SUPERHEROES & JUGGALOS

OK, the big day is here at last. I refer, of course, not to the opening day of Avengers: Endgame...

...but rather to the arrival of the "Friday Flicks" column containing my review of Avengers: Endgame, as well as of an amusing little comedy called Family...

...on Phoenix Magazine online. Have a great weekend everybody!

STUCK YEAH

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, on Phoenix Magazine online, with reviews this week of the musical Stuck and of Wild Nights with Emily, featuring Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson. Also check out my theatre review of Rochester Nights, the inaugural production of Theatre Upstairs here in Phoenix.

A pal recently asked if I was aware that James Mason had once appeared on a Sesame Street special, in which he had played an Egyptian demon. Indeed I was not, and it strikes me that when any two of the categories "Sesame Street" "James Mason" and "Egyptian demon" are present it's interesting, but when all three are present it's pretty much must-see TV. So check out this clip, from the 1983 special Don't Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about six minutes in.

CHANGE OF SPACE

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, on Phoenix Magazine online, with my review of the Claire Denis space opera High Life...

...the Hungarian drama Sunset...

...and Little.

 

DINNERS & MOVIES

After a hiatus of several weeks to update the site, Phoenix Magazine online seems to be up and running again (although some links on this blog to my older stories may still be inoperative). Check out my April "Four Corners," the column's third anniversary, and also...

...my "Friday Flicks" reviews of Shazam!, The Public, Storm Boy and The Wind.

DODGER DOG, STRAY DOG

Happy Opening Day everybody!

Last week The Wife, The Kid and I played hooky and ventured into enemy territory, aka Glendale Ranch, to watch our beloved Diamondbacks BEAT LA, 10-4, in Cactus League Spring Training action. A bit disconcerting to be surrounded by all that Dodger Blue, but an excellent game; we got to see some fine hitting by new D-bax acquisition Adam Jones, and we saw poor Steven Souza play before his season-ending injury earlier this week.

I even ate a Dodger Dog. And I liked it.

(Of course, in this photo taken by The Kid, it looks as if I swallowed the hot dog vendor.)

Then about 10:30 Saturday night, this little dude...

...showed up in front of our house, obviously lost, no collar, running from front door to front door and back in the neighborhood. I sat in the driveway for about 40 minutes before he got close enough for me to get a hold of him. He spent the night in the garage, away from our maniac Chihuahuas, and Sunday morning I very reluctantly took him to the Maricopa County Animal Shelter on Rio Salado. It turned out he had a chip, with a Sacramento, CA address, but the staffers there got no answers from the phone numbers. I would love to have kept him; he's a sweet, docile, friendly, quiet little guy. I just checked with the Animal Shelter; he's being held for his owners until tomorrow, March 29, after which he'll be available for adoption. If you're looking for a great dog, get down there.

REPORT WHINE

If you know me, you know what I think about our current President. If you don’t, you can read about it here. Or, if you don’t feel like reading that, I can summarize:

To call our current President a sack of shit does an injustice to sacks of shit, many of which are upstanding members of our society that do the important work of fertilizing our crops. To say that his Presidency has already harmed our nation isn’t enough; his candidacy alone, and the legitimacy conferred by the media and the political establishment upon its bigotry and ignorance and fraudulence, would have harmed our country even if he hadn’t won the Electoral College. He’s reprehensible, toxic human garbage, most of the major players in his administration are even worse, and every day they’re in power is part of an accruing disaster for our country and the world. I would also point out that he’s riotously incompetent, except that his incompetence may well be the only aspect of his administration that has saved us up to this point.

This, though mildly expressed, is what I think about our current President. So please remember that this is the context in which I want to urge my fellow Trump opponents to knock it off with the petulant disappointment about the Mueller Report.

While I thought, and still think, that the Special Counsel’s investigation was essential, from the start I haven’t been comfortable with the attitude of many Trump opponents toward it; waiting for it like a kid waiting for Christmas morning, naively convinced that it would be a magic spell that would make the bad man go away. No matter what the report shows—and at this writing that still isn’t public—it was never going to lead promptly to the President’s removal from office.

No matter how compelling the speculations extrapolated from the indictments and guilty pleas the investigation has already produced, there were always several possibilities about the final report with regard to the President. One was that, however improbable it might seem, it would exonerate him from colluding with a foreign power. Another was that it would show that he participated in or knew about or covered up sleazy unethical crap, but that this didn’t rise to the level of criminality. A third was that it would suggest that yeah, he probably committed crimes, but that the investigation wasn’t able to prove it to a degree required for prosecution.

What all of these possibilities have in common is that they wouldn’t bounce this scumbag out of office. That probably wouldn’t happen even if the report conclusively showed that he did collude, because the Senate is in Republican control, and there’s nothing to indicate that the Republican leadership would take action against the President even if, well, you know, even if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone. As things now stand, the report won’t even embarrass him—whatever’s in it, he’ll just claim it’s a pack of lies, and his diehard supporters, shamefully, don’t really care if he colluded with Russia or not.

