Coward on the Coast: eNewsletter May 30, 2009
|
|
|
For U.S. Membership Information
|
contact:
Mr. Ken Starrett
North American Director
The Noel Coward Society
49 W 68th St, Apt 1-RNew York, NY 10023(212) 877-4259email Ken |
|
Join our email list
|
 |
|
|
Featured in this issue, the San Francisco opening of Easy Virtue, directed by Stephan Elliott; excerpts from an interview with Stephan; and notes on Steve Ross's terrific performance at the MPD.
Closing soon: this is the last weekend for Private Lives at La Quinta Playhouse.
|
Easy Virtue Zooms into Wider Release
|
|
Easy Virtue (the film)
Directed by Stephan Elliott.
A jazzy update of Coward's play, with Jessica Biel, Kristin Scott
Thomas, Colin Firth, and Ben Barnes. For excerpts from my interview with Stephan Elliott on May 6th in San Francisco, click here .
For tickets and information, see:
Easy Virtue web site
Opening May 29 in these S.F. Bay Area theatres :
San Francisco
CENTURY 9 SAN FRANCISCO CENTRE
EMBARCADERO CENTER CIN. 5
EMPIRE THREE CINEMAS
KABUKI CINEMA
Other Bay Area cities:
ALBANY TWIN - Albany
CAMERA 7 THEATRE - Campbell
CINEARTS AT SANTANA ROW - San Jose
Coming Soon to:
GUILD - Menlo Park
SEQUOIA TWIN - Mill Valley
CENTURY FIVE - Pleasant Hill
REGENCY CINEMAS SIX - San Rafael
HILLCREST CINEMA FIVE - San Diego
LA JOLLA VILLAGE THEATRE - La Jolla
back to top
|
Star Quality at the MPD
|
|
Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward
Museum of Performance & Design 401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 402 San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 255-4800 Wednesday - Saturdays / Noon to 5 PM Continues through August 29 at the MPD. For more information and details on special events: star quality |
|
What's On in Southern California (May 27 - June 13) |
|
 Present Laughter
Directed by Gail Bernardi
Westchester Playhouse
8301 Hindrey Avenue
Los Angeles, CA
(310) 645-5156
kentwoodplayers.org
Fridays/Saturdays 8 PM
Sundays 2 PM
(May 8 - June 13)
Dylan Little, The Daily Breeze: "What might be a typical week for Garry Essendine in the Kentwood Players production of 'Present Laughter' is fast-paced fun for everyone in the audience. The play is consistently witty and full of laughs."
___________________________________________
Private Lives
La Quinta Playhouse
Old Town La Quinta, CA, 92253
Tickets through Brown Paper Tickets:
brown paper tickets
laquintaplayhouse
(May 8-31)
___________________________________________
back to top
|
Steve Ross in San Francisco
|
|
Coward the Songwriter: 
A Talk with Music by Steve Ross
Museum of Performance & Design
May 27 at 7:00 PM
A full house at the Museum of Performance & Design enjoyed a
wonderful evening with Steve Ross and
the music of Noël Coward. Interwoven with quotes from and about Coward, plus descriptions of Coward's process as a composer/lyricist, Steve sang the following songs:
Medly: Mad About the Boy and Play Orchestra, Play.
Mrs. Worthington; (Epitaph for An Elderly Actress);
Why Must the Show Go On?; I Travel Alone, Sail Away,
Why Do the Wrong People Travel; Bar on the Piccola Marina, Matelot, World Weary; (Poem about Bali);
A Room with a View, What's Going to Happen to the Tots?;
Twentieth-Century Blues, Where are the Songs We Sung?;
I'll Follow My Secret Heart, That is the End of the News,
Someday I'll Find You; "Naughty 5th Verse" for Mad About the Boy;
Poor Little Rich Girl, Dance Little Lady, Never Again, Marvelous Party;
London Pride, Porter/Coward Let's Fall in Love; and
I'll See You Again.
