Utah Opera's La Tragedie de Carmen

The very first opera that I saw performed live was Georges Bizet's masterpiece Carmen so it will always be one of my very favorites.  I was, therefore, understandably intrigued when I heard the announcement that Utah Opera would be performing La tragedie de Carmen by Peter Brooks to close out the 2020-2021 season.  This is a pared down version of the classic (there are only four singing roles and no chorus) that is much more intimate with a particular emphasis on fate.  I procured a highly coveted ticket  (seating is limited to 30 percent capacity to accommodate social distancing) to last night's performance and I was thrilled to be back at Capitol Theatre.  Unfortunately, the director, Omer Ben Seadia, chose to change the setting from Spain in 1820 to Spanish Harlem in the present day and Don Jose is a police officer instead of a soldier, Carmen appears to be a cross between a prostitute and an exotic dancer rather than a factory worker, and Escamillo is a famous singer instead of a bullfighter.  Micaela (Julia Gershkoff) travels from a small town to the city in search of her betrothed Don Jose (Isaac Hurtado) and, while he has fond memories of his hometown, he seems to reject her.  He and his commanding officer Zuniga (Brandon Bell) are called to a commotion on the street and find Carmen (Kristin Chavez) singing about the fickle nature of love.  Zuniga insists that Jose arrest her but she tries to convince him to let her go by promising to dance for him.  Jose is beguiled by her and lets her go, which gets him demoted, then meets her at a club owned by Lillas Pastia (Daniel O'Hearn), who may or may not be Carmen's pimp (he is a sleazeball wearing a red track suit and gold chains).  Carmen dances seductively for Jose but becomes enraged when he says he must go back to work.  When Zuniga comes looking for him, Jose kills him in a fight while Carmen becomes enamored with Escamillo (Efrain Solis) when she hears him singing at the club about a bull fight.  Jose is jealous when Escamillo invites her to his next performance and challenges him but Carmen intervenes and Jose declares his love for her.  They begin a relationship but when Carmen's husband Garcia (Brnadon Bell) appears, Jose kills him.  After a tarot card reading that predicts her death, Carmen leaves him to meet Escamillo at the stage door of his performance at Madison Square Garden.  When Jose finds her there, she knows that he is desperate and has nothing to lose but she refuses to submit to him.  Jose embraces her in a long goodbye, with Fate (Edith Grossman) looking on, before stabbing her to death.  I am not a fan of altering the source material for artistic purposes so I didn't really care for the changes made to the story or to the characters.  I was also really confused by the staging.  While I did like the projections on a scrim at the back of the stage (a chamber orchestra performed on stage behind this scrim), I had a hard time figuring out what was happening with two large panels, especially when the characters would write on them.  However, the beautiful music more than made up for these complaints and the four leads sang their roles brilliantly.  I especially loved Gershkoff's aria "Parle-moi de ma mere," Chavez's rendition of the habanera, and Solis' performance of the famous "Toreador Song."  Even though this production was a bit of a miss for me, I was still so happy to be in an audience listening to beautiful music performed live by a talented cast. There are a very limited number of tickets available to the two remaining performances (go here).

Here Today

I am a huge fan of Billy Crystal and the trailer for Here Today made me laugh so I went to see it last night.  Charlie Burnz (Crystal) is a well respected comedy writer responsible for successful Broadway plays, movies, television shows, and books.  He is currently the head writer for the popular sketch comedy show This Just In and is working on a memoir.  Emma Payge (Tiffany Haddish) is a free-spirited singer who has lunch with Charlie because of a winning bid at a charity auction.  She eventually confesses that she has no idea who he is and just bid on him as a way to get back at her ex-boyfriend who is a big fan.  She has a severe allergic reaction to shellfish during lunch and, because she has no insurance, Charlie pays the substantial emergency room bill.  She attempts to pay him back little by little and they form an unlikely friendship.  She is the first to notice that he is suffering from dementia, which he has been keeping secret from everyone in his life, and helps him reconcile with his son Rex (Penn Badgley) and daughter Francine (Laura Benanti) who blame him for their mother's death.  I actually laughed out loud multiple times and I enjoyed the chemistry between Crystal and Haddish who both give incredibly charming performances.  The message about making peace with the past and living in the present is also very heartwarming but it does become quite mawkish in the final act.  The pacing gets a bit bogged down when the focus shifts from Charlie's relationship with Emma to his role as a mentor to an up-and-coming writer (Andrew Durrand) on the comedy show and to the flashbacks with his wife (Louisa Krause) which feel forced.  Despite the flaws, I liked this movie and so did the large and vocal crowd in my screening.

