Culture Watch

Judy Garland Goes Over the Rainbow in Powerful Play about the Show Biz Legend

by Bruce Chadwick

End of the RainbowBelasco Theater111 W. 44th StreetNew York, N.Y.A few days before I saw Tracie Bennett in End of the Rainbow, the new play about the last days of Judy Garland, I saw Garland, aged fifteen or so, in one of the old Andy Hardy movies on TV. A day later, I saw a clip of her in The Wizard of Oz. I was very ready for the bio-play.End of the Rainbow, which opened last week, is the sensational story of Garland’s tumultuous series of concerts in London in the winter of 1968, when everything went from bad to worse for the broken star. She tried to right her performing ship with a comebac at the Talk of the Town theater in London, but failed miserably. She's supported by her fiancée, Mickey Deans, and a fictional pianist. She took so many pills in the play that she even  swallowed pills she found in the pianist’s attaché case -- prescribed for his dog.

"The Great Gatsby" and the Roaring Twenties Are Back, Green Light and All, On Stages and Screens Near You

by Bruce Chadwick

The actors from the Elevator Repair Company have invaded New York’s Public Theater once again to stage Gatz, their unique version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of the jazz age, The Great Gatsby. Gatz won stellar reviews and several Obie (Off-Broadway) awards last year in a prior six week run at the Public. The Great Gatsby saga is not just at the Public Theater, though. Theater productions and new film version are popping up all over America, and the world, as people are falling in love with America’s best-dressed bootlegger and lost lothario all over again.There will be three more plays based on the book in England this year at Wilton’s Music Hall, the King’s Head Theater and the Noel Coward Theater. Francis Mayhew, artistic director of the Wilton, said that people today applaud “its description of hedonism and excess as people don’t realize they are headed towards terrible tragedy.”

Lenin, Joyce and the Dadaists in Zurich Together in 1917 in the at Times Brilliant and at Times Very Confusing "Travesties"

by Bruce Chadwick

TravestiesMcCarter TheaterPrinceton, NJIf you go to see the revival of Tom Stoppard’s comedy Travesties in Princeton, which opened Sunday, be prepared for a good forty-five minute wait in the first act before anything you see makes the slightest bit of sense. Hang in there, though, because this play about the fictional meetings between novelist James Joyce, revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the anti-war, pro-art Dada founder Tristan Tzara gets a lot better as it rambles on through its menagerie of comedy, drama, poems, rhymes, songs and even a semi-striptease by a prim and proper librarian.

History Resonates through the Lives of Families in "The Big Meal"

by Bruce Chadwick

The Big MealPlaywrights Horizon416 W. 42d StreetNew York, NYThe Big Meal, Dan LeFranc’s new play that just opened at Playwrights Horizon in New York, is the story of eighty or so years of one family’s history. The story is told in a series of encounters that take place around a collection of dinner tables in a restaurant. The "big meal" is the big tent of the family’s story and, decade by decade, reflects American history.At first, the restaurant setting seems unusual and so does the play, but after twenty minutes or so the drama builds and you are caught up in the story. The play moves along like a deep, wide river, the current pulling you farther and farther downstream. You can’t get away.

Was Shakespeare an Anti-Semite?

by Glenn Speer

Sometimes history and culture offer the best means to understanding literature—as James Shapiro proves in his superb book Shakespeare and the Jews.

Little Known World War II Court-Martial Gets Vibrant New Hearing

by Bruce Chadwick

Court-Martial at Fort DevensCastillo Theater543 W. 42d StreetNew York, N.Y.There is something about court-martials that produces great theater and film. Do you remember The Caine Mutiny, A Few Good Men, Breaker Morant, Paths of Glory, Mutiny on the Bounty? The court- martials of Benedict Arnold, Daniel Boone, Jackie Robinson, Billy Mitchell, George Armstrong Custer, Eddie Slovak, Lt. William Calley, the U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq?And, coming soon, the court-martial of Robert Bales for the alleged murder of sixteen civilians in Afghanistan last week.Court-martials have controversial central characters, good lawyers on both sides, a large panel of judges, media coverage and good drama. The trial takes place in a courtroom where everything is confined to a single chamber. An historic, controversial case makes for a good movie or play.Now a new court martial, an actual army trial lost in history, has taken its place alongside the better court martial dramas. Court Martial at Fort Devens , that opened last night, is a solid, impressive, yes sir/no sir military drama with superb acting, sharp direction. It resonates with history. It would make a terrific movie.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" at Fifty

