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Home » Theater Buzz » Page 212

WEAVING THE PAST: JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY Q&A at the Playhouse

August 7, 2014 by Lamb L.

WEAVING THE PAST director Walter Dominguez and executive producer Shelley Morrison will participate in a Q&A following the 4 PM screening at the Playhouse on Sunday, August 24.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDX48lpG-3o

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Filed Under: Films, Playhouse 7, Q&A's

Vulture’s David Edelstein Interviews Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory and Jonathan Demme, the Triumvirate Behind A MASTER BUILDER

August 6, 2014 by Lamb L.

This August 15th we’ll be opening Jonathan Demme’s filmed version of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory’s acclaimed stage production of Henrik Ibsen’s A MASTER BUILDER. Recently film critic David Edelstein, a self-proclaimed Ibsenite, sat down for a group interview with the triumvirate:

On Wednesday, July 22, I had the privilege of hosting a talk with Andre Gregory, Wallace Shawn, and Jonathan Demme, under the auspices of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, after a screening of the trio’s impressive collaboration A Master Builder (now playing at New York’s Film Forum). Much as they did with Uncle Vanya (filmed by Louis Malle as Vanya on 42nd Street), Gregory, Shawn, and the cast rehearsed Ibsen’s play for many years, ultimately performing it for small, invited audiences. Malle being dead, Demme stepped into the breach and filmed the production quickly and well.

A Master Builder centers on acclaimed architect Halvard Solness (played onscreen by Shawn), who fears being dislodged by the next generation. He feels especially vulnerable because he has, over the last decade, gone from making towering structures to smaller buildings in which real people can live. He has lost some stature and is in a depressive marriage with a prim ghost of a woman (Julie Hagerty). At a key juncture, a young woman, Hilda (Lisa Joyce), a kind of architect groupie, arrives to spur Solness to ascend once more — to drive him toward that unattainable ideal, both metaphorically and literally. (She wants him to lay a wreath at the top of his new tower in spite of his fear of heights.)

This was a transitional play for Ibsen (he had many), a move from the more naturalistic dramas (the best known are A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler) of his middle stage and towards the mysterious, symbolic works on which he labored until his death. Gregory and Shawn’s innovation is to make Hilda and everything that happens in her wake a deathbed dream of the master builder. That might offend purists, but, as far as I’m concerned, it brings out every one of the play’s undercurrents while accounting for its often ludicrous surface. I’m not sure Ibsen would have approved, but I think he’d have liked how well the version plays.

What follows is an edited version of our onstage talk. Let me warn you that we don’t discuss Gregory and Shawn’s dramatized version of their friendship inMy Dinner With Andre or Shawn’s inconceivably beloved performance in The Princess Bride. The audience consisted of actors, and the focus was tightly on this play, this film, and this creative process. I had a lot of fun, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.

David Edelstein: First let me say that I’m not just a film critic, I’m an Ibsenite. I love Ibsen and I love this play … and every time I’ve seen it, it has stunk up the stage. It’s an obstacle course over a minefield. You have this naturalistic form and these mythic characters, and audiences either laugh inappropriately or roll their eyes. If you had asked me, “Should we do this play?” I’d have said, “Steer clear.” And yet this is a great movie. What drew you to A Master Builder in the first place? And at what point did you think you could make sense of it by doing it as a dream play?

Andre Gregory: Well, I think what drew me to it was that I was getting old. [Audience laughs and claps.] Thank you.

Wallace Shawn: He wasn’t 80 at that time.

Gregory: When we started this 16 or 17 years ago, I was young, yeah. On a more interesting level, I think that I saw Solness as an artist who had, in a way, reached the end of his career or had nothing left in him to create and finds the way to embrace the last interesting creative challenge, which is giving up this life, and how to do that. When I was a 7-year-old boy, I went to a school where every Christmas, they read Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and I was fascinated by the character of Scrooge, who I see somewhat like Solness. There’s always hope. No matter what kind of a son-of-a-bitch you are, no matter how unhappy you are, how loveless, it’s not over ’til it’s over. And once, when I was in Poland, I was introduced to a young man who didn’t know who I was and he looked into my eyes and he said, “When I look into your eyes, I see the saddest optimist I’ve ever met.” I don’t know if that answers your question.

It does. I never thought of A Master Builder on those terms. I think of Ibsen’s final play When We Dead Awaken that way, as the story of an artist figuring out how to die, but it never occurred to me that you could locate that idea in A Master Builder, too.

