Film Review: Luca

It’s summertime and the swimmin’ is easy, especially if you’re a cute little green sea monster like Luca and live in the waters of the lovely Italian Riviera with your parents and other sea monsters.

Luca finds a new buddy in Alberto, another sea monster who has decided to cast his lot with the humans aboveground. He’s athletic and has taught himself to dive off a home-built ramp back into the sea. Luca’s mom would be horrified if she knew. Even Luca, a bit fearful, wonders at his friend’s bravery. Alberto’s answer: “You’ve got a Bruno in your head, so tell him, “Silenzio, Bruno!”

It’s exciting beyond belief – except for one thing: when they venture out of the water onto land, they turn into little human versions of themselves. Fun perhaps, but when they get into town, it’s embarrassing – not to mention confusing to local observers. 

One such observer is a girl – Giulia Marcovaldo (Emma Berman), a gutsy and determined chick who seems to have no fear. She dreams of owning a Vespa, and intends to win it by placing first in the upcoming pasta-eating triathlon.

Pixar brings us Jacob Tremblay as Luca and Jack Dylan Grazer as Alberto in “Luca,” its latest animated release from Disney. 

“Luca” follows the Pixar mold in charm, humor and positive messages of being yourself and finding likeminded folks. It differs in one obvious respect – much of it is in subtitled Italian, which I for one loved. It also boasts a charming score by Dan Romer.

This may not be top-drawer Pixar – it’s much simpler of plot and more direct of approach – but it is beautiful, delightful and most welcome.

“Luca” streams on Disney+.

Film Review: Summer of Soul: or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised

Everybody knows about that wild 1969 hippie fest at Woodstock. But how many have heard of the Harlem Culture Festival, which took place 100 miles south of Woodstock and in part contemporaneously with that event?

This Festival was no hippie happening, but a series of concerts attracting some 300,000 African Americans and featuring the likes of Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Moms Mabley, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone and bands like The 5th Dimension and Gladys Knight & the Pips. It took place in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) for six weeks between June 29 and August 24, 1969. Woodstock took place 100 miles north, from August 15-19 of that year.

The Harlem festival was taped, but the footage sat in a basement for 50 years, never seen publicly until the release of the film “Summer of Soul,” which opens on July 2.

Director Amir “Questlove” Thompson took the footage and made a fascinating film that’s part music video, part history and still very relevant.

Backers were hard to find because they thought they might not be paid. Fortunately, Maxwell House Coffee and General Foods stepped up.

These concertgoers weren’t just looking for an excuse to party. They were there to celebrate black culture, but were also in search of something bigger than that: call it progress, even freedom.

One participant notes, “We want our freedom now.” It’s been a long struggle, starting in the 17th century, and it’s not over yet.

The film is a fascinating blast from the musical past, with performances and 20-some songs from many of the best-known singers of the time.

One of the most familiar groups is the 5th Dimension, with their crazy clothes and wild colors, singing their #1 hit combining “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” from the hippie musical “Hair.”

Enjoy the high falsetto notes of David Ruffin, lead singer of The Temptations, singing the Motown hit “My Girl.” And the music of Ray Barretto, percussionist and bandleader born in New York of Puerto Rican ancestry, who is said to have “put the Afro-Puerto Rican soul in pop music.”

There’s plenty of gospel music to be heard. Journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault probably speaks for the group when she says, “Gospel is deep in my DNA. It helped us march on and confront the most violent acts.” The Edwin Hawkins Singers offer “Oh, Happy Day” and Mavis Staples is shown singing “Precious Lord” after Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Watch Nina Simone, with huge double-hooped silver earrings, as she sits at the piano, singing and playing “Backlash Blues.”

Sly & the Family Stone offer “Everyday People,” the band’s first #1 hit.

It’s history, it’s celebration, it’s music, it’s joy and it’s a reminder that real freedom hasn’t been attained yet. “Summer of Soul” (complete title: “Summer of Soul ….or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised”) is a piece of history that is hidden no longer. Perhaps this cynical comment will not be true much longer either: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that black history will be erased.”

Opens July 2 at Angelika, Hillcrest and AMC La Jolla cinemas; also streams on Hulu.

Film Review: Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation

 

Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams – both literary giants from the American South – are profiled, interviewed and quoted in the fascinating documentary “Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation,” opening June 25 at Landmark’s Hillcrest Cinema.

Williams is primarily known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which shocked the Broadway world in the 1950s with their frank portrayals of previously taboo topics like rape, alcoholism, adultery and mental illness.

Capote is perhaps best loved for the film version of his 1958 novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which starred Audrey Hepburn (much to Capote’s annoyance; he wanted Marilyn Monroe).

But he is mainly remembered for creating the nonfiction novel with his shocking “In Cold Blood” – detailing the murder of a Kansas farm family – which became an Oscar-nominated film in 1967.