by Thomas Doherty

A lot of movies are important and admired—the National Film Registry list is a testament to just that—but only a handful are truly beloved. At the mention of their titles, the eyes get all moist and faraway and the mind’s projector unspools favorite scenes, frame for frame, the dialogue verbatim. We admire the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. We get mushy over The Wizard of Oz, Shane, and E.T.To Kill A Mockingbird, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year, belongs in that rarified realm. Based on Harper Lee’s equally beloved novel, one of the few works of American literature high school students will read without a gun pointed to their heads, the Alan J. Pakula-produced, Robert Mulligan-directed, and Horton Foote-scripted adaptation is the perfect companion piece to the book, so in tune with the sensibility of Lee’s dappled prose, so evocative of the visionary gleam of childhood, that it shuts down all those dreary book-or-movie arguments: Atticus Finch is Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch.

Nuke York, New York

by Mick Broderick and Robert Jacobs

Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it […Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland. --President Truman, Personal Diary, July 18, 1945Collier's, 5 August 1950. Cover art by Chesley Bonestell.Introduction

Could HBO's "Game Change" Change the Game of Politics?

by Robert Brent Toplin

Occasionally a movie excites a lively discussion in American politics. The HBO movie Game Change has certainly sparked such a ruckus. The drama about Sarah Palin’s experiences in the 2008 election campaign provoked lots of debate in the national media because it depicted Palin as unprepared to campaign effectively, let alone serve as vice president or as president. Game Change delivered a shocking reminder of how close the nation came in 2008 to seating a poorly qualified person in a major leadership position.

"Damn Yankees" Musical about 1950s Hits Home Run

by Bruce Chadwick

Damn YankeesPaper Mill PlayhouseMillburn, NJThere have been a number of plays about sports history recently -- Lombardi and the upcoming Magic/Bird immediately spring to mind -- but way back in 1955 the theater was already chronicling sports in the irreverent musical Damn Yankees. It was the Faustian story of a middle-age man who sold his soul to the Devil in order to be young and strong and lead his beloved -- and terrible -- Washington Senators to a pennant, and the defeat of the seemingly invincible (and universally despised) New York Yankees.

Postcard from Potsdam: Frederick the Great Gets the Full Museum Treatment

by Kevin Kennedy

When visiting the graves of historical figures they admire, most people will lay flowers. But many visitors to Sanssouci, the summer home of Frederick the Great, place potatoes on the final resting place of Prussia’s best-known king. According to a recent poll, every twelfth German believes that Frederick introduced the potato into Germany, thus saving hundreds of thousands of people from starvation during the famines of the late eighteenth century. But the potato was here long before Frederick. He tried, with varying degrees of success, to persuade farmers to cultivate it, but he was only one of several German princes to do so. Still, the story of the “Potato King” endures, one of the many myths and legends that continue to surround Frederick’s memory in Germany. In an attempt to separate fact from fiction, the Prussian Palace and Parks Foundation is staging a monumental exhibit on the life, times and legacy of Frederick the Great. The exhibit is called Friederisko: “Frederick’s Risk.”

