|
December 23 – I went to see Dreamgirls again, in its pre-release limited engagement at the Ziegfeld Theatre, where you paid $25 for reserved seating and a fancy souvenir booklet, along with a collector’s-edition poster (never mind that there are 41,000 copies in print). Kind of hilarious, but fun. I loved the movie all over. Two remarkable things: I don’t know if it’s because the show is based on a stage musical and feels very theatrical, or because of the legendary expressiveness of black movie/theatergoing audiences, but I have never heard so much applause throughout a movie as I have the two times I’ve seen
Dreamgirls. Clapping for a movie always seems ridiculous to me, since the performers aren’t there to receive the applause. But the hot screen presences of all the performers in
Dreamgirls definitely exerts an unusual power over the audience. And seeing it a second time, I found that I was most impressed with Eddie Murphy’s performance. The three musical numbers in a row featuring James “Thunder” Early (“Fake Your Way to the Top,” “Cadillac Car,” and “Steppin’ to the Bad Side”) are absolutely thrilling pieces of film, a tribute both to Murphy’s ecstatic inhabiting the character of Jimmy Early and also to Bill Condon’s canny, performance-savvy montage expertise.
January 2 – Two Trains Running is the one August Wilson play whose original Broadway production I didn’t manage to see. I’m really glad I got it together to buy tickets for the Signature Theater’s revival, which sold out before the first preview (largely because of the Time Warner Inc. subsidy that allowed the ticket price to be $15 for the scheduled run – the show was extended twice, and the price went up to $55). Wilson was a great playwright, and
Two Trains had all the stuff that makes his plays work – fantastic characters rooted in a deeply felt black environment, speaking a language that allows terrific black actors to wail like great free jazz musicians. The title (which comes from an old blues song) encapsulates the multitude of cross-purposes at play throughout the story. Memphis Lee (the great stage veteran Frankie Faison) owns a well-worn, well-loved diner in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, in an area being redeveloped by the city; he spends the entire play focused on getting no less than $25,000 from the city for the property, which he bought for $5000. (I love how this play focuses on specific amounts of money.) He’s both a big man and a
beggar, a proud independent victor and a helpless pawn of the
white man's system. The other regulars at his café are the worn-out, self-mutilating waitress Risa (January Levoy), who hurries up for no one; Hambone (Leon Addison Brown), a mentally retarded guy with a long-standing grievance against the white supermarket manager who reneged on his promise of a free ham in exchange for a paint job; Wolf (the superb Ron Cephas Jones, whom I remember fondly from Labyrinth Theater’s Our Lady of 121st Street), the local numbers-runner; Holloway (Arthur French, one of my favorite veteran character actors in NYC), a retired
truthteller who champions the wisdom of Aunt Esther, the
349-year-old mystic who is never seen onstage but is the
central character in Wilson's Gem of the Ocean; Mr. West (Ed Wheeler), who runs the (sad to say) very successful and active funeral home in the neighborhood); and Sterling (Chad L. Coleman, in a role for which Laurence Fishburne won a Tony on Broadway), a young hustler fresh out of jail and so intent on his next scheme that he’s clearly headed right back to the slammer sooner than later.
They've all got little pockets of life where they've found
freedom for themselves, and yet they're all stuck in one form
or another of self-delusion or enslavement. The people come and go, the story rambles on for more than three hours, and I was never bored. The fantastic cast is well directed by Lou Bellamy.
Over a yummy late dinner at West Bank Cafe, and several days
afterwards, I was haunted by the play's treatment of death --
something ordinary and everyday yet dreadful and spoken of
briefly without much dwelling. And I miss August Wilson.
see previous entry here
|
