The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 31

THE GAZETTE, MONTREAL WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1997 B9 ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR: LUCINDA CHODAN 987-2568 REVIEW UN 'We did it' says Orchard ready to roll with GlobaFs Messiah: Handel in a hurry ARTHUR KAPTAINIS Gazette Music Critic new live entertainment magazine A tti the end of the debut edition of Global Tonight, host Jamie Or -IX chard winked at the camera. It won't become her signature sign- off. Orchard says the wink was an impromptu reflex, born of relief that Global's new nightly entertainment magazine is finally on the air. i "My gut reaction was, 'Oh my God, we've finally done Orchard said yesterday, still buzzing on the morning after opening night "I didn't mean to wink. In fact, I didn't realize I had winked.

My friend called me after the show and said the wink was cute. I said 'What I was really excited." Orchard is a 31-year-old native of MIKE BOONE RADIO Handel's Messiah has arrived on schedule for many years in Notre Dame Basilica, although the visit is usually longer than it was last night under the direction of Nicholas McGe-gan. Without the long pause after Part One, this performance would have clocked in at about two hours, surely a new record, at least for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. The explanation lay not in the cuts to Part Three not unprecedented but in the greyhound tempos the British conductor adopted in most of the choruses and some of the arias. While high velocity also is well- established among historically minded Han-delians, this run through the composer's masterpiece put me in mind of what columnist Art Buchwald once called the seven-minute Louvre.

To be fair to McGegan, it should be said that his interpretation was coherent: light as well as lively, with fresh textures, fanciful ornaments and buoyant, dancing rhythms. There were several unexpected dips in volume, and the opening of the normally stentorian Amen finale was done softly, a la Palestrina. Musicians and choristers (the latter coached by Iwan Edwards) responded smartly to these and other innovations. SOLOISTS SPARKLE All this could be reported on impassively and even admired from afar. But move," she recalls.

"But they said, 'We want you to host, and it's going to be a half-hour entertainment and culture which is something I'd wanted CF to do for a long time "And then they said, 'Five nights a And then they said, At that point, it was a no-brainer." Orchard jumped to Global in August and immersed herself in the gestation period that has finally produced Global Tonight, three months after the new station signed on. WORK IN PROGRESS Orchard, producer France Longtin and Global news director Benoit Aubin acknowledge that Global Tonight is a work in progress. During a discussion yesterday at the station's studios in the Tele-Metropole building, the Global Tonight team solicited my opinions of the debut show. I'd been underwhelmed, but we had a cordial chat about it No one expected Global Tonight to be perfect first time out, and they were interested in constructive criticism of a show that brings something new to Montreal's supper-hour TV mix. So we kicked a few things around.

I'd been put off by the inclusion of a short news summary off the top of Global Tonight. I thought it messed up the rhythm of the program, which is supposed to be a half-hour of light information. Orchard said the headline segment had been the subject of intense debate in the Global newsroom. Glenn O'Far-rell, the president of Global-Quebec, had joined the discussion and said that viewers are conditioned to expect news at 6 o'clock. Fine, so start Global Tonight at 6:05.

And maybe they will. "We'll experiment with different forms," Orchard said. "Nothing is set in stone There are still things we have to tweak. "I thought the show generally had a real flow to it. But the news segment jumped out at me." Orchard stressed that Global Tonight is trying something new and very ambitious.

She pointed out that one of the show's CBMT antecedents. studied communications at McGill for two years before transferring to Con- oordia to complete her degree. She began her professional journalism career in 1991 at a country-music radio station in Vernon. B.C. Orchard was lured home after two years by the offer of a job at CHOM.

She went from there to CBMT-6 (BusyBodies. weather forecasts on Newswatch) and CFCF-12, where she was an entertainment reporter on Pulse. iLwj Orchard says it was difficult to leave -h the CFCF newscast. Her boyfriend, a operator, still works there, and she still has a lot of friends among Channel 12 technicians. "Television is very trusting, espe-cially if you're in front of the camera," says.

