Monday, December 31, 2007

Year in Review/A Look Ahead

Arrivederci 2007!

Coming up in 2008: Reviews of the DVD POPEYE 1933-1938 and a biography of Walt Disney. My new year's resolution is to make a little more money so I can get out more On the Town.

With all the excess eating and traveling the past week I'm cheating and offering this
2007 in review:

Friday, December 21, 2007

Sweeney Todd: Comments on the Film Itself and in Relation to TOS

Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. I’ll only make comments and not a full review.

I can’t pretend I didn’t see the stage production as the best film critics do and simply look at the film in a vacuum. For example, the phrase, “Don’t I know you mister?” is repeated several times by a certain character in the play but used one time in the movie. It ruins the setup for the final scene.

There’s a major goof in the script: Mrs. Lovett tells Sweeney she was with his wife and tried to talk her out of taking poison. In a later scene, she’s making conversation and asks him what she looked like. Right there he should have known she was lying and been suspicious of her motives.

Judge Turpin has to be hideously unappealing. Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin is not. Maybe because I saw LOST IN TRANSLATION or DADDY LONG LEGS or have seen any number of Douglas/Z.-Jones-like marriages in Hollywood, I believed he had a shot at a hottie like Johanna. The judge is addicted to porn, like Jud in OKLAHOMA! But other than a little stubble on the judge’s face, director Burton didn’t show the terror that Johanna is supposed to have at the thought of being with the judge, her legal guardian. We might need a female director to empathically convey this revulsion.

I posted this on imdb today: I saw the original Sweeney Todd on Broadway and was genuinely shocked during the last scene when a character's true identity is revealed. Can imdb lead the way and show some respect for the story by editing the cast list to hide this point? This is the info that the production company has released for listings in reviews. I compare this to the cooperation that the producers of THE CRYING GAME encouraged when it debuted: Don't reveal the shock to your readers! This being a fan board, you all know what I'm referring to, but I'm thinking of the young fan whom will miss the emotional jolt that isn't a slit throat and a spurt of blood. In addition to this comment, let me add that I went back to my original Playbill and yes, the Cast did not give away this dual role.

Zaniness, simplemindedness, fey qualities: Mrs. Lovett lacks the first, Toby the second, and the Beadle the third in the movie.

MRS. LOVETT

Mrs. Lovett is as much a maniac and murderer as Todd but Helena Bonham Carter is directed to play it low key by Tim Burton. Her mild singing voice and inability to hold a note hurts her performance. Here is an example: if you don’t know the tune, read the lyrics of “Wait.” First read them normally. Then read them and hold the word “Wait” for 3 or 4 beats.

Don't you know,
Silly man?
Half the fun is to
Plan the plan!
All good things
Come to those who can
Wait.

There’s a world of difference, between singing “wait” in one beat and waiting for the word “wait” to end on a nicely-held note. You need a singer who can hold a note for this song.

TOBY

It could be that it was politically incorrect to play Toby as mentally challenged as in the play, so the movie made him a drinker who doesn’t get drunk. In the play Mrs. Lovett addresses him as “child,” because of his child-like mentality. The movie casts a real child, Ed Sanders, and he is excellent, particularly in the song standard, "Not While I’m Around.”

BEADLE BRAMFORD

His kooky “Parlor Songs” with Mrs. Lovett is not in the movie. Onstage I suspect it’s a delaying tactic for the crew to set up the final scene in the basement and give the lead singer a breather. On film you don’t need to kill time or let people rest. Plus, you need a screwball performance from Mrs. Lovett to pull it off and that’s not the concept this time.

In the play, Antony is told by Sweeney Todd in the opening scene that he will not long forget the young man who saved his life when they were shipmates. In the film, this is watered down to something like, “helping me get through” the voyage. I’m giving the gist, I can’t recall the exact line. Why would you want to water down this bond? Perhaps to show the soullessness of Todd?

THE UNBEARABLY INSANE JOY OF “Have a Little Priest”

This of course is what encores were made for and on stage it’s a riot. I recently saw Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou on You Tube do this at a charity event in L.A. The movie cuts this duet short, as it does several other numbers. Maybe double entendres don’t have the humor they used to have, or the bloodthirsty audience this movie is aimed at just wouldn’t appreciate this delay to getting back to the action.

