Ordinarily we disdain remakes (remember the bonehead who tried to improve “The Big Sleep”?) but the movie we most want to see is just that. The very idea of Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear is enough to produce little frissons of terror. The original, made in 1962 by J. Lee Thompson, was a terrifically nasty thriller starring Robert Mitchum as an ex-con seeking revenge on Gregory Peck, the attorney who locked him up. The Mitchum role is now in the hands of Scorsese’s favorite actor, Robert De Niro, covered with tattoos and pumped up with evangelical self-righteousness. Nick Nolte is the attorney and Jessica Lange his wife, and from all reports Scorsese has darkened their characters too. Mitchum and Peck make return cameo appearances.
Steven Spielberg has had some trouble making the transition to grown-up movies. With Hook, his updating of “Peter Pan,” the boy who wouldn’t grow up, he’s simply stopped trying. Robin Williams stars as a Peter who’s become an investment banker, but has to return to Neverland to rescue his kidnapped kids from the clutches of the evil Hook (Dustin Hoffman in a lot of makeup). Tinkerbell takes the form of Julia Roberts. A cast like this doesn’t come cheap. (Dec.)
If Spielberg hopes for a return to the box-office glory of “E.T.,” the ever high-minded Roland Joffe (“The Killing Fields”) seems to be pulling for a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s journeyed to the Calcutta slums to film City of Joy (from Dominique Lapierre’s book). Playing a disillusioned doctor who finds new meaning in life among the downtrodden is Patrick Swayze. Do not expect dirty dancing. (Dec.)
Norman Jewison, who’s turned a number of hit plays into movies, tries his hand at Other People’s Money, Jerry Sterner’s off-Broadway comedy of Wall Street voraciousness. Danny DeVito plays a fiscal shark who devours companies for breakfast. (Oct.) The season’s second big play-to-film event couples Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino. In Frankie and Johnny, she’s a waitress and he’s a short-order cook. The whole point of Terrence McNally’s play “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” was that these were schlumpy losers who fell in love. Something tells us that under the direction of “Pretty Woman’s” Garry Marshall the Hoffman schlumpiness has taken a back seat. (Oct.)
Hollywood has always taken a fancy to Southern novelists and 1991 is no exception. The hype machine is already in overdrive for Barbra Streisand’s adaptation of Pat Conroy’s page turner The Prince of Tides. The buzz is big on Nick Nolte’s performance as a Southern teacher who journeys to New York and untangles his family’s dark Gothic secrets with the help of a very sympathetic Jewish shrink (Streisand). But it’s never wise to count your Oscars before your movie’s hatched. (Dec.)
Now that Kevin Costner has won his shiny statuette, everybody wants to direct. We’ll see if Jodie Foster has the filmmaker’s touch when Little Man Tate arrives. It’s a drama about a child prodigy torn between his know-nothing mom (Foster) and a knows-too-much child psychologist (Dianne Wiest). (Oct.) Lili Fini Zanuck, who coproduced “Driving Miss Daisy” with her husband, Richard, makes her move into the director’s chair with the crime drama Rush. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays an undercover narc hooked on coke and Jason Patric. (Dec.) In an even odder career move, art dealer turned producer Arne (a.k.a. Arnold) Glimcher has now turned director, adapting Oscar Hijuelo’s The Mambo Kings, a novel about two musical Cuban brothers in 1950s New York. (Dee.)
The fall promises its share of weirdness from some of our more adventurous filmmakers. In My Own Private Idaho, “Drugstore Cowboy’s” Gus Van Sant gives us River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves as Portland street hustlers in a contemporary retelling of “Henry IV.” (Oct.) Steven Soderbergh follows “sex, lies, and videotape” with a paranoid thriller shot in black and white called Kafka, with Jeremy Irons in the title role. (Nov.) And first-time filmmaker Michael Tolkin may have a cult movie with his apocalyptic tale of a promiscuous L.A. phone operator (Mimi Rogers) who gets born again in The Rapture. (Oct.)
The Addams Family promises weirdness for the whole family. Presiding over this macabre comedy are Anjelica Huston as Morticia, Raul Julia as her husband Gomez and Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester. Nifty casting, but will cinematographer-turned-director Barry Sonnenfeld have the right stuff ? (Nov.) Going head to head with the Addams bunch at Thanksgiving are two major animated features. From Walt Disney is a musical retelling of the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast and Steven Spielberg presents An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, a sequel to the popular Mousekewitz family saga.
Fievel’s a piker in the sequel game compared to the duffers on the Starship Enterprise. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is billed as the crew’s swan song. Promises, promises. (Dec.) December also serves up a double helping of Steve Martin. He’s the papa in a remake of Vincente Minnelli’s 1950 Father of the Bride. The revamped comedy features Diane Keaton and Martin Short. And Martin is part of an ensemble that includes Danny Glover, Kevin Kline, Alfre Woodard and Mary McDonnell in Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon. Dubbed a “very serious comedy” about Los Angeles life, we’re hoping for a return to Kasdan’s “Big Chill” form.
By this point you may be craving a little Continental cuisine. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique is a lyrical, mysterious story of two identical women, one French and one Polish. (Nov.) And the irrepressible Pedro Almodovar mixes murder and matriarchy in his spicy Spanish brew High Heels. (Dec.)
At year’s end, Bruce Willis gets a chance to redeem himself for “Hudson Hawk” when he costars with Damon Wayans in Tony Scott’s murder mystery The Last Boy Scout. And Warren Beatty hopes to prove he’s still a viable screen Lothario as gangster Bugsy Siegel in Barry (“Diner”) Levinson’s big Christmas movie Bugsy. Beatty gets obsessive about building Las Vegas’s first luxury casino, and even more obsessive about a starlet played by Annette Bening. The off-screen Beatty/Bening affair shouldn’t hurt this one’s prospects a bit. Seeking forgiveness for her recent clinkers, Bette Midler teams with James Caan to sing and crack wise as they entertain the troops in For the Boys. Her “Rose” director, Mark Rydell, guides this saga from World War II to Vietnam. Any season that includes a belting Bette, a flying Robin and a double dose of Nolte sounds OK. We’ll be even happier if some of these filmmakers actually have something to say.
