How a musical was born -- almost

 

         When I was a much younger man living in Manhattan, I met lots of people. Some of them were actors. I won’t name names, but one became a major star. Only one.

          The majority of young people who head to New York seeking a niche in the arts find impoverishment, heartbreak, and crushed dreams. New York teaches painful lessons: The world owes you nothing. All you'll ever achieve is a bit of status on the fringes of the endeavor you love. Maybe you won’t even get that far.

          The risk: You become too old to be considered promising. You have no fallback, and you’re unemployable. Such is the gamble.

          Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut deals with someone who took the risk. Tick, Tick ... Boom! explores the life of playwright/composer Jonathan Larson before he hit the big time with his award-winning musical Rent.  

          It’s not surprising that Miranda chose Larson’s play for his directorial debut. He knows this milieu. He was part of it. 

          And like Larson, Miranda, still best known for Hamilton, helped remake the musical form. Here, he revels in the energy of a diverse group of performers bursting with a singular ambition: to have their voices heard.

      Those familiar with Larson’s story also know that it ended with an unexpected and shattering exclamation point. Larson died in 1996 of an aortic aneurism on the day of Rent's first Off-Broadway preview. He was 35.

       So Tick, Tick ... Boom! is a sad movie? Not really.

       It's an upbeat look at a struggling composer who's trying to establish himself in musical theater. Tick, Tick … Boom! focuses on Larson's efforts to put on a workshop performance of Superbia, a futuristic musical based on George Orwell's 1984. 

     As Larson, Andrew Garfield puts the movie on his shoulders and carries it a long way; he's the focal point in an aspirational world that swirls with talent, hope and energy.

    Miranda organizes the musical around a performance of Tick, Tick ... Boom!, a show Larson performs on a bare stage with a piano and back-up band. Numbers from the stage play mix with depictions of Larson's bohemian life in New York City. 

   The mood ranges from excitement to the desperation Larson experiences as he tries to write the song that will complete Superbia. The story also deals with the AIDS onslaught that has begun to thin the ranks of the creative class, striking close to home for Larson.

    Miranda brings a few additional characters into focus.

    Robin de Jesus portrays Michael, a gay singer who traveled to New York with Larson but who tires of rejection and poverty. Michael opts for a more stable life in advertising. 

   Larson's girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp) remains committed to him until she realizes that Larson uses intimacy to discover emotion for his songs. He’s too involved with his work to make a relationship succeed.

    Judith Light has a late-picture turn as the agent who gives Larson a tough lesson about the vagaries of theatrical endeavor.

     Larson supports himself by working as a waiter at SoHo's  Moondance Diner, a job that pays for the crummy apartment where he lives with an Everest of dishes piled in the sink.

   There's not much suspense about the outcome. Roughly half way through, musical master Steven Sondheim (Bradley Whitford) shows up to ratify Larson's talent. It's clear that the young man eventually will find a vehicle to propel his career. 

   Garfield, who does his own singing, pours on the energy -- sometimes to the point of annoyance and the movie's desire to celebrate the exuberant diversity that hit New York during the 1990s doesn't feel quite as fresh as it once might have.  

    Mostly, though, the movie remains engaging. Miranda works in a quick-cut, pop-and-flash style that reminded me a bit of director Jon M. Chu's colorful approach to the movie version of Miranda’s play,  In the Heights.

    Tick, Tick can be taken as an updated version of the “Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Show” school of entertainment -- only smarter, more articulate and more driven.

     Perhaps fondness for its characters explains why at two hours in length Tick, Tick hangs on longer than it should.  It’s not only Larson who’s being celebrated and remembered; it's the dreams of youth.

      

     

'In the Heights' hits lots of high notes

 

     With In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda established himself as a major figure in American musical theater. Miranda followed In the Heights with Hamilton, the production that took Broadway and then the nation by storm. 

    Now In the Heights has reached the big screen where it serves as a vibrant celebration of the Washington Heights neighborhood that has become a center of New York Dominican culture, broadened here to encompass a variety of Latino ethnicities living in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge.

    The message behind the energy that director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) and a fine cast bring to the movie involves identity and assertiveness, insistence of characters on building lives in New York while keeping their culture close at hand.

   A large-scale ensemble piece, the movie nonetheless centers around Usnavi de la Vega played by Anthony Ramos in a commanding performance. Ramos narrates the story and also participates in the tale as a bodega owner who, in the movie's framing device, tells a group of youngsters how he wrestled with the idea of giving up his New York business and emigrating to the Dominican Republic to open a nightclub.

    Scenes in the bodega make good use of Gregory Diaz IV, who plays Sonny, Usnavi's teen assistant, a kid who wants to legalize his presence in the US, attend college, and make a life for himself.

    Chu introduces the movie in a way that makes it clear that he's telling the story of a neighborhood, showing us a block springing to life on a hot summer day. To underscore the challenges of big-city living, a crippling power outage looms.

