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W E D N E S D AY, F E B R U A RY 1 4 , 2 0 0 7A Lear, A Song, A Coast, A Trail And A LyricOkay, catch up time.I saw Kevin Kline's King Lear on Friday. It was the very firstperformance so I certainly won't review the show other than to say Idon't know if I can see what they're working towards and that worriesme. Kline isn't a natural Lear but he was good when Lear was brokenand mad. Cerveris was of course very good. And the happy surprise wasJoshua Logan-Green, who has gone from being dumped by "The OC" toperforming Shakespeare at the Public and holding his own.Then I saw Adrift In Macao, a silly film noir musical by ChristopherDurang. For all its faults, it was pretty fun, as the NYTimes put it. Iwould single out Will Swenson as capturing the dry tone of this satirejust right. In general, these things work better when they're playedstraight, so his big number (in which he talked about paying outsidesongwriters to pen him a tune) didn't work for me. And frankly, I can'tbelieve the NYTimes didn't mention that Orville Mendoza (who playsthe "scrutable" Asian Tempura) looks like a dead ringer for Jack Black.Saturday night I saw Part Two of The Coast Of Utopia, which was justterrific and moving. I have no objection, by the way, to ChristopherIsherwood saying he found Coast boring. My objection is to his claimthat he was being very bold and brave to swim against the tide of publicopinion in saying so. Hardly. There's nothing safer than taking themost acclaimed movie/tv show/play/book/CD of the year and saying,"Well, it's not THAT good." Saying the Emperor has no clothes is aboutthe easiest thing in the world.Over the weekend, I finally got around to watching the Robert DuvallWestern "Broken Trail," which was very satisfying and perhaps even anotch better than I was hoping for.Finally, I also saw a screening of "Music and Lyrics," in which HughGrant plays Hugh Grant to the point where it almost seems like parody.The parodies of 80s pop tunes -- by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains ofWayne -- were good. "Pop Goes My Heart" does indeed soundconvincingly like a one-hit wonder. What it doesn't sound like is aNext Blog»sal1mineo@hotmail.comSEARCH BLOG FLAG BLOGFOLLOW BLOGP O P S U R F I N G . C O MS U R F I N G T H E WAV E S O F P O P U L A R C U LT U R EB Y M I C H A E L G I LT Z & F R I E N D SPOPSURFING.COM: A Lear, A Song, A Coast, A Trail And A ...http://popsurfing.blogspot.com/2007/02/lear-song-coast-trail-an...
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