Marshall, Frank

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares119 Views

    ‘Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story’ Review: An Event With Unique Flavor

    by

    Gumbo, fried oysters, po’ boy sandwiches. And then there’s the music. This documentary gives an overview.As has been demonstrated in films as wide-ranging as “Monterey Pop,” “Woodstock,” and “Summer of Soul,” music festivals can’t help but get part of their vibe from their settings. As musicians from all over the world testify in the documentary “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,” directed by Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern, the Louisiana city’s annual jazz festival has an irreproducible flavor because it happens in the cradle of American music.The movie’s opening montage, featuring familiar famous faces ranging from Tom Jones to Pitbull, is — happily — a bit of a fake out. These big names and others get some play (and in what some might consider an unfortunate feature, Jimmy Buffett gets a lot of play) but the movie is conscientiously attentive to the festival’s homegrown eclecticism.Exploring the musical atmosphere of New Orleans itself, the film features experts laying out the distinctions between Cajun and Zydeco, for example. While both are dance music that trades in old melodies, the latter features electric guitar and washboard and comes at you “like a freight train.”The entrepreneur George Wein, who founded the Newport Jazz Festival, had a hand in Jazz Fest’s creation, sagely taking on the musician Ellis Marsalis (you may be familiar with the pianist’s work, or that of his sons, who include Wynton and Branford) as his New Orleans docent. The organizational work was soon handled by the young music enthusiast Quint Davis, who’s still in charge today.The ebullient history — which also cites on-site food tents as a mind-blowing component of the fest’s appeal — becomes tearful when Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans in 2005. But the music came back like a miracle, and the movie reports that after a two-year postponement because of Covid-19, the event is currently on the comeback trail again.Jazz Fest: A New Orleans StoryRated PG-13 for a little saucy language. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      ‘Diana’ Musical Sets Netflix Run — and Broadway Opening Night

      by

      In an unprecedented move, a recording of the show will start streaming in October, while audiences can see it live (if theaters reopen) in December.“Diana,” a new musical about the idolized but ill-fated British princess, managed to get through nine preview performances before Broadway shut down last March.Now, one year, one pandemic, and one Oprah interview later, the show is ready to try again, with a new strategy and a new context.In a first for a Broadway show, a filmed version of the stage production will start streaming before the musical opens. “Diana,” which was shot over a week last September in an audience-less Longacre Theater, will begin streaming on Netflix on Oct. 1, and then two months later, on Dec. 1, will resume previews on Broadway.The musical’s producers announced Tuesday that they intend to open Dec. 16, which is 625 days after its originally scheduled, but pandemic-postponed, opening night. The producers are putting their Broadway tickets on sale now, and counting on the Netflix film, which will have an open-ended run, to boost interest in the stage production.“I think people will see the movie and will say, that’s a show I want to see in person,” said Frank Marshall, a prominent filmmaker who is one of the musical’s lead producers. Another lead producer, the Broadway veteran Beth Williams, acknowledged that the plan involves “a slightly more complicated rollout,” but added “we feel like it’s an incredible opportunity to put ‘Diana’ in front of the global Netflix audience, and then give them an opportunity to see it live.”Broadway, of course, remains closed in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus, and producers expect that most full-scale plays and musicals won’t attempt to start performances until after Labor Day. “Diana,” which chronicles the life and death of the Princess of Wales, who was the first wife of Prince Charles, is among the first shows to put tickets on sale and to choose a specific date for a target opening.The scheduling, Marshall said, was a matter of trying to anticipate how the country’s post-pandemic reopening will unfold, and trying to coordinate the two projects to strengthen them both. “We wanted to make sure our marketing plans aligned,” he said. “I’m very optimistic about the fall, for both movies and for Broadway.” (A spokesman for the show declined to say how much Netflix paid for the streaming rights.)The musical, featuring Jeanna de Waal in the title role, is directed by Christopher Ashley and choreographed by Kelly Devine, who previously collaborated on “Come From Away”; it was written by Joe DiPietro and David Bryan (the Bon Jovi keyboardist), who created the Tony Award-winning “Memphis.”Through virtual and in-person work, the show, which had a pre-Broadway production at La Jolla Playhouse, was revised early in the pandemic. The producers said they do not expect further revisions, and expect their cast to remain intact.Diana has remained an object of public fascination in the years since her death in a 1997 car crash. But her story also has a contemporary sequel, as her younger son, Harry, and his wife, Meghan, stepped away from their royal duties, and, in an interview this month with Oprah Winfrey, he said that “my biggest concern was history repeating itself.”The lives of Diana’s children are not the subject of the new show. “You see Diana become a mother, but her children are not in the musical,” Williams said. “We’re telling the story of a complicated marriage, and at the same time we’re telling a coming-of-age story, and we’ve always seen it as a celebration of Princess Diana, whose legacy will live forever.”The producers said they don’t yet know what sort of safety protocols might be required for cast, crew, or ticket holders at the in-person production. Will there even be an opening night party? “There will be a celebration,” Williams said. “It’s too soon to know what that will look like.” More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Review: A World of Cardsharps and Zoom Dupes in ‘The Future’

