The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 57

THE OTTAWA CITIZEN MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1987 D7 Psychological play marks French company's return to York Street Theatre By Barbara Crook Citizen staff writer space was once again up for grabs. Theatre d'la Corvee is leasing the theatre for eight months. "We wanted to take over the theatre two years ago, but it's a good thing we didn't, because at the time we didn't have the money or the administrative structure to handle it," says Legault. "Now we're in a much better position, and we've negotiated an agreement for the first year that is beneficial to both parties. The NCC has also agreed to put a marquee outside the building, which should help draw attention to the then the whole picture changes with the next witness.

"The actors also have to maintain the audience's interest it's not a show in which anyone gets up and tap dances." Crac! marks the beginning of La Cor-vee's first full season as operator of the York Street Theatre. La Corvee managed the theatre on an interim basis before the 258-seat Byward Market space was taken over by a group led by Ottawa writer Maynard Collins in 1985. After Collins's York Street Theatre Company folded last season, the NCC locked the doors of the theatre, and the Claudia, the central character of has killed one of the clients at the massage parlor where she works. She is placed in a psychiatric hospital, where a psychiatrist diagnoses her as paranoid-schizophrenic. Her very respectable parents agree.

But Claudia insists she is not insane, and the play examines her courtroom battle to prove her sanity. "It's a very difficult play for the actors," says Legault. "It's a very psychological text, and there are constant reversals one moment it looks as if she's going to win, Samuel French in New York say no to the first French production of the play. Legault finally went directly to author Topor to get the rights to Nuts, which has been translated into French by Paul Latreille and opens Tuesday at York Street Theatre under the title Crac! "It's relevant, it's contemporary and it's got something important to say about society," says Legault, who is directing the production. "It's also gripping.

And there's such an interest in courtroom dramas and other court shows on television these days people just love to see other people's problems." When Theatre d'la Corvee artistic director Andre" Legault came across a of Tom Topor's play Nuts in a Boston bookstore, be was dismayed to discover it required a cast of nine al- most prohibitive for a small professional theatre company. But once he read Topor's courtroom 'drama about a young woman's attempts to prove her sanity, he knew he had to do the play somehow. He obtained the rights from Samuel French Ltd. in Toronto, only to have Gory story elevated to level of art priingsteein: By Nancy Baele Citizen staff writer bold siep iiuito new territoiry. 4 WW By David Hinckley New York Daily News Purgatory that state where souls endure prolonged and penitential suffering must be much like the extraordinary film Near Dark.

Operating in the zone between dawn and nightfall, between reality and spookiness, Near Dark is a thriller that is part horror story, part love story, part updated western. It resists an easy classi- fication because of the way it's been filmed by writerdirector Kathryn Bigelow who trained as a painter. Her spare dialogue, her carefully composed scenes bring out the the evil in such mundane locales as wayside motels, road houses, highways, and the mid-western farmland. It's a film of the night, when nothing is seen clearly, when the evil spirits are in control. Like many descents into an altered state, Near Dark begins innocently enough when a nice farmboy Caleb Colton, played by Adrian Pasdar, sees Mae, played by Jenny Wright, eating an icecream cone.

When he insists they kiss, she gives him a vampire love-bite that changes his life. He becomes a changeling, part I of the gang she lives with Jesse played by Lance Henriksen, his ladv Dlaved bv Jenette Gold- I i "Loving one who loves you And then taking that vow Nice work if you can get it And if you get it won't you tell me how?" George Gershwin, 1937 Composers, like movie makers, have pretty much stuck to the easy part of love, which is the getting there. Two hands clasp and fade to the credits. It's easy and it doesn't make anyone uncomfortable by tackling the hard part of love, which is the living with it. Enter Bruce Springsteen with Tunnel Of Love, which hits U.S.

stores today and plays neither its subject nor its music safe starting with a field holler and moving into a remarkable and highly personal mixture of pop, blues, rock 'n' roll, folk and love ballads plus a hint of gospel. circumstances" have forced the delay of the Canadian release, said Zim Zayac, director of national promotion for CBS in Canada. Tunnel of Love wasn't to be released to radio stations until today, but CBS rush-released it across North America on Friday. "It's a shame people can hear but not buy it, but it will sure whet their appetites for it," said Zayac, adding he hoped the record will be in Canadian stores by the end of the week.) With Bruce playing most of the instruments himself, Tunnel is considerably more subtle and spare than Born Li The U.S.A. Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, and Bill Paxton in scene from Near Dark Kovia reviaw Near Dark Nelton, Britannia, Promenades stein and a mean boy Homer played by Joshua Miller.

