I really enjoyed the four-season Amazon show Mozart in the Jungle about the wild lives of NYC philharmonic musicians. It was a funny, sweet, heartwarming show about an exclusive world that rarely gets shown to the rest of the world -- and it had a great cast including Bernadette Peters, Malcolm McDowell and Mark Blum.
The show was based on a memoir of the same name by a classical oboist named Blair Tindall who published it in 2005 -- and got some flack for revealing that elegant classical musicians are just as randy as the rest of the us.
Blair Tindall has died at the age of 63, and she had an interesting life. Believe it or not, she used to be married to Bill Nye the Science Guy! Anyway, RIP.
A great NYC actor of the stage and screen, Mark Blum, has passed away from this terrible virus.
He had long and busy career, and appeared in classic movies like Desperately Seeking Susan and Crocodile Dundee as well as brilliant TV shows like Mozart in the Jungle and Succession.
I just finished the fourth season of the Amazon show Mozart in the Jungle -- a wonderful comedy about the classical music world of NYC -- and was saddened to find out that this season is the last.
Amazon cancelled the show last month -- along with lots of others.
I didn't blog a lot about this show but it was an incredibly funny and warmhearted look at an industry (classical music) struggling to survive in the crazy world of 21st century culture and NYC. The characters were wonderfully realized, the writing was sharp, the stories were heartfelt, and it was a great look at a slice of life, a little world, in NYC. It was a show about artists, people who love what they do, and are willing sacrifice for it. It was a show about triumphs, disappointments, love, and everything else. It was wonderful.
Most of all, it featured Bernadette Peters and Malcom McDowell, still going strong after decades in show business. It had a great cast.
And now it's gone.
It's gone because Amazon, after firing its previous programming chief in a #MeToo moment, hired a new person who's decided to cancel shows like Mozart (small, sophisticated boutique shows about real people and their struggles) in order to spend roughly a $1 billion to re-imagine Lord of the Rings. Apparently, Amazon wants its own Game of Thrones, its own Stranger Things, it's own big-time cultural buzzy hit. It wants a blockbuster.
Le sigh.
Forgive me, but can Amazon really do a better job with LOTR than Peter Jackson did with his movies? Does the culture really need or want this? And while I'm a HUGE fan of GOT and enjoy Stranger Things, I loved that Amazon had all these funky, small, literate shows -- like Mozart, Transparent and One Mississippi. These were original, groundbreaking, history-making shows, shows that truly pushed the art of television forward.
But business is business, and this was probably inevitable. Still, it's disappointing. So let's just appreciate that for a brief, shining moment there was a place where shows like this could thrive.
And, like all good things, like all great moments, they come to an end.
The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Annie, back in 1982. I didn't remember much about it except that I really liked the woman who played the bad guy's girlfriend. Sure, she was pretty, but there was something else about her, something more, a mysterious allure, that captivated me. You got the feeling in her performance that there was a depth to her character that we were only seeing the surface of, that there was more, a lot more, than met the eye. Oh, and she could sing. Boy could she sing!
I found out later that this actress was Bernadette Peters and I'm a lifelong fan. Ironically, the first time I saw her was in a movie but she hasn't done a lot of movies in her career (although before Annie she was in the Steve Martin break out The Jerk) -- she's mostly done Broadway and is one of the last, truly great musical theater stars (check out my review of her performance in A Little Night Music from 2010). She's originated roles in Sondheim's A Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods, she's played Annie Oakley and Mama Rose, and very soon she'll be taking over from Bette Middler (the Divine Ms. M) in Hello Dolly. Ms. Peters is one of the great entertainers of our time, up there with Ethel Merman and Chita Rivera, and she'll be remembered long after she retires. So, if you're a big fan like me, you should read this big interview with The Divine Ms. P from New York magazine. What's surprising about it is how modest, how normal she sounds -- considering that she's a Broadway and NYC legend, she sounds downright humble. Amazing. If want to see The Divine Ms. P in something, you should watch her in two very different roles, from two very different eras, from her long career: the 1989 movie Slaves of New York and the current Amazon show Mozart in the Jungle. She's great in both, playing very different characters, but her talents, as always, shines through. The fact that her career has lasted so long, in so many forms, speaks to her huge talent. P.S. A couple of years ago I saw Bernadette Peters being interviewed by some airhead on a red carpet and this interviewer was talking to the Divine Ms. P like she was a Kardashian or some such cultural bottom feeder (lots of "girlfriend!" etc.). I was offended that a massive talent like her was being talked to like a dummy by a dummy but classy way she acted the just made her all the more divine.
