Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

A Streetcar Named Desire…was directed by [Elia] Kazan, who seems to have an instinct for the best of both [Arthur] Miller and Williams. It is perhaps the most misunderstood of his plays: the English and French productions were both so blatantly sensationalised that Williams’ underlying fibre passed unnoticed. If Willy Loman is the desperate average man, Blanche DuBois is the desperate exceptional woman. Willy’s collapse began when his son walked into a hotel apartment and found him with a whore; Blanche’s when she entered “a room that I thought was empty” and found her young husband embracing an older man. In each instance the play builds up to a climax involving guilt and concomitant disgust. Blanche, nervously boastful, lives in the leisured past; her defense against actuality is a sort of aristocratic Bovarysme, at which her brutish brother-in-law Stanley repeatedly sneers. Characteristically, Williams keeps his detachment and does not take sides: he never denies that Stanley’s wife, in spite of her sexual enslavement, is happy and well-adjusted, nor does he exaggerate the cruelty with which Stanley reveals to Blanche’s new suitor secrets of her nymphomaniac past. The play’s weakness lies in the fact that the leading role lends itself to grandiose overplaying by unintelligent actresses…

Kenneth Tynan, 1954

Nobody has ever confused Cate Blanchett with not being an intelligent actress. But man, dig this rave review of Liv Ullman’s new production of Streetcar from the Times theater critic, Ben Brantley:

Blanche DuBois may well be the great part for an actress in the American theater, and I have seen her portrayed by an assortment of formidable stars including Jessica Lange, Glenn Close, Patricia Clarkson and Natasha Richardson. Yet there’s a see-sawing between strength and fragility in Blanche, and too often those who play her fall irrevocably onto one side or another.

Watching such portrayals, I always hear the voice of Vivien Leigh, the magnificent star of Elia Kazan’s 1951 movie, whispering Blanche’s lines along with the actress onstage. But with this “Streetcar,” the ghosts of Leigh — and, for that matter, of Marlon Brando, the original Stanley — remain in the wings. All the baggage that any “Streetcar” usually travels with has been jettisoned. Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have performed the play as if it had never been staged before, with the result that, as a friend of mine put it, “you feel like you’re hearing words you thought you knew pronounced correctly for the first time.”

This newly lucid production of a quintessentially American play comes to us via a Norwegian director, best known as an actress in the brooding Swedish films of Ingmar Bergman, and an Australian movie star, famous for impersonating historical figures like Elizabeth I and Katharine Hepburn. Blessed perhaps with an outsider’s distance on an American cultural monument, Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have, first of all, restored Blanche to the center of “Streetcar.”

I haven’t been to the theater in years but this sounds like a memorable experience for those lucky few who’ll get to see it.

One of the things that interests me here, is how Brando’s performance in movie version of Streetcar, and presumably the original stage version too, was so stunning that it overshadowed the lead character. The role wasn’t minor exactly, but it wasn’t the central character, and his performance was towering, seminal. What are some other examples of a supporting performance dominating a production?

These are all over the place (and some are really minor characters more than even supporting ones), but off the top of my head, here’s a few: Orson Wells in The Third Man, Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, John Turturro in Miller’s Crossing, and Joe Pesci in Good Fellas.

My work ID gets me into several city museums for free, including the Museum of Modern Art, which is a good thing because otherwise I’d never go. The idea of paying twenty bucks to go to a museum rubs me the wrong way, bless Washington D.C. Sometimes, I’ll head over for even just ten minutes during my lunch break to stimulate my eyes. Plus, it feels like being on vacation, what with all the tourists, perfumed and looking nice (what is it about art museums that makes people dress-up?).

My favorite spot–in the old Modern and the new one–is the Matisse room.

Reproductions can’t do the paintings justice, of course, but this here is the picture I’d die for:

It hangs next to The Piano Lesson. I sit and swoon.

It is incredible to me how I never tire of looking at my favorite pictures. It is as if the paintings are living and breathing things. They never get old. There is always something new to see.

