Jessie Buckley and the Luck of the Irish

Well, it’s all over now but the shouting. The 98^th annual Academy Awards ceremony is in the books, and most viewers (me included) are rather happy about the outcome. Timothée Chalamet was gracious in defeat as Michael B. Jordan was hailed for his lead performance(s) in Sinners. (Trivia time: the only other actor who won the Oscar for playing twins was Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou.) Some of the actresses on display looked suitably gorgeous while others (I’m looking at YOU, Renate Reinsve) just seemed, well, a bit weird. Host Conan O’Brien was a hoot wearing Amy Madigan’s red fright wig from Weapons, being chased up the aisle of the Dolby Theatre by a pack of very excited kids. The glamorous and uninhibited Teyana Taylor seemed to have surgically attached herself to the leg of Paul Thomas Anderson as he strode to the stage to receive one of three long-overdue statuettes. There was real heartfelt emotion in the In Memorian segment, particularly in Billy Crystal’s tribute to Rob and Michele Reiner.

 But I want to focus on one of the evening’s least suspenseful awards: that for Best Actress. Everyone seemed to agree from the get-go that Jessie Buckley was a lock for  playing Shakespeare’s grieving wife in Hamnet. I too loved her performance, but it made me more curious than ever about how her career evolved. I first spotted Buckley in a small 2018 film called Wild Rose. It focuses on a young Scottish single mother who loves American country music and dreams of traveling to Nashville. Buckley impressed me in that role, and I figured she was a talented young Scot with a bright career ahead of her. Wrong! Buckley is Irish, and apparently the first Irish actress ever to win a major acting Oscar. So her win was well-timed, just ahead of St. Patrick’s Day.

 As to the question of how Buckley’s career got started, I’ve discovered something quite charming. Back in 2008, at the ripe old age of 18, she was a contestant on a BBC competition show called I’d Do Anything. The show’s title came from a perky song in the musical, Oliver! (based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist) which was a massive hit in London and New York before being transformed into an Oscar-winning film. The gimmick of the TV show was that various aspiring young singing actresses were competing to win the star role of Nancy in an upcoming West End revival of Oliver!, with votes from the public making all the difference. You can find the show’s finale on YouTube, with Buckley and another singer-actress, costumed identically, each singing Nancy’s big torch number, “As Long as He Needs Me.” 

Guess what! Buckley came in second, though guest panelist Andrew Lloyd Webber passionately campaigned on her behalf. For me, looking back on the competition after several decades, Buckley was a star in the making. I am not expert enough at singing to comment on the technical prowess of the two contestants, but there’s no question that Buckley was better at pouring into this song a deep well of emotions. Clearly, she understood the lyrics. 

 The Jessie Buckley of 2008 was not exactly the woman we saw on stage at the Dolby. At 18 she was very slim with a mop of curly hair and a fair amount of makeup, not the more austere look she seems to favor these days, as a wife, a new mother, and a recognized dramatic actress. She was adorable back then, but I wouldn’t have guessed what she’d go on to do. Now, though, the sky’s the limit. Brava! 

 

 

Letting the Cat Out of the Bag About “Cats”

Damn you, Andrew Lloyd Webber!  Yes, you’ve enlivened the world with major stage extravaganzas like Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar. Your greatest hit, The Phantom of the Opera, may have seemed overwrought to me, but it had the virtue of introducing thousands of fans to the joys of musical theatre. For better or for worse, you certainly know how to write a tune that won’t leave my head.

 On a recent plane flight, I decided it was time to check out the film version of one of your best-known works, a show about which I’ve had decidedly mixed emotions. I first saw Cats in 1985, when it touched down in L.A. as part of its first national tour. (So great was the public enthusiasm for this elaborate show—one emphasizing music, dance, and over-the-top scenic effects—that it ran for 21 years in London and 18 on Broadway.) In 1985 while writing on theatre for the Los Angeles Times, I had the fun of taking a backstage look at the show’s elaborate makeup designs. That’s why I was granted two  house-seats, which allowed me to introduce a very young relative to the magic of live theatre. Out of this came a passion for the musical stage that has never left him.

 So Cats, the stage musical, will always have a warm spot in my heart.  I’ve never thought of it as a play, exactly. It’s more like the masques embraced by the royals of Shakespeare’s day: a theatrical confcction that delights the senses through its appeal to eye and ear. But this stage adaptation of playful poems by none other than T.S. Eliot is not much on basics like characterization and plot. Here’s the IMDB summation of the dramatic throughline: “A tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new Jellicle life.”  Meaningful, no?

