FILM REVIEW: SOLITARY MAN

The leering eyes of Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas).

No stronger than his sex

By John Esther

Later this year, actor Michael Douglas is slated to return to the big screen in director Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Rests to reprise his 1980s-greed archetype and the politically motivated Academy Award-winning character, Gordon Gekko, where the once Ronald Reagen-era demi-tycoon of downtown Manhattan reportedly comes out of prison and attempts to rebuild his kingdom in the George Bush Jr. era.

Not too dissimilar, in director and co-writer Brian Koppelman's Solitary Man, Douglas plays Ben Kalmen, a Long Island man whose own greedy disregard for others has brought him to the brink of woe and is now attempting to regain his robe and crown.  

Once one of Long Island's most successful car dealers, six-plus years later after visiting a doctor -- who potentially has news of that fearful thing for the dedicated father and husband -- Ben is attempting to pull himself out of his current failures in family and finance. He has already lost his wife of many years, Nancy (Susan Sarandon), but manages a strained relationship with his daughter, Susan Porter (Jenna Fischer), and his grandson, Scotty (Jake Siciliano) -- much to the dismay of Susan's husband and Scotty's father, Gary Porter (David Costabile), who is probably more successful than Ben was at his age and far more subdued as well.

(Similar to this film's storyline, in the latest Wall Street, Douglas' Gordon is allegedly estranged from his daughter, played by Carey Mulligan. In the original Wall Street Gordon had a son.)

Feeling the patriarchal impotence of a man disconnected to his family, Ben buries up his manhood by continually seducing women of flaming youth (insert Catherine Zeta-Jones observation here). His current girlfriend, Jordon Karsch (Mary-Louise Parker), is not only considerably younger than Ben she also has enough income and influence to chauffeur Ben back on the top of the car lot. 

Shall he dwindle, peak and pine? Ben would rather co-play the beast with two backs with women that threaten his family and financial future rather than be the king hereafter. A masochist of Shakespearean proportions, the more Ben sinks in his own dick-sand the harder he tries to pull out, only to ejaculate it in all the wrong places.

A thoroughly engaging film and by far Douglas’ best films in years, Ben's primrose path eventually hoists the anti-hero on his own petard without creating some false sense of pathos for the character. Ben’s expense of spirit in a waste of shame is motivated out of his perverted sense of control for his mortal coil and while it is not easy to sympathize for him, his itching palm is of a far more benign nature than those capital characters on Wall Street.  

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THEATER REVIEW: THE STIGMATIZED

Robert Brubaker as Alviano Salvago in L.A. Opera's The Stigmatized.  

Conflicted sexuality in a work rescued from obscurity and the Nazis by L.A. Opera

By Ed Rampell

There is a stereotype many have that “high” culture, such as William Shakespeare and opera, deals with refined “classical” subject matter, as distinct from what critic Pauline Kael called the “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” obsessions of pop culture, especially movies. But those who make this distinction forget that in Elizabethan England, Shakespearean dramas were largely performed for the masses. Hamlet, in fact, is a ghost story about murder most foul, incest, suicide and is as much a revenge tale as any film noir picture.

The same is true of opera. For instance, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto is, among other things, about a hunchbacked jester who apparently has incestuous desires for his sexy daughter, Gilda (perhaps not coincidentally also the name of a sexy 1946 Rita Hayworth movie and character). Austrian composer Franz Schreker’s The Stigmatized is another case in point, a work of “high” art that is mostly about the “baser” passions.

The current production of The Stigmatized is the opera’s U.S. premiere and part of L.A. Opera’s “Recovered Voices” series, which, according to press notes, is “a multi-season initiative to revive the works of composers whose lives and careers were cut short by the Nazi regime.” (Perhaps this is a sort of compensation and penance for the company’s spending so much time, money and energy on presenting The Ring cycle by Hitler’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner, widely believed to be an ardent anti-Semite.) Schreker’s saucy work, set in 16th century Genoa, was originally presented in Germany in 1918, and can be viewed as being part of the edgy postwar culture of the Weimar Republic that included sexually charged works in various cabaret acts and by playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, this so-called “degenerate art” was banned due to its blatant sexuality. It didn’t help that Schreker was half-Jewish. To make matters worse, Schreker’s lead character in The Stigmatized, Alviano Salvago (tenor Robert Brubaker) is hunchbacked and crippled, and with their “Master Race” delusions, Dr. Mengele and his cohorts despised the misshapen (unlike Schreker, who also wrote The Dwarf, which L.A. Opera mounted in 2008). In any case, Salvago is also a fabulously wealthy nobleman who has created an island utopia called, after Greek mythology, “Elysium,” which he has altruistically decided to donate to the people of Genoa.