Both were gay and not shy about it. Both were engaging conversationalists; both had inner demons they wrestled with throughout life.

Williams grew up with a mostly-absent traveling salesman father. He was greatly saddened by the fate of his sister Rose, who suffered from mental illness and was subjected to the then-common “cures” of a lobotomy and 65 electroshock treatments.

Williams was not a social butterfly like Capote, who attended all the fancy parties. “In New York,” he says, “you play a game of importance and start to believe it and so do others. It is all an artificial aura created by New York.”

Capote wanted to be noticed. He succeeded, and once said “I’m famous for being famous.”

Yet this pair became great friends, traveled to Europe together (with their respective boyfriends) and genuinely liked each other. They even came to similar ends, dying within 18 months of each other, of overdoses (Williams of Seconol; Capote of drugs and alcohol).

Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland has assembled an amazing amount of information, quotes and footage from interviews with reporters, notably Dick Cavett and David Frost. In addition, actors Jim Parsons (as Capote) and Zachary Quinto (as Williams) do a very credible job of reading some of the lines from the writings. Major kudos to editor Bernadine Colish for making the whole so very watchable.

Theater review: Once On This Island

 

                               

Moonlight Stage Productions opens its first full-scale musical in over a year (and not a moment too soon) with Lynn Ahrens’ jaunty, Calypso-inflected “Once On This Island,” a retelling of the old “Little Mermaid” tale. Paul David Bryant directs.

Almost more opera than musical – the show packs 20 songs in a show that would run maybe 85 minutes without intermission – this tells (or rather, sings) the story of a Caribbean “island of two different worlds” and the young girl named Ti Moune (Brooke Henderson), who tries to bring them together.

Ti Moune herself was found high in a tree after a huge storm. She was rescued and adopted by local peasants Mama Euralie (Patricia Jewel) and Tonton Julian (Leo Ebanks). A serious-minded girl, Ti Moune wants to find her purpose in life.

On the other end of the island live the “grands hommes” swells (descendants of French planters) who, like most swells, are partial to big parties and strong drinks.

Mama Euralie asks the gods to give Ti Moune her purpose in life, preferably love.

Since this is a fairy tale, we also have gods – the goddess of love Erzulie (Anise Ritchie); the god of water Agwe (Nathan Andrew Riley); mother of the earth Asaka (Jodi Marks) and of course the colorful demon of Death Papa Ge (Edred Utomi). Papa Ge proposes a test to determine which is stronger, love or death.

One day Ti Moune is out walking after a huge storm when she sees an obviously injured “swell.” She runs to his aid, saves his life, and of course falls in love with him. He is Daniel (Ala Tiatia-Garaud), and he quickly becomes quite taken with her as well.

Can this work out? Will it? You’ll have to see the play to find out. 

This production boasts a strong cast of singers and dancers (well directed by Bryant) in wildly fanciful rented costumes which almost deserve their own bow. My favorite character was Edred Utomi’s amusing demon Papa Ge.

Lyndon Pugeda conducts (and plays in) the boffo band of six. 

“Once On This Island” isn’t the best musical ever written, but it’s an amusing way to spend a summer evening. Even more important, theater is back!

Theater review: Beehive (The '60's Musical)

Beehive: The ’60s Musical

There are lots of things to remember about the ’60s – crazy clothes, the flower children in San Francisco and Woodstock among them. Music got a little goofy then too, and New Village Arts brings us that aspect in “Beehive: The ’60s Musical” through July 25 outdoors at the Flower Fields in Carlsbad.

The show’s creator, Larry Gallagher, has chosen to concentrate on the girl singers of the decade with a musical that features seven terrific singers and 30-some songs of the decade. That means that only songs written for women are included here (shall I be snarky and point out that the vast majority were written by men?), but that’s plenty to fill an evening. You’ll hear songs like “Where The Boys Are,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” along with  and “Son of a Preacher Man” and Aretha Franklin’s “A Natural Woman” and “Respect.”

The first act is all about love and hair styles and funny fashions; the second gets a bit into the more insidious historical facts of war, assassinations and the continuing struggles of women to be recognized. But mostly, this is just a show to kick back, tap your toes and even sing along with (after all, it’s outside; nobody will mind).

The singers are terrific. Here’s the list: Natasha Baenisch, Megan Carmitchel, Brittany Carrillo, Rae Henderson, Bibi Mama and Eboni Muse. There’s power in those vocal cords, every one of them, and they know how to use them. Bravo, ladies.

Kudos also to director Kristianne Kurner, who keeps the show moving, costume designer Faith A. James (ah, the memories those costumes evoke) and Missy Bradstreet for those wigs!

Old farts like me may carp that historically, this show seems to want to pretend a time that never was. Even Otis Redding’s “Respect” – written for black men to sing to black women – was rewritten a bit in order to create a hit song.

