musical

Leading Ladies

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:58:00 +0000

Directed by Erika Randall Beahm, Daniel Beahm

It may seem quite an impossibility, but the film Leading Ladies is, simply put, a quietly revolutionary dance musical. While most dance musicals (think Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance) center on the boy-meets-girl heterosexual love match, Leading Ladies is a beautifully wrought girl-meets-girl story. It is simultaneously a dance musical, coming-of-age story, and coming-out narrative. The power of the film comes from its ability to maintain the generic conventions of the story while completely rejecting the hetero-normativity that is typically the narrative thrust of the genre. What’s perhaps even more amazing is that Leading Ladies succeeds at thwarting convention within a conventional structure while simultaneously being a whole lot of damn fun. Lesser films would sink under such weight.

Helmed by first-time directors Erika Randall Beahm and Daniel Beahm, this joyous film tells the story of the Campari women. The matriarch of the family is ballroom-dancing stage mom Sheri, played by Latin and Ballroom Champion Melanie LaPatin. Sheri has two daughters: like-minded drama queen and dancing champion Tasi (Shannon Lea Smith), and Toni (Laurel Vail), Tasi’s practice partner and the wallflower of the family. The film centers on Toni’s relationships, particularly with the emotionally volatile Tasi, and an unexpected romantic attachment to Mona (Nicole Dionne), a bubbly and outgoing woman Toni meets at a dance club. While LaPatin’s acting is a bit stiff, Smith’s neurotic and self-obsessed Tasi is played to high-pitched perfection. Vail might be the real star of this film, however, as she says more with her eyes than many actors can express with a word. She artfully plays the Ugly Duckling, the quiet witness to familial squabbles and the glue that keeps the Camparis together.

Leading Ladies has an ebb-and-flow, alternating between slow and quietly stirring scenes and vibrant, fast-paced dance numbers (most notably a hysterical and boisterous number set in a grocery store). The heart of this film beats loudly and quickly, and it leaves the viewer invigorated and deeply moved. To learn more about her hopes for the film, its generative process, and the ideological concerns that lead to its creation, I recently spoke with co-director Erika Randall Beahm.

Beahm co-wrote the film with Jennifer Bechtel, a friend and LGBT youth advocate in Champaign, Illinois, and Bechtel was struggling to find mainstream films that spoke to the young gay community. As Bechtel and Beahm perceived it, most gay and lesbian cinema tends towards violence or explicitness, while mainstream cinema features gay characters as “the sidekick.” Beahm and Bechtel thus sought to create a “family-centered gay and lesbian film for the mainstream market.” Their hope is that Leading Ladies provides gay youth with a positive portrayal of gay romantic love and thus “open a dialogue within themselves” and perhaps between gay youth and their families.

The film eschews aggressive and explicit representations of gay love for a romantic and “joyful falling in love which... straight kids get to experience in movies all the time.” Indeed, Leading Ladies treats its same-sex couple as any movie musicals’ heterosexual pairing: they meet, they dance, they fall in love. The romance is beautifully articulated through an artful juxtaposition of two dance sequences. Toni and Mona’s meeting is shot like a typical dance movie sequence—bright lights, loud music, and overhead shots looking down on the dancers. This film could be Dirty Dancing, if it weren’t for the same-sex couples dancing on stage and in the audience. Indeed, this is the goal of the film: to illustrate that dance (and by extension, romance and love) is the same for same-sex couples as it is for heterosexual partners. Toni leads Mona through a raucous, enthusiastic dance, and as convention dictates, the two find love while dancing. In a beautiful inversion of this sequence, we next find Toni in Mona’s lush apartment, where the more romantically experienced Mona takes the lead in the dance of romance. The lovers’ embrace is gorgeously shot in sensual blush tones and shadow.

For choreographer and dancer Beahm and youth musical programmer Bechtel, dance served as an obvious choice of backdrop for the love story. Beahm choreographed the film’s dances with Melanie LaPatin and Benji Schwimmer, the former So You Think You Can Dance! winner who also plays Toni’s best friend in the film. For Beahm, dance has an inherently transformative power: “There’s this kind of kinesthesia with dance that gets people to literally be moved on a physical level, and I believe also on an emotional and intellectual level.” The love scene between Mona and Toni, for example, is highly choreographed to match the non-diegetic music; Beahm suggests that this emphasis on “energy shifts… and the musicality” of the scene helps the spectator “lose sight of this being a gendered duet, and it just becomes two people moving together, falling in love.”

