Matins POETRY
Condini, Ned
with a Flanagan embodying pure...
...how few more years I will walk in the light...
...Gilbert-despised by his parents, unable to make love to his wife, feeling such a fury at the opening-night audience (and perhaps at all humankind) that he takes a nightmarish walk through the worst slums rather than pace backstage-burrows into his writing as a soldier under bombardment huddles in his foxhole...
...Allan Corduner's Sullivan, an amalgam of shy sensuality with Victorian dignity, and Jim Broadbent's Gilbert, a bull both undermined and inspired by melancholy, perfectly complement one another...
...ISBN 0-86716-377.1 $8.95 A Retreat With Brother Lawrence and the Russian Pilgrim BIMiTHiR LiYRl.tii j Praying Ceaselessly by Kerry 1V.4.rs Your directors are Brother Lawrence and the Russian Pilgrim, Though from different centuries and different cultures, both learned the wisdom of constant prayer-what Brother Lawrence describes as "practicing the presence of God...
...Shade covers a good part of me...
...That oxygen comes from Sullivan's music...
...O Commonweal 2 3 March 10, 2000...
...In the midst of Victorian splendor and squalor, a small band of men and women are achieving radiance and order through devotion to work...
...it routs opsy-Turvy, another film things into dust, if I stretch my hands out...
...Are we merely being given a guided tour of the Life and Times of G&S...
...But this is gaged, basically utilitarian art that is truth, and the conflict between them precisely the sort of straitened society sniffed at by the Dies committee...
...In Robbins's view, ap- through the opening bars of numbers beined information that will puzzle any parently, these two are the avatars of fore he gives the time check...
...ISBN 0.86716-369-0 $9.95 ST...
...Unlike Tim Robbins, who serves up so little of The Cradle Will Rock that we can hardly grasp what was so revolutionary about it, Mike Leigh gives us more than half-a-dozen full numbers from The Mikado, and his performers convey what it was like to deliver these enchanting songs for the first time, without the crust of a hundred years of tradition, a word that too often stands for rote taking the place of thought...
...Gilbert has entrusted her with the lead even if his name is on the soundtrack (I For surely one of the key themes of role of Yum Yum, he cannot bring himdidn't hear it), will the uninitiated un- Cradle (the movie, not the musical) is self to give her his complete benison bederstand how the German's theories of the conflict between the sort of admin- cause she is an alcoholic and an unwed stagecraft influenced American theories...
...releases A Retreat With Patrick Discovering God in All by Timothy Joyce, O.S.B...
...that Gilbert had abominable relations with his dotty parents...
...What do all these facts add up to, we may well ask ourselves, as we learn that the 1880s saw the flourishing inventions of the fountain pen (the "reservoir pen"), the doorbell and the telephone...
...devotion to craft leaves one insufficient for everyday existence, especially domesticity...
...about a theatrical openToday you are only that breath of my dust...
...hidebound) as the mythic Japan that's because she encourages a socially en- Both positions have their measure of portrayed in the operetta...
...But Topsy-Turvy's real achievement is in demonstrating what can never be demonstrated too often: The texture of a work of art validates its ideas, not vice versa...
...But tiates the second half of the film...
...the slighted Caesar haircut and German accent who itself (Welles's brand of liberalism woman stiffens but then seems to accept serves as Blitzstein's artistic-political marked almost all his work) but also vi- the slight snub as her due...
...This movie may seem a little too amorphous in its first half...
...with a Flanagan embodying pure goodness opposing a Welles/Houseman duo Matins oozing effete aestheticism, the battle has to be one-sided...
...fingers at each other and screaming waits respectfully while performers run This movie is stuffed with unexam- "You shut up...
...If a guillotine fell on some- Elwes as a pair of prancing queens the proximity of their entrances, begs perbody's neck, it certainly wasn't that of (though Welles was straight and House- mission of the stage manager before he American capitalism, so shortly to be re- man always dignified), wagging their raps on dressing-room doors and then vived by World War II...
...But that produces men such as W. S. Gilbert Commonweal 2 2 March 10, 2000 New A Retreat With...
...ing-The Mikado in London As to still fronds in the hot, sultry nights in 1885-proves to be one from the air an unexpected murmur sighs of the best films of 1999...