But never mind. These women can sing. And dance. And entertain. So go and enjoy.

“Beehive” plays through July 25, 2021 at the Flower Fields in Carlsbad.

Friday at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday at 4 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m.

Tickets: https://newvillagearts.org/event/beehive/2021-06-11/

Film review: In the Heights

 

Great news! Usnavi, Nina, Vanessa, Benny and the whole gang of other inhabitants of Washington Heights are back – this time on the screen – to sing and dance about life “In The Heights.”

The plot’s been updated a bit and there seem to be a lot more dancers (or at least more hoofing) than in the stage version, but the feeling is the same. Director John M. Chu brings us a joyful, active, almost dizzying  portrait of a group of Latino immigrants celebrating life in a New York summer. And the look is even better, because it was filmed in the real Washington Heights.

At the center of the action is “Hamilton” veteran Anthony Ramos playing Usnavi, proprietor of the local bodega where people meet, hang out and enjoy life and an occasional frozen ice bar, when the Piragua guy (played by co-writer and Broadway wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda) wheels by with his cart. Miranda played Usnavi in the original stage version, but Ramos gives the part all the heart it needs and deserves.

Washington Heights is mostly Latino, but gentrifying. Rents are going up, the richer and whiter are buying the property and making residents like Usnavi pine to return to the Dominican Republic and open a bar on the beach like the one his father had.

Usnavi has eyes for Nina (Leslie Grace), a Stanford student and the first in her family to go to college. Her dad Kevin (Jimmy Smits) pins the family hopes on her.

Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who wants to be a clothing designer, may end up moving downtown where that action is. Salon owner Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega) has already been forced to relocate her salon to the Bronx.

But for right now, celebration is in order and we’ll see such wondrously charming scenes and one set in a local public (so far) swimming pool, complete with a water ballet.

When a blackout hits, nobody gets bent out of shape. After all, that sort of thing is temporary, and this show is about something so much more important. It’s time to party at the “Carnaval del Barrio.”

Overseeing all the action is Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), nobody’s and everybody’s grandma, who brings even more of a family feeling to the show.

Above all, “In the Heights” is about community and the relationships we find there, relayed in hip-hop style and a positive attitude.

There couldn’t be a better time for this delightful, upbeat, swinging show.

Theater review: Becoming Dr. Ruth

                        

                                                     

If you don’t know who Dr. Ruth is, you probably weren’t listening to the radio or watching American TV in the 1980s. Here’s your chance to meet the diminutive gnome with the distinctive accent and enlightened attitudes about sex that led her to say things like “Skiing is like good sex: all about instincts, timing and taking risks.”

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, sex therapist extraordinaire, was a fixture in those pre-Internet days, dispensing humorous, no-nonsense advice to the lovelorn and sexually confused.

Playwright Mark St. Germain, who has penned theatrical profiles of other famous people such as Typhoid Mary, Thomas Edison and Tammy Wynette, lets Dr. Ruth tell her own dramatic story. 

It’s more than dramatic; harrowing might be a better description. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, she was orphaned at 10 by the Holocaust and sent to a boarding school in Switzerland, where she became a maid. She never saw her family again.

After the war, she went to Palestine where, she says, “I was a servant again, this time on a Jewish kibbutz.” But she got a scholarship to study in Jerusalem, where she got a certificate as a kindergarten teacher. She met a soldier and they moved to Paris, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne.

In 1956, they emigrated to New York City and settled in Manhattan, where Ruth scored a scholarship to the New School, graduated with a master’s degree in sociology and went to work as a research assistant at Columbia University.

She eventually got a Ph.D. from Columbia, but though attracted to a scholar’s life, she found her niche when a lecture she gave to New York broadcasters about the need for sex education programming led to an offer for a 15-minute radio show every Sunday. It was an immediate success, “Sexually Speaking” was lengthened to an hour and by 1984 Dr. Ruth was syndicated nationally.

Now North Coast Repertory Theatre offers a delightful streamed version of “Becoming Dr. Ruth” through July 4. Ellenstein was smart enough to offer Tovah Feldshuh the role, and we are lucky that she accepted. 

Feldshuh may not be 4’7” tall (she’s not much taller, at 5’3”), but she is perfect for the part – she has the accent, the attitude and the movements down. And the fact that she counts Dr. Ruth a friend (so when questions arose in rehearsal they could just call the authority) didn’t hurt.

Kudos to North Coast’s resident set designer Marty Burnett and Elisa Benzoni for the just-right set and costumes, and to Aaron Rumley, who made the tech (cinematography, editing, projections and sound design) look easy.

The world is lucky that Dr. Ruth (at a sprightly 93) is still with us. And now you can see her again through July 4, thanks to the magic of technology. Don’t  pass up the chance. Get a ticket at northcoastrep.org.