Nobody's too big to fail

But 26 years ago, I thought Marvin Hamlisch was.

He'd already had a Broadway hit with "They're Playing Our Song," shared a Pulitzer Prize and won a Tony for the groundbreaking "A Chorus Line" and collected three Oscars in one night for "The Sting" and "The Way We Were." (He had also written "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows" for Leslie Gore -- briefly, when I was 10, my favorite song.)

Now he was composing a new musical with Howard Ashman, the witty lyricist from "Little Shop of Horrors." (Ashman's great Disney collaborations with Alan Menken were ahead of him.) They'd chosen to adapt "Smile," a satire of the beauty-pageant world that had gotten strong reviews as a movie in 1975. Future "Little Mermaid" star Jodi Benson had the leading role, and Rock Hill's own William Ivey Long (who had recently won the first of many Tonys for "Nine") did the glittering costumes.

I bought an orchestra seat weeks in advance for the second day of the Broadway run, before reviews were posted, and enjoyed the show. The songs, I thought, were especially strong. But the critics were brutal. Despite its strong advance sale, "Smile" closed six weeks later.

Hamlisch went on to win his "EGOT," as people call the Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony cycle. (He's one of only 11 people to do that competitively. Only two have also won a Pulitzer: Hamlisch and composer Richard Rodgers.)

But his career was never the same. Between "Smile" and his death this week, he never again wrote a musical that could run for six months. He never again wrote or adapted a score for a hit movie. He ended up as a musical director for tours by Barbra Streisand and Linda Ronstadt and conducted pops concerts for symphony orchestras.

His death reminded me once more how fickle show business can be. One of the hottest musical figures of the 1970s hit a couple of rough patches in the 1980s, and boom! He was old news. Maybe his confidence failed. Maybe his talent had reached its limits anyhow. Either way, he was all but gone. So I'll say R.I.P. here to a man forgotten before his time.

Mel Gibson, kicked again

You may have noticed that Mel Gibson's latest film went directly to DVD and video on demand. More likely, you didn't, which is my point: For the first time in more than 30 years, Gibson couldn't get a theatrical release for a movie in which he starred.

Early reviews for "Get the Gringo" were favorable: Gibson's apparently in "Payback" mode, as a career criminal who learns to survive in a Mexican prison with the help of a 10-year-old boy, then takes revenge on his enemies. (I haven't seen the film.) Yet no American distributor would touch it.

Gibson's anti-Semitic babble has made movie executives (many of whom are Jewish) justifiably irate. His problems with alcoholism and women, which I would guess to be related, have hurt his public image. Christians embraced him eight years ago when he directed "The Passion of the Christ," but that support has eroded over time. Thus, "Gringo" stayed in cinematic jail.

So here's my question: If Mel Gibson has made a hash of his personal life, can we separate the artist and his art?

Spiritual depth, personal decency and a benign outlook don't necessarily lead to good art: The world is full of pleasant composers, painters, writers and filmmakers who do second-rate work year after year. And monsters sometimes produce masterpieces, or we wouldn't be listening to the operas of Wagner or appreciating the paintings of Picasso.

Every audience member can vote with his feet: My dad, still disgusted by Jane Fonda's behavior during the Vietnam War, has never rented or attended one of her movies for 45 years. I have a friend now who feels the same way about Gibson; she hasn't seen anything he's made since "Signs." Both of them have missed some worthwhile motion pictures.

But a critic needs to distinguish between the worker and the work. Four years ago, Marion Cotillard made idiotic remarks about the "real" reason the World Trade Center was destroyed and doubted that astronauts walked on the moon. (She later took the WTC comments back.) Did she still deserve the Oscar for playing Edith Piaf in "La Vie En Rose"? Yes. Did she do a good job in "The Dark Knight Rises" this summer? Yes.

I have no idea whether "Get the Gringo" sizzles or stinks. But I'd have reviewed it with an open mind -- or so I hope -- if distribution companies hadn't decided to slap Gibson down.

The United States of Amnesia

That's what Gore Vidal called this country when I interviewed him seven years ago. He was about to turn 80, and though he distrusted mass media as much as ever -- Vidal preferred to do interviews via fax, so he couldn't be misquoted and had copies of his replies -- he agreed to chat about a new play that was going to get a staged reading at Duke University: "On the March to the Sea."

It was a drama about a Southern opportunist (played by Charles Durning) who christened a palatial new home and sent his sons off to the Civil War; when Union troops commandeered his estate, the man had to choose between loyalty to his friends and the Confederacy or the preservation of his wealth and estate. (Michael Learned and Chris Noth co-starred.)

Vidal, who died this week, often wrote books about history, whether in the fifth century before Christ ("Creation") or the New Deal ("The Golden Age"). He was equally fascinated by politics; his grandfather was Oklahoma's first senator, his mother married Jacqueline Kennedy's stepfather -- Vidal and JFK were close friends -- and Vidal ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1960. The two interests dovetailed in this play about "our own Trojan War," as he called it. (His grandmother came from Charleston, so he was especially interested in Southern history.)

