Monday, January 27, 2019
587 - Vanya on 42nd Street, United States, 1994. Dir. Louis Malle.
Come and meet those dancing feet
On the avenue I'm taking you to--
42nd Street.
42nd Street was a 1933 Warner Bros. film directed by Lloyd Bacon and starring Dick Powell, Ginger Rogers, George Brent, Bebe Daniels, Lyle Talbot, Allen Jenkins, Una Merkel, Ruby Keeler, Warner Baxter, Guy Kibbee, and Charles Lane.
The theme song was written by Al Dubin and Harry Warren.
Busby Berkeley created the dances and ensembles. Of course.
In 1980 42nd Street was made into a Broadway musical starring Jerry Orbach, Tammy Grimes, Wanda Richert, and Lee Roy Reams in the original cast. It ran for nearly 9 years.
The musical opened in London's West End in 1984 and won the Olivier for Best Musical. It famously launched the career of Catherine Zeta-Jones.
The musical was revived on Broadway in 2001 and won the Tony for Best Revival.
The actual street named 42nd Street is one of a few east-west streets that were designed to be not quite twice as wide as the others, and its history includes George Washington, John Jacob Astor, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. It is the location of several significant buildings, including the Chrysler Building, the United Nations, and Grand Central Station, among others.
Broadway is a north-south street, except that it runs northwest, at a diagonal to all the numbered Avenues rather than parallel to them. It crosses 7th Avenue at 45th Street to create the famous northern wedge known as Times Square, extending north to 46th and 47th Streets. Times Square proper begins at 42nd Street, creating the southern wedge. The Times Square Metro stop is on 7th Avenue near the 42nd Street and Broadway intersection.
This is the Great White Way. The theater district. The home of the American stage in New York. Broadway. And 42nd Street. The great theaters are mostly on one of these two streets. Or near them.
So just as one refers to Broadway as the world of the theatre in addition to the street itself, one might use the term 42nd Street in a similar fashion. The phrase 42nd Street appears in more than a dozen film and television titles.
Just west of Broadway and 42nd, just west of 7th Avenue, on 42nd, is the New Amsterdam Theatre. On the South side of the street facing North. Today it is owned by Walt Disney. And it houses Aladdin. Before that it housed Mary Poppins. Before that, The Lion King.
The New Amsterdam was finished in 1903. Its first production was A Misdummer Night's Dream. For fourteen years it was the home of The Ziegfeld Follies.
The number of great stars who performed at The New Amsterdam is myriad. It includes Fanny Brice, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Eddie Canter, Basil Rathbone, Clifton Webb, Fay Templeton, and Bob Hope, among others.
But today in the film, in 1994, it is vacant. Abandoned. Dilapidated. And crumbling.
But this does not stop Andre Gregory.
Andre Gregory is a man on a mission. He is a theatre man in search of the truth of human behavior.
Gregory has been holding Uncle Vanya workshops for several years now. He has gathered some fine actors, including his improv and film partner Wallace Shawn from My Dinner with Andre (1981) and a young Julianne Moore, to work on and perform Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya in people's houses, apartments, rooms, and old theaters wherever he can find them. Today they are in The New Amsterdam. By now they have been working together, workshopping, on and off for several years.
Their old friend and colleague Louis Malle, who directed them in My Dinner with Andre, is here filming today. As well as a few visitors who are here to watch.
Louis Malle begins with his characteristic documentary approach, starting with the street sign and then moving to life on the street. When we watched his documentaries, such as Calcutta (1969) and Place de la Republique (1974) and God's Country (1985), we experienced Malle's way of getting a sense of a place through watching its people as they go about their lives.
So here he captures a place in time. On this day. In this place. The shops of 42nd Street. Not just the theatres but also the stores, and the restaurants, and the adult palaces of the Red Light District. People walking. People driving. People stopping.
Wallace Shawn leans against a counter eating a knich. Julianne Moore and Brooke Smith cross the street. Andre Gregory comes up the sidewalk. He turns to look at a girl with cut-off denim shorts. He approaches his friend Wally.
Mrs. Chao and her friend Philip Innuno approach. Wally introduces them to Andre. They met last year in Berlin. May they join us today? Of course. Andre would be delighted. He loves to have people visit.