"I trusted a lot of people RICHARD ARLESS JR GAZETTE Orchard: "There is so much happening in the features such as theatre and movie reviews (by Global's Tracy McKee and Bill Brownstein of The Gazette, respectively), information on the hot video releases, music reviews and a fashion segment. Last night's Global Tonight feature item was on a graffiti artist. Tonight the show will focus on Garth Brooks, who's making a pit stop in town this morning to promote his new CD. Global Tonight is on CKMI-46 week-nights at 6. City Beat, was a weekly telecast "with a huge budget and facilities to go everywhere "We're doing a live show every day with a small budget and a small crew.

We think we can do it because there is so much happening in the city" Factoring in the news summary, a sports report and commercials, Global Tonight has to come up with about 19 minutes of material in each telecast. As Orchard said, that shouldn't be difficult in a city like Montreal. Global Tonight will include regular LURED AWAY Global lured Orchard away by play- in on concerns about her future at CFCF-12, which had warned darkly that downsizing would be necessary if -anew English TV competitor came to town. And Global offered her something that Pulse couldn't. "I thought Global would offer me an entertainment reporter's job, and I would never have made a parallel there was surely something wrong when the main thought that preoccupied a listener standing dutifully through the Hallelujah Chorus was that all disco versions of this celebrated vision of Christ triumphant had been rendered superfluous.

Soloists performed nobly. Baritone Brett Polegato brought vitality to Why do the Nations and focus to The Trumpet Shall Sound the latter featuring the clarion obbligato of Paul Merkelo. Ann Monoyios negotiated a gentle tempo for I Know That My Redeemer Liveth and sang Rejoice Greatly with coloratura brilliance. Veteran mezzo Catherine Robbin performed with deep feeling and impeccable diction. Tenor Gordon Gietz sounded a little strained in his opening arioso but recovered handsomely in Thou Shalt Break Them.

Strange to say, Robbin and Gietz absented themselves during Part Three, as if they had better things to do backstage. Other oddities included the reluctance of the crowd to clap after Part One, and a spontaneous burst of applause before the concluding Amen. Many left after Hallelujah, acting either out of ignorance or according to taste. Some doubtless enjoyed McGegan's approach to the score. Perhaps the MSO should consider next year servicing the rest of us those who view Messiah as one of the most majestic expressions of religious feeling in art.

The authentic bunch, if you will. Author's past haunts Little Tree ed himself as a New Age wise man and was, essentially, the same segregationist in his final years as he was earlier. The revelations received wide attention in 1991 when Dan Carter, a history professor at Emory University who was researching a biography of George Wallace, wrote an essay that appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times. "This guru of New Age environmentalists was actually a gun-toting racist," said Carter, who was distantly related to Asa In the film, the 8-year-old part-Cherokee orphan, played by Joseph Ashton, leaves his mother's family in a hard-scrabble mining town to live as an Indian with his paternal grandparents in the backwoods. There he comes to understand the wonders of nature and the wisdom of the Cherokee way.

In the process, the child encounters cruelty, venal politicians and state officials who look down on Indians. What impact the author's segregationist past will have on the film's re Eleanor Friede, whose imprint at Delacorte Press published the book in 1976 and who now represents the Carters, denied that Carter was a bigot and racist. "He was definitely a segregationist, but so was most of the nation at the time, certainly the state of Alabama," she said. "But he was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan." What stirred Hollywood's interest was that the book was nothing less than a publishing phenomenon. Re-re BERNARD WEINRAUB New York Times HOLLYWOOD Can The Education of Little Tree overcome its origins? The movie, adapted from a best-seller published in 1976 and reprinted in 1986, is a sensitive story about a Cherokee orphan's childhood in the backwoods of East Tennessee in 1935.

The author was Forrest Carter, who described himself in the years before he died in 1979 as a Cherokee cowboy, lease remains unclear. "Here was a guy," said Friedenberg, "who did bad things, disappeared off the face of the Carter: Asa Carter was described as a bigot who helped organize a vicious paramilitary unit, called the Original Ku Klux Klan of dishwasher and ranch hand and self-taught writer. Carter's background was a hoax. Several accounts state that he was real leased in paperback in 1986, it sold only 2,000 copies in its first year. But in its second year those sales doubled.

