Edward Hopper, (Manhattan Bridge), 1925-26. Whitney Museum of Art

Clement Greenberg once observed that Edward Hopper was a “bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.” “Edward Hopper’s New York,” a major retrospective currently on view at the Whitney Museum, confirms this judgment. There is occasionally a clumsiness to Hopper, especially when he steps out of his comfort zone. But he knew where he excelled, and perhaps was unrivalled – that is, in capturing the unmistakable atmosphere of the city, and finding it not in the typical places, skyscrapers, crowds, traffic, and such. Hopper looked to the strange and transient moments of stillness and solitude: it was at such unpromising moments that he was able to convey, as Greenberg described, an “insight into the present nature of American life.” Born in 1882, in upstate New York’s Hudson River Valley, Hopper settled around 1913 into an apartment facing Washington Square Park, with his wife, the painter Josephine Hopper. He would remain in that neighborhood until his death in 1967. Hopper is chiefly remembered as the quintessential American realist. Yet it is no surprise that his emphasis on formal qualities found notice and admiration among the abstract expressionists who would go on to make New York City home to the world’s most advanced painting, finally displacing Paris, which had long retained that title. The Whitney’s exhibition of some 200 paintings, sketches, and artifacts includes a handful of the widely-known masterpieces, but there is a generous selection of rarely seen works; paintings that are relatively unknown but reveal a side of Hopper that is less about the aesthetics of film-noir, and more about the growing impersonalization of the city, the social malaise, and the fleeting instants when the coordinates by which we routinely move seem on the verge of slipping away. Hopper’s New York is a palimpsest, where old and new are often adjacent, as in From Williamsburg Bridge (1928), a painting that is characteristic of Hopper’s emphasis on the horizontality of the city, rather than the verticality with which New York has been typically associated. “I just never cared for the vertical,” Hopper once said. Uninterested in skyscrapers, or the city’s famed skyline, Hopper’s city lives at a grounded, human level, which makes these scenes, frquently absent of people, distinctively haunting, melancholic, and ultimately defamiliarizing. There are certain subjects that Hopper would return to repeatedly. In paintings such as Girl at a Sewing Machine (1921), Morning Sun (1952) Eleven A.M. (1926), and Room in Brooklyn (1932) a lone woman sits facing a window into which the sunlight is streaming. A note of sad resignation accompanies these images. Sometimes it is as if Hopper is intent on stripping away anything that would impede the transparency of his subjects. Even the glass has been removed from his windows. Indeed, under the interrogational glare of Hopper’s raking light there is no longer any room for illusions. Office in a Small City (1953) is a case in point. The painting uses simple forms to convey the diminution of the individual in modern life. It is no accident that the title makes mention of the office (bathed in light), but none of the man who sits within its purely utilitarian, bone-white concrete slabs. In fact, he is not an individual at all, but with his white rolled-up sleeves, he is as undistinctive and functional as the room he inhabits. The militantly unadorned building towers over some old brownstones; and the juxtaposition is made more brutal, even violent, by the corner of the office building that stretches the entire height of the painting, literally dividing the older buildings in the background. In this case, the sheer verticality of the building is a kind of counterpoint to the insignificance of the man installed within that space. November, Washington Square (1932/1959), is Hopper’s only double-dated painting. Depicting the view from his apartment, the painting was only finally completed following the successful outcome to his and his wife’s successful preservation campaign that ultimately saved their building and home. The exhibition even includes a vaguely hostile exchange of letters between Hopper and Robert Moses, then Commissioner of Parks, with the latter being unsurprisingly condescending in the face of Hopper’s opposition to New York University’s relentless annexation of buildings facing the park. City Roofs (1932) is important for its intense focus on the formal relationship between shapes and geometric patterns. Color has taken a decided backseat, but if anything, that only serves to accent Hopper’s endless fascination with raking light (which is the real reason for his eschewal of the vertical in favor of the horizontal). The rooftop is a privileged setting in which to study the effects of oblique, unobstructed sunlight. Realism in this case brings us to the very door of abstraction, where purely utilitarian objects – chimneys, pipes, and skylights – have crucially become sources of intrinsic meaning and value, entirely independent of their functionality. The exhibition includes a sampling of the ten watercolors Hopper painted of the city, all between the years 1925 and 1928. Five of these were views taken from the rooftop of his Washington Square residence. The rows of airshafts and other objects in Roofs (1926) have become a kind of personal skyline of its own, a concrete canyon of cylinders and blocks. In the silence and stillness of this stage, it is the angled light itself that is the true star of the show. What is it that has so fascinated the masters of raking light, from Caravaggio, to Vermeer, to Hopper, among others? It seems to me that the significance of raking light is that we often fail to grasp a thing when we reach for it straight on; rather at times we must catch it from the side. This will be familiar to some as the principle of obliquity: that complex goals are best achieved indirectly (this is also probably why the happiest people are generally not those who are preoccupied with securing their happiness). Likewise, we do not adequately see a thing by shining the light directly on, or perpendicular to, the object; but parallel, or at an oblique angle the truth of the thing comes out, its structures, textures, its real, hitherto hidden countenance. Many of Hopper’s most famous works – Nighthawks (1942), for example (not in the exhibition) – have become so ubiquitous that we are in danger of no longer being able to see them. The corrective for this over-exposure is to engage with the artist’s less familiar work; that is, to come to the artist through another portal – obliquely, if you will – and thereby trace a new path into the world that his oeuvre represents. Hopper observed, “I think I’m not very human, I didn’t want to paint people posturing and grimacing. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” It is as telling a description as any of Hopper’s painterly fascination with New York City.  

Camille Lou in "Women at War" (Netflix, 2022)

My main reaction after watching the eight-episode Netflix series “Women at War” was how foolish and stupid World War I was, and how more women than men seemed to sense that war’s folly. By the first several days of August 1914, all of the major European Powers had declared war, and the entire eight episodes (each lasting between 48 and 56 minutes) take place starting in mid-September and culminating sometime in October. At the end of the last episode, we see written on the screen, “The Great War lasted another four years.”

Although we lack exact counts, over 8 million combatants lost their lives in the war, and that does not count civilian deaths. Since the “women at war” in the series are French women, consider this: In the war three out of every ten French men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, overwhelmingly soldiers, lost their lives (although not as proportionally high as French losses, the total number of German and Russian deaths was each higher). As one historian has written, “Among the major [European] combatants, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that every family was in mourning: most for a relative–a father, a son, a brother, a husband–others for a friend, a colleague, a lover, a companion.” 

And all these deaths, all the innumerable individual tragedies, all these sacrifices of husbands, fathers, sons, friends, etc., were for what? In an earlier essay,  “A Memorial Day Lament for Capt. Wilfred Owen, Sgt. Joyce Kilmer, and the Needless Dead of Foolish Wars," I indicated that the loss of these two poets (one from England and one from the U. S.) and so many others was needless.

But before readers sense any forthcoming historical harangue about the folly of most wars, let’s switch focus and concentrate for a while on the series’ characters and plotting. As the title suggests, the main figures are women, especially four of them: Marguerite (Audrey Fleurot), a Parisian prostitute; Suzanne (Camille Lou), a nurse; Agnes (Julie de Bona), the Mother Superior of a convent turned into a hospital;  and Caroline (Sofia Essaïdi), who takes over her husband’s truck factory when he goes off to war. Marguerite, Suzanne, and Caroline each have interesting backstories, and all three and Mother Agnes become entwined in various plots and counterplots during the time covered in the eight episodes.

All four women operate mainly in the area of the mountainous town of Saint-Paulin in the Vosges Mountain region of Eastern France. As a result of German gains in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, this small town was very near the border of Germany, which had gained most of the regions of Alsace and Lorraine during that war (in late 1961-early 1962, I was stationed as a U. S. army officer for six months near Luneville, a Lorraine town that the Germans captured but lost back in mid September 1914).

Dealing with the four women are plenty of villains, mainly men. Marguerite’s principal nemesis is a brothel owner. For Suzanne, it’s a Parisian detective who wants to kill her. For Mother Agnes, a priest who sexually abuses young novitiates at the convent-turned-hospital. And for Caroline, her brother-in-law, who attempts to gain control of the factory she runs after her husband goes away to serve in the military. 

Each off the eight episodes is packed with drama. But to avoid spoiler alerts, this review/essay will refrain from revealing too much. Very briefly, however, Marguerite is almost obsessed with the fate of a young officer in the front lines, and with combating the evil doings of the brothel owner who employs her. Suzanne, who attempts to hide her identity, not only has to evade the Parisian detective, but also to prevent a French pilot who seems to be a German spy from taking her away from her nursing work to save lives. In addition, she develops a romantic relationship with a doctor. Mother Agnes not only contends with the evil priest who is a sexual predator, but also grapples with her own inner struggle between her vow of celibacy and her attraction to one of her patients (a struggle similar to one I recently described of U.S. monk Thomas Merton.)  And Caroline not only battles her brother-in-law for control of the family factory, but also contends with her mother-in-law, who wishes to take Caroline’s young daughter from her.

And all of the main actors do a first-rate job. Especially the four main women and Sandrine Bonnaire, who plays Caroline’s mother-in-law. Among the men, there is also some fine acting, notably by Tchéky Karyo (who plays General Duvernet), Tom Leeb (the general’s son, surgeon Joseph, who falls in love with Suzanne), Yannick Choirat (the brothel owner Marcel), Maxence Danet-Fauvel (the young officer Colin, whose actions Marguerite observes as closely as possible), and Grégoire Colin (as Caroline’s brother-in-law, Charles). Some of these actors I’ve seen before, especially Audrey Fleurot (Marguerite) who had a main role in the excellent 72-episode “French Village” series about the Second World War, and also “The Bonfire of Destiny” series on Netflix; and Tchéky Karyo (General Duvernet), who was the title character in the PBS Masterpiece series Baptiste.

It is through the characters of Marguerite and Caroline that we are primarily led to the military front and experience many of the brutalities of the war. Because of Marguerite’s interest in the young officer Colin, she is sometimes at the front, especially after she becomes an ambulance driver, as do some other prostitutes. This is made possible by Caroline’s conversion of the family truck factory to ambulance production.

One of the battle scenes shows the Germans using gas against French troops (although in many ways, the series reflects the actual history well, here it takes some artistic license because the Germans didn’t actually resort to gas attacks until 1915). After some of the afflicted soldiers are brought back to the hospital, doctor Joseph says, “They're dropping like flies. As if the gas is eating them from within. All I can do is ease their suffering with oxygen and atropine.”

The horrible effects of gas warfare were later captured by Wilfred Owen (mentioned above) in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which includes these lines,

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori [It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country].

The total of all gas deaths in WWI is estimated at 91,000. In “Women at War” it is primarily the women (mainly nuns and novitiates) who tend to those brought back to the hospital after being gassed. It is Mother Agnes and nurse Suzanne at the hospital; and Marguerite and other prostitutes who drive the ambulances, and Caroline, who runs the factory producing them, who are more focused on helping the war-wounded. Although doctor Joseph is one man more concerned with healing than killing, for most of the soldiers their primary responsibility was to kill the enemy.

In the decades leading up to WWI and during the war, women played a key role in first trying to prevent war and then in ending it. In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman writes of European peace advocates like Baroness von Suttner and (in the U.S.) Jane Addams. In his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, Adam Hochschild writes of the important role many women, like the English Sylvia Pankhurst, played in opposing the possible and then actual war that began in 1914.

Early in 1915, the British Helena Swanwick wrote a pamphlet opposing war. It was called Women and War. She wrote of women’s special war burden as being “the life-givers and the home-makers.”  In “Women at War” we often see the special agony that women feel as the men they love suffer and sometimes die in war, whether they be husbands, sons, or fathers.  In one scene Mother Agnes is in chapel and prays, “God help me. Be my guide. These men [suffering mental disturbances] don't have the strength to fight anymore. I can't let them return to battle. They wouldn't survive. I beg you, give me a sign. Help me. What should I do?” In another scene tears run down her face as she tends to one of these soldiers.

While compassion seems to come more naturally to women, men must be wary of the trap of machismo.  In 1977 Philip Caputo recalled how as a young college student in 1960 he enrolled in a Marine officer training program partly as a result of the romantic heroism of such war movies as Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Guadacanal Diary (1943), and Retreat, Hell! (1952).  He explained his motivation as such:  “The heroic experience I sought was war; war, the ultimate adventure; war, the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary . . . . Already I saw myself charging up some distant beachhead like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, and then coming home a suntanned warrior with medals on my chest .  . .  I needed to prove something—my courage, my toughness, my manhood.”

In a book on war, Gwynne Dyer wrote, “the most important single factor that makes it possible for civilized men to fight the wars of civilization is that all armies everywhere have exploited and manipulated the ingrained warrior ethic that is the heritage of every young human male.” He also indicates how an emphasis on toughness, compliance with orders, peer pressure, and concern for one’s fellow soldiers, can turn a young man (or at least a boy being made into a “man”) into someone who will kill when told to do so. 

“Women at War,” as well as Putin’s war in Ukraine, and some recent police shootings, once again indicate that more compassion and less machismo would serve our world well.

Still from Habermann (2010)

With ethnic tensions in the USA much in evidence as witnessed by attacks on Asian Americans, increased antisemitism, and continuing Trumpian white resentment against minorities and immigrants, two films recently available on Amazon Prime Video that display ethnic hatred are timely indeed. They also reflect real historical happenings.

The first, named as “Hatred” on Prime, is a Polish drama that first came out in 2016 under the title “Volhynia.” But the movie does show hatred aplenty, including some brutal killings--especially of Poles by Ukrainians.