Wrath of Man

When Guy Ritchie is good, he is very good but, when he is bad, he is very, very bad.  Most of the time you don't know which Guy Ritchie you are going to get until the lights dim and the movie starts.  I saw his latest, Wrath of Man, last night and it definitely belongs in the former category even though it is a bit of a departure from his usual idiosyncratic style.  Fortico, a private armored car company responsible for moving millions of dollars around Los Angeles, is involved in a heist in broad daylight which results in a shootout that kills both Fortico guards as well as a civilian.  Several months later, Patrick "H" Hill (Jason Statham) is hired as a guard at Fortico after barely passing his shooting and driving tests.  He is taciturn and antisocial (Statham is perfect in the role) but, when H singlehandedly shoots every member of a gang during another heist, his co-workers come to view him as either a hero or a psychopath.  H is clearly not who he claims to be and half the fun of this movie is trying to unravel who he is and what he is doing as an armored car guard.  There are multiple possibilities as to his identity which are explored in several timelines and all converge in the initial heist shown from three different perspectives.  It is very clever and it kept me guessing throughout with a mysterious member of law enforcement who turns a blind eye (Andy Garcia), a group of ruthless gangsters (Cameron Jack, Darrell D'Silva, Babs Olusanmokun, and Thomas Dominique), a group of veterans (Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Eastwood, Deobia Oparei, Laz Alonso, Raul Castillo, and Chris Reilly), and a group of guards who may or may not be on the take (Holt McCallany, Rocci Williams, Josh Hartnett, and Niamh Algar).  The final heist at the Fortico depot, in which H unleashes his wrath, is absolutely epic and features stylized action sequences, cross-cuts between the planning and the execution of the heist, and a pulse-pounding score underneath it.  However, this movie is much darker in tone than any of Ritchie's previous movies and it lacks the humor and witty banter that we have come to expect from him but it really works.  I had a lot of fun watching this movie (I loved being in a large crowd on a Friday night) and I highly recommend it to fans of crime thrillers.

Percy vs. Goliath

I like a good underdog story so I went to see Percy vs. Goliath, a movie which pits a small independent farmer against a behemoth agribusiness corporation, last night and I found it very charming.  Percy Schmeiser (Christopher Walken) and his wife Louise (Roberta Maxwell) have a small canola farm, passed down from generations of his family, in Bruno, Saskatchewan.  Every year he harvests the seeds from the sturdiest plants in order to use them the following year just as his ancestors once did.  In 1998 he is accused of using Monsanto's genetically modified seeds without a license and then saving them to use again.  Monsanto sues him for patent infringement and demands the value of all of the crops grown from the seeds for the past several years.  He contends that the seeds from his neighbor's farm accidentally ended up on his and refuses to settle.  He hires an inexperienced but idealistic lawyer named Jackson Weaver (Zach Braff) and the case attracts the attention of Rebecca Salcau (Christina Ricci), an environmental activist, who uses Schmeiser shamelessly to gain publicity for her organization's fight against Monsanto.  They eventually take the case to the Provincial Court of Appeals, which brings Schmeiser to the brink of bankruptcy, and then, when he receives support from farmers around the world, to the Supreme Court of Canada.  This movie is based on a true story and it is incredibly inspiring with quite a few stand up and cheer moments.  My favorite is when a nervous Weaver gives an impassioned speech to the Supreme Court after watching a phalanx of Monsanto lawyers enter the building.  Walken is extremely appealing in the role (I sometimes forget that, despite his penchant for giving campy and eccentric performances, he is a very good actor) and I was surprisingly invested in his plight considering the outcome of the case is basically a foregone conclusion.  The visuals, which feature many wide shots of the open prairie, are absolutely stunning.  The message is sometimes a bit heavy-handed and the stakes are not as high as in the much better Dark Waters, but this is highly enjoyable and I recommend it.

The Virtuoso

Last night I went to see the action thriller The Virtuoso but, ultimately, I didn't find it to be very thrilling.  The Virtuoso (Anson Mount) is a highly paid assassin known for his meticulous planning and attention to detail (he tells us so in an elaborate second-person narration as he carries out a hit on a mobster).  He is given a job by The Mentor (Anthony Hopkins) without the requisite time that he needs for planning and, due to circumstances beyond his control, it goes horribly wrong resulting in collateral damage.  He is haunted by this and ignores a number of jobs until The Mentor gives him one he cannot refuse.  He only has a time, a location, and a mysterious clue to use to identify his target, a fellow assassin.  He arrives at the appointed place at the appointed time and sees several possibilities: a Loner (Eddie Marsan), a Waitress (Abbie Cornish), a Stranger (Richard Brake), a Local Girl (Diora Baird), and a Deputy (David Morse).  After observing them without discovering his target, he decides to eliminate them all one by one.  However, this assignment is not what it appears to be.  The premise of this movie is actually quite intriguing but the execution (pun intended) is incredibly bland.  Because the pacing is so slow, I was anticipating a build-up to something dramatic but I guessed the plot twist early on so it was a bit anticlimactic.  Mount’s performance is not engaging enough for his character or his actions to be compelling and the excessive voice-over gets very tedious very quickly because it is so monotone.  I wasn't invested in any of the other characters either because they have almost no development which wastes the considerable talents of the actors in these roles.  The only highlight is Hopkins who has one impressive monologue (but phones in the rest of his performance).  All of this could be forgiven if the action sequences were exciting but, alas, even they are few and far between and the lighting is so dark that you can't really see what is happening.  Despite an interesting story and a talented cast, this is a dull and boring movie and I recommend giving it a miss.