[ThisWeek] A Prairie Home Companion Movie and Benefit at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[This Week at the Kenworthy]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre and NorthWest Public Radio present
A Prairie Home Companion Movie & Benefit
Friday, August 25
Sponsored by Hayden & Ross
Music and Reception at 6:30 PM
* featuring the talents of Ben Walden and Charlie Sutton
* hosted by Mary Hawkinds & Robin Rilette
* food provided by Moscow Food Coop
* beer and wine provided by Mikey's
Movie at 8:00 PM
$20/general admission
All proceeds will support the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre and NorthWest
Public Radio.
Tickets on sale at BookPeople in Moscow, Brused Books in Pullman, or by
calling 882-4127.


A Prairie Home Companion (PG-13)
Also showing
Saturday, August 26
7:00 PM
Sunday, August 27
4:30 & 7:00 PM
$5/adult, $3/child 12 or younger
KFS pass accepted for Sunday movies
(See movie review below)
* * *

Save with a Sirius Idaho Theatre season pass

Preparing for their third season, Sirius Idaho Theatre is offering a
significant savings to patrons who purchase a 2006 ­ 2007 season pass.
Passes are now available at the Moscow Farmers¹ Market and at BookPeople of
Moscow. In addition, if you pay with a check made to Sirius Idaho Theatre,
you can pick up your season pass at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre box
office the next time you see a film! (If you wish to purchase with a
credit/debit card, purchase your season pass at BookPeople.)
Buy a season pass before the end of August and receive a ³Tipping Ticket,²
good for any performance to the world premiere of Cow-Tipping and Other
Signs of Stress, opening September 21st.

Adults - $15 per show or $40 pass
Seniors - $10 per show or $25 pass
Students - $6 per show or $15 pass

The 2006 ­ 2007 Sirius Idaho Theatre season includes the following
productions, with all performances at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre,
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho

World Première
Cow-Tipping and Other Signs of Stress
by Gregory Fletcher
7:30 pm, September 21 - 23 & 28 - 30, 2006

Touch
by Toni Press-Coffman
7:30 pm, January 25 ­ 27, February 1 - 3, 2007

Breaking the Code
by Hugh Whitemore
7:30 pm, April 12 - 14 & 19 - 21, 2007

For more information, contact Pam Palmer, Managing Artistic Director,
208-596-2270, siriusidahotheatre at gmail.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sirius Idaho Theatre
P.O. Box 8762
Moscow, Idaho 83843

http://www.SiriusIdahoTheatre.com/

PAMELA PALMER, Managing Artistic Director
Mailto:siriusidahotheatre at gmail.com
phone 208-596-2270

Sirius Idaho Theatre is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Tax-deductible donations are appreciated!

³Let the beauty you love, be what you do.²
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Coming in September:
Superman Returns; Sirius Idaho Theatre presents Cow-Tipping and Other Signs
of Stress

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $3/child 12 or younger
Wednesday matinee prices: $4/adult, $1/child 12 or younger
KFS series pass prices:  $30/10 films, $75/30 films.  KFS pass good only for
Sunday movies.

For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a
schedule, visit our website at www.kenworthy.org
* * *

This week¹s movie review-

A Prairie Home Companion

Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Garrison Keillor, based on a story by Mr. Keillor and Ken
LaZebnik
Rated PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned) It has some sexual humor and
innuendo
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes


As reviewed by Steve Persall, the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times Film Critic

Nostalgia has little to do with my adoration of Robert Altman's film version
of Garrison Keillor's venerable radio show, ³A Prairie Home Companion.² How
can one be nostalgic about something experienced only through hearsay? A
better question is: How did Altman and Keillor make a newcomer to the
program feel so at home, clutched to the bosoms of affable strangers,
somewhere I've never been?

An answer is elusive, but what a wonderful place to be. It must have
something to do with the notion that wherever you go, there you are; make
the most of it, or at least as much as such unfamiliar comfort offers.

³A Prairie Home Companion² is as hospitable as any movie can be, sharing one
free-wheeling night with people who'll seem like lifelong acquaintances by
the fadeout. That twinge of sadness when it ends is partly regret that such
decency seems so foreign today.

