Susan Carroll specializes in historical fiction that mixes intrigue, magic and sweeping romance. Carroll's newest book, The Lady of Secrets, is the sixth volume in her Dark Queen series. Like the others, it involves a smart, somewhat haunted heroine, a "daughter of the earth" who practices healing arts on a French island.
The newest Lady of Faire Isle is Meg Wolfe, whose mother was a very dark and dangerous witch. With her mother's death behind her, Meg attempts to make her own path, a much more peaceful one than her mother envisioned, but events conspire against her, beginning with the arrival of two mysterious Englishmen. With talk of spells and witchery connected to a Silver Rose -- a name Meg's mother once attached to her -- Meg is pulled to England, where King James has made a habit of putting a torch to women who take any steps toward magic.
Carroll jumps into the 17th century and across the English Channel with
this book, which gives her an opportunity to move beyond Catherine de
Medici, the Dark Queen who gave her name to the series. As always, Carroll's characters are terrific, and Meg is a truly worthy heroine, trying to live down the shadows of the past and find a place where she fits in the world. She has two potential suitors, and we're left in the dark as to who's who or which she'll choose for a good long while, but I have to say, I found the Right Man much more appealing than the Wrong Man from the get-go. There is danger and real suspense as the story unspools, with a backdrop of Guy (also known as Guido) Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot as well as James' superstitions and penchant for witchhunting.
One last note -- the cover, as you can see above, is simply gorgeous. Carroll has had some great ones from Ballantine, but The Lady of Secrets may just be her most beautiful yet. And everything that the cover promises, the book delivers. In this case, you can judge a book by its cover.
The Lady of Secrets is available at bookstores right now, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble. If you'd like to catch up with some of Susan's older titles, she is now offering Kindle and iBook editions. You'll find details on those books here.
When Charles Durning died last week at the age of 89, the stories of his life sounded like something Dickens would've written. He had one heck of a journey, that's for sure. Larger than life in all his roles, Durning made it through childhood poverty, incredible war service, Shakespeare with Joseph Papp, a stint as a dance teacher, and then more television and film roles than you could throw a stick at, including nominations for Tony, Oscar and Emmy Awards. He won a Golden Globe for his appearance as John Fitzgerald (AKA Honey Fitz) in 1990's TV miniseries The Kennedys of Massachusetts, a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Durning was born in Highland Falls, New York, a small town whose only other claim to fame was that Billy Joel lived there for awhile in the 70s. Durning's family was large, but poor, and five of his nine siblings died in childhood. According to the New York Post, his first experience with theater came when he worked as an usher at a burlesque show in Buffalo, New York. When one of the comedians showed up soused to the gills, Durning supposedly went on in his place, basking in the laughter and finding his place in the world.
But then he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving among the troops rushing Omaha Beach on D-Day. All around him, his fellow soldiers were going down, but somehow Durning survived, the only member of his unit to make it. With wounds in his legs, hands and head, he was patched up and sent back, just in time for the Battle of the Bulge. For his military service, Durning received three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star. He didn't talk much about those days until an appearance on PBS's Memorial Day television celebration in 2007. You can hear what he had to say in the clip linked here.
After that, he returned to New York, taking a job as a dance instructor. He supposedly said that dancing was easy, but acting was hard. By the early 60s, Durning was appearing regularly in Shakespeare productions with Joseph Papp's Public Theater. He also began to get roles on Broadway, like the musicals Drat! The Cat! and Pousse-Café, two shows that played for 11 performances combined. The Happy Time with Robert Goulet was more successful, although Durning's role wasn't one of the ones that got a lot of notice. It was in That Championship Season, Jason Miller's Pulitzer Prize winner, that Durning really began to break out. Another Joseph Papp production, the play transferred from Off-Broadway to Broadway's Booth Theatre in 1972, winning the Tony for Best Play to go with the Pulitzer. Durning earned a Drama Desk nomination for his role as George Sikowski, one of the reunited basketball players who has traded on his former sports success to become the mayor of their town, even though his wife is cheating on him with one of the other players and his political career is in serious jeopardy because he's so bad at it. It was the kind of role Durning did best, as an authority figure with cracks in his facade, an uneasy jocularity, and a sense of warmth and vulnerability even when playing unpleasant roles.
