Fans of “the Bard” are used to enjoying Shakespeare productions at the Old Globe in the Lowell Davies Outdoor Theatre during the summer months; not in the dead of winter.  Be that as it may, The Globe’s new Artistic Director Barry Edelstein, wanted his favorite Shakespeare play, “The Winter’s Tale” to be his first directorial production – and he wanted to present it inside, in the Globe’s venerable and famous 75 year-old theatre.
I’m so glad he got his way.

The Globe has been fortunate over the last decade to have Shakespearean scholars or experts in the role of Artistic Director selecting and overseeing the Bard’s many plays.  Most recent AD’s answer to the names: Darko Tresnyak, Adrian Noble, and now with the 2014 season underway, current A.D. Barry Edelstein.  Each brought talent, intelligence, experience, and passion to the job.

With “The Winter’s Tale”, Edelstein’s personal vision and theatrical fingerprints are all over this production of loss and redemption.  Although labeled as a comedy, the story is one of complexity, and by today’s linear standards might be considered as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” (at least, in it’s construction).  In Shakespeare’s day the plot and construction wasn’t an issue.

The story in short (if there is ever a short version of anything in Shakespeare’s plays), breaks down like this: Once upon a time there were two Kings.  Leontes, the King of Sicila (Billy Campbell), and Polixenes (Paul Michael Valley), the King of Bohemia, who were boyhood friends.  Polixenes decides to visit his old friend Leontes and ends up staying for about nine months.  Prolonged visits among royalty and friends, was quite common in those days, distance being what it was.

In Act One, Leontes’ beautiful wife Hermione (Natacha Roi) is nine months pregnant, but still manages to be an attentive hostess who is charming her husband’s friend, perhaps, a little too much, in the eyes of Leontes.  The tone of the play changes darkly and dramatically when suddenly, Leontes fills a farewell party for Polixenes with accusations of infidelity, disbelief and denials.  Paranoia and jealousy change the lives of Leontes, Polixenes, and Hermione; affecting both royal families.
What begins as a visit of two best friends ends on a rage-filled note by Leontes, who banishes his guiltless and innocent wife, disowns and abandons his-new born daughter Perdita, to a death at the hands of a trusted courtier (who fails to do the deed), and Leontes then retreats into a life of introspection and depression.  The “loss leitmotif” has thus been fulfilled.

In Act Two, the tone of the play changes again. This time 180 degrees.  It’s sixteen years later.  Polixenes is safely back in Bohemia and far from the troubling issues back in Sicilia.  His son Florizel (A.Z. Kelsey), meets and falls in love with a shepherd’s daughter (actually it is Perdita, who is unaware of her royal lineage) and the two young lovers plan the marriage they both know Polixenes will not approve.   Bohemia is a land where people laugh and seem to enjoy life.  It’s full of energy and is sometimes a little silly with the situations and the costumes the characters find themselves in.

The “redemption leitmotif”, however, takes place over the passage of time; combined with a “peace treaty” brokered by the friends of both Kings: Paulina (Angel Desai) in Scilia, and Camillo (Cornell Womack) in Bohemia, in the hope that the two houses, in the end, will be reunited.  In the meantime there is heck of a lot of talking going on, and many plot-point dots will be connected.  Remember, I said very little is short or brief in Shakespeare’s plays. But the wait is always worth it.

In the last scenes of this tragi-comedy, the “miracle” moment (the English version of the Greek’s  deus ex machina) is a mesmerizing, spell-binding, piece of theatricality that needs to be seen and experienced with an audience.  For over one minute, one could hear a pin drop on opening night when director Edelstein revealed his piece de resistance moment.  It was absolutely sublime.

The large and energetic cast is solid in their performances, but there are always standout performances and they come from: Billy Campbell as the tortured Leontes; Paul Michael Valley as Polixenes; Cornell Womack as Camillo; Maya Kazan as Perdita; Angel Desaik as Paulina; Mark Nelson as Antigonus; Brendan Spieth as the Clown; Paul Kandel as Autolycus and as Archidamus; and Natacha  Roi who is oh so warm as Hermione.