They go inside.
They cannot use the stage. The rats ate through the ropes. There are nets set up to catch the falling plaster.
Watch your step Phoebe.
You look tired.
I'm doing these two other little plays. They have me doing extra rehearsals. I was up at 6:00 this morning. Over at the Hearts and Minds Cafe.
Never heard of that theatre.
No reason you should have.
The group talks as they set up. Wallace Shawn lies down across a row of seats. He seems to take a nap.
Larry Pine and Lynn Cohen begin talking. As if they are Larry Pine and Lynn Cohen talking. Until it is evident that they are Dr. Astrov and Nanny talking. And the play has begun.
Anton Chekhov is one of the greatest writers in world history. In both short stories and plays. He lived in Russia, and his plays were staged at the Moscow Art Theatre.
This play, Uncle Vanya, was first directed by the father of modern acting, Constantin Stanislavsky. The man himself. The man who wrote My Life in Art, An Actor Prepares, Becoming a Character, and Creating a Role. The man who taught the people who taught the world the system of acting.
David Mamet has translated Uncle Vanya into English. In contemporary English. Without slang. Yet without excessive formality. So that these Americans can speak these lines in a more natural way, in a way more in line with the way they really speak.
Andre Gregory encourages the actors to behave according to how they feel right now. Rather than adapt yourself to the emotions of the character in the moment, live the life of the character within your life in this moment. If the character is to be feeling depressed at this moment, but you are feeling content, then play this moment with contentment. Do not try to trigger depression.
And show up with your lines memorized.
Some directors allow theatre actors to learn their lines concurrently with rehearsal, while in rehearsal, so that they are learning them alongside the blocking and the emotions that they are organically exploring. But Gregory wants to get the memorization out of the way. Now show up and live in the part. And do it over and over and over, with the freedom to make it different every time, to make it who you are and what you are feeling right now, until it becomes a part of you.
One reviewer compares the results of this process to the naturalistic improvisational approach of Mike Leigh.
The goal is always authenticity. Emotional truth. And Andre Gregory is applying a specific approach to achieving it.
It appears that it would have been a joy to have participated in this process with these people.
Louis Malle's film.
Andre Gregory's staging.
David Mamet's translation.
Anton Chekhov's play.
Uncle Vanya.
Vanya on 42nd Street.
The film is as much a documentary of the process as it is a film of a play. And since we are watching contemporary actors dressed in their own contemporary clothes, on the floor of an abandoned theatre, without props or set pieces or furniture, essentially living the life of the characters during an advance-stage rehearsal, this film might appeal more to actors and literary enthusiasts than it would to movie fans. Its box office receipts certainly suggest as much.
But for those who are engaged in this process, it is a film worth watching. And reviewing. And studying.
And for actors, it is a process worth doing.
* * * *
What Chekhov is about is the nature of the quality of passing your life. - Andre Gregory.
What it feels like to be here as we travel across the ocean of life. - Andre Gregory.
Uncle Vanya was first and foremost the most important period of my acting life. It was the time when everything about how I feel about acting, how I approach things, where everything developed. - Julianne Moore.
We never thought we would take that journey.
At this particular time this play screamed out at me. Very much because I could picture how great Wally would be in the role. - Andre Gregory.
When he came to me I said I didn't want to do theatre. - Wallace Shawn.
He said, 'This won't really be theatre. We're not gonna do the play. We're just going to explore a piece of writing for a greater understanding.' - Wallace Shawn.
We were doing it for the love of it. The financial rewards were nil. - George Gaynes.
We just gently, gently gently, let this play invade our souls. - Lynn Cohen.
There's a natural tendency when you begin rehearsal to begin with a stereotype. We all have in our minds who Yelena is--anyone in the theatre--or Vanya. So you start playing the stereotype. Michelangelo said, I believe, that sculpture for him was that you take a huge piece of stone, or marble, and you chip at it, you chip at it, you chip at it, and suddenly one day what's left is the sculpture. So this is a process not of adding, which you do mostly in the theatre when it's four weeks. It's a process of subtracting, taking away, taking away, until finally what you're left with is years of subtext, years of the experience of being together. - Andre Gregory.
* * * *
You go see to the chickens and I'll tend to the tea.
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