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: A World of Cardsharps and Zoom Dupes in ‘The Future’In his latest magic show, Helder Guimarães shuffles an old genre into a new technology with mixed results.Helder Guimarães in “The Future,” his Zoom magic show for the Geffen Playhouse.Credit…Julie RenfroDec. 14, 2020When a used-car salesman says, “I will be honest,” it’s a sure sign he won’t be.Same with a card huckster. For him, “I will be honest” means “Don’t look at my hands.” Other tells may include “You saw for yourself that this deck was legitimately shuffled.” (It wasn’t.) Or “I want this to be as fair as possible.” (Watch your wallet.)All of these are part of Helder Guimarães’s patter in “The Future,” a Zoom magic show from the Geffen Playhouse trying very hard to be more — but only partly succeeding. Oddly, it’s the magic part that most disappoints, at least as theater. The “more” part, a stretch toward greater meaning, is engaging even as you wonder if it too is a deception.That stretch comes between card tricks, as Guimarães offers glimpses of his life’s journey from fanboy to sorcerer’s apprentice to fast hand for hire. The tension between entertainment and crookery that’s built into the business eventually grows into a full-blown dilemma when he meets his childhood idol in Marseille.The idol, a British cardsharp named Kevin who presents himself as a reformed gambler, at first fulfills Guimarães’s teenage fantasies. Kevin seems to be the kind of man who would ply his trade in purple rooms with velour curtains and Venetian landscapes on the wall.The reality, in the form of a rigged high-stakes poker game Kevin invites Guimarães to join, is somewhat seedier. Eventually the younger man has to make a choice between betraying his idol and maintaining what he thought were his values.“I wanted to put some wonder in the world,” he says. Kevin, on the other hand, “wanted to outsmart people for money.”By the time Guimarães finds himself rigging raffles at corporate parties, the bright-line difference between those two worldviews has blurred. We never do learn what choice he made about Kevin, which makes sense theatrically, if not morally or magically. Who creates an illusion but refuses to complete it?To the extent the show’s tricks are meant to illustrate that story, they are effective. Many of the ones Guimarães learned from Kevin or saw him perfect — “second dealing, center dealing, stacking the deck, false shuffling, mucking” — are performed live during “The Future.” Narratively, that’s satisfying.Guimarães displays a hucksterish eagerness, but on Zoom, “pick a card, any card” doesn’t work.Credit…Geffen PlayhouseBut as magic for magic’s sake, the tricks, however brilliant, are baffling, for the very reason they succeed: They’re invisible. That’s especially the case on Zoom, where “pick a card, any card” doesn’t work.It’s less than awe-inspiring, for instance, that Guimarães has to tell us he has completed Kevin’s “cold deck” deception, a holy grail act of prestidigitation in which all 52 cards are secretly switched out for 52 others. On the evidence of our senses, nothing at all has happened except the elaborate setup and the surprising conclusion. I oohed but wasn’t sure what I was oohing at.Guimarães’s hucksterish eagerness, in contrast to his questing thoughtfulness in other contexts, doesn’t help in this one. As a workaround for the Zoom problem, he hammers so hard at the transparency of his deceptions that, like a character in a play, he invites skepticism about them. We know they are tricks; why keep badgering us to say that they aren’t?It’s misdirection, of course, the art of keeping our minds off whatever a magician doesn’t want us to notice. Kevin’s version, during that rigged poker game, was to have a confederate shatter a wineglass; on Zoom, with its lack of real eye contact, the task of distracting the eye is naturally much harder. That’s probably why a ticket to “The Future” includes a collection of props, including a deck of cards, mailed to each audience member in a chic black capsule: misdirection for the pandemic age.So although I admired Guimarães’s skill in “The Future” as much as I had in “The Present,” his previous show for the Geffen, I tired of his more elaborate tricks even faster than I did in the past. And though his storytelling — this time more evocatively realized in Frank Marshall’s direction — was lively, it wasn’t so distracting as to quell my suspicion that it was merely another form of misdirection.This suggests a genre problem. (Or it may just be a me problem; most of the 50 or so participants seemed to have a grand time throughout.) Magic, like ventriloquism, mind-reading, mime and other para-theatrical forms, has long sought greater legitimacy on what used to be called the legitimate stage. Working Vegas like some elephantless variety act is no longer enough for ambitious magicians; they aspire to the condition of drama.I think that’s a mistake. If the choice, as Guimarães expresses it, is between putting some wonder in the world and outsmarting people for money — tickets for “The Future” are $95 — I vote for wonder. I’d rather have some sequins and a rabbit than a three of clubs with a résumé.The FutureThrough March 14; geffenplayhouse.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 75 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      How the Bee Gees Stayed Alive

