THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

The Nose Gets It: The Hollywood Foreign Press Association hasn't been known for its sterling integrity over the years; there was the infamous Sharon Stone dinner party, and there are continuing murmurs about lavish gifts from studios to voters (fine timepieces are especially appreciated, according to one of this year's Golden Globe nominees). As if to bolster its prestige, if not its credibility, the HFPA seems to have learned to vote in a high-minded, pseudo-Academy-style way. How else to explain the orbs showered on The Hours, a film not so much made as mounted, as if for a trophy case? It's deadly stuff, the worst sort of tasteful emotional pornography, with some of the best actors around marking their way through thickets of portentous doggerel about regrets, choices, happiness. The three female leads have lucid and embarrassing moments in equal parts; Nicole Kidman has to wear that literally pointless Margaret Hamilton nose and Julianne Moore, for a few excruciating scenes, a pathetic old-lady mask; Meryl Streep escapes the humiliations of the makeup chair but not the grovelling required by the film's life lessons. I was actually looking forward to David Hare's screenplay adaptation, as the material is close to the themes of his mysterious and brilliant film 1985 Wetherby, but found it TV-movie competent at best. There's credible work from the supporting cast--particularly Allison Janney, Stephen Dillane, and Ed Harris--but the film's strongest performance is by the preternaturally perceptive tyke Jack Rovello; the way he watches Moore quietly unravel, with a mixture of abject worship and growing distress, contains all the heartbreak and terror The Hours has to offer.

And while it's good to see Kidman getting the respect she's long deserved, her lean, hungry Woolf was not the female performance of the year. Without question, that was Moore in Far From Heaven, which--I hasten to add, after my dis in this space a few weeks ago--appeared to me, on a second viewing, to be a near-masterpiece. At first viewing, writer/director Todd Haynes' homage to 1950s women's pictures felt cold and academic, old-fashioned not just in its style but in its thinking, however liberal. I wouldn't have seen it again but for a recent special screening, hosted by Back Stage West, featuring a cordial post-film Q&A with Moore and Haynes. This time out, it all worked on me emotionally: the picture-perfect recreation of Douglas Sirk's color scheme, the lushly anxious Elmer Bernstein score, the fraught deep-focus compositions, the matter-of-factly theatrical flourishes of the supporting cast. And Moore's performance, rather than being the anomaly it first seemed, appeared as the hothouse flower at the movie's quivering heart, all hushed tones (she admitted in the Q&A that she stole the voice from Doris Day) and confused goodwill. Here's hoping SAG and Academy voters recognize the right redhead come March.

• Speaking of talented redheads, Emily Bergl is a force to be reckoned with, currently in South Coast Rep's fine staging of David Auburn's Proof. Indeed, Bergl may be the best character-actor ingenue on the market; she brings a funky, unpredictable immediacy to her work, a fierce focus that feels single-minded but, given her free-ranging intelligence, never simple-minded. She can make braininess sexy (get her a Stoppard play, pronto), or, as her recurring stint on Gilmore Girls shows, can give a diamond-hard bitch a diabolical glint. It's a little shocking, though, that the witty if pedestrian dramedy Proof took the 2001 Pulitzer; all it proves is that the death of the staid, "well-made" play has been greatly exaggerated.

• Are tales of Hollywood debauchery similarly exaggerated? From Peter J. Nieves' Cringe, at the Evidence Room, and Roger Kumble's Turnaround, at the Coast Playhouse, you may conclude that the only thing writers, producers, and their assorted toadies love more than screwing each other, and screwing each other over, is talking about it in explicit detail. Cringe is crammed full of, er, oral histories that live up, or down, to the play's title, while Turnaround sprays a stream of toxic quips about backdoor deals of all sorts. The difference is that while Cringe is a lacerating, if indulgent, morality play that's ultimately about more than just Tinseltown venality, Turnaround is the kind of winking, preachy self-flagellation that the Hollywood types it sends up can't get enough of; there on opening night to watch the leads--David Schwimmer, Jonathan Silverman, and Tom Everett Scott--debase themselves with sitcom-gone-wrong aplomb were Renée Zellweger (squired by producer Neil Meron), Selma Blair, Paul Rudd, Lauren Graham, and assorted Friends. I did relish the chance to glimpse front-row-seater Bob Saget offer an obliging chuckle to a rude joke about the Olsen Twins, and I did catch some choice pre-show small talk I don't overhear at most theatre openings: "It's been so long since I've seen a play--I can't remember the last time. How's your new house?" But while Turnaround has its share of genuinely acid wit, up-to-the-minute lifestyle satire (one character calls a serial e-mail busybody "the Aunt Bea of Blackberrys"), and a fascinating irreverence--I think--toward 12-step self-help, it's too broadly drawn to provoke much painful self-examination, let alone offense, among its industry-heavy audiences.