Altman's film glows like a cozy fireplace, pulling us into an unbroken
circle of homespun humor and bittersweet memories. He doesn't simply capture
a performance of Keillor's live radio show, although choice moments occur in
which everyone appears to be flying by the seats of their pants. That must
be what attracted the 81-year-old filmmaker to this material, ensemble
interaction that looks and sounds ragged until all those tiny revelations
fall into place.

There isn't a false note among the performances, even Lindsay Lohan's turn
as a Johnson girl's Generation X daughter slowly realizing what's about to
disappear. Keillor's unflappable debut performance, playing himself but not
entirely, is the hub Altman's cast spins around, making us wonder where this
truly original screen presence has been hiding all these years.

No matter the easy comparison to Altman's 1976 classic ³Nashville² with its
country music twang, this one is different. Heartland values spoofed in that
political epic are warmly embraced here, even modestly canonized. If
³Nashville² was a warning of where we were headed then, ³A Prairie Home
Companion² is an acknowledgement of where those values might have led us,
had they not been corrupted, like everything else. Perhaps "eulogy" is a
better word to describe it than "nostalgia."

Death is a constant theme in Altman's movie, as it must be for an old lion
with a transplanted heart: death of a medium that transformed lives long
before digital contraptions, and death as an inevitable part of life. Yet
this isn't a dour Ingmar Bergman meditation on mortality; it's a buoyant
celebration of doing what one does best until the chances run out.

If this is Altman's curtain call - and with any luck it isn't ­ ³A Prairie
Home Companion² is a fitting finale to a legendary career.


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

A late, minor addition to the Robert Altman collection ‹ but a treasure all
the same ‹ "A Prairie Home Companion" is more likely to inspire fondness
than awe. This is entirely appropriate, since the movie snuggles deep into
the mood and sensibility of its source, Garrison Keillor's long-running
public radio variety show.

Beloved by tote-baggers across the land, Mr. Keillor's weekly cavalcade of
wry Midwestern humor and musical Americana has never set out to make
anyone's hair stand on end. Notwithstanding the occasional crackle of satire
or sparkle of instrumental virtuosity, it mostly offers reliable doses of
amusement embedded in easygoing nostalgia. It looks back on ‹ or, rather,
reinvents ‹ a time when popular culture was spooned out in grange halls and
Main Street movie palaces, and when broadcasting was supposedly a local
affair sponsored by mom-and-pop purveyors of biscuits and Norwegian pickled
herring.

In the film Mr. Keillor, who wrote the screenplay and also plays himself (as
a jowly, owlish and curiously detached master of ceremonies), supplies the
whimsy. Mr. Altman, a more cantankerous spirit (he comes from Kansas City,
Mo., a wilder corner of the Midwest than Mr. Keillor's Minnesota), brings
his unrivaled sense of chaos and his mischievous eye for human eccentricity.
Together they have confected a breezy backstage comedy that is also a sly
elegy: a poignant contemplation of last things that goes down as smoothly
and sweetly as a lemon drop.

The action takes place during the final performance of "A Prairie Home
Companion," a live radio broadcast that, unlike its real world counterpart,
is not made possible by the generous support of listeners like you. Its home
station, WLT, has been gobbled up by a Texas-based chain and a corporate
heavy, known only as the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), has been sent north to
shut the program down.

Shooting almost entirely within the Fitzgerald Theater, named for the author
F. Scott, in St. Paul, Mr. Altman observes the doings of a loose tribe of
artists, technicians and hangers-on. The sometime-narrator is Guy Noir
(Kevin Kline), a mainstay of the actual "Prairie Home Companion" here
incarnated as a onetime private eye and part-time stage-door security guard.
He is the first to notice the presence of a mysterious woman in white
(Virginia Madsen), who turns out to be an angel and also the film's literal
femme fatale.