I Love Downton Abbey, Because the Granthams are (Essentially) My Ancestors

by Pearl Duncan

Downton Abbey is great television. Besides the drama, family conflicts, elegant Edwardian costumes, scene-stealing acting, and stratified class hierarchies of its upstairs/downstairs characters, the BBC import, written by Julian Fellowes, has a major dominant character at the center of the moral and historical conflicts: the fictional Downton Abbey itself, the real-life Highclere Castle in Hampshire. The human characters are also memorable: the scheming, speak-her-mind Lady Violet Crawley, grandmother and Dowager Countess of Grantham (Dame Maggie Smith); Sir Robert Crawley, Lord Grantham, the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville); Mr. Carson, the honorable butler (Jim Carter); John Bates, Sir Robert’s heroic valet, (Brendan Coyle), and the others. Their world is almost totally alien for most Americans (the largest self-identified ethnic group in the United States, according to the 2000 census are German Americans). But those who've dabbled in family history, and those who have done more serious genealogical research (like myself), may be surprised at how close to home Downton Abbey truly is.

"An Iliad" for the Ages Takes History Lovers Back to the Trojan Wars

by Bruce Chadwick

An IliadNew York Theatre Workshop79 E. Fourth StreetNew York, NYOne of the most thrilling adventures of all time is one of the earliest: Homer’s Iliad, the lengthy, heroic story of how the Greeks went to war with Troy around 1250 to bring back the beautiful Helen, wife of Spartan king Menelaus, who had been stolen away from him by the Trojan prince Paris. The Greeks, led by Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and aided by the world’s greatest warrior, Achilles, battled the Trojans for nine long years to recover her before finally conquering them with a trick –- Odysseus's legendary Trojan horse.Homer's epic poem has enchanted readers for millennia. (Not even Shakespeare can claim such longevity -- at least not yet.) With such an ancient provenance, you'd think there'd be no innovative way to yet again tell the tale, but playwright Lisa Peterson and actor Denis O'Hare have found one. Using the late Princeton classicist Robert Fagles's most recent translation of The Iliad, they've turned the 15,963-line, 24-book long poem into a one-man show. It's too gruelling of a performance for one actor, though, so O'Hare alternates performances with Stephen Spinella (who starred in the performance I attended). O'Hare/Spinella plays The Poet who punctuates the tale of the Iliad with references to our own time.

Albee’s 1980s "Lady from Dubuque" Gains Ground as a History Play in 2012

by Bruce Chadwick

Lady from DubuquePershing Square Signature Center480 W. 42d StreetNew York, N.Y.When Edward Albee’s play Lady from Dubuque first opened in New York in 1980, it was savaged by the critics, who did not understand it, and closed after just twelve performances, hardly enough time for the actresses in the story to get their hair done in either Dubuque or New York. The play sat in Albee’s drawer for a generation before being produced again in 2007 at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in London, and now at New York’s new Pershing Square Signature Center, where it opened Monday night.The play, starring stage veteran Jane Alexander, works much better now than it did when it opened because it offers a window into a now bygone era: the dawn of the '80s, a decade now just as much part of our cultural past as the '70s, '60s, and '50s. Albee added some dialogue about the Nixon administration for the London show, but dropped it here. It should have been retained. It added a nice backdrop to the post-Watergate America portrayed in Lady from Dubuque.

World War II Sailors Chase Victory—and Lots of Women—in 1944 New York

by Bruce Chadwick

Fancy Free New York City Ballet Lincoln Center New York, NYChoreographer Jerome Robbins took long walks through New York City in the autumn of 1943 and, unsurprisingly, the city was full of sailors: sailors on shore leave; sailors in training; sailors passing through; or sailors working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There were thousands of them, decked out in their sharp white uniforms, white hats and wide smiles.Why not a ballet about the sailors as they raised a little hell during the New York night in search of true love? (After all, they already have matching clothes!) Robbins went to his friend Leonard Bernstein, then a boyish composer of twenty-five, and asked him if he could write music for a ballet built around popular American music and dance, including the soft shoe shuffle, the boogie woogie, and the lindy hop. Bernstein smiled widely and handed Robbins a song he had written at the Russian Tea Room that very afternoon. The choreographer loved it. The pair went to work.

