Zora Likes Sweeney Todd - The Rev-Engine

Astronomical dramatization occurs in Sweeney Todd ("At last my arm is complete again."). As the story moves forward, inexorably, it builds to a stasis of general purpose. This happens at the end of act one and beginning of act two. We are there, operating in a perfectly functioning engine. Mr. Todd, treading water until the return of his condemned man, is channelling his rage by providing Mrs. Lovett with the meat for her pies. He is a great barber, shaver, tooth-extractor, following in the operatic footsteps of figaro. The engine that runs his life is revenge. His energy and skills focus upon his purpose and we experience how great it is to have a quest. Is there no stronger quest than revenge? Establish the quest. It could be a horrible one but it gives purpose to our lives...often containing the seeds of its own destruction making it perfect for a night at theater. Justice runs through the story without legal intervention. Perhaps the judge deserves to die, but then, so too dies Todd after killing the object of his drive. "If only angels could prevail we'd be the way we were"... but no. We're having too much fun and we, the passive observers of the audience, can walk out with our guilty pleasures knowing that the workers, the creative artists, serve us a higher justice. And while Mr. Sondheim may have been completely immersed in the beauty of the creation, Mr. Prince pulled it out, into a Dickensian world that reduces everything into a state of desparation. There is a collaboration here. There is also the dynamic of the story which builds slowly and achieves that beautiful middle ground... I've felt that seeming stasis arrival in Hamlet... I have to consider why and offer the reason another time. So the double sided double album breakdown of the work allows for the overlap between act one and act two on side three. The stasis of functionality occurs there, in the 1980 LP. Also the tone of Len Cariou is definitive. I don't think it is worth going anywhere else with the performance without simply writing another piece. Just sing and speak it with the tone and modulations of Mr. Cariou. I suppose Ms. Lansbury should be acknowledged too for her professionalism and pitch-perfect accuracy throughout. The pieces fall in place from beginning to end. It seems like a good idea to write dramatic musical theater ... but did it ever happen again? I don't think it was from Sondheim if it did.

Remembering Last Tango in Paris

1972 was one of the years that movies deeply engaged me and its highlight was United Artists' US release of Last Tango in Paris. If you were over 18 and paid $5.00 you experienced an up-close-and-personal alt-cinema appearance by Marlon Brando, an actor about whom I somehow knew nothing until my mother took me to see The Godfather where he played a supporting role. Although he worked well with The Godfather ensemble, the degree to which I found him uninteresting was difficult to express. My friend Lou Filosa suggested that I see The Young Lions, or The Men. I read "A Street Car Named Desire" for our all boys Molloy High School English Class and thought the movie version with Marlon Brando was an offense to the play. An English teacher at High School known simply as Mr. Jones, assigned many memorable books, the most traumatic being Orwell's 1984. Mr. Jones conveyed the notion that "Streetcar" was by a man writing about being a woman. So I experienced the story entirely from Blanche's perspective. It seemed silly that a highlight in the movie version was Brando yelling Stella. All the other characters surrounding Blanche were peripheral to her plight. (My awareness of changes to the texts of Tennessee Williams' work intensified after seeing a 1973 Broadway-bound production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at a Stratford Theater in Connecticut. The Stratford production, staged when Mr. Williams was alive, boasted its use of his original script. An example of a difference between it and its movie with Elizabeth Taylor is the choice of an ending line: "I wish I could believe that," instead of "There's life in the old girl yet.") Anyway, Marlon Brando had trouble remembering his lines, so in Last Tango he wrote his own. After hearing Patti Smith recall her friendship with Brando's co-star, Maria Schneider, I wondered whether this movie would ever be shown again, but yes, it was broadcasted on Showtime. I still have cable, which I started watching after September 11, 2001, and I sometimes search it for an interesting broadcast. There it was, Last Tango, scheduled for an obscure hour well into the future, but having found it I could set the broacast to "record," and now, weeks later, here it is, recorded and viewable on demand. I watched about twenty minutes of it. I was enjoying the cinematography (Look at the camera movement through the halls!) and I loved the moment when Ms. Schneider lets loose her hair, but I turned it off when Brando reached the point in his story where he went to his prom with cowshit on his shoes. I remembered that Ms. Schneider will tell him he's been "had" for revealing something of himself and then he'll say, how do you know I didn't just make it up, and then he'll go on to make up a whole lot more, including surprising her with a request to use butter to make possible their sodomy (non-coital sexual copulation) scene. Was his need to sodomize Ms. Schneider because his prostate was shaped like a potato? (I thought it was more of a hazing exercise to see if she could pass the initiation into his fraternity of one. Perhaps he was teaching her not to love him so that he would find it easier to accept it when she realized she did not. That won't stop him from chasing her, though.) I potentially love this kind of living room cinema, but yes there was a concern about Ms. Schneider, whom I also loved from afar. I'm remembering a story, but I don't know how I heard of it, that she was committed to an insane assylum from which she escaped with the help of her biker girlfriend. I saw no distinction between her and her co-star regarding age, social status, and acting ability. I only later realized that the movie was about Brando (and how he was not able to remember his lines...). Perhaps Bertollucci could have identified more with her. For some reason he was only identifying with Brando. Aha, in 1973 Robert Alley novelized the movie, and it was his book I read before seeing the movie (I saw it as a double feature with a kung fu movie on 42nd Street. With me was Cinema VII founder Mike Lindsay.) Mr. Alley helped introduce the movie (to those of us under 18) and included in his paperback book cute photos from the movie, such as one of Ms. Schneider wearing her father's military hat. Bertolucci does his best to make the movie fun, using Truffaut's Jean-Pierre Leaud accompanied by sweeping music by Gato Barbieri, but Last Tango in Paris is up there with the most depressing movies ever made. I must add, though, that if you are really depressed, it will help you feel better. So that's it for now. Bertollucci provides passive movie hero identification. It's easy to identify with someoneto whom everything happens, so Last Tango fits in with After the Revolution, and The Last Emperor, and The Conformist, and my favorite Bertolluci movie, Partner. Brando passive? Well, the happenstance provided by the script makes him so. It gives him an apartment worthy of Francis Bacon, it gives him his wife's inexplicable suicide, his wife's hotel, and a bubble gum girl who shares his interest in the vacant houses of Paris. And Schneider gets a documentary within the movie to allow her to tell her own fanciful story from her beautiful family manse. I'm remembering a movie called The Story of Joanna, a 1975 movie directed by Gerard Damiano and with that I conclude that Guys are in a rut. Again, I potentially like these movies. I potentially relate to them... I would like to express the male predicament but it too often involves further victimization. I thought the world of Prepare to Meet Your Maker provided that opportunity, and I furthered the problem in The Last Dodo, and perhaps in my version of Coppelia. Also I want to acknowledge movies that truly engage their cast. People were more willingly self-sacrificing for the sake of the movie in the 1960's and 1970's. The movies don't change, but our perceptions of them change...to the point where we don't even watch them.

"Masculine" Auteur comedians acting as characters in their own show

This essay is becoming overshadowed by feelings of hope and gratitude for the work of various auteur comedians, with a renewed appreciation for the life of Charles Chaplin, whose movie, The Gold Rush, communicated in its entirety (in its 8mm film format) with our 3 1/2 year daughter. Are there female auteur comedians? I think of Elaine May, Agnes Varda, Lena Wertumuller, Sara Silverman, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett... The iconic auteur comedians are often male, malish, or just plain Masculine, and variations thereon. I'm a guy, so it is more likely for me that the work of other guys provokes my response. For an Italian stereotype, an identity with which I obligatorialy identify, I think of Lena Wertumuller's variation, embodied by the great actor, Giancarlo Giannini, and I contrast that with Italian Auteur Comedian Roberto Begnini, who offers himself as a variation on generic masculinity. As Mr. Begnini is playing his own character, he arrives at a place of strength, whereas Mr. Giannini doesn't care (The character he plays is from Ms. Wertmuller's screenplay and he's often left in shreds, such as at the end of Swept Away, The Seduction of Mimi and The Seven Beauties.). Mr. Giannini takes on his character like an assignment, as does Dick Van Dyke. They both embody, as if they created their own, unique auteur (male) comedians, but they do not take control of their projects. They accept their jobs (comedic or otherwise) and just do their best. Yet their comedic identies are unique to them. (I'm thinking, let's add Robert Morse to this list.) I conclude my tangent on unique comedians on assignment by considering an additional talent, unique to Dick Van Dyke. He's one of the greatest dancers movies have ever documented, and yet dancing for him is just part of his job. And like Robert Morse and Giancarlo Giannini, he didn't write and direct his own projects. (We're eventually getting