We reflexively think of fantasy-object movie stars as It Boys and It Girls, but Sean Connery was always the It Man, a guy alluring because of his ease with old-fashioned masculine authority. As his Rising Sun director Philip Kaufman put it, "Steve McQueen had It. Cagney had It and so did Cary Grant. If an actor has It, it means he can take stuff out of a supermarket freezer and there's something special about it. The fact is people are very attracted to the way he behaves. They have an empathy with him...and he has gravity under pressure."

Rising Sun, one of Connery's best and most underrated movies, isn't part of Turner Classic Movies' day-long tribute to the star today. (Rising Sun does play Wednesday at 3:30 a.m., on Cinemax.)

But TCM's salute does include two of his least-known gems. At 6 p.m. it shows 1978's The Great Train Robbery, a feast for lovers of boys' book adventure, trains, Connery, Lesley-Anne Down, Donald Sutherland, and England. Based on an actual 1855 gold theft from a full-steam-ahead locomotive -- the first recorded train robbery -- it's as pretty as a Gainsborough picture. Connery's roguish Victorian hero says he heists a gold shipment meant for the Crimea just because he wants the money, but we don't believe him for an instant. He must do it partly just because it's there -- the criminal Mt. Everest of his day. As Pierce, Connery is a satyr in Savile Row clothing. With a neat Satanic set of whiskers, his beef bursting out of the tailored, layered clothes, he's more than a 19th century Bond -- he's Bond mixed with Sherlock Holmes and Raffles.

Watching the Soviet vistas in 1990's The Russia House (airing on TCM 1 a.m. Saturday), it's easy to feel the exhilaration of Connery's reluctant hero, a British publisher embroiled in the attempt of a visionary Soviet physicist to publish USSR military secrets in the West. The images of old Russia's churches and the Soviet Union's mammoth public architecture have a vibrancy and sweep that go beyond travelog pictorialism. There's a hum of discovery to them. They express the chivalric, adventurous feelings that emerge with a rush in Connery's character as soon as he claps eyes on the physicist's courier (Michelle Pfeiffer), an editor whom Connery jocularly describes as the Soviet answer to the Venus de Milo. Pfeiffer and Connery scale the Mt. Olympus of screen romance. She creates a Soviet idealist with formidable gravity, and he creates something completely different: a bookish boozer and jazz fan who seizes the chance to act on his instincts and become actively humane. The keenest pleasure among the multiple joys of this movie is watching his love for her dawn in his eyes and gradually reach a blazing noon.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

From fashion writer Tanika White:

Dear old Granddad, who turned 89 yesterday, used to want me to take up tennis. He had visions of me winning at Wimbledon in a tidy white pleated skirt (that met the dollar bill rule, of course) and a polo-shirt buttoned nearly to the neck.

My lack of any kind of discernible athleticism prevented me from becoming a tennis player then, but oh! how I wish I could be a star on the courts these days.

High-performing female tennis pros have taken the traditional tennis outfit and turned it on its staid head.

These days, I'd tune in to the competitions where Venus and Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova and Bethanie Mattek play any day -- just to see what they're going to wear.

At the U.S. Open this week, Wisconsin-native Mattek wore a metallic gold dress that would have made the prudish Atlanta City Councilman C.T. Martin declare a fashion fault: The top of Mattek's dress exposed her bra - and in some cases, when she bent too low, her breasts, too.

But other tennis fashionistas did a better job showing their personality in their performance gear.

Sharapova's red flared dress, designed with Nike's help apparently to look like the New York City skyline, was simply gorgeous -- the crystal neckline could easily have been worn with sandals or flats to a beach party or picnic.

Venus Williams' drop-pleated green tennis dress, with a feminine bow on the side, was designed in partnership with discount chain Steve & Barry's. In addition to being cute, the affordable outfit shows that you don't have to spend a ton to have high-performance, high-fashion athletic gear.

And her sister Serena's black super-short black Nike outfit with pink bow detail (sweetly matched to a pink headband and a pink armband)went a long way toward feminizing Williams' powerful mannish figure. She should always wear pink, and little heart-shaped jewelry, IMHO.

I can't play a tennis game any better today than I could when I was a small child.

But I can relate a lot more to contemporary female competitors since they've added color, accessories and sex appeal -- and stepped up their fashion game.
    
