Bryan Cranston in "All The Way" on Broadway

Melanie and I saw the last preview of the Broadway play “All The Way” last night (it formally opens tonight) based on the early months of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. The play stars Heisenberg as LBJ. I mean Cranston, it stars Bryan Cranston.

Cranston is the reason to see this, what a great performance. I was surprised to discover afterwards this is his Broadway debut because there was nothing tentative or uncertain about his acting. Though I’d never think of him as an obvious actor to portray LBJ (the title “All The Way” comes from the campaign slogan “All The Way with LBJ”), Cranston captures LBJ’s physicality and presence perfectly, with a larger-than-life energy which not only seems fitting, it raises the energy in a show which might otherwise be boring.

This is a good show, but not a perfect show. It’s three hours long including intermission and when Cranston isn’t on stage it lags; the play could use some trimming.

The other major figure is Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. played by Brandon J. Dirden. Though he nails King’s voice and cadence, Dirden’s performance compared to Cranston’s is a little flat and dull. It’s not that he’s bad, he just doesn’t bring anything memorable. He’s fine, he’s serviceable, but he’s not very exciting, and when you consider King was a dynamic preacher and speaker, it’s a disappointment. Put him next to Cranston’s (very effective) scenery-chewing, and he pales in comparison.

The play focuses on LBJ’s efforts to get his civil rights bills passed and you see a lot of the backstage political maneuverings involved. That’s always interesting stuff and the show handles that well. But when the play shifts focus to King’s efforts, it’s an abrupt shift. King’s story is a dramatic one and should be equally as riveting as LBJ’s, but the play doesn’t handle those scenes as well.

On the other hand, you come away with a deeper appreciation for what all sides had to go through to get these bills passed, and the narrow margins by which they succeeded.

The play too often reads a bit like a history lesson and bogs down sometimes under political minutiae. Many references are made to the MFDP and if it was ever defined in the show, I missed it. (I looked it up later, it stands for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.) As Melanie pointed out, the show is a bit lacking in relationship and character development. Though Cranston’s LBJ is a fascinating, dynamic figure, I would have liked understanding his motivations and internal drives better, and would have liked having more insights into all the character’s relationships with each other. In other words, a bit more personal drama in addition to the professional turmoil (we get a good amount of LBJ’s agonized soul-searching as he tries to pass his civil rights bills) would have helped. At one point LBJ tells a story about being a young man and being struck by the inherent unfairness of the racism he sees, but the moment is a little light and unconvincing, sounding more like a politician politicking than a man baring his soul.

Cranston makes the production much better than it might otherwise be. His LBJ is a riveting, profane, salty Texan using language we might not expect from a president, including a fair amount of political incorrectness. Lenny Bruce used to do a bit about how LBJ couldn’t pronounce the word “negro” properly, his Texan’s mouth was incapable of forming the word. “Nigra, nigra-oh, nigger-oh, nagraoh; shit, I just cain’t say it!” Cranston’s LBJ uses “nigra” throughout and occasionally more derogatory terminology, but you never suspect him of being racist no matter how coarse he gets. You witness how shockingly insensitive and vulgar other people’s racial attitudes were at the time – especially shocking because they’re so nonchalantly and openly espoused - and if LBJ is less politically correct than you’d expect today, you admire him all the more for rising above the beliefs of many of his peers, especially his peers in the 1960’s south.

There’s only one set, which is made to look different from scene to scene by the projection along its upstage wall. Sometimes it’s a photo of the wall behind the desk in the Oval Office, sometimes a wall in the Senate, sometimes a restaurant, sometimes it’s an exterior of the White House as seen from a podium on the grass, sometimes a hotel room, etc. The stage itself has a semi-circular arrangement of tiered jury box-like seats. There’s a desk that sometimes rises up from center stage, sometimes is lowered making the stage a flat surface, and in one scene is lowered even more to form a grave. This is a play with a limited run and probably not much chance of making a huge profit, so the sparse trappings are probably one way of keeping expenses down while still making things interesting. It’s effective but does look a little cheap. The set is serviceable and doesn’t detract from the action, but it doesn’t enhance it much either.

I noticed a bit of sloppy tech work. The actors didn't appear to be wearing body mics and depending on where they stood, their voices changed noticeably in amplification and tone. I imagine there were overhead mics being used, and if so, they were far overhead indeed. I was able to hear the dialog fairly well (after the first few minutes), but the audio was uneven depending on where the actors stood. I noticed this especially when someone was delivering a monologue as they walked about the stage. There were some background lights that flickered a bit, and throughout the show occasional pieces of (what turned out to be) confetti drifted down to the stage floor. This is a preview performance, true, but for a Broadway show opening the following evening, I was surprised to see any sloppiness at all.

If these sound like serious complaints, they aren't. This is a show worth seeing. Cranston gives a tour de force performance which I’ll remember for a long time. Melanie said she read this is a labor of love for him. Apparently he said he made so much money from “Breaking Bad,” he doesn't need to obsess over a project’s paycheck, and took this job because he believed in it. The show is a “strictly limited engagement” and I’m not sure when it closes – at the moment tickets are available through June – but if you can, check it out. It’s a bit long, but Cranston makes it well worth seeing, even if he never once says, “Say my name.”

http://allthewaybroadway.com/

"Frozen" and "The Wind Rises"

In our ramp-up to the Oscars, Melanie and I ended up seeing some of the films in our least-favorite category, Animated Movies. Why least favorite? Because WE’RE NOT 12! Very few animated movies are made for adults, and because we don’t have six-year-olds, no one drags us in to see this dreck. Still, this week we saw two, “Frozen” and, last night, “The Wind Rises.”

