In my next life I’d like to talk like this
By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - 6 Comments
Noël Coward truly knew how to live
Sasha/Getty Images
As well as being an opera star, great writer and dressage champion—preferably all three at once—I have prayed that in my next life I will be able to carry on a conversation with Noël Coward and his friends. What a circle: snobby Bright Young Things from Oxbridge, campy men in espadrilles and pale linen trousers on the Riviera, the violently talented and viciously bitchy homosexuals he palled around with—Somerset Maugham, Beverley Nichols, Iris Tree, Tallulah Bankhead—all of this razor-tongued bisexual society of the 1920s and ’30s, madly experimenting with anything on offer. This was a pudding rich in Continentals, British aristocrats and intelligentsia including aesthetes and one-offs like Coward who had perfected the cut-glass accent and Savile Row suit necessary to transport himself from the ordinariness of south London to international society.
Going to see Coward’s 1930 play Private Lives at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto (now playing, and an absolutely fabulous production; never tell me Kim Cattrall is just a sex symbol. She is a superb actress and comedian) brought home to me once again how stuck in wet concrete my tongue is. When I say “carry on a conversation” with Coward, I mean to engage him by having at one’s tongue-tip le mot juste, just as his leading characters always do. I have never ever had a mot juste at the right moment in my life, and in my next I want to have paragraphs of them plus fabulous one-liners.
Imagine being at ease in a country-house party at Coward’s home Goldenhurst or at Edward Molyneux’s spread in Cap d’Ail, with Somerset Maugham’s wife, Syrie, spitting mad at her husband for his dalliance with Gerald Haxton, who tried to shock at dinner with a singular tale of seducing a 12-year-old girl in Siam for a tin of condensed milk. What a witches’ brew of hissing serpents and spewing talent. In these times, you mixed the trivial and decadent pursuits of the wealthy with genuine artists and artistic achievement—before war and tax policies broke the whole edifice down, exiling the wealthy to St. Barts and the artists back to their studios.
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Cattrall vs Gross in the gilded cage match of ‘Private Lives’
By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 5:52 PM - 3 Comments
- Paul Gross and Kim Cattrall in Noël Coward’s ‘Private Lives’ at the Royal Alexandra Theatre
I would never presume to review theatre. I have enough trouble evaluating film, when the work is at least fixed. Even if the critic’s viewpoint is fluid, and the film may seem to change with repeated viewings, it’s still the same show. But theatre is a moving target. The physical chemistry of the actors, with each other and the audience, changes from one night to the next. And I spend so much time in movies that the flesh-and-blood presence of actors—the visceral bond between viewer and performer—makes me nervous, sometimes claustrophobic. Even if, on rare occasions, it can be electrifying, frankly, I find so much theatre too . . . well, theatrical.
This apologia serves to introduce some observations about seeing Paul Gross and Kim Cattrall in Private Lives, which I caught last week in Toronto at the Royal Alex after it had premiered to rave reviews. This is a show you want to root for. Originating last year with Cattrall in London, it’s now Broadway-bound, and Cattrall and Gross form the closest thing to a theatrical royal couple Canada has had since I don’t when. They’re both witty, debonair, confidently seductive and—pushing the envelope of middle age—defiantly sexy. Casting them as romantic misfits in a vintage screwball comedy seems inspired. Continue…
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$ex and the City 2
By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 3:22 PM - 13 Comments
The sisterhood (from left) Cynthia Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis
Offering my views on the latest adventures of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte strikes me as a pointless task. There’s no doubt that Sex and the City 2, like its predecessor, will be critic-proof, and man-proof. As a male critic, I’m totally not the target audience for this film. And whatever I have to say about it will be automatically suspect. I could condemn it outright as a witless, shapeless and shameless confection that is more about money than sex. But what difference would it make? I’ve already spoken to a several women who admit they’re eager to see it no matter how bad it might be. These four Manhattan superwomen of shopping and romance are their guilty pleasure, the chick-flick answer to the action blockbusters that cater to immature male fantasy. But I think these women will feel disappointed and betrayed.