The original title refers to a Ukrainian area below modern-day Belarus. It is a region now in Ukraine that in history has bounced back and forth between Russian and Polish control, e.g., Russia ruled it in the nineteenth century and Poland controlled the western part of it between WWI and WWII. A graphic at the film’s beginning cites the ethnic makeup of Volhynia prior to WWII as 70% Ukrainian, 16% Polish, and 10 percent Jewish.

Many viewers of the film will probably just shake their heads and ask how humans can be so hateful and cruel to each other. All the ethnic and religious killings remind one of the lines from Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh: “In Punjab, Assam, Kashmir, Meerut--in Delhi, in Calcutta--from time to time they slit their neighbor’s throats. . . . They killed you for being circumcised and they killed you because your foreskins had been left on. Long hair got you murdered and haircuts too; light skin flayed dark skin and if you spoke the wrong language you could lose your twisted tongue.”

But in Volhynia, like in India and Pakistan, not only did different ethnic groups (e. g., Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians) clash, but so also did differing religious beliefs--in Volhynia’s case, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Judaism. In eastern Europe as a whole, similar conflicts occurred from even before the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb in 1914 up to the 1990s’ conflicts among Serbs, Croats, Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims and other ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and created millions of refugees. In his sweeping The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, historian Niall Ferguson lists ethnic conflict as one of the three main causes of the “extreme violence” of the century, and central and eastern Europe as the most deadly of the “killing spaces.”

Hatred centers on the story of a young Polish girl, Zosia Głowacka, living in a Volhynian village. It begins with the wedding of her sister to a Ukrainian. Zosia is also in love with a young Ukrainian, Petro--an early scene shows them physically intimate. But in exchange for farmland and some animals, her father marries Zosia to Maciej, an older widowed Polish landowner with children (In the interwar years, the Polish government had helped many war veterans and other Polish colonists settle in Volhynia, which contributed to Ukrainian resentments). The wedding occurs on the eve of Germany’s 1939 invasion of western Poland, and Maciej is soon drafted to help the Poles fight the Germans.  

After the Germans quickly rout them, Maciej and other Poles attempt to return to their Ukrainian homes, but many of them are captured, tortured, and killed by local Ukrainians. Maciej, however, returns to his village by disguising himself as a Ukrainian. But he will not remain there long because according to the secret agreement attached to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, part of “Polish” Volhynia is to be taken over by the Russians. After they do so, they arrest and send many Poles, including Maciej, to forced labor in Siberia or Kazakhstan--the new teacher also tells (in Russian) her young students that religion is a superstition.

From late 1939 to the summer of 1941, Zosia remains at Maciej’s farm with his children and an infant son of her own, probably fathered by Petro, who gets killed soon after helping Maciej’s children and Zosia avoid deportation.

In June 1941 the Germans attack the USSR and quickly take over the Volhynian area where Zosia lives. Some of her fellow villagers who are Ukrainian greet the German troops and cooperate in the arrest and killing of Jews and Poles. Zosia, however, risks her own life to help some Jews.  

By the summer of 1943 the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) has grown, as has the number of local Poles it has killed. The film shows two Ukrainian Orthodox priests preaching to their congregations. The first warns against excessive nationalism, but the second states, “We need to fill all the rivers with Polish blood because Ukraine has to be pure.”

Shortly thereafter some of the most horrific scenes of the film appear as local Ukrainians burn Polish huts and kill by burning, stabbing, axing, and other means, while shouting, “Death to the Poles.”

Zosia escapes with her little son, but sees her stepson burned alive. Eventually, she arrives at the home of her sister, Helena, and her Ukrainian husband, Vasyl, who is urged by his brother to kill the Polish Helena. Instead, Vasyl ends up killing his own brother with an axe.

Shortly thereafter, however, it is the Poles’ turn to be barbaric. They kill Helena’s whole family, including her for marrying a Ukrainian. Zosia escapes again, hiding in the woods with her son.

The film’s final scene shows her on a long dirt road, lying in the back of a horse-drawn cart, her and her son being transported by a kindly young man who found them in the woods. And the following wording is displayed on the screen: “In the period of 1943-45 an estimated 80 to 100 thousand Poles and 10 to 15 thousand Ukrainians had fallen victim to Ukrainian nationalists’ attacks and Polish retaliations in the Eastern Borderlands” (According to various historical sources, these estimates seem a bit high, but a joint Polish-Ukrainian conference in 1994 agreed that 50,000 Polish deaths was a moderate estimate).

The second film on Amazon Prime, Habermann, is a 2011 Czech-German film that reflects tensions between Czechs and Germans in the Sudetenland area bordering Germany and Czechoslovakia during the years 1938 to 1945. This border region was part of Czechoslovakia from 1918 until 1938, when Hitler it annexed. On the the first page of his Mein Kampf [1925], Hitler had written that all German speaking people should be united in an enlarged Germany. In March 1938 he began this process by absorbing (German-speaking) Austria to Germany. Later that year, in late September, he got the governments of England and France to “appease” him (in the infamous Munich Agreement) by agreeing that the Sudetenland, where ethnic German speakers were in the majority, was to be given to Germany.

August Habermann is a Sudeten German sawmill owner whose family has run the mill for generations. He is married to the Czech Jana, whose father (unbeknownst to her) was Jewish. They have a young daughter. August’s best friend is a Czech forester named Jan Brezina, who is married to Martha, an ethnic German. Most of the employees at the mill are ethnic Czechs, and August treats them fairly. But he begins having major problems after the German takeover, when SS Major Koslowski starts making demands on him and the sawmill and complains that Habermann employs mainly Czechs as opposed to Sudeten Germans.

The film then displays various examples of Nazi cruelty--for example, Major Koslowski demands that Habermann select 20 Czech civilians for execution to avenge the deaths of two German soldiers, and Habermann’s wife Jana is sent to a concentration camp. It also shows various examples of Czech resentment of Nazi control. Although some Sudeten Germans like August Habermann are unhappy about Nazi demands, others, like his younger brother Hans, who joins the German army, are fervent Nazi supporters.

The movie’s final scenes, like its opening one that foreshadows them, display the violent wrath (including killing) of the Czechs against their Sudeten German neighbors after the Nazis pull out in 1945. Unfortunately for August, the local Czechs blame him for cooperating with the Nazis. They even direct their hatred at his Czech wife, Jana, who has been freed from the concentration camp. “Habermann’s whore,” they call her.

Like Hatred, Habermann visualizes for its audiences many unpleasant truths about how beastly we humans can be to one another. According to the Czech historian Tomas Stanek, in Verfolgung [Persecution]1945, from May until early September 1945, Czechs brutalized and killed hundreds of thousands of Sudeten Germans as they drove them out of Czechoslovakia.

As we watch all this ethnic hatred on display, we naturally ask ourselves, why?  How can we act so inhumanely toward other human beings?

In Chapter 1, “A Century of Violence,” of my An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces (2008), I attempted to explain ethnic and other 20th- century violence. In doing so, I cited the Nobel-Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, who wrote that much of it flowed from “the illusion of a unique and choiceless identity,” for example, that of nationality, race, or class. He added that “the art of constructing hatred takes the form of invoking the magical power of some allegedly predominant identity that drowns other affiliations and in a conveniently bellicose form can also overpower any human sympathy or natural kindness that we may normally have.”

I also indicated that

there are many reasons why the deaths of foreigners or those considered fundamentally different seemed to matter much less to people than the deaths of those more similar. . . .  It is natural for people to feel more compassion for those closer to them--for family members, neighbors, or members of a group or nation with whom they identify. In addition, in the case of a nation or state, patriotism and nationalism were often reinforced by education, by media, and by social and cultural rituals such as the singing of national anthems, and, especially in wartime, by government propaganda. (For more of my thoughts on the motivations for violence and the dehumanization that often precedes it, see here.)

Looking specifically at the two films reviewed here, the focusing on past grievances and an ideology of ethnic nationalism are two main causes of much of the bloodshed. Volhynian Ukrainians remembering Polish government and individual mistreatment of them in the first film, and Czech revenge for Nazi oppression in the second are main factors.  In an interview about his Volhynian film, director Wojciech Smarzowski said it’s “ against extreme nationalism. The film is a warning–it shows what a human being is capable of doing when equipped with a relevant ideology, political or religious doctrine and is allowed to kill.”

I have often written against any nationalism, dogmatism, or ideology that makes us less tolerant of others. And I closed a recent essay with the hope that the USA could be “a land of many ethnic groups and various believers and non-believers [who] can live harmoniously together, can become “stronger, not in spite of its many elements, but because of them.”

How exactly to do so is complex, but a starting point might be to look at the example of the South Africans Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who in the 1990s respectively created and chaired a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which attempted to move South Africa’s Whites and Blacks beyond the cycle of violence and counter-violence.

Background: Minor Threat, Washington D.C., 1981, Photo Malco23 CC BY-SA 3.0

When most people hear the word “punk,” they think of drug addled, nasty behavior.  Like Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols high on heroin, slashing himself with a broken bottle and wearing a t-shirt with a swastika on it.  Stupid and nihilistic both.

But if you push beyond the year the Sex Pistols imploded and when Sid Vicious died (1978-1979), you might be surprised to meet a punk who would tell you how he rejected drugs, alcohol, and sex – often labeling himself “straight edge” – but who still believed Johnny Rotten was right when the Sex Pistols singer called “anger” an “energy.”  Usually a suburban resident, this punk rocker would tell you how big corporate music CEOs kept releasing albums that sucked. Maybe our ideal type punk of the 1980s had realized that the music industry’s sales were tanking in 1980.  This kid, usually a young white male, would explain how he rejected corporate music and went into his basement and formed a band that played at small and cheap venues (sometimes even just friends’ houses), or produced his own zine pasted together and xeroxed, or drew art that served as social commentary about the boredom of suburban life.  All of this centered around the idea of Do It Yourself (DIY), its own kind of ethic.

As local punk scenes started to gel across the country in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan ascended to power as president.  While contemporary conservatives fawn over him today, many punk kids at the time perceived him as scary and mean, projecting a surface image much like the celebrities he admired (he invited Michael Jackson to the White House in 1984, not just because Jackson was a celebrity with a certain brand but also because he saved the music industry in 1983 by reinvigorating record sales and the bottom line).  Reagan exuded celebrity himself: from his days as a movie actor in Hollywood to his time shilling for General Electric Theater on television.  When elected, some called him the Entertainer in Chief. 

And just as much as punks hated corporate music, they also hated celebrities who thought of themselves as standing above the masses who consumed their every manufactured creation.  The punk poet Dennis Cooper wrote about seeing Blondie, probably sometime in 1980 – a band that had grown out of the 1970s CBGB punk scene and then “sold out” and broke big with a disco hit, “Heart of Glass.”  Cooper yelled at the stage while recognizing the futility of his action.  Debbie Harry, singer of Blondie, was a star: “she doesn’t even see me, or deem to answer my call ‘cause she’s above me, far above.”  He explained poetically that “arena rock” performers faced “warm eyes gazing up at them in audience, lives blown like a wheatfield by their beauty, our wild applause – their jackpot.”  Punks rejected this sort of “arena rock,” where celebrity acts played mechanically to distant audiences.  When punk kids started to “slamdance”, they broke down the wall between performer and audience member, as kids would just crawl onto the stage, make quick contact with a band member before “stage diving” back onto the dance floor.  Punk refused to genuflect to celebrities, which also seemed not such a bad ethic (especially now that we know what we know about Michael Jackson, for instance).

What punks really hated about Reagan was his bellicosity; he seemed a man looking for war (he’d get that with the invasion of Grenada in 1983).  One of his first acts as president was to “flip flop,” as we call it today.  He had campaigned in 1980 against Jimmy Carter’s strengthening of the Selective Service System (which called for registering young men as a preparation for a potential future draft).  Reagan’s libertarianism drew back from such big government activity.  But once he learned how the Selective Service System would speed up any future military mobilization, he went back on his campaign promise.  Not only did he eerily declare Vietnam a “noble cause,” he cracked down on young men who had not registered with the Selective Service, prompting a punk band called Wasted Youth to sing “no one cares if we die, reinstate the draft and tell us lies” and True Sounds of Liberty (TSOL) to scream, “I won’t go!”  A zine out of San Jose, California, Ripper, counseled fellow punks how to resist the draft.  And Raymond Pettibon, an artist mostly associated with his brother’s band, Black Flag, drew an image of what appeared like Arlington Cemetery, with rows and rows of small white crosses over graves, along with the words: “You are necessary.” 

Reagan’s meanness hit young people hard throughout his first term.  Most explicitly when it came to his huge tax cuts for the wealthy accompanied by an increase in military spending, all of which generated the need for cuts at home (and killing off any idea that the Republican Party worried about deficits).  This included slashing funds for school lunch programs and the declaration that “ketchup” could be deemed a “vegetable,” in order to make a thirty percent cut without scaring people about kids’ nutrition.  Facing criticism, Reagan, at first, figured the charge of caring more about the military than kids’ lunches came from bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture who hoped to embarrass him (what the right today would call the “deep state”).  But it was actually just Reagan’s worldview, which favored the wealthy and the military over kids living in poverty.  At the same time the school lunch program crisis hit, Jello Biafra, lead singer of the Bay Area band Dead Kennedys, released a compilation album showcasing the proliferation of punk bands—and from places like Arizona and Texas as much as San Francisco and L.A.  Pondering titles, Biafra came up with Let Them Eat Jellybeans (jellybeans were purported to be Reagan’s favorite food).  It could just as easily been entitled Let Them Eat Ketchup.

