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<FONT FACE="Verdana"><B>This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre-<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Stage Beauty (R)<BR>
</H2></FONT><B>Friday, January 28<BR>
7:00PM<BR>
Saturday & Sunday, January 29 & 30<BR>
4:30 and 7:00PM<BR>
</B>$5 adults <BR>
KFS passes accepted for Sunday movies<BR>
<B>(See Review below)<BR>
* * *<BR>
</B><BR>
<B>February 2005 at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre . . .<BR>
</B><BR>
<B>Being Julia (R)<BR>
</B>Feb 4 at 7:00 PM<BR>
Feb 5 - 6 at 4:30 and 7:00 PM<BR>
<BR>
<B>Yes Men (NR)<BR>
</B>Feb 11 at 7PM<BR>
Feb 12 – 13 at 5:00 and 7:00 PM<BR>
<BR>
<B>House of Flying Daggers (R)<BR>
</B>Feb 18 at 7PM<BR>
Feb 19 – 20 at 4:15 and 7:00 PM<BR>
<BR>
UI Architecture Dept presents<BR>
<B>Will Bruder lecture<BR>
</B>February 25 at 5:00 PM<BR>
FREE<BR>
<BR>
<B>Dig (NR)<BR>
</B>Feb 26 at 7:00 PM<BR>
Feb 27 at 4:15 and 7:00 PM<BR>
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<B>Regular Movie prices</B>: $5 adults, $2 children 12 and younger. <BR>
KFS passes accepted for Sunday movies<BR>
<BR>
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho<BR>
For more information, call 208-882-4127 or visit www.kenworthy.org<BR>
<B>* * *<BR>
This week’s review-<BR>
<BR>
<FONT COLOR="#800000"><FONT SIZE="5">Stage Beauty</FONT></FONT> <BR>
</B><BR>
Directed by Richard Eyre<BR>
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes<BR>
''Stage Beauty'' is rated R (Under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sexual references and situations, and some nudity.<BR>
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<B><I><U>As reviewed by Michael Wilmington writing for the Chicago Tribune<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
"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.<BR>
<BR>
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.<BR>
<BR>
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).<BR>
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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 … ."<BR>
<BR>
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."<BR>
<BR>
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.<BR>
<BR>
<B><I><U>As reviewed by A. A. Scott writing for the New York Times<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
''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. <BR>
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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. <BR>
<BR>
''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. <BR>
<BR>
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. <BR>
<BR>
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. <BR>
<BR>
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. <BR>
<BR>
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. <BR>
<BR>
<B><I><U>As reviewed by Carla Meyer writing for the San Francisco Chronicle<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
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. <BR>
<BR>
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. <BR>
<BR>
<I>Reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart<BR>
</I>* * *<BR>
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</B></FONT>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<BR>
PAMELA PALMER, <B>Volunteer<BR>
</B>Mailto:ppalmer@moscow.com<BR>
Film and Events Committee <BR>
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre<BR>
<BR>
http://www.kenworthy.org<BR>
To speak with a KPAC staff member, <BR>
call (208) 882-4127<BR>
Mailto:kpac@moscow.com<BR>
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