I don’t weep easily at movies or books or music even. But great paintings, for whatever reason, bring me to the brink.

Lena Olin in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Oooh La La…

Here’s a Disco record:

Tyler Kepner with the latest on Johnny Damon:

The Yankees did not offer salary arbitration to Johnny Damon on Tuesday, which may not be such a bad thing. Damon, who is in Paris, said he was encouraged.

“In a better position since teams won’t lose draft picks,” Damon said in a text message. “Will now wait and see what develops.”

If the Yankees believed Damon could receive a better offer on the open market, they probably would have made the arbitration offer and taken draft picks if he signed elsewhere. By making no offer, the Yankees are again predicting a severely depressed market for free agents.

Damon is in Paris, Alex Rodriguez is in London. Life is good for the World Champs.

Cliff hipped me to a terrific interview with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner at the Onion’s AV Club:

AVC: Carl, you’ve said in other interviews that you’re against analyzing comedy. Why is that?

CR: Well, people have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it’s usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.

AVC: Do you think comedy is something you can teach somebody?

CR: No. There are people born with intelligence; you’re not born with a funny bone. If you’re just a normal thing, the palette is there; it just depends on who puts the paint on the palette, and what they put on the palette when you’re very young. And then when you’re a little older and go to the movies by yourself, then you start making choices, and it’s usually honed by choices you made very early in your life.

MB: Where are you?

AVC: I’m in Chicago.

MB: I was always treated with love and respect and joy in Chicago.

According to Jon Heyman, Billy Wagner has signed a one-year deal with the Braves.

Tommy Henrich died today. He was 96, bless him.

Man won four rings with the Yanks.

It has clearly been a tough week for Tiger Woods. Over at Esquire, Charles Pierce weighs in with his take:

Tiger Woods and I go back a long ways. A little bit over twelve years, truth be told. Back then, I wrote a profile of him just prior to his winning the 1997 Masters, the first major accomplishment of his professional career. Over the course of a day’s worth of interviews, which were themselves the result of negotiations with his People at the International Management Group that were so protracted they should have been moved to Panmunjom, Tiger made some distasteful remarks and told some puerile and sexist jokes. Seeing as how they occurred during my limited interview time, I included them in my story, along with some not-overly-subtle intimations that Tiger had a reputation even among golfers as something of a chaser. The quotes were a Media Thing for a brief time, and the ensuing dust storm looks positively charming compared to what’s certainly coming after the events of this past weekend, which already appears to be something between Al Cowlings on the highway and an episode of The Real Housewives of Gated Communities. Back then, all that happened was that Tiger’s People at the International Management Group accused me of wiretapping a limo driver. (Me and Gordon Liddy!) And that Tiger’s father, Earl, whom I still miss, told Charlie Rose he hoped my story wouldn’t do permanent damage to his son’s career, and that Charlie Rose waved a copy of the magazine and told Earl he intended never to read the story. This is why Earl was an entertaining con man and Charlie Rose is a salon-sniffing Beltway yahoo.

Better still, Esquire has reprinted Pierce’s classic 1997 profile, “The Man. Amen.”

Well worth checking out.

Here’s an odd one, Luchi De Jesus’s cover of “Round Midnight.”

Will Leitch on Matt Holliday and the Yanks:

Holliday is exactly the player the Yankees need, a relatively young, high-average, hit-to-all-fields complete player who would look downright gorgeous batting fifth, behind A-Rod. He won’t turn 30 until January, and he’s a proven postseason performer (if you ignore his unfortunate dropped fly ball that cost the Cardinals Game 2 of their NLDS) and a sturdy lineup fixture. He’s not a Gary Sheffield/Jaret Wright type looking to cash in after a big year. He’s a cornerstone. The market is currently depressed for him, but only because the Yankees haven’t yet entered the bidding. If they want him, the Yankees can have him

Nobody around here is going to sniff at Derek Jeter winning SI’s Sportsman of the Year honor. That’d be like moaning about Paul Newman finally winning an Oscar for The Color of Money. Over in the Post, however, Joel Sherman wonders if Alex Rodriguez isn’t a better cherce:

Sports Illustrated should not run from an atmosphere it helped create. After all, SI is the entity that outed A-Rod as a steroid cheat.

