When it’s too darned hot to venture out, and the news is naggingly nasty, it’s time for the beach read, the air-conditioned matinee, the TV binge. Here’s my list of recent amusements to pass a summer’s day.
“Something Wonderful” is pretty wonderful. It’s the story of the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s collaboration that began in 1943, lasted almost 20 years, and changed musical theater forever. It’s labor of love by Todd Purdum, a veteran political reporter famous for his tough-mindedness. But scratch a cynic and discover a cock-eyed optimist, humming along to show tunes.
He follows his two protagonists from their early collaborations with others to their successful run as not just authors but an industry. Having been burned, they were owners of their own songs and plays, producers of their own shows, and controlled all aspects of their work.
Personally, they were quite different characters, though they had a similar background — New Yorkers, Columbia graduates, theater mad from an early age. They were also both consummate perfectionists, perhaps to a fault. Both also admitted to others that they never really knew if their partner liked them. The book not only chronicles their work, but is filed with wonderful glimpses of their world, including backstage. Here are a few examples.
Rodgers has a reputation as a hardheaded businessman. His daughter demurs. “My father was an atrocious businessman, he just made a lot of money.”
When she was a girl, the same daughter was in school with Irving Berlin’s daughter. It was a small world. She asked her mother whose father was more famous — hers or Mary Ellin’s. Her mother had to tell her the answer was, “Mary Ellin’s.”
Hammerstein’s fiercely loyal wife overheard a woman say Jerome Kern wrote “Old Man River.” “No,” she corrected the woman, “Oscar Hammerstein wrote Old Man River, Kern wrote “La La Dum Dum.”
The young Mary Martin came to audition and said she was going to sing an old song that Mr. Hammerstein might not know. She sang “Indian Love Call. Hammerstein complimented her and said he did know “Indian Love Call.” In fact, he wrote it. She was morified, but was soon in the road show of one of their musicals and not long afterwards originated the part of Nellie Forbush in “South Pacific.”
Especially charming is a story of Rodgers and the young Balanchine. It had been decided to include a long dance sequence in “Pal Joey.” Rodgers had never worked with a choreographer before and asked how it worked. Did Mr. Balanchine design the dance and then have music written to fit or vice versa. Balanchine in his Russian accented English said succinctly, “You write. I put on.”
Most interesting is the fact that the team that created the enduringly popular “Oklahoma,” “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” and “The Sound of Music,” musicals that integrated book, music and dance seamlessly, had its share of clumsy, peculiar, misbegotten shows — “Allegro,” “Me and Juliet,” and the disastrous Pipe Dream.
Purdum doesn’t say so, but the evidence he offers seems to suggest that the difference was the quality of the source material. Hammerstein was a genius at adapting the stories of others to the musical stage, but less deft starting from scratch.
Also from the bookshelf are two novels by Ward Just, an Illinois boy who became a Washington reporter who covered Vietnam. I am slowly working my way through all his novels. They treat Vietnam, the Midwest in the 1940s and 50s, bureaucratic and political Washington in the 1960s and 70s. “An Unfinished Season” is the coming of age story of a boy from outside Chicago, his industrialist father, labor troubles, McCarthyism, and the girl who got away. It offers an expert evocation of a lost world.
“Exiles in the Garden” concerns a Washington D.C newspaper photographer and his Swiss-raised, Eastern European wife. The garden is that of the house next door to their Georgetown home. In it, emigres from Eastern Europe gather to dream of returning to their lost world that has vanished behind the Iron Curtain.
The husband is another Midwesterner, the son of a Senator who did not join the family business. His wife’s parents were like the exiles next door. She finds their European Weltschmerz seductive, while he’d rather stay home and watch baseball. And so begins the dissolution of a marriage due to historical forces he did not fully appreciate.
At the movies, I recommend “Sicario: Day of the Soldado,” a rare sequel that is as interesting as the original. It turns the menacing and ruthless Benicio del Toro character into a more soulful, though no less deadly, figure.
The very funny “Ideal Home” stars Steve Coogan as a gay Martha Stewartesque TV chef and lifestyle guru. Paul Rudd is his partner in life and business. Their design for living is knocked out of kilter when Coogan’s estranged brother is jailed on a drug charge and his child, who only eats Taco Bell, winds up in their custody. It’s the odd trio.
“The Spy Who Dumped Me” might have been paint-by-numbers silliness about a jilted woman who discovers her boyfriend was a spy He left her only to protect her from assassins out to kill him. Soon the girls are plunged into slapstick international intrigue. But the bond between best friends Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon adds a bit of heart and a lot of craziness to a couple California naifs running for their lives across Europe.
Once again McKinnon shows she can steal any show she’s a part of from SNL to Ghostbusters to this latest outing as madcap friend to the more cautious Kunis. As with “Wonder
Woman,” this film shows that female directors can pep up tired genres by bringing a fresh perspective.
Finally, you can just stay home and watch shows like the snarky “Succession,” (HBO) a thinly disguised take on Rupert Murdock’s family drama, though the Trump children may also spring to mind.
“The Split” (Sundance) is an excellent British series starring Nicola Walker as a high-profile London barrister. She is familiar from several earlier cop shows and as the haggard, lovelorn daughter in “Last Tango in Halifax.”
Here, she is blond, glamorous, and involved in another family drama. She learned the law at her mother’s knee. She and her younger sister both practiced divorce law with her mother, but she has left a joined a larger firm. Complications arise.
Her father, who abandoned the family when the three sisters were young, returns to claim a share of the business and to serve as father of the bride to the youngest daughter. The women differ bitterly about whether he should be forgiven or sent packing. The mother, it develops, may have not told them the whole story, nor has she mentioned the family firm is in financial trouble. Meanwhile the daughter who left the firm and mom find themselves on opposite sides in an ugly divorce, and a hack involving call girls seems to implicate Walker’s husband.
Finally, “Killing Eve” (BBC America) is must see TV starring Sandra Oh as Eve, a desk-bound, frazzled, frumpy British spook who becomes obsessed with the notion that there is a sleek, Russian contract killer at work, code name Villanelle. As played by Jodie Comer, she is wickedly, gleefully amoral. Soon Eve is desk-bound no more, and a weird folie a deux grows up between the hunter and the hunted.
Villanelle steals Eve’s luggage, and when it’s returned it contains a far more fashionable wardrobe in Eve’s size. This is a really odd couple involved in a prelude to a kiss of death. It makes Eve, and the audience, weirdly attracted to and even amused by a villainess so cheerfully malign.
Season One ends with a heck of a cliffhanger that will make you impatient for the next installment, due in 2019. Can’t wait, but a reminder we sure aren’t in Oklahoma anymore.