The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 39

39 Love provides the potency in 'Mississippi Masala' Its longevity is 'Madness' THE BOSTON GLOBE FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1992 By Jay Can- GLOBE STAFF Backstage stretches of employment, it's consistently championed by low-grade actors. It's also beloved by the hordes who've never heard of "Life With Father," "Tobacco Road" (second-longest straight play run), "Abie's Irish Rose" (third) "Deathtrap" (fourth), "Gemini" (fifth). Never mind "Hamlet." MISSISSIPPI MASALA Directed by: Mira Nair Screenplay by: Sooni Taraporevala Starring: Denzel Washington, Sarita Choudhury, Roshan Seth, Sharmila Tagore, Charles S. Button, Joe Seneca, Ranjit Chowdry, Mohan Gokhale, Mohan Agashe, Tico Wells, Natalie Oliver Playing at: Nickelodeon Rated: (brief, discreet sex scene, strong language) Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury in "Mississippi Masala." It's no accident that Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury meet in a collision in Mira Nair's FIavia "Mississippi Ma- 10Ve sala," when the I RGVIfiW large borrowed i gunboat of a sedan she's driving through Greenwood, Mississippi, crunches into the back of the van he uses for his carpet i cleaning business. The film is about collisions cultural and otherwise -I and neither his black family nor her Indian one come away undented.

Yet the film is anything but the hot, spicy masala of the title. It moves in fits and starts and it isn't obsessively tidy about each and every loose end, i but in its sweet, slightly melancholy, I gently humorous way, it fills the screen with the freshest, most winning love story we've seen in ages. "Mississippi Masala" is fine as long as Nair's camera is trained on Washington's upright Demetrius, the hard-working son of a poor but warm and well-bred family, and Choudhury's dutiful but independent and sensuous Mina, daughter of an Indian family expelled from Uganda when Idi Amin came to power in 1972, when she was 6. One of the appealing things about Nair's film is that she comes at its social updatings from a freshly matter-of-fact angle, without the didacticism of so many American-made films about the New South and those in it "Mississippi Masala" doesn't make much of the fact that Mina's father and mother (Roshan Seth and Sharmila Tagore) are part of an extended family of exiled Indians who have gravitated to owning and running motels in the It also gives Choudhury reason to identify with the earnest Demetrius as something of an underdog. Watching their mutual attraction take hold reminds you how often chemistry is missing from the usual Hollywood force-fed romances.

There's not nearly as much feeling behind a sex scene as when they, walk through a bayou and exchange two soft kisses. They're the kind of lovers you want to see get together -a feeling not shared by their respective families. In this, of course, "Mississippi Masala" is no different from "Abie's Irish Rose," but its particulars are distinct. Sometimes they're crude, such as the farcical way in which the couple are discovered in bed; sometimes they're serendipitous as when the multicultural soundtrack has an African band play Indian film hits. Partly because Nair comes at racism from an outsider's angle, and identifies with both blacks and Indians, she makes her points in ways Brattle Theater offers 'Lolita' for Valentine's Day In its sweet, slightly melancholy way, it fills the screen with the freshest, most winning love story we've seen in ages.

that avoid heavy-handedness. When we see Choudhury purse her lips at the mention of her own darkness, or when Washington accuses Seth of absurdly considering himself white when a black man courts his daughter, the observations come as rapier thrusts, not bludgeonings. Still, "Mississippi Masala" remains more love story than lecture on race relations. Its warmth and keen eye for social anomalies carry it past script unevennesses, such as the sitcomlike simplicity of both families, narrative slack and an impactless back-to-Uganda element. "Mississippi Masala" takes some patience to sit through, but it repays the effort with its two leads and its refreshing reminders that the world always keeps realigning itself too quickly for stereotyping to ever apply.

Charlie, can be seen on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at the Harvard Fflm Archive, 24 Quincy Cambridge John Gielgud coached Marlon Brando for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" (1953) and it paid off. Brando's mumble-free Marc Antony holds his own against Gielgud's Cassius, James Mason's Brutus and Louis Calhern's Caesar in the handsomely crafted production, which can be viewed Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. at the Wellesley Free Library, 530 Washington St.

-tr Toad of a as Wheelock Family Theatre 180 The RIverway (Route 1) LIMITED FREE PARKING -FENWAY rRtjgrn 7.508.00 mcvisa ISQght's 'Dream Ticket Prices: $49.75 to $11.75 fx 'KZZ' person qj? at The Wang denier dox uiticc 270 Tremont St. center box uince, "Shear Madness" may not be any good, but on Tuesday it passed its performance at the Charles Playhouse. Despite what its press rep says, it's an audience-participation game show and not a play. It's been estimated that this sleuther which opened on Jan. 29, 1980 in the Charles' dimdark bar-basement has been seen locally by "close to one million people," a statement then blown into its own kind of madness, to wit: "In 1987 'Shear Madness' gained national attention, eclipsing the 40-year-old record held by 'Life With Father' as the longest running, non-musical play in the history of the American theater." Now, first and foremost if there's to be any kind of truth in hype "Life With Father" ran its performance record of 3,224 performances on Broadway, where it counts, where tabulated long runs have some measure of significance.

