miliosr

Mamma Mia! held very well in its second weekend -- down only 36% from its first weekend. In an era where movies typically decline by 50% or more in their second weekend of release, this tells me that word of mouth must be great for Mamma Mia!

I guess I'm the only one who has seen this (or will admit to it, at any rate!)

While I make no claim for Mamma Mia! as art of any kind, it is well-made popular entertainment. Meryl Streep belts her heart out as Donna and Amanda Seyfried is wonderful as her daughter Sophie. The supporting cast members (Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard and Dominick Cooper) are first-rate and the ABBA songs will leave you humming along for hours afterward.

The only negative for me was Pierce Brosnan's "singing" on "S.O.S." This is one of the definitive ABBA songs and Brosnan's off-key warbling just kills it for me. (I don't mind his other vocal efforts so much -- he sounds somewhat like Bruce Springsteen, actually.)

I'm updating this thread to reflect performances of Limon's work during the second half of the year:

July

Jacob's Pillow - 07/02

5:00pm - Tudor and Limon at 100 (panel discussion)

6:30pm - New York Theatre Ballet (Mazurkas w/ Tudor's Jardin aux Lilas and Little Improvisations)

Fall

Luna Negra Dance Theater will be touring "There Is a Time"

Reading Cyd Charisse's obituary, I couldn't help but chuckle when I read that, as a member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, she went by the name 'Felia Sidorova'. It reminded me of Doris Humphrey's tart observation (on seeing one or the other of the Ballet Russe companies) that, "I greatly admired all those Russians from Brooklyn!"

davidsbundlertanze -- The Corman/Ebert Valley is the "sequel".

The original Valley Of the Dolls stars Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke and Sharon Tate as three starlets who seek fame and fortune in show business but find heartbreak, drug and alcohol addiction and death instead. Susan Hayward also stars as Helen Lawson, a tough-as-nails Broadway musical star (clearly based on Ethel Merman.)

The movie is very melodramatic and downright ridiculous at times but the more melodramatic and ridiculous it gets the better you'll like it.

Brad Pitt's "British" accent in Troy is unfortunate. He should have just stuck with his regular speaking voice rather than reaching for something he couldn't achieve.

So, I saw The Strangers w/ Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman this afternoon.

The Strangers is a "home invasion" horror film in which Tyler and Speedman must fend off three masked assailants at a remote house in the country. The director has stated that he based the film on an incident from his own past where someone knocked on his family's door asking for a person who did not live there. Only later did he and his family discover that empty homes in their neighborhood had been burgularized that night.

I had a glass three-quarters-full/glass one-quarter-empty reaction to this film. I liked that it was a throwback to late-70s/early-80s horror films in its use of lighting and sound (or the absence of it) to create a mood of dread. The film relies much more on suspense than gore, which is a welcome change-of-pace from the current "torture porn" films like the Saw and Hostel series.

That being said, I hated the ending. I just . . . yuck.

Susan Hayward in Valley of the Dolls -- terrible lip-synching during her big musical number (the one where she looks like she's fighting her way through a Calder mobile.)

Interesting about Shirley MacLaine. My prime offender in Steel Magnolias is Olympia Dukakis.

How could I forget -- Edward G. Robinson in The Ten Commandments! (No attempt at all to alter his normal speaking voice even though he is participating in a period drama set in ancient Egypt. Of course, so many of the performances/accents in the movie are so off-the-wall that it all becomes great fun.)

As I recall, some of the attempts at Southern accents in Steel Magnolias were pretty bad. Obviously, the born southerners (Julia Roberts, Dolly Parton) were fine. But the rest of them . . .

Cher's "Italian-American" accent in Moonstruck was fairly ridiculous. But she won an Oscar for it!!! (Or won for Mask, actually.)

Sharon Stone's southern accent in that mid-90s death row prison drama of hers [the name escapes me] was laughable: "If ahm gonna dah, it's gonna be on mah terrrrrmmmmmsssss!"

So, I was reading about the film Taras Bulba and I couldn't help but chuckle at the thought of Tony Curtis (w/ his Bronx accent) playing a Ukrainian Cossack (and Yul Brynner's son!)

It got me to thinking -- which accents have been the worst in film history? The criteria:

1) An actor adopting a foreign accent for a part and failing miserably, or

2) An actor playing a character foreign to his or her own homeland and not even bothering to cover up their own native accent.

One that comes to mind immediately:

Kate Hudson in the remake of The Four Feathers w/ Heath Ledger and Wes Bentley. Listening to her attempt an English accent is surely a form of torture!

Your choices?

So, I received my latest Limon Company E-news bulletin describing where the company will be performing their reconstruction of Anna Sokolow's Rooms this Summer/Fall:

SUNY Brockport, July 24/25 - informal preview performances

Luckman Fine Arts Center, LA, October 18 - official premiere

Joyce Theater season, December 2-7 - NY premiere

I think this is an admirable reconstruction and is something I would very much like to see. But here's what perplexes me. Why, during Limon's centennial, is the centerpiece going to be a work by Sokolow? Why not wait until 2009??