Some punks were discovering that Reagan governed via entertainment, that he couldn’t separate the two things. Consider when, in 1983, the president celebrated the Congressional Medal of Honor.  He suddenly broke into his memory bank, such as it was, and announced a posthumous Medal of Honor for a “young ball-turret gunner” who had lost control over his plane (Reagan narrated his story with suspense).  His commander supposedly counseled the young gunner and said, “Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.”  An inquisitive journalist covering the event thought this sounded strange, for how could there be a record of what was said by two men killed in battle without surviving witnesses?  The journalist Lars Erik Nelson searched for the original story and figured it was a memory of something Reagan read in Reader’s Digest or perhaps the 1944 movie A Wing and a Prayer.  Whatever, it showed that Reagan liked to live in his imagination and “dreams,” as he called them.  When asked about the whole episode, Reagan’s White House spokesman, Larry Speakes offered this: “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”  

Earlier in the year, one young female punk who called herself Nancy wrote a long critique of the 1980s ethos published in the leading punk publication, MAXIMUMROCKANDROLL (MRR).  She recoiled at unfair (and unproven) portraits of punks as violent and nihilistic on television shows – ChiPs and Quincy, the latter claiming that punk rock drove young kids to murder – and outlandish movies like Class of 1984, which depicted punk kids raping a pregnant woman.  For Nancy, these portrayals by the mainstream media showed off how the entertainment industry resorted to sensationalism and misrepresentation (her argument turned slightly conservative sounding here, the way “straight edge” and its rejection of sex and drugs sounded conservative to some).  She recollected how the music industry tanked in 1979-1980, and desperately searched for the next big thing.  For instance, for a short period of time music execs thought they found what they wanted in new wave, “skinny tie” bands, like the Knack, who, Nancy pointed out, celebrated underage sex with their 1979 hit song “Good Girls Don’t (But I Do),” which was about a “teenage sadness… you  know you can’t erase til she’s sitting on your face” (the band’s most famous song, “My Sharona,” had the line, “I always get it up, for the touch of the younger kind”).  Nancy intoned, “Now who would you say is corrupting the youth?”  As she saw it, anything and everything the entertainment industry offered was a quickie search for sensation and whatever satisfied the bottom line of music execs.  If there was nihilism anywhere, it was with those who sold whatever entertained.

So in reality, punk rock of the 1980s was not about nihilism or violence; it wasn’t just a bunch of Sid Vicious wannabes.  In part, it was a visceral hatred of a president who seemed old, mean, and not terribly smart (he gave very few press conferences and preferred campaign rallies for his speeches).  Who governed by celebrating whatever the music industry and Hollywood offered.  Who made things up and avoided follow-up questions.  Who was rightfully called the entertainer-in-chief.  Those punk kids, usually thought of as violent and nihilistic, were instead those who got angry with the musical fare offered and who went into their basements to create their own culture.  And who questioned a president who saw politics as a sales job.  Their voices and commiserations might just inform the times we’re living through now.   

Lin-Manuel Miranda and fellow "Hamilton" cast members Phillippa Soo, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Christopher Jackson perform at the White House, 2016.

This past Fourth of July, millions of Americans logged on to the new Disney + streaming service to watch the television debut of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, the Broadway hit and cultural sensation. The show didn’t disappoint: the singing, the dancing, the acting, the rapping, the dueling, yes, dueling—everything dazzled. It was also cathartic in a way. Watching the story of Alexander Hamilton’s rise and fall was a temporary reprieve from a year we’d all like to forget. Even more, the show’s diverse cast offers a hopeful message of a better America, even as that better America receives daily harangues from the highest halls of power. 

The show’s most poignant message, however, is perhaps its most subtle, for what threads the show together is a running reflection on how we tell our history—and who tells it. This recurring theme makes Hamilton more than a musical and even more than a work of historical fiction: it’s a powerful meditation on how we remember the past. 

First, consider the songs. Common refrains throughout the show alert the audience that they are not witnessing history per se, but rather the construction of history as we know it. Early, in “The Story of Tonight,” Hamilton and his friends sing We may not live to see our glory, but we will gladly join the fight/and when our children tell our story, they’ll tell the story of tonight—a reprisal that reappears over and over again at various points during the performance. Later, in the pointedly titled “History has its Eyes on You,” George Washington resigns himself to the fact that you have no control/ Who lives, or dies, or tells your story, an example of him battling the weight of history as much as any British army. Most explicitly, after being publicly humiliated by her husband’s infidelity, Hamilton’s wife Eliza sings I am erasing myself from the narrative/ let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart while she burns the love letters from their courtship—an archival trace that could redeem Hamilton’s misdeeds for all posterity. 

Moreover, the drama that pulls the show together is the tragic rivalry between Hamilton and Aaron Burr, a peer, colleague, and one-time friend. Yet what makes the story so gripping, so tragic, is that it’s a drama that works on two levels. On the surface, the Burr-Hamilton rivalry is a classic story of two men with much in common, except that one has what the other wants. Both are fathers, revolutionaries, and leaders. Hamilton is ambitious, relentless, bold, and decisive; Burr is reserved, coy, fickle, and more than a little mischievous. He is every bit Hamilton’s equal, yet it is Hamilton whose fame rises, which draws out Burr’s own ambitions. The climax comes when their rivalry boils over in the form of duel, and they both, curiously, act in ways more emblematic of the other: Burr becomes the bold one, shooting Hamilton, and Hamilton becomes the sly game player: Is this how you’ll remember me? What if this bullet is my legacy? What is a legacy? he asks as he fires a shot into the air. 

And with that, Hamilton sealed his place in history—which is why the story cuts so deep. Burr didn’t just kill an old friend and political rival; he acted unlike himself and, in a critical lapse in judgment, crystalized how posterity would remember him. He tells us in the penultimate song: 

Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints. It takes and it takes and it takes/ History obliterates. Every picture it paints it paints me in all my mistakes/ When Alexander aimed at the sky he might have been the first one to die, but I’m the one to pay for it/ I survived, but I paid for it/ Now I’m the villain in your history…

Hamilton, meanwhile, escaped into history marred, but unbroken. Even in death, he would rise alongside the nation. 

Yet neither Hamilton nor Burr get the last word. It’s Eliza who has the last song, and it’s her message that brings the story full circle. In a song entitled “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story,” she quite literally inserts herself back into the narrative—I insert myself back into the narrative—to give Hamilton what all his peers had the privilege of crafting for themselves: a legacy. Indeed, as Jefferson, Adams, Madison et. al. live out their last days sorting their affairs for those who will remember them, Eliza and her sister set to work combing through Hamilton’s writings, interviewing men who served with him, and finishing the work she expected of him. Eliza, in other words, ends the play by constructing Hamilton’s legacy—the legacy with which we remember him today. Her Hamilton is our Hamilton. 

Now, as admired as the show has become, it is not without its flaws. In an important essay, critic and public humanities scholar Lyra Monteiro points out that the show instantiates some of the worst of America’s cottage-industry history: despite featuring a diverse ensemble with people of color cast as founders like Washington and Jefferson, it’s still founders chic; it still erases people of color from the story by not seriously grappling with slavery; worse still was its ambiguous treatment of anti-slavery, which, in contrast to slavery, the show over-represented.  

These real criticisms aside, there’s an important message at the heart of Hamilton. It’s that history is all in how we tell it—indeed, all in how we remember it. It’s never static. It’s always changing. And in a moment in which Confederate monuments are finally coming down and we are re-thinking how we tell our history, Hamilton is a sign of hope. It’s a sign that while history is something we can never resign from, we can always enter the narrative and, like Eliza, construct a history of our own. 

The Berkshire Theater Company rehearses "Godspell" in Pittsfield, MA in preparation for an outdoor performance under COVID-19 precautions.

The show must go on…finally.

There has been no professional legitimate theater anywhere in America since early March, when the coronavirus hit and the nation's stages were shut down by Broadway producers, theater officials across the country and the Actors’ Equity Union. That shutdown lasted a few months and then was extended to next January. America was stageless. Two theaters, though, with the courage of Shakespeare’s greatest heroes, are flinging open their doors once more this week. And with history plays, too.

How will they do it in this pandemic world? They’ll do it thanks to the two state Governors, the Actors’ Equity national office, lots of planning, unique seating charts, masks, hand sanitizers and lots of outdoor fresh air.

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, at Drew University in Madison, N.J., is producing a double bill of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria Da Capo and Moliere’s The Love Doctor and, separately, Verily, Madly Thine, a series of Shakespeare scenes about the crazy things people do when they are in love. They are calling it Crazy Love! Millay’s play is a short one act anti-war play, written in 1920. Moliere’s farce, also about lovesick people, in France, was written in 1658 and was Moliere’s first play produced in front of King Louis IV, who adored it. The comedy was staged in the Louvre’s theater, since abandoned. It saved the reputation of Moliere, the author of School for Wives and Tartuffe.

The Berkshires Theater will stage Godspell outdoors under a tent behind its old Colonial Theater in Pittsfield. In New Jersey, the Shakespeare Theater will stage its repertory of plays outdoors on its great lawn. Both theaters require all patrons, staff and volunteers to wear masks throughout the entire performance, sit a good six feet away from each other in small seat clusters, restrain from using the rest rooms (yes, the outdoor ones we all know and love) or, as at Pittsfield, use every other stall and urinal and move everywhere in single, straight lines. Patrons in Pittsfield will have their temperatures checked.

The Shakespeare Theatre at Drew University will stage its plays on the Great Lawn at its Thomas H. Kean Theatre Factory in nearby Florham Park, not in its indoor theater at Drew (or its outdoor amphitheater across the street).

The theater’s Shrewd Mechanical Company, a group of eight non-Equity actors, will perform in both plays.  The company has lived in Madison in isolation in the same house for several months and been tested regularly for the virus.  

“We are one of the first companies to be bringing live theatre back to life.  Given the restraints that the pandemic has placed  on all of our lives and our normal activities, this little  announcement feels monumental, groundbreaking and thrilling – and under the circumstances it kind of is – certainly for us and we hope for you too!” said Bonnie Monte, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in a statement.

The Berkshires theater is staging the hit musical Godspell, which had its Off-Broadway debut in 1971, was revived several times on Broadway, and has been staged ever since all over the world. The musical, with music by Stephen Schwartz and book by John-Michael Tebelak, is based on the Gospel according to Matthew and has a rousing, roof rattling hit song, Day by Day.

The Berkshires theater officials wanted to stage their play outdoors.

“Everybody in this country is scared to go to a theater anywhere, so we thought holding the play outside, with special, limited seating (80), would make people less afraid to come to the theater,” said Nick Paleologos, the executive director of the Berkshire group.

It is working. Paleologos says tickets are selling briskly,

The Berkshire people had to battle with the Actor’s Equity Union to get the one exemption to stage a play. “It was a tough fight, but worth it,” said Paleologos.

He thinks his theater will be safe and his show a good one.

 “We wanted to do a really ‘feel good’ play to try to get people out of the doldrums of COVID,” said the executive director.

Godspell battles COVID directly. It is set in the “age of COVID” said Paleologos. The actors, always six to ten feet away from each other on stage, sometimes wear masks and even facial shields and protective costumes. 

There is another reason the theater is staging Godspell. “We want to remind the Berkshires, and the country, that the virus will be defeated and that in the meantime we must reclaim our lives and the arts is the way to do that,” said Paleologos

The problem with both shows, of course, is that they are being staged outdoors. Neither theater will be able to present indoor shows until the end of the year or beginning of 2021.

The Shakespeare theater plays start Thursday, July 30 and continue until August 9. Performances are at 7 p.m. with some 4:30 p.m. matinees. All tickets are $20. The Berkshire Festival Godspell opens August 6 and continues until September 4. Godspelltickets are $100.

  (Some states, such as Massachusetts, do permit plays to be staged indoors, but we currently do not know of any.)

Was Roy Cohn evil?  There seems to be a consensus that he was.   

That is at least what we learn from two recent films on New York City’s most notorious lawyer: Matt Tyrnauer’s 2019 documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” and Ivy Meeropol’s “Bully. Coward. Victim.  The Story of Roy Cohn,” just released last month on HBO.

A fixture of the New York political and social scene until his death from AIDS in 1986, Cohn made himself indispensable to some of the biggest movers and shakers of the late 20th century, including Joseph McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, members of the Genovese crime family, and Donald Trump.  A friend to the rich and famous, he was the bête noir of liberals and the left.  

As an assistant prosecutor in the espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Cohn illicitly lobbied trial judge Irving Kaufman to impose the death sentence, carried out by electrocution in June 1953.  Later (as we learn in Meeropol’s film), Cohn admitted to fellow lawyer Alan Dershowitz that he had helped frame Ethel Rosenberg by coaching false testimony from her brother David Greenglass, a miscarriage of justice later confirmed by Greenglass in a 60 Minutesinterview.  About using the courts to murder an innocent mother of two young children, Cohn had no more remorse than he had about not paying his income taxes.  “We framed guilty people,” he reportedly told Dershowitz.  To protégé Roger Stone he said, “…if I could have pulled the switch, I would have.” 

Cohn used the notoriety he achieved helping to execute the Rosenbergs and convict other accused Communists to land the coveted position of chief counsel to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in his notorious Congressional crusade against alleged communist infiltration of national government and the military.  Cohn’s constant presence at McCarthy’s side in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 earned him international fame, while at the same time crashing his political ambitions once McCarthy’s manic overreach brought censure from the public and the Senate. 