I’m absolutely positively NOT the audience for animated movies. I loved cartoons as a kid (I remember asking a teacher why it was so much easier to wake up on Saturday mornings when cartoons are on than it is to wake up for school), but that love faded with puberty and the discovery of real live girls with real live girl parts. Not to disparage an art form, but to me animated movies are just cartoons and they’re still made for kids with far too few exceptions. On the other hand, I love “Finding Nemo,” so sometimes they do work for me.

“Frozen” is pretty much a steaming pile of cow patty. Like women I’ve dated, It’s pretty with no substance. It’s totally Disney, so Disney it made me want to vomit. All the classic Disney story ingredients are here: princes and princesses and queens and handsome lads on horses, and of course a goofy character for comic relief, in this case a talking snowman (who is, admittedly, pretty funny). I give the movie a 1.5 out of four.

NOT that it has no value. It is, I can see, an amazing production. Start with the music. Broadway songwriters are now whores to Disney; the music in this film, though saccharine, is clearly first rate (and apparently catchy, because there are “Frozen” Sing-Along screenings. Man, if they’d handed me a lyric sheet when I’d walked into this thing, I’d have walked right out again.) I did like some of the CGI effects. I mean animated visuals. I mean CGI effects. I mean animated visuals. I mean… It’s getting hard to tell the live action movies from the cartoons anymore, but that’s a topic for another blog. “Frozen” is very good at accomplishing what it sets out to be. It shows you all the things you expect from a classic sweeping Disney animated feature. It’s all cute and gooey.

But it’s hard to know who the movie is supposed to be for. It’s too trite for adults, and not modern or exciting enough for kids. Who’s the audience for this thing? Ah, that’s right; parents who want their kids to love it. ApPARENTly there are a lot of them, this thing has made close to four hundred million dollars and is still going strong. Still, it has an uneven mix of qualities; the story is unfocused, the look amazing, the elements trite and uninspired, the singers and songs top-notch, the elements unoriginal, the story largely predictable, and the humor dropped in like a necessary ingredient in the Disney mold. Sadly, it will probably win the Oscar for Best Animated Movie on Sunday.

Cut to: “The Wind Rises.” This one’s from Japan and has English overdubs. I expected there’d be English subtitles, but then I realized, why NOT overdubs? It’s a cartoon, ANY language will match the lip movements.

This is more like it. I don’t know much about the history this movie covers - the hero is a Japanese airplane designer and engineer and shows us his life before and during WWII - but it was nice to see an animated movie with a base in real life and recent history. It’s definitely made for an older sensibility and I like seeing animation used in a more mature way. I’s very poetic, a little slow moving, but if you settle into it you’ll enjoy its grace. Here’s a bit about the director and animator Hayao Miyazaki from Wikipedia: “Miyazaki's films often contain recurrent themes, like humanity's relationship with nature and technology, pro-feminism, and the difficulty of maintaining a pacifist ethic. The protagonists of his films are often strong, independent girls or young women. While two of his films, The Castle of Cagliostro and Castle in the Sky, involve traditional villains, his other films like Nausicaä and Princess Mononoke present morally ambiguous antagonists with redeeming qualities. He co-wrote films The Secret World of Arrietty, released in July 2010 in Japan and February 2012 in the United States; and From Up on Poppy Hill release in July 2011 in Japan and March 2013 in the United States. Miyazaki's newest film The Wind Rises was released on July 20, 2013 and is planned for an international release. Miyazaki announced on September 1, 2013 that this will be his final feature-length film.”

Not being a big fan of animation I’d never heard of Miyazaki, but my friend Erik had and he joined us for this one. We all liked it. I also like aviation, especially the planes of the pre-jet era, so it was nice to see a film about someone who was passionate about planes. It makes sense that this is an animated movie, it’d be a very expensive live action film, maybe prohibitively so. The film handles Japan during WWII in an interesting way. You hear the engineer characters say several times how disappointing it is their beautiful creations will be used in war, and you see the main character lament at the end how none of his most accomplished planes ever made it back from a mission. You do see brief scenes of fighting and a field of wrecked Japanese planes, but the war isn’t what this movie is about and not much attention is paid to it. It’s really a film that celebrates the artistry of engineers and their creativity. You’ll recognize the planes Jiro Horikoshi designs, iconic Japanese fighters of WWII, and will develop a deeper appreciation for their graceful aesthetic. I like how the film shows you how even an “enemy” nation has good, creative and accomplished people.

The movie has several recognizable voices for the English version including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the lead character Jiro Horikoshi, John Krasinski, Martin Short, Werner Herzog, William H. Macy, Mandy Patinkin, Stanley Tucci and Elijah Wood among others. The original voices were Japanese actors and I’m not sure how they got so many heavyweights for the English release.

The movie is poetic and graceful and if a little slow, it’s refreshing to see a mature approach taken with an animated movie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_(2013_film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises