Modish coiffure

Here is a nifty advertisement I came across while looking through microfilm at the library this week. It dates from 1925.

Another Lulu review

"Thankfully, Chicago-based Silent Theatre Company understands the appeal of classic celluloid, which they ape to sublime ends in their piece "Lulu", an adaptation of German playwright Frank Wedekind’s 1894 Lulu cycle, comprising "Earth Spirit" and "Pandora’s Box", but bearing more of a resemblance to G.W. Pabst’s 1928 film revision starring über-vamp Louise Brooks. "      Another review of the stage play of Lulu can be found at www.sfstation.com/lulu-at-victoria-theater-a2239

Research jottings

Back at the library, I continue my search for even more Louise Brooks clippings. I went through the Columbus Ledger (from Columbus, Georgia), Ripon Weekly Press (from Ripon, Wisconsin),  and Arkansas City Daily Traveler (from Arkansas City, Kansas) - and in each found articles and advertisements relating to Brooks' two seasons with Denishawn. The company performed in each of thee towns. I also went through a few other newspapers looking for material relating to Brooks' films. I went through the Arkansas Gazette (from Little Rock, Arkansas), Deseret News (from Salt Lake City, Utah), and Hartford Times(from Hartford, Connecticut). And I found a few reviews and ads. The most interesting item was a Little Rock ad for the Capitol Theater promoting the screening of Love Em and Leave Em during the first half of the week, and Just Another Blonde during the second half. That's unusual, especially considering that the two films were made by different studios.

I also went through the North China Daily News, an English-language newspaper from Shanghai. I looked through the first four months of 1929, and found material - including one review - for three of Brooks' 1927 films! Wow - what a cosmpolitan city and what a worthwhile newspaper! There were numerous movie theaters in Shanghai at this time, and all of the major American films seemed to have been shown. And the theaters ran big advertisements in the newspaper. The review I found marks my first Chinese citation! Eventually, I plan to look through every month of theNorth China Daily News from the late 1920's and early 1930's that I can get my hands on.

Pandora's Box screening 10-23

The Florida Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida will screen a "digitally restored" version of Pandora's Box (1929) on October 23rd. This screening will feature a new score for the film composed by Prof. Tony Steve of Jacksonville University, which will be performed live by the JU Percussion Ensemble. This one-time only show will take place at 7 pm.

A reminder

Don't miss this . . . . "Lulu" - a silent (wordless) stage play at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco
Frank Wedekind's scandalous turn of the century drama performed as a silent film a la Louise Brooks in "Pandora's Box."

"Lulu" was the hit of the 2006 NYC Fringe Festival, and has received rave reviews in the New York Times, Chicago Tribuneand San Francisco Chronicle.  It's lot's of fun. And Kyla Louise as Lulu is the sexiest femme fatale since Brooks herself played the role.

“…dreamlike…luscious…a bona-fide knockout.” - CHICAGO TRIBUNE.

Performances run Thursdays through Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays at 7pm.
(Remaining shows October 19-20-21-22, 26-27-28-29).
More info and tickets at www.victoriatheatre.org

More about the play, the actors and the theater company (including video clips) at www.silenttheatre.com or www.myspace.com/silenttheatre

Two local stage productions

This review of two local stage productions appeared in today's San Francisco Bay Guardian. Check it out at www.sfbayguardian.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=1891

Mother Courage
By Robert Avila

The sideshow denizens who scramble out onstage at the Victoria to mime the evening's prologue constitute an impressive assortment of freaks and wild beasts, stooping giants and bearded ladies strutting and marauding in the nostalgic glow of a flickering projection lamp. But they take second billing to what a supertitle introduces as "the most untamed beast of them all." That would be unbridled sexuality, in the person of our heroine, Lulu.

It's now more than a century since Frank Wedekind, the forefather of German expressionism, gave creative birth to Lulu, a charmingly insatiable and just too desirable young woman and singer from several good homes, thereby throwing sexual hypocrisy back in the faces of his bourgeois audience. Today sexuality is hardly less controversial to the bourgeois even if, say, a film like Shortbus simultaneously suggests we've come a short way. Shortbus gets a happy ending, after all, while the result of pitting anarchic human sexuality against a repressed and repressive patriarchal society in Lulu's day had to spell tragedy. Still, though the results are grim, untamed sex emerges glorious if not victorious in Lulu: A Black and White Silent Play, Chicago-based Silent Theatre Company's lightly and cheerfully lewd and cheekily clever production.

Both form and content marked out Wedekind's two antinaturalistic Lulu plays — Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora's Box (1902) — as exceedingly modern and risqué for their day. Silent Theatre's silent-movie-style staging builds shrewdly on permutations of form and nostalgia by translating back to the stage G.W. Pabst's famous 1929 silent screen adaptation (which starred Louise Brooks and her distinctive bob) in a single one-hour-and-fifteen-minute act. The results benefit from a game cast (including a pert Kyla Louise Webb as Lulu), as well as shrewd and playful staging, filled with the vivacious gestures and grotesque exaggerations of the silent screen and spiritedly choreographed to the infectious accompaniment of pianist-composer Isaiah Robinson and his spiraling movie-house score.

Although principally an expressionist, Wedekind also pointed in the direction Bertolt Brecht was to take a generation or so later in an already post-expressionist mode. But then, Wedekind and Brecht had much in common, including a penchant for cabaret songs and reimagining the traditions of the carnival and the circus in assailing in boldly experimental form the ferociousness and folly of the social order. That circus-cabaret theme is certainly evident in the Berkeley Rep and La Jolla Playhouse coproduction of Brecht'sMother Courage, not least in the utterly fresh yet evocative new score by composer Gina Leishman (among other things founder of Mr. Wau-Wa, a quintet devoted to Brechtian songs). Director Lisa Peterson's sharp cast and vigorous, inspired staging take full advantage of playwright David Hare's earthy and immediate translation to bring Brecht's antiwar play resonantly alive.

Mother Courage, the wily peddler who with her three children follows the battling armies of 17th-century Europe's Thirty Years War to hock her wares and make her living, remains one of the most famous antiheroes of a decidedly antiheroic, antiromantic playwright. But that doesn't seem to stop audiences from identifying her (unironically) with that intentionally ironic name of hers. Indeed, rendered with a fine Weimar-esque soulfulness and grit by Ivonne Coll, she's a charismatic figure despite her outstanding flaw: her parasitic reliance on war at the inevitable, albeit unintended, expense of her offspring.

Brecht's play, in addressing itself to the class enemy lurking behind the delusional divisions of religion and territory, systematically undercuts any legitimacy claimed by the warmongering values of courage and valor. The Chaplain (a deftly comic turn by Patrick Kerr), for instance, easily exchanges his cassock for some street clothes when the need arises, just as surely as the Catholic flag comes down and the Protestant one goes up when the winds of battle change direction. And by showing how Mother Courage, having tied her cart to the scam of war, must hang on to it at all costs — even that of her children's lives — the play doubly negates her name in the circumstances it exposes. But maybe it’s Brecht’s ambivalence even more than his excoriating attack on the hideous cheat of war that seems utterly contemporary: the strangely productive and seductive balancing act taking place between his dismal view of human nature — alternately vicious and comic in its outline — and his overweening determination to awaken his audience to the truth and thereby to change the world. 

LULU: A BLACK AND WHITE SILENT PLAY
Through Oct. 29
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.
Victoria Theatre
2961 16th St., SF
$20
(415) 863-7576
www.victoriatheatre.org

MOTHER COURAGE
Through Oct. 22
Tues. and Fri., 8 p.m.; Wed., 7 p.m.; Thurs. and Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m.
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
2015 Addison, Roda Theatre, Berk.
$33–$61
(510) 647-2949
www.berkeleyrep.org

Jazz Age Beauties

Today, I got a copy of Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston by Robert Hudovernik. It's a very nifty book - and you'll want to check it out. There are five full page images of Louise Brooks, a few other future silent film stars (nudes of Norma Shearer, portraits of Billie Dove, Mae Murray, etc....), along with a bunch of other lovely portraits of Ziegfeld Follies girls. There is also an image - something I had not ever seen before - of the front of the New Amsterdam Theater (the home of the Follies) in 1925. That's when Brooks was performing there. Wow! That makes me wonder what other sort of unknown images might be out there. There was also a gracious mention of myself and the Louise Brooks Society in the acknowledgements. Thank you Robert, glad to be of help.