His history as a McCarthyite clung to Cohn like a cheap suit, but as he retreated home to New York City he made that suit a fashion statement, amping up his anticommunist rants and selling his legal services to anyone who needed a ruthless courtroom advocate with no compunction about twisting the truth.  His clients included mobsters, crooked politicians and Gotham’s worst powerbrokers, the city’s real estate titans, among them the young Trump, who at the time was turning his father’s outer-borough business into an international empire.  Cohn cherished his friendship with Trump, whom he defended in the 1970s against a federal suit for racial discrimination in housing.  Trump repaid that loyalty by pretending he didn’t know Cohn when the latter’s AIDS diagnosis hit the press.  Until, of course, he needed a truly ruthless advocate during the Russiagate crisis, when Trump’s long dead former personal fixer once again became “my Roy Cohn.”

The banality of “Cohn’s evil”

Many interviewees in both documentaries testify to Cohn’s “evil,” his social pathology, his lack of scruples, conscience or remorse, and his nearly innate criminality.   An unattributed voiceover sets the tone for Tyrnauer’s film from its opening scenes:  “Roy Cohn’s contempt for people, his contempt for the law was so evident on his face that if you were in his presence you knew you were in the presence of evil.”  According to former prosecutor and author, James Zirin on whom Tyrnauer relies heavily for background and color, “He was like a caged animal.  If you opened the door to the cage, he would come out and get you.”  

Meeropol’s film sets almost the same tone, though differently framed by her experience as the granddaughter of the Rosenbergs.  Interviewing very few of the same informants, Meeropol seems to come to the same conclusion.  John Klotz (a lawyer who investigated Cohn in the 1970s) declared, “Roy Cohn was one of the most evil presences in our society during most of my adult life.”  As Cohn’s cousin, journalist David Lloyd Marcus (who also appears in “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”), succinctly put it, Cohn was “the personification of evil.”

In cataloguing Cohn’s misdeeds, both films are precise and exhaustive.  They leave little doubt that this behavior resembles textbook examples of a personality disorder or social pathology.  A lawyer from Cohn’s firm could have been providing a profile to Psychology Today when he tells Tyrnauer that Cohn “knew no boundaries” and that “if you were on the right side of him, you were OK.  If you were on the wrong side of him, it was terrible.” According to Zirin, Cohn was “a personality in disarray.  A personality in anarchy, which had no rules, had no scruples.  It had no boundaries.”    

But as Cohn himself might declare, “what’s it to us?”  Why should we care about this psychologically crippled character? How was Cohn’s corruption and unscrupulousness so different from anyone else’s?  Isn’t the world Cohn inhabited, of socialites and their lawyers, of mobsters and real estate speculators, full of sociopaths and disordered personalities like Cohn’s?  It’s only if we think of Cohn as especially emblematic of the age that we spend so much time learning about his life.  

Tyrnauer only hints at a broader perspective that might have been useful in understanding Cohn as a historical figure.   “Roy was an evil produced by certain parts of the American culture,” writer Anne Roiphe (another Cohn relative) tells us.  But what parts?  “When you look at Cohn’s life,” the voice over opening Tyrnauer’s film intones, “you are shining a light on demagoguery, hypocrisy, and the darkest parts of the American psyche.” Tyrnauer cuts to scenes of Cohn with a young Donald Trump, Trump speaking and, at the end the montage, the scene of a violent attack on a black protester at a recent Trump rally. 

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother

Unfortunately, we don’t learn much from such juxtapositions.  Did Cohn create Trump?  Was he Trump avant la lettre, as New York Magazine columnist Frank Rich recently proposed?  Or did they have some origin in common?  As they strain to explain Cohn’s significance, both films get hung up on the notion that Cohn was “evil.”  Tyrnauer’s suffers the most, and “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” takes off from that assumption on a psychoanalytic tangent that is all too familiar: It was all about his mother. 

David and Gary Marcus, Cohn’s cousins on his mother’s side, recount the story of a Passover hosted by Dora Marcus Cohn at the family apartment, when a maid died preparing the Seder dinner.  Dora, Roy’s mother, hid the body and kept the incident a secret, until one of the children asked the traditional question, “why is this night different from every other night?”  Dora blurted out “Because there’s a dead maid in the kitchen.”  

Cousin Gary thought Dora was more troubled by the fact that the maid’s death had interrupted the Seder, “not that a life had been lost.” For David, this incident revealed the origins of Roy’s pathology: “That’s totally Roy’s spirit.  His lack of ethics, his lack of empathy.  That came from Dora.  For Roy, life was transactional.  It was all about connections and accruing power.”  

In Tyrnauer’s extensive picture of her, Dora, the homely rich Jewish daughter who at best could achieve a desperately arranged marriage, doted on her only son, holding him so close that he could not break free until her death.  Dora here seems blamed both for his homosexuality and his need to hide it.  And thus for Cohn’s “transactionalism” of corrupt exchange and manipulation, in which people were simultaneously shields against public scrutiny (as was lifelong friend, Barbara Walters, who reluctantly bearded for him) and instruments of power. 

But, wait.  What about the father?  We learn some things about Al Cohn, but not really enough.  Father Al bought his judgeship with money from his wife’s family in exchange for marrying Dora.  He then served the New York political machine for the rest of his long career on the bench, and put his son in contact with some of the biggest hitters of Tammany Hall, including Bronx political boss Edward J. Flynn, a slick Roosevelt loyalist who nonetheless helped Tammany run the city like a cashbox through the middle of the twentieth century.  Later, Cohn the younger maintained that close relation, serving Tammany stalwarts like party boss Carmine DeSapio, Brooklyn’s Meade Esposito, and Bronx party chair Stanley Friedman, who also joined Cohn’s law firm.  Cohn, like his father, was a creature of the machine. In a city run so “transactionally,” why do we even need to be talking about Dora?  

The father’s Tammany connections also help explain the son’s ardent anticommunism. The Bronx political machine, led not only by Flynn but also by its representatives in Albany, stood at the forefront of New York anticommunism during the 1930s, the “red decade.”  Bronx Democrats were responsible for some of the most repressive anticommunist legislation on the eve of World War II, long before the Cold War or any inkling of a Soviet threat to national security.  In March 1940, it was a Bronx Democrat, state Senator John Dunnigan, who launched the city’s Rapp-Coudert investigation of Communists in the public schools and municipal colleges, leading to the firing of several dozen and serving as a prelude to McCarthyism a decade later. 

Why did Tammany hate communists?  Throughout the 1930s, Communists in the teacher’s union and elsewhere effectively challenged Tammany control of city schools and agencies, a wrench in its patronage system rivalled only by reformers in Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s City Hall.  Clearly, not all Democrats were “liberal” like FDR, or like Roy Cohn claimed he once was, before he decided to support Republican Cold Warriors such as Reagan.    

Meeropol does a bit better in historically situating Cohn.  In contrast to Tyrnauer’s facile psychoanalysis, she traces Cohn’s evil back to his pivotal role in the Rosenberg case, though the history stops there.  Her film is not as slickly cut or scored as Tyrnauer’s, but Meeropol is more honest and insightful, as she continues the project of self-exploration through family history begun in her 2004 documentary on her grandparents’ case, “Heir to an Execution.”  This project, which includes extensive interviews with her father Michael, the elder of the two Rosenberg/Meeropol children (her uncle Robert is notably absent from this latest film), is valuable as history in its own right. 

Meeropol also provides a more nuanced picture of Cohn’s closeted homosexuality, which is at once public and repressed, as well as weirdly honest, dishonest and corrupting, all at the same time.  In this she follows the lead of Tony Kushner, whose play Angels in America figures prominently in her reconstruction of Cohn’s disturbed and disturbing life.  Like Kushner, Meeropol sees something convoluted and paradoxical about Cohn, even as he represents the worst of American culture.  “To call him ‘evil’ -- it’s true,” journalist Peter Manso tells her at one point.  “But it doesn’t explain a hundred other things about Roy Cohn.”   

That’s a good point.  But it would be nice to learn a few more of those hundred things.  More needs to be said about Cohn’s resemblance to and affinity for Trump, the historical roots of that “strain of evil,” as Rich puts it, in New York’s social register and political “favor bank.”  It’s not enough to justify our interest in Cohn merely by connecting him to Trump, as Tyrnauer does.  We need to know who and what enabled each of them to exist.  Many of those enablers are the same people.  Their story is worthy of yet another film.

“Awful” is not the most thoughtful way to begin a film review. But why mince words? The film’s “bloods” are four black Americans who have returned to Viet Nam to recover the remains of a fifth, their buddy Norman. If you took the storylines of Frances Ford Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now out of Bloods – yes, they even go upriver to strains of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries! – there is little originality left for filmmaker Spike Lee to claim; even its subplot of the four’s search for a buried chest of gold bars is plagiarized from 1999’s forgettable Gulf War adventure Three Kings. 

Bloods trots out every caricature of Viet Nam War figures that you can imagine, beginning with American veterans of the war. The image of traumatized veterans was a Hollywood staple even before PTSD was canonized in the 1980 DSM. The utility of the victim-veteran as a metaphor for the America victimized by the war made it political and filmic catnip from Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” years to Donald Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again.” You might think Spike Lee could leave it alone but no: when fireworks are thrown outside a bar in Ho Chi Minh City, all five “hit the deck.” Later, one of them randomly claims “we all have PTSD,” while still later another says, “We’re all broken.” 

But Viet Nam veterans were not all broken. Most returned quietly to their workplaces and schools like veterans of any other generation. Many others, politicized and empowered by their wartime experience, joined the antiwar movement. One of those, Chuck Searcy, returned to Viet Nam and founded Project Renew devoted to finding and defusing unexploded ordinance left behind by the American military in Quang Tri Province. Searcy is white. Maybe Lee has his bloods connecting with Searcy and redefining their mission—instead of searching for buried treasure, they search for buried landmines? Guess again.

Lee’s troop meets up with a group of backpackers in-country to do Project Renew-type work. The group’s leader is a whiter-than-white twenty-something woman, a scion of wealth reaped from what had been French Indochina—a riff from the 2001 Apocalypse Now Redux—who is irresistible to a son of one of the bloods who has (somehow, inexplicably) arrived in the jungle from Morehouse College. 

Bloods’ racial clichés are the film’s strongest through line. The bloods come across as foulmouthed and uninformed about the war as they probably were when they were sent to fight it; the veteran-father of the Morehouse College man is an absent presence in his son’s life; and with the exception of Otis, who takes time in Ho Chi Minh City to find the daughter he fathered back in the day, the bloods are as disdainful of the Vietnamese as many GIs were at the time. And the Vietnamese characters fit stereotypes too: some paramilitary guys looking like the hapless losers seen in most American movies (check); the one woman, a wartime prostitute (check). 

This awful movie is also dangerous. With one blood wearing a MAGA hat, the loss of the war is attributed to home-front betrayal—upon return, we were called “baby killers,” says one of the four. Republicans have been on a half-century campaign to avenge the treachery of the anti-war left, as they see it, and now is not the time to give credence to Trumpian revanchism as a promising course for Black Americans—or anyone.        

The one good reason for seeing Da 5 Bloods is to credential your advice to others that they don’t. 

"The Spirit" statue of Michael Jordan outside the United Center Arena, Chicago, in front of the remaining

portions of the demolished Chicago Stadium, 1995. Photo Danielmustain, CC BY-SA 4.0

There’s a scene in episode 1 of “The Last Dance” that reveals far more than it initially appears.

Near the end of the episode, a veteran Michael Jordan is among the most famous people in the world. Before a game in 1997, a wide-eyed reporter approaches him in the hallway for a short interview, to which Jordan acquiesces. The camera trails the reporter after his quick brush with fame. He is gushing, his face flustered, his eyes in disbelief that he shook Jordan’s hand. ‘Wow,’ his face seems to say. ‘I can’t believe I just interviewed Michael Jordan.’

The sentiment sums up “The Last Dance” rather neatly. The 10-episode film is the “Presidential Historian” of documentaries. A film that purports to reveal an ‘untold story’ is, in truth, a recitation of familiar plot points, packaged in tropes of presidential hagiography: palace intrigue, proximity to power, paying homage to greatness, and, in the end, being thankful for the existence of dominant alpha-males (and it is always males), whose superior character and talent lifts a population.

For the non-sports fans among us, “The Last Dance” is ESPN’s new documentary on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls. Divided into ten episodes, it has debuted during the covid-19 pandemic. 

The structure of “The Last Dance” unfolds like a Presidential biography. It opens with a carefully-framed, back-shot of Jordan in his palatial home, evoking a President in the Oval Office: silhouetted, pensive, the weight of the world on his shoulders.

We hear Jordan confirm the fulfilment of his own prophecy, an oration fit for a Commander-in-Chief. “If you remember in 1984 when they drafted Michael Jordan,” Jordan says of himself, “I said then when I got here that we’d be champions… Well, we’re a five-time champion going for six.”  

From there the film cascades into a wave of nostalgia, narrated by an all-male cast of sports aficionados: columnist Michael Wilbon, reporter J.A. Adande, broadcaster Bob Costas, reporter David Aldridge, sportswriter Rick Telander, and author Mark Vancil. We get confirmation of the Bulls’ celebrity status through their appearances on Oprah, Arsenio Hall, and the David Letterman show. Wilbon states that Jordan was the ultimate sports “alpha-male,” and we see female fans and small children shrieking each time Jordan is near, ooh-ing and aah-ing like John F. Kennedy fans during the 1960 Presidential campaign.

President Barack Obama even makes an appearance. Obama offers no insight into Jordan’s career; rather his presence is meant to impress us with how powerful a cast the film’s director, Jason Hehir, was able to assemble. Obama states that while living in Chicago he could not afford a ticket to Bulls’ games but that Jordan was someone everyone could “rally around.” President Bill Clinton makes a similar appearance in episode two, revealing equally little about Bulls forward Scottie Pippen, Jordan’s sidekick, who, like Clinton, happened to be from Arkansas—though Pippen grew up in poverty and attended Central Arkansas and Clinton went to Catholic school and attended Georgetown, Oxford and Yale.

