Jew Eat Yet?

Les Misérables

My daughter Leah completed a run in “Les Misérables” today. This was something like her 40th musical. I love watching her on stage—since Leah's very first play (“West Side Story” at the age of 6—she played Officer Krupke!), she has taken performing very seriously, giving 100% of herself to every role. 

I saw a touring production of “Les Misérables” in the late 1980s and I loved it but until I saw Leah’s show I forgot how great and epic a musical it is. I remember being in Paris when the original opened at the huge Palais des Sports in 1980. The English-language version premiered in London in 1985. Kendall and her family saw it there with Patti LuPone as Fantine and Colm Wilkinson as Jean Valjean. Though it’s transferred theatres twice, the show is still playing in that city 26 years later which is pretty incredible. It’s a real masterpiece that has been seen in 40 countries and translated into 21 languages. It played over 7,000 performances on Broadway. The musical is finally being made into a film this year with Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean.

 

Of course the show is based on Victor Hugo’s book, set in 19^th-century France. It follows the story of Jean Valjean, a good man who is sent to jail for 19 years because he stole a loaf of bread.We see many other characters struggling through miserable living conditions and achieving various levels of redemption amidst the backdrop of a political revolution. In Leah’s production, she played Enjoiras, the leader of a band of student revolutionaries and a close friend of Marius, who is in love with Cosette, the daughter of the late Fantine, who was forced to become a prostitute to send money to the abusive couple that was raising the daughter she had to give up. Oh yeah, there are some pretty intense themes in this musical, and I was surprised at how well this high school-aged troupe dealt with them all.

I loved seeing Leah as such an lefty activist. She also played smaller parts in other scenes. The story of “Les Misérables” couldn’t be more appropriate for our times with its harsh examination of poverty, greed, and corruption. It seems very meaningful that we were watching the final performance of this show just as Congress and President Obama were in final negotiations on the debt ceiling crisis, with many of the programs that could have aided the characters in this story put on the chopping block.

The show was almost three hours long (oy, those poor kids!) but I’ve made a five-minute version if you want to take a look at Leah’s ability to mobilize the masses:

 

There's a reason I could never be an actor, besides a total lack of talent. I would find it very difficult to bond so intensely with a group of people in a show only to be thrown to the winds after the last performance. On the other hand, Leah has been part of this acting company for nearly a decade and has several very close friends in the cast.

The music in this show is really beautiful. Charlie already knows most of Leah’s big number, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” I wonder if disappointed Democrats are singing it tonight in Washington:

Do you hear the people sing? 
Singing a song of angry men? 
It is the music of a people 
Who will not be slaves again! 
When the beating of your heart 
Echoes the beating of the drums 
There is a life about to start 
When tomorrow comes!

The Hitlist Movies Blog

Are you tired of reading about the debt ceiling crisis? Will one more story about John Boehner or Michelle Bachmann make you ingest cyanide at your next tea party? Then check out The Hitlist, the new blog for MSN Movies that I started writing for a few weeks ago. I’m writing 12-15 posts a week for the blog—very different from the stuff I write about on here but I still manage to get in some of my favorite topics (for example, see yesterday’s post about the new Kristin Scott Thomas film that focuses on the 1942 mass arrests of Jews in Paris by French—NOT German—police).

I’ll be writing for the Hitlist four days a week—on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. You can find all my posts to date here. But be sure to check the main site and read the interesting articles by the four other contributors. They’re an incredibly talented bunch: William Goss, who also writes for Film.com; Kate Erbland, who is a writer and managing editor at Gordon and the Whale; Corwin Neuse, who, in addition to writing about movies has a blog about hiking the Appalachian Trail; and James Rocchi, film critic for MSN Movies and a variety of publications.

It’s fun writing about different aspects of the movies, from the women of Harry Potter to the curse of the Bond Girls to an upcoming sequel to “The Wizard of Oz.” Feel free to comment if you like. The most comments I’ve received so far was for a tongue-in-cheek “liveblog” I did of opening day at “Captain America.” I liked the film okay but shared some critical comments. For that I had my IQ questioned and got called a racist and a douchebag! (I admit that I take a perverse pleasure in such comments. My favorite to date was when someone referenced my blog on a Wilco message board and someone else wrote, “Oh God, not the Danny Miller blog again!”)

To quell the panicking in the streets, I will stress that I’ll still be writing here as regularly as I can. And thus ends another bout of shameless self-promotion. Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Charlie Sings Woody Guthrie

I get yelled at on Facebook whenever I apologize for posting a new video of my two-year-old son, Charlie. On the one hand, I still marvel at the ease with which the Digital Age allows us to instantly share images of our loved ones for all to see—it’s such a great way to connect with family and friends who are interested and, in Charlie’s case, with the supportive folks, some of them total strangers, who’ve been following his story ever since he was born at 24 weeks weighing only 1 lb. 4 oz. He truly is a miracle baby and his progress is seen by many as a tremendously hopeful sign for their own children who may be dealing with similarly grave heath issues.