I'll try to hold comment until I see what the Fall touring/Joyce rep will be. I'll be baffled, though, if we don't get to see rarely performed Limon dances (like Carlota) or anything by Doris Humphrey but do get to see Rooms.

And the Joyce season looks short.

Add me to the list of people who can't stand Diane Keaton in The Godfather. In an otherwise pitch-perfect movie, she drives me up-and-over the wall with her blank-slate line readings and general whining (Miiiiiichael)! Ugh!!

(Strangely enough, I like her in The Godfather Part III, which will never qualify as an overrated movie.)

Interesting post Paul.

In the Dancing Times article, Sarah Stackhouse talks about how the early modern dancers (i.e. Limon and Graham) were interested in capturing Expressive states and how they used these states to drive their bodies. She admits freely that many of the dancers were "terrible" from today's technical perspective. But she also says that they had an "engagement" with the material which animated their bodies.

I would love to see the Limon company perform Dark Elegies this Fall. But, alas, it looks like their major non-Limon (or Humphrey) revival will be Anna Sokolow's Rooms.

bart -- I would throw a third variable into the mix regarding the longevity of Tudor's work.

The April issue of Dancing Times features an interview with Limon stager Sarah Stackhouse in which she talks about staging Limon's The Moor's Pavane and Chaconne for the Phoenix Dance Theatre in the UK. Specifically, Stackhouse discusses how today's dancers are phenomenal in terms of jumping and turning but not so great in terms of performing "gestural movement" or movement that is "slow and dragged-out".

I got thinking about this when I read your post about Tudor because it seems to me that the handicaps Stackhouse discusses in relation to restaging Limon works would also apply to Tudor. Dancers today are geared more toward speed and power rather than the less pyrotechnical characteristics found in Tudor. While it's not impossible to train them up to Tudor, a proper restaging of Tudor probably requires more time than usual and, as they say, time is money. If you're a company director with time constraints and a tight budget, you may say to yourself that Tudor isn't worth it, no matter how much you may love his work.

If (as several posters maintain) that there isn't a single guy in the ABT corps worth promoting to soloist status, then it begs several questions:

1) What is going on either at the audition level or at the corps mentoring level that ABT is unable to find suitable candidates for promotion from within, and

2) if (as Helene notes) "there will never be a shortage of dancers who are willing to be in the ABT corps", then (as Memo notes) what is the point of the school/summer programs/scholarships/ABT II? If the end result is that the beneficiaries/graduates of these programs/entities dead end in the corps, then why bother? Why not scrap the programs, take the money and become the New York Yankees of the ballet world -- go forth and start waving money under dancers' noses in London and Paris and Copenhagen and St. Petersburg and Moscow and create a 70s-style all-star roster of principals and soloists who will pack the Met and get the fan base hooting and hollering and shredding their programs.

I apologize if it seems like I am being argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. My quarrel isn't with Mr. Simkin, who I am sure is the greatest thing since Grape Crush soda (my favorite). What I'm annoyed about is that ABT wants it both ways. They want to be mentioned in the same breath as the French and the Danes and the Russians and the City Ballet-ers so they've created this whole apparatus of a school and summer programs and scholarships and ABT II to create the impression of school-to-corps-to-soloist-to-principal just like all the others. But then they also want to have an array of larger-than-life personalities on stage and so they defy their own internal apparatus and go out and hire dancers from the outside.

To me, ABT is a company that doesn't know what it wants to be. Personally, I think that whole 70s-style/Lucia Chase/"can't have enough stars" approach is their true DNA and they should just embrace it and stop trying to please people who carp about the absence of a "company style". But I wish they would just pick one direction and stick with it rather than the current muddle which (if this thread is any indication) only divides the fan base.

(And thanks to vipa for mentioning Bujones. I had forgotten that he, like Ted Kivitt, got the downside of the Baryshnikov hiring. Curiously, I think Lucia Chase's hiring/treatment of Bujones was correct -- he won at Varna but he started in the corps, became a soloist the next year and became a principal the year after that.)

Blaine Hoven 4 Ever!

A couple of points:

1) Hiring Simkin may prove to be a masterstroke on ABT's part -- only time will tell. But the (perhaps) salutary act of hiring talent from outside of the company's ranks doesn't make it any less true that (a) morale within the corps may suffer, and (b) that defections may occur at a more rapid clip as a result. Now, from the artistic staff's viewpoint, having a high "burn rate" in the corps may be an acceptable trade-off if it leads to long-term replenishment of the principal ranks. (That would actually be an interesting statistical comparison -- year-to-year turnover at the corps level among the major US companies.) But it puts lie to the notion that ABT is anything more than a glittering collection of international stars. ("More stars than there are in Heaven" as it were.)