Cringe, on the other hand, is quite eager to offend, though that's not what it makes it more successful. For one, it has a killer cast--the always watchable Christian Leffler as the brooding, impotent provocateur at the story's center; there's also strong work from Kevin Cristaldi, Lauren Campedelli, Don Oscar Smith, and Patty Scanlon. (Cringe opened in November and runs through Feb. 9; John Fleck has taken over the key role of a crass producer from Dan Butler.) One mark of the show's strength, under Nieves' and Bart DeLorenzo's assured co-direction, is that it sustains our interest and rouses a rich mix of reactions, even when it drops the jokes and shock arias, as in a queasy late-night power play between Leffler and Dorie Barton, as the reluctant but resigned mark for his Vertigo-like projections. I can't count how many times at Back Stage West we've heard theme-and-variations on the scenario of an actress lured to "audition" at the bachelor pad or hotel room of some sleazy supposed auteur, who then asks her to "improvise" a love scene; here, Nieves and DeLorenzo stage this archetypal scam with a quiet, ambivalent intensity.

• Caught up with the Blank Theatre Company's Daniel Henning, who will soon work his first regional theatre gig helming Marc Saltzman's Mr. Shaw Goes To Hollywood, opening at Laguna Playhouse in April. It's inspired by three hours the playwright spent in 1933 at Louis B. Mayer's bungalow, and, like Saltzman's Tin Pan Alley Rag, which imagined a meeting between Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin, Mr. Shaw is chock-full of real-life characters: William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, Clark Gable, John Barrymore. Henning wasn't done casting when I spoke to him; for the lead I immediately thought of Robert Budaska, so excellently Shavian as Shotover in Jessica Kubzansky's Heartbreak House at the Colony in 1996; for Gable, I thought of the Evidence Room's Leffler, who in 1999's No Orchids for Miss Blandish played a short-lived 1930s gangster with gelled hair and a thin black moustache.

• BSW Features Editor Jamie Painter Young files this report from Sundance: "The two most talked-about and perhaps most commercially minded films at this year's festival were The Cooler, by first-time director Wayne Kramer and starring William H. Macy, and Pieces of April, written and directed by Peter Hedges and starring Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, and Derek Luke. Both films were picked up for U.S. theatrical distribution: The Cooler was bought by Lions Gate Films for $1.5 million; Pieces of April sold to United Artists for $4 mil. Other well-received films included Raising Victor Vargas, All the Real Girls, American Splendor, and The Station Agent (which sold to Miramax), featuring the busiest actress at Sundance this year, Patricia Clarkson. Another popular film was thirteen, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who co-wrote the script with teen star Nikki Reed, who has received tremendous attention and is a definite breakout talent. The film sold for about $2 million to Fox Searchlight.

"Perhaps the most visible person at Sundance was Roger Ebert, who was constantly asked which way his thumb went for the films he saw. 'My thumb is a state secret,' he replied to one eager filmgoer. As he was so influential in the success of last year's entry Better Luck Tomorrow, which sold to MTV Films at last year's festival, Ebert can make or break a small movie.

"As for the performances, notable breakout talent included Maria Bello for The Cooler, Peter Dinklage for The Station Agent, Daniella Alonso for Rhythm of the Saints, Troy Garity (son of Jane Fonda) and Lee Pace for Soldier's Girl, Stark Sands for Die Mommie Die, Sabrina Lloyd for Dopamine, and Victor Rasuk for Raising Victor Vargas. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Tatum O'Neal's performance as a seductress in The Technical Writer is so painfully bad that the Academy should consider asking for her Paper Moon Oscar back."

* Local talents Gleason Bauer, Tracy Hudak, and Rebecca Gray are organizing a "Lysistrata Project" in L.A., inspired by www.lysistrataproject.com. They're seeking groups-"poetry, dance, theatre, art, music, any, all"-to perform in a Los Angeles reading of the Greek classic as "an act of dissent with regard to war." (I suggest the tagline "No sex for oil.") The date and location of the event are still TBD, but interested parties should contact Bauer at gleaball@earthlink.net, or Gray at mnolnykt@carbonbasedfilms.com., before Feb. 3.