Durning had done more than twenty TV and film appearances by the time The Sting came along in 1973, but his performance as Snyder, the bulldog of a cop who keeps coming after Robert Redford's Johnny Hooker, really put him on the map. He also got noticed for another cop role in 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, picking up an award from the National Board of Review and a Golden Globe nomination.
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) showed off his singing and dancing skills, earning him an Oscar nomination in the process. You can watch him "Do a little sidestep" in the clip below.
Durning was nominated for an Oscar again in 1984 for his role as a bumbling Nazi colonel in Mel Brooks' remake of To Be or Not to Be, plus he picked up numerous Emmy nominations, including two for his work on Evening Shade, where he played a small-town doctor alongside pal Burt Reynolds, his costar from Whorehouse.
Back on Broadway, he played Big Daddy in a 1990 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, taking home the Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play. Durning was Matthew Brady opposite George C. Scott in Inherit the Wind, the other half of The Gin Game opposite Julie Harris, and the ex-president in the 2000 revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man.
But my personal favorite performance from Durning is in the Coen Brothers' film The Hudsucker Proxy, where he played Hudsucker himself, setting the plot in motion when he jumps out a window from the very top of the Hudsucker Industries Building. You can see the dancing man, the joy of performance and the wonderful character actor in his Hudsuckerscenes. Here he is, as an angel, in the scene below.
The life of Charles Durning, with his Oliver Twist beginnings, his heroic military career, his rise to fame and fortune, would've made a great movie. It's just too bad he isn't here to star.
As we near the end of 2012, we have some very intriguing shows to look for in 2013. One of the strangest is probably Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine, set for performances from April 5 to 13 at Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts.
The Adding Machine is an expressionistic piece about an everyday schlub, a nobody named Mr. Zero, who is what you might call a pencil pusher. Mr. Zero has held the same job for 25 years. But now he's about to be replaced by a machine. An adding machine. Without his job, Mr. Zero truly is nothing, and he has a violent reaction to the boss who announces the arrival of the machine. That takes Mr. Zero on a journey through the justice system and eventually a weirdly surreal afterlife called the Elysian Fields.
You may recognize Elmer Rice's name for Street Scene more than The Adding Machine, given that he won a Pulitzer Prize for the former. But it's the latter that gets revived more often, and its picture of an inhumane industrial world seems to resonate throughout the decades.
Tennessee Williams riffed on the same basic idea in his play Stairs to the Roof, which I saw some years ago at the University of Illinois. There was also a 1969 film of The Adding Machine which starred Milo O'Shea as Mr. Zero, as well as a 2008 musical version directed by David Cromer that started in Chicago and made it to the Minetta Lane Theatre Off-Broadway, where it picked up numerous Lucille Lortel and Drama Desk awards.
For ISU, MFA directing candidate Jeremy Garrett will take the controls on this Adding Machine, with David Fisch, who played Queen Elizabeth I, Adolph Hitler and Ronald Reagan in last year's Passion Play, taking on Mr. Zero.
Others in the cast include Caitlin Boho as Mrs. Zero, Lizzy Haberstroh as Daisy, and Storm Angone, Pat Boylan, Trace Gamache, Matt Helms, Dominique Jackson, Drew Mills, Kent Nusbaum, Jenny Oziemkowski, Jason Raymer, Allison Sokolowski, Kelly Steik, Kaitlyn Wehr and Arif Yampolsky in multiple roles.
Jake Wasson will design the set, with Olivia Crosby as costume designer and Deborah Smrz as lighting designer.