Second, "Shear Madness" has never been in New York, although Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan, who put together its drivel, have been bold enough to shovel it elsewhere. It has been playing in Chicago for 10 years, in Washington for five, and has recently spread to Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires. There are reports of long runs "abroad." Furthermore, there are potential "Life With Father-bashing runs planned for Fort Worth and St. Paul. What is all this? Nothing more than a gimmick, a fluke Abrams and Jordan happened upon and turned into a gold mine.

Based on a rewritten European script (in which, by the way, Abrams and Jordan costarred, if that's the word), "Shear Madness" is nothing more than a board game on a stage, "Clue" dumped on a platform without any reason for being there. The audience "armchair detectives" one and all is privy to a murder in a Beacon Hill hair salon (the locale is craftily changed from city to city, complete with topical and neighborhood references), then, after full cabaret service, is asked to finger the murderer (whose identity changes nightly on something like a laughmeter basis). It's all just dumb and dreadful. Because it offers long ICAM PADMC $15 tfl.MI1 unmik Tue .218 JAZZNOST RUSSIAN JAZZ QUARTET Wed. 219 JAMIE BAUM, CERCIE MILLER Thu.220 RONNIE EARL -BLUES 221-22 JERRY GOHZALESffOBT tfUCB nsas AuHnhw Dm pil 783-0811 Sbew at 1 10, 1:30 10:30 Partrtm $2 You Never Advanced ideas collide with old-fashioned romance.

New Date! SAT. MAR. NORTHEAST I Anyway, there's something far more provocative lurking among whodunits. "Solitary Confinement," a mystery with Stacy Keach being readied for Broadway, is likely to have a try-out at the Wilbur in April. Premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse in November, the production directed by Kenneth Frankel has also been seen in San Diego and Washington.

Written by Rupert Holmes, this one-man show is said to be about "a reclusive Howard Hughes-type entrepreneur." Holmes is chiefly known as the book-music-and-lyrics man behind the adaptation of Dickens' "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," which, in December 1985, transferred from off-Broadway and ran 608 performances at the Imperial. (During the run the title elided to Seemingly committed to mysteries of one kind or another, Holmes is also the author of "Accomplice," a comedy thriller that had a Broadway run two years ago of only 41 performances. Kate Nelligan and Roy Scheider will do "Love Letters" at the Wilbur Theater March 3-8. In an effort to help the financially troubled Trinity Rep, the city of Providence yesterday loaned the company $12 million. The money comes from federally backed HUD funds rather than city funds, and is expected to double Trinity's credit line with various banks in and around Providence.

While Trinity, which is now in its 28th season, has been prospering artistically, it owes $500,000 to its own endowment program and $200,000 to the city. Currently, the Rep has a list of more than 9,000 subscriptions, an increase of 60 percent over last year. Like virtually every other regional threater in the country, Trinity has been suffering the woes of the re-cesssion. 19P1 Can Tell 14- ioam-5pm TRADE CENTER New Date! 800 Tables- Over 200 Dealers Savings of 20-80 More New, Used, Surplus Goseouts Moat Vendors will take Credit Cards ir. Chccka Over Two Million Items for Sale Dealers having "Price-Wars" USING FULL HALL MORE SPACE Children under 10 Free wadul i.i nun ir mi mum mi ii it i- rn Sweetheart I Special I jgQgl Ha South.

It just puts them there, and we accept it Seth, who has the kind of finely chiseled face made for noble suffering, is bitter because as a third-generation Ugandan and a lawyer he defended blacks, then was thrown out by Amin's regime. He spends his time petitioning the post-Amin courts in Uganda to make reparations, while the more pragmatic Tagore keeps the family alive by running a liquor store. And, in the classic American assimilationist mode, Choudhury concerns herself with the here and now, considering herself an American, resenting her closely knit clan's efforts to marry her off to a prosperous Indian boy, resenting even more the fact that as a dark-skinned Indian she's regarded as less desirable than a fair-skinned one. This is a new slant on racism at least to American audiences as is the lengthy credit sequence showing the family's expulsion from Uganda. glasses.

