Word: macha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Accompanying the imaginative text is the score by Jeff Tennessen, which succeeds admirably in conveying and supporting the moods of given scenes. Tennessen's vocal numbers are considerably less effective, and the motivation for song is not always clear. But Alison Weller playing Macha, the play's protagonist, does a fine job with her several songs...
Playwright Karen Malpede intended the work to be a celebration of womanhood and woman's fertility. At a crucial and trying moment early in the play Macha states, "Bind me to life." Both she and her daughter Etain (Courtney Williams) see themselves as bound to life, and the phrase as their emblem...
...believe, because it too is part of the life cycle. Etain asks, while standing over the bones of the deceased woman whose name she bears, "What have I to fear if this is what you have become?" Death is a return to mother earth, and both Etain and Macha glorify the mother. Macha celebrates the regenerative process of birth when she says, "There is no love like the love I bear for Etain." She and her daughter, the only truly successful female characters, are exemplars of binding to love and life, and they view that binding as the quintessence...
...else is a shambles. The director, Andrei Konchalovsky, has an unique gift for bringing out the worst in good actors. Alan Bates, as Stephanie's composer husband, looks goofy in a Beethoven haircut; Star Pupil Rupert Everett rants and sniffles; Macha Meril, as the Italian maid, provides her own subtitles in moments of distress ("Aiuto! Help!"). And finally the movie exonerates all the rats in Stephanie's life. She sees them happy and united and goes off to die by her favorite tree. Duet for One died long before...
Caveman has been assembled with the :are that would normally be lavished on a Big Mac during the lunchtime rush. The dialogue (in a pre-Tarzan patois) rarely gets more sophisticated than "Aieee! Kuda! Ma pooka ma bobo aloonda zug-zug fech macha!"* But Ringo is splendid leading his tribe in man's first jam session, and the rest of the cast is fully up to the demands of the script. Kudos to Richard Moll as an Abominable Snowman who shambles around like Groucho Marx in sopping-wet fake fur, and to an animated Tyrannosaurus rex who deserves next...