    A large case keeps things lively, but a few of the performances must be highlighted.  Leslie Grace plays Nina, a young woman who has returned to the neighborhood after dropping out of Stanford, where she didn't feel accepted and where she felt she was betraying her roots. 

    Nina's father (Jimmy Smits) owns the cab company where Nina's boyfriend (Corey Hawkins) works as a dispatcher.

    Most of the movie's themes revolve around the issue of flight, how to balance aspiration with faithfulness to heritage.

    -- Smits's character is ready to sell his business to finance Nina's tuition.

    -- Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega) runs the local hair salon and is thinking about moving her business to the Grand Concourse, abandoning Manhattan for the Bronx.

    -- Melissa Barrera portrays Vanessa, a young woman who wants to abandon the Heights to establish herself in the downtown fashion world.  

     The beating heart of the neighborhood belongs to Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), a Cuban-American woman who has no children but who has become a grandmother figure for the entire neighborhood.   

     Merediz sings one of the movie’s key songs, Paciencia y Fe  (Hope and Patience), which Chu stages in a New York subway station.

    Chu adds some nice graphics and effects flourishes, one involving a spinning manhole cover, another enabling Grace and Hawkins to scale the side of an apartment building as they sing a love duet. 

     Other highlights include a number at the local pool, where the characters wondering what they'd do if they had a winning lottery ticket that would pay $96,000.

    Miranda appears in the role of Piraguero, the guy who sells flavored ice from a pushcart.

    When I lived in New York, Washington Heights was known as an Irish neighborhood, a fact to which the screenplay makes glancing reference. Smits’s character bought his business from an Irish-American who was moving elsewhere.

    The movie's themes aren't exactly groundbreaking, but new voices give the entire enterprise an invigorating feeling of freshness.

     Chu and Quiara Alegria Hudes, who wrote the movie's screenplay, might have done a bit more to condense a two-hour and 23-minute run time, but In the Heights stands as a rich and spirited entertainment that brims with love for a neighborhood and the people who populate it. 

    Oh, and did I mention that it’s also a lot of fun?

'Hamilton' for the multitudes. No waiting.

Reviewing Hamilton at this stage of the game  —  nearly five years after the show premiered on Broadway — is a bit like debating the virtues of the candidates in the presidential election of 1904. The verdict already has been reached. Theodore Roosevelt clobbered his Democratic opponent, Alton B. Parker. What you don't remember Alton B.?

Unlike poor Parker, Hamilton has not wanted for media attention. It has been reviewed with its original cast, with performers who have taken over for the originators and with companies that have staged touring productions. Now, Disney has made a filmed version of the original cast available for streaming. 

As I said, the verdict on the show already has been reached: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip hop approach to American history brims with the exuberant energy of a story recast in a "revolutionary" way. Hamilton's mostly black and brown actors capture the cockiness, impudence, and energy of men seized by an intoxicating blend of ambition and vision; i.e., our so-called "Founding Fathers." 

The version that’s being brought to the screen by Disney offers immediate advantages. You don't need to take out a bank loan to see it. You needn't get up at the crack of dawn to score a ticket or enter a lottery in hopes of being lucky enough to gain access to Hamilton-world.

You also get to savor the work of the original cast as it brings rap rhythms to dialogue that's delivered with snapping, rapid-fire elan. A key theme appears in a recurring line. "I'm not throwing away my shot,"  Hamilton repeatedly insists. The line underscores Hamilton's piercing ambition, echoing almost from the moment Hamilton arrives in New York City from the Caribbean until he falls in a duel to Aaron Burr. 

The cast is fine: Leslie Odom Jr.’s Burr tries to elevate fence-straddling into a virtue.    Christopher Jackson’s George Washington projects the requisite authority, and a deviously entertaining Daveed Diggs makes Thomas Jefferson into a bit of a fop — if it’s possible to be foppish while rapping. 

The women, too, are well represented. Phillipa Soo portrays Hamilton’s wife, Eliza; Renee Elise Goldsberry commands the screen as Eliza's sister,  Maria Schuyler; and 
Jasmine Cephas Jones brings seductive allure to Maria Reynolds,  a married woman with whom Hamilton had an adulterous affair.

Don’t forget Jonathan Groff who turns King George III into some of the best comic relief ever to grace a musical stage, sometimes in close-ups that show the spittle that accompanies speech loud enough to resonate in the back rows of a theater.

And, of course, there’s Miranda’s audacious, energetic, and ever-striving Hamilton, who -- oddly, I think -- isn't always the most compelling presence on stage.

Directed by Thomas Kail, who also directed the Broadway production, Hamilton rightly can be seen as a gift to all of us for whom the Hamilton experience has been confined to reading the endless quantities of ink that have been spilled on the show’s behalf.

Now, having said all that, I need to tell you that Hamilton neither should be seen as a static filmed record of a play or a completely cinematic experience.