Caleb can't go back to his father and sister and a life when his blood was warm and he didn't have to suck blood from the veins of Mae in order to live. But neither can he be accepted completely by the gang because he can't kill. He is offered opportunities to earn his spurs. But each time he draws back. He only redeems himself in the gang's eyes when he helps them escape from a most subliminal in scenes such as a fight in a roadhouse where the words of Fever "fever, till ya sizzle and burn" make the acceptance of another code, a code of hell plausible.

And it's this type of visualaural meld with no screeching and no inflated action that gives the film it's appeal. Well acted and haunting Near Darkis a filmic breakthrough, the equivalent of an adult Grimm Brothers fairy tale. taken from magazines such as Outlaw Biker and elevated to the level of art. The faces are photographed in close-up, so that they are half-hidden, as though part dream. The change as night comes on and they become creatures of darkness, is eerie.

They might be wandering beggars from a medieval painting, creatures from a charnel house, lost and scary souls. The low-key dialogue, the music by Tangerine Dream that is al shoot-out, shielding them from the dreaded sun, the agent of their destruction. Redemption comes when his father rescues him with his own blood, transfusing him so that he can be reborn again. It's a gory story told like a blood ballet. The cast moves like dancers in scenes that might be Bruce Springsteen Dangerous rock and roll here he uses a harmonica.

The fans' fear, of course, is that the title of last year live album (Bruce Springsteen and Heart attack kills major French dramatist at 77 the Street Band 1975-1985) will become an epitaph. And 7 maybe someday it will. Where Nebraska may have So yes, call it less commercial. Do not call it less powerful. been a semi-accident, Tunnel Of To momentarily oversimplify Love was clearly planned for Bruce.

He not only plays his most consistently ambitious gui a rich and complex work, Tunnel Of Love looks at how two people can live with each other in real life, where more is involved than climbing into the tar in ages (Tougher Than the Rest), but puts his voice more out front than ever. The exten ded notes on Brilliant Disguise and the light pop touch on All car a la Thunder Road and pulling out to win. This does not diminish Thunder Road, it only acknowledges the guy who wrote it is older, with new That Heaven Will Allow are part of that; equally significant is the way he lets his voice and a ferociously strummed guitar cards in his hand and a different set of options. carry the leadoff song, Ain't So Bruce plunges into territo Got You. The track is as direct in content as it is in sound: "I ry no major artist has probed this deeply since Dylan's Blood on the Tracks in 1975.

"It's got all the riches baby any man ever knewBut the only thing I ain't got honey I ain't got you." By the time he's finished with easy for two people to lose each other in the tunnel of love," goes the title track, and that's only the start. film career briefly, appearing in White Cradle Inn (1946), An Innocent Affair also entitled Don't Trust Your Husband (1948), and The Fan (1949) before retiring. Marguerita Cockshutt, 82 TORONTO (CP) The opera singer known to audiences of the 1930s as Radio's Sweetheart has died at the age of 82. Marguerita Cockshutt, who sang under the name of Marguerita Nuttall, was hailed in reviews of the 1920s and 1930s as having "a voice of astonishing lightness" and as a "gifted young artist." She died Saturday, a day before her 83rd birthday. Born in England, Cockshutt came to Canada at the age of four with her family.

She made her debut in 1928 at Conservatory Hall as a coloratura soprano and later specialized in Mozart operas and operetta. Cockshutt was also a star of the early days of radio, on the CNR radio network's coast-to-coast New Year's Eve broadcast of 1930, and the rival CPR's Transcontinental Hour. She was a regular on CKNC's weekly Neilson Hour. Charles Palmer, 78 TORONTO (CP) Charles Palmer, a man who spent his life on stage, in front of television cameras and behind radio microphones has died after a battle with cancer. He was 78.

Palmer's familiar face appeared in hundreds of television commercials during his acting ca this idea or as finished as it could ever get he's made PARIS (UPI) French play-y wright Jean Anouilh, who became one of the most controversial and versatile dramatists in Europe by portraying the human condition with both scorn and compassion, died in Switzerland after suffering a heart attack, his family said Sunday. He was 77. Anouilh, who rose above the ranks of his contemporaries with his Second World War works Antigone, Eurydice and Oreste, had lived for several years in Lau-. sanne, Switzerland, where he died Saturday. President Francois Mitterrand sent a telegram of condolences to Anouilh's widow, saying, "I learn with great sadness of the death of Jean Anouilh.

