Peter and the Starcatcher at CPT

Last night I got to see Peter and the Starcatcher, one of my favorite shows, at Centerpoint Legacy Theatre and it was so much fun!  This play tells the story of how a lonely and mistreated orphan boy becomes Peter Pan.  We learn how he gets his magical powers, how he arrives in Neverland, and how the inept pirate Black Stache becomes his arch-nemesis Captain Hook. What I absolutely love about this show is that it takes place on a minimal set and uses everyday objects as props so it requires you to use your imagination just like the lost boys. You must be willing to believe ("Clap if you believe") that stars fall from the sky and give people magical powers, such as turning the male ensemble into dancing mermaids. There were people around me who didn't quite understand what was going on but I think the script is so clever and I was laughing out loud from beginning to end! The entire cast is fantastic with many of the actors playing multiple roles. I particularly enjoyed Jason Shumate as Peter Pan because his characterization was a lot angrier than I have seen before and I think it really worked. I always love the character of Molly Astor because she is such a strong and independent girl but I think Emma Kate Leishman imbued her with a bit of vulnerability and she had great chemistry with Shumate. I also really enjoyed Logan Stacey as the alteration-loving Mrs. Bumbrake because he was completely over-the-top! However, as always, my very favorite character is Black Stache (a misunderstood poet at heart who only wants to find a hero to defeat so that he can become a memorable villain) and Brandon Green stole the show with his incredibly flamboyant antics! He brought a lot of physicality to the role and I especially loved it every time he would roll himself on to a different level of the stage. His facial expressions were absolutely hilarious (I was sitting on the font row) and his ad-libbed remarks had me laughing so hard (sometimes I was the only one laughing). The minimal set consisted of several pieces which could be moved around to become various locations on two different ships as well as various locations on an island, the costumes were very clever (especially the aforementioned mermaid costumes), and the props were a lot of fun (particularly the life-preservers and lanterns used to represent the crocodile). It amazes me to think that CPT is a community theatre with a minimal budget because this is one of the best productions of Peter and the Starcatcher that I have ever seen. I highly recommend getting a ticket (go here) to this clever and imaginative show.

Dear Edward

Last night I went to a meeting of my book club to discuss this month's selection, Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano. Because I was really sick in the middle of January and then busy with the Sundance Film Festival I didn't actually start reading this until a few days ago but, once I started, I couldn't put it down and I became completely absorbed in Edward's story. Twelve year old Edward Adler boards a plane from Newark to Los Angeles with his parents, his older brother Jordan, and 183 other passengers. When the plane crashes in Colorado, Edward is the only survivor and is taken in by his mother's sister Lacey and her husband John who have had their own heartbreak. He must deal with the devastating loss of his family, the fact that he has become a figure of national interest, and the well-meaning attempts of his aunt and uncle to shield him from anything that might upset him.  Ultimately, he must come to terms with what happened to him and find a way to live again. The narrative alternates between Edward's perspective after the crash and the perspectives of several passengers during the flight leading up to the crash. This device is incredibly effective because part of what keeps Edward from moving on is his refusal to think about the moments leading up to the crash. The crash actually happens just when Edward is forced to remember it when he gets a letter from one of the first responders. It was also really effective to have all of the passengers spend most of their time during the flight thinking about what they are going to do once they land in Los Angeles not knowing that their lives are about to end and that they won't have the time to do all of those things. Living in the moment is an important theme of the novel and something that Edward must embrace to move forward. As always, we had some great discussions! We talked about the fact that Edward's aunt and uncle try to shield him from anything relating to the crash and they keep the letters that the family members of the victims send him hidden away. It is just human nature to want to protect someone you love from pain but it is the letters that give him a connection to the other passengers and his decision to help the families anonymously gives him the motivation to live again. We also had a great discussion about Edward's relationship with his next door neighbor Shay because, throughout the novel, is appears that she is saving him from despair but at the end of the novel she tells him that he has saved her.  Our facilitator mentioned that our discussion was really depressing but all of us felt that the book was incredibly uplifting and hopeful.  I found it to be a beautiful and moving story about resilience and I highly recommend it.

