Losin' It: All the Way and The Mystery of Love and Sex, reviewed.

Most of the cast of Arena Stage's All the Way, starring Jack Willis as LBJ. (Stan Barouh)

Prince is all I've thought about in the can-it-really-be-only-a-day since the world learned of his death, but here are the two theatre reviews I filed earlier in the week for the Washington City Paper. Arena Stage does Richard Schenkkan's 2014 Tony winner All the Way, and Signature Theatre stages Bathsheba Doran's The Mystery of Love and Sex.

Okay, back to deliberating whether I should post Prince's long out-of-print 2002 three-disc live album One Night Alone Live, which is not available for purchase anywhere unless you're prepared to drop north of $300 on a used copy. 

Pop Culture Happy Hour No. 288: Batman v Superman and Objects We Desire

Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne remembers his fallen partner Robin in Batman v Superman (Warners).

I was happy as always to join Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, and my Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon on this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein we perform an autopsy on the rotten corpse of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which I was expected to defend but could not. The precedent for this was my defense of Man of Steel on this show three years ago.

Since none of us liked this film — in fact we all disliked it so much that the controversial issue of Henry Cavill's height never even came up — we decided to broaden the topic to try to pin down the elements that make a would-be action blockbuster work or not work. I forgot to say so on the show, but I wrote about this for Linda two summers ago after helping the staff of The Dissolve, may it rest in peace, to determine the 50 Greatest Summer Blockbusters.

Blockbuster Patient Zero:

I Like Pink Very Much, Lois: Top Five Superman/Batman Movie Moments, on this week's Filmspotting

Michelle Pfieffer and Michael Keaton in Tim Burton's Batman Returns, a film I like more now than I did in 1992.

It was a true pleasure to be on Filmspotting again, this time in a World's Finest-style team-up with my Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon. Glen is "unauthor" (his joke, people) of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography and author the just-published, even-better The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. Host Adam Kempenaar invited the two of us to join him for this episode's Top Five segment, Superman/Batman Movie Moments. Adam and Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips reviewed Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice in the show's first segment. They didn't like it any more than I did.

There's always at least one thing in my notes that I forget to say when I'm on a podcast/radio show, and this time it was a big one: In my No. 1 Superman/Batman scene, the Lois/Superman patio interview from Superman '78, the big guy actually volunteers to the Daily Planet reporter that he can't see through lead. Hey world! I know I seem invulnerable, but I do have a few exploitable weaknesses which I shall now reveal!

I love this, because it shows us that Supes' belief in humanity's goodness is so absolute (and unchallenged, somehow, even though we know from this very film that he attended high school) that it doesn't even occur to him that he should keep his vulnerabilities to himself. But when Lois asks his age, he will say only that he is "over 21," a line that perfectly encapsulates the discreet but palpable sexual tension of the scene. It's a huge improvement on Superman’s reply to this question in an earlier draft of the scene that was used to audition actors for the role of Lois once Christopher Reeve had been cast: “Thirty.”

Everything that's weird about this conversation — "Krypton with a 'C-R-I?'" "No, Krypton with a K-R-Y." — feels like a deliberate, and inspired, decision by screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz  (whose formal credit on the picture was "Creative Consultant") and director Richard Donner. There's plenty in their Superman that I don't love, starting with all those wacky komedy scenes of sacrificial fat guy Ned Beatty falling off of ladders while tuba music plays. But the stuff Superman gets right is as right as any superhero flick has ever gotten anything. The patio interview is one of those.

Totalitarian Recall: 1984 and The Pillowman, reviewed.

Jim Jorgensen, Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, and Bradley Foster Smith in The Pillowman (Forum).

My reviews of the British theatre collective Headlong's adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, and Forum Theatre's new staging of Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, are in today's Washington City Paper.

Here's the trailer the 1984 Michael Radford's version of 1984 that I mention I saw at an impressionable age. I can't imagine ever saying this in any other context, but the Eurythmics soundtrack was not a good idea.

Gloom Patrol: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, reviewed.

There's lots of stuff I didn't have room for in my NPR review of this enervating zeppelin-crash of a superhero flick, but first things first: Gotham City and Metropolis are just across the bay from one another? So close that a person who doesn't have Super-eyesight can see the Bat-signal lighting up the sky over Gotham... from Metropolis?

@ctklimek In the 70s, they were twin cities with a bridge between them. pic.twitter.com/QOmd32TQkk

— Glen Weldon (@ghweldon) March 23, 2016

I know this has been asserted in actual DC Comics—pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths, pre-New 52 DC Comics—but it just feels wrong. Gotham is New York City. Metropolis is Chicago. Or St. Louis. Somewhere not coastal.

I thought we all knew that.

Anyway, if you're interested in a delightful Superman-and-Batman story to rinse the bitter taste of BvS away, I recommend Dave Gibbons and Steve Rude's three-issue revival of World's Finest from 1990.

George Jones Talks About His Greatest Lines

My review of Rich Kienzle's new biography The Grand Tour: The Life and Music of George Jones, is in Sunday's Washington Post. There's probably some other stuff in there that would be good to read, too, I bet.

Anyway, here's a paragraph I had to cut for space.

Amid his dutiful, carefully sourced recounting of booze-lubricated recording sessions and singles, Kienzle highlights some amusingly unexpected sides of Jones, like when he told his ex-wife Tammy Wynette in a 1980 interview in Country Music (a magazine Kienzle contributed to for 24 of its 31 years) that if he had to find a second career he would enjoy being an interior decorator. He might fare better than he did as the proprietor of three outdoor country music parks, which he opened at three different points in his life and quickly abandoned. He was also wanton enough with his brand to lend it to random products: George Jones Country Sausage and, also, troublingly, George Jones Country Gold Dog Food and Cat Food. Kienzle notes that a TV spot for the latter was called “George Jones Talks About His Greatest Lines.” If a TV commercial has to have a title, that’s either an unfortunate one or a brilliant one for a pitch from a man whose life and career were so damaged by his eight-year dalliance with cocaine.

I wouldn't ordinarily be so flip discussing something as serious as an addiction problem but that ad just beggars belief.

Popcorn Psychology: Signature's The Flick, reviewed.

Thaddeus McCants, Laura C. Harris, and Evan Casey in The Flick (Signature Theatre).

I review Signature Theatre's production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic drama The Flick in this week's Washington City Paper. It's the fourth Annie Baker play I've reviewed — five if you count her translation of Uncle Vanya — and the second in which I've quoted a heckler. Maybe I wouldn't have done that had I remembered doing it in my review of Studio Theatre's The Aliens three-and-a-half years ago.

Further reading, if you really want to see me struggle not to repeat myself: Circle Mirror Transformation, from 2010, and Body Awareness, from 2012.

A Silver Spoonful of Sugar: The Lion, reviewed.

Benjamin Scheuer, composer & performer of the solo musical The Lion (Matthew Murphy).

I struggled with my Washington City Paper review of The Lion, a strong, brief one-man musical play by the singer-songwriter Benjamin Scheuer. This was a case where learning about the circumstances of the show's creation—as one is wont to do when writing about art—made me like it less in hindsight than I did the moment the performance ended. Is that fair? I'm still not sure. You can read my attempt to work through my consternation while still giving the artist his due here.