Word: mortons
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Grey calls those who treat Wood with benign contempt "jackals of bourgeois sensibility." And he's right. As critic Jim Morton notes, "If there is a 'worst film ever made,' it is one that is boring -- a sin Ed Wood Jr. is rarely guilty of." But there is a more melancholy irony to be found in Grey's interviews with the director's colleagues. Unlike most trashmeisters, Wood had radical messages for his audience: about sexual tolerance (Glen or Glenda), nuclear madness (Plan 9), parental smugness (The Sinister Urge). He was as dedicated to filmmaking as Welles or Kurosawa...
...MORTON MEYERSON, 53, WAS PEROT'S ALTER EGO AT EDS, the man who helped put the founder's ambitions into practice and stayed on top of the details. He started in 1965 as a trainee and left the company 21 years later as its vice chairman with more than $20 million from the buyout. Since then, Meyerson has invested his time in civic projects. He headed the group that sold the Federal Government on building the controversial $8.4 billion supercollider in Texas. He spearheaded the construction of the new symphony hall in Dallas, which is named after Meyerson because Perot...
Playwright George C. Wolfe, best known for his unsparing satire in The Colored Museum, plainly has grander ambitions in mind for Jelly's Last Jam, a biography of composer and performer Jelly Roll Morton. The show is as much a review of Morton's racial politics and ethnic fealty as of his musical contribution as the asserted "inventor of jazz." The central plot point is that Morton was of mixed-race Creole ancestry and prided himself on his relative whiteness, even while immersing himself in, and transforming, black music. The show's theme is that neither he nor any black...
...vulgar along the way, including a prolonged bout of simulated sexual intercourse at center stage. Some of the stage effects bring unintended laughter from the audience, as does much of the pseudospiritual dialogue for Keith David, in an impossible role mingling elements of Death, Satan and St. Peter. And Morton himself remains a sketchy figure whose few bits of trademark bad behavior are repeated over and over...
...Jelly's Last Jam fails as dramaturgy, it succeeds much of the time as bouncy entertainment, thanks to four people. Mary Bond Davis is a first-rate upholstered mama. Tonya Pinkins is sultry, sharp-tongued and sweet-voiced as Morton's love interest. Savion Glover, 18, outdoes his own brilliant best in tap-dancing the role of the young Jelly. And as the mature Jelly, Gregory Hines vibrates with the kind of glorious triple-threat talent -- as singer, dancer and actor -- that Broadway used to revel in but hardly ever witnesses anymore...