Blue Moon

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Eric H-G posted this review on Facebook — and, not previously having been aware of this movie, I'm really intrigued:

Hollywood Reporter:  Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley Mesmerize in Richard
                                                   Linklater's Affecting Study of a Gifted Artist on a Downhill Slide
                                                   Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott co-star in this real-time account of musical-theater lyricist Lorenz Hart
                                                   getting pickled at Sardi's on opening night of his former writing partner's Broadway triumph Oklahoma!


It reminds me a bit of Raising Havoc — the tone may be quite different, but the inside-baseball view of midcentury Broadway has me itching to see Blue Moon.  Well, that and the gold-plated cast, and David Rooney's glowing review; and, sure, also the counterfactual inclusion of a 13-year-old "Stevie" Sondheim at the opening night that would catapult his soon-to-be mentor's already remarkable career into the ionosphere.

While Hammerstein apparently did take the young Sondheim to see Oklahoma! at some point in 1943, SJS recalled his first-ever opening night as that of Carousel's 1945 Hartford tryout, on his fifteenth birthday, where the Act I finale so moved him that he stained Dorothy Hammersteins's fur with his tears.  But reflexive disdain for the film's inaccuracy on this point, as evinced by some Facebookers in reaction to the review, strikes me as too inside-baseball, by far — dismissing a valid and potentially fascinating dramatic choice on the basis of what can only be regarded, outside the realms of documentary or nonfiction biography (or of hypersensitive fandom), as historical trivia.  Even from Rooney's review alone it seems likely to me that, beyond just wanting to namecheck Sondheim, Linklater may understandably have found the dramatic usefulness of repositioning him on that particular block of Manhattan on that particular evening, at the scene of Hart's Waterloo, too intriguing to resist.  We're watching Hart on this fateful night, in real time, as he slips irrevocably into Broadway's obsolete past.  But what would it be like to put him into even brief, awkward conversation with its unwitting future, the next Next Big Thing who will in turn grow up to supersede — and, in quasi-Oedipal terms, vanquish — the revolutionary duo whose epochal joint success is displacing and effectively destroying Hart before our eyes?  Also: how does it shade this imagined conversation if we know that Hart and Sondheim, urbane gay men of the Lost and Silent Generations, respectively, whose lyrics reflect a discernibly similar sensibility — an often sharp, sometimes aching existential ambivalence about love and loneliness — will each be held in historical contrast to the straight, married-with-children R&H's optimistic, heteronormative midcentury "innocence"?  This doesn't look to me like random sloppiness on Linklater's part, and still less like arrogance.  It just looks like good storytelling.

Apparently a US release is planned for this May.  [Ed.: Pushed to October, see below].

In 2008 I designed a Rodgers & Hart revue which lightly sketched both men's biographies over its 90ish-minute runtime, in the process making them each a bit more vivid to me than they had previously been — especially Hart, and especially in his decline.  So I'm fascinated to see what Linklater (an established Sond-head in good standing) and Hawke (one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, according to a friend of mine who was once a downtown neighbor of his) make of him.

[scenicdesign71]

Deadline:   Richard Linklater's Blue Moon To Rise This Fall


Limited theatrical release October 17, going wider October 24.

[scenicdesign71]

https://www.sonyclassics.com/film/bluemoon

Lemuel Ayers's Oklahoma! set* appears to have been both diligently researched and lightly "interpreted", especially as regards color (a more faithful recreation of his original palette might have appeared cartoonish to modern eyes, gaudily unsuited to what Linklater might want us to understand as a decisive shift away from the plotless, decorative spectacles that had previously defined the B'way musical).^†  And that's clearly not the St. James, nor even trying to look like it; the proscenium opening is at least ten feet too narrow, and I can't think of any B'way houses with stages that small flanked by double-tiered boxes.  That narrower/taller aspect ratio feels more like the West End than like Broadway; I would assume they used a theater somewhere in Ireland or the UK, Blue Moon having been filmed in Dublin.

Nonetheless, even this quick glimpse of the curtain call shows that the research was done, and used appropriately, which is encouraging.  I'll be interested to see how wedded, or not, they were to the layout of the real Sardi's, where the bulk of the film takes place.  The details of its decor in the trailer seem accurate enough to have been, like those of the Oklahoma! set, thoroughly-researched but not slavishly-copied.  The trailer also includes fleeting appearances by a solemn-looking kid who I assume is young Stevie, perhaps on spring break from his first year at the George School.

Looking forward to October!

* In addition to his impressive design career, Ayers is also remembered as the lead producer whose untimely death at 40 scuttled what might otherwise have been SJS's B'way debut two years before West Side Story.  Speaking of inflection points in the history of the American musical, it's interesting to imagine how differently Sondheim's career might have unfolded if Ayers had lived and Saturday Night had opened in 1955 as planned.

^† While this shift isn't central to the story Linklater is telling, Hart's predicament gains in pathos if we understand that he's being "left behind" not only by Rodgers or by this one runaway hit, but — as a result of its literally overnight success — by the entire industry in which he made his name as a very different kind of lyricist.  As germane as Oklahoma!'s introduction of a new kind of musical-theatre dramaturgy may be its lyrical tone and rural setting: earnest, backward-looking, notably eschewing the urbane modernism for which Hart had been celebrated.  In its tiny way, leaching a little of the color out of Ayers's set might give us a sense of how Hart, in his bitterer moments, might have regarded the show: tame; anodyne; "corny and uninspiring" in content, even as its integration of words, music and dance advanced the form and paved the way for later developments.  The backlash against Rodgers and Hammerstein would eventually arrive, but in the meantime Hart could only watch the new partnership's meteoric ascendancy with helpless envy — and while a single smash hit might have stung, Hart's (accurate) intuition that the turf itself was suddenly shifting beneath his feet must surely have made his experience of Oklahoma! all the more unsettling and depressing.  Granted, that's a lot to cram into an image that most audiences will simply read as "old-fashioned Broadway-musical scenery"; my usual overthinking.  But I'd be surprised if Linklater and his production designer Susie Cullen hadn't devoted some more-or-less conscious and detailed thought to this look — however brief it may be in the film — at the show that's causing all the ruckus, the catalyst of Blue Moon's entire story.