Well, no good deed goes unpunished. It turns out that Salvago’s elite “friends” have been using Elysium’s grotto (holy Hefner and the Playboy Mansion!) to stage orgies at. These ignoble nobles have been abducting Genoa’s most beautiful women to participate in their sex-capades, and Salvago’s plan to donate their happy hunting ground to the city threatens this sexual cabal’s revels, so they conspire to thwart him. With “friends” like these…

Salvago, who is full of sexual angst largely due to his deformity, begins a romance with Carlotta Nardi (soprano Anja Kampe), the daughter of the mayor, Lodovico Nardi (bass-baritone Wolfgang Schone). In the words of another famous musician, Carlotta is “a hunk-a hunk-a burning love,” and she, too, is torn between her affection for Salvago and lust for the dashing Count Tamare (baritone Martin Gantner).

Carlotta is an artist who strives to be a sort of portrait painter of the soul. Her quest to give form on canvas to the true inner self reminded me of the 1981 Barbra Streisand movie, All Night Long, wherein Gene Hackman’s character invents a mirror that shows people exactly how they are (instead of the image being reversed).

The Stigmatized raises the question of presenting sexual aesthetics onstage. An L.A. Times article about the opera prior to its debut at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion contended that: “L.A. Opera's staging will contain explicit sexual situations and is intended for mature audiences only. Director Ian Judge said the production will evoke the ‘rank smell of bad sex’ for the orgy scenes.” Really? Most of the revels consisted of performers romping around a circular revolving stage in tophats, cloaks, suits, long dresses and the like. There is one nude scene per se with an actress who has sex with a partially clad male. But overall the orgies were pretty chaste and, for the record, did not have foul aromas.

As I have written many times before, in the past artists fought and suffered for the freedom to depict sex, nudity and other taboo topics in the arts, and it’s disappointing when today’s talents, who now possess those hard fought for rights, don’t use them. Having said that, to be fair L.A. Opera’s 2008 production of The Fly did feature the full frontal nudity of bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch as scientist Seth Brundle, partially clad women and lots more sex than the 1986 film version, which was likewise directed by David Cronenberg. So it is strange that, like its character, this production of The Stigmatized seems sexually conflicted.

Schreker’s music, ably conducted by James Conlon, is sonorous, if not exactly toe-tapping. But what really stands out is this show’s visuals. Sets are almost characters in their own right in many L.A. Opera productions –- the mad scientist’s lair in The Fly, the prison in Tosca, a piazza in Carmen or The Barber of Seville. There is not so much a set design as much as a projection design in The Stigmatized, imaginatively projected onto a scrim and overseen by award-winning Broadway veteran Wendall Harrington, who’s work includes what may be the first rock opera, The Who’s Tommy. The images include a reference to Hieronymos Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, although for some reason the 16th century Dutch painter’s orgiastic images are not projected, while his edenic landscapes are, to suggest Elysium. Nevertheless, in lieu of sets per se, the projected imagery enhanced this production of The Stigmatized with a cinematic verve and flavor. Which seems appropriate, as so-called “high” and “low” art meet and mingle in The Stigmatized.

The Stigmatized runs at L.A. Opera in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., on Thursday, April 22 and Saturday, April 24 at 7:30 pm. For more info: 213/972-8001; http://www.laopera.com./

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THEATER REVIEW: JULIUS CAESAR

Will Geer and Will Shakespeare’s toga party

By Ed Rampell

I have a friend named Fred McKinnon who’s a Manhattan playwright. Above his computer, printer, etc. – his work space where the magic takes place, except when Fred is globetrotting, doing research, play hopping at London’s West End or recharging his muse at writers’ colonies from Hawaii to Massachusetts – is a postcard bearing a picture of William Shakespeare and the words: “So I haven’t written lately. Neither has Shakespeare.” Perhaps you have to be a scribe to fully appreciate this joke, but this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

Of course, if you’d written immortal masterpieces such as Julius Caesar, you’d be excused for being a slacker of a pen pal. Unlike modern scribblers such as Fred and your humble and most obedient servant, without benefit of the Internet, word processing, drama format software, etc., the poetic genius from Stratford-upon-Avon rendered classic after classic for the ages, using only a lowly low tech quill, ink and parchment. Yet the angels sang when Shakespeare wrote, and it’s astonishing how many expressions still in use in the English language are derived from the Shakespearean canon.

