Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

They all starred in ‘Godspell.’ Then they became comedy legends.

The original Toronto cast included, from left, Avril Chown, Garber, Valda Aviks (in front), Radner, Gerry Salsberg, Short, Levy and Rudy Webb. (Stéphane Carret)

Published in The Washington Post [PDF]

They all still remember when Gilda Radner sang “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

It was the final callback auditions for a 1972 production of “Godspell,” and the Stephen Schwartz musical about ragtag, hippie disciples of Jesus was the most sought-after gig in Toronto, hot off its off-Broadway success the year before.

Eugene Levy sat in the auditorium near his college buddy Martin Short, whom he introduced to his friend Andrea Martin. Victor Garber brought a guitar. Paul Shaffer was there to accompany two auditioners on piano.

This improbable lineup of ambitious 20-somethings would all end up onstage at the June 1 opening night, before they became famous through Second City, “Saturday Night Live,” “SCTV,” movies, Broadway and more. For several, “Godspell” at the Royal Alexandra Theatre was their first major job, the moment that nudged their life’s trajectory toward show-business stardom. They formed relationships that have lasted 50 years — all while in a musical that is literally about exuberant comedic strangers learning to connect with one another.

At that callback, many felt bad for Radner, onstage in pigtails and singing a children’s tune. But the creators weren’t looking for polish. They were looking for raw talent. “It was the cutest thing in the world,” Shaffer says now, “but she knew exactly what she was doing.”

Many of them did not. This is an oral history of that production, in interviews that have been condensed for concision and clarity.

The best movies about isolation that speak to our moment

Published in The Washington Post

At the beginning of the movie “Room,” Jack wakes up in the shed where he’s spent every minute of his life in captivity, and greets his friends: “Good morning, Wardrobe. Good morning, TV. Good morning, Sink. Good morning, Toilet. Good morning, everyone.”

It’s hard not to feel like Jack these days, with our household objects becoming more familiar, especially through frequent 20-second meetups with our mutual acquaintance Sink.

Emma Donoghue, the writer of the movie and the original novel, researched how families survive hardships. “Creating your own routine, your own rituals, can help shape your time in a way that feels active and meaningful,” she says via email. “So doing laundry becomes an adventure.”

While virus movies such as “Contagion” and “Outbreak” speak directly to our time, movies in enclosed spaces, like “Room,” do so in more subtle ways. For many of us, staying at home is a privilege — the situation isn’t as extreme as a film plot. But even when movies confine characters far from home, on islands or in spaceships, they show shades of our present moment — our solitariness, our resiliency, our fear of what’s outside — and reveal how we might emerge from this pandemic transformed.

Many tight settings are harder to pull off than it appears. “Film is an outdoor medium, not an indoor medium,” says the screenwriting guru Robert McKee via phone from his Connecticut home. “The camera wants to move. The camera wants to go places physically that no other medium can.”

TV has become more cinematic recently, but its hallmark is the one-set sitcom. Theater is already a closed space. Novels are comfortable not only in rooms, but in minds. Movies beg for variety.

Still, enclosed spaces force screenwriters to get creative — and that can pay dividends. “If people are confined like that, the pressure that puts them under should crack them open in ways that nobody would see coming,” says McKee, to reveal “the truth of who people are and what they really think and really feel.”

Here are some movies that reveal a truth or two about our circumstances, starting with how we’re . . .

The unlikely greatness of ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’ 25 years later

At the Renaissance Theatre in Mansfield, Ohio, cast and crew gather for a panel before an Aug. 16 screening of “The Shawshank Redemption,” part of a weekend of events celebrating the film’s 25th anniversary. (Destination Mansfield/DRM Productions)

Published in The Washington Post

MANSFIELD, Ohio — In the lobby of the Renaissance Theatre, Justin Tedders lifts his T-shirt: A poster for “The Shawshank Redemption” is tattooed across his entire back. The movie’s phrase “Brooks was here” is just above his right butt cheek.

