In the present, where we first meet Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep in her Golden Globe-winning performance), she is mad and alone, hallucinating about her dead husband and nostalgic for her glory years as prime minister. Her extreme ambition in her political career led her to alienate everyone in her life, from her children that she never had time for to her colleagues whom she frequently berated without restraint. Of course, Streep nails her tics and affectations and gives us a glimpse at the three-dimensional character that the film dances around but never fully explores.

Read the rest at the Stanford Daily.

“West Side Story” is the epitome of what a good musical should be. It’s full of memorable songs, impressive dance numbers, and a poignant story to tie it all together. Leonard Bernstein composed the complex and enduring music with lyrics by Steven Sondheim, choreography reproduced from Jerome Robbins’s original work for the play and a story based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

It’s the Upper West Side in the 1950s, and our Romeo is Tony, an American and the former leader of the Jets. His Juliet is Maria, a Puerto Rican immigrant whose family belongs to the opposing street gang, the Sharks. The gangs hate each other based on principle and unshakeable racism. But when Tony (Ross Lekites) and Maria (Evy Ortiz) meet at the local dance, it’s inauspicious, color-blind love at first sight.

The story is told largely through song and dance. Bernstein’s music is a great challenge to sing: it requires a huge vocal range and the ability to master difficult syncopated rhythms and melodies with challenging intervals. Ross Lekites, as Tony, owns his musical part. He has a powerhouse voice with large and beautiful range that never becomes operatic. Every note is clear, with perfect pitch, allowing the music to shine to its fullest. Ortiz’s voice is meeker, by comparison, but full enough to get the message across. The rest of the cast does a fine job tackling this complex but rewarding material. Unlike many modern musicals, you will leave “West Side Story” humming the songs.

Between Stanford Jazz, Yoshi’s Jazz Clubs in San Francisco and Oakland, Zellerbach Hall and the San Francisco Jazz Festival, the Bay Area is a great place for jazz enthusiasts, and there’s much to look forward to in 2012. It’s one of the reasons why we can attract so many world-class artists who simply love playing the Bay Area.

Start the year off in San Francisco in the Fillmore jazz district at Yoshi’s, where you can catch trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s Quintet (Jan. 12–15), vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson (Jan. 20–21) and the great bassist Stanley Clarke with his fusion band (Jan. 26–28). Keep your eyes peeled for more great concerts at Yoshi’s. Head to Berkeley on Jan. 29 to see the great young jazz pianist Alfredo Rodriguez do a solo concert in the Wheeler Auditorium.

Read the rest of this preview of Jazz in the Bay Area at the Stanford Daily.

“The Good Wife”–Alicia Florrick finally kicks her husband out

In the last two years, we’ve watched her wade through so much chaos caused by her adulterous, philandering husband as she secretly pines for Will Gardiner. How empowering for her to finally stop being “the good wife” and give his undeserving ass the boot.

..and Peter Florrick teams up with Cary to declare war on Alicia
 It’s proof positive that Peter can be such an awful sleaze-bag, but it was terribly exciting to anticipate just how bitter and scary he could be and how destructive he might be to Alicia. We hate him for it, but we kind of love the show for having him go there.

-AH

Read the full article here.

“Songs of Mirth and Melancholy”–Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo

Jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis and pianist Joey Calderazzo’s much-anticipated duo album of original music is absolutely marvelous, with a mix of foot-tapping numbers like “One Way” and beautiful ballads like “The Bard Lachrymose.” The result is a wonderful album that shows off what a jazz duo is meant to do.

 

“33”–Alex Pangman

Canadian songstress Alex Pangman transports us back to the 1930s with her new album, “33”, full of songs almost exclusively from 1933 in celebration of her 33rd birthday. Pangman updates these old songs for a modern audience while still maintaining an authentic sound that’s true to the era. The albums includes songs like  “Happy As The Day Is Long,” “Shine” and “I Found A New Baby” that are so upbeat they’re sure to wake you up, get you smiling and get you on the dance floor. There are also several ballads to pull on your heartstrings like Pangman’s composition “As Lovely Lovers Do,” which sounds like it could have been written in the 1930s and “I Surrender Dear.”

The new Broadway musical, “Fela!,” has some fun dance numbers but is largely a disastrous, disconnected and misogynistic production about the life of Nigerian Afrobeat superstar and political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti. It takes place in the African Shrine, a nightclub in Nigeria where Fela (Sahr Ngaujah) is giving his final concert and telling his life story through the songs that he wrote.

“Fela!” delivers a glorious spectacle with impressive percussive afrobeats and delicious dancing, but the play is so desultory that if there is a message, it gets lost in the jumble. Without a coherent storyline, the production is disorienting. It doesn’t establish tone appropriately. The dance numbers are so vivacious, fun and sexual, that it’s unnerving when we hear excruciating details about how Fela’s wives were tortured in the second act: all signs in the first act pointed towards this being a generally light production.

