Offscript - In the footlights
New films pay tribute to theater - sort of
Movie stars frequently repeat the clich “My first love is the stage,” but several current films pay tribute, or at least lip service, to the sentiment. On Feb. 27, the Academy Awards will feature several nominees that hark back to the European theater of earlier eras. Finding Neverland evokes the London stage of 1903, Being Julia the same city in the 1930s, while The Phantom of the Opera takes in Paris in the 1870s.
It’s easy to see the superficial appeal. Theatrical settings give films an air of literary credibility (Julia is based on W. Somerset Maugham’s novella Theatre), and diva characters make for juicy roles, like opera legend Maria Callas in Franco Zeffirelli’s recent release Callas Forever. All the films revel in the chance to portray backstage as a buzzing hive of stagehands and dressing rooms. Plus, as an art form created in front of an audience, theater generates suspense that, say, sculptors, writers, or even movie actors cannot.
These particular films all examine the lives of creative people more comfortable in art than reality. In last fall’s Stage Beauty (coming up at Actor’s Express this summer), a Restoration-era actor who specializes in female roles suffers an identity crisis when King Charles II allows women to act. In Being Julia, Annette Bening gives an outstanding performance as an actress of a certain age coping with her own celebrity and competition from hottie ingenues. Neverland’s J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp) prefers the childlike world of his made-up Peter Pan rather than the difficult truths of his life. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom dwells in a pure - if admittedly psychotic - realm of musical ideals.
The collective drawback of the theater-films is their shared nostalgia for the stage as it used to be: big, format events performed for kings and aristocrats. The movies propound the stereotype of live drama as an elite art form rather than something that speaks to everybody.
You get a truer glimpse of modern theatrical realities in smaller-scale playhouse stories, like the newly released film Bigger Than the Sky, which shows how an average guy finds a new zest for life when cast as the lead in a community theater’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Even the cruel jokes of Waiting for Guffman’s portrayal of deluded small-town artistes convey that grassroots theatrical spark. Films like those seldom attract the Academy’s attention, but they stay closer to the spirit of theater the way it is, rather than how it was.
Reciprocal responseAtlanta’s newest theater company, Reciprocity Entertainment, presents its inaugural production, For Black Boys Who Have Considered Homicide When the Streets Were Too Much, through March 6 at Dad’s Garage Top Shelf. Artistic director Eric Paulk and managing director Robb Douglas, both Morehouse College graduates, founded the theater company last year to challenge stereotypes and present more complex portrayals of the African-American male experience.
The 20-year-old play For Black Boys pays deliberate homage to style and content of Ntozake Shange’s classic for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Black Boys unfolds as a kind montage of spoken word monologues and poetry about poverty, crime and social problems affecting black men, identified in the play by number, not name. Geoffrey D. Williams directs a six-actor cast that features Johnell Easter and Darius Truly.
The company’s inaugural season continues in May with Strong Arms, by Atlanta playwright Shirlene Holmes, which depicts the abuse of black men, and concludes in July with Stones, Jamil El Shamir’s drama about the relationship between a father and his three sons.
Reciprocity is poised to fill a need in Atlanta, a city that seldom gives adequate support to its African-American troupes, as shown by the struggles of the New Jomandi, our oldest African-American theater. Jomandi’s efforts to retain audience and leadership hint that Reciprocity Entertainment is walking into a challenging environment.
Regards to BroadwayThe New York touring shows that play Atlanta represent both the biggest shows in live American theater, as well as the most commercially safe, “establishment” fare. Broadway in Atlanta’s newly announced 2005-06 season confirms the light nature of such tours, while another visiting show views Broadway in a more irreverent perspective.
Broadway in Atlanta’s 21st season features one unquestionably intriguing production, Wicked (May 17-28), the Tony-winning prequel to Wizard of Oz that provides a musical backstory of the good and evil witches. The otherwise tame season includes the umpteenth return of The Phantom of the Opera (for nearly a full month, Aug. 31-Sept. 25) to piggyback on the film release, as well as the sentimental two-actor show Tuesdays With Morrie (staged at Theatre in the Square last year), starring “Barney Miller’s” Hal Linden.
Often you can find insight into an art form by seeing how people make fun of it. Playing Feb. 26 only at Jewish Theatre of the South (www.atlantajcc.org), the Forbidden Broadway tour presents the long-running, oft-updated spoof of the Great White Way, featuring musical send-ups of the likes of The Lion King, Hairspray and Wicked, as well as parodies of specific performers like Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. It helps to get the joke if you’ve seen the originals, but Forbidden Broadway should amuse anyone who’s witnessed one of those loud, flashy, low-carb touring shows at the Fox.