We’re reminded throughout the series that Jordan, like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, was a man of exceptional character as well as talent. He worked harder than anyone else. He didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. He gambled, but always within his means. He kept his apartment neat. He wrote letters to his mother. Had he chopped down a cherry tree, he would have surely confessed to it. His destiny as savior of Chicago and the NBA was foretold by his work ethic—and not that he was fortunate enough to grow eight inches in high school. The genetic good fortune to be 6’6” enabled Jordan to earn a spot on the high school basketball team after he was cut the previous year for being only 5’10.” Had he never grown he may have worked at General Electric with his father.

The major plot points revolve around millionaires feeling disrespected. One millionaire, Scottie Pippen was upset that he was underpaid. Jordan, another millionaire, was upset that the general manager wanted to rebuild the team. Dennis Rodman, the eccentric millionaire, was at war with his own insecurities. The millionaire general manager felt slighted because he did not get enough credit. The palace intrigue feels lifted from any number of popular histories of presidents-in-crisis: aggrieved Senators angered at being disrespected by the President, disputes among rival Cabinet Secretaries, battered egos and personal grudges among Senior Advisors. All the while the media and the public circled outside, eager to participate in the unfolding drama. It’s essentially how broadcast media has covered the Trump Presidency.  

What makes the film possible is the fact that a camera crew followed the Bulls during the 1997-1998 season. Why they did so is never explained. Who made that decision? For what purpose? The source of the footage is never discussed. Yet this documentary could not exist without it, evidence of how the stories we tell today are dictated by preservation choices made in the past.

Also never discussed are the social and economic implications of major corporate entities run by white Americans exploiting the talent of young black athletes to spawn a global empire worth billions of dollars. The consequences of the NBA’s and Jordan’s ascendancy to worldwide influence are always assumed to be positive. Are they? Was the Jordan-led NBA complicit in ushering in the mass corporatization of sports? What were the consequences of poor children around the world enriching Nike each year by buying $200 sneakers? The documentary goes nowhere near these questions, choosing to stay within the comforts of palace intrigue and platitudinous dichotomies between “the business side of sports” and the “integrity of the game.”

On the matter of sources, for a global superstar in a city as diverse as Chicago, it is overwhelmingly men of a certain vintage that are invited to reflect on Jordan and the Bulls. There are no women interviewed in the first two episodes, with sportscasters Andrea Kremer and Hannah Storm making cameos in episodes 3 and 4. Carmen Electra is interviewed briefly as Dennis Rodman’s sex partner and claims to be oblivious to the larger dynamics. No one who is Hispanic-American nor Asian-Asian is shown on camera, nor is anyone from other countries or other major sports. Much like our Presidential cabinets of yore, this is an all-boys-club of media and basketball insiders making the case to each other how consequential their actions were in bending history. Arthur Schlesinger himself could not have scripted it any better. 

Presidential historians earn their prestige through access: access to Presidents, access to sources, access to power. To be able to eloquently chronicle the inner workings of the highest levels of government affords the writer his gravitas. Such is the case with this film: like the reporter in the hallway, the director clearly enjoys his access to sports royalty and the privileges associated with it. The unspoken pact is that powerful figures will grant access in exchange for the right to tell their version of events. Critical analysis is not part of the bargain. 

Perhaps “The Last Dance” is harmless since it is ‘just’ about sports. Yet the structure of the film reinforces a way of seeing and thinking about leadership that is distorting and limiting. The hype surrounding the film evinces how such “great man” theories of history (and it is always a man) still retain much potency in American culture. Embedded within these tomes are parables about male leadership, American fortitude, gumption, and grit. Rivalries and bruised egos make for entertaining plot points along the way. The conclusion is always the same, however, as it is in “The Last Dance”: Thank goodness we have alpha-males. Come, let us celebrate them.

The sudden firing this past February of Dan Didio as co-publisher of DC Comics continued a tumultuous era for the company. During Didio’s decade-long tenure, DC’s comic universe frantically churned through four separate reboots/rebrandings–“The New 52,” “DC You,” “DC Rebirth,” and “DC Universe”–with a fifth allegedly in the offing for later this year. A consistent feature of this hyperactive course correcting has been an explicitly stated intent of building stories and heroes that more fully reflect the diversity of their real-world readers. Such an emphasis appears likely to continue. Speaking in the aftermath of the corporate turnover, now sole Publisher Jim Lee promised an even brighter future grounded in superheroes who are “inclusive and diverse.” 

It might be easy to think of this impetus toward inclusion within comics as a fairly recent phenomenon. But understanding diversity as only a 21st century preoccupation shortchanges what comic books have (and have not) been doing since Superman first flew onto the scene in 1938. Superhero popular culture, in fact, has always been embedded within American racial attitudes, reflecting and even contributing to them in ways that have set the stage for how we continue to grapple with these matters in 2020, especially in revealing that goodwill is not sufficient, in and of itself, to fix our problems.

Self-conscious explorations of racial issues in American comics date most fully from the late 60s and early 70s, when creators turned in earnest to the idea that they might use their medium to help build a more egalitarian world. No creators better embody this turn towards what would be termed “relevancy” in comics than Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, the creative team that produced the much-lauded “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” series. Wanting, as he later wrote, to do his part in the movement for civil rights, O’Neil used his four-color pulpit starting in 1970 to explore a range of issues, including urban and rural poverty, industrial exploitation, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and teen drug addiction. Alongside these, O’Neil and Adams also addressed race as the heroes encountered not only African Americans and Native Americans, but also the discrimination and marginalization such persons of color confronted on a daily basis. 

However, O’Neil and Adams’s work – despite its undoubtedly good intentions – reflected the limits of the liberal imagination of its time. Postwar liberalism offered grand visions of racial equality and harmony, but too often imagined the obstacle to these goals as discrete, misguided individuals as opposed to systemic inequities within U.S. society. Such an understanding readily translated to the good guy/bad guy duality in comics, and so Green Lantern and Green Arrow regularly dealt with corrupt slumlords and businessmen while leaving intact – if not completely unacknowledged – the structural problems fomenting race-based discrimination and impoverishment. Too, the series often put the onus for change on nonwhites themselves, chiding them to, in essence, get their act together and/or accept benevolent white assistance, implicitly casting them as part of the problem rather than its victim.  

If 60s and 70s comics were hemmed in by the liberal ideology prevailing within U.S. society, 80s and 90s comics found themselves trapped by the problematic understandings inherent within what would become known as “multiculturalism.” Nowhere is this seen more fully than in the super teams that developed during this era and would seem ready-made to promote inclusion. It turns out, however, that they fell prey to the limits of multiculturalism itself, which too often traded in superficial forms of inclusion as well as a flattening of nonwhite persons into racialized caricatures.

On the comic book page, inclusion often meant adding one nonwhite – and most often, black – member to an otherwise all-white lineup. The lauded relaunch of DC’s “New Teen Titans” by writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez, for example, included the African American Cyborg as its only nonwhite member (setting aside, of course, the orange-skinned alien Starfire and green-skinned Changeling, neither of whom represent any real-world forms of racial difference). Other teams with wider-ranging diversity in their memberships traded in reductive stereotypes. The “Detroit-era” Justice League, for instance, added the Latino hero Vibe who spoke in a stilted dialect and came from “the street” as well as the African Vixen who was as much defined by her sexuality as her extranormal abilities. Even worse was DC’s “New Guardians,” an even greater conglomeration of stereotypical associations: an emotionless Japanese hero who was half human and half computer, a Chinese heroine with mystical abilities and an unrelenting sex drive, and a Latin American magician that likely could not have embodied more degrading stereotypes of homosexual men if his creators tried.

If looking back reveals signposts marking the ways in which comics have long evidenced Americans’ limited success in addressing race, we might then wonder what DC’s hyperactive – if not hyperreactive – rebooting of its heroes suggests about U.S. society, particularly as these reboots have been inextricably linked to inclusion. Certainly, it reveals some good-intentioned will to build something better. But such will, as in the past, does not guarantee a better world, and Americans, not unlike DC, still struggle to enact real reform. As DC struggles to find solutions that are anything more than feel-good bromides, Americans remain contradictorily caught between the pleasant fiction of what we claim – and have always claimed – that this country represents regarding diversity, and the unpleasant realities of a president who brags about building a wall along our southern border, a government agency that separates immigrant families, and police officers who brutally slay young men simply because they are black. The result is a kind of paralysis: We remain hemmed in by the disjunction between our lofty ideals and the disturbing realities that goodwill and talk are insufficient to resolve. Until such realities are acknowledged, real change is no more likely than the fairy-tale happy endings that comics so often promise.

Baron Wolman. Jimi Hendrix performs at Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, February 1, 1968.

Gelatin silver print. Iconic Images/Baron Wolman

You remember rock music promoter Bill Graham. Sometime in your life you read about him, saw his photo in a newspaper or magazine or went to one of the thousands of rock and roll shows he produced from coast to coast. Even if you never went to one of his rock shows, you were influenced somehow by his work. Regardless of your age, you were a witness to the legacy of Bill Graham. You may think you know all about him—friend of Mick Jagger, late night confidant of Bob Dylan, pal of Janis Joplin, discoverer of the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and Carlos Santana.

Whether you think you know all the details of Graham’s life and career, or know little, you will be dazzled by a mammoth and wildly pleasing new exhibit about his rich life, The Rock & Roll World of Impresario Bill Graham at the New York Historical Society (running February 14-August 23).  

The fun starts when you enter and they give you a headset. On the headset, for the one or two hours you spend at the exhibit you listen to some of the greatest rock and roll music ever played. You go from room to room to see, chronologically, Graham’s life as a promoter.

The Grajonca Family, Berlin, ca. 1938 Gelatin silver print Collection of David and Alex Graham 

Did you know that he was not a Bronx native, but was born in Berlin and spirited out of the country as a child in the 1930s by his mother (who would die at Auschwitz) as the Nazis took over, enduring a dangerous train and boat ride from Berlin to New York? Did you know that when he got to Lisbon on that journey, they asked him where he wanted to go to start a new life. He had no answer. “The United States?” an official said. “Yeah, sure,” he said and shrugged his shoulders. Thus was the legend born.

Graham’s love of music and promotion intrigued NYHS CEO Louise Mirrer, but so did his childhood. “Few know about Graham’s immigrant background and New York roots. We are proud to collaborate with our colleagues at the Skirball Cultural Center to present this exhibition in New York – Graham’s first American hometown—and to highlight his local experience. His rock and roll life was a pop cultural version of the American Dream,” she said.

That dream got started when he was the young manager for a street Mime Show. The performers got arrested and Graham staged a concert to raise bail. That was the beginning of a 40 years’ music career that ended suddenly when he died in a freak helicopter crash at the age of 60.

Graham started relatively small; tickets to one of his theaters the, Fillmore East, went for just $3.50 in 1970. In the late ‘60s, you could buy a Sunday afternoon show ticket at the Fillmore West in San Francisco for $1 and get to see the Grateful Dead, AND the Jefferson Airplane AND Carlos Santana. The enterprise grew, however. Graham put up 5,000 of those now-famous wild psychedelic posters in each city where he promoted a show and told the storekeepers that displayed the posters to keep them. The walls of the exhibit are covered with these posters featuring performers and friends such as Janis Joplin, Gracie Slick, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Etta James. Lenny Bruce, the Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana and Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs. Original copies of some of those posters today area worth several thousand dollars.

Sections of the exhibit tell the story of the Fillmore Auditoriums, East and West, and their short but eventful lives from 1968 to 1971, and of the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.

Visitors then pass through rooms telling the story of the huge, 50,000 seat arenas and upscale venues Graham booked for later shows. When Graham was looking for a theater to house a Grateful Dead concert in the 1970s, he turned down his own Fillmore, the Beacon, and Madison Square Garden to put the Dead onstage at Lincoln Center’s swanky, blue-blood Metropolitan Opera House (they sold out, quickly). 

Baron Wolman B.B. King backstage at Winterland Auditorium, San Francisco, December 8, 1967 Gelatin silver print Iconic Images/Baron Wolman 

Graham’s social activism is also represented. Visitors can learn of a show he staged to raise money for poor children’s school lunches in California, which drew 50,000 music fans, notably Willie Mays and Marlon Brando.  Graham’s concerts also introduced black blues and R&B musicians like Etta James to young white fans of rock groups they had influenced. Once, B.B. King came to him and said he saw a “bunch of long haired white people” on the ticket line. ” I think they booked us in the wrong place,” he said.

There is social relevance, such as Graham’s campaign to stop Ronald Reagan from visiting a cemetery in Germany where Nazi soldiers were buried and touching stories such as the hundreds of letters he was sent upon the closing of one of his venues. The exhibit also showcases Graham’s personal friendships with musicians. Sometimes these friendships were tested by business. Graham described his time managing the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane as “the longest year of my life.” There are delicious personal stories, such as his relationship to Bob Dylan. “We heard that Dylan wanted absolute quiet around him all day on the day of a show, so I ordered everybody in the theater not to talk to him. Later at night he comes to my office and says ‘why is nobody talking to me?’

Note from Donovan to Bill Graham, San Francisco, November 1967 Offset print with inscribed ink Collection of David and Alex Graham Photo by Robert Wedemeyer

The exhibit contains a wealth of visual and physical artifacts, including stage costumes and a dozen guitars played by musicians in Graham’s orbit. And there are walls full of the famous wildly colored psychedelic posters with all the writing that nobody could understand.  “The only thing anybody is going to understand in that poster is the asterisk,” Graham complained to one artist, who, of course paid no attention to him. 