The technical department at The Old Globe has few equals when it comes to creating magic from backstage.  The creative team led by Edelstein includes:  Scenic Designer Winston Chin, who provided a visually stunning, yet sleek and expansive playing area for the actors to perform their magic. Lighting Designer Russell H. Champa painted the stage with just the right amount light not only to heighten and enhance moods, but also to allow the costumes of Judith Dolan to be seen and fully appreciated.  The sound design by Fitz Patton complements the original music of Michael Torke, and Musical Director Taylor Peckham.

Barry Edelstein’s masterful directorial debut at the Old Globe was everything one was hoping it would be.  The Globe begins a new era under the intelligent, knowledgeable, and the highly articulate leadership of its new Artistic Director.  Long live the King!

There is absolutely no doubt that Neil Diamond is an iconic singer/songwriter/performer and a genuine Superstar.  But it wasn’t always so.  The documentary film “Neil Diamond: Solitary Man” by a BBC-TV production team directed by Samantha Peters is a very honest and unvarnished exploration of how this somewhat shy and talented young man from Brooklyn, USA, rose from humble beginnings, to the pinnacle of music industry success, ultimately becoming its King in the process.

The source material and the on-camera personality in the documentary film is the man himself.  Diamond has always been a private and a self-effacing person, who likes to be considered as just one of the guys.  But, according to Russ Regan a legendary, former music industry executive, when Diamond performs he never holds back and Regan ought to know.  He was responsible for Diamond’s early song writing and performing successes. Whether his audience is 100 or 100,000 (as was the case in his Australian concert “Hot August Night”) he lives to perform and his glitzy powerhouse shows reflect that performing philosophy.

“Neil Diamond: Solitary Man” chronicles Diamond’s early years growing up in Brooklyn and his initiation into the world of songwriters working in the famous Brill Building, in New York City in the fifties.  He wrote songs for others, but always harbored a desire to become a performer of his own songs.  It’s the same route later traveled by Barry Manilow, who also wrote songs for others first before going solo with his concerts.

Diamond, in this documentary, is refreshingly candid about his career, with a tiny peek into his personal life. But it’s his business life with its up and downs, its disappointments, and perhaps, the questionable choices made in his spectacular career, that everyone wants to know. Ah, the price of stardom and celebrity.   But it’s hard to argue about his choices that have produced over 125 million records worldwide in a career that spans more than five decades.  His music genres cover the spectrum of the American music scene: Pop, rock, folk, country, and soft rock.  Neil Diamond is one of America’s true poetic singer/troubadours, like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seegar (his role model), Bob Dillion, Carole King, James Taylor, Helen Reddy, and John Denver, among others.

Lee Holdridge, the famous American music composer, arranger and conductor has worked with Diamond and Denver, and most music stars over the last two decades.

He shared some of his “Neil experiences” at a special screening in La Jolla, CA during the San Diego Jewish Film Festival.  Holdridge, who appears in the film, said, at the Q & A session following the screening, that when Diamond is preparing an appearance, there is no detail that escapes his directorial eye or his showman’s intuition.  He knows what he wants the audience to see and to hear.  True Superstars have this need to be in charge of their own performances.  Sometimes a vision of a show may fall short of what was expected.  But that doesn’t happen very often.

Now 73 but looking 53, Diamond still performs.  He has said that LA’s Greek Theatre is one of his favorite venues, and holds a special place in his heart.  It’s not surprising.  The Greek Theatre regularly sold out all of Diamond’s performances.  There are a lot of former New Yorkers living in Los Angeles that remember the Brooklyn boy who grew up to become the Jewish Elvis.

This 59 minute film documentary is informative and highly entertaining, with plenty of music, anecdotes by Diamond, as well as other music industry icons, and is chock full of archival performances.  It’s a fitting tribute to one of America’s performing giants.  If you see it being advertised anywhere, make sure you catch it.  You won’t be disappointed.

“It Happened in Saint-Tropez” is a saucy, delightfully entertaining, zany, Rom/Com of a movie with touches of farce, that launched the ten-day San Diego Jewish Film Festival on February 6th.  Hey, we’re not discovering Radium with “Madame Curie” or the antics of the Marx Brothers in “A Night at the Opera” here.  It’s somewhere in between which leaves a lot of room for margin of error and the silliness of the characters and the situations they get themselves into.

