Send in the Clowns

I have always wondered how comedians manage to perform when they are sad. What if they are genuinely depressed and don't feel like being funny? This thought crossed my mind again last Wednesday night when I was at Comix comedy club on West 14th street listening to a lineup of stand up comedians who work on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The man himself wasn't there, of course, but his executive producer and writer Rory Albanese was, as was one of his funniest correspondents, John Oliver.

Oliver, with his very proper-sounding British accent reminded the crowd that if this had been 250 years ago he would have been barking orders at us instead of jokes. He joked about the waning American empire, as evidenced by some of our most ridiculous TV game shows, and he had a rather long, imaginary conversation onstage with his father about deciding to tell a joke involving a certain part of his father's anatomy. There was a hint of sadness there, but only in his effort to exit the joke gracefully, which was impossible.

The surprise guest of the evening was comedian Jim Gaffigan, who has absolutely nothing to do with The Daily Show but is very, very funny. I happen to know this because my son is a big fan and has recited numerous Gaffigan jokes about food. This particular evening he went on about McDonald's and how much we love to hate the place. He pointed out that our expectations should be low when the mascot is a "pedophile clown from the 70's." If he was sad that evening it didn't show; it must help if you can make a crowd of people laugh.

I once asked author Michael Crichton if he ever wakes up and doesn't feel like writing. His response was "if I was an airline pilot, I couldn't just say I don't feel like flying today. " So I guess the best advice for comedians and writers alike is, "smile, though your heart is breaking." And go to a comedy club once in a while if you want to see how it's done.

A LIttle Night (and Day) Music

Last Thursday I stood in line at 10:00am along 59th street near Fifth Avenue with throngs of Sting fans. I have never been a huge Sting fan and only know him for the few Police songs that are burned into my brain from college frat parties. But a friend of mine from work is a fanatic, and she needed someone to share the experience of jumping up and down, screaming and clapping on cue for his free outdoor concert taped for the Early Show on CBS. I didn't watch the show the next day, but apparently I was on television for a tenth of a second if you watched with a high powered telescope.

Mary, my friend, said that I was the perfect person to bring to this event, which I wasn't sure to take as a compliment or an insult. My brief impressions of Sting , from a very close spot near the stage, were that he still has a good voice, that despite being 58 years old he makes everyone around him look totally uncool, and that his real fans are the ones that have been singing the words to 'Roxanne' since 1978. As far as musical revelations go, there were none, other than the fact that a good back up orchestra can make even a mediocre song sound like a symphony.

On that same evening, I went to Lincoln center to meet my mother, step-father, sister and niece for dinner and dancing at the Midsummer Night Swing outdoor dance festival. Midsummer Night Swing is a unique experience that can only be described as New York at its most ridiculous and joyful. Hundreds of people come out to Damrosch Park behind the New York State Theater to dance to live music of a different genre every night for three weeks.

The night we were there it was "Disco." Donna Summer and the Bee Gees were well represented, as were a full range of ages and dance abilities. One elderly gentleman in his 80s managed to swing more dance partners around the floor than other men half his age, and the girls he danced with couldn't stop smiling. Some of the couples clearly practiced before they came, but other people just grabbed whoever was willing and made up the moves as they went along. It's free if you remain outside the inner dance area, and $17 if you want to dance closer to the live music. Most people just dance wherever they are standing, with whomever they lay eyes on.

The only one who wasn't having a blast was my 20-year-old niece. She just couldn't get into the 70's music. She left to meet some friends at a bar. My sister and I paid our tributes to Donna Summer by dancing together to "I Will Survive," and then we made our way out past the crowds and the glittering fountain to find our own drinks and shared memories.

The Kids May Be All Right, But The Movie Isn't

Suzanne Tenner/Focus Features

Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in “The Kids Are All Right.”

Lest anyone is under the false impression that I love every movie and every theater that I attend in New York City, I have to take a minute to write a short, negative review of "The Kids Are All Right."

The movie, which just opened on Friday to superlative reviews, has a stellar cast including Julianne Moore, Annette Bening and one of my favorite actors, Mark Ruffalo. But ironically, it is the "kids," played by Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson who really are the only thing that is right with this movie.

The story is about a lesbian couple with two teenage children, Joni age 18, and Laser, age 15. The boy --probably wishing that someone else had named him--wants to seek out the children's sperm-donor father. With the help of his sister, they find him and arrange to meet him.