Still, James Mason's donnish murmurings as the fixated Humbert Humbert and Peter Sellers' mercurial edginess as his enemy, Quilty, give the film its hallucinatory wildness. And Shelley Winters, as Lolita's voracious mom, a portrait not steeped in kindness, almost steals the film. It's on today and tomorrow with King Vidor's "The Fountainhead" (1949), based on Ayn Rand's novel, starring Gary Cooper as a sort of Frank Lloyd Wright of the political right Although Claude Autant-Lara's mmmm TONIGHT 8 P.M., TOMW Lauren Richard Bacall Kiley FEBRUARY 18-23 Jane Edward Curtin Herrmann FEBRUARY 25-MARCH 1 Charlton Alexis Heston Smith LOVE LETTERS TICKETMASTER: 1-800-382-8080 Group Sales: (617) 426-6444 WILBUR THEATRE 246 Tremont Street, Boston. MA 02116423-4008 Ei A3 film of Stendahl's "The Red and the Black" Roge et le (1957) often replaces ardor with' pictoria-lism, Gerard Philippe still makes an impression as the opportunistic Ju-lien Sorel. His post-Napoleonic antics are on view tonight through Sunday at 8 p.m.

at the French Library, 53 Marlborough St Charlie Chaplin's sentimental but still potent "The Kid" (1921), starring Jackie Coogan as the waif Charlie shelters in his shimmy digs, and memorable for the sequence in which the kid breaks windows, insuring a steady flow of business for glazier ri- DINNER lUNit THEATRE HOW TO Fri 1 Sat Kites MURDER Holiday Inn One Newbury St. YOUR Ftt. 1 North, Peabodv (508) 535-4600 doss umner snow wmmm DINNER THEATER Thure thru Sundav nites In Boston (Randolph, Nashua Worcester and uunbndge) North Shore opening soon! Call the Original 262-1826 zA cSMidsummer 16 FEB. 6- Call Today! 931-2000 i BOSTON (MM By JayCarr GLOBE STAFF Leave it to Cambridge's Brattle Theater to take the sentimentality out of Valentine's Day with showings of Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita" (1962). Kubrick, no romantic, retained some of the lapidary irony of Vladimir Nabokov by hiring Nabokov to adapt his novel of two middle-age men dueling obsessively over a sexually precocious teen.

Ads for the film at the time were built around Sue Lyon's title-roleist in heart-shaped sun Join the 5000th Celebration! SHEAR CHARGE BY PHONE 426-5225 Sat. 6:30 Sun. 3 7:30 14 Feb Fri 8pm: 12; 10pm: IS Feb Sat 9pm: JM; llpm: 16 Feb Sun 7pm: J10; 9pm: 10 THE ELVIN JONES JAZZ MACHINE THE MILIFLOR DOUBLE DUO THE LASZLO GARDONY QUARTET FEATURING RANDY BRECKER 20 Mlta 9pm-lam: Feb Fri 8pm: SI2; 10pm: 112: 22 Feb Sat 9pm: $14: llpm: SI2 THE BOBBY HUTCHERSON QUARTET 23 Feb Son 7pm: 19; 9pm $9 DEBORAH HENSON-CONANT: JAZZ HARP NOW PLAYING! Tonightft Sat at Bpm Sunday at 28i7pm Tus. -Thu. at 8pm 1-95 (Route 128) Exit 35 (JUST SOUTH OF 1-93) Wobum, Mass.

Minutes from Downtown Boston Next to Ames Shopping Center IBM Clones Compatibles Portables and LactoD PC's Software for popular systems Hard More Free Parking Over 2000 Cars Software as low as $1 Program iob, Mb 480 complete systems Admission $8.00 (With this ad!) ANTON CHEKHOV hu ROM AIM! PI tbeS A The Seagull revolutionized the modern mt meant uj ipyut iAaiiiiuutg uic l.i by iuic (TWO PERSONS AT $8.00 EACH WTO THIS AD-NO COPIES REGULAR ADULT RATE IS SS.OO) SHOW INFO: (800) 631-0062-A KGP PRODUCTION ueiweeii true exui eiuu aim uuuiiiciviai suiitss, ioioeauu.il is a lenuerw f. i iiuimy uiiy ui i evjiu teu out rum eijuiieu jovb ui winui uieutmious ennui oi countrv life is contrasted with the suDerficu.1 snnhist'icalinrt ohKp ritv. stase when it debuted at the Moscow ui uic 1.1 caiivc atjusi a tvuiiu wuu 1 tt.fh.Sjl' i i EXT til A 1 13 A v- by GEORGE BERNARD SHAW dirot0d by DAVIO WHEELR F.h. 21, 28, 27. Mtr, 3.

19. 20 9pm Mar. 1 at Mr iS attttlpm i CME'IBOIID c-s- Created in the glorious time of King Louis the XIV Chambord has the deepest, richest black raspberry taste of any liqueur in the world. (. Imported, prepared and bottled by La Mason Oelan et Ptiila.

Ba 33 Praol.