Gibson Guitar Corporation 1959 Cherry Sunburst Gibson Les Paul played by Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers Band 

during live concert recording at Fillmore East; recorded: March 12–13, 1971

Collection of Galadrielle Allman Photo by Robert Wedemeyer

Graham was a gregarious, flamboyant man. Actor Peter Coyote said he “was a cross between Mother Theresa and Al Capone.” The promoter always knew that in the rock music world he was working with oddballs. “I always felt that someone had to relate to reality. That someone was me.”

Ken Friedman Bill Graham between takes during the filming of “A ’60s Reunion with Bill Graham: A Night at the Fillmore,” 

Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, 1986 Courtesy of Ken Friedman 

And he created a marvelous reality for tens of millions of music fans.

The new version of West Side Storythat opened in New York on Thursday is not your grandfather’s West Side Story. 

No finger snapping by the two street gangs involved in the fight for the streets of Manhattan’s West Side. No fire escape romances between Tony and Maria, the star crossed lovers. No recognizable scenes in a sprawling “America” song, the one that made Chita Rivera a superstar. No sense of the warfare between the Jets and the Sharks other than a lot of badmouthing and intense staring. No mentoring and friendship by Anita for young Maria, newly arrived from Puerto Rico. Anita is an urban barracuda. You’re far more afraid of her than both street gangs put together. Worst of all, no “I Feel Pretty,” the classic song that the director cut from the play. Yes, he cut “I Feel Pretty.”

All of those changes pale compared to the biggest change in the musical play, one of the best in theater history. The director has filmed the play and runs the film on a mammoth screen behind the actors while they play the scene. You see these tiny actors performing the real play and behind and from the stage floor way up to the heavens is this huge screen as big as the back theater wall, so high that airplanes fly past it. It is discombobulating. The movie runs through most of the show and dwarfs it You go to the theater to see a play, and you get a nearly two-hour movie. If I wanted t see the West Side Story movie, I’d turn on television and catch it – for free.

That is the ne colossal problem with the new West Side Story, that opened last week at New York’s Broadway Theater. The movie simply overwhelms the play and you watch the movie, not the play. The movie is the same as the play in front of it in some parts and entirely different in others. It has close up of the actors faces that are as big as the Empire State building and they scare you. The movie intrudes on the play, too. There is always a cameraman in the middle of the actors on stage, filming them for the movie that is running behind them.

I guess it is experimental theater, but it looks like a junior college Media 101 workshop staged badly.

The play has lost its focus and sense of history, too. The 1957 play, and very memorable 1961 movie told a rough tale about life in New York City in the 1950s, the era of the savage juvenile delinquents and the damage they caused and fear they struck in the heats of all. Two street gangs fight for supremacy while star crossed lovers try, in one night and one day, to find happiness. All goes badly. People get killed.

Little of that is in this movie, er, play. The two gangs do rumble and Tony does love Maria, but that’s about it. All of the fabled songs are in there, but there is little engaging story around them.

Some of the actors were injured during the long months of rehearsal. The man who plays Tony was out for a month with an injury. Another star was hurt so badly he had to leave the play and never came back. There were disputes between the various choreographers on the staging of the musical numbers. There were glitches here and there, troubles filming scenes three stories above the stage.

Director Ivo Van Hove (this is his first Broadway musical) worried that audience might not understand his daring new approach. He is right.

The acting, even though a bit exuberant, is fine. Director Hove gets good work from Isaac Powell as Tony, Amar Ramasar as Bernardo, Sheeren Pimentel as Maria, Yesenia Ayala as Anita,  Jacob Guzman as Chino, and Dan Oreskes as a candy store proprietor.

Oh, if you loved the music, it is all still enchanting and heart stopping. Maria will still bring tears to your eyes andTonight will get your heart racing. You will still chuckle at Gee, Officer Krupke. You will still shake your head in wonder at the score with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (Arthur Laurents marvelous book has been altered a bit). Something’s Coming is still wonderful and America, as current today as it was in 1957 with its troubled immigrants theme, is still enchanting, if you close your eyes and thin of Chita Rivera. Can the music save the show, though?

This West Side Story needs a lot of work from the east side, north side and south side, too,

PRODUCTION: The play is produced by Scott Rudin, others. Video Design: Luke Hall, Costumes:  An D’Huys,  Sound: Tom Gibbons,  Orchestration: Leonard Bernstein,  Sid Ramin, Irwin Kostal, Scenic Design and Lighting: Jan  Versweyveld, Choreography:  Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker ( based on the original work by Jerome Robbins). The play is directed by Ivo Van Hove. It has an open ended run.

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

From the end of World War I to the 1960s, several million African Americans in the South migrated to the North to escape the Jim Crow racism of the South and violent oppression by the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups. After World War I, too, there were thousands of new jobs for blue collar workers in northern cites. African Americans moved to a number of places, and New York City, particularly Harlem, became the new home for many of them. They were attracted by its culture, it unfolding literary scene and racial freedom, in addition to jobs. In the 1920s, they developed the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural era that has been shown in numerous plays, novels and movies. Harlem was home to the great bands and singers, plus noted writers.

Blues for an Alabama Sky, a new play by Pearl Cleage, tells the story of a handful of those people. It is a deep, rich play in which their stories are carried out against the cultural backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance. They are not part of it, just people who live on its perimeter, bystanders. It is an engrossing, poignant play that is a lesson in humanity – everybody’s. The play opened last night at The Theater Row, W. 42nd. Street and Ninth Avenue, in New York.

The plot is simple. It is the summer of 1930 and one of the Southern migrants, Angel, a female singer, can’t find work. Her best friend Guy, who lives with her and is gay, struggles, too. He is a fashion designer who just can’t sell what he thinks are wonderful new dresses. During the play, he is waiting for word on a large purchase from famed entertainer Josephine Baker in Paris. Their neighbor Delia finds love, we think, with a Doctor, Sam. All appears to be bliss for the newly arrived residents from the South, but there is trouble up ahead for all.

Angel is blinded by her new found love for a new man in her life, the tall, handsome, dashing Leland who just lost his wife and baby in the South. Guy’s big sales are delayed and delayed and delayed. Delia’s birth control clinic is shuttered. What will happen to them? Will their new found paradise in Harlem turn ugly? Will the Great Depression put them down, too, as it did most of the country?

Woven throughout the play are sub plots concerning a beating of Guy by neighborhood thugs who object to his lifestyle, the Doctors worries about his job, Delila’s struggle convincing the women of Harlem to use birth control falters and so does Angel’s on again – off again life in show business and men. The last boyfriend was a low-level mobster. Will they find happiness in Harlem as they so fervently believed?

What carries the play are the magnificent characters created by playwright Cleage. She starts right in with Angel, who at first appears to be very talented and very sweet and certain to soon be America’s valentine. Then she grows mischievous and deceitful and cold. Delia is one of those goody-two-shoes types that you want to hug all night. Doctor Sam is a saint, on the surface. Leland is a Prince, or is he?

Guy is one of the stage’s great characters. He is overly gay and just does not care who knows about it. He is funny, he is soft, he is tough. He is bold and bodacious. You just love this guy. You want him to sell his dresses and get out of New York and move to Paris, where life will be beautiful.     

Ms. Cleage has written a sterling play, and the end is far, far better than you expect, a real jolt.

In Blues for an Alabama Sky you learn a lot of history about Harlem and show business in black and white New York city in that era. The characters go to Small’s Paradise, that was, along with the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater, one of New York’s legendary entertainment spots. You earn a lot about Josephine Baker, the fabled American singer who moved to Paris and found a new life. You learn about soaring unemployment in the black community in the Depression, which was just as high, and in some places higher, than it was in the white community. You get to know the Mafia and how it spread its tentacles into the night life of Harlem, running everything from prostitution to the clubs to the numbers racket.

Director L.A. Williams has done a fine job of making what could have been an ordinary play very engaging and entertaining. He gets fine work from Jasminn Johnson as Delia, Sheldon Woodley as Sam, Khiry Walker as Leland, Alfie Fuller as Angel and, whoa baby,  John-Andrew Morrison as a sensational Guy.

PRODUCTION. The play is produced by the Keen Company. Sets: You-Shin Chen, Costumes: Asa Benally, Lighting: Oona Curley, Sound: Lindsay Jones. The play is directed by L.A. Willlams. It runs through March 14.

The late 1960s was the heyday of America’s sexual revolution and nowhere was it bigger than in California and nowhere in California was it wilder than in the bedrooms of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, two married couples who went to a sexual awareness seminar. There, they learned free love was the name of the game and plunged ahead.  Sexually energized, they dove under the sheets with anybody who was breathing.

Their fictional life became a hit movie in 1969, directed by Paul Mazursky. This fall was the 50th anniversary of the film and now The New Group, in New York, has turned it into a musical, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. If you saw the movie, you will love this play. If you did not see the movie, you will still love this play. It is uproariously funny and is an X-rated (sort of) look at what was a very new sexual atmosphere in America in 1969.

The play, that opened Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Theater on W. 42d Street, New York, is now a musical and Grammy winner Suzanne Vegas sings most of the songs as the “bandleader.” The songs are OK, but, frankly, there are too many of them. More dialogue would have been more useful.

The play, written by Jonathan Marc Sherman based on the movie script, starts when Bob, a film maker, goes to San Francisco to do some work and has an affair with a graduate student he met there. He is so proud of his sexual awakening with the girl, 24 to his 35, that he rushes home to tell his wife all about it. This is all right with her. She then begins an affair with her tennis club’s pro. This is perfectly OK with Bob (I don’t know about that.) 

After those two sexual adventures, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice slowly start to give each other the eye. Will the fearsome foursome swap partners?

This play about sex is very indecent without ever being indecent. The idea of sex is in your head right from the start, but there is no nudity or simulated sex, just a lot of suggestions.

What this is, really, is a romp. Pillows and sheets and well, other things, fly through the bedroom amid arguments between the four and a lot, and I mean a lot, of sexual tension.

This 50-year-old story unfolds as if it were written yesterday. The playwright has written a sharp, bold comedy laced with sexual antics that is genuinely funny.

Do these 1969 era sexual circuses still take place today? Sure, they do. There have been documentaries and magazine articles on them. Are they right now? Were they right in 1969? Who knows?

An interesting aspect of the play is that from time to time the actors pull audience members on to the stage and talk to them, or confess to them, or argue with them without the audience members speaking or acting. It is fascinating to watch the audience people react to the actors. They picked people out of the first row of seats. I was sitting in the second row. Thank God!

The strength of the play is that these friends remain so throughout the story and continually forgive each other for their transgression. There is an expression today, “friends with benefits.” That certainly would have applied to this quartet.

The director of the musical, Scott Elliott, must be given considerable credit. The play is set in a stage surrounded on three sides by the audience. Members of the audience are close enough to, well, touch a towel. Elliott’s genius is making the audience part of the play and yet a step back from the play. It works. He keeps the actors moving on and off the stage through the aisles at a brisk pace, towels flying. There is never a dull moment in the comedy.

Elliott gets fine performance from Bob (Joel Perez), Carol (Jennifer Damiano), Ted (Michael  Zegen), Alice (Ana Nogueira) and the singer (Suzanne Vega), plus Jamie Mohamedein. They are bold, brave and very funny. You are appalled by their sexual activity at first, but they grow on you and by the end of the play you see them is a soft, but rather unorthodox, light.

PRODUCTION:  The play is produced by The New Group. Music: Duncan Sheik and Amanda Green, Sets:  Derek McLane, Costumes: Jeff Mahshie, Lighting: Jeff Croiter, Sound: Jessica Paz, Musical staging: Kelly Devine. The play is directed by Scott Elliott. It runs through March 22.

A young solicitor in London gets an assignment to help organize the estate of Mrs. Alice Drablow, who has just passed away after living all of her life in a creepy, decrepit old mansion in Crythin Gifford, a small village in the British countryside. On his way to the home, he passes a cemetery with dozens of tombstones overturned. He thinks nothing of it until he reaches the house and finds himself in the middle of a sprawling ghost story, a tale in which the ghost, a woman with a ghastly face dressed all in black, rambles through the Drablow mansion, scaring the hell out of everybody who enters it.

The solicitor scoffs at the idea of a ghost because he, for one, does not believe in ghosts. Come on, ghosts? They are for the old black and white movies and weekends out in the countryside when the power goes out.

Something is drifting through that building, though, and the solicitor, who has left his fiancée back in London and is alone, needs to find out who it is and the terrible things the woman in black has done. This is the plot of Susan Hill’s chilling and mesmerizing play, Woman in Black, that just opened in the Club Car, a pub in the McKittrick Hotel on West 27th Street, in New York.

The play is a tale filled with unreal tension and suspense. Hill has written it as a slow-moving ghost story. The drama builds and builds towards an explosive conclusion that leaves everybody in the theater gasping. The play, full of Hill’s rich, extraordinarily descriptive language, grips you by the throat in the first ten minutes and does let you go until the end and all the dust has settled, and there is a lot of dust. It is this slow, ever tightening stranglehold that gives the play its mystery and power.

The terrifying and wondrous Woman in Black is an international hit. It has been running for thirty years at London’s Fortune Theater and has been staged in twelve different countries. It is currently on an American tour. You can see why it has been so successful for so long as soon as you take your seat in the Club Car at the McKittrick and the theater is plunged into darkness. 

Talk about history. This is a play staged in 2020 that was written in 1987 about an event that took place in 1927.

