London. The 1960s and 1970s hit songs that Burt Bacharach wrote with his late lyricist, Hal David, are most often heard now in elevators and hotel lobbies, but a musical that opened in London this week lifts them right back into the stratosphere. “What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined” has turned the tiny Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre in south London into a happy place, where the audience wastes no time getting into the spirit by singing and clapping along with the exuberant young seven-member cast.

“Do You Know the Way to San Jose?,”, “Walk on By,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” and “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me” haven’t sounded this fresh, or drawn such attention to David’s often artful and clever lyrics, since they were hits for the likes of Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black and B.J. Thomas decades ago. The question in the title is the signature line from Bacharach and David’s theme song for the 1966 Michael Caine movie “Alfie,” about a London cad who uses women. The question — minus the mention of Alfie — pops up repeatedly, even in other songs, as something of a “what is the meaning of life” trope, but that’s as profound as things get.

The show, set to run through Sept. 5, is the brainchild of its music director and lead performer, Kyle Riabko. The program notes say he sold the now 87-year-old Bacharach on the idea of a rethink of his songs some years ago, when Riabko sang demos of new arrangements to the composer at a Los Angeles studio.

The resulting 90-minute tune fest was an off-Broadway hit. It ran for more than a year at the New York Theater Workshop, won several awards and was extended twice before closing in February of last year.

Riabko, an almost alarmingly fresh-faced Canadian with the energy of a young Pete Townshend, reprises his role as lead singer and guitarist, this time with a cast that draws on talent from both sides of the Atlantic.

Anastacia McCleskey, the troupe’s strongest soul-Motown voice, brings down the house with a searing version of Warwick’s “Don’t Make Me Over”. She hails from Nashville while guitarist-singer Daniel Bailen, who was in the off-Broadway cast, is from New York City.

The British-based talent includes singer-guitarist Greg Coulson, keyboardist-vocalist Renato Paris and singer-percussionist James Williams. Singer and instrumentalist Stephanie McKeon, who sings a wistful “Walk On By”, is from Ireland.

The stage in the production directed by Steven Hoggett is set to resemble a ramshackle urban apartment. Chairs, sofas and a variety of table lamps are dotted about, suggesting the type of environment where Bachararach and David would have worked to come up with the tunes and lyrics that made them into a hit factory. That gives license for Riabko and his cast to, as the title has it, “reimagine” Bachararach, as if the songs are being dreamt up and performed for the first time. Other than that, there is no attempt to provide a backstory, or any plot at all. What you see and hear is what you get – performers who weren’t even born when Bacharach and David wrote these songs making them sound as if they were written yesterday.

Reuters

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London. Master of the macabre Christopher Lee, who portrayed Dracula in outrageous Hammer Films horror classics but became known to later generations for roles in “Star Wars” and as the wizard Saruman in the “Lord of the Rings,” has died aged 93.

Lee died last Sunday in hospital, where he had been undergoing treatment for respiratory problems, a copy of his death certificate posted online showed. Lee’s agent, in an e-mailed statement, said his family “wishes to make no comment.”

Roger Moore, who played James Bond in “The Man with the Golden Gun” (1974) in which Lee was the villain Scaramanga, paid tribute to Lee on Twitter and offered condolences to his wife of 54 years, the former Danish model Birgit Kroncke, their daughter Christina and her husband, Juan Francisco Aneiros Rodriguez.

“It’s terrible when you lose an old friend, and Christopher Lee was one of my oldest,” Moore said. “We first met in 1948.”

The London-born Lee achieved fame from the late 1950s into the 1970s playing characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Mummy for Hammer Films.

With his deep, mellifluous voice and ramrod 1.93-meter frame, Lee was the last English-language horror movie star in a line that traced back to silent era luminary Lon Chaney and included Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, Lee’s regular Hammer Films co-star.

Lee brought to his monsters a sense of pitifulness that he called “the loneliness of evil.” Despite being a master of the horror genre, Lee did not even like the word.