So there’s always been something unrealistic about the salivating impatience of the President’s opponents for the report, and there’s also something unseemly about it. If the report truly shows that the President didn’t collude, or didn’t knowingly collude, with Russia…well, I hate to sound like a civics-class Pollyanna, but that’s a good thing, and a relief. If we’re people of good faith, we shouldn’t want our enemies to be worse than they are.

But if, as seems more probable, the report shows that he’s a lowlife who cozied up to a vile foreign power for campaign help but didn’t quite cross the line into criminality, or didn’t do so provably, let’s not throw a tantrum because this isn’t what we asked Santa for. The report, though it may turn out to be enormously important, was never going to be a quick easy solution to the immediate problem of this administration. Most outrageous of all, and I’ve already heard a little of this, is suddenly impugning the integrity of Mueller or his team, after casting them, for the last couple of years, as white knights riding to our rescue. I understand being tired of having this President and his toadies and cronies and puppeteers pollute the White House every day with their presence, but this report was never going to be a silver bullet.

And the thing is…I’m not sure it should be. While I don’t necessarily doubt that, regardless of what’s in the Mueller Report, the President may be deserving of impeachment, I’m also not sure that impeachment would be the healthiest way for us to get rid of him. I have to wonder if it wouldn’t be better for voters to run his ass out of office on a rail in the next election, along with, almost more importantly, as many of his revolting enablers as possible.

I’m not sure I’m right about this. For one thing, it means enduring this administration for, at a minimum, more than another year and a half. And I see no remote guarantee that my party won’t blow another election, if dilatory, candy-ass Democrats once again fail to vote for whoever the nominee is, because he or she somehow fails to conform sufficiently to our delicate ideological sensibilities, or just because we don’t think he or she is cool enough.

But overall, I think that focusing on voting him out is the better way because, first of all, it’s a natural reproach on the part of the electorate to everything he stands for. If he got thrown out of office, he and his followers could always whine that it was a cheat, that the “deep state” or whatever pushed him out, over the wishes of the people. They’ll claim that anyway, of course, if he loses the election, but it will be far less convincing.

Second of all, we should make voting him out our goal because, once again, at some level the Mueller Report is moot, for the moment, no matter what its conclusions. This President was never going to be impeached, at least not in his first term. Working toward voting him out as soon as possible is preferable to daydreaming about impeachment, because it means engaging with the process ourselves, doing the hard work of protecting our beloved country’s institutions and forwarding the agendas we want. It was the complacent lack of this commitment, more than anything else, that brought us our current President, whether he got a boost from Russia or not.

THE PLAY'S THE THING (THAT GOES WRONG)

Perhaps the theatre's most cherished maxim is that the show must go on. The company performing The Murder at Havershaw Manor certainly seems to have taken it to heart. From the first few lines of the wheezy old drawing-room murder mystery, set pieces fall off the walls, doors fail to open, an actor who is supposed to seem dead reacts, understandably enough, when his hand is trodden on. Duran Duran ends up, unintentionally, among the music cues. All in all, it becomes The Play That Goes Wrong.

 
This British farce by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, which opened in the West End in 2014 and on Broadway in 2017, is a spectacular piece of slapstick escalation. The premise is that we're seeing the "am-dram" (amateur dramatics; what we would call community theatre) production fall apart while we watch, but as the show progresses--if that's the word--we may not be prepared for the silent-movie/Looney Tunes degree to which, for instance, the shoddy set will collapse around the actors.

There's a human element to the catastrophe as well; one actor keeps mispronouncing multisyllabic words, another simply refuses to take the show seriously, smirking at the audience and capering around for our approval. The long-suffering stage manager has to step in and take over when the leading lady is incapacitated; when she returns, her replacement is reluctant to give up the role. And throughout, the comedy hinges on the tendency of actors, when a show is going badly, to focus on what's least important.

The frenetic yet disciplined cast is truly ensemble. But a word should probably be said for Peyton Crim as Robert (aka "Thomas Colleymoore" in the play), who, in the midst of, say, being buried in furniture as a platform sags under him, still manages to use his beautiful deep voice to maintain a weary dignity.

The splendid irony behind The Play That Goes Wrong is that, unlike the play within it, it goes off like clockwork. The timing and physical commitment of these actors is a joy to watch, and also a thrill--there are moments that seem dangerous, though this is (I hope) an illusion. Many of the show's biggest laughs, however, are in its slow-burn pauses, in which a performer realizes the extremity of what he or she is up against. Laugh-out-loud funny as this show is, the company's determination, against ever-worsening odds, to get to their curtain call may ultimately seem allegorical for life, the ultimate Play That Goes Wrong.

The Play That Goes Wrong runs through Sunday, March 20 at Gammage Auditorium. Go to asugammage.com for details.