Even when the production gets serious, it gets serious about characters who have never been developed and that we have never learned to care for: Fela’s wives are indistinguishable, scantily clad background dancers without personality, and his mother (Melanie Marshall) is treated as an idolized savior. While the atrocities committed against them are atrocious by any standards, the play lacks the poignancy that it could have had if any of them had been developed into more than clichés of the messianic mother and the whorish wives. The only character in the play with any development–and even that is shallow–is Fela, our obnoxious host.

“Fela!” is never fully able to create an emotional connection because the entirety of the story occurs in an isolated place–the African Shrine–and is guided by Fela, a largely isolated figure: we rarely see signs of the poor state of the world seeping into the Shrine. Most of the audience is not already well-versed in Nigerian history, making it difficult to guess at the important historical events that are occurring when the play is set. The play doesn’t even provide subtle hints of these. Without the outside world seeping into Fela’s world in the African Shrine, there is no context. And without context, it’s impossible to understand how the world is affecting Fela and how he is effecting change in it.

It’s not an impossible task to achieve this harmony between the story of Fela and his connection to that of Nigeria. Consider “Cabaret,” a play about people and politics, in many ways the predecessor to “Fela!”, where the emcee is our guide–here Fela is our emcee. In “Cabaret,” we get to know the characters well as three-dimensional, realistic people. The reason “Cabaret” is so heartbreaking and moving is that we get to see how the influence of the Nazis is slowly seeping into their world and impacting their lives: the merry singing and dancing is about active denial of the real world. In “Fela,” we can’t quite tell what the point of the singing and dancing is. Mostly, it comes off as shallow entertainment.

“Fela!” provides us with some jaw-dropping dance numbers, with impressively athletic vibrating and gyrating, set to some foot-tappingly good rhythms. But while it had the potential to deal with real issues, such as how and why Fela helped or tried to help his country, it settled instead for crowd-pleasing numbers that focus on sex and feces rather than on the problems Fela was famous for rebelling against.

Published in the Stanford Daily. Online version available here.

The New Italian Cinema festival focused on emerging filmmakers in Italy, many of whom were present to introduce their films and participate in a Q&A afterwards. The festival began with a retrospective of Daniele Luchetti’s films: Our Life, It’s Happening Tomorrow, and Ginger and Cinnamon. Most of the other directors were first time feature directors or relatively new directors: these aren’t just recent Italian films but films by new artists in Italian cinema.

Alessandro Aronodio’s first feature, One Life, Maybe Two, is a dark coming of age story about Matteo, a directionless young adult, who crashed into a parked police car when driving on a slippery road. Two stories play out simultaneously: one in which the crash happens and another in which he stops in time. In both realities, facets of Matteo are revealed, which are true of him in both realities: he’s lost, angry, and bored. The film often references Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, the story of another, younger, troubled youth who gets dealt an unfair set of cards.

Aronodio picks up on the running and water imagery from The 400 Blows, and uses them in his picture to show at once freedom and imprisonment. There is a beautiful ending in which Matteo meets himself at a protest – in one story he is a protester and in the other the riot police – which emphasizes how lost and fragmented Matteo is. These parallel stories so often feel like a weak plot device that we focus more on how the two stories play out differently than on the characters within them. Despite the two stories, Matteo remains largely a mystery: you often feel like you’re straining to find meaning where meaning doesn’t exist. Perhaps Aronodio should have consulted Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, as well, for that is a film that tells two parallel stories – one comedy and one tragedy-  and finds unexpected meaning in both from a device that never seems like gimmick.

Francesco Falaschi’s This World is For You is, on the surface, a light-hearted comedy about yet another directionless youth, Teo, who yearns to be a writer but is sidetracked by family problems, including his father’s debilitating illness, which lead to unexpected responsibilities. Look a little closer and you’ll find a lot of precious insights. On one level, there’s a story of a father and son desperately trying to communicate in a culture where they have never been on level ground, hurting each other as they fail, but somehow finding a balance. On another level, it’s the story of dealing with the realities of first love, where the object of Teo’s desire, Chiara, is a strong, independent woman, whose research on wine will ultimately lead her out of the country and put an expiration date on their relationship. It’s also the story of how the scatterbrained, ambitious Teo, who can’t figure out how to write something honest, comes at it unexpectedly, and finds a way to meet family expectations as well as those he has for himself.

This World is For You is full of humour without undermining the serious themes it deals with. Consider the scene where Teo meets Chiara. He orders cheap white wine and tries to pass it off as champagne to impress her; he discovers, instead, that she’s a wine connoisseur, and that only ignites their attraction. There are also some delightful sceneswhere Teo is fighting with writer’s block, including trying to find the perfect start to his story, and ends up copying out Tolstoy’s famous opener, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The humour is always entertaining but it also serves to underline just how young and naive Teo is by letting us laugh, gently, at his foibles. It’s easy to dismiss The World is For You as a shallow film, but beneath the light humour, there are a multitude of clever observations about families and the painful transition into adulthood.