The ’80s may be over, and life returned to modest proportions, but the coming popular-music season shows high levels of those ’80s intoxicants, gall and self-importance. Modest proportion can wait. From Barbra Streisand to Guns N’ Roses, Paul McCartney to Natalie Cole, overweening pretension and excess carry the day.
Did somebody mention overweening pretension and excess? McCartney offers up what may be the season’s grandest lollapaloser: his “Liverpool Oratorio,” a semiautobiographical opus for 300 musicians and singers, conceived in six movements. Not to be outdone in grandiosity, Streisand releases “Just for the Record,” a four-volume boxed set of mostly unreleased performances and plenty of chat-a shrine to one of our great talents, erected to her own specifications. The discs include her Emmy and Oscar acceptance speeches, some singing by her mother and her first demo recording, “You’ll Never Know,” made when she was 13. There’s also a new version of the song, with Streisand electronically singing duet with her teen self. Sort of like Natalie Cole’s digital duet with her father, only with no need to share the spotlight.
Cole, whose own gall earned her a No. 1 album this summer for her remakes of her father’s hits, tries it again, repackaging her 13-week-old “Unforgettable” album for the holidays, adding “The Christmas Song” and a video. Never mind respecting the dead; let’s use them to enhance our own slight credibility. When Johnny Mercer, writer of such classic songs as “Moon River” and “That Old Black Magic,” died in 1976, he left a stack of lyrics that needed a worthy hand to set them to music. This year, they found one-Barry Manilow, writer of such classics as “Copacabana.” The Manilow-Mercer canon is found on Nancy Wilson’s upcoming “With My Lover Beside Me.” Manilow also offers his own “Showstoppers,” an album of show tunes.
Nat King Cole’s own recordings will soon be available in excessive proportions. Try a massive boxed set (27 albums or 18 CDs) of his Capitol trio recordings. Faced with a recession, the record industry shows its own gall by upping the price of admission with boxed sets. Some are worthy: Ray Charles’s long out-of-print Atlantic recordings, a 104-song Patsy Cline box, a 16-CD set of John Coltrane’s Prestige recordings, as well as sets by Aerosmith, Howlin’ Wolf, Fats Domino and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Some are simply good marketing: Lynyrd Skynyrd; Jeff Beck; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Jimi Hendrix in concert. And some-well, some are by the Carpenters and the Monkees. Guns N’ Roses, who haven’t managed a real new record since 1987, release two later this month: “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II.” And Neil Young can’t just issue a double-CD live set from his “Ragged Glory” tour; he’ll also sell it in a three-volume set, with a 35-minute collage of feedback and outtakes that Young calls “new-age metal.” Did somebody say overweening and excessive? Also on tap for fall:
Prince has a new band, and George Jones has a new sound. The first tastes of Prince and the New Power Generation’s “Diamonds and Pearls” have been flat and undefined. As for Jones’s new sound, heard on “And Along Came Jones”’ if it seems familiar, it is-it’s Randy Travis’s. Very cute Prince protege Tevin Campbell releases his own album in October. Other proteges of willful geniuses with upcoming albums include pianist Kenny Kirkland and saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who left Wynton Marsalis’s band together in 1988 to tour with Sting (the willful genius being Wynton, not Sting). Willful guys with records of their own due include Paul Simon (live from Central Park) and Harry Connick Jr. (big band stuff ).
Bruce Springsteen’s new album, the delay of which has now lasted almost as long as his marriage to Julianne Phillips, is now scheduled for 1992. But we will finally get the perennial question marks from U2 (“Achtung Baby”) and Michael Jackson (“Dangerous”). The Jackson album, his first since splitting with Quincy Jones, will be coproduced with Teddy Riley, among others. One of its biggest rivals will be Bobby Brown’s fourth solo album (still untitled), which Riley is also coproducing. Bruce diehards can consider John Prine’s “The Missing Years,” which features cameos by Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty and Christina Amphlett of Divinyls.
Airbrushed diva Mariah Carey and country hunk Garth Brooks, who still have albums near the top of the charts, are releasing new ones anyway. His is “Ropin’ the Wind”; hers, “Emotions.” Further diva doings include Abbey Lincoln’s striking “You Gotta Pay the Band,” there issue of Anita Baker’s overlooked l987 “The Songstress” album, Bette Midler’s Stansfield “For the Boys” soundtrack and the second solo album by English neosoul singer Lisa Stansfield.
It’s a season for comebacks. Dire Straits, who haven’t made a new album since 1985, return with “On Every Street,” and Bryan Adams, gone since 1987, releases “Waking Up the Neighbours.” With his No. 1 single “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” Adams has evolved from a poor man’s Springsteen into a poor man’s Michael Bolton-a pretty good definition of poverty, any way you look at it. The poor man’s Bruce mantle falls to John Mellencamp and his gritty “Whenever We Wanted.” Looking for a comeback are Tracy Chapman, James Taylor, Genesis, INXS, Simply Red and, as usual, Van Morrison (his double album “Ordinary Life” is a likably messy return to partial form).
MC Hammer, who is galling and overweening even when he’s just playing the ponies, promises his new “Too Legit to Quit” album next month. Other big rap releases include Ice Cube’s “Death Certificate,” Public Enemy’s “Apocalypse 91, The Enemy Strikes Black,” and new albums by Kid ‘N Play, MC Lyte, Digital Underground and the all-star Human Education Against Lies. And that’s the rap on the fall of 1991.