The title of this blog refers to his disgust and sadness at Americans' short attention span, feeble collective memory and unwillingness to confront ugly truths. (He'd have been cynically amused, though not surprised, by the recent North Carolina legislation forbidding anyone but government agencies to release scientific data about the rise in sea level.)

Vidal experienced a spate of popularity in the current election year with a Broadway revival of "The Best Man," a stinging attack on rabid right-wingers and feeble left-wing intellectuals during a political primary campaign. The show had been revived not long before he and I spoke; when I asked about it, he said, "The sad thing was that the same jokes got the same laughs after 40 years. It's still topical." Sometimes, even the most acidulous cynics don't want to be proven right.

Gael force Edgar Allan Poe

I'm one-sixteenth Scottish, which I suspect would make people willing to lift a mug with me at the Scottish Games but means I have zero knowledge of Gaelic. Yet I enjoyed "An Cridhe Cabaireach," a re-telling of E.A. Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" in that language.

Technically, it's three re-tellings, all by Gardner-Webb University's Jim Lawrence, who now lives in Asheville. He'd been studying that language online with Canadian actor Angus MacLeod, who plays a madman who murders his master and then confesses to the police in the 24-minute film.

Professor Lawrence told the story through 600 video stills and a green screen, editing the action into a kind of surreal animation. He presents it in Gaelic only, Gaelic with English subtitles, and an English narration with Gaelic subtitles. (The last relies on the reedy speaking voice of GWU prof Joseph Webb, who plays the silent old man in the film and isn't a sufficiently disturbing narrator.)

Lawrence directed this short to find a use for the new language he'd learned. Yet because he's a filmmaker, the movie (available on Amazon.com) makes us re-think a classic. We're used to hearing Poe's narrator say creepy things in our own tongue, but the mellifluously exotic Gaelic forces us to re-absorb the story visually.

The film, which begins and ends in an asylum, has a picture-book quality (if anyone makes picture books about a butler who stabs someone, cuts him up and buries him beneath the parlor floor). The police are empty uniforms that stroll in and sip tea, suggesting they're figments of the narrator's imagination. Maybe the crime was never detected; maybe, if he's mad, he never committed it at all. The impressionistic quality of the movie opens it up to multiple interpretations.

Reading the Gaelic subtitles, I found almost no point of contact with Poe's English text. (Most of us probably know this story and don't need narration at all, of course.). But it was a pleasure to re-evaluate a story that has scared me since elementary school.

We'll never see THIS again

I've just finished "Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters," 500 pages of correspondence (edited by Richard Mangan) over an 87-year period from 1912 to 1999. Short review: It gave me a lot of pleasure. Long review: It's an indispensably frank look at the person I'd guess to be the greatest actor of the 20th century.

I say "guess" because he stopped appearing onstage long before I could appreciate him in America or travel to London to see him. His film and TV work is sporadic. Like Laurence Olivier, one of his two great British theatrical peers (the other being Ralph Richardson), he appeared in a lot of trash late in life to pay for the costly upkeep of a rural estate. But onstage, he could play anything from Shakespeare to Restoration comedy to Harold Pinter.

The jacket describes him as "best known for his Academy Award-winning role in the hit comedy 'Arthur.' " I wonder if that's true, now that 31 years have passed. That modestly funny comedy about an alcoholic millionaire (Dudley Moore) cared for by a shrewd butler (Gielgud) belonged to the Reagan years; I doubt Gielgud is known at all to anyone under 35.

To get to know him, listen to his recordings of "Hamlet" from the 1940s and "King Lear" from the 1990s, or watch Alfred Hitchcock's "Secret Agent" or Joseph Mankiewicz' "Julius Caesar." Or read this book, in which he comes across as kind, greedy for approval (as all actors are), bawdy, anxious, publicly diplomatic and privately blunt, capable of great love but also capable of greatly exploiting -- perhaps without realizing it -- those who loved him.

Like many members of the British upper class born before World War I, he was mildly racist and anti-Semitic. He loathed many landmarks of 20th-century culture -- "Carmina Burana," "Waiting for Godot," "The Godfather," Stephen Sondheim's musicals, Tom Stoppard's plays -- while admitting his devotion to "Dallas" and "Dynasty" and repeatedly delighting in trips to Disneyland. Yet when he offers advice, as he does about Romeo to actor Richard Sterne, he writes so intelligently that you don't want to see the role done any other way.

I gobbled the book in chunks, because he wrote to entertain his correspondents as much as inform them. As I read, I realized that not only will we never see another actor so versatile and dedicated in my lifetime -- at least, none are on the horizon -- but we will probably never see modern books like this one.

Who prints out e-mails with an eye toward helping future biographers? Who even bothers with long e-mails, anyway? You can't make a book out of a celebrity's dribblings on Twitter: "Full house tonight in Omaha. U rock, Nebraska! Next stop, Tulsa. Drummer sick, had bad cheez fries ha ha."

