Angels in America, the HBO Movie

The HBO thing is much better, though it's a little long. The comments about Pacino are OTM.

i kind of get don's antipathy (knowing who don is anyway) since kushner/AinA is rosenberg-apologist...

these have been playing on hbo lately; my previous contact was limited to harold bloom's opinion of them (yeah yeah i know) which is that the plays posit that we are all, in some sense, similar, but fails in this position cos the play only "has life" when its malvolio character has the stage.

...which is fairly counter-argued by these films cos (as said above) jeffrey wright is so so good and pacino is so so bad. and i coulnd't read the theme of "similary" that bloom is strawmanning either, fwiw.

politically tricky in its vilification of mormonism. i agree that the LDS is repugnant, but then, i did already, get me? the gay lawyer dude telling louis to "accept the irredeemability of the world" or whatever seemed phoned in (the writing i mean, the actor was ok). as a "soaring paean to gay survival" yes, absolutely... as an "evisceration of conservativism and its miseries," no, i think it's missing something. Kushner simulates his compassion for that world but but but. i don't know what to say abt what's wrong with it, but since i've brought up malvolio, he threatens revenge and exits left, Kushner's baddies are redeemed or killed, how nice.

"The first part, Millennium Approaches, was commissioned and performed at its world premiere in May 1991 by the Eureka Theatre Company of San Francisco..."

So assuming the Reagan Justice guy's lines weren't added subsequently, I wouldn't tie them to High Clintonism. (Clinton's two terms are as symptomatic of the Death of Liberalism as anything.) I think Louis speaks for Kushner when he says "I hate the Democrats too, but..."

Finally saw the Nichols film on DVD. Pacino just fine (Ron Leibman and F Murray Abraham did a lot more spitting and screaming as Cohn on Broadway -- partly cuz they could), Streep and Wright also brilliant.

I though the intentionally anticlimactic Heaven scene actually worked better than onstage, as did the rabbi's opening eulogy. I'm really not sure how Kushner wants us to think/feel about Joe Pitt -- is he the character he has the least compassion for, even less than Cohn?

They cut one of the biggest laugh lines from Broadway:

BELIZE: New York's biggest closet queen just checked into my ward...

PRIOR: Koch?

As awkward and ungainly as a lot of this is on screen, it's also terribly moving in places, now that I'm watching it a second time. Patrick Wilson, Jeffrey Wright, and Al Pacino (his last great hambone performance) -- all fine. The only one I don't care for, as usual, is Streep, but only because she, curiously, is the most uncomfortable and stagebound.

Pretty much feel the same--some of it was a mess, but it stayed with me, and I felt like I'd really seen something. I'll watch it a second time somewhere down the road. I thought the Cohn-Rosenberg scenes were effectively weird.

the play is being revived at the court theatre in chicago! chicago folks, go see it and tell me i should come see it, too!

if you've only seen the miniseries and you live in chicago, you should really check it out. the play is magic.

Charles Newell, guy directing the Court production, is a pretty great minimalist.

('shoe, are you back in town? I bet we could get a group together to go.)

plus, cohn and the lawyer from justice gushing abt reagan's "new uniquely american political personality" and chortling abt the "death of liberalism" must have been quit a titter during high clintonism,

because "high Clintonism" was "Reaganism unleashed"?

minimalism is not a partic good fit for AiA

He staged Caroline, or Change a few years ago, and Kusher was crazy about it. More an essentialist than a minimalist--gets to the heart of the play, likes sparse playing space.

Here's more on the Newell/Kushner working relationship and the new Angels production:
http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/theater/15235886/court-theatre%E2%80%99s-revival-of-tony-kushner%E2%80%99s-angels-in-america

maybe we shd shorten the thread title someday

epic oral history

Tony Kushner: During that rehearsal period, someone on the board gave me their spider-infested cabin on the Russian River, and I went away for 10 days—it was early April—and I sat down, and I started writing. And I wrote 700 pages of Perestroika in 10 days—three times as much as would ultimately be in it, all by hand. And it was literally like The Red Shoes—I could not stop writing. If I tried to go to sleep, I would wake up two minutes later and just go. And a lot of the best stuff that’s in the play now was in that first draft. I got in the car to drive back, even though I hadn’t slept in 11 days, and I was literally shaking from exhaustion. I didn’t have a computer—it was just a big stack of legal paper. And I thought, if I go off the cliff into the Pacific Ocean, no one will ever know what happened, so I have to be really careful.

David Esbjornson: It was like Moses coming down from the mountain! We went out that night to celebrate with champagne. I said, “Tomorrow we’ll read Perestroika.” So we started at 10, and 6:30 came and went and we were still reading it.

Tony Kushner: In this 700-page, really long version, there was a lot of shit. I mean, something with a homeless kid. ... A chauffeur? One of the reasons that I could write for 10 days without stopping is I was just, “Nobody ever has to know what I’ve done here.”

David Esbjornson: I did finally just go, Oh, shit. There was no money. It’s not like you can just throw bodies and cash at it, you just have to do it.

Robert Hurwitt (theater critic in San Francisco): As with any theater community, there were people who were saying “Oh my god, they are going to fall flat on their face.” This thing has gotten blown all out of proportion and the second part isn’t even ready yet!

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/cover_story/2016/06/oral_history_of_tony_kushner_s_play_angels_in_america.html

Great. Thanks for the link!

this is an extraordinary piece of writing, I really wish I'd seen a theater production, but the HBO version is amazing too.

Watched this for a second time the last couple of nights. The performances are so good. I'd give honours to Justin Kirk and Meryl Streep, but everyone's close to perfect. (All I know is the movie, so nothing to compare them to.) Loved the music, too--going to seek out the soundtrack. And get Citizen Cohn out of the library.

Upcoming London revival of play has Nathan Lane as Cohn; strange.

just watched the first episode and it was fantastic. i'll skip the thread until i finish it. i have to say, almost everyone is giving standout performances, and it makes mary-louise parker's (imo) badness stand out. it's too bad, because, so far, she's really the only female presence in the story, and her story is interesting and i would like to maybe see someone else give it a shot.

episode 2, the part near the middle and end where the people who deeply care extricate themselves. that was written by someone who knew that.

that is everything, maybe even the fundamental decision we all face, in different ways. we face cruel inujustice, and soon after, whether to give it a name and acknowledge it, or not. but either way, we all face it

One thing that disappointed me in the HBO version was that Justin Kirk as Prior was pretty flat, to the point that Louis felt more like the lead character.

I got to see the play with all of the original cast except Ron Leibman, and Stephen Spinella as Prior was the absolute standout.

I remember Morbs raving about Adam Driver as Louis in an off-Broadway production before Driver had even done Girls.

It really has held up, and reading the recent Nichols biography made clear to what degree he poured everything he knew about theatre, theatre acting, and how to adapt theatre for film.