(Maria Sharapova photo by Associated Press // Venus Williams photo by Getty Images)

Posted by Sarah Kickler Kelber at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

A lighthouse and a lightship in Baltimore are two of the 10 attractions that will be featured in the fifth annual "Maryland Lighthouse Challenge" that will be held Sept. 15 and 16 around the state.

The Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse on Inner Harbor Pier 5 and the Lightship Chesapeake at Inner Harbor Pier 3 are the Baltimore stops in the two-day challenge, which encourages people to visit land-based lighthouses and other attractions in Maryland.

The event is sponsored by the Chesapeake Chapter of the U. S. Lighthouse Society and individual lighthouse organizations of Maryland. Others lighthouses that will be open are in Cecil, Harford, St. Mary’s, Talbot and Anne Arundel counties. The non profit Living Classrooms Foundation operates the Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse and the Lightship Chesapeake.

Posted by Ed Gunts at 7:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

The AFI Silver series Totally Awesome: Films of the 1980s closes with a bang with David Lynch's Blue Velvet Friday at 7:15 p.m., Saturday at 7:15 p.m., Monday at 9 p.m., and Tuesday and Thursday at 8:45 p.m. It brings you back to the time -- 1986, to be exact -- when Lynch personified personal filmmaking, not solipsistic filmmaking.

Ingmar Bergman, one of Lynch's heroes, worried about directors becoming insular. The Swedish master wrote, "My admiration for Fellini is limitless. But I also feel ... that Fellini began to make Fellini films." He preferred Kurosawa, who "never made a Kurosawa film," and asked, "Where are we going? Has Bergman begun to make Bergman films?" While trying to be true to himself, even an artist as great as Bergman or as adventurous as Lynch can get lost in himself.

After his inscrutable The Inland Empire, I hope Lynch realizes that the friction between a director's sensibility and an actual drama or story can often prove a filmmaker's salvation. He's demonstrated that again and again in his own career. He leapt from the debacle of Dune (1984) to the masterly Blue Velvet, where he showed, like Bergman, that he could open up a private universe that still encompassed the real world. He did it with a script as tense and basic as Ross Macdonald's classic Blue City. Lynch's hero (Kyle MacLachlan), a collegiate Hardy Boy, returns to his hometown to help at the family hardware store after his father is hospitalized. With the aid of a high-school girl who becomes a reluctant Nancy Drew (Laura Dern, great back then, too), he discovers the sordidness and despair that lurk beneath the driveway-to-sidewalk sod and the wall-to-wall carpeting. The movie has social-political resonance as a portrait of the mud beneath America's white picket fences, but its blood-and-guts coming-of-age pop poetry gives it a rock and roll transcendence.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

The AFI Silver series John Huston: American maverick reaches its apex Friday at 5:25 p.m. and next Tuesday and Thursday at 7 p.m. with The Dead. The traditional Christian salute to the Magi is at the center of this film, which leaves you with something rare in movies: a fullness of emotion. The director's 1987 valedictory, scripted by his son Tony from James Joyce's short story, is a serene work of art that also, at a mere 83 minutes, offers a complete evening's entertainment. Without any fuss, Huston ushers us into Misses Kate and Julia Morkan's celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany in Dublin, 1904. For the delight of such guests as the Morkans' college-teaching nephew Gabriel (Donal McCann) and his wife, Gretta (Anjelica Huston), a college dean reads Lady Gregory's translation of a Gaelic poem, Julia gamely trills through a song from Bellini, the Morkans' niece plays the piano, and the renowned tenor Bartell D'Arcy croons a poignant ballad, "The Lass of Aughrim." 

When Gabriel sees Gretta struck motionless by D'Arcy's singing, it's one of the great moments in movie history. The scene is hushed, suspended in time. Yet it's fraught with feelings -- of Gabriel for his wife and of Gretta for a boy who once loved her. In the end, the cozy claustrophobia of the Morkans' party and the simmering anguish of Gabriel -- who must face his emotional limitations and his hollow cultural pretensions -- come together with absolute inevitability. You may find your eyes filling with tears when Gabriel declares, "Better pass boldly into that other world, in the glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age." But they won't be simple tears of mourning. They'll be the ambiguous "generous tears" that fill Gabriel's eyes, too: the tears that accompany epiphany.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

For the past 20 years or so, Labor Day weekend has meant one thing to me: around-the-clock screening of new network fall TV shows. As network fare has steadily declined, so has the quality of my late-summer life.