On the other hand, whenever I write Charlie-centered posts, part of me still can’t shake the notion that they are akin to the endless slide shows we were all forced to watch of our relatives’ Bermuda vacations back in the Dark Ages before computers changed our lives and the world became a much smaller place. I know it’s a silly comparison, especially since unlike those forced viewings in darkened living rooms, no one has to click on these videos or look at these photos if they don’t want to see them. So I hereby vow that I will no longer apologize for sharing these items. And I can’t deny that, because of Charlie’s precarious early months, there are people who are very interested in following his developmental progress.

The past month has been full of changes. Charlie still works with physical therapists three times a week and despite the delays caused by his Grade III and IV brain bleeds (intraventricular hemorrhages), his walking has finally taken off. Verbally, he is just exploding, repeating every word he hears (oy, we really have to watch our mouths now!) and seemingly memorizing every book in his collection. I only wish I had half the memory that Charlie has. I’ve been singing to Charlie ever since he was born, often without even thinking about it just when we’re walking around. It’s only lately that I’ve realized that he knows the words to almost all of the songs in my eclectic repertoire. Sometimes he seems to commit them to memory after hearing them only one or two times.

One song that I sing a lot as we’re bopping around town is Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” The American folksinger’s 99th birthday would have been last week and it happened to be on that day that Charlie started singing along with the iconic lyrics. He’s heard a lot of Woody Guthrie in his lifetime. I often sang Guthrie tunes in the NICU and Charlie’s Uncle Jeff wrote the music for and recorded (with Billy Bragg) two albums of previously unheard lyrics by Woody Guthrie in collaboration with his daughter Nora. If someone commanded me to choose only one musical artist in history to represent the American zeitgeist, it would have to be Guthrie, wouldn't it? I’m glad Charlie is already a big fan.

Later on Guthrie’s birthday, I grabbed my camera and recorded Charlie singing his song while taking a bath:

 

The following two videos were already posted on Facebook but my non-social-networked relatives begged me to repost them. Here’s Charlie and my daughter Leah reading one of Charlie’s favorite books, “B Is For Bulldozer” by June Sobel. I have to say Charlie’s obsession with trucks and construction has helped me learn a bunch of new vocabulary words, I can now identify almost every kind of truck that I see in the streets! I was delighted to get a comment on YouTube from the book’s author and happy that a bunch of people reposted the video on their own sites, including progressive education activist and expert Susan Ohanian who included it on her “Good News” page extolling the importance of surrounding children with reading opportunities.

 

Charlie is also a big fan of Simon & Garfunkel. He does a killer “Scarborough Fair” that I haven’t recorded but here he is singing, for the first time, “Mrs. Robinson.” He knows it much better now—I no longer have to add the “-son” to “Robinson” and he sings a lot more of the lyrics. Koo-koo-ka-choo:

  

Do we have another future recording artist in the family? Oh, and seeing these three videos on one page, I just want to note that Charlie does wear clothes most of the time, it’s funny that these videos were all recorded shirtless! Oh well, maybe that will be his thing? The Naked Toddler Folksinger? 

Betty Ford

Just before the last presidential election, I decided to rate the ten First Ladies of my lifetime from “best” to “worst,” from Mamie Eisenhower, who occupied the White House until I was 16 months old, up to Laura Bush. It was sort of an obnoxious post, and I’m not sure I’d stand by all of my ratings now, but my feelings about one of the First Ladies have not changed a bit. The top Republican woman on my list was Betty Ford, who died yesterday at the age of 93. She and her husband, Gerald Ford, who died in 2006, were the first occupants of the White House who both lived into their nineties.

I had great respect for Betty Ford during her few years in the White House. I was in high school during her reign and remember closely following her gutsy and often controversial moves. I’m sure President Ford’s “handlers” were wringing their hands every time Betty opened her mouth and I’m sure they were incapable of shutting her up. She was the first president’s wife in my memory who had been divorced. What she did to bring awareness to alcohol and drug addiction had an enormous impact on so many people in this country, as did her open discussion of her own breast cancer. Though a lifelong Republican, she was a stronger advocate for women’s rights than many Democratic figures, then or now. She supported the Equal Rights Amendment, was strongly pro-choice, and even spoke candidly about marijuana and pre-marital sex. In today’s climate, such a Republican wife would be ostracized and shunned.

Many presidential scholars have noted that Betty Ford's impact on American culture would be far wider and would last much longer than that of her husband, who served a mere 896 days. And she never stopped speaking her truth. In one interview in 1975, Ford said she was asked just about everything, except for how often she and the president had sex. “And if they’d asked me that I would have told them,” she said, adding that her response would be, “As often as possible!”