 I had thought that with its cartoony characterizations, its plotlessness, and its heavy reliance on whimsy, Cats would be immune to Hollywood’s meddling. And so it was, until 2019, when Tom Hooper (known for The King’s Speech and Les Misêrables) got his hands on it. Hiring a big-name cast, he set about transferring the magic of the stage experience to the big screen. Critical response was not pretty. Cats racked up a series of Worst Film of the Year awards, including the infamous Razzie, and audiences stayed away in droves. No one, it seems, wanted to watch actors with pointy ears, tails, and garish makeup, cavorting in close-up.  It was, in short, a catastrophe.

 Still, I persisted in being curious about this debacle. Some of the actors in the featured comic numbers, like  James Corden as the snooty Bustopher Jones and Rebel Wilson as domestic queen Jennyanydots, are as embarrassing as I had heard. Jennifer Hudson warbles “Memory” beautifully, but her pillowy lips spoil any possible illusion that she’s a cat. Idris Elba’s evil-minded Macavity makes no more sense that it did on stage. But somehow Judi Dench retains her dignity as Old Deuteronomy. To me the film’s vocal star was (surprise!) Taylor Swift, who looks a lot like a slinky feline as she belts out the jazzy “Macavity” late in the film.

 And when things are turned over to the dancers, in choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler of Hamilton fame, some glimmers of magic appear. The film’s one innovation is the addition of an adorable white kitten, Victoria, who listens in wonder to all the goings-on. Ballerina Francesca Hayward is absolutely purr-fect in the role.

 

 

 

The Cats Came Back (Caterwauling at the Movies)

 I’m not exactly a cat person. Still, I admit I teared up when Holly Golightly (as played by Audrey Hepburn) rescued her sometimes-cat from a downpour at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’ve liked other movie cats too, including Pyewacket , the sleek Siamese who was Kim Novak’s kindred spirit in the long-ago Bell, Book, and Candle. And it was hard to resist the frisson of watching Marlon Brando stroke a tabby while contemplating nefarious deeds in The Godfather.

My new friend Léon Bing, who modeled for the fashion world’s enfant terrible, Rudi Gernreich, and then wrote the bestselling Do or Die, has a particularly striking association with cats. As an aspiring model in New York City, she had to invent for herself a distinctive runway style. She had managed to rent a tiny but charming Park Avenue apartment, up only two flights of stairs. With time on her hands, she took to watching TV, and at one point the Movie of the Week was a sultry Southern-fried thriller, A Walk on the Wild Side. This 1962 drama, directed by Edward Dmytryk from a Nelson Algren novel, starred Laurence Harvey and Capucine, along with Jane Fonda, in one of her very first roles, as a young bordello recruit. It was possibly the name of Fonda’s character (Kitty) as well as all the film’s cat-house references that inspired the opening title sequence, the work of the great Saul Bass. While Elmer Bernstein’s music throbs on the soundtrack, a black cat prowls in dramatic closeup through the streets and alleys of New Orleans. As the music heightens you just know danger is lurking around every corner. And then it strikes. For Léon Bing, this footage—which she watched over and over—was total inspiration. She learned to slink through fashion shows like that dangerous cat, and the result was a long, successful career.

All this is by way of saying that I’m not so sure I’m enthralled by the prospect of seeing Cats on screen. The Andrew Lloyd Webber stage hit, set to charmingly whimsical poems by none other than T.S. Eliot, began its decades-long Broadway run in 1982. It ran so long (18 years at the Winter Garden Theatre) that it inspired an advertising slogan: “Cats, Now and Forever.” The vagueness of that slogan hints that Cats is not about anything much. Humans dressed as furry felines cavort about the stage, performing all sorts of colorful specialty numbers. What suspense there is involves which cat will be chosen by wise old Deuteronomy for a sort of cat-reincarnation. Of course the prize goes to the cat who’s the most bedraggled and sings the show’s most poignant power-ballad. And you surely remember what that’s called.

I don’t mean to sneer. Years ago, when Cats came to L.A.’s old Shubert Theatre, I had one of my favorite assignments for the Los Angeles Times¸ describing everything that happens at a big-time playhouse before the curtain goes up. So I watched stagehands preparing the set while ushers stuffed programs and actors stroked on their elaborate makeup. As a reward, I got to return with my six-year-old  son, for whom this was a first-ever theatre outing. I had firmly lectured him on good behavior. But then—in the middle of a musical number!—a well-known local TV personality squeezed into my row with his young daughter. Instead of taking the empty seat next to me, she STOOD on his lap, and proceeded to give those around her a loud running commentary on the show. That was one kitten I would gladly have thrown down a well.