Fifty Years on Stage (2013)

I’d previously seen a truncated version of this that aired on TV, but now I’ve seen the complete version through National Theatre Live. Celebrating, as the title says, fifty years of the National Theatre, all manner of talented actors come together to pay tribute to some of the many shows performed on that stage.

As such, there’s no plot summary to speak of. Countless actors appear to perform short excerpts from dozens of shows: busy ensemble scenes, intimate two-handers, snippets of monologues, and the occasional musical number. All are from shows performed at the National Theatre, some with the original actors reprising their roles.

Tribute is paid in other ways as well. The live performance is augmented by short talking heads of actors reminiscing about their experience working at the National Theatre or discussing the scene they’re about to perform. A small number of archival clips from early productions are shared. And the first scene of the event is the opening scene of Hamlet, which was the National Theatre’s inaugural performance in 1963; to take it a step further, the very first line of Hamlet is spoken, not by an actor onstage, but through an archival recording of the actor from that first production.

So many noteworthy actors and scenes here. We get snippets from, not one, but two Tom Stoppard plays that debuted at the National Theatre, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead! Benedict Cumberbatch is in that tribute, performing Rosencrantz’s “dead in a box” monologue, and we also get a scene from Arcadia featuring Rory Kinnear and Anna Maxwell Martin. For Shakespeare, we get Hamlet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra, plus archive footage of a very young Ian McKellen playing Richard III.

What else? Most of the original cast from The History Boys reunites to perform the French lesson scene, which is fun. Dominic Cooper and Andrew Scott do the critical talk between Louis and Prior from the early scenes of Angels in America, with Scott doing a splendid job as Prior Walter. Judi Dench sings “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music—other musical performances include “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat” from Guys and Dolls and “The Rain in Spain” from My Fair Lady. We get a scene from No Man’s Land, although not with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen—that production came a few years after this. Instead, it features Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi. A scene from War Horse showcasing the beautiful puppetry.

Lots of other terrific actors on display. We get Adrian Lester, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Christopher Eccleston, Ralph Fiennes, Simon Russell Beale, Penelope Wilton (Harriet Jones, prime minister!), and archive footage of Anthony Hopkins, just to name a few. At the end of the show, the actors come out in batches, according to the decade when they first worked at the National Theatre. There are, I believe, six whose history with the theatre dated back to its earliest productions in the ‘60s, including Maggie Smith and Derek Jacobi, and the “classes” of actors just get more numerous from there. A lovely way to pay tribute to a special place and to celebrate theatre itself.

Warnings

Language, violence, sexual content, and thematic elements.

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)

This is most definitely not a movie.  If I were to compare it to anything we have nowadays, it’d be somewhere between an awards show and a telethon, only without awards to give out or money to raise for charity.  Rather, this is a lavish revue featuring brief performances from all of MGM’s top stars, something of an extended ad for their talents (which is also part of the function of an awards show.)  And if I’m placing this correctly in context, this revue came out pretty much right as MGM was getting into sound movies, so one of its additional draws was getting all its stars in one place and letting audiences hear them both talk and sing.

For the awards-show aspects, we have lots of celebrities (Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Joan Crawford, and Jack Benny, just to name a few) all rubbing elbows on the same soundstage for a couple of hours.  There’s the same sort of staged banter with the same sort of winking nods, and there’s plenty of fawning introductions and self-congratulatory airs.  For the telethon aspect, we see these stars, not just standing around being lovely and impressive, but performing for the viewers.  It’s pretty much wall-to-wall song and dance interspersed with introductions and broken up by an occasional skit.  This is, essentially, MGM’s way of saying, “When you’ve got it, flaunt it!”, and for many people watching it in the theater, it’s seeing their favorite stars show off talents they might not have seen before (definitely not, in the case of the singing and speaking.)

Really, much of it isn’t for me, but that’s mainly because I’m just not familiar enough with enough of these stars or the songs they’re performing to get too drawn in (I mean, I know who plenty of them are, but I’ve only got one idol in the bunch, and that’s Buster – more on him later, of course!)  That said, I know that if someone told me I could watch all of today’s big-name actors sing and dance in a movie for two hours – no plot in sight, just celebrities strutting their stuff – I’d be there yesterday.  So I’m sure this was awesome back in its day; I’m just too removed to appreciate it from that vantage point.

But what I do appreciate?  Buster all over.  Seriously, Buster is the man in this thing.  Other than a quick camera pan in a group number at the end, he’s only in one main scene, but he’s awesome in it.  Even if you don’t want to watch The Hollywood Revue of 1929 in its entirety, watch his scene on YouTube.  As I’ve written about before, it’s his “Princess Rajah” dance that he started doing back in his vaudeville days and later used to entertain the troops when he was overseas during WWI.  And it’s amazing.

Everything about this dance is utterly fantastic.  His cobbled-together “Arabian princess” costume is fabulous (I especially love the ladles hanging from the skirt, and the slap sandals are awesome,) his little bits of random business are hilarious, and his acrobatic slapstick dancing is off the hook.  We get a series of no-handed cartwheels like in Back Stage, as well as his patented move of trying to hoist himself onto something one leg at a time (it’s hard to describe, but it’s still magic to see every time.)  Even as a decidedly-biased person, I have think this performance, among the rest of the revue, is in a class of its own.  Buster was such a pro, and here, he shines in every moment.

(Sadly, this film comes right after his two silent features for MGM and just before the start of his sound pictures, and it’s not an exaggeration to say it was all downhill from here.)

But no matter what came after, it can’t take away from this scene.  Buster’s comedic dancing prowess was always on point and he put it to good use during his film career, but even though he has other dances that borrow from this one, I’m so glad it got recorded in its entirety.  Routines that originated on vaudeville in The Three Keatons can feel a bit mythic almost – reading accounts of tremendous physical humor that doesn’t exist anymore – and the only way we’re able to experience them for ourselves is in situations like this, where Buster takes a bit from the stage and puts it in front of a camera, making a record of it for us to see that will last long after news clippings of old vaudeville reviews fade.

Warnings

A bit of slapstick violence.