Note:  Next month's selection is American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. Apparently there is a bit of controversy surrounding this book so it will definitely be interesting to read.  Go here for more information about the Barnes & Noble book club and to sign up at a location near you.  As always, if you are local, join us at the Layton Barnes & Noble on March 10.  We have a small group but we are lots of fun.

Sundance Film Festival 2020

The 2020 Sundance Film Festival has concluded and, even though I am incredibly sleep deprived, I had such a great time!  I was able to see 16 films in 10 days at five different venues and I really enjoyed all of them.  My first film was The Perfect Candidate which was filmed in Saudi Arabia.  Despite many restrictions on her freedom, a young woman (Mila Alzahrani) practices as a doctor in a small clinic but access is difficult because the dirt road leading to it frequently floods.  She tries to get the road paved but no one pays attention to her.  When she accidentally signs up to run in a municipal election, she decides to pursue it, against all odds, in order to get the road paved but, instead, she earns the respect of everyone in her life.  I thought this film was a very charming story of female empowerment and I really enjoyed the amusing scenes where her sisters help her with her campaign.  My second film was Worth which is a true story about the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.  Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton) is a powerful New York lawyer tasked with assigning a value on the lives lost in the 9/11 terror attacks for compensation purposes to keep families from suing and potentially crippling the U.S. economy.  At first he uses an actuarial formula and then he realizes that he needs a more personal approach when he begins meeting with the families.  Keaton gives a very affecting performance, especially when he is sparring with Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci) who lost his wife in the attacks.  My third film was Promising Young Woman which I really liked.  Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) is a med school drop-out who now lives with her parents and has a dead-end job in a coffee shop.  When a former classmate (Bo Burnham) comes back into her life, he stirs up memories of the incident that derailed her and awakens a need for revenge.  The ending is not at all what I was expecting but it had the crowd at my screening cheering out loud.  It is a quirky and subversive take on the traditional revenge story and, even though it has some bizarre tonal shifts, it is fantastic.  My fourth film was Dream Horse with my students (go here for my review and here for a review written by one of my students).  My fifth film was Surge which was difficult to watch but, upon reflection (and a Q&A with the director Aniel Karia), I have decided that it is brilliant.  Joseph (Ben Whishaw) is an airport security officer who lives alone in London.  Living in an urban environment has anesthetized and isolated him and, after an incident with his parents and an incident at work, he experiences a psychotic breakdown in which he wanders the city without inhibition.  The tension builds and builds with hand-held camera work, pulse-pounding sound design, and a frenetic performance from Whishaw (it reminded me of something the Safdie Brothers would do).  My sixth film was the documentary Time which tells the heartbreaking story of a woman named Sibil Fox Richardson who fights for over twenty years to get her husband released from a life sentence in prison (it is implied that the excessive sentence was imposed because he is black and poor).  Home videos of family life recorded for her husband over twenty years are interspersed with her tireless crusade to free him.  The interviews with their six sons are incredibly poignant, especially since they all grew up to be stellar young men despite their hardships.  At first I felt like Sibil was playing to the cameras but a moment of vulnerability after a court clerk informs her that a judge hasn't had time to write the decision brought me to tears.  My seventh film was the documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind.  This is a loving tribute by Natasha Gregson to her mother with newly discovered home videos and interviews with close friends and family members.  Both her personal and professional lives are explored and the overwhelming message for me was that her death left an incredible void in the lives of those who knew her best.  My eighth film was the documentary Coded Bias and I was able to take my nephew Sean to see it with me.  Joy Buolamwini, a woman of color, was working on a project at MIT and discovered that the facial recognition software she was using had difficulty recognizing the faces of females and people of color.  Upon further investigation, she discovered that many algorithms used as "gatekeepers" for getting approval for a loan, applying for college, or getting an interview for a job are similarly biased and, even worse, erroneously track people perceived to be a threat.  