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookHow the Bee Gees Stayed AliveThe HBO documentary “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” traces the decades-long arc of a band that mastered a rare pop skill: adaptation.Maurice, Barry and Robin Gibb in “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” a documentary that explores the group’s long and winding career.Credit…HBO MaxDec. 14, 2020, 1:16 p.m. ETDiscovered, embraced, disbanded, reunited, ignored, reinvented, hailed, scorned, disguised, recognized — the Bee Gees’ long career was filled with improbable ups and downs. Most bands are lucky to get one Top 10 hitmaking streak. The Bee Gees — the brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb — had at least two, singing heartache ballads in the late 1960s and re-emerging in the mid-1970s as the multiplatinum pop face of disco.“The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” an HBO documentary directed by Frank Marshall, moves sympathetically and efficiently through the group’s decades of making music. It traces the ways artistic instincts, family dynamics, business considerations, cultural shifts and sheer coincidence can shape memorable songs.In the documentary, abundant archival footage — a cavalcade of flashy fashions from 1960s frills to 1980s cool — coalesces around 2019 interviews with the last surviving member of the Bee Gees, Barry Gibb, who is grizzled and thoughtful but by no means retired. The documentary shows him performing as a headliner at the 2017 Glastonbury Festival, and he has an album due in 2021, “Greenfields,” that revisits the Bee Gees catalog with country musicians. The documentary also features the Bee Gees’ studio collaborators and, cannily, members of other bands of siblings: Oasis and the Jonas Brothers.The Bee Gees were prolific and often masterly songwriters, and they sang three-part harmony as only siblings can. Many of their songs are credited to all three brothers. “The only way I can describe how we work at it is to become one mind,” Maurice Gibb says in a clip from a 1999 interview.They started performing together before they were teenagers, in the late 1950s, looking to R&B vocal groups like the Mills Brothers and then, like countless others, to the Beatles. And like the Beatles, they soaked up all sorts of music: rock, country, gospel, vintage pop.But nearly from the beginning of their recording career, the Bee Gees clearly had something of their own. Barry and Robin Gibb, who traded off lead vocals, each brought a tremulous drama to their melodies, a striking mixture of eagerness and hesitancy. In an era of brash frontmen, they could sound like they were painfully shy yet simply unable to hold back.From 1967 to 1970, the Bee Gees released a string of hit ballads including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” With melancholy lyrics, delicately blended voices and careful, often Baroque-tinged productions, their songs offered yearning and solace in psychedelically turbulent times. Around the hits, their albums — notably “Odessa” — floated larger musical and poetic concepts and more eccentric productions.In 1969, egos boiled over. Robin quit the Bee Gees to try a solo career, and he and Barry sniped at each other via interviews for over a year as Maurice played go-between. They regrouped — in part to support their manager, Robert Stigwood, as he started his own company — and came up with more hits: “Lonely Days” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”But by 1974, the Bee Gees’ fortunes had waned. They had drinking and drug problems; their scattershot albums weren’t selling. Their label was “about to drop us,” Barry Gibb recalls in the documentary. “We had to adopt a new sound. We had to adopt a new attitude.”The Bee Gees were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — but not until 1997.Credit…Ed Caraeff/HBO, via Getty ImagesLuckily Stigwood also managed Eric Clapton, who suggested that they record where he had, at Criteria Studios in Miami. There, in 1975, some alchemical combination of sunny skies, close collaboration with their backing band, the stirrings of disco culture and a producer close to American R&B — Arif Mardin — led to the Bee Gees picking up their tempo and finding a brisk, guitar-scrubbing groove they would use in a new song, “Jive Talkin’.” In the documentary, Gibb connects it to the clicking rhythm he heard driving across a bridge to the studio each day.Because the Bee Gees had fallen so far out of fashion, their label sent “Jive Talkin’” to radio stations without identifying the group. With a blank label, the song became a radio hit; the Bee Gees were back.There was another breakthrough at the Criteria sessions. Barry Gibb was ad-libbing some backup vocals at the end of “Nights on Broadway” when he happened upon a sound he hadn’t fully realized he could make: a bright, piercing falsetto, androgynous and insistent, linking the Bee Gees to a longtime falsetto tradition in Black American music. It was a voice — a whole new sonic persona for Gibb, not shy at all — that would leap out of club and radio speakers in “You Should Be Dancing” and in songs the Bee Gees wrote for “Saturday Night Fever.”When they wrote those songs, the Bee Gees were at the Château d’Hérouville, a dumpy old French estate where Elton John had recorded the album “Honky Chateau.” During the sessions there, the band’s drummer, Dennis Bryon, was called away for a family emergency; to keep working, Albhy Galuten, a co-producer, made a tape loop from two bars of “Night Fever,” slowed it down and ran it as the Gibbs brothers wrote “Stayin’ Alive.” The mechanical feel of the loop gave the song something mysterious and tenacious; it stayed in the finished song, and has spawned innumerable looped drumbeats ever since.The 1977 “Saturday Night Fever” album, a two-LP anthology of disco hits and Bee Gees songs, became a record-setting blockbuster. Although disco had emerged from Black music and Black and gay clubs — as the documentary takes pains to point out — the Bee Gees, smiling in their silvery suits, became disco’s pop figureheads. In the late 1970s, the Gibb brothers’ music was everywhere: their own hits; songs for their younger brother, Andy; songs written for others. In 1979 they toured stadiums. They didn’t realize an anti-disco backlash was building.For a directorial flourish, Miller intercuts a euphoric July 1979 Bee Gees concert in Oakland with an event that happened two days later: “Disco Demolition Night,” promoted by Steve Dahl, a rock disc jockey who had popularized the obnoxious slogan “Disco Sucks.” Between games of a Chicago White Sox doubleheader at Comiskey Park, Dahl exploded a pile of disco records, which set off a hugely destructive crowd rampage. In the documentary, Vince Lawrence, who worked as an usher at Comiskey Park that night and later became a house-music producer, describes the event in hindsight as “a racist, homophobic book-burning.”The Bee Gees finished their tour amid bomb threats; radio stations pivoted away from dance music and shunned the Bee Gees. “We’re just a pop group, we’re not a political force,” a defensive Barry Gibb says in television footage from the time. “We’re just making music, and I don’t think there’s any reason to chalk us off because we existed in the ’70s and we would like to exist in the ’80s.”Avoiding the spotlight, the Gibb brothers persisted as songwriters and producers. The longtime Bee Gees sound — tuneful midtempo ballads, vocal high harmonies, distinctive chord progressions — comes through unmistakably in songs they wrote for others, including Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” and the Kenny Rogers-Dolly Parton duet “Islands in the Stream.” Even in post-disco purgatory, the Bee Gees were still hitmakers. And as disco and the backlash receded (and dance music never went away), the Bee Gees returned more modestly, making albums every few years and garnering the respect they deserved. Yes, they got into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — but not until 1997.Maurice Gibb died in 2003, Robin Gibb in 2012; that vocal blend is extinct. In the documentary, Barry Gibb understands exactly what his brothers and his band accomplished. “We never really had a category. We just had periods and we managed to fit into different eras,” he reflects. “We didn’t always connect. But we stayed around.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Bee Gees’ Review: Night Fever, for Decades

