[ThisWeek] Stage Beauty at the Kenworthy

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre-

Stage Beauty (R)
Friday, January 28
7:00PM
Saturday & Sunday, January 29 & 30
4:30 and 7:00PM
$5 adults  
KFS passes accepted for Sunday movies
(See Review below)
* * *

February 2005 at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre . . .

Being Julia (R)
Feb 4 at 7:00 PM
Feb 5 - 6 at 4:30 and 7:00 PM

Yes Men (NR)
Feb 11 at 7PM
Feb 12 ­ 13 at 5:00 and 7:00 PM

House of Flying Daggers (R)
Feb 18 at 7PM
Feb 19 ­ 20 at 4:15 and 7:00 PM

UI Architecture Dept presents
Will Bruder lecture
February 25 at 5:00 PM
FREE

Dig (NR)
Feb 26 at 7:00 PM
Feb 27 at 4:15 and 7:00 PM

Regular Movie prices:  $5 adults, $2 children 12 and younger.
KFS passes accepted for Sunday movies

508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
For more information, call 208-882-4127 or visit www.kenworthy.org
* * *
This week¹s review-

Stage Beauty 

Directed by Richard Eyre
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
''Stage Beauty'' is rated R (Under 17 requires an accompanying parent or
adult guardian). It has sexual references and situations, and some nudity.

As reviewed by Michael Wilmington writing for the Chicago Tribune

"Stage Beauty" is a rich, shining valentine to the British theater and the
eternal joys of Shakespeare, a movie drama about sex roles and backstage
romance that left me smiling, imaginatively sated and a little giddy.

The movie is both knowingly witty and royally pleasurable itself, an
exhilarating sample of the verbal wizardry and expertise of British plays
and players. It's no "Shakespeare in Love," but it gives you, in many ways,
the same kind of intoxicating, bejeweled diversion.

In Thatcher's script, we see Ned first at his height: ruling Pepys' London
with his beauty, talent and impudence; entrancing the backstage lovely and
theatrical hopeful Maria (Danes) with his definitive Desdemona; upstaging
his onstage Othello, actor Thomas Betterton (Tom Wilkinson), and living it
up with his suave lover Villiars, the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin).

Then comes a gradual fall. Alienating the somewhat perverse Charles--whose
mistress Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper) lusts for the stage--and then outraging the
elephantine and randy dandy Charles Sedley (Richard Griffiths), who becomes
Maria's patron and Ned's enemy, Ned soon finds himself parodying his old
grandeur in taverns. It seems to be a case of "A Star is Born's" Norman
Maine and Esther Blodgett in the Restoration, but there's a hitch. Maria,
not yet a good Desdemona, still loves Ned. And, after all, as Shakespeare's
Hamlet told us, "the play's the thing Š ."

The movie is full of top-flight English actors, including Edward Fox
frowning through the puritanical Edward Hyde, Hugh Bonneville peeping away
as the legendary Pepys and Fenella Woolgar ("Bright Young Things") as Lady
Mersevale. But, up at the top, Americans Crudup and Danes hold their own,
just as Gwyneth Paltrow did in "Shakespeare in Love."

At the center of it all are Hatcher's witty lines and ideas and Eyre's
seductive whirligig staging. Good movies about theater--"Children of
Paradise," "All About Eve," "The Band Wagon," "Farewell, My Concubine" and
"Shakespeare in Love"--can be supremely entertaining, largely because we
sense how much the filmmaker and actors enjoy making them and playing with
all the layers and levels of theatricality. That enjoyment is palpable in
"Stage Beauty," an ode to artifice, a salute to the Bard of Avon and a
ballad on the war of the sexes--all of them.

As reviewed by A. A. Scott writing for the New York Times

''Stage Beauty'' takes place in London during the reign of Charles II, an
era of curly wigs and knee breeches much beloved by connoisseurs of high-end
costume drama. It was a thoroughly theatrical age, and Richard Eyre's new
film, based on a play by Jeffrey Hatcher, feasts on both its on and offstage
spectacles. 

Though the playhouses, shut by Puritan zealots earlier in the century,
reopened soon after the Catholic Stuarts regained the throne, the old rules
forbidding women to appear in them were still in effect. As in Shakespeare's
time, all the female roles were played by men.

''Stage Beauty'' observes the collapse of this tradition and the birth of
female English acting through the entwined careers of Ned Kynaston (Billy
Crudup), the last of the old-school female impersonators, and Maria Hughes
(Claire Danes), who starts out as his stage-struck dresser and later becomes
his rival. 

For about two-thirds of its length, ''Stage Beauty'' is propelled by a
complex and fascinating set of ideas about sexual identity and theatrical
performance. Maria's assertion of her right to act -- backed up by Nell
Gwynn's behind-the-throne influence -- costs Ned more than his career. His
fall includes a brutal series of humiliations, like the loss of his lover,
the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin). Ned goes from being an accepted, even
celebrated part of London's social and sexual landscape to being an abject,
marginal figure, reduced to performing obscene music-hall numbers in a
merkin and a shabby wig, while Maria and others like her usurp his place in
the firmament. 

Up to a certain point, Mr. Eyre and Mr. Hatcher hold Maria's triumph and
Ned's disgrace in almost perfect balance, so that you feel both the glow of
progress and the ache of loss. The flowering of feminism is provocatively
and convincingly linked to the rise of homophobia: in the new world of
female emancipation, it seems, there is no room for a man like Ned.

But as it rushes toward an upbeat ending, the movie at once recoils from
this notion and bizarrely succumbs to its logic. In disowning drag and in
straightening out Ned Kynaston, ''Stage Beauty'' -- absurdly for a work that
professes to revel in the love of theater -- takes a literal-minded stand
for the straight and narrow in both sex and art. Ned and Maria, performing
''Othello'' out of drag (though one of them, of course, is in blackface),
break free from the stylized mannerisms, suddenly bringing the unruly
emotions of the Actors Studio to Restoration London, which responds with
wild applause. 

And just as the theater is cured of its perverse affectations and
artificialities, so Ned, once he shares the stage (and his bed) with a real
woman, is straightened out. He is turned from a fascinating, changeable
creature into a regular guy, and in satisfying itself with this outcome, the
movie spoils some of its beauty.

As reviewed by Carla Meyer writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

Billy Crudup's gender bending in "Stage Beauty" transcends the powder, rouge
and wigs he dons to play a 17th century stage actor doing women's roles. His
character is a classic heroine: a great beauty exploited, discarded and
forced to claw her way back to dignity. The actor embodies this heroine even
out of drag. 

Crudup has hovered near the A-list for years now without breaking through.
But films like "Almost Famous" and "Big Fish" haven't allowed him to immerse
himself in character the way a smaller picture like this one does. As a
perfectionist performer upended by changes in theatrical gender rules,
Crudup mixes hyper-feminine traits with touches of male chauvinism, topping
things off with sexual hedonism and gender confusion. The film rarely
matches Crudup's performance, appearing confused itself about whether it's
farce or drama. But its palette of burnished browns and reds pleases the
eye, and at its best, "Stage Beauty'' captures the tensions and electricity
of backstage dramas.

Reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart
* * *

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org
To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  

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