And Rodriguez should win this award. He embodies where sports are now. He is the intersection of illegal performance enhancers, advancements in sports medicine, celebrity and on-field genius.

Rodriguez could end up in People or US Weekly because of Madonna, Kate Hudson or his inner Centaur. Or he could end up in the New England Journal of Medicine for his rapid, successful return from major hip surgery. He could be in a game of shadows over “boli” or playing his game, baseball, brilliantly.

And his 2009 story also included redemption. He became a better teammate — less obsessed with himself — and as the hitting star of the postseason, he freed himself from the choking shackles.

Goes without saying that Crime Don’t Pay, right?

If I could vote for the Hall of Fame, this is who I’d send to Cooperstwon:

Robbie Alomar
Fred McGriff
Bert Blyeleven
Tim Raines
Alan Trammell
Barry Larkin

I’m not as convinced about The Hawk or Edgar, but sure like them both better than Jim Rice, so I wouldn’t mind seeing either of ’em make it.

SI.com’s Jon Heyman has been on just about every local broadcast media outlet and the MLB Network the past two weeks discussing this offseason’s Free Agent class and potential trade market, all the while saying, “Don’t discount the Yankees in any talks about Roy Halladay, Matt Holliday, or anyone else.”

This, of course, is stating the obvious. Remember the story in The Onion in February of 2003, shortly before Spring Training started, with the headline “Yankees Ensure 2003 Pennant by Signing Every Player in Baseball“? With new developments in the Halladay sweepstakes, and the Yankees’ additional need for a left fielder — contingent upon what Brian Cashman decides to do about Hideki Matsui and Johnny Damon — the Haters could be on the march with a similar headline for 2010. As we’ve seen, however, the Yankees don’t care much about public or media perception when payroll is the topic.

Much of why that Onion-type headline could return is a result of last winter, when the Yankees signed three of the top free agents in baseball to $423.5 million worth of contracts. All of them — CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett and Mark Teixeira — contributed to the World Series title, only feeding the thought that the Yankees bought their championship and leveled the small-market teams’ chances of success. That thought would be, and is, incorrect. Cashman didn’t buy a title, he bought the necessary pieces — buying on need as opposed to greed — to put his team in the best position to win. Cashman has said through the years that’s all a general manager can do, and he’s right. Once the ink dries, it’s the players’ jobs to perform and live up to those contracts.

What to do now? Cliff Corcoran has done his usual yeoman’s work analyzing the team’s needs. It just so happens that the two biggest names being rumored to move would fill two of those voids. Let’s take a look at both Halladay and Matt Holliday, since there’s nothing else better to do leading up to the Winter Meetings in Indiana City, Indiana.

ROY HALLADAY

Per a Daily News report, Halladay told the Blue Jays Saturday that he would waive his no-trade clause to come to the Yankees, if the pieces of a deal came to fruition. (Read: “I would waive the no-trade clause to go to the Yankees because I know they’re on the short list of teams that don’t need to win the lottery to pay me, and I won’t have to deal with the exchange rate.”) This is super-interesting because a week ago, it looked like the Red Sox were all-in and Yankee fans, some of us still in a championship daze, cried a collective variant of “Uh oh.” ESPN made it worse, posting a projected 2K10 Red Sox rotation of Halladay, Beckett, Lester, Dice-K and Buchholz (not taking into account that Buchholz may be the linchpin in getting or not getting the ’03 Cy Young Award winner).

What it means: Nothing yet. This is still very much in the conjecture phase. As the article states — and we know — the Blue Jays want high-end prospects and young players who are either major-league ready or have some experience. The article also notes how the Yankees did not want to travel down this path two years ago when Johan Santana was the soon-to-be-traded pitcher.