Personally, I was a fan of the Sex and the City TV series; I watched almost every episode. And even though the first movie significantly blunted its subversive edge, you could still find a glimmer of genuine romance, and some evidence of actual relationships, in among all the shoes and shopping and real-estate porn. But the sequel goes beyond the pale. It turns Carrie and the gang into a parody of their former selves, virtual drag queens in a bourgeois gay pride parade of female caricature. These are no longer working women who like to shop. They’re post-feminist Barbies trapped in a Disney World of absurd opulence. Any promise of an emotional narrative is stifled—along with love and sex—in an orgy of outrageous costumes, five-star decor and cheap one-liners. This is Sex and the City: Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Continue…
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The truth about Cleopatra
By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 7:45 AM - 8 Comments
It turns out the iconic last queen of Egypt was noticeably less beautiful but a lot smarter than we thought
When Shakespeare wrote about how “age cannot wither” the “infinite variety” of Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt, he meant to invoke the fascination she exerted over all who met her, but he could as easily been describing her enduring afterlife. For 2,000 years the Western world has loved, or at least loved to hate, its Eastern beauty, whether as doomed lover or immoral seductress. Dante put her in the second circle of Hell with the other “carnal sinners,” while Chaucer thought her a virtuous woman steadfast in love. Pascal believed her beauty was one of the accidental details upon which the axis of history turns: “Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the face of the world would have changed.’’The broad sweep of her story is well known, and many of its details almost universally so: her seduction of Julius Caesar (to whom she had herself smuggled wrapped in a rug and unrolled before his feet); her fateful choice between the two men vying for the assassinated Caesar’s mantle (allying with Marc Antony rather than the eventual victor, Octavian, later Augustus Caesar); the conspicuous consumption (once taking a pearl valued at 10 million sesterces—enough to maintain 10,000 Roman soldiers for a year—dissolving it in a cup of vinegar and drinking it down, merely to display her wealth); and, of course, suicide by asp bite.
The intense theatricality of it all is why, despite considerable literary portrayal, Cleopatra’s presence in the Western imagination has always been primarily a matter of spectacle. There are dozens of paintings (with the pearl and the deathbed as favourite scenes) and ballets, plays and films, with Shakespeare’s endlessly revived Antony and Cleopatra—Kim Cattrall has just signed on for a fall run in England—and the 1963 film Cleopatra standing at the apex as twin icons. Best known for the scandalous public affair between stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that seemed to mirror onscreen events, Joseph Mankiewicz’s cinematic hymn to wretched excess offers Cleopatra’s single most potent modern image.
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G20 fashion, Castro's eleven children, and the Booby Ball
By Ken MacQueen - Friday, October 2, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments
Newsmakers of the week
Dalai Lama: a ray of Vancouver Sunshine
The Dalai Lama, the peace-loving Buddhist monk and champion of an autonomous Tibet, began a busy week in Canada by serving as “guest editor” of the Saturday edition of the Vancouver Sun. The result was a very earnest paper filled with love, compassion and understanding—the usual murder, mayhem and politics sent to the back of the bus. Even the sports section opened with a story on the value of breathing and positive mantras. Football and the Vancouver Canucks were relegated to the inside pages, not being very Zen. On Sunday, the Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted the opening of a sold-out Vancouver Peace Summit, sharing the stage with leading spiritual thinkers, and fellow Nobel laureates. A bad back kept retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu from a session on achieving personal peace. In his stead, he sent his daughter Mpho Tutu, a mother and Episcopalian priest. Avoiding tantrum-throwing two-year-olds, she joked, is one step toward harmony. Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean sent greetings by video although she had been scheduled to appear in person. A spokesperson denied her absence was to appease Chinese leaders, who see the Dalai Lama as a dangerous separatist. He made no references to China, perhaps wishing to avoid controversy. The news media focuses too much on bad news, he said after a day of editing the Sun.
Putting the Fidel in infidelity
Revolution isn’t Fidel Castro’s only passion, says American author Ann Louise Bardach, who tabulates his conquests of Cuban women in her forthcoming book, Without Fidel. She calculates Castro populated Cuba with 10 and possibly 11 children by at least seven women. He had a son with his first wife, Myrta Diaz-Balart, in 1949, and five boys with Dalia Soto del Valle, a long-time companion he is believed to have secretly married in 1980. There were many lovers, but 1955 was a banner year, after the 29-year-old rebel leader was released from prison after a failed uprising. He celebrated his freedom to such an extent that three women bore his children the next year. Continue… -
Newsmakers: Breakups
By Anne Kingston - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment
From the Summer ’09 Newsmakers family edition
Jennifer Anniston & John Mayer
Exactly what caused the sporadic soulmates’ final fade from tabloid covers was the subject of much frenzied speculation. Was it her wanting a baby? His womanizing ways? Her eternal pining for Brad Pitt? The final consensus: the former Friends star became fed up with the schmaltzy singer’s compulsive Twittering.Prince Harry & Chelsy Davy
Commoners learned of the breakup of the blond Zimbabwe-born law student and the ginger-haired British royal stud after five years of yacht-frolicking via that great equalizer, Facebook: Davy changed her relationship status to “not in one”—accompanied by a symbol of a broken red heart. Continue… -
Video Gallery: Maclean's Gala
By Jeff Harris - Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 11:48 AM - 0 Comments
Jeff Harris goes behind the scenes
Maclean’s celebrates it’s 100th birthday — and relaunch — with pinache. Canadian celebrities and literatti came out for a night on the town, and to offer their opinion on the magazine’s redesign. Our 15 videos include clips from Kim Catrall, Conrad Black, former premier Brian Tobin, and more.
