Charles Jarrott | Mary Queen, of Scotts / 1971

relying on the heart instead of the head

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Hale (screenwriter), Charles Jarrott (director) Mary Queen, of Scotts / 1971

 

Given the remarkable cast of Vanessa Redgrave (as Mary), whom I believe to be one of the greatest actresses of the 20th century, and Glenda Jackson, who has played Queen Elizabeth so brilliantly in many productions, I was hoping that this production, now basically free of the Hays Code and so much more informed about events, would be a truly memorable film production.

   I was more than disappointed. Critics immediately jumped on the old bandwagon of historical inaccuracies. In fact, this film, in many respects, is fairly accurate. Unlike almost all portraits of the Virgin Queen this film actually shows Elizabeth’s love for Robert Dudley, whom she later named the Earl of Leicester. And instead of suddenly beginning as did the earlier John Ford 1936 version with Mary’s necessary return to her homeland, this movie begins in France with Mary still married to the then King of France, Francis, happily Ily in love until he suddenly develops his brain aneurism which began as an ear infection that sends him into madness and death. His mother Catherine de' Medici is not at all sympathetic to her daughter in law, forcing Mary to scuttle back to Scotland, where she still remained queen; but after years of being in France, she was only 17 at time, having had utterly no political education, she was ill-prepared to face a changed world back home which, through John Knox’s endless preachings and transformation of the scene, her own insistence on maintaining her Catholic faith, and her lack of recognition of the various divisions between Scottish clansmen, she was ill-prepared for what she had to face.

    I grew up Presbyterian, a church in which John Knox was always portrayed as a hero, but after watching these two films, and perceiving what a vile religious zealot he probably truly was I once again despaired of all religious values, which after all had been behind the endless Tudor-Stuart battles. It only made me glad of my choice of atheism which I determined at a rather early age. Religion has almost always been the spur of hate.

   If I thought Katherine Hepburn had betrayed her feminist viewpoints and her queenly-like demeanor of the early part of the film, Redgrave playing Mary is already clueless and all about the heart over the head. I have never before or since seen such a muted performance by Redgrave, who speaks her lines very nicely, and occasionally fights out forcefully for her queenly rights against even the kind of imprisonment her half-brother, James Stewart, Lord Moray (Patrick McGoohan) imagines for her: he will rule, while she shall be given a world of lovely parties, dances, and pleasures of the kind she has experienced in France.

    She does attempt, vaguely, to rebel against this, but oddly the forceful Redgrave, in this film is basically ineffectual until she comes under the protection of the atheist Lord Bothwell (Nigel Davenport), who is willing to battle the other clansmen in protection of the throne.

     The forceful and more dominant actress in this film is most certainly Jackson, who despite her love for Dudley, first sends him to offer a marriage proposal to Mary, knowing Mary will certainly deny him as representing her own “left-overs,” offering up another young, quite handsome man, whom although Elizabeth knows of his own ambitiousness, treachery, womanizing, and perhaps of his numerous bisexual encounters, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnely (Timothy Dalton), is nonetheless not at all the fop as portrayed in the 1936 film, but a man with an unquenchable appetite for both men and women. As Elizabeth perceives, she wins with either choice, putting her rival’s life into chaos.

     In this version of the film, she almost girlishly Mary falls for the handsome demeanor of Darnely without a clue to his inner nature or actual behavior.

     Jarrott’s film is honest enough to show Darnely in Mary’s Italian secretary David Riccio’s (Ian Holm) bed, as both plot for his rise in power of a consort King.

     The major inadequacies of this film arose not from its general historical arc, but the fact that it relied on minor historical speculations and unproved theories and ran with them as major plot developments. Darnely is fully involved, in this version, with the murder of Riccio because of his belief that he his wife and been having and that the child, the future James I and IV, who will become heir to Scotland, Ireland, and England, was not actually his own offspring. He and the anti-papist clansman, who have convinced him of that possibility, together plot Riccio’s stabbing in front of the queen as if it was an historical fact; it is not. The even happened, but scholars are not at all certain that Darnely was behind his former lover’s death.

     Soon after, it is made clear that James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, with the Queen’s permission and even, in this case, her pretense of making up with the brutal and now violently drunk Darnley, to plot his death at Holoyrod. Some historians have believed by this time Darnely, due to his multi-sexual activities, and come down with the pox (syphilis). The film makes this quite evident with a mask removed at one moment to reveal his pox-ridden fact.