Here are a couple of images that might suggest what the experience is like: 1) Picture a man with his head in a steel mill's blast furance. 2) Or, think back to the iconic image from the 1940s of a group of people standing in a trench in a desert looking at a mushroom cloud. They are wearing dime-store plastic sunglasses that they think will protect them from the bomb that appears to have exploded less than 100 yards away. That's me in front of the TV at this time of year.

And yet, as much as I want to whine and kvetch, even after all these years, I love it. Even when network series are an artistic mess, they are often still a cultural feast -- or at least a tasty bit of pop pastry.

I am not saying any of these are great shows --  or that they will even still be with us when May rolls around and all anyone can say is Simon Cowell. But here are the first of what in coming days and weeks on this blog will be a fast preview of series worth going out of your way to check out for what they say about American life today.

K-Ville: Another cop drama from Fox, but this one is set in post-Katrina New Orleans. The storm, the government's lack of a meaningful response, and all the TV images of an American city looking worse than the slums of a third world country, left a giant scar on the national psyche, and this drama aims to rip off the scab.

The pilot offers an intense exploration of heroism, cowardice, race and social class stratification in New Orleans today. Anthony Anderson, as New Orleans Police Officer Marlin Boulet, delivers an engaging performance as lead character, Officer Marlin Boulet.

Unlike most netrwork dramas with a social conscience, K-Ville looks like it might even have a chance in the ratings: It's paired with Prison Break on Monday nights starting Sept. 17

Posted by David Zurawik at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Speakers include: Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore; Joseph Haskins, chief executive of Harbor Bank; Scott Levitan, senior vice president and development director of Forest City Science and Technology Group, and architect Walter Schamu of Schamu Machowski Greco Inc.

The forum is sponsored by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and will be followed by a reception. Hopkins professor Elaine Worzala will be the moderator. Tickets range in cost from $30 to $40 per person, and on-site registration begins at 5 p.m.

Posted by Ed Gunts at 6:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

I live for Ledisi, the jazz-soul singer from Oakland, Calif., whose reputation among discerning music lovers has mushroomed in the last decade. In that time, she has doggedly worked the international underground soul circuit, pulling material from her two hard-to-find independent albums: Soulsinger (2001) and Feeling Orange But Sometimes Blue (2002). About two years ago, I profiled her in my column. Shortly afterward, a Ledisi concert in New York was glowingly reviewed by the New York Times.

Now, she's on a major label, Verve/Universal. Her first release for company, Lost & Found, hits stores today. I must admit: When I received an advance copy of the album about two months ago, I was a bit disappointed with the subdued, smooth jazz-like production. In concert and on her indie albums, Ledisi cuts loose and funks it up. She pulls back on Lost & Found, catering her sound to urban adult radio. But she's never boring. Although the album feels tentative here and there, Ledisi's sun-drenched vocals are always inviting. Homegirl can't sing a bad note. Even with a few so-so moments, the album is still impressive, something for the "grown and sexy" crowd.

Anthem, the sophomore album by experimental jazz trumpeter Chrisitan Scott, also hits stores today. Be sure to pass this one up. I want to like this guy. He's talented, but neither his 2006 debut, Rewind That, nor Anthem is all that impressive. The songs are listless, his playing meanders. On the new album, a post-Hurricane Katrina tribute to his hometown of New Orleans, Scott folds in various musical textures from rock, soul and hip-hop. But nothing is all that memorable. 

For more reviews, check out my LIVE column on Thursday.

Posted by Rashod Ollison at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

In what was a fairly lackluster week -- no surprise, given the paltry offerings among the new films released -- Superbad reigned atop the American box office for a second week, pulling in about $18 million. Among the week's new releases, Mr. Bean's Holiday came in first, with an estimated $10.1 million. But before Rowan Atkinson's fans start crowing too loudly, consider this: That's considerably less than the $12.7 million his first Bean film earned in its opening week 10 years ago.

Other tidbits:

1) With total ticket sales of $185.1 million (including $12.4 million last week), The Bourne Ultimatum is just short of becoming the highest-grossing film of the series. Of this summer 10,000 sequels, it's the only one to out-earn its predecessor (Bourne #2, The Bourne Supremacy, earned $176.2 million)

2) Hairspray, the little musical that could, pulled in $3.5 million. Its total box-office of $107.5 million makes it the second highest-grossing musical of the past 20 years. It's moved ahead of Dreamgirls, but still trails Chicago's $170.7 million.