to actor/comedian Raymond Ramono writing, directing and acting in his own movie, "Somewhere in Queens.") As for men and women becoming kings or queens of comedy, the field of comedy can unite genders while maintaining the importance of dividing them. I next briefly offer a behavioural parallel when auteur comedians fall from favor; the descent of the beloved comic is precipitous, and the similarities of their actions are often striking. My easy example is of Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen, both lovable little guys, remarrying while under attack. For their behavior, their beliefs, and for their expressions of their beliefs, people called upon them to account. Gossip columnists assert that celebrities have a responsibility to account for themselves, and Chaplin and Allen mostly chose to respond indirectly, and to let their work and their actions, and other people's words about them, no matter how damnable, suffice. No such issues arise with Raymond Romano, who is just an all-around regular guy, and this essay began as my search for childhood memories launched from remembering the Romanos (our families were friends). I began writing it after my sister and I saw "Somewhere in Queens" at the Tribeca film festival. Although I found very little interest on the part of Raymond Romano in our reunion amidst the celebration of his great accomplishment, I still feel like I, like, know Raymond Romano. He speaks in specifics, inviting conjecture, as I project myself onto him, now that he has crossed over, into a celebrity matched only by another comedian from Queens, Jerry Seinfeld (Queens College class of 1976), and the reality is, I missed the TV careers of both. (I enjoyed a pseudo-verite Larry Charles/Larry David short movie episode approach in the TV series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, as well as some appreciation of Larry David as the picture of health. I also saw The Sopranos TV Series begin with a pseudo-verite camera eye, but I missed out on engaging with it. What I am saying is, I cannot comment on Everybody Loves Raymond, Seinfeld, and The Sopranos.) Raymond's first auteur movie, "Somewhere in Queens" premiered in the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. My sister and I attended its first screening and having done so I became a late joiner to the audience of his extensive and phenomenal work, in which one gravitates to him as the center of a talented ensemble (ie, including Peter Boyle). My expectation in wanting to see "Somewhere in Queens" was that it would be a memory movie, (a Fellini Amarcord) about growing up in Forest Hills in the 1960's and 70's. Raymond's cousin, AJ, also creating screenplays, was the one to tell me about it and that the Tribeca Festival (headed by Lisa Cusamano) accepted it, and I said, I'm going. I said to my sister, Monica, we have to go. This is going to be something we can connect with and contribute to; but instead (I again credit Robert McKee's class in story structure), there is a full-blown modern-day original screenplay filled with time bombs, uniquely familiar characters and satisfying twists. (A father becomes engulfed in supporting the athletic capabilities of his son. We experience catharsis as the son barely confronts and rejects what it means to be a good son, and we expand the realm of possibility as a father enlists the help of the son's former girlfriend. As I write this I sense in the respectful treatment of the characters something clueless. Can I do something better?) Raymond has so sealed this movie into an exercise in basic screenplay excellence, ie, He Has Been Completely Creative, that ultimately all I can say is Good! This movie is a full blown expression of amalgamated creativity and originality, with audience expectations easily engaged through basketball skills and a child's blissfully unidagnosed autism, as rugs get pulled from under them, and the audience. In addition, Raymond creates a place for his unique stand-up comic to live. Therefore, Somewhere in Queens is not the movie to revisit past mysteries of Forest Hills, Queens. (Ours was a neighborhood with a tennis stadium that hosted The Beatles, that included a LIRR commuter's housing development called The Gardens which looks quite ordinary unless you compare it with every where else, and a disconnected railroad line that would have taken people to Kennedy Airport but instead became a place for indiginous plants to reclaim, bordering little league baseball fields...) He truly created something self-contained from his vast experience, such that I could easily recognize in the script the clash of an intelligent blond girlfriend confronting the Italian Sunday dinner crowd, but his placement of her character (I think of our mutual friend, Barbara Weltsek) serves the bigger picture. His screenplay, further woven together with Rocky references, is not a fragmented essay like Fellini's Amarcord, or like this is... When I write there is the rawness of Confidence Betrayed. What am I doing? My projects are many, drawn from my own experience, inexperience and confusion, and are thus easily un-engaging. I sketch and leave the creative work undone, and then drop what I have, such as it is, into