As the networks crank out a fall line in which almost everything old is deja-view again (NEWSWEEK, Sept. 9), public TV and cable suddenly look like oases of innovation. PBS, hoping to duplicate the impact of “The Civil War,” will unveil another documentary epic on Oct. 6. Columbus and the Age of Discovery, a seven-hour series filmed in 27 countries, examines all four of the famous mariner’s voyages to the Americas as well as the medieval world that molded him-then analyzes his impact on the New World. Most of one episode was shot aboard full-scale replicas of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, built by the Spanish Navy to commemorate the Columbus quincentenary. As for the words, many are drawn from the admiral’s own log and the writings of his son. The maxi-doc also explores the sea of controversy currently engulfing the man and his legacy. Was Columbus a heroic visionary or a destructive opportunist? PBS, not renowned for plunging into stormy waters, lets all sides have their say.
Another arduous journey-that from infancy to adolescence-will be charted in public TV’s Childhood. Premiering Oct. 14, the seven-part series takes a uniquely cross-cultural tack. Through intimate looks at the lives of a dozen families in the United States, Russia, Japan, Brazil and Cameroon, it illuminates how different societies influence similar stages of a child’s development. Not even a visit from Dr. Spock can stop the kids from stealing the show.
On HBO, Richard Dreyfuss and Oliver Reed star in a dramatization of France’s infamous Dreyfus affair. Another made-for-HBO movie casts Jack Lemmon as a bored, self-made millionaire who gives up his riches to see if he can rise from rags again. The cable channel’s most promising new comedy series, created by Billy Crystal and titled Sessions, follows the victim of a midlife crisis (Michael McKean) through his encounters with his psychiatrist (Elliott Gould).
The networks’ only major effort, aside from surviving the season, is NBC’s A Woman Named Jackie. Adapted from C. David Heymann’s smarmy best seller about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the six-hour mini-series casts a jaundiced lens on both of Jackie’s marriages. The title role is played by Roma Downey, formerly of the soap opera “One Life to Live.” Could there be a message in that?
For a black American painter earlier in the century, artistic coming of age was a series of cultural whiplashes. He emerged from a rural Southern upbringing with the natural talent not only to get into a big-city art school but to win prizes and head for Paris. His style transformed by night life and cubism, he returned to the States only to feel queasy at having forsaken his roots. Then the search for a synthesis-of realism, modernism, African art and black city life-began. The struggle made some artists and broke others. Homecoming: William H. Johnson and Afro-America, 193846 is the story of both success and failure: a brilliant faux-naif body of work and a dismal last 23 years spent in a Long Island mental hospital. Had the Harmon Foundation not intervened at the last minute, a court-appointed attorney would have destroyed the destitute Johnson’s warehoused paintings and, of course, this essential show, opening Sept. 13 at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.
Although the Johnson exhibition is the most poignant of the fall’s diverse array of solo shows, it won’t be the only one to leave the viewer a little melancholy. Georges Seurat lived briefly (1859-91), but he transformed painting with a method called pointillism that looks as fresh today as it did more than a century ago. His drawings, however, will be the real discovery for those who know only “La Grande Jatte.” With just a little bit of Conte crayon, Seurat could equal volumes of Proust. (At New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, starting Sept. 24.)
On the contemporary side, the Martin Puryear retrospective, debuting Nov.2 at The Art Institute of Chicago, is the most anticipated show, especially after the abstract sculptor’s grand prize in the prestigious but faraway 1989 Sao Paulo Bienal. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is often accused of being merely a Soho gallery with a thyroid condition, but sometimes its trendiness pays off. Alexis Smith, the wry California collagist, might not have gotten the full museum treatment anywhere else. (Opens Nov. 21.) Well, maybe she would have gotten it at The Oakland Museum, which takes a flier beginning Oct. 19 on Michael C. McMillen: Habitats-Installations and Constructions. McMillen, a former prop maker for such movies as “Close Encounters,” is a master at evoking weird personalities through their fictional environments. It’s the kind of art Duchamp would have made had he apprenticed as a model railroader and not a painter. At the supercollider end of physical scale, we have the itinerant Bulgarian and mad wrapper Christo, whose latest public project is the simultaneous opening of 3,100 20-foot Umbrellas in Japan and in California. The stateside segment unfurls Oct. 8 in Tejon Pass, off I-5 just south of Bakersfield.
Matthew Barney, a 24-year-old Yalie, could win the trophy for the year’s farthest-out show and redeem his age group’s reputation (the one lost on the screenplay for “Regarding Henry”). A dedicated free climber, Barney will traverse the ceiling of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York and exhibit some athletic mock-equipment coated in cooled petroleum jelly (starting Oct. 19). Compared with Barney, Jonathan Borofsky’s sculptures of ICBMs with beating hearts are positively establishment. But he’s showing them (as of Oct. 25) with Paula Cooper in lower Manhattan, and she-not Leo Castellihas been the insider’s favorite art dealer for the last 20 years. So in general, just watch that space.
Art meteorologists checking on the jet stream (sometimes called the Zeitgeist) pay a lot of attention to group shows. No Laughing Matter, organized by Independent Curators Inc. of New York, is a show of political artists who use humor as a weapon. It begins its long tour Oct. 2 in a typical ICI venue: North Texas State University in Denton.
Art this autumn is not without its dignified side. Stuart Davis, An American Painter is the great-granddaddy of everyone from Warhol to Jeff Koons and a better artist than either and all. He gets his first retrospective in 25 years, opening Nov. 23 at the Met in New York. In the category of the really august is The Triumph of Japanese Style in the 16th century, debuting Oct. 19 at The Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA always does these tried-and-true treasures shows with savoir-faire. Speaking of riches, Christie’s will auction off modern paintings from the Burton Tremaine collection on Nov. 5. Now that we’re in the ’90s, artsies will probably proclaim “Who cares?” Then they’ll rush to check the prices in the next morning’s paper.
