Arts & Culture

ANNA IN THE TROPICS: Theater Review

From Russia, With Lust: Tolstoy Meets “Florida Man”

By Ed Rampell

It’s ironic that A Noise Within’s absorbing production of Anna in the Tropics opens, as fate would have it, while Russia is making frontpage news. This is because the titular “Anna” is a reference to the eponymous Anna Karenina in Count Leo Tolstoy’s famed 1878 Russian novel. But in this Pulitzer Prize winning play, playwright Nilo Cruz has transmogrified Tolstoy’s saga of infidelity, moving it from Moscow and St. Petersburg (in Russia – not Florida!) to – of all places! – Tampa in the Sunshine State in 1929.

There, Cuban transplants (like the Mantanzas-born Cruz, whose family emigrated to Miami’s Little Havana in 1970) have established an old school-style cigar factory. To break the sheer monotony of long days, often in stifling heat, spent rolling the handmade cigars, “lectors” were hired to read books aloud to the hardworking proletarians. As Tropics opens, a new lector, Juan Julian (Jason Manuel Olazábal) arrives at Tampa and the first novel he has chosen to regale the cigar rollers with is none other than Anna Karenina.

Hollywood is popularly perceived as a realm of romance and glamor. But over the decades the entertainment industry has also been the site of intense labor organizing and struggles between craft and trade employees against management and owners, in the form of studio executives, producers and movie moguls. In this article we take a look back at a teachable moment for organized labor: The 2007-2008 strike that rocked Tinseltown and how the workers organized to win one of the rare union triumphs during the Bush era.

Assassins, with music/lyrics by the legendary Stephen Sondheim, book by John Weidman, based on a concept by Charles Gilbert Jr., is a bold choice for the venerable East West Players to reopen with after having been shuttered due to the you-know-what for almost two years. Staged with a loose revue format, Assassins is about most of the men and women who successfully or unsuccessfully attempted to kill a sitting US president.

The über-assassin highly esteemed by the other trigger-happy members of this (as depicted) kooky club of ludicrous if deadly misfits is the granddaddy of them all, John Wilkes Booth (Trance Thompson), who literally shot Pres. Lincoln in 1865 while he was sitting (in a box seat at Ford’s Theatre watching Our American Cousin). In chronological order when they committed their crimes (although the freewheeling musical isn’t sequential per se), the other title characters are:

I left the Geffen Playhouse feeling exhilarated, not only because I saw my first play in months since the you-know-what returned, but due to the fact that Power of Sail is a very timely one-act play with a stellar cast that dramatizes an urgent issue America is grappling with. The play asks: Does hate speech have the right to free speech? Here’s playwright Paul Grellong’s story in a nutshell (and I warn you, Dear Theatergoer, there may be some plot spoilers in this critique):

WASPy Charles Nichols (Tony and Emmy award winner Bryan Cranston, who scored an Oscar nom for depicting that freedom of speech champion Dalton Trumbo in the 2015 biopic Trumbo) is a fifth generation Harvard student and/or professor, an author of arcane, obscure, unread tomes who teaches history and presents a prestigious symposium there annually. The secret list of invitees Nichols has selected for Fall 2019 has been leaked – and one of Prof. Nichols’ choices has triggered heated protests on campus.

Academy Award-winning Danish director Bille August’s screen adaptation of Thorkild Bjørnvig’s (played by Simon Bennebjerg) memoir The Pact, about his experiences with the celebrated Out of Africa novelist Karen Blixen (who was portrayed by Meryl Streep in the 1985 Sydney Pollack-directed film of the same name, but is here played by the Copenhagen-born actress Birthe Neumann), is a movie meditation on the nature of celebrity, wealth, power and how they affect (and afflict) artists. Endowed with fame, Blixen, a baroness ​whose pen name is Isak Dinesen, takes Thorkild – who’s less than half her age – under her wings, arranging for businessman Knud Jensen (Anders Heinrichsen) to subsidize the handsome aspiring writer.

