontation with Rose. She jumps to anger too fast as if try to out-shout Audra McDonald’s more justified moments of fury. When she says she enjoys being Gypsy Rose Lee, she says without an ounce of true enjoyment.

And to those who dismiss Audra McDonald’s performance because she’s a soprano cast in a belter’s role, I would point out that:

She’s hardly the first Rose to use head voice. Angela Lansbury not only used head voice at times but added some higher notes, something McDonald doesn’t do.

Her belt is as good as any Rose’s I’ve ever heard (and better than Tyne Daily, who constantly sounds as if she’s not sure what the next note is).

There’s a logic to when she breaks into head voice. It comes out mostly in the two ballads and when she deals with her dreams in a more internal way (rather than when she uses them to manipulate others)

I’ll listen to her head voice any day in this role because it is among the finest pieces of acting I’ve ever seen and the best I’ve seen on Broadway. I place it on a par with Judith Andrson in MEDEA, James Cagney in WHITE HEAT, Beverly Sills in LA TRAVIATA, Bette Davis in OF HUMAN BONDAGE or ALL ABOUT EVE or THE LETTER, Katharine Hepburn in LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, Laurence Olivier in KING LEAR. I could go on. There’s no point in calling something great without sharing what else I consider great.