Habemus Papam, which has been making positive waves on the festival circuit at Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival, was the much-hyped closing night film, and the only film by a truly seasoned actor-director, Nanni Moretti. Moretti’s film is sure-footed and mature, a clever, hilarious, and surprisingly gentle satire about the choosing of a new pope. It will be getting a theatrical release in 2012.

When the new pope, Melville (Michel Piccoli), is chosen, he suffers from stage fright, starts to hyperventilate, and absolutely refuses to make his first public address and appearance. Hijinks ensue. They bring a non-religious psychoanalyst (Nanni Moretti) to talk him through it, but locate their sessions in public, with all the cardinals looking in, and forbid the psychoanalyst from asking him questions about sex, his parents, and his childhood. They hold the psychoanalyst in the Vatican until the unveiling of the new pope, and in his boredom, he starts up a volleyball tournament between the cardinals, and divides them by continent: Oceania only has three players and complains but he insists “if you’re good to your people, God will give you a bigger team next year”.

While many great laughs are to be had, the film works so well as satire because of the way it humanizes Melville and the other cardinals. We see the cardinals in their quarters, playing solitaire, putting together puzzles, and taking their medication. We see the cardinals as regular people with regular whims and cravings: they are anxious to leave the Vatican and explore Rome while they have a chance, to get delicious cappuccinos and doughnuts from the outside.

And most importantly, we see Melville, terrified about the task he is being asked to perform for the church. He runs away from the Vatican and begins walking and exploring the streets of Rome, contemplating his doubts and trying to understand his place in the world. He saw a second psychoanalyst who did not know he was the pope, and when asked his profession, Melville responded that he is an actor. We discover that his youthful ambition was to be a professional actor, but only his sister had talent, so despite his love for Chekov – we see him recite part of The Seagull with a troupe of actors – he went into the clergy.

In a suit, losing his breath after too much walking, Melville looks like just another elderly man, and that’s exactly how he feels, ill-equipped for the post of pope. Melville is so realistic, so human, that it becomes hard for us and for him to see himself as this divinely holy figure. All this discussion of acting is not in vain, for when he is finally forced to take up his post, we see him dressing in his papal costume, preparing for the biggest performance of his life. In a way, the film suggests, he has gone into the theatre after all.

The key festivals of the Fall Season may be over, but the SFFS is still screening independent and foreign film at headquarters, and gearing up for its winter programming and the annual San Francisco International Film Festival in the spring. The film scene is alive and well in San Francisco.

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Abridged version was published in the Stanford Daily here.

My Afternoons with Marguerittecould have been manipulative and maudlin but it manages to mostly just be touching. It’s a simple story of a seemingly dim-witted but kind-hearted man, Germain (Gerard Depardieu) who, despite still living next door to his mother, has never felt loved by her. A chance encounter in the park while watching the pigeons with the radiant ninety-two year-old Margueritte (Giselle Casadisus) sparks the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Margueritte is educated and patient and she reads the classics of modern literature to Germain, starting with Camus’s “The Plague”, igniting his imagination and inviting him into a world of words and stories. Much of the plot is obvious and predictable: Germain finds a surrogate mother figure in Margueritte; she helps give him confidence; and he returns the favour.

We are a society becoming increasingly urbanized. Fifty percent of us already live in cities, and 75 percent of us will by 2050. Cities face significant challenges: sustainable urban mobility, maintaining green spaces while allowing development, recovering from natural disasters, ensuring good infrastructure and many more. Gary Hustwit’s film “Urbanized” touches on many of these topics to give a broad portrait of cities today by introducing us to some exciting projects happening around the world.

Read the rest at the Stanford Daily

Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Image courtesy of Stanford Lively Arts

If you think you know what dance is, Merce Cunningham’s Nearly 90² breaks so many rules that you might leave with a different opinion. I grew up on old Hollywood musicals, so to me, dance is an expression of emotion, often of romance, and a means of physicalizing music and rhythm. Nearly 90² violates all of these conventions, sometimes to great effect, creating unexpected patterns of movement, and sometimes just serving to alienate the audience.

The dancing is completely divorced from the music, if you can even call the rhythm-less noises music. Cunningham’s process is to choreograph without the music, putting the two components together only in the dress rehearsal. The ‘music’ acts more like background noise to fill the silence than to drive the movement, and it even changes slightly with each performance. John Cage, the composer, is famous for passing off noise as music, sometimes even gunshot noises, but this music was so innocuous, so unobtrusive that it was disappointingly conservative: I had expected to be shocked.