(more…)

Heppy Boitday to our man Mariano Rivera who turns 40 today. There’s no telling how long he’s gunna last but we know he’s in the last phase of his career–he is near the end, right…right?How about if he pitches til he’s 42 and then hangs ’em up, that works nice numerically.

Last year at 39, Rivera was at the top of his game. We all know he’s the best of his kind we’ll ever see. So here’s to appreciating each and every last appearance the Great Mariano ever makes in a Yankees uniform, ’nuff said.

Heppy Boitday, 42, Heppy Boitday, Mo.

The love is deep. You are the best present a fan could ever wish for. Say word.

According to an item on Deadspin, Sports Illustrated will announce tomorrow that Derek Jeter is their Sportsman of the Year.

Who needs a stinkin’ MVP anyway?

Heppy Holidaze.

Spike, take it away:

I was talking to somebody at work a few days ago about all of the public deaths in 2009, and they said, “We’ll be hearing new and un-released Michael Jackson tracks for the next twenty years.”

I said, “They’re still putting out Tupac records, aren’t they? You bet we’ll be hearing more Michael.”

Most un-released material wasn’t released in the first place for good reason, however, I’m not so narrow-minded as to think there aren’t gems to be discovered, or re-discovered. I got to thinking about this after reading a fascinating article in the New York Times today:

Yet Verve has just released “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” a four-CD boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald singing 76 songs at the Crescendo, a small jazz club in Los Angeles, in 1961 and ’62 — and none of it has ever been released until now.

These aren’t bootlegs; the CDs were mastered from the original tapes, which were produced by Norman Granz, Verve’s founder and Fitzgerald’s longtime manager.

They capture the singer in her peak years, and at top form: more relaxed, swinging and adventurous, across a wider span of rhythms and moods, than on the dozens of other albums that hit the bins in her lifetime.

…There’s nothing rare about a joyous Ella Fitzgerald recording; the woman exuded joy in nearly every note she sang. Yet the level on these sessions soared higher and plumbed deeper.

Gary Giddins, the veteran critic and author of “Jazz,” agrees. “This ranks on the top shelf of her live recordings,” he said. “It’s about as good as it gets.”

I don’t know much from Ella other than I’m vaguely familiar with her work (my twin sister, Sam, loves her, and played her records when we were kids).

It’s not that I’m going to go out and buy this set, necessarily–although it does sound appealing–but the idea of it is amazing. The idea there are still hidden gems out there, tucked away in some warehouse vault…it’s enough to make your mouth water and mind float away in a dream.

Another Roy Halladay rumbling as the Hot Stove warms up, this one from Anthony McCarron in the Daily News.

Pauline Kael on His Girl Friday:

In 1928 Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote The Front Page, the greatest newspaper comedy of them all; Howard Hawks directed this version of it — a spastic explosion of dialogue, adapted by Charles Lederer, and starring Cary Grant as the domineering editor Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson, the unscrupulous crime reporter with printer’s ink in her veins. (In the play Hildy Johnson is a man.) Overlapping dialogue carries the movie along at breakneck speed; word gags take the place of the sight gags of silent comedy, as this race of brittle, cynical, childish people rush around on corrupt errands. Russell is at her comedy peak here — she wears a striped suit, uses her long-legged body for ungainly, unladylike effects, and rasps out her lines. And, as Walter Burns, Grant raises mugging to a joyful art. Burns’ callousness and unscrupulousness are expressed in some of the best farce lines ever written in this country, and Grant hits those lines with a smack. He uses the same stiff-neck cocked-head stance that he did in Gunga Din: it’s his position for all-out, unstuble farce. He snorts and whoops. His Burns is a strong-arm performance, defiantly self-centered and funny. The reporters — a fine crew — are Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Porter Hall, Roscoe Karns, Frank Jenks, Regis Toomey; also with Gene Lockhart as the sheriff, Billy Gilbert as the messenger, John Qualen, Helen Mack, and Ralph Bellamy as chief stooge — a respectable businessman — and Alma Kruger as his mother.

And here, direct from the good peoples at Hulu, is the complete movie: