Harry Potter naked!

The most interesting development I've heard this week comes from Newsweek's interview with Daniel Radcliffe. In order to shake off the perpetual do-gooder reputation he's developed in the Harry Potter movie franchise, Radcliffe will appear on the London stage next year in a production of Equus. I'm entirely amused by the appearance of an childhood icon for so millions as a psychotic, sometimes naked horse-worshipper. I want to know how many parents will take their kids to Equus because "Harry Potter is in it" without knowing what the play is actually about. It may not be unlike my favorite Onion article of all time: Second-Graders Wow Audience With School Production of Equus.

Response to Katlyn Carlson's letter to the editor

So unless you're completely blind, you've probably noticed we've changed the formatting around here at the Voices Blog, and we've got a nifty new banner. We're technically public at this point, though I haven't created that much publicity around it yet.

I'd like to take this chance to respond to Katlyn Carlson's letter to the editor that was published in the October 17th issue of The Maroon, responding to my review of The Pillowman. I was quite excited about this letter, even though it completely bashed me, mostly because it shows I'm getting some reaction to my writing.

The first objection raised was that I falsely categorized Yasen Peyankov's accent as Russian, when it was in fact Bulgarian. While I feel that my mistake is understandable due to the similarities of the languages, I should point out that the program for The Pillowman spoke of Peyankov's work with Russian theater. Had I not seen that, I probably would have simply said "eastern European," and the problem would have been avoided. Nonetheless, I do admit that I phrased my criticism of utilizing the accent poorly, as the decision to use an accent is obviously in the hands of the director, not the actor.

Furthermore, I do admit exaggerating with the phrase "leaving all traces of Method at the door." I fully admit that Stanislavskian techniques have had such an influence on modern acting that it is impossible to fully ignore them. I apologize for sacrificing accuracy for a stylistic decision. However, I do feel the claim Ms. Carlson made was also too extreme. She stated:

I’m also puzzled by Mr. Stanislawski’s assertion that “McDonaugh’s plays are not meant for Stanislavskian techniques.”Unless the play you’re dealing with has absolutely no grounding in reality whatsoever, not even then in all cases, this argument is baseless and, actually, impossible to make.

Despite the enormous influence of Stanislavsky on modern production, I don't think it's impossible to argue that a production can avoid his methods. Theater had existed for over 2000 years before Stanislavsky was born, so it is certainly possible not to use his techniques. In reality, acting at this point is a composite of thousands of years of different approaches to the theater. While I agree that The Pillowman, like any contemporary play, has to account for Stanislavsky, I also think it's not out of line to say that some plays are better suited for certain styles than others.

Finally, I feel Ms. Carlson's remark about The Maroon's coverage of theater was a bit unfair and ungrounded. I do recognize that we don't have enough coverage of theater in The Maroon, and it's something I've tried to remedy. But she doesn't seem to realize that, since we're a semi-weekly publication directed at college students, it would be unreasonable to expect us to publish a review of every Chicago production.

Furthermore, since our content is based on what our volunteer writers decide to review, we can't be held responsible for every event we neglect to cover. Ms. Carlson chose to take the opportunity to plug her own theater company—a theater company I am very fond of, mind you—instead of making a responsible argument against The Maroon's theater coverage.

What her letter justly exposes is that I still have a long way to go in improving the precision of my theater criticism, and for that, I'm thankful.

Some Oscar Favorite...