     With no evidence that I have ever encountered, this movie presumes that he escapes and is strangulated, although in the original medical findings, his body was tossed through the explosion to the outside with no evidence of strangulation.

     There is no question in this romantic version that the heart-led Mary arranges for her own kidnapping from her estate and openly joins with Bothwell in what other scholars describe as a rape.

     Time and again, this film takes theories, accusations of the day, and speculations as evidence to present its romantic spectacle, leaving reality and real characterization behind. Mary becomes, as Elizabeth proclaims, a woman who has mistakenly attempted to rule with her heart instead of her head.

     And not only do the two queens meet once in this version, despite the fact we know they never met, but joins up again in a second meeting, basically repeating Mary’s charges against Elizabeth as fictionalized in the 1936 version. Frankly, by this time I had become a supporter of the far more intelligent and clearly plotting Elizabeth that the mindless Mary, even as played by Redgrave, who in a few last moments attempted to breath life into her already headless character.

     Jarrott’s film is often beautiful to look at for its country views, but it finally becomes such an empty vehicle that I longed for Hepburn’s panting desires and March’s attempts to appease her. But ultimately, even Bothwell is forced to leave her, escaping to Denmark where he too is imprisoned and killed.

     Mary greets her death as her fate, but Elizabeth has made it clear, she might have been a marvelous queen had she only employed her mind instead of her emotions. I might say the same of the same of this failure of a movie that took any chance with historical fact to create a quite empty sense of romance, which despite it’s beauty is drained of true character and filled with imaginative twists that have little to do with what actually might have happened—or perhaps I should say provides its own notion of what might have happened without any full historical evidence. Films generally do not like indeterminacy, and this film bulldozes its way through any possibility of speculative thought.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

Ari Itkin and Devon Diffenderfer | Love You Tyler / 2019

the tease

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ari Itkin and Devon Diffenderfer (screenwriters and directors) Love You Tyler / 2019 [9 minutes]

 

Devon Diffenderfer and Ari Itkin’s short 9-minute movie Love You Tyler is what you would have to describe as a tease.

      Luke (Diffenderfer) and Tyler (Ryan Pater) are roommates of two years, and both of the attractive young men appear to be interested in the other. Yet something is missing, and we see Luke in the first scene attempting to get up the courage to tell Tyler something.

      He finds Tyler packing up to take a weekend hiking trip—with other friends, and without him, which perhaps is behind his sudden urge to tell him his secret. He even wonders aloud why he wasn’t invited, immediately claiming his question was just a joke. But we sense it isn’t a joke and that all of his unexpectedly odd comments have some deeper significance.     

     When he finally gets up the courage, he tells Tyler that he has a new girlfriend who he’s known for only two weeks. Coincidentally her name is also Tyler, and like his male roommate works as a part time bartender.

       Even stranger, Luke insists that he’s soon going to ask her to marry him—yes, after only two weeks—and he’d like to practice is marriage proposal with Tyler. Beginning with the words “I love you Tyler,” he gets to his knees, talks about the two years of a roller coaster ride of a relationship—Tyler interrupts him to wonder about the “two years,” about which Luke apologizes as yet another “mistake”—finally saying “will you marry me?”—repeating the phrase over three more times in different intonations—and when Tyler finally utters “yes,” slips a ring on his finger (a gold band that might be used at a gay wedding as well as a heterosexual wedding proposal).

    It certainly sounds to the outsider audience, given the similarity of names and jobs, like Luke is really proposing to Tyler, and his roommate interprets it in the same manner, particularly when Luke thanks him for his help with a kiss on the lips. Tyler seems offended, almost disgusted by the kiss, almost as if he were a bit homophobic; and worse he proceeds to abuse Luke by arguing that there is obviously no girlfriend and he will never have a girlfriend because “you’re you,” suggesting that this is only one of many such stupid routines Luke has performed over time.

      Luke storms off to his bedroom, slamming the door. And a few minutes later, Tyler, obviously regretting his outburst, gently knocks.

      Opening it almost immediately, Luke plants another kiss on his lips, further outraging Tyler, Luke backing immediately away insisting that he had simply misread the situation, apologizing for his behavior and promising that it won’t happen again.