After the ’80s giddiness of sculptural and architectural mix-ins, photography could be retrenching. If museum shows have any influence, contemporary photographers will get back to basics after Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, an exhibition of 150 rare images at Ft. Worth’s Amon Carter Museum. Opening Oct. 26, it’s our pick for the season’s best show. What rigor it doesn’t provide, Walker Evans will. Starting Nov. 24 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and emphasizing his 1938-41 “Subway Portraits,” it’s photography the way it ought to be: black and white, beautiful and haunting. But lest photography’s power to subvert go unnoticed, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, with Tina Barney, Larry Sultan and others, will remind you that while the camera often lies, photographers don’t. (Opens Sept. 26 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.)
This being the season for counterrevolutions to fail, there’s a solid chance that Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women will strike a blow for that bedeviled movement, feminism. Sure to be controversial, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter’s polemic won’t appear until the end of next month, but it’s already being proclaimed as the “Feminine Mystique” for the ’90s. Faludi’s thesis is that whenever women make progress, an antifeminist backlash sets in. In San Francisco last week, Faludi observed that our society has “demonized” feminism, blaming it for everything from female executive burnout to depression to infertility and spinsterhood.
Faludi argues that feminism and the freedom it engendered didn’t make women unhappy; what did was the backlash agenda designed to create self-doubt and recrimination among successful women. Symptoms of the backlash may be as blunt as the Hollywood executive who finds working women “a defeminized, unappealing, pushy lot,” or as subtle as the antifeminism she finds in TV’s “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.” Dismayed by the antifeminist backlash, Faludi set out to document it in a fat book that explores our society’s assumptions and the popular culture it has produced. It’s an angry book, but trenchantly written, highly readable. It will cause talk.
It’ll be hard to avoid the following: Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost (October) rivals Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul (November) for the Most - Important - Novel-That - Nobody - Could- Finish Award. Rumor has it that “Harlot’s” plot drowns in 1,300 pages of talk and argument about the CIA’s duplicities. Brodkey’s long-advertised novel involves a sensitive hero looking back on his childhood and youth (No! Really?). Publishers Weekly has called it “flabby, bloated, overwritten, overwrought, often tediously self-indulgent. "
Garrison Keillor’s fans will be charmed by WLT: A Radio Romance (November), a story that involves quaint characters and a Minnesota radio station in 1926. But the excerpt in Life magazine from Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” (September) suggests that this multimillion-dollar production may be much worse than anyone feared. Rhett and Scarlett go sailing. Do you suppose he strums a banjo and sings “True Love”?
Many readers turn eagerly to each new novel by Stephen King to see if he’s learned to write yet. Needful Things (October) brings the Devil to small-town Maine. King promises never to write about this town again and we must hold him to it. The season’s most hyped thriller seems to be Victor O’Reilly’s Games of the Hangman (October), about terrorists in Switzerland. “Breathless suspense,” its publisher assures us; if so, this 500-page affair will leave us purple with asphyxiation.
Robert K. Massie’s Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (November) is the fall’s most important work of history. The invention of the battleship is only one of many dramatic events brought to life in this hugely comprehensive narrative of the way the world came to war in 1914.
In her fascinating and remarkably moving memoir, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (September), Jung Chang recounts the lives of her grandmother, sold as a concubine to a Manchurian warlord; her mother, devoted to the communist revolution in China; and herself, a “barefoot doctor” who took part in the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and then rebelled against them.
The Journals of John Cheever (October), much edited, is elegant and alarmingly frank in the anguish it expresses. Perhaps no important American author has recorded so vividly his struggles with drink and the imperatives of his bisexuality.
Biographies this season come in contrasting pairs. Curt Gentry assembles everything worth knowing (if little new) about J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (September), while Robert Lacey looks at the other side of the law in Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life (October), a well-documented and engagingly written account of “the thinking man’s gangster” who helped get gambling started in Las Vegas and Havana.
Many literary worthies have called Michael Holroyd’s life of G. B. Shaw one of the century’s great biographies. It concludes with Bernard Shaw 3: The Lure of Fantasy 1918-1951 (September). Shaw admired Lenin (in some respects, at least), whose successor receives an important reassessment in Dmitri Volkogonov’s Stalin: Triumph & Tragedy (September). The author, a former colonel general and present head of the Institute of Military History, draws on “heretofore secret files of the Communist Party, the Politburo, the military and the NKVD.”
Finally, a pair of showmen: Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (October), by Charles V. Hamilton, a Columbia professor, recounts the rise and fall of the notorious congressman from Harlem who charmed his constituents by his ability to flout white-establishment ethics. Jimmy Breslin may have been born to write Damon Runyon (September), a life of the fashionable and highly paid cynic who reported on and wrote stories about Broadway in the 1920s.
Celebrity memoirs are the diet sodas of the book world; what they lack in substance they make up in fizz. Katharine Hepburn’s coyly titled Me (September) is the season’s most ambitious, but we’ll also get Ginger Rogers’s Ginger: My Story (October) and Eartha Kitt’s Confessions of a Sex Kitten (September). In Wouldn’t It Be Nice? (October), former Beach Boy Brian Wilson offers a stomach-turning look at life with an abusive dad, cretinous band members, and his own battles with insanity, drug addiction and the pressures of fame. Raisa Gorbachev’s I Hope (September) was made obsolete before its covers were glued on.