Will "The Help's" Oscar Revive Interest in "The Long Walk Home"?

by Peter Dreier

At this year's Oscars, The Help captured the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer) and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Viola Davis), and another Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain).If the success of The Help helps Americans understand the terrible times of Jim Crow and legal segregation, whets their appetites to learn more about the civil rights movement, or simply sensitizes people to the psychological costs of bigotry and the importance of treating people with respect regardless of race, it will have served an important social purpose. But I hope that the triumph of The Help at this year's Academy Awards will also draw attention to another film, The Long Walk Home, about African American maids enduring similar indignities, that is both more compelling and more realistic.

Galileo, the Earth, the Sun, the Catholic Church and Injustice

by Bruce Chadwick

Galileo Classic Stage Company 136 E. 13th St. New York, NYGalileo Galilei was a world-renowned Italian astronomer, mathematician and physicist of the seventeenth century. He discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter (appropriately known as the Galilean moons); he was one of the first observers of sunspots; he improved the telescope and the military compass; and he wrote several well-received books. The brilliant Galileo remains a legendary figure in science today.History does not remember him best for peering through a telescope and staring at the stars, though. It remembers his war with the Catholic Church over heliocentrism, the theory that the earth revolves around the sun. The Church, armed with two thousand years of religious and scholarly tradition and Biblical notations, steadfastly did not agree. The church made the scientist an outcast.Acclaimed playwright Bertolt Brecht (of The Threepenny Opera fame) took that battle and made it the focus of his 1922 play, Galileo. A revival of it, starring Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham, opened last Thursday at the Classic Stage Company in New York. It is a detailed and vigorous look at Galileo’s last eighteen years and his battles with Pope Urban VIII, the Jesuits and the Church over the earth/sun debate.

Antiwar Critics Forgotten on Oscar Night

by Adam Hochschild

Well in advance of the 2014 centennial of the beginning of “the war to end all wars,” the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play it’s based on is still packing in the crowds in New York and a second production is being readied to tour the country.

History Films Are Back at the Oscars

by Bruce Chadwick

William Faulkner famously wrote that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.” He was right. The past is not dead. It is alive and well and will be present in force at the Academy Awards next Sunday. A history film seems certain to win Best Picture. The big favorite is The Artist, the unique and much heralded black and white “silent” film about the history of Hollywood as seen through the story of a veteran actor and an ingénue in 1927. If it fails to capture the prize, though, almost every other nominee for Best Picture is a history film (excluding The Descendants and arguably Moneyball) is a history film: War Horse is Steven Spielberg’s World War I epic; Hugo is Martin Scorcese’s love letter to film pioneer Georges Méliès; Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s love letter to the Lost Generation in Paris; The Iron Lady features Meryl Streep in the titular role of Margaret Thatcher; The Help is set in the civil rights-era South; The Tree of Life is Terrence Malick’s ambitious experimental film which intercuts the story of a family in 1950s Texas with the origins of life on Earth; and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the adaptation of Jonathan Foer’s novel about 9/11’s effect on a young boy who lost his father in the attack.

If History is Any Judge, the History Movie is a Big Winner at Oscar Time

by Robert Brent Toplin

During much of the year, history-oriented movies do not command much attention from the cinema-loving public. In the summer, especially, audiences rush to see special effects-driven blockbusters. Moviegoers also embrace horror films, romantic comedies, and hyperviolent crime sagas. But when Oscar time rolls around, cinematic history is in vogue. Historical films compete strongly for the Academy Awards because they have gravitas. Filmmakers are able to enhance their standing as serious artists through involvement with them.Three qualities among many distinguish the historical film. First, these movies usually feature a strong moral theme. They draw our attention to oppression, prejudice, military aggression, and other problems. Chariots of Fire and Schindler’s List reminded audiences about anti-Semitism, and Driving Miss Daisy recalled racial prejudice in the South. Titanic had a lot to say about class prejudice, and it endorsed feminism.