By emphasizing the movement and musicality of the scene, then, Beahm hopes to ease the fear of spectators who are uncomfortable with same-sex coupling and perhaps open a space for internal dialogue within the spectator: “For people who might have a hard time seeing two women... make out, it becomes this kind of transference of two bodies going through these really emotional and tender but also choreographed spaces, and so gender becomes less important.” By shifting the spectator’s focus from gender distinction to the movement of the body the film illustrates how little gender matters and how love—like dance—is a universal language. Thus the film utilizes dance to open up a space for shifting “people out of the fear they may feel if they’re watching from an outside perspective.”

Though the idea of dance as a catalyst to ideological and personal transformation may seem unusual, Beahm is quick to point out that dance has often added a “queer element” to the movie musical. In West Side Story, for example, the spectator sees groups of men “snapping and skipping” and yet the dance isn’t “sexualized, it’s charged and it’s activated.” Dancing is particularly subversive in moments of unison dancing, she suggests, when members of both sexes dance the same movements, suggesting a unity of the sexes and the democratization of the body. Leading Ladies takes this democratization one step further, rejecting the hetero-normative ballroom dance structure of male lead and female follow and replacing it with same-sex couplings. In doing so, Beahm simultaneously feeds off of the democratizing nature of dance while rejecting the rules of a dance form that reinforces gendered performance.

It is the inherent queerness in dance that Beahm finds so appealing and in tune with her views on feminism. For her, dance and feminism are “compatible” because they are both “hard to pin down” terms; their “slipperiness” as terms allows them to create spaces for dialogue and questioning. She likes her feminism to work “from the inside out,” enjoying the notion of becoming part of a system, and breaking it down from within. This is why her personal mantra is the cheeky suggestion to “wear pearls to the country club and then talk dirty.” Ultimately, Leading Ladies represents a filmic expression of this mantra—by placing non-conventional characters within a conventional generic structure, the film wears its pearls but then lets out a glorious, enthusiastic expletive as it sits down to dinner. Swearing has never been so much fun.

Written by: Joanna Chlebus, July 15th 2010

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates

admin — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Directed by Massoud Bakshim

Documentary Educational Resources

Massoud Bakshim’s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates identifies itself as “a musical, historical, comedy, docu-drama, love story, experimental film.” Attempts to classify the film—as a postmodern visual stew, as a sarcastic video collage-portrait, as a half-tribute-half-roast—don’t quite encapsulate the its nuances. This resistance to simple definition also fits the film's subject: the Iranian capital of Tehran.

This portrait of Tehran is not a straightforward, traditional documentary comprised of facts and interviews, and there is no startling revelation about the city around which the documentary is centered. Early in the film viewers are told that the subjects interviewed throughout the footage may seem real, but are not, and that the facts and history provided are "probably inaccurate." Viewers are told the film is not finished, and that the footage they are watching is the research collected for a project that will never come to fruition, a sort of allegorical way to indicate that it is impossible to successfully complete a film that would depict the true realities of Tehran. The film’s greatest accomplishment is not in any one particular subject or goal concerning Tehran; rather, it is the commentary cleverly tucked throughout.

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates dissects the city by comparing old footage and photographs to images from today, bringing into question the true extent of its progress. Women's attire is used by Bakhshim to demonstrate. Garments worn by men and women of the past are shown to the viewer; then the narrator cheerfully moves to address modern clothing, pointing to how men and women have many choices. The camera shows men wearing a variety of clothes and women wearing the veil and scarf, who can be differentiated from each other only by the colors they choose.

Aside from simply comparing and contrasting the present with the past, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates addresses specific issues that beset modern day Tehran, all with a biting sarcasm. Once the film begins to address modern times, the mischievousness reveals itself and the film’s spunky qualities liven up the pace during the search for “Tehran’s biggest problem.” Unfortunately, sardonic humor and history can make confusing partners, and during the first portion of the film, it was difficult to identify the legitimate historical information. The language barrier—the film is in Farsi with English subtitles—combined with my limited knowledge of Iran's history intensified this effect, and the film’s unique approach suffered.

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates is a bit of an inside joke, and a Tehrani will see a different film than someone raised on a farm in rural Wisconsin. He or she will have the benefit of reactions based on personal experiences while the rest of us can only sit back and absorb.

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates treats the title city as one would a beloved scoundrel of a friend. The polluted, overcrowded city is not cast in an entirely despicable light, and there is a constant undertow of familiar love. Without that sense of caring, the sarcastic tones would have fallen as flat as a “your mama” joke to an orphan.