3) With a take of only $1.8 million, Resurrecting the Champ had the weakest opening ever for a boxing-themed picture. Then again, that's about par for the course for movies centering on journalism, which is also a major subject of the film.

4) September Dawn, in which a band of crazed, righteous Mormons slaughter a wagon train filled with unsuspecting Christians (the movie's based on a real 18th-century event, but greatly oversimplifies what actually happened), earned only $1.1 million, according to estimates from the releasing studio, Slowhand Cinema Releasing. Box Office Mojo, however, suspects that may constitute an "overly optimistic projection," given that the film had grossed less than $500,00 through Saturday.

5) Transformers, with a total of $308.6 million, moved into third place among the summer's releases, surpassing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ($307.6 million) 

Posted by Chris Kaltenbach at 6:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Fifty years ago Pauline Kael complained that Americans rated the qualities of their heroes according to the flatness of their stomachs, but no more.

300, a graphic-novel-style remake of The 300 Spartans,in which every bit player and extra boasted 6-, 8-, or 12-pack abs, was roasted at the DVD racks by Wild Hogs, a comedy about middle-aged and mostly out-of-shape bikers. Are the Wild Hogs being taken as role models or as walking cautionary tales? More important, did anyone who rented this commercial hit and artistic disaster think it was remotely funny? 

Travolta should be glad that it came out before his entertaining turn in Hairspray. If he gets lucky at Oscar-time, Wild Hogs won't taint him the way Norbit did Dreamgirls' Eddie Murphy.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Specialty distribution whiz Bob Berney made trade-paper headlines when he nursed Christopher Nolan's tricky thriller Memento into an art-house sensation, then made major-daily headlines when he helped Mel Gibson find a huge audience for The Passion of the Christ.

As the head of Picturehouse, a joint venture of New Line Cinema and HBO, he's retained and further developed his knack for furthering "directors' pictures" of many kinds, from Guillermo del Toro's epic fantasy Pan's Labyrinth to Jeffrey Blitz's individualistic high school comedy, Rocket Science. He continues to exploit reviews and word of mouth in ways that elude blockbuster-obsessed big studios. In an interview about the release strategy for Rocket Science two weeks ago, Berney emphasized the important of flexibility. He resists chasing after huge numbers of screens for opening weekends, yet still hopes to get his films into the national marketplace in time to benefit from N.Y. and L.A. media attention.

Most important from a filmmaker's point of view, he believes he should involve a director in the release plan from festival premieres to opening day. Nothing delight hims more than discovering that someone like Blitz really is a born moviemaker.

Coming off a beloved documentary hit, Spellbound, it was hard to predict how Blitz would fare in his first fictional feature. What sparked Berney's enthusiasm in the finished film was "Blitz's sense of comedy and style; it has a smart and uncompromising sense of humor. The story is very different, and the music just knocks you out. And the casting is brilliant. It really is a director’s piece, very quirky. And the way we work on these pictures, we keep the director involved in the quote ads and the look to the campaign and the promotional interviews.It's something of a partnership."

Was working with Blitz on Rocket Sciene any different from working with Gibson on The Passion of the Christ?  "It was very similar, really. We'd go into talks about the trailers, we'd discuss his ideas and ours, and we worked it out, had a pretty easy time with that. He was in a good mood." Then Berney added, with a laugh, "He was on coffee, mainly." 

Posted by Michael Sragow at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will mark the 25th anniversary of the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall with a "Gala Concert" featuring its new music director, Marin Alsop, on Sept. 15.

In honor of the hall’s anniversary, the BSO is offering 1,000 tickets for $25, a price that includes post-concert entertainment in the lobby.

The remaining tickets will be sold individually starting at $750 per person. The higher-priced tickets include dining, entertainment and a silent auction before the concert and admission to a separate "post-party" afterwards, with dancing and desserts.

The BSO’s fall gala is its largest fund-raiser of the year, and all proceeds go to support the orchestra’s educational outreach programs throughout Maryland.

The 2,443-seat hall opened on Sept. 16, 1982, at 1212 Cathedral St. in Baltimore’s Mount Royal Cultural District.

The Sept. 15 concert marks the start of the hall’s silver anniversary season, and will feature arts groups from throughout the city performing alongside the BSO and under the baton of Marin Alsop.