“It implies something nauseating, revolting, disgusting – which one sees too often these days. I prefer the word ‘fantasy,’” he told the New York Times in 2002.

Many leading directors sought out Lee’s talents, especially in the latter stages of his career when he was already elderly.

Career renaissance

He won new generations of fans after the turn of the century in some of the biggest money-makers in film history. He played the evil Count Dooku, fighting Jedi knights in “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones” (2002) and “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” (2005).

Lee was also the fiendish criminal genius Fu Manchu in five films, Scaramanga in the Bond film and, in a rare departure from cinematic wickedness, gave life to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in a couple of movies.

Lee also portrayed the power-hungry wizard Saruman in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy in 2001, 2002 and 2003, and in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012) and “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” (2014).

As part of his late-career flourish, he also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” (2011) and Tim Burton’s black comedy “Dark Shadows” (2012) with Johnny Depp.

According to movie industry website IMDB, Lee has a lead role in the as-yet unreleased “Angels in Notting Hill” and was to have appeared in “The 11^th,” which has not yet begun production.

He also had a lifelong interest in music and his single “Jingle Hell” in 2013 entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 22, making him the oldest living artist to enter the charts.

Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born on May 27, 1922, and took up acting on the suggestion of a cousin after serving in Britain’s Royal Air Force in World War Two.

He made his film debut in 1947, launching a career that eventually spanned more than 200 movies.

Lee was most closely associated with the role of Dracula, dispensing with the nobility Lugosi had given the role and adopting a more beastly, lustful bearing as he dispatched various buxom victims.

Reuters

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Cannes. Michael Fassbender is a “Macbeth” for our times, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, while Marion Cotillard is a Lady Macbeth haunted by the loss of a child, in the final competition entry screened on Saturday for the top Cannes prize.

The main Palme d’Or prize for the 68th edition of the film festival will be awarded on Sunday evening local time.

Most critics appear to think Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “Nie Yinniang” (The Assassin), about a martial arts killer, is the most deserving.

It is followed closely by Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes’s “Saul Fia” (Son of Saul) set in the Auschwitz concentration camp and American director Todd Haynes’s lesbian romance “Carol” starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.

The screen credits for “Macbeth” directed by Australian Justin Kurzel (“Snowtown”) give fair warning that it is “based on the play by William Shakespeare.”

Unlike some previous movie adaptations of one of Shakespeare’s darkest plays, this unfurls a bit like a study guide version with the lines (“Out, damned spot”, “screw your courage to the sticking point”) retained but much dialogue cut.

What Kurzel has opted for is to open up the play as a psychodrama about the romantic relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth that is spiraling towards disaster because of the psychological trauma each has endured.

Fassbender said Kurzel had suggested in an early conversation about the film that Macbeth, shown in the midst of battle in the opening scene, has nightmares and visions of witches because of his battle scars, physical and mental.

“The idea that he’s seeing hallucinations, we know from soldiers today coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan that describe traumatic stress disorder,” Fassbender told a news conference.

“The fact that they have these hallucinations, the fact that they can be walking down the Croisette here (in Cannes) and next thing it’s Basra – real time, Basra – so that made so much sense from the beginning with the character, the fact that he’s seeing the witches – are they there? are they not? – and his sort of unhinged behaviour.”

Kurzel said he also wanted to show the impact of the stark, rainy and cold Scottish winter landscape on the protagonists.

“I think it’s kind of like a western, I think it was kind of integral to the way we make film,” Kurzel said.

Cotillard, one of France’s top actors, said it had been a challenge for her to get inside the character of Lady Macbeth.

“It’s difficult for me because firstly the language is English with a particular accent and I was always afraid of not managing to pay tribute to a given text, particularly when you’re talking about Shakespeare, so that for me was perhaps what intimidated me most,” she said.