I went to see Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers last weekend, expecting to see perhaps the peak of the honest, moralistic filmmaking that has characterised Eastwood's late career. What I saw instead was a clunky exercise in melodrama that never made much sense. Even tossing out the laborious present-day scenes, which all reviewers seem to have panned, the movie was a bore. The transitions between the three plot lines--the battle of Iwo Jima, the war bond effort at home, present-day interviews with the survivors--were especially sloppy, as a stormy day in America becomes a night of explosions on Iwo Jima island.
A few moments of the film--the abandonment of a man overboard, a final swimming scene--have a surreal horror and beauty, but for the most part, we're never grounded long enough in any plot line for it to matter much.
NY Times reviewer Manohla Dargis wrote, "the film works, among other things, as a gentle corrective to Steven Speilberg’s Saving Private Ryan, with its state-of-the-art carnage and storybook neatness." This film isn't half the movie that Ryan was. That film brought to life the the frantic terror of war. This movie brings horrors, but it never has the kind of visual immediacy that made Ryan so difficult to take. Ryan fell into melodrama to be sure, but so does this film, and its meditations on the meaning of heroism never move past the simple statement that it is difficult to define a "hero." Adam Beech's solid but hammy performace was Pima Indian private Ira Hayes exemplifies the film, an admirable effort that bursts into easy tears without ever forcing us to feel the sadness that makes it cry.

The Victory Gardens

I plan on attending the Victory Gardens's new theater at the Biograph this weekend. The theater is one of the most unique in Chicago, with a rare ensemble collection of playwrights, and it has just upped the stakes on its role in Chicago's theater scene with its multimillion dollar expansion. Charles Smith's new play Denmark is currently running, and I will probably review it for next week's issue.

While we're talking about theater, I'd like to mention how the Maroon will now approach UT shows. We'll be covering them more regularly than in the past, but it won't be a Friday review. Instead, we'll have feature pieces on the upcoming shows the Tuesday before the show premieres. This was mutually beneficial for both UT and the Maroon, since it creates more interesting pieces and saves us the trouble of having to scramble for writers who don't have UT involvement. We should begin this Tuesday with a feature on the workshop productions.

Farewell, CBGB. Hello, Mike Watt.

Tonight was the farewell concert to CBGB in New York, and I'm sorry I missed it. Despite living in New York for most of my life, I never once got to go to the legendary punk club, which is something I sorely regret right now. Patti Smith performed there tonight, and she was one of the first to ever perform there. Richard Hell wrote an excellent homage in the Op-Ed section of Saturday's New York Times.

On a related, but much more upbeat note, I had the punk moment of my life this Friday. I attended a concert of the Evens, Ian MacKaye's new band, and who would show up but none other than Steve Albini and Mike Watt. That's right, I was in the same room as Ian MacKaye, Steve Albini and Mike Watt. MacKaye had a crowd surrounding him, and I knew all I had to do was breathe in the wrong direction to annoy Albini. No matter, because Mike Watt was the one I had the most interest in meeting.

He was everything I thought he would be and more. When I said I was a Minutemen fan, he handed me a sticker. I thought he thought I wanted an autograph, but turns out he was just handing out stickers to everyone. The sticker, which is now on my bass, reads "Mike Watt—The man in the van with a bass in his hand" We talked about everything from Chicago weather to blogging to the nature of bass guitar to youth. He was a fantastic guy, and I couldn't have asked for more from the experience. Look for my review of the Evens concert in this Tuesday's Maroon.

Unusual success in epic Stoppard production

As someone who is continually saddenned by the decline of theater's relevance in the arts world, I got a bick pick-me-up just now when I read a New York Times piece entitled Stoppard’s New Math: 41 Actors, Half a Year, 3 Plays. Tom Stoppard, the reigning king of playwriting in the English language, spent years working on his grandiose The Coast of Utopia, a three-part play covering 35 years of 19th-century Russian intellectual history. The play premiered at the National Theatre in London three years ago, whereupon it was critically heralded but publicly regarded as a snob's hit.

What particular excited me about the article was the remarkably success of the casting process. According to the article, they got just about all of their first choices for the production, among them Ethan Hawke, Billy Crudup, Martha Plimpton, Josh Hamilton and Jennifer Ehle. Citing Brokeback Mountain as a primary influence, the creators chose to court younger actors for the play where characters progress from their twenties to their mid-fifties. Many actors, despite financial struggles and offers from more lucrative television jobs, chose to work on an ensemble piece where their names will be buried among 40 others.

