Paradise Square makes quite the reach. A musical about the build-up to New York’s horrific Draft Riots of 1863 reaches to the past to tell us about the present. It reaches across cultures to tell us about assimilation and appropriation. It reaches across styles of music and dance to celebrate diversity and commonality. It reaches to contain both epic realism and mythical nostalgia. And somewhere along the line it reaches a point of no return, when all that reaching just wears itself out.
The musical, opening tonight at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, is big in a way that calls back to the Cameron Mackintosh productions of the 1980s and their ’90s Broadway offspring like Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman – those latter two courtesy of Garth Drabinsky, the producer attempting a comeback with Paradise Square after some financial flim-flam landed him in a Canadian prison; he was paroled in 2013 after serving 17 months.
The musical, opening tonight at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, is big in a way that calls back to the Cameron Mackintosh productions of the 1980s and their ’90s Broadway offspring like Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman – those latter two courtesy of Garth Drabinsky, the producer attempting a comeback with Paradise Square after some financial flim-flam landed him in a Canadian prison; he was paroled in 2013 after serving 17 months.
- 4/4/2022
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
Fall has finally truly arrived (those 90s temps have at last vacated), so it’s really time to get serious and somber at the multiplex. But, to quote a ’08 classic, “Why so serious?”. After all, there’s often time for a comic book-based cold weather flick. Ah, but this one’s very different from the big action epics from a few months ago. First and second, it’s deadly (accent on the first syllable) dramatic in tone and earns it’s “R” rating. Not the first comic-based flick to do so, but this centers on a villain. Let’s be specific, this is “The” comic book villain, really the greatest comic baddie of all time, maybe just as popular as his arch-rival. I’d say he ranks right up there with the greatest villains of fiction, earning a place alongside Dr. Fu Manchu, Simon Legree, and Prof. Moriarty. Origin story?...
- 10/4/2019
- by Jim Batts
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Walt Disney lost control of his most popular character, Oswald the Rabbit, probably the low point of his life. He bounced back by starting his own company and introducing Mickey Mouse, a thinly-veiled Oswald rip-off, down to the same short pants, with added alliteration, and the rest is history.Oswald, of course, faded into obscurity without Disney's hand to guide him, but here's a later talking Oswald cartoon (Mickey introduced sound to the cartoons with Steamboat Willie in 1928, an oddly abrasive toon in which the iconic rodent spends most of his time torturing animals to produce musical sounds. Mickey, at this stage in his development, seems likely to grow up to be a serial killer.)The wonderful thing about thirties cartoons is how disturbing they are. We first encounter Mickey Oswald here getting his ass sewn up by granny and a cat and a mouse, their traditional enmity forgotten...
- 1/6/2018
- MUBI
This week we wind up our discussion about the 6th volume of DC’s reprint of my (and Kim Yale’s) run on the Suicide Squad. We’ll be discussing the final story in the book; it was issues 48 and 49 and featured Oracle, a.k.a Barbara Gordon, the former Batgirl crippled by an attack from the Joker. She then re-made herself into the go-to information broker in the Dcu. Well, Kim and I re-made her but you get the idea.
This story brings back another character from the Squad, Simon Lagrieve who had been the Squad’s shrink. He and Waller had not parted well and now he was the head of the Institute for Metahuman Studies (the Imhs). La Grieve was doing Waller a favor in treating two members of the Squad who were hurt in the previous story and in return, had a favor to ask of her.
This story brings back another character from the Squad, Simon Lagrieve who had been the Squad’s shrink. He and Waller had not parted well and now he was the head of the Institute for Metahuman Studies (the Imhs). La Grieve was doing Waller a favor in treating two members of the Squad who were hurt in the previous story and in return, had a favor to ask of her.
- 5/14/2017
- by John Ostrander
- Comicmix.com
Seeking the Monkey KingIt is all too fitting that a film series focusing on “3D in the 21st Century” should feature the work of Ken Jacobs. More than any other single avant-garde filmmaker, Jacobs has explored the pulsating, tremulous frontier where images hit the eyes, and a great deal of his exploration over the last 30+ years—beginning with his experiments with the Pulfrich filter and his development of the dual projection “Nervous System”—has involved three-dimensional illusionism, that ambiguous perceptual space where flatness and depth wrestle in the optical mind. Historically, aesthetically, and technologically, it would make no sense to consider cinema in three dimensions without including Jacobs’ contributions.But there’s more at stake in Jacobs’ presence in the Bam’s 3D series. No mere formalist, Jacobs has been a tireless artistic whistleblower, documenting and cataloging the ugliest aspects of American culture. From blackface and animal torture in Star Spangled to Death,...
- 5/11/2015
- by Michael Sicinski
- MUBI
As Steve McQueen's Oscar favourite 12 Years a Slave opens at cinemas, Sarah Churchwell returns to the 1853 memoir that inspired it – one of many narratives that exposed the brutal truth about slavery, too long ignored or sentimentalised by Hollywood
In 1825 a fugitive slave named William Grimes wrote an autobiography in order to earn $500 to purchase freedom from his erstwhile master, who had discovered his whereabouts in Connecticut and was trying to remand Grimes back into slavery. At the end of his story the fugitive makes a memorable offer: "If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious happy and free America." Few literary images have more vividly evoked the hypocrisy...
In 1825 a fugitive slave named William Grimes wrote an autobiography in order to earn $500 to purchase freedom from his erstwhile master, who had discovered his whereabouts in Connecticut and was trying to remand Grimes back into slavery. At the end of his story the fugitive makes a memorable offer: "If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious happy and free America." Few literary images have more vividly evoked the hypocrisy...
- 1/11/2014
- by Sarah Churchwell
- The Guardian - Film News
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