This documentary is incredibly thought-provoking and a little unsettling.  My ninth film was another documentary called Spaceship Earth.  This tells the story of the Biosphere 2 experiment where eight scientists attempted to live in a self-sustaining environment for two years with the hope of possibly using these structures in space.  I found it fascinating how a group of idealistic people came together to try to improve the world and how they were undermined by their own publicity.  My tenth film, Nine Days, was definitely my favorite of the festival.  It is a beautiful and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.  On another plane of existence (an isolated house in a desert), a man who was once alive (Winston Duke) interviews a group of souls given temporary existence over a period of nine days in order to choose one of them for the privilege of being born.  He tests them to see if they can handle the pain and sorrow of life but he is ultimately reminded by one of the candidates (Zazie Beetz) that there is also happiness and beauty to be found in life.  I loved this film so much and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I saw it!  My eleventh film was The Glorias which I also really enjoyed.  It is a biography of the feminist Gloria Steinem but what sets it apart is that there are four actresses who portray her at various times in her life (Ryan Kiera Armstrong as a child, Lulu Wilson as a teenager, Alicia Vikander as a young adult, and Julianne Moore as an older adult) who frequently interact with each other while traveling on a Greyhound bus through her memories.  The inside of the bus is filmed in black and white while the world outside is in color (an homage to The Wizard of Oz).  I think this motif works very well and I was captivated by the performances of Vikander and Moore.  My twelfth film was Sylvie's Love, a lovely old-fashioned movie about a romance between a woman engaged to someone else (Tessa Thompson) and a Jazz musician (Nnamdi Asomugha) in the 1950s.  They go their separate ways but, when they are unexpectedly reunited later in life, they realize they still love each other.  Thompson and Asomugha have great chemistry and the soundtrack is fabulous!  My thirteenth film, Tesla, was my most anticipated film in the festival because I find Nikola Tesla to be endlessly fascinating and I was excited to see Ethan Hawke portray the enigmatic genius.  It begins by telling the same story as The Current War, but from Tesla's point of view, and then it portrays his obsession with developing wireless technology and even inserts smartphones and google searches to emphasize that he had envisioned the future we live in now.  It gets pretty weird (Tesla sings a karaoke version of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears) with dramatic low lighting, theatrical backdrops, and a narrator (Eve Hewson) who breaks the fourth wall but I found it intriguing and I suspect it will become a cult classic.  My fourteenth film was The Go-Go's, a very straightforward biopic about the first all-female band to play their own instruments and have a number one record (this is mentioned multiple times), including their meteoric rise, pressure to duplicate the success of their first record, drug addiction, and squabbling over publishing rights.  As a child of the 1980s, I loved the Go-Go's and it was very nostalgic hearing this music (I tried not to sing) once again.  They've still got the beat!  My fifteenth film was Ironbark, a true story about a Soviet spy starring Benedict Cumberbatch.  Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) is a high-ranking science officer in the Soviet Union who is horrified by the build-up of nuclear weapons and wants to give classified information to the West.  Because Penkovsky is so prominent, the CIA and MI-6 don't want to compromise him by using known agents so they recruit businessman Greville Wynne (Cumberbatch) who knows very little about spy craft.  It is very atmospheric with lots of Cold War intrigue and Cumberbatch gives a riveting performance.  I am a fan of spy thrillers so I loved it!  My sixteenth and final film was the Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana.  I am a huge fan of Taylor Swift and, even though this was already streaming on Netflix by the time of my screening, it was so much fun to watch this with a large and rowdy crowd!  This documentary chronicles a transformative period in Swift's career in which she sheds her "good girl" persona, makes her voice heard about social and political issues, and writes the music for her album Lover.  I really loved the image of a 13-year-old girl squaring her shoulders to walk out on to a stage for the first time at the beginning juxtaposed with her confident return to the stage after the album release at the end.  Whew!  It was a crazy ten days but I loved seeing movies that might not necessarily get made without this festival and I loved talking about these movies with people from all over the world (I talked to a family from London while in line for Ironbark!).