A note from Jack Foley (Oakland, California poet and broadcaster at KPFA radio - 94.1 FM):
"Steve Ross's performance tonight was just wonderful. I knew just about all the songs Steve sang--melodies and lyrics--and I knew them in Noel Coward's voice because I'd heard so many of Coward's performances. What Steve managed to do was to remake every last song he sang. Not a single rolled r, no Britishisms even when he sang about "London Pride." Oddly enough, it was as if Steve were consciously avoiding the way Coward sang the songs--and yet what he sang was marvelously expressive.
I found myself laughing heartily or feeling deeply touched by songs I knew very well. It had to do with Steve's inflections, the little surprises as he sang, the little looks he sometimes gave, the riffs he played. Gershwin showed up momentarily--which was certainly a surprise. Everything seemed marvelously new--yet I knew very well that all these were old songs, songs I knew inside and out. Yet Steve showed me that I didn't know them as well as all that: I didn't know they could be done so differently from the way Coward did them and still be tremendous songs. Make it new, wrote Ezra Pound. That's exactly what Steve did to every song he sang."
back to top
|
Coming in June...
|
|
.
 Presentation by John Lahr:
Museum of Performance & Design
Veterans Building, Fourth Floor
401 Van Ness Avenue #402
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 255-4800
John Lahr, the brilliant theatre critic for The New Yorker and author of Coward The Playwright, comes to the Museum of Performance & Design for a special talk on Coward's work.
This event is made possible thanks to the generous support of The Noël Coward Foundation.
Tickets: MPD. Members - $10/ Non-Members $15.
(June 17 at 7:00 PM)
___________________________________________
Antaeus Theatre Company
The Young Idea Project
Deaf West Theatre
5112 Lankershim Blvd
North Hollywood, CA 91601
(818) 506-5436
To help nurture a love for Coward's material in young artists and young audiences, young actors from the Antaeus Academy will present readings of:
HAY FEVER (June 26)
PEACE IN OUR TIME (June 27)
EASY VIRTUE - the play (June 28)
This event is made possible thanks to the generous support of The Noël Coward Foundation.
back to top
|
|
|
___________________________________________________________________________________
Easy Virtue: An Interview with Stephan Elliott - May 6, 2009
[Liaison Kathy Williams interviewed Director Stephan Elliott at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, two hours before the opening of Easy Virtue at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Here are excerpts from that interview.]
KW: When Joe Abrams and Barnaby Thompson came to you with Easy Virtue, you were in a hospital bed, recovering from a broken back. Your initial take was, "Why on earth are you bringing me Noël Coward?" Your writing partner, Sheridan Jobbins, said, "What? You? Write Noël Coward?" So... How did you go for it?
SE: Two steps. Initially, it was drugged to the eyeballs that I went, "Ah, yeah ... yeah, why not! Coward!!" And a year or two later, I was saying, "Oh my god ... how did they ... they've given me Coward! This is madness!" I said to Joe and Barnaby, "It's Coward. It's very staid. It's all set in one room, and three acts. I really don't think I'm the right guy for this. And the key was what Barnaby said to me - and what Joe said, "No, actually that's why we're here. Because probably you are the wrong guy for it in some ways!"
At that point I said [to myself], "That's interesting. That's a challenge." Because I develop all my own stuff. I don't adapt stuff. I write very slowly. I've only made a handful of films. You always say No. You say No! Even in a hospital bed, you say no every time. What an interesting way to come to you the way they did. And I thought, you know, I'm going to rise to the challenge of this. And I will write it first, with Sheridan - we'll write it. I'm not going to commit to directing.
Then I started doing some serious Coward homework, beyond what I knew of him, which was from school, like the great lines and the songs, which of course I know backwards. I started delving into the man, really getting into his psyche, and I found a real chunk of myself in there - I mean, he was subversive. If you gave him black or white, he would change it. "Don't tell me this is how it is," Coward will say, "This is how you think it is ...." And he'll come at it from five different angles to prove that that is not how it is: that is the front you're putting up, about how it is, and why it's black or white, and how you made it black or white. That's who Coward was - pulling the layers off.