Brían F. O'Bryne, the fantastic Irish actor who stunned me in Doubt, summed up best the exceptional nature of this production in stating his reasons for signing on to the play: "When does anyone get a chance to do this, in this country, on the Broadway stage?...This is a dream job. I mean, I don’t think I’ll understand that this is a dream job until March, when we’re not rehearsing and we’ve just started playing it. But that period is only a couple of weeks at the end. So, until then it’s just, like, head down and O.K., we’re getting through this."

Voices update

After years of almost never going to concerts, all of a sudden I'm going to concerts on consecutive days this weekend, first the Evens (with Fugazi's Ian MacKaye) on Friday, then Beck on Saturday. This is after seeing Clap Your Hands Say Yeah after my third attempt to see them last week.

My review of the Evens concert will appear in Tuesday's Maroon, as will Rose Schapiro's review of the Beck concert. My review of The Information, Beck's latest album, will appear on the Maroon website this morning (but not in print). Overall, Voices will be packed with articles in the next few weeks, thanks to an influx of new writers.

Things are looking up for Voices. We have an excellent new Associate Editor, Eric Benson. We have three new columnists and Eric's temporarily writing a fourth. The blog is pretty much public at this point, and we're finally sorting out how we handle UT reviews.

Not much of a State of the Section, but I thought I'd at least mention the actual publication's status every now and then.

The ban of Death of a President

I was going to make a post on Google's purchase of YouTube, but what struck my eye more from the recent news is Regal and Cinemark's decision to ban Death of a President from all of its theaters. I'm not saying a movie depicting the assasination of Bush is a particularly good idea, but it is certainly an interesting one, and from all accounts the film is more about the questions such a situation would raise instead of being based on wishful thinking.

Nonetheless, I'm not surprised that two of the biggest movie chains in America have made this decision. I can only imagine the innumerable death threats and protests theaters will receive when the film eventually does hit American theaters, and it makes sense that two large corporations would want to avoid anti-American claims.

The film would probably only be art-house material anyway. Nonetheless, I expect a rant by Bill O'Reilly soon enough, and he will probably not see the movie before making the rant.

Culteral learning for make benefit glorious box-office draws

The more I hear about the upcoming Borat movie, the more I find myself thinking that Sacha Baron Cohen is a genious. While Da Ali G Show has become a cult favorite on HBO, there's no way Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan would be getting all the hype it's been getting without Baron Cohen's shrewd marketing strategies. If there's anything The Passion of the Christ and The Da Vince Code has taught Hollywood, is that political controversies equate exceptionally large revenues. Baron Cohen has been doing all he can to milk the Borat controversy for all it's worth, between calling Kazakhstan distributors to see if they're showing the film to inviting President Bush to the premiere.

The only difference between Borat and those other films is that Baron Cohen isn't trying to hide the fact that what he's doing is a ploy. His reputation for tricking people into farce interviews is already well-documented, and by infuriating an essentially powerless nation like Kazakstan to his controversy, there's little chance of long-term ramifications (save the South Park: B,L,UC references). The fact that he's Jewish in real life prevents him at least partially from anti-Semitism allegations, and with all the positive hype this controversy has been getting, he's essentially eliminated those chances down to zero.

In a way, he's making a mockery of politics as much in the marketing of the film as much as in the film itself, and he's lined to make up a boatload of money in the process. Obviously we'll wait to see how the movie actually does at the box office before making any judgment calls, but I still believe this is one of the cleverest manipulations of the entertainment industry I've ever seen.

The White Stripes go classical

Here's the link of the day, which I ashamedly got off Pitchfork (I should really switch to reading popmatters at this point, and you should too). I'm normally fairly indifferent to classical reworkings of rock songs, but this actually sounds pretty good. Aluminium (taken and Britishized from the Stripes song) is releasing an album in November complete with classical reworkings of songs written by Jack White of the White Stripes. They even got some juicy B-Sides in there.

What I like about it more than other versions is that, based on the recordings I heard, Aluminium uses modern themes in their reworkings. Most other classical reworkings of this kind stick with standard classical era reworkings, which makes the work more based on a gimmick than on artistic ingenuity (though I did like Christopher O'Riley's reworkings of Radiohead for piano). I will probably pre-order this album when I can, mainly because only 3,333 CD's will be made.