Gregory: Well, of course we emphasize it, and when Wally and I had our mutual, in a way, death scene together — that first scene in the movie — this guy [Jonathan Demme] was roaring with laughter. The more depressing it got, the funnier he thought it was.

Was the theatrical production a dream play?

Shawn: I didn’t feel comfortable tampering with the text, really, until we put in something like a dozen years. We rehearsed the play starting in 1997—

Most artists peak around the seventh year of rehearsal, I hear.

Shawn: —and after we had done about 12 years, I did feel that somehow I had earned that right — which could be certainly argued with, some people might say that was a terrible thing to do — but I did tamper with the text, taking out certain things and putting in the fact that it was all a dream. Because it is not a realistic play, and it can’t be a realistic play, and Hilda cannot be a real girl. I mean, in a very, very tortured way, you could figure out a story in which Hilda made sense as a real person, but you’d be disturbing Ibsen’s play, really.

She was based on a real person in Ibsen’s life, but he transformed her into a mythic creature.

Shawn: She’s a fantastical figure, and Andre had always seen her as that. Once that decision was made, you can see how the play really is about someone wrestling with the contradictions in his own life, contradictions that he cannot resolve and he doesn’t resolve. And of course, you feel that of Ibsen himself.

Gregory: He was the most self-revelatory writer. Maybe because it was so outlandish and so impossible — and people in his time didn’t know that you could be a confessional dramatist in that way — that I don’t think people asked him, “Gee, do you feel these contradictions within yourself?” Because they wouldn’t have presumed such a thing.

Read the rest of the interview on the Vulture.com site.

(from left to right) David Edelstein, Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, Jonathan Demme

 

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Filed Under: Featured Films, Films, Royal

Music Hall Q&A’s with 37: A FINAL PROMISE Actor-Filmmaker Randall Batinkoff and Co-Star Scottie Thompson

August 6, 2014 by Lamb L.

Randall Batinkoff, star-director-co-screenwriter of the new indie drama 37: A FINAL PROMISE, and co-star Scottie Thompson will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:30 PM screenings at the Music Hall on Friday and Saturday, August 8 and 9.

Randall Batinkoff

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Filed Under: Music Hall 3, Q&A's

Interview with FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS Director Mitra Farahani

August 6, 2014 by Lamb L.

We are very pleased to be opening the new film FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS at our Royal and Town Center theaters on Friday, August 15. The lyrical documentary explores the enigma of provocative artist Bahman Mohassess, the so-called “Persian Picasso,” whose acclaimed paintings and sculptures dominated pre-revolutionary Iran. In the Village Voice Michael Atkinson called the film “never less than addictively fascinating – Mohassess’s story is a heroic torch of individualism battling mad-state ideology, from the Shah to the mullahs, and his autumnal stance toward all things non-Mohassess is hilariously derisive.” Recently Hollywood Soapbox interviewed director Mitra Farahani about her film. Mohassess, she says, “used to ask: “what could be the meaning of painting anymore, in a world with a sky devoid of birds, a sea devoid of fishes and a wood devoid of beasts?’ In front of all that violence Mohassess’ answer of course was not self-destruction, for the course of his life showed him harshly struggling with those issues, in a positive attitude. But certainly the end of his life, the choice of self-exile and symbolic retirement, all the violence in the world that profoundly disgusted him, all contributed to a more violent answer to violence. Destruction progressively becoming a part of it.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6YNQWzVgpc
Mitra Farahani

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Filed Under: Featured Films, Films, Royal, Town Center 5

FORT MCCOY Q&A with Filmmaker Kate Connor

August 5, 2014 by Lamb L.

FORT MCCOY is a new drama based on a true story about a family that lived next to a Wisconsin POW camp that held Nazis during WWII. The film stars Eric Stoltz, Lyndsy Fonseca, Camryn Manheim, Seymour Cassel and Matthew Lawrence and Kate Connor, who wrote the screenplay, co-directed and plays her real-life grandmother. Ms. Connor will be at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills for a Q&A following the 7:30 PM show on Friday, August 15.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O3Sb6iKKsY

 

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Filed Under: Music Hall 3, Q&A's

Win Tickets to FOREVER FLAMENCO at the Ford

July 31, 2014 by Lamb L.

Laemmle has several pairs of tickets to give away to the astounding FOREVER FLAMENCO — a special one-night only celebration of music, song, and dance at the Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood. The event takes place Saturday, August 9 at 8:30pm.

ENTER-TO-WIN here!