Three business books threaten to flutter the honest investor’s heart. In Den of Thieves: The Untold Story of the Men Who Plundered Wall Street and the Chase That Brought Them Down (October), front-page editor of The Wall Street Journal James B. Stewart unravels the conspiracies of Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and other buccaneers. And John Rothchild takes on Robert Campeau in Going for Broke: How Robert Campeau Bankrupted the Retail Industry, Unleashed the Junk Bond Crisis, and Brought the Booming Eighties to a Crashing Halt. The book that should have hotshots blushing with shame is Graef S. Crystal’s In Search of Excess: The Overcompensation of American Executives (October) in which Crystal blows the whistle on out-of-control CEO salaries, bonuses and perks.
In Cruel Doubt (October), Joe McGinnis picks up another juicy murder case. This one involves a couple who are stabbed and beaten while in bed. The woman survives, only to learn that one of the men accused of the crime is her own son.
Finally, a book as ambitious and odd as any this season: William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map) (October) is a massive enterprise, a “vertical” analysis of a single county in the Great Plains. That is to say, as he interviews its residents, Heat-Moon works down through the land to find its history and structure.
Norman Rush’s collection of stories, “Whites,” was so wonderful that readers are eagerly awaiting his long first novel, Mating (September). It’s set in Botswana, where a woman anthropologist pursues a man who has created a new Eden in the Kalahari Desert. Russell Banks is always a strongly affecting writer. In The Sweet Hereafter (September), he examines the personal tragedies deriving from a schoolbus crash in an Adirondack town. In Talking It Over (October), the inimitable Julian Barnes offers a classic comedy routine: what does a young married Brit do when his best friend falls in love with his wife? Jump and Other Stories (October) offers further evidence that Nadine Gordimer’s short stories may be even better than her novels. And, finally, there’s the most unusual work of fall: Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II (October), a sequel to the remarkable adult comic book in which Jewish mice succumb to a holocaust conducted by Nazi cats.
Vincent Scully is a professor so legendary that his retirement from the Yale faculty last spring made the front page of The New York Times. Now everyone who never got to hear Scully lecture on architectural history will be able to get a taste of his passionate style when his latest book, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, comes out in November. This is expected to be a big art book-the first printing is 70,500 copies-but then, Scully’s long-held convictions have become part of the Zeitgeist: a respect for nature, historic buildings and the complex urban fabric, and a disdain for the inhumanity of much modern architecture. The new book, meant for the general reader, is not a chronological march so much as a tour of Scully’s mind, crisscrossing time and disciplines; it is illustrated with more than 500 images that he’s used in lectures over the years. Scully links Mayan temples to early skyscrapers, classical French gardens to city planning; he probes the relationship of architecture to nature, from the Southwest pueblo hugging the desert floor to the Greek temple on the hill to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, a wound cut into the earth.
Among the modern architects that Scully really likes is Louis Kahn. Scully has written the catalog introduction to Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, the first major retrospective exhibition of the architect’s work, which will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in October and travel to Paris, New York, Japan, Los Angeles, Ft. Worth, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio. Kahn, who died in 1974, used a modern vocabulary and materials like concrete, but made buildings with such a timeless quality of space and light-think of the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth-that they have the feel of ancient architecture.
A show of the work of contemporary Japanese architect Tadao Ando, who designs minimalist buildings in concrete and glass, also opens in October, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ando, born in 1941, is one of the most influential Japanese designers worldwide, despite the fact that so far he’s built nothing outside of his native country.
Tough times have hit the architectural profession, but a number of major architects have been busy putting finishing touches on museum projects across the country. The biggest new building is the Seattle Art Museum, which will open in December, designed by another Scully favorite, Robert Venturi, of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. The handsome $60 million building, squeezed onto a downtown site, is faced in fluted limestone, and decorated with a lively mix of granite, marble and bright terra cotta.
In November, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will expand its space with a bold new marble, granite and brick building designed by Moshe Safdie. Later this month, in Cambridge, Mass., the Busch-Reisinger Museum in Werner Otto Hall, part of the Harvard University Art Museums, will open a $7.5 million wing by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates.
The final building in the Denver Performing Arts Complex will open in November. The 2,800-seat Buell Theater, designed by Beyer Blinder Belle of New York and van Dijk, Johnson & Partners of Cleveland, was built inside the shell of the old Denver Arena.
Finally, on Oct. 9, The Getty Center in Los Angeles will unveil the design of its new complex by Richard Meier-almost seven years after the architect was chosen. Six buildings, including the new J. Paul Getty Museum and the Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, will be clustered on a 110-acre site in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. So far, the cost of the project, slated to open in 1996, is estimated at a whopping $350 million.
Even more than a winner, the theater loves a loser that comes back in triumph. So this November Broadway’s eyes will be on Nick and Nora, the musical that seemed down for the count several times over the past three years. Based on Dashiell Hammett’s “The Thin Man” (which became the popular William Powell-Myrna Loy movies), the show has survived the inexperience of first-time producers, the slowly evolving score by Charles Strouse (“Annie”) the replacement of the book writer by director Arthur Laurents and a case of malaria that floored the leading man. Now, the show has new producers, a revised book, a reconstituted score, a hale male star and a healthy $4.8 million budget. “Every time it fell apart, it came back,” says Laurents. “It’s not going to be defeated.”
Brave words, but Laurents insists that “Nick and Nora” is “the first high-comedy musical. The idea is that Nick and Nora are literally and figuratively dancing through life.” Heretically, Laurents is no fan of the Powell-Loy movies. Nick (Barry Bostwick) is now a much rougher character, a Greek who changed his name and became a private eye. Nora (Joanna Gleason) is a rich San Franciscan with an eye for dangerous men. “The business of class is very important to this show,” says Laur about outsiders.” Of course Asta the dog is on hand, despite Laurents’s futile attempts to get rid of the adorable mutt. “I’m just praying the dog doesn’t screw up the show,” he says.