The 34-year-old from Barbourville, Ky., a loader at a Walmart distribution center, beat out other Shankheads to be second in line at a 25th-anniversary screening here two weeks ago, part of a three-day celebration in and around the prison where the movie was filmed. His obsession with movies is a safe way of channeling an “addictive personality,” he says, and any time he’s in trouble, he returns to “Shawshank.” “It’s given me a purpose,” he adds. “My back represents what it means to me. I can’t really tell you what it means. I can show you what it means.”

What does this movie mean? In its 25 years, as of next month, “Shawshank” has emerged as an unlikely entry in the contest for the most beloved movie of all time. It’s not a family saga like “The Godfather,” or a geopolitical romance like “Casablanca,” or a technical masterpiece like “Citizen Kane” — just a box-office also-ran about two prison friends. It’s too sappy, some might say. It’s too neat. It’s basically an all-male cast. It’s not quite at those other movies’ level, but it’s not quite not at their level, as it’s spent the last 11 years as the No. 1-rated movie on IMDb. It somehow found the right alchemy of hope and friendship and, of course, redemption — with an ending so cathartic that, yes, this story still requires a spoiler alert. And it’s moved fans to make pilgrimages to this town in Ohio that once pretended to be a town in Maine.

When writer-director Frank Darabont read the original Stephen King novella, “it felt like a perfect metaphor for every hardship I ever endured,” he recalls, standing outside the theater.

Unsatisfied: Meet the people who have some reservations about ‘Hamilton’

Published in The Washington Post [PDF]

After the final performance of “Hamilton” at the Kennedy Center last Sunday, Jim Barnett and Faye Elkins stood on the terrace overlooking the Potomac River. The couple, from Bethesda, had bought the tickets three days earlier, when they realized the show was about to end, spending $1,200 for the pair on StubHub.

I asked whether “Hamilton,” the groundbreaking musical by composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, had lived up to their expectations. They actually hadn’t talked about it yet. Elkins quickly said yes. But Barnett shifted his feet, turned his head, scrunched his face. He was preparing to disagree.

I imagine that’s a difficult thing to do. “Hamilton” has won Tony Awards, Olivier Awards, a Grammy, a Pulitzer Prize and the first Kennedy Center Honors ever given to a work of art and not a person. It has been hailed as a landmark for bringing hip-hop seamlessly into a Broadway musical, for its nontraditional casting of minorities as white Founding Fathers, and for its thrilling execution of the American origin story. Who are the few poor souls who don’t actually like this thing?

It’s hard enough to exit a theater and hear your spouse hail a work as brilliant and then look them in the eye and declare that they’re wrong. Imagine disputing thousands of fans, every possible awards-bestowing body and Michelle Obama. An aesthetic disagreement can often feel like a moral one.

How liberals are turning to ‘The West Wing’ in 2018

Published in The Washington Post [PDF]

Paul and Shirley Attryde drove from Durham, N.C., to Washington this spring for a live taping of “The West Wing Weekly,” a podcast about a TV series that ended 12 years ago. They stood on the Lincoln Theatre stairs before the show, watching audience members line up to meet hosts Hrishikesh Hirway and Josh Malina, who spend about an hour every week analyzing a single episode.

The Attrydes, both in their 40s, are apolitical, but still — these days, rewatching a show about idealistic wonks working for a Nobel Prize-winning economist president is “a little slice of heaven,” said Paul, wearing a gray “West Wing Weekly” sweatshirt. “It’s the president we all want but don’t have.”

“When you see so much partisanship and so much anger and hatred of politics right now,” Shirley added, “it’s refreshing to remember that maybe there are people behind the scenes that really are trying their best to work for the greater good.”

