[ThisWeek] Walk the Line and Mark Cantor at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

Walk the Line (PG-13)
Friday, February 24
7:00 PM
Saturday & Sunday, February 25 & 26
4:00 & 7:00 PM
$5/adult, $2/children 12 and younger
KFS passes accepted for Sunday showings
(see Review below)
 
International Jazz Collections
2006 Lecture Series
Mark Cantor
Celluloid Improvisations:
Black, White, and Technicolor
Saturday, February 25
12:30 PM
Free
* * *

Callbacks/audition notice
(one more opportunity to audition if you missed it last week!)

Sirius Idaho Theatre announces auditions for final show of season

Sirius Idaho Theatre announces auditions for A Walk in the Woods, by Lee
Blessing, the final show of their 2005-06 season. Open auditions are being
held this Saturday, February 25, 10:00 am, at Eastside Marketplace in Moscow
at the location of the old pet store (opposite the inside entrance to the
Mexican restaurant, Fiesta en Jalisco). Prepared monologues are encouraged
but not required. The script for A Walk in the Woods is available for
preview at BookPeople of Moscow.

A Walk in the Woods, nominated for both the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize in
1988, takes place in a ³pleasant woods on the outskirts of Geneva.² The
story follows the differences dividing two arms negotiators, one Soviet and
one American. It is a refreshing and humorous look at the frustrations
inherent in the negotiating process and allows us to understand the humanity
of these wise and decent men.

The cast consists of two men: Andrey Botvinnik, a 57 year old career Soviet
diplomat, and John Honeyman, a 45 year old American negotiator. Dialects are
not required for auditions.

Rehearsals for A Walk in the Woods begin in late February and performances
are April 6-8 & 13 - 15, 2006 at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre.
Sirius Idaho Theatre provides stipends for actors.

For more information about the play or to volunteer with Sirius Idaho
Theatre, contact Pam Palmer, Managing Artistic Director, at 208-596-2270
siriusidahotheatre at gmail.com or visit the web site of Sirius Idaho Theatre
http://www.siriusidahotheatre.com/
* * *

Coming in March: Auditorium Chamber Music Series presents Masters of Persian
Music; Capote; U of I Women¹s Center Lunafest; U of I American Indian Film
Festival; Grangeville Bluegrass Company

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre presents
Grangeville Bluegrass Company and Prairie Flyer in an evening of bluegrass
music on Friday, March 24, 2006 at 7:00 PM.
Tickets will go on sale March 1 for $12/ general admission and $8/child
under 13 years.
* * *

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $2/children 12 and younger
KFS passes accepted year-round for Sunday movies!

For more information, go to www.kenworthy.org or call 208-882-4127.
* * *
This week¹s movie review-

Walk the Line

Academy Award Nominations for ³Walk the Line²

Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon
Best Actor: Joaquin Phoenix
Best Sound Mixing
Best Costume
Best Film Editing

Directed by James Mangold; written by Mr. Mangold and Gill Dennis

Rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Film has hints of extramarital
sex, some prescription drug abuse and a few four-letter words.
Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes

³Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's okay,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man in Black.²


As reviewed by James Cristopher writing for the London Times

Like inmates of San Quentin prison at 7.30pm on New Year¹s Day, 1958, I
didn¹t know an awful lot about Johnny Cash. He was just another alcoholic
hick who strummed tunes. By 9pm he was a jail-house god. James Mangold¹s
extraordinary film begins and ends with this seminal concert in a cement
gymnasium, and the drama is just as addictive.

The director paints Cash in his pomp: rakishly handsome, dressed in black,
and spookily in his element. The singer never lost his Mississippi chains,
or the lifelong suspicion that he was on the wrong side of everything. Cash
couldn¹t drink enough liquor ‹ or swallow enough pills ‹ to atone for a dead
brother, a bitter father and a first marriage destroyed by fame. His lyrics
are paved with regret. But his music shaped a generation.

Joaquin Phoenix delivers one of the most magnetic performances of his career
as the Man in Black. He stews through sheaves of scene-setting exposition,
but he broods as if his life depended on it.

Both actor and character seem to crave pain in order to perform. It makes
for mesmerizing viewing. The young Cash is full of brash and bullish
innocence. There are brief visits to his air force career in Germany where
he picks up his first guitar, and a crucial audition with Sam Phillips, the
owner of Sun Studios, who gives him his big break.

Mangold¹s film plucks at the past like a needy child. There are flashbacks
to his father¹s senseless and selfish cruelty, and stoned moments where Cash
aches for the emotional security that he was denied as a boy. His first wife
seems to have it in spades. But weeks of boozy touring turn the marriage
into a sham.

The film slips into spiky drama when Cash falls under the spell of June
Carter, a bubbly performer who has burnt her fingers more times than she
cares to admit. Reese Witherspoon is a small sensation as the sassy singer
who pounds the circuit with a young Elvis Presley and a manic Jerry Lee
Lewis. The film hinges on her slow-burning romance with Cash. The intimacy
between these two hardened alley cats is electric. Needless to say, Cash
promptly falls apart after he makes the adulterous leap.

The rest, I guess, is history. The star is endlessly scraped off the floor
by Carter, and almost dragged by the hair into middle-age.

