Don Wingate | Kaye Ballard: The Show Goes On / 2019

where or when

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don Wingate (director) Kaye Ballard: The Show Goes On / 2019

 

It seems to me that I always loved Kaye Ballard, the singer/comedian—and her talents don’t end there—but that can’t, obviously, be true since the only role that I actually heard her perform (dozens and dozens of times) was in the 1961 Robert Merrill and Michael Stewart cast recording musical Carnival in which she played The Incomparable Rosalie. I was only 14 at the time, and would not visit New York City until at least 8 year later; yet I fell in love with her—as well, I should add, with Anna Maria Alberghetti (who I did meet one evening years later), Jerry Orbach, James Mitchell, Pierre Olaf and the rest of that august cast—through her drunken rendering of the love/hate relationship she had, apparently off stage as well, with the James Mitchell character. The song was titled “Humming,” (she was brilliant at singing songs that represent a slightly tipsy chanteuse such as in her famous Rodgers and Hart rendering of “Where or When”), although I now prefer her performance in Carnival of “It Was Always You.”

     After reading a biography of lyricist John Latouche and while working on a piece on “My Favorite Broadway Songs,” I much later discovered her “Lazy Afternoon” from The Golden Apples, which easily made “My Favorite’s” cut.

     But I must have seen her as well on TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show, The Mel Torme Show or The Perry Como Show; and, of course, I saw her, without knowing it, in The Ritz, in which even the handsome Treat Williams couldn’t make me divert my gaze from her.

     When last year an email message suggested I might watch the Don Wingate special live-streaming production of Kaye Ballard: The Show Goes On, I immediately signed up and waited patiently until 7:00 only to be told that I could not enter the platform I was viewing it through with two connections—the same problem Criterion had for a few weeks before they fixed it, despite the fact that my WIFI connection was my only entry onto the site.

     I was highly disappointed, but knew that it would eventually show up somewhere else, which it did this past week when I watched it with great delight on the Los Angeles Laemmle Movie Theater streaming service.

     I discovered, accordingly, that I was not the only one who had developed a crush on this woman just because of her immense talent and openness. It seems that everyone—except Phil Silvers who treated her badly and cut most her songs from her first full Broadway show, Top Bananas—was her “very best friend.” Marlon Brando, Carol Channing, Eve Arden, Julie Andrews, Mimi Hines, Spike Jones (with whose crazed orchestra she first performed), Ethel Merman, Desi Arnaz, Jerry Lewis (“I must have been the only American who truly adored him,” she observed), Judy Garland, Andy Warhol, Bette Davis, Alice Ghostley, Doris Day, Steve Allen, Woody Allen, Donna McKechnie, Liliane Montevecchi, Jerry Stiller, Ann-Margret…the list goes on. Many of these and others she also helped in their careers, since she often premiered the songs they later made famous, including “Fly Me to the Moon,” “My Man,” and “Cabaret” long before they tickled the vocal chords of Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Barbra Streisand, and Liza Minnelli.

     In fact, Ballard was, in part, responsible for the hiring of Carol Burnett (after she turned down a stint on The Gary Moore Show), Streisand, Joy Behar and numerous others. She was a true “Broadway Baby” a number which she sang on a revival of Follies, yet she was so much more.

      Singing for years in the most noted nightclubs in New York, including The Bon Soir, The Blue Angel, El Morocco, and elsewhere in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, she would draw in the crowds and celebrities like Garland, Merman, Davis, Betty Hutton, and others just to watch her sing brilliant imitations of their own renowned performances.

      After watching the tabulations of Wingate’s celebration of her life, it appears that except in her later years, Ballard was never without a gig, either in a nightclub, a theatrical revue (the old name for loosely bound musical entertainments), a Broadway show, a television series, or a film. Even the shows that closed out of town, such as the musical rendition of Molly Goldberg’s serial radio show The Goldbergs, Molly and noted composer Marc Blitzstein’s Reuben, Rueben were awarded deserved kudos by critics. She even famously played the flute.

     When one of the celebratory guests of The Show Goes On asks why, after she had become so incredibly famous hadn’t Ballard risen the very top of many legends with whom she was friends, he argues that it was, in part, the era in which she lived which demanded pigeon-holing performers. “The trouble was that Kaye Ballard was just too versatile,” he concludes.