      We are now confused. Didn’t he get the message the first time around that Tyler was straight or least was not interested in a relationship with him, a possibility that Tyler himself now brings up with Luke.

      But the story quickly shifts yet again when Tyler suggests that Luke simply admit that he’s got the hots for him, that he’s gay and wants a relationship. The two at this point are standing face to face, and Tyler suddenly kisses him hard on the lips, backs off and repeats it seriously.

    Luke pauses, and says, “I can’t” as if the earlier dismissal of his “mock” proposal might have soured him on the possibility of their relationship.

      Tyler walks out, furious with the apparent continuation of the game. But as he leaves Tyler’s cellphone rings. He doesn’t answer. And it rings again, he finally taking it, answering, “Hi Babe.”

      Writer and actor Diffenderfer himself describes his intentions to confuse the viewer: “Love You Tyler is a queer friendly romantic comedy of sorts. Awkward and confusing and at times messy in its approach, that to me is how love can be.

     I wrote the short to give the audience enough twists to be kept off balance and leave them in the end to wonder. Regardless of what I Intended and know for myself to be true of the story it is up to the audience to make their own conclusions and be left hopefully wanting more in the end, with a laugh or two along the way.”

 

     His audience will obviously find many ways to read this, including the obvious conclusion, that he truly does have a girlfriend named Tyler who is amazing also a school teacher. But I can’t believe that ending for one moment.

     In hindsight, I now see Tyler’s disdain and seeming rejection of Luke’s first kiss is not in response to the kiss but to the play-acting that he just put him through. It’s clear that both men are sexually interested in the other, but it’s also evident that Tyler can’t fully come out with the truth, to honestly express his love for his roommate, and that miffs Tyler, not the quick kiss. If Luke has been asking him to marry him, why still play a game? And if that is his way of expressing his feelings, then perhaps he isn’t ready for a gay relationship being still far too conflicted about his desire for the same gender.

      Accordingly, I interpret Luke’s statement, “I can’t” has another restatement of his inability to come out. The problem is just as Tyler has described; he can’t admit to himself that he loves another man. Luke is actually “the tease.”

      When the phone rings so immediately after, I see it as being Tyler calling him yet again, Luke returning to a kind of game-playing which is the only way he can express his homosexual love, “Hi Babe.”

     But that’s only my reading. Each viewer will surely have their own way of perceiving the events of this slightly absurdist comedy.

 

Los Angeles, July 13, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022). 

 

Sally Potter | Orlando / 1992, USA 2010

sleeping beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sally Potter (screenwriter and director) Orlando / 1992, USA 2010

 

Sally Potter’s cinematic retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is stuffed with various explorations of sexuality, particularly concerning the role of women, androgyny, and transsexuality. But it is also a history of the United Kingdom from the death of Queen Elizabeth I to the present-day, seen mostly through the eyes of its brilliant central character (Tilda Swinton).

      Swinton as Orlando begins life as the young male courtier in the Elizabeth I court, who is so handsome and talented that the dying Queen (performed with near-perfect irony by the gay/trans woman Quentin Crisp) awards him a palace and an annual financial gift if he only agrees to her terms: “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old."

     Somehow he magically does not appear to age and is prepared to marry a venal woman who would probably drive him crazy until he meets the Russian Princess Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey) with whom he immediately falls in love. When she refuses his offer of marriage and fails to show up for a meeting with him under London Bridge, he undergoes a crisis of sorts which consists of several days of sleep (reminding me a little of the long day-long sleep that the young heroine of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt undergoes when she discovers that her beloved uncle is a murderer).

     Indeed, you might subtitle this film as “Sleeping Beauty.” Orlando recovers and to resolve his sorrows he takes a job as English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, upon which yet further crises follow. Although Orlando remains a male, the addition of long male wigs during this era might almost be said to make him over into a woman, which, after another crisis which involves another long period of sleep, he finally discovers he has become. As Swinton quips: “Same person, no difference at all.”

      She now returns home as the glamorous Lady Orlando, immediately to be challenged by government lackeys over Elizabeth’s largesse, since women were not allowed to own property or accept the inheritance agreements that Orlando has.

      Over a period of 50-year transitions, we see the female Orlando tiresomely having to counter court suits while falling in love with a male, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine (Billy Zane), and producing a daughter.