the hands of an interactive audience. Good luck being entertained. Someday I will offer more help, if I ever get to it. Yet, as an audience I appreciate work that inspires interaction and creativity, making me feel like a discoverer, while doing all the work for me. "Somewhere in Queens" inspires and instructs, and is also complete in itself, finished before its release, an entertainment worthy of its audience. And it offers enlightenment, a lesson about what appears to be important (forced opportunity) versus what really is important (family). We're better for having seen Somewhere in Queens. For our 60's 70's Forest Hills Magical Mystery Tour we'll have to look elsewhere. So while Raymond was becoming a TV star, Woody Allen was the auteur comedian who I followed throughout most of my life. Mr. Allen's movie memory moments may also be too finished, too creative, too universally entertaining, to inspire (or rather, require) audience interaction. He's just pretending to confess (a family dinner under the Coney Island rollercoaster), when it is his function to entertain as many people as possible through skill and creativity. He writes jokes and gives them his movies as the best place for them to live. (I write songs and give them scripts as the best place for them to live.) Anyway, I actually knew Raymond from childhood, my main memory being playing for him themes from my 1974 song, Sadder Yesterday, on his mom's piano. Our parents were friends, with a dating overlap at Italian Catholic Charities mixers, hosted at the Charities' location, still there in Elmhurst, at 83-20 Queens Blvd (11373). Our father's standard answer for why he chose our mother, Madeleine (up and coming attorney as he was) over Lucia (Luciana), a piano teacher (from Julliard) was that, well, mom (a dedicated teacher in the Nassau County school system) offered greater stability. As a result Monica and I are the product of that union, and Richard, Raymond and Robert, the product of Albert and Luciana. Our father, one of six children of Peter and Catherine, was born Nick Dizozza. Having expanded his name into Nicholas Frederick Dizozza, he married (June 20, 1957) Madeline the only child of Antonio and Domenica Carillo, named after her father's mom. She respelled her name Madeleine after reading the Ludwig Bemelmans books (I'm wrong. Bemelmans spells his character's name as Madeline). The date of Lucie and Albert's marriage was, oh... I found their 50th Anniversay invite, they were married on August 1, 1953! Does that make sense? Our parents married nearly four years later on June 20, 1957. After marriages (Albert and Luciana , Madeleine and Nicholas, and the Romanos, and Luciana's sister's family, the Ferraras (and the Cusamanos), became neighbors within a 10 block radius in Forest Hills near the Tennis Stadium and just outside "The Gardens," and remained friends. Raymond and I went to Archbishop Molloy High School before he left to graduate from Hillcrest High School. No matter to what degree I hated Molloy, and I was a very disagreeable student, I stayed there to graduate. I believed there was a stigma in Hillcrest being a Public School. Raymond, arguably, was wise enough to leave! By the time I graduated from Molloy, in 1976, I had put aside "public" school reservations. As did Jerry Seinfeld, and Raymond for a time, I attended Queens College, getting a nearly free bachelor of arts degree with great programs in music and humanities. Tuition at City Universities of New York was nominal; and its Queens College education was phenomenal. Actually all the schools I attended were great, in retrospect, starting with the nuns teaching phonics at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs grammar school, which Raymond also attended, a year ahead of me. Then while attending Saint John's Law School at night I worked on a musical Law Revue with Raymond's former fiancee, the great creative force that is Barbara Weltsek, also a firecracker of a producer and director with stand-up comic aspirations (and attorney). It was a version of her presence I felt in "Somewhere in Queens" during the blond girl at the Italian family Sunday dinner scene. Her worthy retorts to the questions of exceedingly male business men demonstrated that she was more than a match for them. In addition, Barbara gave my parents, I thought, that feeling that here was a woman who would truly make her husband great, as if there were no limits to my achievements with her support. And then we broke up, and I was so devestated that I just wanted to stay in bed, basically what happens to the basketball playing son in "Somewhere In Queens" until Raymond, the boy's father, steps in to make with her a deal. The whole point to my self-effacement here is that I'm begging for your attention! I'm so much more ordinary than I think. I'm special. I want attention, and I deserve it. We don't go to Hillcrest. Public high school was a far bigger pool of fish to get lost in, far scarier than that horribly athletic all boy Molloy where I was no one (I was my star cousin's cousin) until I joined a rock band willing to learn my 70's songs, such as Sadder Yesterday. I was a very exclusive artist, such that the least amount of attention