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Sundance Student Screening 2020

Yesterday I got to take a group of my students to see Dream Horse as part of the Student Screening Program with the Sundance Film Festival.  Even though arranging field trips is equal parts planning the D-Day invasion and herding cats, this particular field trip always ends up being an amazing experience and yesterday was no exception!  I absolutely loved the film we saw and, more importantly, so did my students!  It is a true story (which is also told in the documentary Dark Horse which premiered at Sundance in 2016) about Jan Vokes (Toni Collette) who lived in an economically depressed village in Wales with her unemployed husband Brian (Owen Teale).  She worked two dead-end jobs, as a checker in a big-box retail store during the day and as a barmaid in the evening, and cared for her elderly parents.  She longed for something to inspire her to get out of bed every day.  One night a man in the bar named Howard Davies (Damian Lewis) brags to the crowd that he was once part of a syndicate that owned a racehorse.  Jan decides that she wants to own a racehorse and recruits Howard to help her.  She uses all of her savings to buy a mare that came in last in every race she ran and then creates her own syndicate of friends from the bar (including the town drunk and a lonely widow) to help her pay the stud fee of a champion.  They name their foal Dream Alliance and keep him on their small allotment of land.  They eventually convince a well-known trainer (Nicholas Farrell) to work with Dream Alliance and, when he begins winning races against all odds, he becomes a symbol of hope for the whole village.  I loved the scenes where the eccentric syndicate members watch the races in the owners' boxes with the aristocracy and I really enjoyed the racing sequences because they are so exhilarating (the students cheered out loud multiple times).  This is such a feel good movie about doing whatever it takes to achieve your dreams and it was perfect for my students!  There was a Q&A after the film with Euros Lyn, the director, and he told the students that despite what people tell them they should always follow their dreams no matter how out of reach they might appear to be!  I loved that!  One student asked him how the people of Wales have responded to the film and he answered that Sundance audiences are the very first to see it but he hopes that all of the audiences respond the way that we did!  This will be my final student screening and I'm glad that I picked a good one to end on!

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Fiddler on the Roof at the Eccles

I have always been a really big fan of the musical Fiddler on the Roof.  I have seen it dozens of times and I even got to play Fruma-Sarah in a production so I was thrilled when the show had a revival on Broadway because I knew that the touring production would eventually come to SLC.  I had the chance to see it last night and it was just delightful!  Tevye (Yehezkel Lazarov) is a poor Jewish dairyman living in the small Russian village of Anatevka.  He clings to his traditional way of life as a protection from the harsh realities of life but his three oldest daughters push against tradition when it comes time to find a match.  As I sat in my seat at the Eccles Theatre I anticipated every single musical number with a huge smile on my face:  "Tradition," "Matchmaker, Matchmaker," "If I Were A Rich Man," "Sabbath Prayer," "To Life," "Sunrise, Sunset," "Do You Love Me," "Far From the Home I Love," "Chavaleh," and "Anatevka,"  It was really hard for me not to sing along because I know every word.  I really liked this production because the sets are very simple and stark and use a lot of weathered wood.  It seemed very appropriate considering the harsh conditions of Russia and it really helped to set the mood.  I also really liked the monochromatic costumes which also served the same purpose.  What made this production seem very fresh and new was the choreography.  I especially enjoyed the staging of "To Life" because the slow-motion dancing as the Jews begin to interact with the Russian villagers is very dramatic.  I also really enjoyed the bottle dance during the wedding (I even liked the fact that one of the dancers dropped his bottle because it made it seem so much more authentic) because it is incredibly athletic (the main dancer could kick his legs so high)!  The entire cast is outstanding but I especially enjoyed Lazarov's interpretation of Tevye because he is almost sarcastic in his delivery.  I laughed out loud when he tried to kiss Golde (Maite Uzal) during "Do You Love Me" and it was heartbreaking to see his anguish during "Chavaleh."  I also really enjoyed Nick Siccone as Motel the tailor, especially when he hides under the wagon when talking to Tevye.  This was such a fun evening for me!  I always love seeing the old classics from my youth because they are the shows that turned me into a fan of musical theatre.  I recommend this production (go here for tickets) because it is sure to put a smile on your face.