Yet despite the lack of rhythm in the music, the dance still remains somewhat rhythmic. In the first few dances, the movements may be a little robotic, full of controlled perpendicular motions – a bend at the hips, a leg raised at a right angle, arms raised away from the body at an exact right angle – but there’s a similarity in the pacing of these movements among the dancers. I get the sense that the dancers must be counting to something in their heads.

There’s also a strange but striking balance between movements that are in sync and out of sync. Sometimes two or more dancers will make identical movements, but these are staggered by a half-second: short enough that they don’t appear to be intentionally in a sequence, but long enough that, it almost seems like a mistake. It defies what I’ve come to consider good dancing technique: the ability to be precisely in time with others and reproduce the exact same timing every night. Other times, and only once we’re into the middle of the performance, identical movements are executed completely coordinated – what we normally expect from a group of dancers- and the conventionality of it is arresting because it’s so unlike what Nearly 90² has conditioned us to expect: the unexpected.

Since the dancing is unrelated to the music, this creates another sense of disorder: the dancing is not in time with the music, not that there is anything – rhythmically or harmonically – to match. There was only one moment when the music and the movement found harmony, albeit unexpected: the music crescendo-ed and gradually grew higher in pitch, one of the dancers slowly raised her leg up to ninety degrees, and it just so happened to correspond to the change in pitch and volume.

The closer you watch, as the performance progresses, the more order seems to appear among the disorder. There will be a trio where all three dancers twirl around in unison with an arm raised but they will each have slightly different arm movements or different degrees of extension of the arm. The more I became conscious of this order, the more I found its defiance of complete order beautiful and intellectually challenging: it created a richer, more complex landscape of movements to follow. You have to constantly ask yourself “Are the dancers moving as one? If so, how?”, and only rarely expect the answer to be “yes, in every way”.

Although following the movements is aesthetically pleasing and intellectually stimulating, the dancing is not emotionally involving, making it difficult to care what happens next or how. The dancers’ faces are always obscured by shadows, making it impossible for their facial expressions to guide our emotions, either by mimicking or contradicting their movements for dramatic effect.The dancers also rarely looked directly at the audience or at each other, denying us the kind of interaction which helps solicit an emotional response. Occasionally, a duo would touch, like a man wrapping his arms around a woman, from behind, and the touch would seem electric because it was so rare. Yet the couple would always detach so quickly, without looking at each other or avoiding looking at each other, that it would suck out all the potential emotion from the interaction.

The movements themselves also serve to dehumanize the dancers, creating a wall between them and the audience, preventing an emotional connection. Two or more bodies will contort and interlock, creating a jumble of limbs and body parts: they become bodies not people. There is even a number where two bodies are hoisted up by two other dancers each, holding them above their heads horizontally, as though at a funeral march.

Cunningham’s choreography seems to be about making magnificent shapes more than it is about creating human connection.The dancers aren’t given the opportunity for personalities and instead are difficult to tell apart, dressed in nearly identical solid-coloured leotards with only slight variations in stripes: you’ll notice I’m not using the names of dancers here because it was nearly impossible to keep track of who is who. It is ironic that in a piece where the individual is emphasized over the group – rarely are all dancers moving in the exact same way – the individuals themselves are indistinguishable.

Nearly 90² could not be further from the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies I grew up worshipping. While Astaire and Rogers dance their way into each other hearts, Cunningham’s dancers move gracefully and beautifully without detectable emotion or story. When Astaire and Rogers dance in Top Hat, it’s a celebration of the music, and their tap shoes are a percussion instrument enriching the rhythm and music. Cunningham’s dancers do move with grace and rhythm, but there is no rhythmic background that they are building on, no rhythm in Cage’s noise to accentuate. Yet programmed as I am to see Astaire and Rogers as the holy grail of dancing, I did not hate Nearly 90².

Nearly 90² offers a series of beautiful movements, like sculptures in motion; the beginning even has a series of tableaus that come to life and then freeze again. But there is no sense of story or progression either within the individual solos, duos, trios, quartets, sextets or from one number to the next. Without characters or emotional attachment, how can there be a sense of progress?  Even the noises had no shape, preventing the music from helping to drive the action.

You could walk into the performance at any time without missing anything, and walk out at any time, without feeling like you missed the ‘end’. It is not boring and it is hardly even repetitive, but without emotional investment, being trapped in a theater for eighty minutes, unable to move or talk or discuss what you’re seeing, can begin to feel like torture: you wonder whether your neighbour is seeing something in the dance that you don’t and you know that by the time you have the opportunity to ask, it will be too late to see it for yourself. When the end finally came, I did notice those robotic perpendicular motions from the beginning reappearing. I’m just not sure if I knew the end was near because of this or because I had been sneaking glances at my watch every ten minutes in the last half hour.