Theater Life Raises a Commotion

Most movies about the theater haven’t the nerve to brave the inside of a rehearsal room.

Most movies about the theater wouldn’t take time for the clenched niceties of a salary negotiation.

Most movies about the theater probably wouldn’t bother with a conversation between a composer and a lyricist/librettist stuck in a rut--a conversation sealed by a small, discreet pause in which nothing is said, but everything about a dire collaborative impasse is conveyed.

“Topsy-Turvy,” the disarming Gilbert and Sullivan tribute from writer-director Mike Leigh, has some nerve, all right. It has paid off. Matters of art and craft that typically get short shrift in a backstage film--right down to a notes session with the actors, following a final dress rehearsal of an operetta--take center stage here. Everything on the margins informs our understanding of Leigh’s beloved subjects, portrayed exhilaratingly well by Jim Broadbent (Gilbert) and Allan Corduner (Sullivan).

The film speculates on how an odd coupling of Victorian gents--ramrod-straight William Schwenck Gilbert and the elegant libertine Arthur Sullivan--emerged from a rut to concoct the rapturous, topical, timeless and deeply silly 1885 comic opera “The Mikado.” The movie’s spirit owes a lot to Gilbert and Sullivan themselves. Generously, Leigh interpolates a fair bit of the “Mikado” score by way of performance excerpts. Over-generously, perhaps, he interpolates lengthy sequences from the earlier Gilbert and Sullivan operettas “The Sorcerer” and “Princess Ida.”

“Topsy-Turvy” isn’t the only new film about the making of a musical currently trolling for Oscar nominations. Writer-director Tim Robbins’ “Cradle Will Rock,” the latest from the founding artistic director of L.A.’s Actors Gang, takes its title from that of Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 pro-union morality play. Around that show’s stormy genesis, and even wilder opening night, Robbins expands his focus to include a mural’s worth of Depression-era social clashes.

“Cradle Will Rock” was the most notorious product of the Federal Theatre Project, a subsidiary of Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration. Frustratingly, though, when Robbins’ film is over, you don’t really have any idea what Blitzstein’s “Cradle” was about. Everyone in the movie keeps talking about how “groundbreaking” and “funny” Blitzstein’s work is. Unsuspecting moviegoers have to take it on faith.

By contrast, there’s only a line or two spoken in “Topsy-Turvy” about what Gilbert and Sullivan achieved in “The Mikado.” But we see what they did, and hear it.

Though it’s not the “Shakespeare in Love” lark that its advertising campaign suggests, Leigh has written a remarkable love letter, ardent but clear-eyed, from one medium to another. In ways we’re unaccustomed to, his film is very much of the theater.

Leigh, himself a theater veteran (most recently his play “Ecstasy” was co-produced in 1998 by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble), provides us with daringly extended D’Oyly Carte rehearsal sequences. In one luxuriously long take, Sullivan drills a “Mikado” vocal trio on the ins, outs, triplets and harmonies of the patter song, “A Short, Sharp Shock.” Later, Gilbert and his “Three Little Maids From School” soubrette, Jessie (Dorothy Atkinson, typical of the fine singer-actors on view), deal with the correct pronunciation of “corroborative.”

These aren’t virtues in themselves. Leigh’s priorities lead to a longueur or two. The scene in which visiting Japanese residents instruct the Savoy ensemble never quite jells, though it does set up a wonderful extended take, with Leigh’s actors in V-formation, of the Japanese and the English engaging in a fan-flipping exercise.

But such attention to detail amplifies the film as a whole. This is one backstage movie wherein you find out what people do for a living, and what it entails. Coupled with a wonderfully wide range of theatrical egos--writers, singers, a cast including a morphine addict and a scorned unwed mother--these details gradually complete a pointillist canvas of backstage life.

And yet, not for nothing did Leigh make “Secrets & Lies” and “Naked” and “Life Is Sweet.” His best work, to which “Topsy-Turvy” belongs, has always combined the comically ghastly and the emotionally bruising. After the triumphant first night of “The Mikado,” we’re slipped an emotional mickey, with scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan and the respective women in their offstage lives. Theater is not life, we’re reminded, and life isn’t always sweet.

Working on a larger, deliberately sprawling canvas, Tim Robbins intends “Cradle Will Rock” as its own topsy-turvy dichotomy of Theater and Life, the sweet and the bitter. He’s trying to stoke our outrage over the right-wing attacks, successful in the end, on the Federal Theatre Project, foreshadowing the attacks decades later on the National Endowment for the Arts. (“Topsy-Turvy,” by the way, was funded in part by the Arts Council of England.)

The original “Cradle” opened under myth-making duress. Locked out of one theater on governmental orders, director Orson Welles’ company relocated to another Manhattan venue, 20 blocks away. The performers sang the roles of Steeltown’s Mister Mister, Missus Mister, Larry Foreman, Harry Druggist and the prostitute Moll from the auditorium, while Blitzstein pounded away on a lone onstage piano.

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Heartbreakingly, the onstage “Cradle” we see here--Robbins devotes a full 20 minutes to excerpts of that legendary opening night--fails to make Blitzstein’s work vital. It’s all fist-raising and shouting. Robbins plays directly into Blitzstein’s most strident tendencies. The “Cradle” score, its stern atonalities up-ending Tin Pan Alley, is livelier and funnier than it comes off here. Most depressing of all--well, besides the deeply unfunny hamming of Angus Macfadyen as Orson Welles--”Cradle Will Rock” serves to confirm the right wing’s favored image of the smug, sanctimonious left, and those theater brats within.

Making Blitzstein’s achievement come alive isn’t an easy thing on film. But then, making a film about how “The Mikado” came to pass isn’t easy, either. Maddeningly, “Cradle Will Rock” manages to be both hectoring and reductive about Blitzstein’s achievement. “Topsy-Turvy” honors Gilbert and Sullivan without doing a hagiography job on them.

And it’s a look backstage that actually reveals a thing or two.

Victorian Champs: * Gilbert & Sullivan always have been hot. F6