The French seem to have a stranglehold on comedy movies made for more sophisticated adult audiences, which appears to be the case here.  The story directed by Daniele Thompson and written with her son Christopher, revolves around the family Melkowich, led by over-sexed patriarch and aging roué, Aron (Ivry Gitlis) who is in the middle stages of dementia.  His two sons Zef (Eric Elmosnino) and Roni (Kad Merad a Herb Edelman look alike) are polar opposites when it comes to religion, life style, observing, and raising their families, to say nothing of a long time sibling rivalry.  Zef keeps kosher, Roni, a diamond merchant, keeps the high party life on-going.

The film opens with a wedding and a funeral.  Roni and his Italian trophy wife Giovanna (Monica Bellucci) are marrying off their daughter Melita (a gorgeous Clara Ponsot) to fiancé Sam (Max Boubil) at ceremonies taking place in Paris. Meanwhile Zef’s wife Irene (Valerie Bonneton) is killed in an auto accident in New York while crossing the street to buy Zef a pastrami sandwich (I’m not kidding). These two simultaneous events then set the tone for all of the zany hilarity that follows, no matter how improbable or far-fetched it may seem.

The surreal funeral scene takes place in non-secular New York City where Roni joins Zef, a very orthodox, Jewish concert-touring violinist and his beautiful cello-playing daughter Noga (Lou de Laage), who have just concluded a concert at Carnegie Hall.  One simply has to have sense of humor to appreciate these scenes.

Noga’s travel plans are such that she is traveling alone back to France for her cousin’s wedding. Still mourning the loss of her mother, she meets a young man on the AeroStar train (the one that goes from London to Paris under the English channel) on her way to join the family.  Once Noga and Sam’s eyes lock, it’s a case of love at first sight, and Noga seals the event with a passionate kiss, not realizing she has just fallen for Sam, her cousin Melita’s intended.  I always say that if one buys the premise, then one can buy the bits that follow.  Remember, it’s an adult romantic comedy where raging hormones simmer just beneath the skin.  Suffice it to say that anything and everything is possible when romance is in the air.

Far be it for me to spoil some of the comic bits and hilarious situations that follow by saying anything more.  That having been said, one should be prepared for a roller coaster ride of comedy and poignancy, with twists and turns along the way.  But, I will say in the words of the Bard of Avon … “All’s Well, That Ends Well”

“It Happened in Saint-Tropez” is gorgeously photographed by Jean-Marc Fabre along with a stunning production design by Michele Abbe-Vannier.  The film is easy on the eyes, and is well acted.  It’s a light, frothy, tasty French pastry of a movie that produces chuckles and laughs all the while being entertaining in the process.  And there isn’t a calorie in sight.  Enjoy!

Researchers have unveiled new evidence which they say proves water could be flowing on Mars right now – a claim that could debunk the long-held belief that the Red Planet has been completely dry for billions of years.

Lujendra Ojha and a number of his fellow academics at the Georgia Institute of Technology have proposed that the dark, finger-shaped features on Martian slopes which disappear and reappear as seasons change are in fact flows of saltwater. The dark lines are officially known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), and NASA has previously confirmed that the markings are most visible when temperatures rise.

Ojha, a graduate student, published the details on 13 RSL sites in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The images he examined were captured by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

“We still don’t have a smoking gun for existence of water in RSL, although we’re not sure how this process would take place without water,” Ojha said in a statement issued by NASA. “In HiRISE images, we see them forming, elongating and then fading over time. That’s why they’re called seasonal – they form and flow when the temperature is right.”

What the images do confirm is that iron-containing minerals were found on the slopes where water is suspected. Other slopes, where the dark finger-shapes were not found, do not contain iron minerals.

“Just like the RSL themselves, the strength of the spectral signatures varies according to the seasons,” Ojha explained. “They’re stronger when it’s warmer and less significant when it’s colder.”

Ojha first spotted the strange images in 2011, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona Tucson. At the time, he described the potential discovery as a mere stroke of good fortune, although he could not have predicted that the seemingly minor discovery would send scientists across the country on a hunt to prove something more.

“When I first saw them, I had no idea what it was. I just thought it was a streak made by dust or something similar,” Ojha told CNN in 2011. “It was a lucky accident.”

Alfred McEwen, one of the researchers who examined the evidence last year, said the results have been surprising.

