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Filtering by Tag: High Fidelity

Pop Culture Happy Hour #235: Nick Hornby's Funny Girl and Movies Adapted From Books

Chris Klimek

I was glad as always to join Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon, and – for the first time – Barrie Hardymon on this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Here are my notes and ephemera from this exciting episode. Some of it is stuff I jotted down to say but forgot or didn't get the chance, and some of it is stuff I wish in hindsight that I'd been smart or quick enough to say on the fly. (I keep pounding so-called smart drinks hoping that I shall one day develop the ability to think at the speed of conversation.)

Anyway! I wanted to read this brief passage from Nick Hornby's new novel Funny Girl, our primary topic of discussion, because I think it encapsulates the spirit of the book succinctly. It's the first meeting between the book's heroine, Barbara (who adopts the stage name Sophie Straw), and her agent, Brian:

"I want to be a comedienne," said Barbara. "I want to be Lucille Ball."
The desire to act was the bane of Brian's life. All these beautiful, shapely girls, and half of them didn't want to appear in calendars, or turn up for openings. They wanted three lines in a BBC play about unwed mothers down coal mines. He didn't understand the impulse, but he cultivated contacts with producers and casting agents, and sent the girls out for auditions anyway. They were much more malleable once they'd been repeatedly turned down.
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categories podcasts, movies, novels, video games
tags movies, podcasting, podcasts, Nick Hornby, FUNNY GIRL, High Fidelity, UNDER THE SKIN, Jonathan Glazer, Michel Faber, Stephen Frears, Bruce Springsteen, John Cusack, Kevin Boggs, ALIEN ISOLATION

Personal is Heretical: Theater J's Andy and the Shadows, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

To paraphrase the leader of the free world, let me be clear: I liked Theater J's premiere of Artistic Director Ari Roth's long-gestating, heavily autobiographical play, Andy and the Shadows. I liked it a lot.  It's too long, its references too scattered and too many, and at the end you feel like you've spent the the time in the company of a hyperactive (if uncommonly sensitive and articulate) 19-year-old who just will not stop talking, ever. But these are good problems to have. Overreach is better than undereach. And the cast is just tremendous.

The play, as I note, has been around in some form since nearly a decade prior to the publication of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity in 1995, which means it almost certainly also predates Stephen Frears' Y2K film version of the book.

Nevertheless, the play's likeness to the movie is sort of uncanny. 

My review of the play in today's Washington City Paper lays out the evidence. Any resemblance to fictional persons, living or dead, is accidental.

Peter Marks's review of Andy and the Shadows from yesterday's Washington Post is a fine piece that does an exceptional job of elucidating the rarer attributes of the play's structure and key performances.  I found myself nodding along with his notice as I read it.

FURTHER READING: I interviewed High Fidelity author Nick Hornby in 2009. That's in two parts, here and here.

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categories theatre
tags Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, Theater J, Ari Roth, Kimberly Gilbert, Veronica del Cerro, Alexander Strain, Jennifer Mendenhall, Stephen Patrick Martin