I wanted to see three of the Christmas releases this year:  Fantasia 2000,
The Cradle Will Rock, and Topsy-Turvy.  Fantasia 2000 will *not* be playing
in New Orleans anytime soon, since the only IMAX theater refused to book
it for the four months Disney required.  Cradle - about the premiere of
the Marc Blitzstein Depression opera (characters include John Houseman
and Orson Welles) - played in New Orleans for exactly 1 (count 'em, 1 -
that is, 1 less than 2) weekend.  I blinked and missed it.

I saw Topsy-Turvy yesterday.  It's undoubtedly one of the two best movies
I've seen this year.  The other was Altman's Cookie's Fortune.  The story
concerns the first production of Gilbert and Sullivan's greatest hit,
The Mikado.  Acting was superb.  The voices were a bit weak, but that's
probably closer to what the voices in the original productions were like.
D'Oyley Carte is a rather small theater by modern standards, and you didn't
need big voices to fill the hall.  Also, you could concentrate on getting
actors rather than voice jocks, and the acting was superb.  The magnificent
script was one of the best studies of theater folk I've ever seen, right
up there with L'enfants du Paradis and To Be or Not To Be.  We get the
bragging and the insecurities, the dark secrets, the not-so-dark secrets,
the dark not-so-secrets that everyone in the company knows.  Very little of
the character revelations come about directly.  There's a wonderful level
of ambiguity, masquerading as discretion.

If you get the chance, see it.  It's three hours long, and the time flies.
The production sequences are funny and lovely all at once.

Steve Schwartz