cheerskep

The PBS series of TV dramatizations of Jane Austen novels began Sunday with PERSUASION. It was agonizing to me, awful on nearly every level, especially when compared to the 1995 movie from Britain. The PBS attempt to crush the novel into 87 minutes is a fiasco, and as I watched I ranted repeatedly against the writer, the director, and the producers. The 1995 movie took another 20 minutes or so (107 minutes) and it made all the difference in the world -- both because the additional length gave it additional depth and weight, and because it avoided PBS's witless decision to cram far too many backstory elements into the film when they didn't have time to make them all clear and complete enough. When they were told it had to come in under ninety minutes, they should have refused to be a party to it. If somehow they were forced to do it, they should have found a writer and director who could do a far better job of discerning and deleting the unaccommodatable sub-stories. Then the poor job of casting was compounded by the director's feckless lack of sensibility in judging how to make us care about these people. For those of you who saw the PBS disaster I urge you to watch the 1995 movie version.

One of the great mistakes in commenting on HAIR has been to judge it as a "statement" or a portrait of an era. This is particularly so when the verdict is that it's a period piece whose time has passed. That approach is as misplaced as judging MY FAIR LADY or THE MUSIC MAN on the validity of their depiction of their social eras. HAIR is hugely, constantly vivacious (never more so than when Treat Williams is on the screen), immensely inventive in its presentation of the songs -- often ingeniously blending four or five scenes into one seven or eight minute piece -- and the music itself is seizing. For me, perhaps the best movie musical of all was CABARET, but even it did not equal Forman's imagination in his creation of the music scenes. And Twyla Tharp's choreography is as uniquely her own as Fosse's ever was his own.

(Many films have moving after-stories, but few are more memorable than this: Cheryl Barnes was a hotel maid when she was asked to audition for the part of Hud's former girl friend with their child. Her solo was astonishing. But after the final shooting in a Nevada (?) location, she never left town. I believe she went to work in a restaurant there, and dropped out of show business forever.)