There was a lighter moment when a reporter asked what the best and worst things were about working in Scotland.

“Whisky and whisky,” Fassbender said.

Reuters

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Jakarta. The creators of the animated film “The Little Prince,” which had its world premiere at the Cannes festival on Friday, knew they had to take extra care in adapting one of the most cherished works of 20th-century French literature for the screen.

To that end, American director Mark Osborne (“The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie”) has created a story within a story in which a Little Girl, voiced by Mackenzie Foy (the 10-year old Murph in “Interstellar”) is introduced to poet and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic by an elderly aviator (Jeff Bridges).

He lives in a rundown but fantastic mansion with a wrecked plane in the backyard, next door to the soulless modern home where the girl and her mother, who wants everything to be done on time and to perfection, have moved in.

He reads her The Little Prince, which he says he has written, and opens her mind to how she is missing out on the wonders and fantasies of childhood.

Other characters from the book, which has been translated into 250 languages and sells about 2 million copies a year, include The Fox voiced by James Franco and The Rose voiced by Marion Cotillard.

The film uses stop-motion animation to re-create and expand upon the watercolors that Saint-Exupery painted for his novella, a fantasy tracking the relationship between an aviator who crashes in the Sahara and a small boy, the “Little Prince,” who says he is from an asteroid and tells the story of his life.

Computer-generated images are used for the story about the Little Girl’s friendship with the aviator, and its consequences.

Saint-Exupery fled the Nazi occupation of France and wrote the book in New York in the early 1940s but returned to join the French Free Forces in North Africa to help fight Nazi Germany.

He disappeared while flying a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean in 1944, shortly after the book’s publication.

Osborne said he had done everything in his power to retain the book’s Gallic flavor, and said he had won plaudits from Saint-Exupery’s family when he gave them a rundown of his plans.

“I pitched everything and they applauded it and they said, ‘You have our full support’ and I burst into tears,” Osborne said after a media screening.

“It was like a huge moment because for me it’s really important for us to have that sort of seal of approval.”

The film will be released in France in July, with US plans as yet unannounced.

Reuters

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Cannes. An Icelandic movie about two sheepfarming brothers who have not spoken in 40 years but are brought together by an outbreak of a disease that threatens their flocks won the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday.

“Hrutar” (Rams) by director Grimur Hakonarson took the top prize in the grouping of 19 films in the festival’s second most important competition. The films are chosen to display filmmaking techniques and trends in a variety of cultures and countries around the world.

Jury president Isabella Rossellini said viewing the entries “was like taking a flight over the planet and seeing all the inhabitants and their emotions.”

Hakonarson said winning was a surprise, but he was delighted.

“There are very good films in this program and very big directors,” he said. “I didn’t expect this. I’m in heaven.”

The film is set in remote northern Iceland, among sheepfarmers whose livelihood is threatened by an outbreak of scrapie that is fatal to sheep and requires all their flocks to be put down, but the director thought it would strike a chord with anyone.

“I think it’s a universal story, it’s a story about family conflicts, even though it’s an Icelandic film, it seems to touch the hearts of the audience, you know, but the film, it’s also entertaining, it’s also funny,” he said.

“It’s a mixture of drama and comedy and we seem to have, maybe, profited from that a little.”

Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa got the Best Director award for his latest film “Kishibe No Tabi” (Journey to the Shore).

The Jury Prize went to Croatian director Dalibor Matanic for “Zvizdan” and the Un Certain Talent prize was awarded to Romanian Corneliu Porumboiu’s “Comoara” (The Treasure).

The special jury prizes for debut films (Prix de l’avenir) went to “Nahid” by Iran’s Ida Panahandeh and “Masaan” by Neeraj Ghaywan of India.

Reuters

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Australian actress Cate Blanchett poses during the photocall for ‘Carol’ at the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival, May 17, 2015. (EPA Photo/Ian Langsdon)

Cannes. Cate Blanchett denied on Sunday a report she’d had affairs with women as the Cannes Film Festival swooned over her portrayal of a wealthy married woman who falls in love with an ambitious New York shopgirl in director Todd Haynes’s “Carol”.