     What Wingate doesn’t reveal is that Ballard was also a lesbian, somewhat closeted but open enough to appear in fundraising reviews in the late 1980s in the Pines on Fire Island. Ballard subtly refers to her sexuality in her memoir, writing “I found emotional connect with women like Liz [Smith] that I could never find with a man.” Smith, who later as a noted gossip columnist and editor of Cosmopolitan, was a self-declared bisexual who served as Ballard’s road manager in the 1950s. 

     It was certainly not a problem for her various audiences or even for me, who fell in love with her in a Marion, Iowa living room.

     This marvelous performer died, at the age of 93, on January 21st, 2019.

 

Los Angeles, August 3, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).

 

Gary Halvorson and Mariusz Trebliński | Tristan und Isolde / 2016 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

the sublime and the ridiculous

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Wagner (libretto and music), Mariusz Trebliński (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Tristan und Isolde / 2016  [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

The first HD streaming production of the new Metropolitan Opera season, Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is musically sublime, with outstanding performances by the great soprano Nina Stemme, Stuart Nelson (singing only his second Tristan), Ekaterina Gubanova as the intruding servant Brangäne, René Pape as King Marke, Evegeny Nikitin, singing the smaller role of Tristan’s loyal allay Kurwenal, and, perhaps most importantly, Simon Rattle conducting the Met’s great orchestra.

     Yet this version of Tristan und Isolde is often equally leaden and confusing through production director Mariusz Trebliński’s decision to set the opera on a war ship in Act One, and upon another ship and in that ship’s enormous lower-deck storeroom filled with large containers of what appear to be weapons all stamped with “Warning” in Act Two. The return to Tristan’s childhood home, where Kurwenal has set up like a hospital room, where other portions of the home, having undergone a fire years earlier, appear ready to collapse, is nearly inexplicable, particularly when Tristan retrieves his father’s military jacket from the floor of a nearly creosote leaden room.

      On top of this, set designer Boris Kudlička’s and projection designer Bartek Macias’ sets and projections sometimes clumsily recreated the story of the young Tristan’s loss of his mother (in child-birth) and father, along with the quite unexplained torching of their home and the woods around it, further making murky what is generally a fairly simple tale of love, consuming desire, death, and transfiguration.

     Certainly these various elements do keep our eyes quite busy during the opera’s many long, static passages; and certainly they help to make clear that part of Tristan’s determination to find love—first in his obedience of and service to the King of Cornwall and, later, in his love of Isolde—has a great deal to do with his being an orphan. The worlds of Tristan’s Brittany, Isolde’s Ireland, and Marke’s Cornwall, moreover, obviously are structures of military might achieved through violence—just the kind of world in which Wagner generally locates his operas. Everyone here is a loyal warrior or a traitor, with heroes being awarded and traitors (i.e, the other side) being destroyed.

       But these things are fairly obvious within the long narrative passages Tristan and Isolde recount throughout the opera, and hardly need be reasserted with such heavy-handed imagery and metaphorical projections.

       At moments, particularly the long, long love duet in Act II, the projections of clouds and spinning planets truly do give rise to the kind of splendiferous visions being experienced by the loving couple, particularly as Brangäne interrupts their “maddened” lovemaking with her beautiful off-stage song of warning—a moment, as Rattle himself described it, of near transcendence. But, for the most part, the maritime imagery and weapon’s room storage scenes seemed in opposition to the lovers’ Schopenhauerian ruminations about day/death and night/love. The fact that their verbal love play verges, itself, on gobbledygook is certainly reiterated by the drab surroundings of this production.

       And finally, the metaphorical ghosts of both Tristan’s child-self and his dead father, particularly in Act Three—although again much-needed visual elements while Tristan lies dying—created more murkiness than clarity. It’s apparent that Tristan is being visited by the ghosts of the past, but a child flashing the light of a cigarette-lighter into the dying man’s eyes seems nearly ludicrous—if not dangerous.

      As in all successful renditions of this great opera, moreover, any singer who credibly endures it is a wonder. Here, despite my cavils, this production, particularly given Rattle’s languid and highly nuanced musical direction, along with Stemme’s beautifully balanced and modulated singing and acting, will be recognized as one of the greatest of this opera’s performances.