There are no fleas on the upcoming revival of Frank Loesser’s 1956 The Most Happy Fella, a two-piano version that the composer authorized before his death. Already acclaimed at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., the show, starring Spiro Malas, opens in October in Los Angeles and almost certainly will move on to Broadway. Another praised revival, Bye Bye Birdie, with Tommy Tune, may choose to avoid the risks of Broadway on its ongoing successful nationwide tour, for which Tune has signed on until 1992.
But the gimmick this season seems to be musicals made from movies. Off-Broadway will see Return to the Forbidden Planet, a rock version of the 1956 flick “Forbidden Planet” (a knockoff of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”). This English show was the surprise winner of the Olivier Award, Britain’s Tony, beating out big-deal entries like “Miss Saigon.” In November, Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage will present A Wonderful Life, a musical version of Frank Capra’s 1946 classic with music by Joe Raposo and book and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. And the indefatigable Goodspeed is currently serving up Arthur: The Musical, based on, you got it, the Dudley Moore movie about the poor little rich boozehound. California’s enterprising La Jolla Playhouse plans an October opening for Elmer Gantry, a New Musical, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel that was filmed with Burt Lancaster as the corrupt evangelist. Music is by Mel Marvin and the director is Des McAnuff.
Among the big names that won’t be singing and dancing are Jason Robards and Judith Ivey this November on Broadway in Israel Horovitz’s Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, about a retired teacher and his uneducated Irish housekeeper. And Tony Randall will put down that bag of potato chips he shamelessly plugs on TV talk shows to launch an audacious venture, his National Actors Theatre, which kicks off on Broadway in November with Martin Sheen in a revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In October George C. Scott directs himself on Broadway in a revival of On Borrowed Time, Paul Osborn’s 1938 success about a crusty grandfather who outwits the Angel of Death. Jean Stapleton, a national treasure, will play Julia Child off-Broadway in a one-chef show, Bon Appetit!
You think the theater has problems today? In 1849 the rivalry between actors William Macready and Edwin Forrest resulted in the Astor Place Riot in New York, in which 22 people were killed in a melee among their fervent fans. This astonishing event is explored in Richard Nelson’s Two Shakespearean Actors, on Broadway in December. And Austin Pendleton’s Booth is Back, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in October, portrays the family of thespians that produced Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. In those days, theater really did change our lives.
Back in the early years of this century, the great impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned works for his Ballets Russes simply by bringing together the most daring choreographers, composers and designers he knew. There are precious few Diaghilevs around nowadays, but the Next Wave Festival at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music is famous for programming in his spirit, if not his financial disarray. This fall’s Next Wave includes a typical extravaganza: Griot New York, an exploration of the African-American experience created by three of the country’s leading black artists. Choreographer Garth Fagan, jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and sculptor Martin Puryear are the collaborators, each in his own way a griot, or storyteller.
Washington, D.C.’s, Kennedy Center is the force behind another notable commission: Company B, the highlight of the Houston Ballet’s fall season. Created by Paul Taylor to music by the Andrews Sisters, “Company B” is the first work to emerge from the Kennedy Center’s Commissioning Project. Six ballet companies are participating in the project, which is aimed at beefing up an American ballet repertoire that has been languishing for years. “Company B,” an exuberant but unsettling evocation of the ’30s and ’40s, gets this new initiative off to a terrific start.
Among the many troupes on tour, watch for the American Indian Dance Theatre, whose 25 Native American dancers and musicians perform authentic and spellbinding rituals from 15 tribes; and Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker’s innovative company from Belgium, which arrives with Stella, a work for five women and 100 metronomes.
The New York City Opera was once a celebrated risk taker. But in 1985, a warehouse blaze destroyed $10 million worth of costumes. Periods of artistic stagnation swept in. Fiscal crises cropped up, and by 1989, a protracted strike nearly sent the company under. Last year it staggered up from the ashes with a brilliant realization of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.” Not everything on its current roster appears thrilling, but two new productions in October hold special promise. The City Opera will follow “Moses und Aron” with another work of German serialism, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten” (“The Soldiers”), based on an 18th-century tale of prostitution and military savagery. Zimmermann envisioned opera as “total theater” which should include architecture, sculpture, film and the circus. Small wonder, then, that few Jenkins companies have tackled the epic since its 1965 premiere in Cologne. The NYCO will also produce a “modern Afro-American fairy tale” by the great jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins. “The Mother of Three Sons,” described as a “dance opera,” is choreographed and directed by that master of invention, Bill T. Jones. Once again, City Opera is becoming an exciting place to be.
This year, exactly two centuries after the death of Salzburg’s most famous son, no one has been safe from Mozart (and vice versa). In the absence Of SIMPLY SERGEI T-shirts or a PURELY PROKOFIEV festival, you may not have noticed this is also the centennial of the birth of Sergei Prokofiev. Tune in to the legendary Russian colorist.
The Lyric Opera of Chicago is betting on “The Gambler,” produced by Romanian Jenkins’s ‘Mother of Three Sons’ comes to New York City director Liviu Ciulei. (You have eight chances to see it in November and December.) The San Francisco Opera is mounting “War and Peace,” coproduced by the Kirov and conducted by Valery Gergiev. Last performance: Oct. 2. And this month, Emanuel Ax performs the Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Houston Symphony; he repeats it with Saint Louis in November.
Meanwhile, The Utah Symphony will present the “Sinfonia Concertante” and the orchestras of Detroit and Houston are offering the Fifth Symphony (1944), which Prokofiev conceived “as a symphony of the grandeur of the human spirit.”
As the millennium approaches, even the most hidebound orchestras and opera companies appear eager to dig into the richly disparate music of our century. This autumn, a remarkable number of orchestras are devoting half their repertoires to music written since 1900. Remember, 2001 is only a decade away. You’ll no longer be able to call Arnold Schoenberg–or even a computer-driven composer such as Tod Machover–“modern.”