As part of his eponymous “pact” with Blixen Thorkild moves from his home to reside at the famous authoress’ estate so he can pursue his writing, unobstructed – and so the lonely Blixen can have a young male companion. But not necessarily a lover per se, as Blixen has been afflicted by venereal disease that causes her great pain and rendered her, alas, apparently unable to consummate her amorous longings.

Writer/director Pawo Choyning Dorji’s heartfelt Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom will charm the pants off of you – or, rather, the robes off of you. Because this captivating feature was shot mostly in the hard-to-get-to Kingdom of Bhutan, a Buddhist nation of less than 1 million inhabitants straddling the Eastern Himalayas between India and the Tibet region of the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, Lunana was largely lensed on location in the actual village of that same name, a remote, tiny hamlet, which translated into English Lunana means: “The Dark Valley.” Minus electricity, let alone Internet connectivity and cell receptivity, Dorji’s crew had to shoot on location there using solar power batteries.

LA Opera’s version of Gioachino Rossini’s 1817 Cinderella (or, in Italian, La Cenerentola) is by far my favorite production of this season. Indeed, La Cenerentola is one of the most enchanting, charming operas I’ve ever seen mounted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, full of the joie de vivre of Mozart’s ebullient works, notably The Marriage of Figaro. La Cenerentola is absolutely the perfect choice for the holiday and is ideal for bringing children to share in the enchantment, especially to the matinee performances.

There are17th century written versions of Cinderella and by 1812 the renowned Brothers Grimm wrote their own iteration of the fairy tale. In essence, Rossini and librettist Jacopo Ferretti adapted French author Charles Perrault’s folk tale published in 1697, Cendrillon, which means “The Glass Slipper.” However, La Cenerentola doesn’t have any glassy footwear or pumpkin carriages per se, although Rossini’s opera does follow most of the other conventions of this age-old, beloved children’s fable, which can also be read as a parable of class struggle.

The AFI Fest returned to Hollywood for live, in-person screenings and events, although there was also a virtual component for watching many of the feature, documentary, short, indie, studio, and foreign productions that Los Angeles’ largest annual film festival presented in 2021. Some of the screenings were accompanied by talent who introduced and/or spoke about their films when they were shown at the TCL Chinese Theatres in Hollywood. Here are reviews of some of the films I saw:

ONE SECOND – Chairman Yimou Returns to the Scene of the “Crime”

The AFI Fest returned to Hollywood for live, in-person screenings and events, although there was also a virtual component for watching many of the feature, documentary, short, indie, studio, and foreign productions that Los Angeles’ largest annual film festival is presenting in 2021. Some of the screenings were accompanied by talent who introduced and/or spoke about their films when they were shown at the TCL Chinese Theatres in Hollywood. Here are reviews of some of the films I saw:

THE REAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN – The Reel and Real Little Tramp

My favorite film at AFI this year was The Real Charlie Chaplin, co-directed by Peter Middleton and James Spinney, who co-wrote the almost 2-hour biopic with Oliver Kindeberg. The highest compliment I can pay this documentary that traces the rise and fall and rise of the eponymous screen comic is that Real is worthy of its subject who, of course, was one of motion pictures’ great pioneers.

The AFI Fest returned to Hollywood for live, in-person screenings and events, although there was also a virtual component for watching many of the feature, documentary, short, indie, studio, and foreign productions that Los Angeles’ largest annual film festival is presenting in 2021. Some of the screenings were accompanied by talent who introduced and/or spoke about their films when they were shown at the TCL Chinese Theatres in Hollywood. Here are reviews of some of the films I saw:

MEET THE PRESS FILM FESTIVAL AT AFI FEST

According to the AFI’s website: “In partnership with NBC’s Meet the Press, these short documentaries spotlight compelling stories about pressing issues facing our society with conversations moderated by NBC News journalists.” Meet the Press, of course, is the long running TV program where newsmakers are questioned by a moderator and a panel of journalists hold forth on topics of the day. Accordingly, all of the nonfiction films screened at AFI Fest in collaboration with Meet the Press were topical in nature, and this is the fifth year that MTP participated as a media partner of AFI.