An imdb poster named B_Crawley made this comment:

I watched the movie on the 18th with such high hopes. Burton, Depp, Carter, Rickman, Cohen... all with Sondheim's approval. It's gonna be great, right?
Sadly, to make a good movie musical (or at least a good Sweeney Todd movie musical) you need leads that can carry a tune. Cohen's Pirelli was great, Rickman's judge was good. Toby, Johanna, Anthony, all good. But my God, Depp and Carter were horrid. I'll even give Johnny an A for effort as he seemed to sing on key and hold some notes. . But Helena...I just don't know what to say.
I really wanted to like this movie. Now I just want to forget it was made
.

I replied:

Your review is what I wrote in my head without seeing it yet and I hope you're wrong but I have a feeling you're right. Yet without Johnny the movie never gets made, supposedly. Sondheim has never been happy with a film version of one of his shows and after the hype is done I wonder what he will say. Big CGI movies often suck humor and warmth out of source material, I'm thinking of LOTR and Superman Returns for example. Sweeney needs singers and comedians, like Bryn Terfel and Bette Midler, but in Hollywood he's a no name and she's too old. I'll see it today and if you're right, maybe we'll live long enough for this version to be forgotten and a great movie will be made.

It looks like Mr. Crawley was mostly right. Johnny Depp was not horrid as Sweeney Todd. He acted it like the great actor he is, but he’s just not the guy to sing this score.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Holiday Concert

We're taking a break from the usual today as One on the Town offers selections from a holiday concert by the Brooklyn College Chorale and Conservatory Orchestra. One of my own bairns is the blond young man in the center of the stage, to the right of the conductor.

We open with the closing of Leroy Anderson's Christmas Festival.




Next up: The Blessed Son of God from Hodie by Vaughn Williams.




The grand finale: (standing optional) the Hallelujah Chorus by George F. Handel.



I hope you enjoyed the selections from this free concert at Brooklyn College on December 13, 2007, made possible through the support of the New York City Council.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet

Born on a Blue Day is the bestselling autobiography of autistic savant Daniel Tammett, published in paperback by Free Press. The author is born and we learn he has synesthesia, a mixture of senses often resulting in alphanumerics taking on colors. Tammett also sees numbers as “shapes,…, textures, and motion.” This experience of numbers allows him to perform lightning-fast calculations. Synesthesia, he claims, also allows him to learn new languages quickly. Researchers believe that an epileptic seizure at age 4 “may have played an important role in making me the person I am today,” and he cites other geniuses who had epilepsy and similar feelings such as Dostoyevsky.

The savant side serves him well in school in math but the autistic side makes it difficult to have friends and mix in with other children in grades school. He creates an imaginary friend, a widow named Anne. He talks about everything with her and she reassures him that although he was different, he “would be fine.” One day she went away because she said, “she was dying.” Tammet writes,

Looking back, Anne was the personification of my feelings of loneliness and uncertainty. She was a product of that part of me that wanted to engage with my limitations and begin to break free from them. In letting go of her, I was making the painful decision to try to find my way in the wider world and to live in it.

Tammet is truly a genius. Woody Allen is still paying his analyst after 40 years and has yet to make this kind of breakthrough. Tammet does it at no cost and with profound insight into what holds any of us back from our achieving our dreams.

He begins to make friends and even fills in for a sick friend in the lead of SWEENEY TODD. He creates in his mind fictional histories of countries and an entire new language. Deciding to skip college because he’d “had enough of the classroom,” he’s accepted as a volunteer in a program that sends people to Lithuania to teach English. As a dividend he learns Lithuanian in return. Tammet starts a website, http://www.optimnem.co.uk/index.php, offering online language courses in French and Spanish using a technique he developed that is “intuitive and jargon-free.”

Tammet is clearly high-functioning in the autism spectrum. He’s developed a long-term relationship with a partner. The things that he thinks separate him from the average person are that he’s awkward in new social situations, he gets confused if a familiar rout or routine is changed, and, he’s a genius. By the end of the book he’s become an entrepreneur and world traveler, appearing on Letterman after learning pi to over 20,000 places. Tammet is doing very well.

The book gave me insight into what it’s like to be Daniel Tammet and his story is plainly written and interesting to read. Based on the stories I’ve heard from my wife, a social worker in a school for autistic children, this book does not describe what it’s like to be an average person with autism. The back cover copy claims that Tammet is “among people who have severe autistic disorders” but I disagree with that assessment of “severe.”

Tammet is in a best-case scenario for someone with autism: he’s high-functioning, has a loving family, and is a genius, if somewhat confused dealing with people socially. If you’re the parent of a child with a middle- to severe assessment of autism, this book might make you feel good for the author but won’t help you out much if you’re looking for a “how-to.”