“Water should be rapidly evaporating, so it’s difficult to explain long flows unless it’s sufficiently salty water,” he said. “So far, there aren’t any good dry hypotheses. There are some possibilities, and we keep them open as working hypotheses, but no one has been able to come up with a detailed model that makes sense.”

The scientists admitted that more work needs to be done, in part because roving dust swarms on Mars could taint the quality of the images being studied. Yet they also said if there is water on the Red Planet, it would be salty and close to the surface. Still, the confirmed existence of water would greatly increase NASA’s knowledge of Mars’ climate and make it more likely that life, however insignificant, could exist there.

“The flow of water, even briny water, anywhere on Mars today would be a major discovery, impacting our understanding of present climate change on Mars and possibly indicating potential habitats for life near the surface on modern Mars,” Richard Zurek, a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project scientist, said in the NASA press release.

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“Bethany”, written by playwright Laura Marks and directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, is a dark, tragic-comedy that chronicles the efforts of a young single mother who has been caught up in the economic roller coaster of the housing and financial market bubbles of 2009.  To figure out a way to survive, Marks’ heroine has to make some dangerous decisions.  The way the play is crafted, it’s more a case of style over substance and it’s sprinkled with more than few clichés about how to handle tough times in America.

New car salesperson Crystal (Jennifer Ferrin, in a strong performance) is on the brink of losing her job at a local Saturn agency.  Her pragmatic thinking supervisor Shannon (DeAnna Driscoll), drop hints about the agency going out of business.  Now her only goal is to begin an urgent search for solutions on how to get her life back on track following her bank foreclosure.  She ‘s a single mother of Bethany, her five year-old daughter, who has been placed in children’s protective care when it’s discovered that they have been living in Crystal’s car.  Her caseworker, Toni (a sympathetic Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson) assists Crystal, but warns her that if she makes any unexpected miscues, she could lose Bethany in the process.

Needing time to think and concoct a plan to get Bethany back, Crystal breaks into a foreclosed abandoned house, only to discover she’s not the only person looking for a roof over her head and time to think.  Gary (Carlo Alban) a homeless, unkempt, and paranoid squatter has already laid claim to the house.  But after talking to Crystal he agrees to share the space.  It becomes an uneasy, tense, détente, but not without risks.

The next day at work Crystal meets customer Charlie (James Shanklin), a slick-talking,  street-smart, business type with a “line” a mile long.  He’s a self-styled wealth-is-the- answer-to-everything, guru.  He says he interested in buying a $44,000 top of the line high-tech Saturn.  When Charlie senses how desperate the attractive Crystal is to make a sale, he offers to “negotiate” with her, after hours, up close and personal about the sale; taking great pleasure in humiliating her in the process.  Up against it, Crystal agrees.  Charlie may think he’s won the day, but his here-to-fore unmentioned wife Patricia (Amanda Naughton), has something to say about his “pyrrhic sexual victory” over Crystal.

“Bethany”, as a modern day story may resonate with some because of the financial woes so many Americans, like Crystal, find themselves in today.  But the resonating ends there.  The premise is problematic from the beginning in that it strains logic and credulity, plus it has a few too many  “plot-holes”(pun intended) that the core story keeps falling into.

Having said that, the actors, however, are solid in their performances.  Shanklin’s Charlie is a neat and subtle study of a greedy bully who simply must offend in behavior and cheat on the side.  It’s a delicious portrayal of a white-collar sleaze-bag.  Alban’s take on Gary, the homeless and the disenfranchised of the world, has the ring of authenticity, albeit, a crazy paranoid viewpoint.  Naughton’s “understanding wife” concerning Charlie’s behavior is puzzling.  He’s not Aristotle Onnasis, so money can’t be the reason she stays with him.   Obviously the answer must lie elsewhere.  Thompson’s caseworker Toni portrayal, is sensitively drawn.

As for Jennifer Ferrin’s Crystal, she literally changes and ages in front of you as she passes from crisis to crisis.  It’s a wonderfully nuanced performance of someone who feels the world is closing in and about to crush her but is helpless in being able to do anything about it.

The state-of-the-art Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre, has few equals when it comes to delivering technical requests from directors.  Lauren Helpern’s spare scenic design; Sarah J. Holden’s costumes, and Japhy Weideman’s night and day, lighting design, are all first-rate in this arena-staged production.

“Bethany” runs at the White Stage through February 23, 2014.