      By the early 1990s, when Potter’s film ends, she has nearly been worn out battling to declare her rights of gender, and the longevity of her life leads her to declare: “Today or always tomorrow I am neither a woman or a man.”

      Yet by the end, the “me” who Orlando has uncovered seems to find some peace simply sitting under an orchard tree with the daughter beside. Orlando finally has found a new outlet in writing a book about his/her history, accepted by a 20th-century editor played by Heathcote Williams, who earlier in the film, performing as the fictional Elizabethan poet Nick Greene, derided Orlando’s poetic attempts.

       The beauty of this film does not lie in its fragile and often incongruous plot, but in its dash through British history supported by the glorious art direction of Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs and the costume design by Sandy Powell, all of whom were nominated for Academy Awards.

     Although there’s lots to think about in Porter’s film, the transformations of all kinds visually displayed make this excellent work a bit more like the films of Sergei Paradjanov than any other British or US filmmaker. And Swinton is at every moment someone to behold. She is simply a being to admire and love, helping us to comprehend, as Potter notes, “The intellect is a quite solitary space.”

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2020).

Kenji Mizoguchi | 赤線地帯 (Akasen Chitai) (Street of Shame) / 1956

A WORLD FROM WHICH THEY MIGHT NEVER RETURN

by Douglas Messerli

 

Masahige Narusawa (screenplay, based on a novel by Yohiko Shibaki), Kenji Mizoguchi (director) 赤線地帯 (Akasen Chitai) (Street of Shame) / 1956

 

Kenji Mizoguchi’s last film demonstrated him, once again, tackling important issues about women, and, in particular, geishas or, in the case, open prostitutes. His own sister had been forced into prostitution after her family abandoned her, and, even though she later married a wealthy businessman, it is clear Mizoguchi never recovered from is feelings of anger over his father’s business and familial failures.

     But whereas and earlier film such as Women of the Night (1948) tells a dark story of postwar geishas, including territorial stand-offs of various denizens of the street, the women do come together with such great resilience that one might almost imagine that these women will survive and, perhaps, even find happiness.

     By 1956, the year in which the Japanese Diet was debating whether or not to delimit and ban prostitution, Mizoguchi seems no longer to be able to imagine any future for his five desperate women, trapped in a run-down brothel named Dreamland, with no longer any geisha allure.

     If each of his characters represent a slightly different type, they all share sad tales of having to work to support their sons and sick husbands, to pay off debts, or describe their behavior in reaction to abuse at home.

   Mickey (Machiko Kyō), the youngest and most outrageous of the five women, has run away from her home in Kobe to Tokyo’s Yoshiwara district in order, in part, to punish her own father who has apparently had mistresses and often himself visited such brothels where she now works. Desperate for love and attention more than money, Mickey is the consummate consumer: Mizoguchi presents her constantly eating and borrowing against her future wages to buy perfumes, jewelry, and other items. When her father comes to bring her home—not for her own sake but because her profession may harm his own business, her sister’s marriage, and her brother’s future educational opportunities—she lets loose her hatred of him, revealing how painful it was for her and her mothers (who has recently died) to deal with her father’s extended absences. Mickey alone appears to be content to be where she is, but we can only imagine that within a few years, as an overweight penniless woman, she will have no future left to her.

     Yumeko (Aiko Mimasu), whose husband has died, works to support her son, whom she has place in the country with a relative; after he shows up in Dreamland, she discovers that he has left the farm to work at a nearby factory, and hopes that she may now be able to move in with him; disgusted by her profession, however, he rejects her and demands that she no longer communicate with him.

     Perhaps the saddest of the group is the plain-faced Hanae, whose husband is ill and dying, and waits nearby each evening with their young son upon his back. The couple has previously attempted suicide, and Hane (Michiyo Kogure) comes home one evening to discover her husband trying to hang himself once again. It is clear that no matter how much she works, she will never provide enough money to buy him the proper medicines or hospital care he needs in order to survive.

    The eldest of the woman, Yorie (Hiroko Machida) finds a man who wishes to marry her, and finally decides to leave the world of prostitution behind. The women celebrate her freedom, with Mickey alone insinuating that she will be back before long. Yorie does, sadly, return; her husband has used her like a slave, forcing her to work long hours with no release and no appreciation. At least in Dreamland, she is apaid a few Yen for her work.

     Only Yasumi, the most successful of the geishas, seems to know how to work the system. Having had to enter into prostitution because of debt for her husband’s jail bond, she perceives her encounters with men like business deals, leading on a small businessman who desires to marry her by suggesting that if she can pay off her debt she may join him. Having stolen the money from his company, her customer grows violent, throwing her to the floor and, at first, seeming to kill her. Yet, apparently, she survives, now having saved the money in order to buy a nearby futon shop which now services the brothel in which she worked.

     In the film, the Diet, as in the past, defers it decision on prostitution, but in reality Mizoguchi’s film is said to have been one of the forces that led the Diet to finally ban such previously licensed institutions.

     Yet there may be some truth in what the brother’s owners keep telling their employees. Will the government truly support the women who have been forced to sell they bodies in order to survive and pay off debts? Although these women cannot ever hope to truly escape their lives of shame, can they be truly assimilated into the larger society?

      Mizoguchi’s realist conventions may make everything seem evidently, but the strange, half-experimental, half science fiction-like musical score by Toshiro Mayuzumi (with a theremin as one of the central instruments) takes this film into other territories. The women of Dreamland, it seems, are trapped between two worlds, one just on the dark side of ordinary culture, the other half existing in some outer space from which these dreamers can never hope to return.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2015).

     

D. A. Pennebaker | Original Cast Album: Company / 1970 [documentary]

for the record

by Douglas Messerli

 

D. A. Pennebaker (director) Original Cast Album: Company / 1970 [documentary]

 

Yesterday, exhausted from several days of watching very intense LGBTQ feature films, I awarded myself the opportunity of viewing the noted documentarian filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company. The film was to have been the first in a series of such cast recordings, and received excellent reviews; the producers, however, in the meantime had been hired by MGM, and the series, most sadly, never occurred.

     We have only this “pilot” work, but what a memorable film it is! Criterion, which has re-released the film, most recently with commentary by critic Frank Rich, composer/lyricist Steven Sondheim, and Elaine Stritch, and others, listed it among their LGBTQ films; so it seemed to offer the perfect excuse for me to rush back into the arms of Broadway theater. Yet there is little outwardly “gay” in this production. Indeed, except for composer/lyricist Sondheim and the musical librettist George Furth, I don’t know of another artist in the work who is openly gay.

     The original cast album was recorded just a few weeks after the show’s opening as most such albums are, when Jones had not yet left company which he would shortly after due to the stress of his divorce proceedings with his then wife Mae Entwisle after nearly 17 years of marriage. Although Jones performs a remarkable couple of takes of the third act solo “Being Alive” and a quite touching version of “Barcelona” with Susan Browning—Sondheim even arguing that not only was that performance of “Being Alive” his best but that no one did it better*—that actor, who later became a born-again Christian, has never been one of my favorite performers.

      Now if the film had featured the terribly gifted but unfairly overlooked Larry Kert (the original Tony on Broadway’s West Side Story) who replaced Jones soon after, that would have truly made it a “gay film.”

      Kert was a particular target of the notoriously mean-spirited Jerome Robbins who kept calling him a “faggot” throughout rehearsals, despite the fact that Robbins and most of the male dancers were also gay; obviously Kert didn’t even attempt to hide his gay sexuality. He died, as so very many of the greatest talents of the time, of AIDS in 1991, leaving behind his lover, Bill Pullen.

    Only later, in England, did they dub in Kert’s performances for Jones’ on the recording. But the one we hear in this film is Jones as the central character, “Bobby, baby, bubbie,” beloved by all but in love with no one until he sings the two songs noted above. Although one of his male friends suggests a possible gay relationship with him in the musical, that conversation was, of course, not among this album of songs.

     Although the musical opened to some quite negative reviews, and, early on, was in danger of closing, it eventually ran for a long run of 690 performances, finally fully introducing Sondheim in Broadway as a significant composer, not just a lyricist, who would soon change the very nature of the medium through his introduction of darker, more complex themes, music, and lyrics that those than the musical theater productions that came before.

     One of the most difficult songs to perform is “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” sung by Donna McKechnie, Susan Browning, and Pamela Myers, which, with its close harmonies and fast- talking lyrics, is easy to flub. We see this song, which surprised even a long-time pro like Thomas Z. Shepard, the record producer, in its complexities, performed several times before they get it right.

      Similarly, and even more difficult to perform is the brilliant patter song “Getting Married Today,” sung by Beth Howland. This tongue-twister is surely the tour-de-force regarding the combination of simply singing the lyrics and enunciating them fully enough to have them comprehended, at which amazingly Howland succeeds. She married Charles Kimbrough, who played Harry in this production.

       And Pamela Myers, in “Another Hundred People,” discovers for the first time that she has changed an F-sharp to an A of Sondheim’s original score, and now sings it correctly, Sondheim getting what he wrote down on the record, so to speak. This song I have always believed intimates some of the chordal developments and even lyrics of Sondheim’s later Sweeney Todd, particularly when early in the song she sings the elongated line “It’s a city of strangers,” with great similarities to Sweeney Todd’s “City on Fire.” Both serve as cries of the dangers of the urban space which many of Sondheim’s works celebrate, but with always the Bernstein-like lament for the need to escape to “a place for us,” free from those dangers. And Company, in particular is a nearly claustrophobic world in which Bobby cannot even escape his friends in his deepest most private desires and thoughts until he finally refuses to attend the celebration for his birthday, and leave the ever-present “company” behind.

       The major piece of this film, however, is its last. After everyone else has finally left the Columbia Records studio at East 30th Street and Third Avenue at around 3:00 in the morning, the orchestra, Sondheim, Furth, Shepard, Hastings and the orchestra remain behind with Elaine Stritch to perform the final number, “Ladies Who Lunch,” she having given over her earlier scheduled time to Jones.

       Having heard this song sung by Stritch now so many times, I can recognize almost immediately how tired and stressed the singer is. Sondheim, in retrospect, suggests in was one of those times where she kept drinking a few sips of alcohol just give her the courage to continue going on, and by the time of her song, was drunk enough that she couldn’t live up to the demands of the song.

      The composer insists she first bring down the song into a lower key in order to not hurt her voice. She sings it lovingly and knowingly, but it’s “flaccid,” as Shepard puts it, slower than its usual pace, perhaps even a little better narratively expressed, but without the zest of protestations of those shallow ladies who try to do everything imaginable to fill in their empty lives. By the end of the song, even Stritch can hardly “rise, rise, rise” to full occasion of her narrative dismissal of the lot.

     She sings it again, making it even worse. And again, back in the original key, attempts to belt it out. We are witnessing the difference between a great performance and several mediocre ones. If there was ever an example of that important difference in defining the greatest of both a performer and this series of performances is revelatory.

       At nearly 4:00 a.m. on a Monday morning, they finally tell Stritch to go home, almost against her protests. They have the orchestra play the piece without her. And the film ends the next day, as a rested Stritch, made up for her evening performance, stops by the studio to sing it the way it should be sung, layering her version over the previous recorded orchestral one. Stritch seems also a little fearful, even after her performance, that they still may cut it. But they assure her that everything is now as perfect as any such a recording can ever be.

      As cameraman Jimmy Desmond states, no one could have imagined that such an event would be quite so dramatic; and indeed, as Pennebaker agrees, it’s the perfect film taking only one day and night.

 

*After writing this essay, I did a comparison listening to four of the major singers of this song, Dean Jones, Larry Kert, Raúl Esparza, and Neil Patrick Harris. The results were surprising. Far and away, the best dramatic version was sung by Dean Jones. Sondheim and others had been on target in their evaluations. Esparaza was the most dramatic and often terribly effective, but there was just too much self-consciousness involved with his performance, and his voice as not as lyrical as was Jones’. Larry Kert had the very best voice with remarkable clarity, but there was no depth to his “Being Alive,” which he sung almost as a ballad instead of a discovery of the true contradictions he was suddenly to terms with. Surprisingly, Neil Patrick Harris did a commendable version of it, although it was definitely the weakest of the four. The prettiest version was by yet a fifth singer, John Barrowman, who sang the role of Bobby at the Kennedy Center. But this was from a song album and truly is not comparable with a theater production performance; it was lovely to hear, easy on the ears, and beautiful to listen to, but had next to nothing to do with theater. There are two illegally photographed versions of the Kennedy Center performance on YouTube, unbearable to watch and impossible to listen to. When will people comprehend that such “snapped” performances are not only a crime but truly are a disservice to the artist.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).