Written by: Kelly Palka Gallagher, December 15th 2009

Lizzie Borden (09/10/2009)

admin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:25:00 +0000

The Living Theatre

New York, New York

How do you spin a nursery rhyme into a full-length musical? In this case, the uber-creepy poem in question is, thankfully, based in reality: the eponymous Lizzie Borden who reputedly “took an axe” and “gave her father forty whacks” was a real life New England girl accused—and acquitted—of murdering both her parents in the late nineteenth century, so there’s more than enough material to mine. But the rock musical bearing her name, like the nursery rhyme, doesn’t take this grim piece of history so seriously, blending period and punk to create a tongue-in-cheek murderous romp.

In Took An Axe’s production of the tale, our bloodthirsty heroine (and she is treated as such) goes from prim and pale to full-on goth, trading her petticoats for a pair of leather gloves and black lipstick post-patricide. Meanwhile, the Bordens’ housekeeper Bridget (Carrie Cimma) is pure punk from the moment she steps out on stage, from her spiked-up bleach blonde hair to her leather corset. We quickly discover the symbolism of such costuming as Bridget whispers encouragement in the trepidatious Lizzie’s ear, providing a sort of heavy metal devil on her shoulder. By the time the second act begins, the entire cast has completely abandoned their period posturing to wield their mics like modern rock stars.

On the night that I attended, the audience ate up such irreverence, cheering openly when Lizzie spattered her parents’ blood all over the white backdrop upstage. As with Rocky Horror, though, Borden isn’t just about the gimmick; the music is fantastic too. The full-on rock numbers, like the joyously hard “Why Are All These Heads Off?,” pull no punches, while the more traditional musical theatre tunes are full of gorgeously executed harmonies. “Burn the Old Thing Up,” which the somewhat wistful Lizzie (Jenny Fellner) sings while setting fire to her bloodstained dress, is a poignant farewell to both her younger, repressed self and the evidence of her adult murder.

The Living Theatre’s tiny space is used commendably well, with a red scrim dividing the stage and separating the actors from the band. This gauzy curtain is pulled aside at times, opening up the upstage area for scenes set on the Bordens’ rooftop, which are beautifully staged with creative, unexpected lighting effects.

As one of very few all-female rock musicals in existence, Lizzie Borden is valuable for any feminist theatergoer, and this production is particularly fun. Admittedly, the tone of the show as a whole is a bit muddled, as certain actors play it almost too straight, but if you make a pact with yourself at the door to just surrender to the mayhem, you’ll be cheering too.

Written by: Caitlin Graham, September 15th 2009

Once

admin — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 02:52:00 +0000

Directed by John Carney

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Once is a dreamy film set against the green-grey hues of wintry Dublin and accompanied by the plaintive music of that city's residents. The film's deceptively simple story centers around one of Ireland's unnamed poetic denizens, billed just as "guy," and played by wide-eyed Frames frontman Glen Hansard. He is a busker who croons longing songs, accompanied by a broken guitar, standing alone with his muse on a fancy shopping thoroughfare. One day, he meets a Czech emigre, "girl" (played by Hansard's recent musical collaborator Markéta Irglová) and finds out that she, too, is a musician. She plays a piano in the back of a shop because she can't afford her own. Together, they finish writing some songs and then record them, and their sweet and intense process of music-making is the essence of Once.

Many of the movie's scenes are long, gorgeous sequences with no sound, but Hansard's songs in the background--making it a sort of musical, but one without characters bursting into spontaneous, plot-moving numbers. And it's not a love story in the most traditional sense, because both guy and girl are entangled adults without much room to be impulsive. And after all, falling for someone is not as simple and sunshiny as the Drew Barrmore-Hugh Grant stab at the same theme, Music and Lyrics, would have us believe. Unlike that high-budget film, Once has no contrived lovemaking, no dramatic fights and reconciliations, and no climactic concert-hall triumphs.

But the film and its gorgeously melancholy soundtrack are a far more satsifying ode to the deep intimacy that comes from partnership and the joy of creating something with someone who understands you. Our guy and girl's relationship is as much Lennon and McCartney as Romeo and Juliet.

Director and writer John Carney also gives us an honest look at the artists' life--through his characters' existences, we see the bittersweet consequences of forsaking conventional life to pursue art, and vice-versa. Once is a wispy cloud of a film that will please fans of music, Ireland and love.

Written by: Sarah Seltzer, June 10th 2007