2) I don't think anyone would argue against Lucia Chase's hiring of Baryshnikov in 1974. (It did work against Kivitt but then he was already a principal of six-years standing at the time. Bad luck on his part.) My understanding of the situation at ABT in the mid-70s is that morale suffered more as a result of Chase's penchant for importing guest stars from around the world who jetted in and jetted out of New York and refused to tour than it did from hiring Baryshnikov. (Correct me if I'm wrong about that.)

3) On the matter of Blaine Hoven, Faux, you and I will just have to agree to disagree.

Well, I can name three ABT corps guys -- Isaac Stappas, Alex Hammoudi and Blaine Hoven -- who I saw at the Opera House in Chicago on April 10th, who caught my eye and who look like they're ready to move up. Hoven is young so I can understand letting him marinate in the corps for awhile more but what about Stappas and Hammoudi? In particular, Hammoudi looks like he has the potential to be a good partner for Michelle Wiles, who is languishing a bit for want of an ideal partner. (Hallberg is great -- I just don't think he and Wiles are great together.)

I agree with the poster who said this policy has been ever such. In retrospect, the Baryshnikov regime policy of promoting from within was the aberration. ABT has only reverted back to what it was in the 70s. (And, I freely admit that 70s-era ABT was a Golden Age for ABT.)

In total agreement with you darla788.

What a morale crusher it must be for those talented guys in ABT's corps (and ABT is thick with them) when something like this happens.

Just to clarify:

I realize there are many Kristi fans on this board who are greatly enjoying her performances and I believe they have every reason to do so -- she is the class of the field.

However, I also believe her achievements are occurring in a vacuum. With the possible exception of Jason, none of the other teams are mounting a serious challenge to her. (Jason may beat her but, if he does, I don't think it will because he outdanced her.) At the end of the day, Dancing with the Stars is still a competition. Without a consistent rivalry between two top teams, the competition becomes dull and lifeless -- which is what we are seeing with Season Six.

Furthermore, with the exception of Shannon and Derek's outbursts last week, a genteel quality has overtaken the show which only adds to the soporific effect. The show always benefits when you have two or more teams who are in deadly competition with one another (and, who seem like they don't much like each other.) (I'm thinking Season One with Kelly vs. John, Season Three with Emmitt vs. Mario and Season Five with Helio vs. Mel vs. Marie.)

As far as the ratings are concerned, I merely pointed out that the show has cooled some. I also gave three possible reasons for this -- two of which have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the show. I would argue that the ratings are important. This is a commercial program on a commercial network. If ratings decline, then so do ad dollars; making the show less attractive to ABC. If you're a fan of ballroom dancing on network television (even in the strange form it takes on this show), any decline in ratings should be worrisome.

Ratings - Week Six

Performances - 3rd - 18.0 million viewers

Results - 3rd - 18.0 million viewers

Compared to prior seasons, performance night ratings are down:

Season 3/Week 6 -- 21.3 million

Season 4/Week 6 -- 18.9 million

Season 5/Week 6 -- 21.4 million

Season 6/Week 6 -- 18.0 million

I think there are several causes:

1) Normal audience erosion after six seasons,

2) slow audience return to network television after the writer's strike, and

3) a dull competition. (Sorry Kristi fans!)

If you live in the LA area, it looks like the Limon company will be performing all over LA in October. Details are at their Web site.

Each couple performed two dances last night. Here are the percentages after both scores are combined:

01 Jason/Edyta 55pts = 17.8%

02 Kristi/Mark 54pts = 17.5%

03 Marissa/Tony 52pts = 16.8%

04 Shannon/Derek 51pts = 16.5%

04 Mario/Karina 51pts = 16.5%

06 Cristian/Cheryl 46pts = 14.9%

Cristian has the lowest combined score but, given his injury, he might have drawn a sympathy vote that will let him live to fight another day. I'm inclined to think that either Mario (weak fan base) or Shannon (backlash against whining last week) will go.

I would argue that the Ailey and Limon companies have proven that the modern dance can foster true, multiple choreographer repertory companies without having to employ specialists in every modern technique (Cunningham, Graham, Horton, Humphrey-Limon). Given that a sound modern training in 2008 will encompass the different modern techniques (as well as ballet technique), a modern dancer in the Ailey or Limon companies should be able to work from a sound technical basis to handle most non-ballet dances. Where it gets interesting is with the notion of style. The Limon company performing Sokolow may end up with more of an alternative reading of the piece than a defining reading (much the way the Paris Opera Ballet's performance of Jewels is fascinating but probably will never become the "definitive" reading.)

While were on the subject of what the Limon Dance Company is doing in the month of May, the mailers I've received from them state that the company will be reconstructing Anna Sokolow's Rooms throughout the month. This isn't the first time they've performed a Sokolow work and a certain "cousinage" appears to have developed over time between the Limon followers and the Sokolow followers. And who says there's no such thing as a successful modern dance repertory company?