The donor dad turns out to be an ultra-cool, motorcycle riding single dude named Paul, played by Ruffalo, who runs an organic restaurant and farm. For the daughter, it's love at first sight, although the son reserves judgment for a second visit. Ultimately Paul wins everyone over, including one of the moms, with his easy going charm and non-parental, laid back attitude. It makes sense that the kids want to spend more and more time with him, and he starts to become attached to them as well.

Once Paul is thrown into the mix of this nontraditional family, things gradually take a turn for the worse. The one mom, played by Annette Bening, dislikes him instantly, but she is so uptight and unpleasant it seems she dislikes everyone, including her wife, Jules. Jules played by Julianne Moore, has a very different reaction. She agrees to take on Paul's overgrown backyard as a start-up project for her new landscaping business, and is just as attracted to him as her kids are. They wind up in bed every time she comes over. It's all fun and no work for him, given that the kids are beautiful and smart and practically grown, and the affair with Jules, like everything else in his life, seems casual at first.

The movie is touted as dealing with a very cutting edge subject, gay marriage and parenthood, but the problem is that every relationship seems forced, except for the heterosexual affair. The two women don't have anything in common, and one wonders how they became a couple in the first place. The character of Paul, who is demonized in the end, is totally confused, as is the audience, as to Jules' passionate involvement with him and then subsequent rejection. Granted, he's kind of a smarmy asshole, but he doesn't deserve this.

As hard as writer/director Lisa Cholodenko tries to make this into a real family, the actresses are not able to pull off any genuine feeling between the two main characters. I really didn't care about their relationship in the end. The only thing that is pitch perfect is the behavior of the two teenagers. The fact that they reject their mothers and then their father, but need all of them desperately, is right on the money.

Al Wants a Pound of Flesh, And He Usually Gets It

JOAN MARCUS

Al Pacino (right) plays Shylock in this Central Park production of Shakespeare's controversial play. The cast also includes Lily Rabe (left) as Portia and Byron Jennings as Antonio.

Al Pacino is not the only reason to try and see the Shakespeare in the Park version of The Merchant of Venice. He's great, but so is the entire cast, half of whom I recognized from at least one television sitcom, including Jesse Tyler Ferguson from my current favorite Modern Family.

Part of the pleasure of this production is that the language and the plot are made so accessible by the actors. They all enunciate wildly. And the production itself, thankfully, does not try to change the setting to war torn Europe or Venice 2000, or some other unnecessarily futuristic landscape. Granted it's hard to listen to the tirades against "the Jew" (Shylock) by the Christians (the rest of the characters) with a politically correct, 21st century sensibility. That is why the play is so seldom performed, which is a shame, because while it may bring into focus the accepted anti-semitism of Shakespeare's time, my interpretation is that it doesn't condone it. Shylock is too complex a character for that.

Also, Portia is one of the smartest most fully developed female characters in any play I've ever seen outside of a Wendy Wasserstein play. And Lily Rabe who plays her is the best member of the cast by far; Al was good, but a couple of times when he starts to rant I couldn't help feeling like he was doing a Jewish version of the colonel in Scent of A Woman.

One piece of advice. Bring your own snacks and drinks because the line at the snack bar at intermission is so long that only the NYC marathon runners at the front got served before the Second Act.

Does Al Pacino have eyes? Find out tomorrow!

Stay tuned for tomorrow's review of Al Pacino as Shylock in the Central Park presentation of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice."

And please do a reverse rain dance so that we can actually see the show tonight!!

What a Piece of Work Is (This Wo)Man

What makes people happy? Is it their children? Not according to the cover article of this week's New York Magazine, whose title is "I Love My Children. I Hate My Life." Is it their friends and family? Some studies say that's the key, and yet family also seems to be the main topic of conversation on most therapists' couches. Is it money? That's so 1980's. The sociologists doing the research may want to check out Joan Rivers' documentary. She has the answer: it's work, and in her very funny, very watchable movie she proves that she still deserves to be doing it at age 75.

There are some very moving moments in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," although when Rivers tears up about having to fire her longtime manager and good friend Billy her eyes are the only thing that betray her sentiment. The rest of her face simply doesn't move. But her notorious plastic-surgery induced face, and her self-deprecation about it, makes her life or death struggle to stay in the show biz game that much more poignant in the movie.

There are numerous clips of the young Joan with Johnny Carson and others, pre-surgery. At that time she was not famous for her looks but for her cutting edge, raunchy humor and the fact that she was a woman comedian. If you didn't already know, the movie makes clear that she was a genuine pioneer for women in comedy. But God forbid you call her a "comedy icon." One poor guy does and gets a quick "I don't want to be an icon. Fuck you," in return.

In her advanced age she remains an outsider in what is still a male dominated industry and her anger fuels her comedy. She struggles to get work, except the kind that makes her the butt of the jokes. She accepts that too, for the money, but she doesn't like it. When she is cruelly roasted on Comedy Central by male comedians who are a lot younger and a lot less funny, it's a squirm inducing moment for her and for the audience. You genuinely feel sorry for her. She only half-jokingly advises the audience to "invest wisely when you're younger."

But if anyone has ever made lemonade from lemons, she has. The movie is filled with her jokes, both spontaneous and rehearsed, and they are funny. She doesn't necessarily joke about her misfortunes, and she's had big ones, including the suicide of her husband and partner Edgar. But there is never a joke far behind. She just keeps on going, like a hard, plastic version of the energizer bunny. When her adorable grandson tells her that his friend has three Play Stations and the friend gave him one, she quips "does he have a single grandfather?"

More than anything she loves being center stage, and she is the first to admit it. It makes some of the film's drama a bit suspect, given that she prides herself on being an actress rather than a comedian. But it is still refreshing, and downright inspiring, to hear her talk about how much she loves to work. When she wins "Celebrity Apprentice" and someone congratulates her she quickly retorts, "It's great but it's not an Oscar."

My guess is next March she might have to find another joke, and another gig, when she finds herself a Documentary nominee being asked what she's wearing on the red carpet, instead of doing the asking, for a change.

p.s. One of the things that makes me happy is being able to go to the movies in the afternoon when the kids are away at camp!

Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!

When I saw this portrait of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni (1575-1642) in a museum in Rome a few weeks ago, I had no idea why the painter chose to portray this woman with such deep tragedy in her young eyes. I had never heard the story of the Cenci family, nor did I know that it was also the subject of several books, a 1969 movie and a full scale opera. What I learned when I started to look into the Cenci family history was that shocking family drama is not the exclusive domain of our current tabloid culture. Nor is unspeakable cruelty and intrigue merely the subject of the current bestseller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

As promised, here is a brief synopsis of Beatrice's sordid story: Her father, Francesco Cenci, was a cruel but powerful man who physically abused his children, including Beatrice's two brothers and her step-mother. Although he had been in trouble with the papal courts and was known to be violent and immoral, he was always protected because of his wealth and status. When he went as far as sexually abusing her, Beatrice Cenci plotted to kill her father, with her brothers and step-mother in agreement. She had help from a young guard, who was also her lover. One version of the story claims that they had a child.

I read various accounts of how they did it (drugs, hammer, knife) but ultimately they killed Francesco and threw him off a balcony to make it look like an accident. Despite the sympathy of many Roman citizens, Francesco's position as a nobleman made it imperative that the murderers be punished. Pope Clement VII condemned the family to death for the murder. In 1599, at age 22, Beatrice Cenci was beheaded on a scaffold in Rome. Her brother and step-mother were also killed. Only one younger brother, age twelve, was allowed to live.

If I read this story in a novel or saw it as a play or a movie, I would have thought that it was pure fiction. But really, I should know better by now.

In every era, rich, powerful men (and women) have gotten away with abusing children or adults who they view as weaker or inferior. We have our very own Cenci stories: just ask Nancy Grace. Joran Van der Sloot thought he got away with murder in Aruba and in Peru, as did his father who sought to protect him with his powerful diplomatic influence. George Huguely, who murdered his beautiful Lacrosse-playing girlfriend, clearly didn't think at all, but somehow learned from his wealthy father that he could vent his anger and frustration with no real consequences. Even Tiger Woods, who I don't view as evil or psychotic, used his status and wealth to do things that most men and women would never dream of even trying to get away with.

If life imitates art, then in all of the above cases the perpetrators will pay an irrevocable price for their crimes. At least that's the way it goes in Hollywood and in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Unfortunately, it's too late for Natalee Holloway, Stephany Flores and Yeardley Love. The most we can hope for is that someone will paint their portrait and turn their lives into art.