Paradise Square makes quite the reach. A musical about the build-up to New York’s horrific Draft Riots of 1863 reaches to the past to tell us about the present. It reaches across cultures to tell us about assimilation and appropriation. It reaches across styles of music and dance to celebrate diversity and commonality. It reaches to contain both epic realism and mythical nostalgia. And somewhere along the line it reaches a point of no return, when all that reaching just wears itself out.
The musical, opening tonight at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, is big in a way that calls back to the Cameron Mackintosh productions of the 1980s and their ’90s Broadway offspring like Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman – those latter two courtesy of Garth Drabinsky, the producer attempting a comeback with Paradise Square after some financial flim-flam landed him in a Canadian prison; he was paroled in 2013 after serving 17 months.
The musical, opening tonight at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, is big in a way that calls back to the Cameron Mackintosh productions of the 1980s and their ’90s Broadway offspring like Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman – those latter two courtesy of Garth Drabinsky, the producer attempting a comeback with Paradise Square after some financial flim-flam landed him in a Canadian prison; he was paroled in 2013 after serving 17 months.
- 4/4/2022
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
Rising to prominence in a changing cultural landscape, Robert Mapplethorpe may have been just been in the right place at the right time. At the cultural vanguard he experienced both the free love era of the 1960s with Patti Smith–treated in the film as an impromptu ordeal he was thrown into likely to satisfy his parents–and documented the AIDs crisis as his subjects started to fade away. As a biopic, Mapplethorpe comes up short, falling into the kind of tropes artist pictures tend to plunge into, full of grandiose speeches foreshadowing what’s to come, perhaps a victim of low-budget indie filmmaking forcing compromises. Providing a Wikipedia overview of a complex career, the film chooses to provoke with Mapplethorpe’s images rather than totally engage with his conceptual practices.
Co-written, directed, and edited by master documentarian Ondi Timoner, Mapplethorpe falls short of her best picture, We Live In Public,...
Co-written, directed, and edited by master documentarian Ondi Timoner, Mapplethorpe falls short of her best picture, We Live In Public,...
- 4/29/2018
- by John Fink
- The Film Stage
Lon Chaney, He Who Gets Slapped Lon Chaney is one of the most fascinating movie stars in film history. Throughout the 1920s, Chaney was one the biggest box-office draws the world over despite what could kindly be described as an unhandsome face — one that was often disguised by heavy layers of makeup to make him look ancient, deformed, Chinese, female, etc. His roles usually fell into two categories: total fiends, or fiends and semi-fiends in love/lust with or protective of some pretty young thing or other. On Monday, August 15, Turner Classic Movies will be showing 15 Lon Chaney movies, in addition to the reconstructed — by way of stills — London After Midnight (1927), perhaps the most talked about lost film ever. TCM will also present the premiere of the 1922 version of Oliver Twist, directed by future Oscar winner Frank Lloyd (Cavalcade, Mutiny on the Bounty), and starring Chaney as Fagin, The Kid's Jackie Coogan as Oliver,...
- 8/15/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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