Carlisle Floyd directs his own gripping 1955 work, “Susannah,” at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, and on Dec. 19, the Metropolitan Opera will present its first commissioned work since 1967-John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles.”
In the ’20s and ’30s, Poulenc dared to write concertos for harpsichord and for organ. In November, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will perform both, with Trevor Pinnock and Simon Preston. Debussy’s “La Mer” (1905) and Britten’s “Sea Interludes” from “Peter Grimes” (1945) make a splash with the Philadelphia Orchestra this season, and The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra will play John Harbison’s 1986 fox trot, “Remembering Gatsby.”
A November program by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra includes music by the knotty but popular Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and Arvo Part. Between Nov. 27 and Dec. 22, Pierre Boulez and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra examine works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Holler, among others. And how can you hail modern music without paying homage to the piece that in 1913 split the soul of music: the Atlanta Symphony performs Stravinsky’s revolutionary “The Rite of Spring,” Dec. 5-7.
Record companies have many enticements for stay-at-homes. There’s more from the archives (RCA Victor Gold Seal, for instance, issues 13 Toscanini discs) and some inviting new offerings.
Ever-inquisitive Alfred Brendel probes piano variations-Beethoven’s-and Schumann’s symphonic etudes (Philips).
James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera won the 1990 Grammy for “Die Walkure.” They continue their hair-raising “Ring” cycle with “Gotterdammerung” (Deutsche Grammophon).
With guest artists (including drummers and a choir), the Kronos Quartet performs music by seven African composers (Elektra Nonesuch).
Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax confront the Russians in cello-piano sonatas by Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev (Sony).
Simon Rattle conducts Janacek’s “Cunning Little Vixen,” with Thomas Allen and Lillian Watson (Angel/EMI).
title: “Promises Promises” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-20” author: “Josephine White”
In theory, at least, it all seemed straightforward. Riding the revolution in genetics, scientists have identified more than 3,200 genetic defects linked to diseases including colon cancer, Huntington’s and cystic fibrosis. Only last week researchers at the National Cancer Institute announced the discovery of a mutation in a gene linked to inherited breast cancer; the mutation arises in 1 percent of Jews of Eastern European descent, making it their most common genetic disorder. Of all the possibilities that these discoveries offer-from developing new drugs to screening fetuses for lethal genetic defects-the most tantalizing has been the prospect of substituting a good gene for a bad one. In such “gene therapy,” healthy versions of missing or defective genes would be slipped into a patient as easily as a computer jock installs a software patch to correct a bug-ridden program.
But it hasn’t worked out that way. The National Institutes of Health has approved 125 human-gene-therapy experiments since 1990, almost all to measure whether the techniques are safe. Fewer than a dozen were actually aimed at helping patients. Not a single one has yet shown that gene therapy can cure anything. “When there’s no proof that something works,” says geneticist Robert Erickson of the University of Arizona, “it’s not much different than snake off.”
The latest blow fell last week, with reports in The New England Journal that two more gene-therapy experiments had not worked. In one study, led by Dr. Jerry Men-dell of Ohio State University, 12 little boys with Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy received six monthly injections of immature muscle cells. The hope was that the genes in the healthy cells would fuse with the boys’ wasted muscle cells, which lack the dystrophin gene that gives muscles their strength. In eight boys the repair gene did not even get into the muscle cells. In the other four the gene did sneak in, but to little avail: there was no improvement in the boys’ strength. The other sobering news came from the North Carolina experiment. Dr. Richard Boucher and colleagues hope to cure CF with a sort of viral Trojan horse. The idea is to splice into a common cold virus, or adenovirus, a healthy version of the CF gene. The team sprayed adenovirus-es containing healthy genes into volunteers’ noses; the virus, and hence the gene, was supposed to infiltrate respiratory cells just as cold viruses do normally. But in seven of the patients virtually no genes even got into the cells. In the other five, a few genes got in. But they did not work well enough to have any effect on the disease.
The surprising part of all this is that gene therapies had shown promise in treating lab animals with hemophilia, muscular dystrophy, cancer, immune deficiency and other ills. But as immunologist Christopher Wilson and geneticist Mark Kay of the University of Washington wrote in the journal Nature Medicine last month, “mice are not human beings . . . Major impediments remain to be overcome if gene therapy is to become a reality.” Some of the obstacles:
Natural defenses. In several experiments a patient’s immune system has killed the Trojan horse–the virus carrying the healthy gene. As a result, too few genes enter the defective cells to cure disease. “This probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise,” says Wilson. “Humans have evolved an immune system that keeps foreign invaders at bay”-even if the invader is a virus carrying a gene that might cure a fatal illness.
Leaks. The repair gene sometimes escapes the target tissue. In the cystic-fibrosis trial at UNC, viruses wound up in some patients’ pharynx (above the esophagus) and stool. In another trial, a gene that was supposed to treat brain cancer infected the lining of the brain in one patient. He got meningitis (but survived). The Food and Drug Administration shut down the experiment.
Impermanence. Some genetic diseases involve cells that rarely divide. So even if repair genes slip into, say, lots of liver cells, it will not be a permanent fix: the cells carrying the new, healthy gene do not pass it on to any progeny. Any improvement in a patient’s condition is thus short-lived.
It is not difficult to see why the public might think gene therapy is farther along than it is. In the first such experiment ever done, in 1990, an NIH team led by W. French Anderson and Michael Blaese treated two little girls suffering from severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). Because SCID children lack a gene called ADA, they cannot produce the white blood cells necessary to fight off viruses and disease bacteria; untreated children die, often by age 1. NIH researchers injected the girls with blood cells contain in a healthy ADA gene. Both girls are doing fine. But they remain on a $250,000-per-year drug that does exactly what the new gene is intended to do – so it is impossible to know wether they owe their lives to the old medicine or the new gene. The ambiguity didn’t stop scientists from using the girls as examples of successful gene therapy when they tried to wangle more money out of Congress a year ago, however. In fact, the outcome is probably less clear, judging by a similar experiment on three SCID newborns at Children’s Hospital in los Angeles led by Drs. Donald Kohn and Robertson Parkman. Between 1 percent and 10 percent of their little patient’s blood cells now contains the ADA gene. Apparently, the gene got into some cells. But did it get into enough to help? Because the toddlers remain on the drug, Kohn remains humble: “It’s still unclear whether we have cured them or not.”
NIH director Harold Varmus is concerned enough about gene therapy that in February he appointed a panel of 10 researchers to scrutinize it. He asked in particular whether biotech companies had pushed ahead with clinical trial no to advance the science but to inflate the value of their stock. The panel report should be made public by the end of the year. Academics have been in just as much of a hurry as private companies. Establishing a gene-therapy center raises the profile and prestige of a hospital or university increasing its attractiveness to deep-pocketed donors, says Parkman: “It’s advertising for money.” The rush to grab some of the cachet surrounding gene therapy affects funding agencies journals, too, contends Richard Mulligan, the founder of Somatix Therapy Corp. of Alameda, Calif., and also the soon-to-be director of gene therapy at Harvard University. Agencies have approved clinical trials without examining underlying and unanswered questions of basic science, Mulligan says: “The standard of the science being done have set inappropriately low. And unlike any other discipline, more bad science gets publicized. There are journals that will print any sort of gene-therapy report because of the excitement.”
There is nothing wrong with impatience in the name of curing the sick and dying.But the lack of scientific spadework – in virology, genetics and cell biology – may have cost he field of gene therapy several years. Fr. Ronald Crystal of Cornell University Medical College argues, however, that “the logic behind gene therapy is so compelling, the science is so deep, there is no question it is going to work. “James Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania does not even regard the cystic-fibrosis results as a setback but rather as “normal evolution. We’ll go back to the lab and fix it.” To cure gene therapy of what ails it, he and others have proposed various schemes to foil the immune system’s attack on the Trojan-horse adenovirus. Even the unsuccessful gene trials reported last week have taught researchers what is nd isn’t likely to work. UNC’s Boucher is already several steps beyond the CF trial reported last week, working on delivery systems that might get more healthy genes into more sick cells.
One or another of the new approaches may be the breakthrough the field needs. Champions of gene therapy hope ir comes soon. If we are unable to demonstrate [success] in the next three or four years,” warns Thomas Okarma, chairman of Applied Immune Sciences Inc. in Snata Clara, Calif., “the pendulum is going to swing from flaming to smoldering to smoking to out.” The 80,000 human genes offer the promise of 80,000 disease treatment: after the field’s troubled infancy, the gene doctors would be grateful or a single one. And so would John, 26, the CF patient who would very much like to become 27.
Scientists announced last week that they’ve located about half of the genes in the human body. They don’t know what they all do–or how they work-but the atlas published in the journal Nature is a milestone in the Human Genome Project.
1 Just about every cell in the body contains two copies of every gene. they’re made of a long, twisty molecule called DAN.
2 DNA gets packaged into 23 pairs of chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell. Scientists think these chromosomes contain about 80,000 genes.
3 Genes are made up of sequences of smaller molecules called bases that sit on the spiraling DNA backbone. Designated A,C,T, or G, they encode the information the body needs to build proteins.
4 If those bases get out of order or the sequence gets “misspelled,” a mutaion can occur.
Scientists have found 3,200 mutations in human genes that cause disease. They hope that by substituting healthy genes for these defective ones they can cure illnesses from cancer to cystic fibrosis. But the reality has not lived up to the promise:
title: “Promises Promises” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-29” author: “Richard Wall”
If Han is happy, Beijing is happy. China is desperately trying to lure back the hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers who have left the country during the past two decades. From Shenzhen to Dalian, city governments are competing to create the best business environment for high-tech workers. Local governments have opened incubators, begun offering business and legal advice to start-ups, slashed rents in high-tech economic zones and even advanced venture capital.
Beijing has fretted about China’s brain drain since the mid-’80s. When the education ministry discovered that fewer than a third of the overseas students were returning, officials began to administer rigorous background checks on those sent abroad to ensure that they “loved the motherland,” reported the state-run newspaper Xinhua. Later the government began trying to lure students home with promises of good jobs. Beijing opened a China Returned Students Services Center in 1991, and officials traveled to U.S. cities to explain how they would help graduates find work.
Now that China’s economy has opened and high tech is a national buzzword, opportunities for returning scholars are popping up in nearly every province. Thirty-two science parks target this group, offering them preferential policies. China’s 53 special high-tech zones and more than 100 incubators often favor expatriates, and vie for their talents. Some offer superior service: Shanghai’s Zhangjian High-Tech Park promises to finish the paperwork within five days for starting up a business. Others dangle cash; Shaanxi province has established a credit-guarantee fund for smaller enterprises.
Government officials are even scouting overseas hot spots for expats ready to come home. Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech development zone opened an office in Silicon Valley this month. Chu Junwei, of the center’s Returning Students’ Services Office in Beijing, hopes that Zhongguancun’s presence there will sway some fence-sitters. “China is their motherland,” he says. Patriotism is a powerful motivator. Guo Bing credits a sense of duty–as well as free rent–with encouraging him to leave France for Pioneer Park to start a company developing “intelligent” traffic systems. “Of course we want to make money,” he says, “but if we can help the country, that’s even better.” Fortunately for Beijing, a lot of others are thinking the same way.