...Sureof the NEA that he presents Hallie sumed artist (Welles) who views his art ly it is as stable, as hieratic, as self-apFlanagan as a saint (to be sure, Cherry as Dionysian vision that can never be proving, and as rule-bound (at worst Jones gives great pleasure in the role) bracketed as an "educational resource...
...Though conscience...
...At The Mikado's rehearsals, the male actors have on formal jackets and ties and capitalists to be the heavies in this lefty while Dies projects a certain sinister top hats, while the women wear dresses movie, but why does Robbins conjure force, Flanagan's real foils here are that would not look out of place at a up a costume ball at which the pluto- Welles and Houseman, debasingly car- lunch in a good restaurant...
...One example: filmmaker sends them up and puts the two lead actresses luck, he is cordial Who is the funny-looking dude with the them down...
...His trust that we will be intelligent enough to reach our own conNed Condini clusions about the Victorian society that embraced the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas is the sign of a mature artist...
...that Sullivan was a sexual gourmand...
...Through excerpts from his own writings, we can unravel the facts of his life from the legends he has inspired and examine the unique perspective he brought to Christianity...
...Its maker, Mike Leigh, is probably further to the politiwords yet from the springwell of my dreams cal Left than Tim Robbins, but he's too I know you bring me before dawn...
...Cradle Will Rock is with ended days, grasses and pallid faces committed art, all right, but it's committed only to the naive historical revido not leave me now that I understand sionism of Hollywood liberals...
...Answer: Bertolt Brecht...
...The satirical absurdities in their work (Gilbert's "topsy-turveydom") draw their sustenance from the pompous equanimity of the social world they live in...
...Your director is Patrick, patron of the Irish and one of the most celebrated saints in history...
...Yet, might have produced true drama...
...But day intent on creating multilayered life on can't find them, and I don't recognize you...
...screen to find time to wag a pedantic finger at us...
...Cocaine, alcohol, promiscuity, vanity, fear of physical and professional decline, gluttony, even varicose veins, all take their toll, but when a piece of comic business falls into place, when the high note can be maintained, when a dance finally achieves the correct style, then, however briefly, a god descends...
...Topsy-Turvy doesn't propound any new ideas about the life of the theater, perhaps because all the old ideas are pretty much true: The real children of playwrights and composers are their plays...
...Firefly spirit & undying breath It's odd that a movie as panoramic who live where the intellect is darkest as this one should also be so intellectuwhere every cry descends into peace ally narrow-minded...
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...Worse, Robbins is so anxious to es- erously, looks on art as one contribution What kind of society is it that suptablish parallels between the misad- among many to the ongoing health of ports a theatrical community operating ventures of the F IP and the recent woes the country, versus the totally con- within these norms of propriety...
...And two men who can barely stand each other save each other...
...istrator (Flanagan) who, however gen- mother, and she understands this...
...the slaughter of General Gordon and his troops by the Mahdi at Khartoum...
...The composer aspired to Beethovian grandeur and despised himself for writing what he considered fluff...
...Is TopsyTurvy the cinematic equivalent of a coffee-table picture book...
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...What you take away from this movie is not a bunch of half-baked notions about the social role of the theater, but the sensation of having been in the theater itself and subject to its unreliable but addictive glamour...
...When audience member who isn't a theater Art for Art's Sake, and that is why the Gilbert stops by on opening night to wish student or practitioner...
...This is not only nonsense in to both but kisses only one...
...But it was precisely Gilbert's gift for absurdity that tapped the vein of greatness in Sullivan's limited talent: his penchant not for the grand musical statement but for lyrical grace and humor...
...Gilbert, like a surprising number of eminent Victorians, felt life to be a nightmare with meaninglessness lurking at its center, and his poetry, wittily dense to the point of impaction, both dazzles and cries out for oxygen...
...Though I don't think all its details line up neatly in support of one theme, Topsy-Turvy comes into focus in the second half when The Mikado rehearsals get underway...
...The "call crats dress as eighteenth-century French icatured by Angus Macfadyen and Cary boy," who warns the performers about aristocrats...
Vol. 127 • March 2000 • No. 5