After the gala, Alsop will conduct her first concerts as the BSO’s 12th music director Sept. 27 to 30.

For those who buy tickets that include admission to the silent auction, more than 50 local organizations have donated items to purchase this year, including luxury accommodations in Costa Rica, fine art and skybox tickets for 12 for an Orioles home game. Other items include signed scores from all 11 contemporary composers featured on the BSO’s 2007-2008 season, a lunch for four at Petit Louis restaurant with Marin Alsop, and the opportunity to conduct the orchestra in a children’s concert.

Posted by Ed Gunts at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

This past weekend, good faux Baltimore (Hairspray) reached a milestone while a horrendous use of real Baltimore tanked (The Invasion). And audiences generally proved there may be no more profound show-biz lesson then "always leave them laughing."

Superbad, an R-rated teen farce with a high degree of comic job skills and predominantly positive reviews, easily bested the other broad openings this week, including the disastrous partly-filmed-in-Baltimore (and heavily-reshot-in-Los-Angeles) The Invasion and the Weinstein Company's Excalibur epic, The Last Legion, which was widely panned by critics across the pond when it opened earlier in England. And Death at a Funeral, an R-rated British farce directed by an American, Frank Oz, scored an impressive $5,011 per screen average in a more limited roll-out. 

Some of the best and also biggest movies of the summer, The Bourne Ultimatum and The Simpsons Movie, showed their staying-power with (respectively) 42.3% and 40.8% drops to third and fourth positions, while the routine Rush Hour 3 slid into #2 with a 55.5% decrease in ticket sales. And, quietly, Hairspray, which kept its soul in Baltimore even while it filmed in Toronto, suffered less of a percentage loss than any other film in the Top 10 and passed the $100 million mark.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death, the rock 'n roll king's only child, Lisa Marie Presley, released today a "departed duet" with her father called "In the Ghetto." The two are digitally joined on the song Elvis recorded back in 1969.  (Think Nat and Natalie Cole on the 1991 hit "Unforgettable.")

The song, available on iTunes, is accompanied by a video shot in black and white and directed by Tony Kaye. All proceeds from the song and video will benefit a new Presley Place transitional housing campus in New Orleans.

Initially, though, I thought the song and video were a marketing ploy to generate buzz around the 30th anniversary of Elvis' death. (From the perspective of the distributors and promoters of the project, it may be.) But after hearing the song and seeing the video, I don't feel that's the case with Lisa Marie. Besides, if she wanted to simply ride the coattails of her father's musical legacy, she could have done that a long time ago. She didn't start her own pop career until she was well into her 30s and twice divorced with kids.

The duet is affecting. Lisa Marie's sensitive, albeit indistinctive, vocals complement her father's. But after hearing the song, it is clear that Lisa Marie isn't the standout singer her dad was. Props to David Foster, the song's producer, for preserving the integrity of the original recording during the incorporation of Lisa Marie's vocals.

The video, however, is a bit overwrought. You get several images of babies in cribs playing with guns interspersed with close-up shots of a tearful Lisa Marie and vintage footage of Elvis performing "In the Ghetto" on stage. According to an interview Lisa Marie did with spinner.com, the video was conceived and shot rather quickly. And although the quality isn't necessarily shoddy, the concept and execution are awkward -- nothing on the level of the classy, evocative video for "Unforgettable."

Lisa Marie's duet with Elvis isn't quite as endearing as Nat and Natalie's. But "In the Ghetto" certainly isn't an effort to be ashamed of. And besides, it benefits a worthy cause.

Hear a clip of the song here.  

Posted by Rashod Ollison at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Get out your hankies -- Cry-baby, a new musical based on the film by Baltimore bad boy John Waters, has announced that it will hold its world premiere on Nov. 6 at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.

Following the California tryout, the show tentatively is slated to debut on Broadway in late March, 2008 with the official opening scheduled for April. Casting has not yet been announced.

Cry-baby, which is set in 1954, is a send-up of teen melodramas. It follows the exploits of Wade "Cry-baby" Walker in his pursuit of truth, justice and rock 'n' roll.

Quick -- who portrayed Wade in the 1990 film? None other than that quintessential pop star-actor- heartthrob Johnny Depp.