The dancers, musicians and singers of FOREVER FLAMENCO have been delighting Fountain Theatre audiences for over two decades with the intensity, precision and exhilaration for which flamenco is known. Now Forever Flamenco returns to the outdoor stage at the FORD THEATRES with this passionate expression of Spanish culture. A roster of internationally renowned flamenco artists will pay tribute to Los Angeles flamenco pioneer ROBERTO AMARAI in what promises to be a sizzling performance.

——————————

Acclaim for Forever Flamenco:

The Fountain’s Forever Flamenco series has been called “the city’s preeminent flamenco series” by the Los Angeles Times and “L.A.’s most significant venue for flamenco” by the LA Weekly.

Working Author designates it “the rarest of treats… for both connoisseur and novice alike, ‘Forever Flamenco’ offers the opportunity to luxuriate in the incendiary passions of flamenco.”

Dance writer DEBRA LEVINE says, “performances feature superb gypsy guitarists and singers. Do you enjoy seeing the body in spellbinding motion? Great artistic individuality? Live music? Then go,” and Stage and Cinema’s TONY FRANKEL writes, “Thrilling, sexy and sensuous.”

—————–

Visit Forever Flamenco  on the web for tickets and more info.

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Filed Under: Around Town, Claremont 5, Fallbrook 7, Music Hall 3, News, NoHo 7, Playhouse 7, Press, Royal, Santa Monica, Sunset 5, Theater Buzz, Town Center 5

LE CHEF, a Light Summer Movie that Doesn’t Leave One Deaf from Explosions

July 17, 2014 by Lamb L.

Summertime is lovely for a reprieve from the hectic schedules of the rest of the year and part of the pleasure comes from “light” movies. You can easily take in one of the dozen quarter-billion dollar films the Hollywood studios release every year, one with copious special effects and sometimes even a coherent plot. Occasionally we at Laemmle Theatres get the chance to screen a light entertainment that doesn’t leave your ears ringing but rather charmed and laughing. The new French comedy LE CHEF, about two chefs, one aspiring (Michaël Ruan), one a celebrity (Jean Reno), is such a movie, one that pokes vigorously at the pretensions of those who would take French cuisine from bouef bourgenon to sea slug foam. In her San Francisco Chronicle review, writer Leba Hertz wrote “it’s definitely not love at first sight for this odd couple, which makes for good laughs, but their love of food and life enables them to find the right mix of ingredients for a very funny movie.” Check out LE CHEF et bon appetit!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96A6l5JRs8
Michaël Young

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Filed Under: Featured Films, Playhouse 7, Royal, Town Center 5

Q&A with AFFLUENZA Filmmakers and Star Gregg Sulkin — Friday, July 18th Following the 7:15 PM Show!

July 16, 2014 by Lamb L.

The AFFLUENZA filmmakers and star Gregg Sulkin will participate in a Q&A after the 7:15 PM screening at the Music Hall on Friday, July 18th.

AFFLUENZA star Gregg Sulkin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrLBWz7rQn8

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Filed Under: Music Hall 3, Q&A's

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Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/lost-starlight | Subscribe: http://bit.ly/3b8JTym | In 2050 Seoul, astronaut Nan-young’s ultimate goal is to visit Mars. But she fails the final test to onboard the fourth Mars Expedition Project. The musician Jay buries his dreams in a vintage audio equipment shop.

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Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/lost-starlight

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Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/ghost | Subscribe: http://bit.ly/3b8JTym | Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze) is a banker, Molly Jensen (Demi Moore) is an artist, and the two are madly in love. However, when Sam is murdered by friend and corrupt business partner Carl Bruner (Tony Goldwyn) over a shady business deal, he is left to roam the earth as a powerless spirit. When he learns of Carl's betrayal, Sam must seek the help of psychic Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg) to set things right and protect Molly from Carl and his goons.

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ABOUT LAEMMLE: Since 1938, Laemmle [Theatres] has been showing the finest independent, arthouse, and international films.

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Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/polish-women | Subscribe: http://bit.ly/3b8JTym | Rio de Janeiro, early 20th century. Escaping famine in Poland, Rebeca (Valentina Herszage), together with her son Joseph, arrives in Brazil to meet her husband, who immigrated first hoping for a better life for the three of them. However, she finds a completely different reality in Rio de Janeiro. Rebeca discovers that her husband has passed away and ends up a hostage of a large network of prostitution and trafficking of Jewish women, headed by the ruthless Tzvi (Caco Ciocler). To escape this exploitation, she will need to transgress her own beliefs

Tickets: http://laemmle.com/film/polish-women

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