I'm not sure what I think of The Adding Machine in the expansive CPA. If ever a show seemed suited to a stripped-down black box, it's this one. But it does have a large cast. And there is that Elysian Fields scenery to think about. So I guess we'll just have to see what Garrett and his cast pull out of the hat to put up the world of Elmer Rice's imagination.
Click here for more information about The Adding Machine and all of ISU's upcoming season.
So we've already talked about Ernst Lubitsch's lovely Ninotchka, with Greta Garbo going from cold to hot, as the 7 pm (Central time) show in TCM's evening of Lubitsch. But after that, at 9 pm, it's To Be or Not to Be.
Ah, To Be or Not to Be... I love this movie. It's a wonderful comedy from 1942, based on Lubitsch's own story, but it also represents a bit of risky film business. The risks included the setting -- Poland during World War II -- the concept -- a troupe of Shakespearean actors in Poland during World War II, including comedian Jack Benny as the troupe's leading man -- and a bunch of oddball supporting characters, including a Nazi colonel whose nickname is "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt. Dark humor, to be sure. Lubitsch decided to fight the Nazis the way he knew best. With humor.
If the premise was risky, the film's timing was terrible. It premiered in February, 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor and the United States' entry into the war, one short month after star Carole Lombard perished in a plane crash while returning from a trip to sell war bonds. And those terrible events made To Be or Not to Be seem "callous and macabre" to critics like Bosley Crowther in the New York Times.
Years later, with a bit more distance, To Be or Not to Be doesn't seem rude or mean at all. Instead, its dark comedy is terrific, as is Jack Benny as a very unlikely Shakespearean actor. It's hard to imagine Benny playing Shakespeare at all, and especially not Hamlet, but it turns out to be hilarious. (I wonder if he ever tried Malvolio.) At any rate, Benny's Joseph Tura gets slammed as an actor who is doing to Shakespeare what the Nazis were doing to Poland.
Carole Lombard is luminous as his wife, Maria, and every bit as funny as Benny, if in a totally different way. The running gag is that she cheats on him every time he has a soliloquy. That means her lover, who is sitting in the audience, gets up and walks out every time Joseph Tura hits "To be nor not to be."
The movie is full of that kind of sly, knowing humor, ably brought to life by some of the best character actors ever. Sig Ruman, who was one of the three comrades playing hooky in Ninotchka, is "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt, hunky Robert Stack is the aviator Mrs. Tura is sneaking around with, and Tom Dugan plays Bronski, who can do a dead-on impersonation of Hitler that comes in handy. But the best of the bunch is Felix Bressart, a Jewish actor who shows up in a lot of Lubitsch films, like The Shop Around the Corner and Ninotchka. Whether it was the bushy mustache, the kind eyes (often seen behind spectacles) or just his genial manner, Bressart projected a lot of warmth in his roles. Greenberg, the part he plays in To Be or Not to Be, is one of his best. Like Bressart, Greenberg is a Jew. An actor with Tura's troupe, he has one major desire in life -- to get to perform Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech from The Merchant of Venice. Bressart bites into Greenberg with gusto, making you love him and Greenberg and root for both of them to get to play their parts.
I love To Be or Not to Be. It's smart and funny and the perfect movie for people who think comedy is the best revenge.
As part of this month's tribute to director Ernst Lubitsch, Turner Classic Movies is filling the last Friday evening in 2012 with four Lubitsch films. And these are good ones, too. Their glamor, romance and sly humor make them perfect End O' Year fare.
First up, in the marquee slot at 7 pm Central time is Ninotchka, the 1939 romantic comedy advertised under a "Garbo laughs!" banner. With a screenplay by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch and the famous "Lubitsch touch" evident throughout, Ninotchka is lighter than air, witty and smart, taking on serious subjects (Capitalism vs. Communism, Russian expats, the grim rules and regulations of the Stalinist state) in the most charming possible way.