      Finally, even if by slashing her wrists, Isolde doesn’t quite go “gently into that good night,” it allows her to represent her “Liebestod” as a gradual transformation of worlds through the gradual loss of blood, making Marke’s and Brangäne’s reentries, once again, simple intrusions on the inseparable lover’s lives.  In Tristan’s and Isolde’s love there is no room for others, not even room for living.

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2016).

Lucan Schmitz | Florence / 2022

the mendacity of being queer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Bozick and Luan Schmitz (screenplay), Luan Schmitz (director) Florence / 2022

 

Matthew Florence (Jack Bozick), a shy nerdy kind of gay boy makes an appointment to meet up with Justin (Luan Schmitz). The two boys have a pleasant day catching views of their beautiful city, San Francisco. But when it finally turns into a sexual rendezvous, Matthew backs off, fearful of even kissing someone he’s just met, and nervous about the possibility of his parents discovering his sexuality since he has yet told them. He’s only 18, but is about to turn 19, which somehow has more significance to him than the legal age of consent in California which he already reached. Perhaps he’s still in high school or plans to live with his parents for while longer yet. The film does not quite explain his fixation with adding an extra year.

   Justin wonders why he hasn’t discussed his sexuality with his parents yet, Matthew explaining that he’s seen videos on the net in which a young man comes out to his parents, a lot of them ending in disaster, the child being beaten, kicked out his home, and even worse—which suggests me that for all the positive things gay movies have brought into the world, they can also be detrimental. If nothing else, Matthew knows he’s not the only gay boy in the world—how could he not in San Francisco?—but he’s also come to fear the whole “coming out” process in a way in which previous generations might not even have imagined.

     Justin promises not to follow him on the internet or tell anyone else, if Matthew will only provide with him his phone number and “hang out” with him again.

    They do get together again and continue to meet up on a quite regular basis, a relationship developing between them, each sharing their favorite views of the city and ocean, etc.—just what those “coming out” movies generally signal to show a developing love.

     Time has passed, and Matthew is now about to turn into the magical 19-year-old man. Now at their private birthday celebration on sushi, Justin gives his Matty a special bracelet. Might this be the coming of age/coming out film that Matthew has been seeking out?

     But no, something evil comes this way as the next day Matthew rushes off with a final kiss to get home for his family gathering. Justin grabs his cellphone, communicating to someone: “He just left. I think he’s ready. Let me know if today is the day.”

   We seem to have suddenly entered a mystery adventure, perhaps even something worse. What does Justin and the receiver of this message have store for the innocent boy?

      And finally the director awards us with a meeting of the supposed gorgons, Matthew’s parents (JeJe Gentry and David B. Schively). Both seem absolutely delightful, well-educated, and warm and loving. These are the kind of people with whom you might want to sit down and share even your deepest secrets. And sure enough, Matty finally opens up to tell them that he’s gay, his father responding, “Gay, there’s nothing wrong with that,” and his mother adding, “We’re so glad you told us,” their son almost a little bit disappointed that there is utterly no startlement or challenge.

    Yet he’s so pleased, he also announces that he has a boyfriend, his mother immediately wondering when they can meet him. Asked if he has a picture of him, Matthew pulls out his cellphone and shows them, his mother agreeing that he’s handsome, his father pausing before repeating the word. The moment he leaves the room, the parents turn to one another overjoyed that he has finally told them, making it clear that they have long been waiting for this much-delayed revelation.

     Almost immediately after, the father insists that he needs to go make a call. The call is to, you guessed it, Justin. “You’re my son’s fucking boyfriend. Are you crazy?” For a moment we are even more confused. Is the father having an affair with Justin? What is his relationship to him?

     We soon discover that the father has actually hired Justin to help get Matt out of the closet, and his furious when Justin tells him he is now in love with him. “Get out of this life. Your job is done.”

     Unfortunately, from his upstairs window Matthew has heard the entire conversation. The betrayal may be even worse that the treatment of young gay boys in the “coming out” films Matthew has been watching. Storming downstairs and picking up his father’s cellphone, he discovers that the boy to whom his father has just spoken is named Alexander, with the same number as Justin.

     The mother is also startled by the news, betrayed as well by her husband’s actions. And at that very moment Matthew realizes that his parents knew he was gay the entire time without talking to him about it. That his father also hired the man who is now his boyfriend to help him turns it into an even further debacle. How can the father Mark and his son ever again ever come to terms with one another? Moreover, his own boyfriend, Justin/Alexander has lied him as well, not admitting that the relationship between them was part of a “job.”

