The romance of actors Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner is the stuff of showbiz legend. The beloved comedians, who met on the set of the 1982 flop Hanky Panky, had a relationship (and marriage) that ended prematurely in 1989 when Radner died of ovarian cancer. Now, the couple’s time together has been dramatized by playwright Cary Gitter as an accumulation of scenes that resemble both the sketches for which Radner was famous on Saturday Night Live and the alternately silly and memorable comic films Wilder starred in during his ’70s and ’80s heyday. 

 

Which isn't to say that Gene & Gilda is not entertaining. Gitter has done his homework, and his chronology of their passionate relationship provides moments that are genuinely amusing and, later, touching and tragic. His script also dutifully checks off allusions to—and recreations of—Radner’s beloved SNL characters Lisa Loopner, Candy Slice, Baba Wawa, Roseanne Roseannadanna and Emily Litella, along with bits from Wilder’s big-screen hits Young Frankenstein and The Producers. The downside is that those riffs on the couple’s greatest hits are ready made for nods and easy laughs of recognition, while the framing device of Wilder being interviewed by Dick Cavett breaks the play into bumpily sitcomish segments that are only partially resolved by director Joe Brancato.

 

Happily, Brancato has resourceful performers to help smooth over much of the rest. As Gene, Jonathan Randell Silver, although at times simply a superior impersonation rather than a characterization, does a good job of catching the almost offhand neuroticism in the actor’s demeanor. And Jordan Kai Burnett gives a beautifully three-dimensional portrait of Gilda, showing her comic brilliance alongside her endlessly charming innocence. Burnett also handles the various impressions of Gilda’s characters with comic aplomb, never getting hung up even during a whipsaw scene when she speeds through several of them in a crazy sort of conversation.

 

Silver and Burnett play off each other—and even dance together—well enough to provide an extra dimension to this fateful romance that Gitter’s play sometimes lacks.

 

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

For her smart, often dazzling writing-directing debut, actress Embeth Davidtz has made a poignantly personal drama, based on Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of the same name, about a white Zimbabwean family during the Rhodesian Bush War in 1980, from the point-of-view of 8-year-old Bobo who, along with her teenage sister Vanessa, lives with her parents Nicola and Tim on a sprawling family farm full of ghosts, real and imagined. 

 

 

Davidtz’ deeply felt drama of people clinging to a land that’s no longer theirs has a powerfully authentic sense of time, place and stifling atmosphere, and she gives a formidable portrayal of Nicola. But stealing the show is the astonishingly young Lexi Venter, who invests Bobo with a lively and precocious authenticity as our imperfect but captivating guide.

 

 

 

Night of the Juggler 

A true Manhattan time capsule, this vicious 1980 crime drama follows a former cop literally chasing the maniac who kidnaped his teenage daughter mistakenly thinking she’s a millionaire’s child through the streets is set in a seedy city about to burst from all the dirt, garbage and crime. Robert Butler took over the directorial duties after Sidney J. Furie left, and he pushes the boundaries of taste and logic with every insane chase sequence and bizarrely unrealistic bit of dialogue.

 

 

The performances by James Brolin (as the dad), Dan Hedaya and Richard S. Castellano (as antagonistic cops) and especially a nutso Cliff Gorman (as the kidnaper) are dialed up to 11, which makes this simultaneously silly and must-see viewing.

 

 

 

Rebel With a Clause 

Only someone who loves language as much as Ellen Jovin would make—with her husband, Brandt Johnson—a documentary recording her visits to all 50 states, where she sits at a grammar desk to interact with curious people who discuss and ask questions about such things as past participles, the use of who/whom, ending a sentence with a preposition and, of course, the ubiquitous Oxford comma.

 

 

Jovin puts everyone at ease with her easygoing manner; director Johnson’s camera catches the nuances of these interactions, even showing without commentary the state of homelessness in this country in a couple of heartrending scenes. But the emphasis is on community in an anything but communal society.

 

 

 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako comes a cropper with this contrived tale of young African woman Aya (a delightful Nina Mélo) who leaves her cheating fiancée at the altar to flee to the Chinese city of Guangzhou, which has a heavily African population and where she learns the subtleties of tea-making from Cai (the charming Chang Han), with whom she slowly falls in love.

 

 

It’s certainly painless to watch, and Sissako’s eye is as ever precise in his observations, but there’s little here that hasn’t been done better by Sissako in films like Bamako and Timbuktu. The Blu-ray image looks luminous; lone extra is the Berlin Film Festival press conference featuring Sissako, Mélo and Han.

 

 

 

MacMillan Celebrated 

Kenneth MacMillan was a legendary British choreographer whose dances dominated ballet stages for decades; this disc celebrates his exuberant and innovative work with stagings of his Danses concertantes (to the music of Stravinsky), Different Drum (to Webern and Schoenberg) and Requiem (to Fauré).

 

 

These terrific 2024 performances were staged by the Royal Ballet at its Covent Garden home in London with a cast of exceptional dancers. The hi-def images and audio underline the onstage brilliance; extras include interviews with Benesh choreologists Gregory Mislin and Daniel Kraus as well as Macmillan’s widow Deborah.

 

 

 

Mysteries/Pastorale 1943 

This pair of Dutch films from the 1970s features the estimable pairing of Sylvia Kristel (best known for the Emmanuelle films) and Rudger Hauer (who became a star as an early ’80s villain in Nighthawks and Blade Runner) but are of varying quality— Paul de Lussanet’s Mysteries, in which they play the leads, is a slog of a drama from a Knut Hamsun novel that’s lensed by the great Robby Muller. Krisel and Hauer are excellent, at least. 

 

 

Wim Verstappen’s Pastorale 1943, by contrast, is a hard-hitting drama about Dutch resistance during World War II, with Kristel and Hauer in small supporting roles. In the lead as a Dutchman whose loyalties are murky is the excellent Frederik de Groot. Both films look good and grainy on Blu; extras include commentaries and vintage interviews with Kristel, Hauer, de Laussanet and actor Derek de Lint.

 

 

 

CD Release of the Week 

Israeli cellist Tamar Sagiv’s debut recording is an intensely personal disc that takes the artist—and the listener—through various stages of grief and mourning as well as love and acceptance; the nine short pieces (all original compositions) were inspired by losses in Sagiv’s life along with the precarious state of today’s world.

 

 

Her playing on solo pieces Shades of Mourning, Roots, Intermezzo and Prelude is starkly expressive and nakedly emotional, while her cluster of works for trio (violin, viola, cello) explores sound worlds both familiar and new. The last piece, In My Blue, is a cello quintet in which Sagiv layers all the parts into a lovely and, finally, moving whole.