Greta Garbo stars as Ninotchka herself, an icy, uncompromising Communist envoy sent to Paris on Soviet business. She's specifically there to retrieve three comrades (played by Felix Bressart, Alexander Granach and Sig Ruman) who have been corrupted by the decadence and capitalist joy of Paris, as personified by Melvyn Douglas's Count Leon, who's been plying them with hot and cold running cigarette girls and room service in their luxurious hotel. He has ulterior motives, since he's involved with an exiled Russian Grand Duchess (Ina Clair) who wants to get back her confiscated jewelry, the very jewelry the three previous emissaries were supposed to be selling in Paris to pad the Soviet treasury.
Once chilly Comrade Ninotchka comes up against the debonair count and his pencil-thin mustache, she begins to thaw, going so far as to buy a frivolous hat, drink too much and spend the night in his arms. Will love prevail when the Grand Duchess steals back her jewelry? Will Ninotchka's sense of duty to the Soviet state force her to reject Leon's materialistic world? Will she ever find her way back to her Parisian count?
Is there even a doubt?
Ninotchka is one of those classic movies that fans of romantic comedy, fans of Lubitsch and fans of Garbo hold close to their hearts. Lubitsch went on to The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not To Be, the movie that will follow Ninotchka tonight on TCM, but Garbo did only one more film -- 1941's Two-Faced Woman -- before retiring from the screen completely. Ninotchka represents a world gone by, where even the hardest heart could be melted by silly jokes in a Paris sidewalk cafe. Lubitsch made Garbo laugh. And it was lovely.
Singer Fontella Bass, best known for her 1965 hit "Rescue Me," passed away yesterday in St. Louis, her hometown. "Rescue Me" (which Bass is shown singing in the Youtube clip above, taken from the "Shindig!" show) was a million-seller, hitting #4 on the pop charts in 1965. It was revived for a popular commercial in the 90s, too, although Bass had to sue to get her share of the profits as a co-songwriter on the tune.
I loved "Rescue Me." Still do. That song personified the mid-60s soul-pop sound for a lot of people. So I suggest we all put "Rescue Me" on repeat as we remember the late, great Fontella Bass.
Tony Kushner called Constance Congdon's Tales of the Lost Formicans a look at the "postmodern, collective nervous breakdown American society has been having." I suppose that's as good a description as any.
In Congdon's play, we begin with alien anthropologists studying Earth in the 20th Century as they try to piece together who these "Lost Formicans" were based on the detritus they left behind. That includes kitchen tables and chairs and "numerous wheeled sarcaphogae used
to carry spirits to the next world." Or, you know, cars.
Within the alien framing device, Congdon gives us Cathy, mother to a 15-year-old, coming home to live with her parents after a messy divorce. But home isn't exactly a walk in the park. Her dad has Alzheimer's, Mom isn't coping well, son Eric is unhappy beyond belief to be transported to this weird world, and there's a conspiracy nut named Jerry who keeps popping up. Cathy's childhood friend Judy is still in the neighborhood, but she's full of stories about suicide and dead dogs.
It's to Congdon's credit that this portrait of America in the late 80s, seen from an alien point of view, is funny, surreal, incredibly irreverent and sad, all at the same time. The story isn't linear. It isn't rooted in reality. Its characters are crazy. But they sure feel real when it comes right down to it.
ISU Associate Professor Deb Alley will direct the production scheduled to play in the intimate space at Centennial West 207 from March 28 to April 6, 2013. Her cast has also been announced, with Michelle Stine, last seen in an exquisite performance as mute daughter Kattrin in Mother Courage, in the role of Cathy, Jacki Dellamano (The Marriage of Bette and Boo) and Joseph Faifer (Noises Off) as her parents, Carlos Kmet as her son Eric, and Hannaniah Wiggins as Jerry, the sweet conspiracy theorist next door.
That adds up a great cast and a great director working on a great script. All kinds of possibilities for alien anthropologists!