In England in 1927, is was standard procedure for  a solicitor to go over the papers of the deceased and to straighten out legal affairs. The solicitor starts to do this, with some help from an older man, ‘the actor,’ who plays several people in the story. The young I’m-not-scared-of-anyone solicitor starts to go through the estate papers when strange noises start to rumble through the haunted mansion. There are whooshes and bang-bang-bang sounds, knocking coming from somewhere and a number of yelps.  The solicitor’s head spins as the noises get louder and louder and more frequent. A man gives him a dog to bring with him on his Drablow mission and the dog runs off, pulling the solicitor into a deep fog on the vast meadow from which it appears he will never emerge. Someone is running behind closed doors and locking them. Someone is leading the solicitor around the house for no apparent reason.

What is the mystery of the Woman in Black? Is there a mystery at all? What did she do so long ago? What did someone do so long ago? Where, oh where, do all those screeches come from at midnight?

The director of the play, Robin Herford, should go back in time and get himself a job with the television series The Twilight Zone. His great skill is keeping the tension up as the play slowly moves forward. It is that slow drift of suspense that makes the play so good. He has mastered every single sound in the play, and the sounds hit you at exactly the right spot. The screams, especially, are dazzling. At one point after a long silence, the entire audience jumped out of its collective seat at a horrible heart stopping scream.

Herford gets fine performances from his two actors. Hill’s original 1987 play was adapted by Stephen Mallatratt. He changed its structure so that the young solicitor and older man play themselves as actors playing the characters in the real story and the characters in the real story at the same time. It gets confusing for a while, but then they blend in. The solicitor is played brilliantly by Ben Porter, who deliberately makes the audience think he wants to speed the play up, while he really wants to slow it down. He seems oblivious to danger and terror-proof at first but then, as time gets caught up in the horror.

The older man is played by David Acton, who had the role for several years in the London production. He is just as good as Porter, and particularly fine as he plays different people. He is never quite as frightened as the solicitor, and that makes the story even more terrifying. 

When I left the theater, I walked as fast as I could, nearly running, down the very dark W. 27th Street, scared of every shadow, shaking at the beep of every taxi horn. You never know who’s lurking in the dark, making those strange noises, do you?

PRODUCTION: The play is produced by the McKittrick Hotel and Emursive Productions, Set Design:  Michael Holt, Lighting: Anshuman Bhatia, Sound: Sebastian Frost. The play is directed by Robin Herford. It runs through March 8.

The recently released film “1917” is a cinematically stunning and dramatically riveting “war movie”.  I have no quibble with its receipt earlier this month of the Golden Globe award for best film of 2019 (albeit Quinton Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” a sort of anti-history of the Manson murders, is equally deserving).  But I want to argue here that it is so much more than a typical war-genre film.

Filmed from April through June last year on Britain’s Salisbury Plain (which reportedly upset conservationists, who feared the disturbance of undiscovered ancient-human remains), the film succeeds in placing us in the extensive trenches and corpse-strewn No-Man’s Land of the Western Front.

Of the latter, Leon Wolff, whose 1958 In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign is still the best book on its topic, writes, “The problem of terrain has bedeviled military commanders in Flanders throughout history…. For clay plus water equals mud --- not the chalky mud of the Somme battlefield to the south, but gluey, intolerable mud.”  Wolff quotes one officer, instructed to consolidate his advance position, as writing back to HQ, “It is impossible to consolidate porridge.” [1]

The film’s two protagonists’ trek across No-Man’s Land depicts this “gluey, intolerable” muck, punctuated by decaying men and horses, perfectly.  It also depicts, though not so obviously (and perhaps unintentionally), the abysmal stupidity with which warfare was still being conducted nearly three years after hostilities started in August 1914.

Wolff remarks, “In the fourth year of this war there occurred one of many military cataclysms:  The Third Battle of Ypres, often referred to as the Paschendaele campaign, or the 1917 Flanders offensive.”[2]  

Stalin said, “When one man dies, it’s a tragedy.  When a million die, it’s a statistic.” “1917” puts two human faces on the statistics of that year’s cataclysm.

Cataclysms, of course, were nothing new in the history of warfare, when World War I rolled around.  Also not new was the abysmal “wooden-headedness” of military leadership. Credit Barbara W. Tuchman for introducing this label in her 1984 book The March of Folly.[3]  Tuchman, who built her reputation on the First World War with The Guns of August[4]some two decades earlier, walks us through a series of military disasters from the Trojans’ acceptance of the wooden horse, through the Brits’ loss of the American colonies, to America’s Vietnam debacle. 

Still, for sheer stupidity, World War I arguably has no equal, either before or since.  The eminent English historian Martin Gilbert sums it up for us in his The First World War: A Complete History. “The destructiveness of the First World War, in terms of the number of soldiers killed, exceeded that of all other wars known to history.”  He approximates the total as 8,626,000.[5]  While World War II --- which some might characterize as a continuation and final resolution of WWI --- exceeded this figure in total human carnage (principally due to the extension of total war to civilian populations), eight-plus million remains a stunning figure.  It also remains a tragic figure in light of the technological innovations available literally at the fingertips of the generals who, time and again, threw the flower of their national manhood at the barbed wire and machine guns.

The Context of “1917”

Wolff observes, “The conflict which had exploded in 1914 was, it was felt at the time, fortunately going to be a short one…. [I]n the event, the unexpected power of the defensive… brusquely smashed the respective military schemes….”[6]  After the opponents crashed head on “like two mountain goats” in 1914, the Western Front solidified.  Still both sides clung to the dream that victory by the weight of men and artillery massed could win.  Iron will was rated higher than iron tanks.  “In 1916 Foch, under the continuing delusion that sheer will power could break through barbed wire and machine guns, further drained the life blood of France in vast, notorious battles….”[7]

Wolff goes on to tell us that 1917 would have been a good year to end the struggle.  Both sides were bled white and exhausted.  Instead, first the French and next the British launched new, abortive offensives.

By the time of the Third Battle of Ypres, Field Marshall Haig was again convinced that he could win… and he intended to win before the Americans arrived in force and stole his thunder.  And, although a few visionary leaders like Winston Churchill appreciated the value of tanks against barbed wire and machine guns, this weapon remained largely a novelty. Haig, himself a cavalry officer, clung to the view that his beloved horse soldiers would play a crucial role in his triumph; once the vaunted breakthrough occurred, they would pour through the gap and seize the day. Claims Wolff, “By 1917 Field Marshall Haig had lost not a particle of his optimism and self-esteem, though all his offensives to date had miscarried, the war was a stalemate, British casualties exceeded a million, and his fitness for command had become a known matter of debate….”[8]

This, then, is the context in which the protagonists of “1917” go off across No Man’s Land, carrying a typewritten message.  And, as I have said, the story is indeed an engaging one.  Still, no matter how one cheers for our side, no matter how we clutch the arms of our seats in our anxiety for their fate and that of the troops they are attempting to warn of impending disaster, when the theater’s lights go up, we are left with a gnawing suspicion that we’ve been had.  After all, it was 1917.  Wasn’t there an easier way?

Why not a wireless message?

At the film’s start, we are informed that those nasty Germans, as they retreated, unhelpfully cut all the telephone lines in the abandoned trenches. But wait.  What about wireless radio?  

In Intelligence in War, another eminent British military historian, John Keegan, writes, “Between 1897 and 1899…, Marconi so much improved his apparatus that by 1900 the British Admiralty had decided to adopt wireless as a principal means of communication….”[9]  Keegan added that wireless worked better at sea than on land for a variety of technical reasons.  However, he granted that laxity in the use of unencoded (“clear”) communications was a greater hindrance to effective wireless communication on the battlefield than was technical difficulty.[10]

As with the tank, so it was with the wireless radio.  Per Keegan, “During the years of static warfare…, neither wireless messaging nor interference played any significant part, since the available equipment was ill-adapted to trench conditions and most communication, both strategic and tactical, was conducted by hand-carried paper, as was traditional, or by telegraph or telephone.” (my emphasis) The technology was known. It was either available or readily adaptable.  It was the will to adapt that was missing.  And so our two young Tommies sally forth with a letter from General Erinmore (Colin Firth) to Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch), warning the latter that his impending attack would run straight into a deadly trap at the German’s Hindenburg Line.

Director Sam Mendes tells us at the film’s conclusion that the plot is based on stories related to him by his grandfather, Alfred Mendes, who was a Lance Corporal in WWI.  Keegan, as we see, confirms the veracity of the elder Mendes’s recollections of running messages.  

Then why not an airplane?

That said, my friend and colleague, Dr. Gregory J. W. Urwin, professor of history at Temple University, and himself a distinguished author on the history of warfare[11]and I have been speculating about the sheer lunacy of sending the two corporals (played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) off on their Quixotic mission.

Let us grant that wireless radio, like the armored tank, was a neglected technology. But why place the fate of Mackenzie’s two battalions (1600 men) in the hands of a couple of corporals afoot?  As Dr. Urwin opined to me, “[S]ince they knew the location of the 1600 troops in the two advanced battalions, send over one or more aircraft to drop containers.  Heck, you could have landed a plane on the ground that the regiment occupied to transmit the news.”

General Erinmore insists that Colonel Mackenzie read the message in front of witnesses, because Erinmore fears, with his blood up Mackenzie might ignore the order and proceed with his planned attack. But why not send an officer with the message in a biplane?  In fact, why not opt for redundancy (the hallmark of trench warfare) and send two planes?  We see plenty of aircraft in this film, reflecting that, in contrast to tanks, ‘aeroplanes’ were (to a limited degree at least) an accepted innovation on both sides. 

Airpower, admittedly, was in its infancy.  Pilots, similar to knights of old, fought one on one for control of the sky. Beyond scouting the enemy’s lines, they did little of real use to the war effort.  Bombing raids, which were the hallmarks of the Battle of Britain 20 years on, were novelties in WWI.  Still, the capacity of a biplane or two to get the message to Mackenzie seems beyond debate.

So, is Director Mendes’s tale no more than a contrivance for dramatic effect?

I don’t think so.  If one accepts his claim that he inherited his story from his granddad’s lips, and we also take Keegan at his word that the generals clung to the hand-carried message, then the yarn takes on the trappings of veracity.  Add into the mix the ample circumstantial evidence --- Haig clinging to his faith in cavalry, when early experiments with armored tanks had proven them efficacious, for example --- and “1917” is a microcosmic dramatization of Tuchman’s “wooden-headedness” thesis.

A cautionary tale for today?

The March of Folly’s finale is Vietnam. Just as the Germans learned from World War One and opened hostilities in 1938 with “blitzkrieg” (lightening war), the American military learned from its bloody humiliation in Southeast Asia. This was demonstrated in spades in Kuwait in 1991.  

But wooden-headedness, like all traits of human nature, is intractable. Assuming that Bush the Elder’s lightning war against Iraq was the appropriate template, Bush the Younger plunged us back into Iraq in 2003.  Seventeen years later, not only are we still there.  We may be only one more drone strike away from a new Middle East war. 

Viewed with one eye on this current context, “1917” can surmount its surface characterization as an exciting “war movie” to become an allegory. “As a literary device, an allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which a character, place or event is used to deliver a broader message about real-world issues and occurrences.”[12]  Instead of “1917,” let me propose the alternative title “The Allegory of the Wooden-headed,” with a suitable bow to the late, great Barbara Tuchman.

[1](New York: Time, Inc. edition, 1963) pages 122-23.

[2]Ibid. at xxxvi.

[3](New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1984) at p. 7 (“Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government.”)

[4](New York: The MacMillan Co., 1966)

[5]Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt & Company 1994) at pages 540-41.

[6]Wolff, op. cit., page 6.

[7]Ibid., page 9

[8]Ibid., page 53.

[9]John Keegan, Intelligence in War (New York: Random House 2004) at page 102.

[10]Ibid. at page 144.

[11]https://liberalarts.temple.edu/academics/faculty/urwingregory-j-w

[12]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory

The World War I movie 1917 starts out quickly. A British General tells two enlisted men, Private Schofield and Lance Corporal Blake, that two British battalions are marching into a trap set up by the Germans several miles away. The two men must reach the 1,600 men in the battalions – one man’s brother among them – and warn the soldiers to turn back. To get there, the duo must march in and out of trenches, survive No Man’s Land, undergo machine gun fire, avoid bombs, race through blazing buildings and continually test their own courage and fortitude.

It is a film on fire that emulates the world on fire back in Europe 1917. It is loud. It is tense. It is dramatic. It is terrific.

1917, that opened nationwide last week, produced by Dreamworks and directed by Sam Mendes, is one of those great war movies that comes out only once every generation or so (think Saving Private Ryan). It is also one of the few films about World War I, that always seems to run third in public interest behind World War II and the American Civil War.

There are numerous elements that make 1917 a classic war film, and classic film, period. First, the action is focused on just two men, at the start, and they have to win or lose in the effort to save the apparently domed battalions. Second, their route to the troops takes them through hell on earth, with numerous Biblical symbols (the air all around on fire, climbing over dozens of dead bodies to save their own lives). Third, the special effects are impressive, with airplanes, explosions long, long lines of men in trenches. Fourth, the film has numerous closeups of exhausted, wiped out soldiers, most of whom are panting from the fury of the battle.

The movie is a story within a story – the two men within the greater war. Director Mendes has fashioned the film so that you constantly cheer the two men on, praying that they make it but yet every moment of the film you think they might perish and shortly afterwards the 1,600 men they were sent to save.

There is no great cavalry charge up the hill here, like in so many westerns, no sterling oratorical speeches by Henry V at Agincourt, no General ridings a white horse waving a sword in the air. It is a war of the grunts, trying to just get home. World War II was a war of victory and considerable glory; World War I was a fight for survival. There are numerous references to the idea of survival and no real purpose to the conflict, to any conflict. One General tells a corporal that it doesn’t matter what today’s orders are – next week the high command will issue orders that are just the opposite. Men don’t think of victory and welcome home parades, just getting home in one piece.