Posted by Mary McCauley at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Baltimore-born filmmaker Barry Levinson is currently in the editing room finishing up What Just Happened?, a comedy-drama about a movie producer (played by Robert De Niro) who's like the flip, humane side of Dustin Hoffman's producer in Levinson's Wag the Dog (which also starred De Niro). As he prepares to start screening it for test audiences in the coming months, Levinson says, "There's no way you can show what you do and not be nervous. The only time I wasn't nervous is when I was back on the mixing stage doing the new cut of The Natural for the DVD this past year, and I was very content; I was going, the movie's been out, it's 20 years later, I'm fixing some sound." But decades of experience have taught Levinson not to take preview reactions at face value.

"What the audience thinks that it wants and the thing they'll be most satisfied with are maybe two different things," says Levinson. "Take Rain Man: What the cards were saying, if you went by cards, was they weren't happy with the ending. They wanted Dustin Hoffman to end up with Tom Cruise. They wanted Tom Cruise to take care of him. Instead he was sent back to the institution because Tom Cruise realized there was no way in the world he could probably care of him. Now if the studio wanted to change the ending, what they would have wanted is somehow an ending in which Dustin Hoffman ends up with Tom Cruise. However, that may not have been satisfactory in the end. It's a little like you wish they could be together, but they can't be -- and that's what you want! That's an honest feeling! That doesn't mean they have to have the conclusion. And that's the point. 

"Take Gone With the Wind and after all that's gone on, you think, gee, it would be nice for Rhett Butler to end up with Scarlett, as opposed to he walks out because he's fed up -- but that's what makes it great. As opposed to, you're right, Scarlett, I'm staying [sings Tara theme]. You have the fact that Rhett Butler is going to walk out on her, but in a way that's what's good about it. Just because you have a tug of war emotionally doesn't mean you have to have a conclusion to it.

"If you did get that and you suddenly see them sitting together in Rain Man, then you may go, owww. Because now there's no longer anything to long for or want or hope for, or in that case, may not even be anything emotional. There shouldn't always be a conclusion of that sort. And that's different from a movie that's going along and all of a sudden it's just ended, so you say, what just happened?

"Sometimes you have to evaluate what an audience is saying when they say I wish this would happen." 

Read more from the interview with Levinson in Sunday's Arts & Life Today section.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

"Maybe you can do something about the confusion over the venue for 'Menopause: the Musical.' I live at the Atrium Apartments and take an evening stroll on the top floor of the adjacent parking garage, overlooking the intersection of Fayette and Eutaw. This is how the scene usually unfolds at showtime:

"Dining groups leave nearby restaurants, look across the street and see the Hippodrome all lit up. They are drawn to the lights like moths, cross Eutaw in the middle of the street (not the safest route) and proceed to the Hippodrome entrance doors. At that point they find small signs announcing that the entrance is elsewhere. Most head back up Eutaw to Fayette, ask the Downtown Safety Patrol for directions, and finally walk the half block westward to the 'Menopause' entrance.

"The France-Merrick Performing Arts Center is responsible for this confusion. All their advertising lists the theater's address as 12 N.Eutaw St. But, a Fayette Street address should be listed. I've heard that France-Merrick doesn't want to confuse the public with the Fayette address, but they are already confused.

"Many patrons have difficulty walking, and two or three blocks of unnecessary wandering is criminal. A rainy evening could be deadly!"

Well expressed, Local Correspondent. Is anyone out there listening?

Posted by Mary McCauley at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Meryl Streep, one of the finest actors of our generation, provides fascinating insights into her technique in a new book of interviews called Actors at Work.

Here's just one tantalizing paragraph:

"I agree with critic Robert Brustein's idea that things are written at different periods and times, but things want to be read at certain moments. The time in which you live calls for certain kind of voices to be heard. ... When I read a script, I think, 'This is relevant to now, for whatever reason, or this needs to be heard now.' It's a fluid thing. A play is always seen in the context of its time. ... I don't necessarily think about that, but I rely on it, my inner hum -- my awareness of where I am in the world right now, right here -- and something resonates in the script."

The book also includes interviews with such renowned performers as Frances Conroy, Billy Crudup, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kevin Kline, Mandy Patinkin and Kevin Spacey.

The interviews were compiled by Rosemary Tichler, former casting director and artistic producer at New York's legendary Public Theatre; and Barry Jay Kaplan, a playwright and novelist.

The book was published yesterday (Aug. 14) by Faber and Faber, Inc. and costs $16. 

Posted by Mary McCauley at 7:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)