And then, largely by Writer identified as Asa Carter, Ku Klux Klan member and anti-Semite. Author's background irrelevant, Quebec producer of new Little Tree film says. Lotti adds concert here the Confederacy, in the 1950s, and who for almost 30 years spewed out racist and anti-Semitic pamphlets. The charge was not entirely new. In 1976, a New York Times article raised the question of whether Forrest Carter was actually Asa Carter.

That year, Carter's book, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales had been turned into a Clint Eastwood Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales. At the time Carter denied that he was Asa Carter, but declined to be interviewed. Since Carter's death, his reclusive widow, India Carter, has also declined to talk. word of mouth, sales skyocketed and reached 600,000 copies. Although many high-powered filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, expressed interest in the book as a movie, the revelations about Carter chilled their eagerness.

But Eberts said the author's background was not relevant "It's a beautiful story," he said. "I was more interested in the story than the author's background. Furthermore, when discussing the book with Indian friends, they adored it and could care less about the supposed background of the author." Earth in Alabama, where he was a Ku Kluxer, and reappeared in the Oklahoma-Texas area near the Cherokee reservation of the western Cherokee nation, where he proceeded to write several books. It strikes me he spent his literary life, and whoever he was in his second phase, in some kind of grand apology for his first life. "Of course, this is my take.

No one knows the absolute truth." Others, however, have written that Carter seemed an unrepentant bigot, even at the end of his life. In 1992, a scathing article in Texas Monthly depicted him as a con man who reinvent ly Asa Carter, Ku Klux Klan member, violent white supremacist, anti-Semite and author of some of the most speeches by former Alabama governor George Wallace, including the 1963 inaugural address in which he vowed: "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" The film was produced by Quebecer Jake Eberts and much of it was filmed hi the province. It opens on Dec. 25 in 'some U.S. cities and next month in Montreal.

It was adapted and directed by I Richard Friedenberg, who wrote the screenplay for A River Runs Through It Montreal will be getting a little more Lotti next month. Classical crossover phenomenon Helmut Lotti, who was booked for a Jan. 10 concert in Montreal, has added a second date here. The singer will also perform on Monday, Jan. 12, organizers announced yesterday.

Tickets for the Jan. 12 Lotti concert at Salle Wilfrid Pellet ier of Place des Arts go on sale Friday at noon. They cost $35 to $75, not including tax or service charge, and are available from the Place des Arts box office, 842-2112, or Admission outlets, 790-1245. IRocker Adams proudly Canadian I On the world stage, he wants to be an ambassador for this country, he says ANDREW FLYNN Canadian Press CORRECTION Wrong hours for restaurant A restaurant review of the Porte de l'lnde that appeared in the Preview section on Friday, Nov. 28, gave incorrect hours of operation for the restaurant The Porte de l'lnde is open from 1130 a.m.

to 2:30 p.m. Monday to Saturday and 5 to 11 p.m. Monday through Sunday. The Porte de l'lnde is located at 5195 St. Laurent Blvd.

The Gazette regrets the error. porates sounds that the straightforward rocker hasn't used before, including string arrangements and Spanish guitar Adams and producer Patrick Leonard also brought Irish musician Davy Spillane to provide a Celtic touch with uilleann pipes and whistles. The cross-Canada Plugged In tour, which begins in February, will include acoustic versions of some songs and possibly some of the new instrumentation picked up for Unplugged. Adams appears at the Molson Centre Feb. 14.

ing all these countries it's where I come from. I do feel like kind of an ambassador" Adams, 38, was promoting the release of his Unplugged album and preparing for a new tour across the country where his vault to international stardom began. The album, recorded in September for U.S. music station MTV's popular series that features artists performing acoustic versions of their material, has already produced a new hit single, Back to You. Also on the album are several other new tracks, as well as reworked Adams hits like Summer of '69 and Cuts Like a Knife It incor TORONTO Though he lives in London and tours around the globe, Bryan Adams consid-' ers himself a representative of his homeland.

"I kind of feel of myself as an ambassador for this country," Adams said yesterday at a press conference in a swank downtown hoteL 5 "I want to make people proud. I do want people to think of me as someone about who they can say, 'WelL he's Canadian he's all right' can't help it when I go out and I'm play Adams: on tour for new album..