overinflated my otherwise timid ego. And that's what Raymond contrasts, playing down the importance of all specialness and middle class aspirations, in a much more subversive way, by seeming beneath them, and presenting himself as someone with all the weaknesses, as did Woody Allen, and by doing so he gets all the attention. It's his show and he's sharing it with other talented collaborators and with us. One of my favorite films is Woody Allen's Sleeper. Like the Gold Rush, Sleeper ends with an expression of love for its co-star. Diane Keaton may have beenn working for Woody Allen, but she acts like his collaborative equal. He's done all the preparation, he got the financing, he even commissioned the fabrication of the enourmous fruit and vegetable farm; and she is walking into, and living and working under his direction, in his world. However, she holds her own. Perhaps she's just as professional as Dick Van Dyck or Giancarlo Gianinni but I do believe Mr. Allen means what he says to her at the end of the movie, Sleeper (the way Chaplin meant to kiss Georgia Hale at the end of The Gold Rush). WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT FOR? I THINK YOU REALLY LOVE ME. OF COURSE I LOVE YOU. THIS IS WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT. Perhaps in "Somewhere in Queens," the love story is between the father and the son, with the father learning to allow his son to follow his heart (the son was already ignoring any externally imposed obligation to please his father). The father enjoyed the reflected glory when his son was a basketball pro. His hearing from a talent scout about a scholarship option (the talent scout was looking for an exit from the parking lot) was actually a trap for him. He allowed the scout to direct their lives toward a college scholarship. The prior plan was to skip attending college and go directly to work in the construction company. Somehow the Raymond charactor felt humiliated by his underling status working for the family business, and some later dialogue suggested, from his father or brother, that he was always late in the morning when he promised to be there at 7AM the next day, suggesting he was also trapped within the job. One senses, by the movie's end, the futility of upwardly mobile aspirations (although not the exclusion of material comforts). Each member of this movie family already has everything he or she needs from being in the family, and the ambition of a parent applied to a child is simply inapplicable. However, at the beginning of the movie we expect that movie traditions will prevail. (The son will make the winning basketball shot, but he does not.) A father can want what's best for his son, and the son can be shy without the benefit of an autism diagnosis because his mother doesn't believe in therapy. Basketball is where the son excels because the son is tall. People call him Styx, not as in the river styx, but because his legs are long like sticks. By the end of the movie my Rocky resentment became extreme ("Somewhere in Queens" includes references from the 1976 movie, "Rocky."). I felt left out, and I did see the movie Rocky. My wife, Maira, reminded me later that the Rocky movie ends with Rocky losing the fight, so the ending lines "There's not going to be a rematch" quoted in a poetry slam in Raymond's movie are spoken by Rocky's opponent in the Rocky movie. I thought I remembered Rocky. Its director also directed a movie called Joe with Peter Boyle, yes? Thus I became beyond resentful of the content of the poetry slam at the Queensborough Community College at the end of Somewhere in Queens (By the way, the Tribeca Screening was at the Borough of Manhattan Community College). I didn't know what to make of the like-father-like-son Rocky reverential reference for the conclusion of the poetry slam. The references to Rocky, ultimately used by the son in his poetry slam showed that he carries the influence of his father with him. The script is sealed with it (though the mother's last line in the movie shows she still questions any girl's interested in her son). The poetry slam depiction upset me such that I was pretty irritable for the rest of the evening. Anyway, this was Raymond's night and thus was a good test of my egocentricity. RANDOM NOTES Dumb down is the idea, and it was the opposite of our family approach. My mother was naturally upwardly mobile. The courtship and marriage of my own, our own, Monica and my, parents was one of our middle class father rising to a more upper middle class world. And Raymond's realization was to Dumb Down and let natural intelligence lead. Raymond's comedian persona is as self-effacing and relatable, as inviting, as Woody Allen's everyman, though perhaps in a more permanent way; and like Mr. Allen, Mr. Romano is also as indominatable. They share comedian characteristics arising from Charlie Chaplin. They are the stars of their own movies, as they should be. Woody Allen provided a crossover to the work of Ingmar Bergman, another comedian auteur. What other word is there to use, but Auteur: an author, who acts in his own script.... I update on August 1, 2023 to include acknowledgement of Pee Wee Herman, the unique comic creation of Paul Ruebens.