I don't mock abbreviated communication, because I use it myself. But it tells us only about a mini-moment in time; we don't use it to express deeper feelings or have philosophic discussions, as letter writers used to do. We could collect entries from a celebrity's blog, if he took the time to write more than a paragraph, but those are public utterances carefully written for mass consumption; they rarely reveal the most private aspects of a person, as letters can. So enjoy Gielgud's book, out now in a $16.95 paperback from Arcade Publishing. You won't see its like -- or his -- again. 

History, on the head of a pin

Other than a wedding ring, I have never worn a single piece of jewelry in my adult life. (Even my watch goes in my pocket.) Displaying a beautiful arrangement of precious stones to me is like showing a Matisse to a mule: My ignorant eyes glaze over in about 20 seconds. So I was surprised how much I enjoyed Perry's Pin-tastic Exhibit, which runs through Sept. 23 in the store at 6525 Morrison Blvd.

The Perry's staff was inspired by "Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection," an exhibit at the Mint Museum running through the same date. In fact, Perry's created a diamond brooch for the former U.S. Secretary of State and gave it to her when the Mint exhibit opened. But the pins in Perry's collection go back long before Albright's political career.

They're arranged chronologically, roughly from Queen Victoria's heyday (the period before her beloved Prince Albert died in 1861) through the 1980s. Most came into Perry's collection via estate sales, so we'll never know what inspired someone to create a pin decorated with a photo of a stern Edwardian gentleman, his regal mustache flowing. (And who outside his family would wear it?)

Compact, well-written wall placards explain the periods and styles thoroughly, but the jewels tell their own stories. Onyx, jet and black enamel dominate Victoria's 40-year period of mourning;  architectural shapes -- arches, pagodas, skyscrapers -- influence the art deco period of the 1920s and '30s; a cocky little jaybird flies out of the prosperous 1980s.

These are all pieces of jewelry for women, ranging in price from a couple of hundred dollars to mid-five-figure amounts. Looking them over, we see what expectations men had for women or women had for themselves. The demure cameos of the 19th century tell us women were expected to be quietly lovely, perhaps even educated in classical subjects: (One micromosaic depicts Greek temple ruins.)

Some pins speak in code: Daisies stood for innocence, violets for modesty, pansies for thoughts of a loved one. Jewelry woven from human hair indicated fidelity, either to a lover (when attached to a ring), the memory of a dead family member (a bracelet) or -- well, I wasn't sure what to make of the hair attached to a small cross. Dedication to Jesus, I guess, the way nuns are sometimes called brides of Christ.

Women of Edith Wharton's time, who wrapped dresses across their bodies, were expected to wear heavy shoulder pins that would test the stamina of an Olympic swimmer. Flappers allowed no such weight to impede them by the Jazz Age. By our own era, large and exotic shapes were in fashion again; animals, whether cuddly or crawly, proliferated in lighter pieces that might be popped onto a sweater or blouse.

The jewelry doesn't come with identification, so we don't know the story of the pomaded gent who stares gravely from one of the earlier brooches. We're left to imagine who he was, why he wanted to portray himself this way, or what made his descendants decide to put him on the market. The exhibit reminds us how mortal we all are, even if we try to immortalize ourselves on the head of a pin. 

The revolution will be staged (not televised)

On Q Productions begins its fourth season at Spirit Square this September. When the company sprang up in fall 2009, it ended an 18-year stretch in which no black-themed company had sustained a full season of plays. Now it's so well-established it can offer a subscription package: Through July 31, anybody who buys an $88 season pass gets the second one for $44. You have to call 704-372-1000 or go to www.carolinatix.org and use the password "revolution" to get the bargain. (The website youarenowonq.com has details.)

Why that word? Because the slogan for the fourth season is "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. It'll be Live." And revolutionary some of these plays have been.

The season begins Sept. 14-29 with "Kiss My Black Angst," a pairing of one-acts that dropped jaws (especially white jaws) in the 1960s: Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman" and Adrienne Kennedy's "Funnyhouse of a Negro," in a program directed by On Q founder Quentin Talley. Baraka's play is about a white woman and younger black man who have a sexually charged meeting on a subway; Kennedy's drama traces the last hours of a young black woman troubled by her race and searching for identity.

Next comes Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles," a one-woman show about the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed the acquittal of L.A. police officers. (Hard to believe 20 years has passed since those riots.) That runs Nov. 23-Dec. 8. The season lightens a bit from Feb. 15-March 2 with "The Social Networth," Stacey Rose's satiric play-within-a-play about the way technology shapes (or misshapes) our lives.

The final production, which runs May 24-June 8, is a local premiere and a triumphant acquisition for the company: The Pulitzer-winning "Ruined," a drama by Lynn Nottage that shows how Congolese women coped with the civil war in their country. (It has been likened loosely to Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage.")

Though Charlotte's population approaches three-quarters of a million people, we haven't always been hospitable to culture outside the white mainstream. We tend to restrict it to annual outbursts of exoticism (such as Bon Odori) or marginalize it by paying it little attention: Does anyone ever hear about Indian superstars who command $125 a ticket with live shows here?

In the case of African-Americans, we often wake up grudgingly during Black History Month, then feel we've done our duty for the year. But this whole season is fresh and varied and demands that attention must be paid, to quote a character from another famous American play. I look forward to paying it.