Cash¹s curse is that he was only ever truly alive when he was losing to his
own demons. Phoenix captures it perfectly. He is an uncanny spit of the man
himself when he walks on stage. His voice is close enough to send shivers
down the spine. This is not a rose-tinted homage by any stretch of the
imagination. It¹s a hair-raising trip.


As reviewed by Mark Sells writing for the Oregon Herald

"Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." With a distinguished baritone voice and a constant
rockabilly rhythm, Johnny Cash reshaped the country music landscape with
confidence. Widely recognized as the man in black, Johnny Cash became a
legend, a rebel rocker with a conscience whose songs reached out to the
impoverished, the blue collar, and the downtrodden.

"Walk the Line" chronicles Cash's early struggles, from his childhood days
in Kingsland, Arkansas to his first big break at Sun Records to the gradual
rise to fame and fortune on the country music scene, culminating in the
famous concert at Folsom Prison. But even more so, the film depicts a great
love story - the kindred spirit and long lasting romantic affair between
Johnny and June Carter Cash.

Filled with great music, "Walk the Line" pulsates with songs like "Hey,
Porter" and "Cry, Cry, Cry" that gave Johnny his start to the songs that
defined his success: "Folsom Prison Blues," "Ring of Fire," and the film's
title track. Starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, "Walk the Line"
is a stirring, straightforward musical masterpiece.

Underneath the warm and pleasant exterior, there lies a harder edge as the
film deals head on with Johnny Cash's personal afflictions involving
childhood trauma, drugs and alcohol, and pressures to perform. Mangold
brings a lot of things to the table, effortlessly evoking moments of awkward
strife, emptiness and sorrow, guilt and yearning, and that devilish abandon
that comes from drug dependency.

I am always impressed with actors willing to take risks. And in "Walk the
Line," both Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon take monumental ones,
juggling between acting, singing, and musicianship. A very difficult task
made more so by the fact that both were hand picked by Johnny and June
Carter Cash themselves - an honor and a heavy obligation rolled into one.
The two spent nearly six months in vocal training with music producer T-Bone
Burnett. And during that time, Phoenix learned to play the guitar and
Witherspoon the auto-harp. In fact, I was surprised to learn that both
actors truly sang and played each and every song. And while the sound isn't
a perfect match with their counterparts, the illusion works to perfection.
After all, it's the spirit that counts.

The film is a fitting tribute to the man in black, exuding the same rugged
simplicity and poetic beauty that filled Cash's own existence. And with two
magnificent performances from Phoenix and Witherspoon, "Walk the Line"
reverberates thematically with feelings of sorrow and redemption. In fact,
it's the kind of movie that Johnny himself would have been proud of - a
movie that was "steady like a train, sharp like a razor."


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

"Walk the Line," James Mangold's movie about Johnny Cash, is well cast,
competently written and carefully costumed, it adheres to a familiar "Behind
the Music" formula, following its subject through childhood trauma, marriage
and divorce, alternating off-stage melodrama with recreated performances
that remind us why we should care about this guy in the first place.

Comparisons with Taylor Hackford's "Ray" are inevitable. Both pictures place
on the shoulders of their relatively young stars - Jamie Foxx and, in this
case, Joaquin Phoenix - the burden of impersonating characters whose real
voices, faces and mannerisms could hardly be better known. For good measure,
"Walk the Line" also gives us brief glimpses of actors playing Elvis
Presley, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings and Jerry Lee Lewis.

There are, moreover, some striking biographical similarities between Johnny
Cash and Ray Charles, both of whom worked with the filmmakers telling their
stories, though neither lived to see the final product. Like "Ray," "Walk
the Line" tells the tale of a poor Southerner, born in the early years of
the Great Depression, whose childhood was marked by the death of a beloved
brother. Between the humble beginnings and the eventual immortality come
events that seem almost interchangeable, more like stock situations than
lived experiences. Vintage tour buses rumble down nighttime back roads. Drug
habits are acquired - heroin for Charles, prescription pills for Cash -
leading to trouble with the law and painful scenes of withdrawal. The houses
and the record labels get bigger (Charles moved from Atlantic to ABC, Cash
from Sun to Columbia), the groupies come and go, and the long-suffering
wives and girlfriends occasionally burst into angry tears.

When Cash and his combo audition at Sun Records, Sam Phillips (Dallas
Roberts) stops them in the middle of a pallid gospel tune and harangues Cash
about the importance of honest, raw emotion, advice that elicits "Folsom
Prison Blues" and a recording contract.

A great many songs and recordings followed, of course, of a richness and
variety that very few American artists have equaled. Cash's bottomless voice
and the steady, churning rhythms stayed constant, but the sheer range of
material is staggering: murder ballads, love songs, novelty numbers, pop
covers, gospel standards, all sung with mean wit and heartbreaking
sincerity.

Cash and Carter's long infatuation, tumultuous partnership and eventual
marriage provide the film with an emotional core. Johnny's first wife,
Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), aspires above all to middle-class normalcy and
material comfort, and while the filmmakers try to show her some sympathy,
she doesn't stand much of a chance next to June. Ms. Witherspoon's lively,
smart performance suggests a mixture of warmth and brisk professionalism,
qualities the actress and the singer clearly share.


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
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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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