Larita is exactly that person, and I found myself, like Larita, being stuck in this stagnant , dying world [of The Whittakers] ... of just wanting to go mad! I just wanted to get out and whip these hypocrites to pieces. When I found my line in with Larita, I began to slowly fall very much in love with it and began to get what Coward was doing.
KW: In the play Larita is French. Why in the film is she an American?
SE: Again, from looking into it. Coward wanted to do the collision of the old world and the new. This is a dead-on train wreck between old world and new world. And that wonderful line of Coward's [in the play], which is (it's in the [stage] direction): "Mrs. Whittaker feels like she's missed out on something, which of course means she's missed out on everything." That's the pivotal point of this whole play. So we put that line in, with someone making a joke about her, but that's the real key.
When you see the film, I think you'll see the image that I want. I want this gray, stagnant, old thing, which is crumbling, and falling apart. And I want this alien spaceship to land, and this alien to get out. So we've done it. We've got this beautiful silver BMW, and Jessica gets out in black and white and silver. And that's it: I've done the alien landing, and they [the Whittakers] just all die. You can see it: everybody just freezes. And that's where the American thing came from. It is the future versus the past.
KW: Tell me about your comment: "Never try and out-Coward Coward."
SE: Never try and out-Coward Coward. It was: to think Coward. It was to study him. To watch and read as much as we could. And then: think Coward! We're talking about two people [Elliott and Jobbins] who spent three years doing this [writing the script]. Coward rattled this play off in around about 18 hours .
KW: In the same year, he was acting in The Vortex, writing Hay Fever, and then writing this ... at age 23!
SE: It's daunting when you look at it like that - that we spent three years on this script, and he knocked it off in a couple of days. Famously, of course, Hitchcock shot the thing as a silent movie. So, how do you write Noël Coward as a silent movie? (laughs) In Hitchcock's film there is one card of Coward's original dialogue: One! That's it! And even then, Hitchcock threw the play out the window - his [film] was about a courtroom drama. At the end of the day, [it] talks about Larita and this terrible secret that she's got in her past.
Hitchcock was a baby [when he made the silent film of Easy Virtue]. When he did it, he didn't know what he was doing. He was a guy with a silent camera, and he was a kid. So, when I looked at it, all I learned from that [his film] is: This isn't Hitchcock! It's a film school thing.
But there's two shots in it - two shots - during which you could say, "Hah, hah!" There are two lap dissolves, [and you could see] that Hitchcock had something. The brain was beginning to turn. So what I then said was: if Hitchcock was 52 years old (when he was in his prime) and did it [filmed Easy Virtue], instead of being 20, [his age when he made the silent movie]: how would the older Hitchcock have done it? And that became my visual metaphor, and you'll see it tonight. I kept thinking what the old Hitch would have done, the grown-up Hitch.
So I had The Master in one corner and the Master of Suspense in the other corner, and the two Masters were coming down, and I'd look both ways and go both ways. But that gave the film its visual flair, is what the older Hitch would have done. And a lot of the humanity, and a lot more of the humor which we took - 'cause this [play] is a melodrama - we took a lot more of that classic Coward [Brief Encounter, and whatever, it's just heart-breaking] ... so we took a lot of that: the older Coward and a lot of the older Hitchcock and combined it into a single force, and they were our two anchors.
KW: Are you considering any other Coward-related projects?
SE: Yes. [At the moment,] we're just trying to get through this one. But the experience has been so enjoyable! You'll be happy to know that we're beginning to read our way through the library again. Because, if this [Easy Virtue] does work, I'll definitely give it a shot. There is one we're looking at, but I can't tell you that yet. To be revealed when it's ready!
back to top
|
|
Cheers,
Kathy Williams
U.S. West Coast Liaison
The Noel Coward Society |
|
|
|
|
|