The first half of the film is slow but has some just plain astonishing scene. In one, a troop transport truck gets bogged down in the mud and a dozen soldiers, pushing and grimacing, try to get it out and back on the road. All of the pain of war is told in their faces and their aching arms and legs. In another A German plane is shot down by two allied planes, hits the ground and slides directly at the two messengers and you are certain it is going to kill them.

There are dazzling cinematic scenes, such as long moments focused on soldiers in the trenches, vast wasteland of empty meadows except for a few lone bombed out farm houses, mud puddle after mud puddle. There are vast plains with just one single, tree, still standing in the middle of it. There is a poignant scene in which Schofield meets a young woman and her baby hiding out from everybody in a building. He is attracted to her but has to leave to evade the Germans who are constantly looking for him.

Much has been made of the one camera effect in the film. A single camera picks up the two soldier boys when they leave on their journey and follows them most of the way. You see everything through their eyes or with the camera in front of them, in their faces. The final scene of the movie, shot this way, is striking.

The one problem in the film, and it is in just about all war movies, is that it starts too slowly. Our two heroes march and march and march and little happens.

Then, all of a sudden, the whole world explodes around them, and around the audience.

We are off….

Director Mendes does a brilliant job on this film about a ghastly conflict that tore apart the world. He gets numerous fine performances from a strong ensemble of actors. The two stars of the film, Dean-Charles Chapman as Corporal Blake and George Mackay as Private Schofield, are superb and win you over from the fist shot of the story.

The movie won the Golden Globe for Best Movie and was nominated for Best Picture in the Oscars. It deserves the accolades.

Right after World War I ended, they all said that it was “the war to end all wars.” It sure did, didn’t it? 

Talene Monahon’s new play, How to Load a Musket, takes a deep, hard look at the re-enactors of two wars, the American Revolution and the Civil War. There is a lot of humor connected to the American Revolution, but when she turns her sights on the Civil War she fires away at the lives of the re-enactors, and their views of history and politics, with a blazing musket of her own. She hits most of her targets, too. This play at the E. 59th Street Theater, in New York, that opened Thursday, is a scorcher and the big parades and quaint campfires we have come to know and love fade off into the distance as the playwright fires away about what America I was really like, is like, and might be like in the future. It is a bare knuckled, no holds barred historical brawl on the race issue in 1861 and today, too. She charges that the race argument is about today, and not yesterday.

The play starts off in the office of the head of the Lexington, Massachusetts, re-enactment group and its lovable members. They are cute and charming. One George Washington re-enactor says that he is actually jealous of another George Washington re-enactor. The Americans who play British soldiers poke fun at themselves and a high-spirited middle-aged woman with a thick Boston accent giggles about the men she meets on the battlefield, and so do the man chuckle about the women. They all talk about how hard it is to meet people, but quite easy in the middle of a re enactor battle. They discuss at length at what a warm world they have created within the confines of the re enactor universe.

When the playwright moves to the Civil War, though, the three-cheers-for-the-red-white-and-blue atmosphere changes and the terrain sizzles with debates over the role of re-enactors and which America they represent. There is loud and pronounced verbal fisticuffs over the controversial tearing down and removal of Confederate monuments and what many African Americans might really feel about race back then, today and tomorrow morning.

This is an electrifying play that pulls no punches, a play that grabs your throat. It asks again and again, whose American was it in the past, and whose America is it today?

The playwright focuses much of the second half of the play on the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that was held to support far right political causes and to prevent the removal of statues of Confederate war heroes. There were KKK men and women in their white robes, far right sympathizers and dozens of Confederate flags flying in the breeze. The far-right people were opposed by hundreds of shouting counter protestors. Things got out of hand. One woman was killed and several people were injured. The confrontation, recalled again in the play, drew international attention. In the play, the re-enactors fear they’ll be attacked, too.

That incident then erupted into a national debate over racism and President Trump’s famous line that there were good people on both sides. He should have said there were bad people in the crowds. The line is repeated in the play.

The great grandson of a Confederate soldier says that what is happening in America with monument removals and name changes, is “historical genocide” and that liberals today are trying to seriously rewrite history and cutting the stories of brave Confederate heroes out of it. This is, he insinuates, denying a part of American heritage. This is, of course, a debate that has been raging for several years.

The Confederate great grandson notes that his family helped a post-Civil War newly freed slave family learn how to farm and take care of their home. America is not, he claims, just heroes and villains.

The play is more of a moving conversation and heated debate than it is either a comedy or drama. Ms. Monahon deftly turns it into a play, though, carrying you along in the trenches as the re-enactors debate their lives and their wars.

The playwright does step over the line a few times. She suggests that tomorrow morning the U.S. might plunge int a Civil War over race. That is highly doubtful. She has an African American character say that Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist. Oh, come on!

Jaki Bradley has done a fine job of directing this play. She has carefully woven dialogues and story to turn a serious debate into an engaging and rewarding play. All of the performers are superb in this drama. Bradley gets fine performances from Carolyn Braver, Ryan Spahn, Adam Chanler-Berat, Andy Taylor, David J. Cork, Lucy Taylor, Richard Topol and Nicole Villami.

This play is a bumpy night at the theater. If you go, regardless of your political persuasion – lock and load!

PRODUCTION: The play at the E. 59th Street Theaters is produced by the Less than Rent Theatre. Sets: Lawrence Moten, Lighting: Stacey Derosier, Sound: Jim Petty, Props:  Caitlyn Murphy, Costumes Heather McDevitt Barton. The drama is directed by Jaki Bradley. It runs through January 26. 

On Wednesday, the 29th annual New York Jewish Film Festival, a two week (January 15-28) cinematic celebration of Jewish life, kicks off at Lincoln Center’s Water Reade Theater, in New York, and serves as hope and inspiration to not just Jews, but everybody.

Given the attacks on Jews all over the country, the Jewish Film Festival, one of the oldest in the United States, could not have come at a better time.

Aviva Weintraub, the executive director of the festival that is sponsored by the New York Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said what has been happening against Jews in the nation over the last two months is “horrifying.” She said the goal of the festival each year is to “bring Jews together with each other and others” and said she is hopeful that will happen again this year. 

Discrimination and persecution, of course, are no strangers to Jews and the selectins of films from the festival reflects that.

The film festival starts with the upbeat Aulcie, a sports film about how basketball star Aulcie Perry was spotted playing basketball on a New York City playground tournament by a scout for the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team from Israel in 1976. He was signed and, despite personal problems, helped the Maccabi team win two separate European championships. He later converted to Judaism and became an Israeli citizen

The centerpiece of the film festival is the screening of the award winnings 1970 film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, director Vittorio De Sica’s movie about the struggles of the Jews in the World War II era in Italy, now celebrating its 50th anniversary. That Holocaust era film is joined by a new documentary, Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and Bravery in WW II, that tells the story of Jewish resistance to the Nazis throughout World War II in different countries.

“We chose The Garden of the Finzi-Continis because of its anniversary, but also because it is such as great film about the struggle of the Jews against the Nazis and because it is a beautiful and moving story,” said Ms. Weintraub. The film won 26 international awards in 1970, plus the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film.

Executive director Weintraub is equally proud of Four Winters. “The strength of the film is not just its story, but the inspiring story of each of the men and women, seniors now, who survived the Holocaust and, in the movie, describe what happened. It Is stirring,” said Ms. Weintraub. “You cannot see that documentary and not be moved by it.”

She said Four Winters is a factual and inspirational story of years of resistance against the Nazi regime. “It’s amazing to realize that the Jews and others resisted for that long,” she said.

The festival has always been popular. Weintraub chuckles when she thinks back on different years of the Festival. “We have hordes of people who literally camp out at Lincoln Center to catch as many films in the festival as they can,” she said. “It’s not surprising for someone to see several films. Many people come to Lincoln Center on their way home from work, or between shopping trips on weekends,” she said.

She and two others spend about a year winnowing down the films to 31 or 32 for each festival. “We look for films that represent history, politics and Jewish life. Each year the mix of movies is different, “ she added.

Some movies in this year’s festival represent the Holocaust. There is Birch Tree Meadow, a 2003 film that tells the story of a concentration camp survivor who returns to the camp years later to confront memory and the descendant of a Nazi guard. 

An Irrepressible Woman is the story of 1940s French Prime Minister Leon Blum, imprisoned at Buchenwald, and his love, Jeanne Reichenbach, who fell in love with him as a teenager, and risks her life to find him again.

There are cultural tales. The 1919 silent film Broken Barriers was the first film to tell some of the old Sholom Aleichem stories, that much later became world famous play and move Fiddler on the Roof.

Incitement is the complicated story of the lead up to the highly publicized assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. It tracks not only the murder, but the politics in the nation at the time.

God of the Piano is the story of a woman who is forced to meet high expectations by her father as a pianist. When she grows up, she places those same high expectation of her son but he is deaf. The story is the larger family conflict. 

The festival closes on a high note with the unification film Crescendo, the true story of how music conductor Eduard Sporck took over a joint Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra.  At first, he saw his job as the man to get all of the musicians to produce beautiful music, but he soon realized the harder job,  and the more rewarding job, was to get the children from the two opposing political sides to forget personal differences and to work together as a smoothly running musical group. 

It is 1934, at the height of the Depression, and an opera company in Cleveland is trying to make enough money to stay in business. The answer, its officials believe, is to bring in fabled Italian tenor Tito Merelli for a one-night concert. Merelli’s appearance is highly publicized and the theater is sold out. The opera company has a stage set. It has an orchestra. It has an audience. But it has no Merelli. He is missing.

In late afternoon, just a few hours before the performance, the distraught opera company’s manager takes a bold step. He will use Max, his assistant and an amateur tenor, to dress as the clown Pagliacci and do the show as Merelli. With all the makeup and man in disguise with a tenor’s voice, and also about the correct height and weight, who would know? What could possibly go wrong?

That’s where everything starts to collapse in this play set in 1934, Lend Me a Tenor, that opened last weekend at the Westchester Broadway Theater in Elmsford, N.Y. It is a wacky, crazy, upside down play by Ken Ludwig that has the audience roaring with laughter. This tenor can hit all the high notes and makes everybody laugh, too. He is his own opera company – if he can be found.

The fraudulent singer plan is in place, Max is ready for his fifteen minutes of fame and the audience is waiting, unaware of the deception. Then, unannounced, Tito Merelli arrives, as flamboyant as flamboyant can be, with his overly emotional, arm waving wife, Maria, who is always angry about something. He is ready to go on. Max is ready to go on. Who will go on? 

And then…………well, see the play.

Lend Me A Tenor is not only a hilarious show, well directed by Harry Bouvy, but a neat look back at how opera singers and other highly regarded performers toured the country in that era. Merelli lived when they left their homes in the U.S. or in Europe and went on tours of America or appeared in different cities at different times of the year. The play captures the physical details of the traveling star’s Depression life well.

Star tours were very common in the Depression, despite the sagging national economy, that hurt theaters and opera houses as badly as it hurt everything else. Bringing in a star for a one-night performance usually worked not only to put money in the opera house bank, but garner enormous attention for the opera company which translated to ticket sales for the company’s regular operas. Marian Anderson, the great singer, toured the U.S almost every year in the late 1930s, sometimes taking tours that lasted several months an included up to eighty concerts.  The big bands of the era - Duke Ellington, Glen Miller, the Dorseys - did the same thing, hitting the road early in the year and living out of suitcases for most of it. The casts of Broadway shows also traveled in that manner. There were always logistical problems- train breakdowns, snowstorms, ticket mix-ups, but, in general, the tours worked well.

Except for Tito Merelli.

He and his wife have enormous problems to combat when they finally do arrive in Cleveland (Tito’s main problem is his firecracker wife). How do you un-vanish? How does Max, bursting for a chance in the musical spotlight, cope with the fact what Tito is, in fact, in Cleveland? Or is he? Is anybody really in Cleveland?

In Lend Me A Tenor, the Cleveland Opera Company has rented a palatial, two room suites for Merelli and his wife, an adoring bell hop brings up their bags and the opera company’s manger treats him like visiting royalty. All of this is historically accurate. Performers arrived by plane or train, mostly, although some went by car. They ate well in the hotel’s restaurant, were given tours of the area ad introduced to dozens of artistic and municipal officials. Newspaper ads for Merelli would have been taken out for a week or more prior to the show. Hundreds of large, cardboard broadsides would have been put in store windows or nailed to trees and telephone poles. There might even have been a Tito Merelli Day (that is, if they could find Tito). 

Everything that show business people did to arrange an overnight stay and performance for a star like Morelli in 1934 was done year after year and became the backbone of the American Tour. It is the same way today although social media, television, emails and i-phones have modernized the tour. Tito Merelli would love the contemporary tour, if he could find it.

Director Bouvy, who pays such careful attention to the history of the play, has done a superb job with a talented cast of actors. He lets them all shine as a very group of the eccentric, egomaniacal show biz people we all know and love. The two stars of the show are Tito, played wonderfully and with great style by Joey Sorge, and Max, played equally well by J.D. Daw. In addition to them, Bouvy gets fine work from Molly McCaskill as Maggie, Max’ girlfriend, Philip Hoffman the opera manager, Kathy Voytko as Tito’s wife, Tregoney Sheperd as the doughty opera company board chair, Hannah Jane McMurray as a soprano, Sam Seferian as the bellhop and John Savatore as an assistant stage manager.

PRODUCTION: The play is produced by Westchester Broadway Theater. Sets: Steve Loftus, Costumes:  Keith Nielsen, Lighting: Andrew Gmoser, Sound: Mark Zuckerman . The play is directed by Harry Bouvy. It runs through January 26.