For example, consider Julius Caesar, which the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum premiered June 6 in its amphitheatre under Malibu’s starry, starry skies. It’s common knowledge that the phrase “et tu, Brutus?", which has come to epitomize backstabbing (literally!), originated in Shakespeare’s high drama about the lowdown Roman Empire. But did you know that the term for someone speaking gibberish also wittily began in Caesar, when Casca (Alan Blumenfeld) quipped: “but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.” Caesar’s right hand man, Marc Antony (Aaron Hendry), not Mahatma Gandhi, proclaimed: “Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war.” Even that popular populist 1960s exclamation in the affirmative by Black Panthers arguably emanated from this play when, during his funeral oration, Antony cried: “To stir men's blood: I only speak right on.”

But while so many of Shakespeare’s wondrous words are still perennials, it is the syntheses of swordplay and wordplay, rhyme and theme, that makes Julius Caesar as rabblerousing and timely today as it was when it opened at the Globe Theatre in 1599. As the hotheaded Antony wisely observes: “The evil that men do lives after them.” Indeed, 510 years later the plot about plotters conspiring to assassinate the head of the ancient world’s superpower remains resonant. Like the Rome of antiquity, with more than 700 military bases scattered around the world the United States of America has become an empire beset by internal inequities and endless enemies and wars abroad. Using the pretext of 9/11, just as Caesar had 2,044 years before him, George W. Bush grabbed unprecedented power, diminishing the role and rule of a representative republican form of governance as he assumed greater omnipotence. Like Caesar awaiting to be crowned absolute dictator of imperial Rome by the senate, Bush’s imperial presidency, unitary executive, warrant-less surveillance, extraordinary rendition, prolonged detention without charges, torture, etc., were the tyranny of a latter day “decider” and would-be emperor.

Julius Caesar opens with the Roman throng feting their conquering hero, who displays blithe hubris and arrogantly disdains portents of disaster. Similarly, that prating prancing preening prick of a president enjoyed widespread approval ratings when the uniform-clad wannabe warrior prematurely proclaimed “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck for a preemptive war we’re still, alas, mired in six years on.

From their 21st century vantage point, audiences may congratulate themselves that unlike Cassius’ cabal, we are too cultivated to settle political disputes at dagger point. On the other hand, our too, too loyal “opposition” caved, with many Democrats voting for the PATRIOT Act, to authorize the invasion of Iraq under false pretences, and supported too many Bush measures. To make matters worse, Bush was reelected and although ultimately repudiated by the electorate, now that he’s out of power our spineless senators decline to charge him with war crimes, etc. Meanwhile, his Antony, Dick Cheney, continues to sow discord with impunity. As Cassius (Melora Marshall) said: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world, Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about…”

But time will tell who were truly more refined: the Americans, who cowered in the face of despotism, or the Romans who, as Shakespeare’s most famous fictional character, Hamlet, said, “[took] arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end[ed] them," literally turning their oppressor into a bloodstained quivering mass of orange Julius (played by Carl Palmer). In another half a millennium, history shall pass judgment on who were more civilized.

Caesar’s political overtones befit the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, which was founded after the leftwing cowboy actor (1950’s Broken Arrow and Winchester ’73) refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. Instead of fading away into obscurity, Geer turned his land in Topanga Canyon near Malibu into an outdoor theatre, where he also grew every plant Shakespeare wrote about. Geer went on to co-star in the 1954 classic made by blacklisted talents about striking Chicano miners, Salt of the Earth, and in the beloved 1970s CBS-TV series, The Waltons, playing Grandpa Walton.

Probably the highest compliment I can pay the Theatricum’s production of Julius Caesar is that it’s worthy of the bard. It is, to use Brutus’ (Mike Peebler) words, “a savage spectacle,” with a cast of dozens. Considering that I recently saw the one woman show, Kick, starring DeLanna Studi and the two-actor drama A Number co-starring John Heard, a cast of 40 is of near epic proportion onstage. Ellen Geer deftly directs the mass scenes, which are somewhat reminiscent of Salt of the Earth. The mise-en-scene of the battle sequences, as sword drawn Roman centurions romp over the bard’s boards, are excitingly well-choreographed, making excellent use of the open air Topanga setting. The slow motion assassination of Caesar is harrowingly cinematic.

In the best gender bending acting since Cate Blanchett played Bob Dylan in 2007’s I’m Not There, the production’s most outstanding performance is delivered by Melora Marshall as Cassius. She plays him as an overwrought conspirator, a fanatical devotee of the cause whose own ambition and zeal compels Cassius to take up arms against the man who would be king.

Julius Caesar will be performing through Sept. 26. For more information: call 310/455-3723 or see: www.Theatricum.com.

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