The decision to film before a live audience presented Kail and cinematographer Declan Quinn with serious challenges. Many cameras were used but keeping camera operators off the stage meant that Kail wasn’t always able to use the stage’s space in the most dyadic ways. 

On the other hand,  the presence of an audience helps overcome any distance viewers may feel as Hamilton unfolds. From the show's opening moments, audience excitement spills off the screen. The movie is two hours and 41 minutes long with a brief intermission. It should be watched straight through.

More apparent in the movie’s opening act, the film's limitations tend to fade as the stage becomes less crowded in the play’s post-revolutionary second half. In one of the show's best bits, Kail captures the biting energy of a rap duel between political foes Jefferson, champion of agrarian virtue, and Hamilton, lover of cities with their rude, bumptious energies.

Miranda was inspired to write Hamilton after reading Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography, Alexander Hamilton.  In Miranda's hands,  Hamilton provides an occasion to reflect on the importance of who’s telling a historical story and how a bold new choice in that area can expand and enrich the conversation. Moreover, the play contains enough references to the racial injustices of slavery to bring it into alignment with the current moment.

Still, I'd like to offer a small addendum. I hope that a gifted director someday totally reimagines  Hamilton for the screen, keeping Miranda’s book and music intact, of course. It might not work, but then again it might just be a glorious thing to behold.

Mary Poppins makes a fine return

Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda lead the way in this very belated sequel.

The original Mary Poppins movie — the one starring Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews — is so old I hadn’t even graduated from college when it first reached the nation's screens. The year: 1964.

Look, I'd be lying if I told you that I have especially fond memories of the original, which many have come to regard as a classic of their childhoods. I remember taking my then young kids to see it during one of its revivals, considering it a task -- shall we say? -- of obligation and endurance.

Turns out the original had a tipsy spirit and some memorable musical moments. In short, a good time was had by all, even me. I never gave it a second thought nor did I inscribe Mary Poppins in my book of movie memories.

What I'm trying to say is that had no one thought to make a new Mary Poppins movie, you would not have found me rending any garments on gnashing any teeth. I say all this by way of an admission that I'm not an aficionado of all things Poppins.

With all that in mind, on to the new movie, Mary Poppins Returns, which stars Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda and has been directed Rob Marshall, still best known for the movie version of the musical, Chicago (2002), which won a best-picture Oscar.

I'd have to say that Return is fine for what it is; i.e., a family-oriented fantasy designed to make its audience feel good or at least better about whatever woes they brought to the theater.

Ben Whishaw plays the now-grown Michael, a widowed artist who's trying to take care of his three kids. He has help from his housekeeper (Julie Walters) and from his sister (Emily Mortimer), a woman with a social conscience. She protests on behalf of downtrodden workers, a category that I presume does not include film critics.

Movies such as Return thrive on melodrama and Mary Poppins Returns digs up one of the hoariest bits of melodrama available. The family is about to lose its believed home to a bank run by a smooth-talking official (Colin Firth) whose behavior ultimately proves (pardon the use of a mildly archaic word) "dastardly."

Meanwhile, the clock ticks. Poor Michael has five days to pay off a loan he's taken on his house. Devastation looms.

Devotees of the first movie will want to know that Van Dyke makes a brief appearance and that the new cast seems largely up to snuff.

Not everyone agrees that Emily Blunt makes a great Mary Poppins, but I found little reason to fault a performance that finds Mary, open umbrella in hand, descending from the sky to help solve the problems of a troubled English family.

In Blunt's hands, Mary dispenses magic with the unadorned simplicity of a cop directing traffic. She has no interest in having anyone question her abilities. She's a kind-hearted drill sergeant of enchantment.

And for my money, Blunt sells what might be the movie's most touching song, The Place Where Lost Things Go.

Miranda's performance as lamp-lighter hinges on his ingratiating and ever-present smile. Miranda, of Hamilton fame, begins the musical parade with a number called Underneath the Lovely London Sky, a sigh of a song and a tone-setter for what's to follow. He also performs one of the movie's more elaborate production numbers, Trip a Little Light Fantastic. It involves multiple bicycles.

Whishaw plays a father mired in undigested grief, the kids are appropriately cute and the musical numbers may make you smile even if they don't prove as memorable as the songs from the original; i.e., tunes such as Chim Chim Cher-ee or A Spoonful of Sugar. The songs for Return were written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray).

Marshall knows how to stage production numbers and also makes use of animation in a sequence in which kids take a bath and are transported to the ocean for another musical number. Marshall even includes a show-stopping moment from Meryl Streep, who plays Mary's cousin and who turns her musical number (Turning Turtle) into a memorable comic cameo.

Few of the youngsters who are taken to Returns aren't going to spend much time making comparisons to the original, but they should be able to get lost in the movie's carefully considered production design and an abundantly clear desire to entertain.