On the podcast, Hirway brings a fan’s passion and a critic’s rigor, while Malina, who played deputy communications director Will Bailey on “The West Wing,” is the comic relief. At the Lincoln Theatre, Malina trades insults with fellow former cast member (and frequent guest) Bradley Whitford as longtime Democratic operative Ron Klain chimes in with a real-world perspective.

“This is the closest I’m getting to the actual West Wing until 2021,” Klain said to audience cheers.

“The West Wing Weekly’s” guests have included Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and it sold out its five-city tour, from Boston to Dublin. Its popularity — an average of 1.3 million downloads a month — indicates just how much the NBC series still resonates, especially for those on the leftward side of the political spectrum.

See the rest of the story at the Washington Post's website.

 

Why does Hollywood keep equating beauty with virtue?

Published in The Washington Post [PDF]

Vail Reese is the world expert on movie characters’ skin conditions. The San Francisco dermatologist can tell you anything you want to know about scars, birthmarks, tattoos, Jon Hamm’s vitiligo and the Austin Powers adversary Fat Bastard’s extra nipples, a spoof of the same condition on Christopher Lee’s assassin in “The Man With the Golden Gun.”

For two decades, Reese’s website, Skinema, has chronicled these abnormalities, which, he argues, too often appear on villains. For instance, in the movie “Grease,” he writes, “Pretty boy Travolta . . . musically drag races . . . the extensively acne-scarred ‘Crater-face.’ ”

Reese sees how such conventions affect his own patients. “It’s not just, ‘Am I going to look pretty?’ ” he says. “It’s, ‘Are people going to judge me?’ ”

His work is a peek into how Hollywood equates classical beauty with virtue, from Disney romances to James Bond bad guys to comedians making fun of Stephen Bannon’s face. Despite some progress, movies and TV still lazily perpetuate a notion we no longer believe: that looks correlate with character. When many in Hollywood are fighting for greater diversity and against stereotypes of all kinds, should that fight include types of bodies and faces?

“It’s overdue,” says Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who wrote the 1999 book “Survival of the Prettiest.”

“Hollywood could do a lot to move us in a direction to widen our empathy and widen our notion of what is beautiful.”

‘Arrival,’ the latest political sci-fi film

 

Amy Adams's character tries to make contact with aliens in the Oscar-nominated “Arrival.” (Jan Thijs/Paramount Pictures)

 Published in The Washington Post

Amy Adams’s character in “Arrival” ascends on a vertical lift through a hole in the alien spacecraft, and gravity suddenly shifts sideways. When she finally sees the creatures, they’re behind glass, obscured by fog — looking like enormous black hands with seven fingers, purposefully designed by the filmmakers to be not-so-human.

Beyond the special-effects wizardry, the scene is a reminder that the word “alien” shares a root with the Latin “alius,” meaning “other.” The film, it turns out, is about overcoming divides not only between species, but also among nationalities, as Adams’s linguist character works with colleagues from China, Russia and other countries where the oblong ships have been parked to figure out the aliens’ pictographic language.

These themes in Denis Villeneuve’s film, nominated for best picture and seven other Oscars, became especially resonant after the election of a strongly America-first president in a deeply divided nation, and are even more so now, amid immigration crackdowns. And, as the film shows, science fiction has a knack for helping us sort out our feelings about those different from us.

See the rest of the story at the Washington Post's website.

I Saw A Christmas Carol in Eight Cities. Here's What I Learned

Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “A Q Brothers’ Christmas Carol” (Michael Brosilow)

Published in The Washington Post

Bud Miller, the miserly chief executive of Milweiser Brewing, sits in his office on Christmas Eve counting grains of corn.

“You would prefer I would empty my coffers to put in a fancy ‘malted barley’?” he bellows. “Beer is meant to be brewed on a mass scale with no objectionable flavors!”

But later that night, he’s visited by the Ghosts of Water, Grain, Hops and Yeast and eventually learns the true meaning of craft beer.