     One almost longs for the good old days of a father taking up the rod and sending his son out of the house into the streets forever! Not really, of course, but this modern-day comic version of experience is certainly not as clear about the issues surrounding heterosexual intrusion and love.

     This is pure farce. Where do we go from here? Even more ridiculously we now learn that Mark hired Justin from Craig’s listen where “You can hire people to do things….” Perhaps we have entered the Twilight Zone. It turns out he hired an actor in Alexander without knowing he was also gay.

     Through Matthew’s closed bedroom door, the father attempts to tell him that they have long known he was gay, and were simply worried about making him happy, apologizing for his intrusion into his son’s life. The door isn’t opened.

    Now speaking in Spanish, the mysterious Justin/Alexander confesses to his friend, Juan (Pablo Ruiz) just how he too has fucked up. Has Justin also hidden even his ethnicity if performing his job, in his courting of Matthew? Layer after layer, we see how everyone has lied with the best of all possible intentions—with the exception of being honest.

     Regarding homosexuality, apparently, honesty is the most difficult of all possibilities. The “honest” coming out movies struck terror into the young gay man’s soul. His parents didn’t dare honestly confront him about his sexuality. Justin/Alexander in fear of losing the boy with whom he’d fallen in love, could not get up the courage to tell him of his own background, his profession as an actor, his relationship with the boy’s father. And Matthew couldn’t even imagine it was possible to tell the most open-minded people in the world that he was gay. Clearly, as the farcical comedy reveals, speaking the truth around the issue of being queer is not an alternative even today. I have to admit, I cried a little about that always evident truth.

    Unfortunately, Alexander’s friend Juan’s answer, a bunch of roses and a box of chocolates, is the answer of almost every predictable heterosexual comedy to a romantic dilemma. Yet love is love, isn’t it? Fortunately, Safeway was out of flowers, and Alexander’s roses have become a pineapple instead. To my way of thinking, that’s gay!

    Too bad that this charming film might not tightened up its script just a little, that Luan Schmitz (aka Luan Larbac) couldn’t afford professional actors, and that he hadn’t chosen an editor who might have more quickly cut away from the cars, showers curtains, and walls when the characters have already exited the scene, helping establish a more energetic rhythm in sync with farces such as this. This might have been a small masterwork.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

Henry Hills | Henry Hills: Selected Films (Porter Springs 3, Kino Da!, Money, SSS, Goa Lawah, Little Lieutenant, Bali Mécanique, Porter Springs 4, Electricity and Failed States) / 1977-2008

dancing artists

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henry Hills Henry Hills: Selected Films (1977-2008) (Porter Springs 3, Kino Da!, Money, SSS, Goa Lawah, Little Lieutenant, Bali Mécanique, Porter Springs 4, Electricity and Failed States)

 

New York filmmaker Henry Hills studied with James Broughton, George Kuchar, and Hollis Frampton at the San Francisco Art Institute, and was influenced by Bruce Connor and Harry Smith. The other afternoon I watched several of his short films, including the 1977 silent short, Porter Springs 3, Kino Da! (1980), Money (1985), SSS (1988), Goa Lawah (1992), Little Lieutenant (1994), Bali Mécanique (1994), Porter Springs 4 (1999), Electricity (2007), and Failed States (2008).

     Let me begin my discussion by reiterating the general statement about Hills’ work: that it all very much deals with dance, in some cases, such as SSS incorporating the works of actual dancers (Sally Silvers, Pooh Kaye, Harry Shepperd, Lee Katz, Kumiko Kimoto, David Zambrano, Ginger Gillespie, Mark Dendy, and others) and Bali Mécanique, which involves four traditional Bali sections of the Lelong dance (the Condong, the Bapang, the Penipoek, and the warning of the Guarda). But even works without dance, often appears, in his usually frenetic intercutting, to be a kind of dance—of images, words, figures, and color.

     Secondly, Hills often works with New York poets (such as my friends Charles Bernstein, James Sherry, Diane Ward, Ron Silliman, Allan Davies, Jack Collom, Bruce Andrews, and others), and pieces with other filmmakers such as Abigail Childs, composers and audio artists such as Christian Marclay, John Zorn, and Zenna Parkins, and playwrights such as Richard Foreman—in a work not discussed here.