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Bee Gees’ Review: Night Fever, for DecadesThe documentary “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” from Frank Marshall, strives to paint a wider picture of the band often associated with its disco hits.From left, Maurice, Barry and Robin Gibb, the subjects of the documentary “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”Credit…HBO/ShutterstockDec. 11, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETThe Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken HeartDirected by Frank MarshallDocumentary1h 51mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” pays tribute to the Gibb brothers with a tour of their pop music reign. Grooving through the decades, this entertaining documentary aspires to prove that the Bee Gees were more than a hitmaker for disco nightclubs. Rather, Barry, Maurice and Robin were master songwriters and chameleons, continually reinventing themselves to harmonize with the times.Working largely off archival footage intercut with interviews — both original and vintage — of the brothers and their collaborators, the director Frank Marshall graphs the band’s ups and downs onto a chronology of ’60s, ’70s and ’80s popular music. At first the Bee Gees, forming at a young age, echoed early Beatles albums. As their warbling harmonies evolved, the brothers’ star rose.[embedded content]In addition to laying out the personality of each member, the film offers a satisfying look at the process of making and marketing music. Barry recalls that he found his trademark falsetto, later flaunted on disco hits like “Stayin’ Alive,” after a producer urged him to let loose while recording “Nights on Broadway.” Barry also confesses that the song was originally “Lights on Broadway”; an executive suggested they change the lyric to make the band seem more adult.Once it reaches the disco era, the documentary hits a bump. Interviews with the DJ Nicky Siano and the dance music producer Vince Lawrence detail how disco was born in Black and gay spaces before the music was commercialized and eventually axed in a backlash inflamed by racism and homophobia. The movie implies that the Bee Gees, evermore linked to the genre after “Saturday Night Fever,” got swept up in the chaos. Crucially, Marshall fails to probe where the Bee Gees fit into a history of whitewashing and profiting from Black music. For several pesky beats, the film slips into hagiography — like an awkward bridge in a song that, otherwise, makes you want to hit the dance floor.The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken HeartNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on HBO Max beginning Dec. 12.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More