Such is the tale of “A Beer Carol,” a live radio play by the Chicago theater company Drinking & Writing. Three performers stand at microphones inside the Haymarket Pub and Brewery before an audience of 40, making sound effects by hitting bowls for church bells or blowing bubbles into water.

Chicago was one of eight stops in my recent journey from Pasadena, Calif. to Washington, D.C., seeing stage adaptations of “A Christmas Carol,” in an attempt to find the true meaning of the show about finding the true meaning of Christmas. I expected to see the ways this American ritual unites us around the universal themes of giving and forgiving, of lost love and second chances. But what stood out were the variations: the beer and hip-hop versions in Chicago, the one-woman production in Phoenix, the Memphis play “If Scrooge Was a Brother.” Though film, TV and the Internet still rule our daily lives, “A Christmas Carol” is the rare piece of popular culture that’s still experienced through a local lens.

All the World’s a Stage at WoW Festival

A tennis court version of "Three Sisters." Photo by Jim Carmody

Published in the Wall Street Journal 

A car, a garden path, a basketball court, a garage. Audiences at La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls Festival in San Diego last week weren’t short of venue options. Some watched Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” on a tennis court. Others experienced “Hurtling,” a performance designed for one audience member at a time, on the roof of the University of California San Diego’s engineering school.

Theater staged in the real world can be a jolting experience, but WoW Festival organizers hoped the unusual locations of its 22 site-specific shows would heighten the storytelling. “It’s getting people off this fact that they’re supposed to ‘get it.’ That there’s a singular idea,” said Liz Lerman, director of “Healing Wars,” a dance show that had audiences wander backstage before the show to witness vignettes set during the Civil War. “It’s truer to life.”

While immersive theater isn’t new, especially to Europeans, it’s been gaining steam in the U.S. over the past few years. The trend is influenced by shows like the New York hit “Sleep No More,” a mashup of “Macbeth” and Hitchcock in which audiences wear masks and follow performers around a Chelsea warehouse.

No, It's Not the "Second-Strongest Summer" at the Film Box Office

Published in L.A. Weekly

 

Last Tuesday's L.A. Times sported a front page headline claiming that 2015 is on track to be the “2nd-strongest summer” for film box office, with $4.4 billion. The verdict has since been repeated in a number of places, and the official tally has been pegged at $4.48 billion.

Unfortunately, as with a lot of film box office reporting, the claim does not account for inflation. The Times story mentions that another summer (2011) raked in $4.4 billion, but if you account for inflation then 2011 would pull ahead of 2015 ($4.4 billion is $4.67 billion in today's dollars). According to the The Hollywood Reporter, 2009 got $4.33 billion, which is $4.82 billion today. According to Deadline.com, 2007 saw at least $4 billion, which is $4.6 billion today, and 2004 saw $3.95 billion, which is $4.99 billion today.

A similar issue cropped up earlier this summer, with news stories touting Jurassic World as the no. 3 movie of all time domestically. But Box Office Mojo's inflation-adjusted list puts it at no. 23, below the original Jurassic Park at no. 16. An article in Forbes praises the hiring of Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow to helm the ninth Star Wars movie while citing the claim that Jurassic World's opening weekend set a record, but when you factor in inflation, it's actually no. 2, behind The Avengers.

Ignoring inflation makes it difficult to accurately gauge how healthy the industry is compared to past years and to determine the summer box office's impact on Hollywood companies' bottom lines. The people making and exhibiting the films have to account for inflation when dealing with costs, so why ignore it when the money comes in? (While box office observers often acknowledge movies' costs, sometimes they ignore them when they might be useful. For instance, were the summer movies of 2015 also the second-most costly of all time?)

Some might call this nitpicking. So what if the summer of 2015 slides a few places down in the list? But when the front page of the daily newspaper in the city Hollywood calls home touts this summer as the second-biggest ever, it's bound to make a lot of people feel all warm and fuzzy when they shouldn't.