      The humorous yet seriously probing Money, for example, sends almost all of the figures mentioned above to the New York streets to speak about and read works about their needs or disregards for money. Hills then chops up their comments into a manic mishmash of single words, short phrases, and slightly longer sentences which clearly express not only the freshness and energy of these mostly younger artists, but the importance and comic urgency of what that word might mean to them. I knew most of the people involved in this work, and was both delighted and a bit shocked to see these friends dressed in the style of the mid-80s and to revisit their then fresh faces. The  beautiful Ward looked more like a teenager, and Andrews, Sherry, Silvers, and Bernstein—all born performers, seemed a bit more like street hucksters and poets and dancers, but then that’s the point: in a sense they were, as Bernstein would later write of poetry, pitching their art.

      The earlier Kino Da! uses poetry in a different way to create a kind of zaum-like work similar to a mix of Russian poet Khlebnikov and the American poet Stein, read by San Francisco poet Jack Hirschman (also a friend).

      Little Lieutenant steals Weimar cabaret scenes, German labor footage, and images from Walther Ruttmann’s film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (see My Year 2015), combining these with John Zorn’s arrangement of Kurt Weill’s “Little Lieutenant of the Loving God,” along with choreography by Silvers and Cydney Wilkes to give us a stunning sense of what Weimar Berlin was before the Nazi takeover.

      Goa Lawah focuses on the dance of the bats in the sacred bat tree in Bali, as their pitched-voices accompany their upside down antics; while Failed States represents the spin of machines and humans which end in their collapse, all accompanied by the poem “Guru Guru Gatha” by Jackson MacLow (yet another good friend). Electricity centers on the dance of the high wire trams in Prague set against the backdrop of other significant sites.

       Perhaps only in the more personal Porter Springs movies, which return the filmmaker to a Georgia mountain retreat where his family visited almost every August, does this pace let up a bit. Yet even here, in the third manifestation of those films, the trees weave in and out with wind in a heaving motion that seems to call up, once again, dance; and in Porter Springs 4, made up of family home movies shot over 20 years, family members leap into air and jump into water in a near ritualistic pattern.

      The short music video commissioned by John Zorn’s Elektra Records calls up both the film noir images of Jules Dassin’s film of the 1950s and scenes from Bernstein’s West Side Story.

       By the end of watching these 10 short films and 1 music video, I felt that I too was sharing an evening of marvelous home movie about friends and acquaintances from the present and years past. While some might define Hill’s “palette,” so to speak, a very limited one, in its very specificity, his films become almost a kind of time box for a group of talented, mostly New York-based artists. Just as Teju Cole recently described William Christenberry’s photographs of Hale County Alabama and his own works of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park as a way to capture time in images, so too does Hills’ use of the same poets, playwrights, dancers, musicians, and other artists throughout his career document a very specific history of time and place, a process he repeats in his return to a beloved spot in his four Porter Springs films.*

 

*Teju Cole, The New York Times Magazine (February 5, 2017), pp. 14-17.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2017).

       Perhaps only in the more personal Porter Springs movies, which return the filmmaker to a Georgia mountain retreat where his family visited almost every August, does this pace let up a bit. Yet even here, in the third manifestation of those films, the trees weave in and out with wind in a heaving motion that seems to call up, once again, dance; and in Porter Springs 4, made up of family home movies shot over 20 years, family members leap into air and jump into water in a near ritualistic pattern.

      The short music video commissioned by John Zorn’s Elektra Records calls up both the film noir images of Jules Dassin’s film of the 1950s and scenes from Bernstein’s West Side Story.

       By the end of watching these 10 short films and 1 music video, I felt that I too was sharing an evening of marvelous home movie about friends and acquaintances from the present and years past. While some might define Hill’s “palette,” so to speak, a very limited one, in its very specifity, his films become almost a kind of time box for a group of talented, mostly New York-based artists. Just as Teju Cole recently described William Christenberry’s photographs of Hale County Alabama and his own works of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park as a way to capture time in images, so too does Hills’ use of the same poets, playwrights, dancers, musicians, and other artists throughout his career document a very specific history of time and place, a process he repeats in his return to a beloved spot in his four Porter Springs films.*

 

*Teju Cole, The New York Times Magazine (February 5, 2017), pp. 14-17.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2017).