The cast moves through it all with relaxed professionalism, making the whole
production look as effortless as Mr. Altman's sauntering dolly shots or Mr.
Keillor's mellow riffs on the virtues of ketchup, rhubarb and duct tape. If
it sometimes seems to be on the verge of falling apart, that's the point.
The film is, partly, a protest against the smooth, standardized, bottom-line
culture represented by the Axeman, and a defiant celebration of
imperfection, improvisation and accident. Sometimes you forget a song lyric,
your joke falls flat or you scatter the pages of your script all over the
floor. Such mishaps occur frequently in "A Prairie Home Companion," and each
one turns into a moment of grace. It's not a perfect movie, and it does not
aspire to be a great one. It's just wonderful.


As reviewed by Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Times

What a lovely film this is, so gentle and whimsical, so simple and profound.
Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" is faithful to the spirit of the
radio program, a spirit both robust and fragile, and yet achieves something
more than simply reproducing a performance of the show. It is nothing less
than an elegy, a memorial to memories of times gone by, to dreams that died
but left the dreamers dreaming, to appreciating what you've had instead of
insisting on more.

This elegiac strain is explained by the premise that we are watching the
last performance of the weekly show. After a final singing of "Red River
Valley" (the saddest of all songs), the paradise of the Fitzgerald Theater
will be torn down so they can put up a parking lot. After 30 years, the show
will be no more.

The show is hosted by a man referred to as G.K., and played by Garrison
Keillor as a version of himself, which is about right, because he always
seems to be a version of himself. Keillor, whose verbal and storytelling
genius has spun a whole world out of thin air, always seems a step removed
from what he does, as if bemused to find himself doing it.

The last show is treated like any other. In the dressing room, incredibly
cluttered with bric-a-brac and old photos, we meet Lola's mother and her
aunt, Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin). They are
the two survivors from a four-sister singing act: "The Carter Family was
like us, only famous." Their onstage duets are hilarious, depending on a
timing that rises above the brilliant to the transcendent; they were doing
this double act on the Academy Award telecast last March.

We also meet Chuck Akers (L.Q. Jones), an old-time C&W singer, and Dusty and
Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), two cowboy singers who threaten
to make the last program endless as they improvise one corny joke after
another. We also meet the people who make the show work: The stage manager
Molly (Maya Rudolph), and, borrowed from the show itself, the makeup lady
(Sue Scott), Al the backstage guy (Tim Russell), the sound effects man (Tom
Keith), the bandleader (Rich Dworsky) and the P.H.C. house band. Molly is
surely so pregnant she should stay calm, but she is driven to distraction by
G.K.'s habit of never planning anything, and moseying up to the microphone
at the last conceivable moment.

Adding another level is the materialization in the real world of Guy Noir,
Private Eye (Kevin Kline). Listeners of the program will know that Keillor
and his stock company perform adventures from the life of Noir, as a salute
to old-time radio drama. In Altman's movie, Noir is a real person, a
broken-down gumshoe who handles security for the show (he lights his
cigarettes with wooden kitchen matches, just like Philip Marlowe in Altman's
"The Long Goodbye"). Guy is visited by a character described as the
Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen), who may perhaps be an angelic one.

The final visitor to the Fitzgerald theater is Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones ),
who represents the investors who have bought the lovely theater and will
tear it down. He doesn't recognize the bust of a man in the theater's
private box, but we do: It is F. Scott Fitzgerald, that native son of St.
Paul in whose honor the theater is named. A little later, Ed Lachman's
camera helps Altman observe that Fitzgerald and Guy Noir have profiles so
similar as to make no difference.

Like the show that inspired it, "A Prairie Home Companion" is not about
anything in particular. Perhaps it is about everything in general: About
remembering, and treasuring the past, and loving performers not because they
are new but because they have lasted. About smiling and being amused, but
not laughing out loud, because in Minnesota loud laughter is seen as a vice
practiced on the coasts. About how all things pass away, but if you live
your life well, everything was fun while it lasted. There is so much of the
ghost of Scott Fitzgerald hovering in the shadows of this movie that at the
end I quoted to myself the closing words of The Great Gatsby. I'm sure you
remember them, so let's say them together: And so we beat on, boats against
the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.


Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart
* * *

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
208-882-4127
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
logging onto our website
http://www.kenworthy.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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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