The Off Broadway production of Cost of Living two years ago brought Martyna Majok the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the height of acclaim of which most new writers – Majok, with four plays behind her, has yet to turn 35 – can only dream.
A one-night stand between a female college student, Margot, whose part-time job is selling snacks at the cinema, and thirtyish Robert, a customer, goes pathetically awry. It was disappointing, uneasy, perhaps more, and memorialised in all its edgy discomfort in Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”, published in the New Yorker in December 2017.
Baggage can weigh a movie down. The Mule comes with quite a bit of baggage, and not just the kilos of coke stashed in the car’s trunk. Clint Eastwood’s fifty plus years as a screen icon turned director, his dodgy love life and libertarian politics all make it hard to walk into a cinema showing his latest film without dragging along a whole load of preconceptions.
Satire was once thought in America to be that thing that closed on Saturday night. Not here: filmmaker Adam McKay goes the distance with Vice, a hurtling examination of realpolitik that puts Dick Cheney under a spotlight at once satiric and scary. Do we have Dubya's onetime veep to thank for the subsequent rise of Trump and the parlous state of affairs Stateside since then?
Following Caroline, or Change and Fun Home, the UK is blessed with another work from American composer Jeanine Tesori; this is the British premiere of her 1997 musical Violet, which had a Sutton Foster-starring Broadway production in 2014. If not as refined as that exquisite duo, it’s still a compelling piece, thanks to a ravishing score and a dynamite central performance.
The multi-costumed Lucy Worsley is television marmite, loved or loathed: her gesticulating enthusiasm can grate, as can her stream of bland platitudes. Typically the title is Worsley-twee, evoking fibs instead of lies and falsehoods; are we in the nursery, as smart Nanny Worsley seems to think?
The tortuous road to addiction and back again – or maybe not – makes for a faintly tedious experience in Beautiful Boy, notwithstanding the committed performances of an A-list cast.
Perhaps inspired by the success of the revived Hawaii Five-O, CBS and Universal have gone back to the Eighties, and back to Hawaii, to see if the venerable Magnum P.I. could benefit from a similar overhaul. Early evidence suggests that as formulaic American dramas go, it’s… sort of business as usual.
On Drums was inhabited by a parade of fine-looking young and middle aged multi-ethnic anglophone drummers, all introduced by Stewart Copeland, the American drummer of the Police. In vintage film and contemporary interviews his chosen musicians seemed almost invariably fit and trim whatever the substances ingested in the past.