The film, which has won rave reviews from critics and audiences, shows Blanchett’s title character and Rooney Mara as the shopgirl Therese Belivet having an affair that includes making love in a motel “presidential suite.”

Blanchett at a news conference was quick to contradict the published version of an interview she gave to the trade publication Variety in which she seemed to say she brought personal experience of affairs with women to the role.

“From memory, the conversation ran, ‘Have you had relationships with women?’ And I said, ‘Yes, many times. If you mean I’ve had sexual relationships with them, the answer is ‘No’ — but that obviously didn’t make it to print,” the Australian actress and mother of four children said.

“But in 2015, the point should be: Who cares?” she added.

“Carol” follows hard on the heels of the graphic “La Vie d’Adele” (Blue is the Warmest Color) about a lesbian affair, which won Cannes’s top Palme d’Or prize two years ago.

Haynes’s gorgeously photographed and sensitively plotted film is distinctly less racy but hugely sympathetic to the relationship of two women who fall in love when they set eyes on each other in a store at Christmas time.

Towards the end, when Carol is facing a choice between losing her lover and losing custody of her daughter, because of her supposedly bad moral character, she tells her husband and a roomful of lawyers she will not go against her nature.

The film is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, who also wrote “The Talented Mr Ripley,” but which she penned under a pseudonym because of the taboo subject matter.

“It was the first sort of lesbian story that had a happy ending,” said Blanchett, who added that she had read several lesbian-themed novels to research her character.

The film uses Cincinnati as a stand-in for 1950s New York City and tries, as Haynes put it, to capture the “murky and maybe also morally murky time and place” of early 1950s post-war America.

It is in part a tribute to the famous 1945 David Lean film “A Brief Encounter” about a married woman having an affair with a stranger she meets at a railway station, Haynes said, with both films opening and closing with almost identical scenes.

“Carol” begins and ends with a scene of Carol and Therese having coffee at a posh hotel. Both sequences are meant to be the same time and place, but the viewer has now seen how the affair developed and the scene takes on a different meaning.

Reuters

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Cannes. Mexican director Guillermo del Toro said as he arrived in Cannes to serve on the main film festival jury on Tuesday that having gotten his start there with a debut film in 1993, he now wanted to give new generations of filmmakers a chance.

Del Toro, director of the dark fantasy “Pan’s Labyrinth”, had his first film “Chronos” screened in Cannes. He will sit on a jury headed by the filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen for the festival, which opens on the French Riviera on Wednesday.

“It feels like a responsibility that I take very seriously, because Cannes started my life filmically when ‘Chronos’ won the Critics Week,” del Toro told reporters.

Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, whose film “Mommy” scooped the Jury Prize at last year’s festival, said that he was honored to be chosen as a judge at the tender age of 26 — and it would help for his next project.

“It feels great. It’s the other side of the mirror which is extremely exciting,” Dolan said.

“And I didn’t think it would come as early on in my life, so it’s very inspiring, we’ll see. I can’t think of a better preparation for the movie I’m about to embark on, to see like 25 films.”

Actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who starred in the 2014 film “Nightcrawler”, brings a touch of Hollywood to his place on the jury, alongside British actress Sienna Miller, French actress Sophie Marceau and Malian actress Rokia Traore.

Spanish cinema star Rossy de Palma expressed the great honor and excitement she felt at being on this year’s panel.

“I’m very honored, really very honored. Such a pleasure, I’m so happy, it’s like a dream,” she said.

The festival will open for the first time with a woman director’s film, “La Tete Haute” by Emmanuelle Bercot and starring French actress Catherine Deneuve. Hollywood is pitching in by holding the world premiere for “Mad Max: Fury Road” on Thursday.

Reuters

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