The Arts Online This Week - May 11-17

Wings – 1927

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97 years ago this week on May 16, 1929, the first Academy Awards ceremony  took place in what was not yet called Hollywood. Tickets for the event cost $5 and the ceremony lasted 15 minutes. The host was Douglas Fairbanks, the president of the nascent Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to honour the best pictures of 1927/8.

Here’s the back story of how it came to be. Louis B. Mayer established the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927 purportedly to unite the five branches of the film industry: actors, directors, producers, technicians, and writers.

Asked for the real reason he created the awards, Mayer said, "I found that the best way to handle them was to hang medals all over them ... If I got them cups and awards, they'd kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That's why the Academy Award was created."

Major winners at the 1929 ceremony included 7th Heaven and Sunrise, with three awards apiece (the latter winning for Unique and Artistic Picture), and Wings with two. 

The winners had been announced three months ahead of the ceremony. Some nominations did not reference a specific film, so an actor could be awarded for multiple performances: Emil Jannings won Best Actor for his work in both The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command, while Best Actress winner Janet Gaynor was honored for three films. 

Charlie Chaplin and Warner Brothers each received an honorary award. Jannings, a Swiss-born performer who gained fame in Berlin, had been notified in advance of his victory; he subsequently posed for pictures with his statuette before leaving for Germany.

Here is Wings, Clara Bow starring with Charles Rogers and Richard Arlen, with Gary Cooper in a tiny role. Two young men, one rich, one middle class, who are in love with the same woman, become fighter pilots in World War I.

Wings, directed by William Wellman, had groundbreaking aerial combat cinematography with real planes and set the standard for future war epics. It was the most technically ambitious film of the silent era and helped shape Hollywood’s big-budget spectacle style.
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Audra McDonald: I Am What I Am (Director's Cut)

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With a record-breaking six Tony Awards, alongside two Grammy Awards and an Emmy, Audra McDonald is a powerhouse of musical theatre.

Before she opened in Gypsy on Broadway, she came to London for a sold-out concert at the London Palladium. She fulfilled all the expectations of those of us who believe that she is the natural heir to Ethel Merman in the musical theatre, only better.

Her voice, which can soar into soprano heights and swoop to a raucaus belt, allows her to perform any song that takes her fancy. In this concert she shows her musical muscle, performing a diverse array of showstoppers, including theatre classics, such as “I Am What I Am”, “Summertime” and “Rose’s Turn”, Mama Rose’s mad scene from Gypsy.

This is the directors’ cut of this wonderful Audra McDonald concert, recorded live onstage at the London Palladium. 

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Inter Alia – Rosamund Pike

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Jessica Parks is a judge, a mother, a wife, a friend. Her career exists inter alia (among other things). How will one unthinkable event pull into question all aspects of her life?

Following their global phenomenon Prima Facie, the ‘dream creative collaboration’ of Suzie Miller and Justin Martin reunite with this searing examination of modern motherhood and masculinity.

Featuring a ‘gale force performance’ from Rosamund Pike and music from Erin Le Count and Jakwob.

Here, at last online, even while Pike is performing the show live on stage in New York, is the sold-out, critically acclaimed show ‘that we should all be talking about’, on National Theatre at Home.

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Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts Tchaikovsky and Weinberg — With Gabriela Montero

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Conductor Mirga Gražinytė‑Tyla takes the podium at Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw for a thrilling concert with piano virtuoso Gabriela Montero, who performs Tchaikovsky’s perennial favorite Piano Concerto No. 1, lending her artistic sensitivity and astonishing skill to some of the most memorable melodies in classical music.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra bookends the piano treasure with Raminta Šerkšnytė’s De Profundis and Mieczysław Weinberg’s Symphony No. 3.

The result is a rich program that perfectly blends Šerkšnytė’s dramatic dissonances and Weinberg’s stormy tension with Tchaikovsky’s sweeping Romantic lyricism.
 

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