Do you remember Betty Ford’s good-natured appearance as herself on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show?” She was clearly way more popular than her unelected husband. Following Ford’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign, Betty said, “I would give my life to have Jerry have my poll numbers.”

 

Hanging Out with George Cukor

I love it when my dreams cooperate with my fantasy life. I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was attending a glamorous 1930s movie premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Please? I remember talking with a very young and beautiful Katharine Hepburn and film director George Cukor.

I read yesterday that it was George Cukor’s birthday so I’m sure that info was dialed in to my subconscious. Many of Cukor’s films had gala premieres at Grauman’s. One that I read about happened on August 30, 1933, nearly 80 years ago! It was for his first all-star hit, “Dinner at Eight.” I don’t think this delicious film gets the acclaim that it deserves. Reading about the gala premiere makes me wish I could jettison back in time. Actor Walter Huston (father of John, grandfather of Anjelica) acted as the M.C. at the Chinese Theatre for some reason and he brought onto the stage some of the brightest stars of the day: Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, John and Lionel Barrymore, and Billie Burke, as well as MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer and his son-in-law, David O. Selznick, the producer of the film. If you look at photos of George Cukor at the time, he bore an odd resemblance to Selznick, his partner for many incredible films. Later, in the 1940s, Cukor lost a lot of weight and his hair turned gray and he looked completely different.

Although she is renowned as the original Blonde Bombshell, does Jean Harlow get the credit she deserves today for being such a brilliant actress? She comes close to stealing the picture, not an easy feat with that cast. Here’s a quick look at what the folks at Grauman’s were treated to so many years ago:

Cukor would have turned 112 yesterday. Good God, I remember him well from my childhood, he was directing films well into his 80s. Were he still alive, he probably would have thrown one of the lavish parties he was so famous for. His homosexuality was a very open secret in Hollywood at the time. While not officially “out,” he never played the game that his gay actor friends had to suffer through in pretending he was straight. There were a handful of scandals about his sexuality over the years, even an arrest for "vice" that was promptly squashed by the powerful studio PR folks. 

I doubt there’s a director who is responsible for more Oscar nominations (21). His roster of stars included close friend Katharine Hepburn (they made 10 films together) along with Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Norma Shearer, Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert, Deborah Kerr, Jimmy Stewart, Judy Holliday, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and so many others.

Cukor hated his label as a “woman’s director” and despite being saddled with this reputation, he managed to coax some of the best performances out of many of Hollywood’s biggest male stars. David O. Selznick hired him to direct “Gone With the Wind” before the book was even published and he worked tirelessly on the project for several years before being famously fired shortly after filming began. Rumors circulated that Clark Gable was responsible for the firing, with the idea that he couldn't relate to Cukor’s “gay sensibility,” but more recent research reveals that it was mostly due to clashes between Cukor and Selznick regarding the script and direction of the film. Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland were apparently so devastated by the loss of Cukor on the difficult film that both continued to meet with him secretly for one-on-one coaching.

It was great luck for movie history that Cukor was fired from “Gone With the Wind” because a week after he left that film he was hired to direct one of his greatest masterpieces, MGM’s “The Women,” one of the best films ever to come out of that studio.

As was Cukor's “The Philadelphia Story” the following year. I could write a whole post about each of George Cukor’s 65 films—and I probably will some day. Other personal favorites of his include “David Copperfield,” “Gaslight,” "Adam's Rib," “Born Yesterday,” “It Should Happen to You,” and “My Fair Lady.” Sigh. Where are the movies like that today?

My mother- and father-in-law (who shared Cukor's birthday) had the honor of being in Cukor’s very last film, 1981’s “Rich and Famous” starring Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bissett. There was a party scene in that film that took place at the Algonquin Hotel in New York (courtesy of an exact replica built on the MGM lot) and Cukor thought it would be fun to populate the party with real writers. At one point in this scene you can see Bergen exclaiming, “Betsy! Oliver! So good to see you again!”

George Cukor directed Judy Garland in her "comeback" film, "A Star Is Born." Here's what he said about filming the amazing "The Man That Got Away" number: "When you look at something, you're used to seeing the whole of a thing—then suddenly you see a section, arbitrarily, not composed. Just a section of something cut off. In the David painting 'Sacre de Napoleon,' when the detail is reproduced in an art book, you see a head to one side, bits of other heads cut off here and there. And I thought, 'Why not do that in a movie?' So I decided we could do that when Judy sang 'The Man That Got Away'. I wanted the camera to follow her, always in front—sometimes she would go to the side and almost disappear out of the frame—all in one long take, for the whole musical number."