Victor Garber's Broadway Role of a Lifetime
Victor Garber has been working in the theater and in Hollywood for decades, but he may just now, at 60 years old, be inhabiting the role of a lifetime. Garber stars in the brilliant Broadway revival of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, playing a middle-age, womanizing matinee idol, Garry Essendine, who waltzes around in silk robes, continually impressing himself with his own grandeur. It’s a campy, bawdy role, and Garber tackles it with ease—maybe a little too much. He told The New York Times, “I totally related to this character. What I wish it was, was that I was that smart and funny. Garry says, ‘I’m fundamentally honest,’ and I admire that.” .
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A Gravity-Defying Photography Show
The French have a unique sense of humor. Denis Darzacq has brought that to America this week, with Hyper, a new photography show at New York’s Laurence Miller Gallery (through March). The exhibition features bright shots of professional dancers flipping and flying through French grocery stores, wearing everyday street clothes and moving through their environments weightlessly, as if stuck in time in the banal vacuum of daily food shopping. The Daily Beast’s Rachel Wolff weighs in on Darzacq’s work, writing, “I like that he captures those in-between moments—not necessarily the poses or peaks of each jump, but rather the ascents, the descents, the near catastrophes and the awkward transitions.” Watch a video of Darzacq at work, here.
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All Aboard: Catherine Deneuve’s The Girl on the Train
More from the French! This week, they are really churning out cultural gems. The indie release of the week is undoubtedly The Girl on the Train, a French soon-to-be-classic (starring Catherine Deneuve) about the controversial news story of a woman who faked being the victim of an anti-Semetic attack on a Paris train. Young beauty Emilie Dequenne plays Jeanne, who works as a babysitter, and later, as an assistant to a Jewish activist. Jeanne (Deneuve is her mother) gets involved in a violent relationship with a wrestler, who encourages the lie and sets off an explosive chain of events. As the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane writes, “At the age of 66, [director Andre Téchiné] approaches the exploits of his characters with a gusto, and a willingness to be led astray, that borders on the adolescent.” They must be putting something in the French water.