It is a great writer who has disappeared, whose work 'has made an impression on French theatre." Anouilh's unrelenting criticism iof the French government under successive Gaullist regimes kept him from being duly honored in his native land. His father, a tailor in the wine trading city of Bordeaux, where Anouilh was born June 23, 1910, was determined that Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh should have good education. His mother, a violinist, gave her son a deep love of classical music. Jean carried both passions with him throughout his life. i The family moved to Paris when Anouilh was nine, and he studied law at university, later taking a job in a Paris advertising agency.

He began at the same time to write plays works that posed Insoluble moral dilemmas and questioned established ethics. and Pauvre Bitos in 1956 were portraits of dark human conflict. In this period Anouilh's writing reached its zenith with the 1959 production of Becket, the tale of the sainted archbishop of Canterbury who defied King Henry II and was murdered on the altar steps of the cathedral. The play was made into a successful film with Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole. Anouilh thought Becket was a Saxon when he wrote the play and when British critics pointed out he was a Norman, Anouilh replied that he was a playwright not a historian.

Madeleine Carroll, 81 Madeleine Carroll, the cosmopolitan actress of the 1930s and 1940s who starred in the Alfred Hitchcock classics The 39 Steps and Secret Agent and more than three dozen other movies, died Friday afternoon at her home outside the resort town of Marbella, Spain, a spokesman for the Marbella Hospital Clinic said. She was 81. The hospital spokesman said she died of natural causes. The actress, whose real name was Marie-Madeleine Bernadette O'CarrolL was born on Feb. 26, 1906, in West Bromwich, in the English Midlands.

She made her acting debut as a French maid with a touring company in England. After a screen test, she got roles in several British movies, beginning with three 1928 films. In 1936, she went to Hollywood, where she was put under contract to Walter Wanger and 20th Century-Fox. After the war, she resumed her Fear strikes by night (Cau tious Man), doubt pierces to the core (Brilliant Disguise), the mirror becomes the enemy (One Step Up), and yet the struggle is worth maintaining, because the alternative is no alternative at all: "They say he travels fastest Jean Anouilh Controversial His first published work in 1932, L'Ermine (The Ermine) the story of an orphan boy adopted by a duchess was a case in point. The boy grows to hate his patron but falls in love with her niece.

He murders the duchess and inherits her fortune. But is he happy? Anouilh lets his audience wonder. He followed the moderate success of L'Ermine with Le Voya-geur Sans Baggage in 1937, and La Sauvage (Restless Heart) and Le Bal des Voleurs (Thieves' Carnival) the next year. His post-war works represented a more disturbing psychological writing and included l'lnvitation au Chateau (Invitation to the Castle) in 1947, and La repetition ou 1'amoureux puni (The Rehearsal or The Punished Lover) in 1950. Both l'Alouette (The Lark) in 1953 who travels aloneBut tonight I miss my girl mister tonight I miss my home." There are no overt homages to rock 'n' roll on Tunnel Of Love, what it has are more-than-incidental religious refer ences (God's light came shinin' on through I woke up in the darkness scared and breathin' and born The songs' content, like the poker-face cover photos, suggests a man who knows he's moved from growin' some of his most diverse and fascinating music.

In the past he's been a melting pot; he throws everything in the stew and comes out with his own powerful synthesis. Here, in a sense, he breaks some of it back down. All That Heaven Will Allow, besides a slight first-verse resemblance to Angel on My Shoulder, is a pop tune Buddy Holly could have written. Two Faces Have I has a Lou Christie line and the ominous guitar from the Police's Every Breath You Take. Tougher Than The Rest and When You're Alone have country rhythms; the guitar break after the third verse of Tougher could easily have segued into a fiddle.

He even uses his past; Cautious Man is Highway Patrolman with new (and almost-as-good) lyrics. Gluing the styles together is the song sequence. After Aint Got You lays down the premise, Bruce goes back to the days before love, to the tough-kid pose of Tougher Than the Rest and the tough-kid vulnerability of AU That Heaven Will Allow. Spare Parts, about cast-off people, wakes the kid up to real toughness, and the rest moves through pride, doubt, frustration, happiness and other big issues before ending up at Valentine's Day, which suggests that what endures is back at home, not out on the road. It's probably not what all Bruce fans want to hear.

The truth can be like that reer, including the "Mr. Christie, you make good cookies" advertising campaign. Jackson terms surgery, hormone reports lies NEW YORK (UPI) Sineer Michael Jackson Hp- up to grownup. This is dangerous in rock 'n' roll, of course, since many fans prefer their idols in time capsules. So just as some fans from the Rosalita days felt abandoned by Born In The U.S.A., some newer and older fans may be jarred by Tunnel Of Love.

For starters, they may be nervous about the future of Bruce's live show. While he's had a good time playing old rock tunes this summer, this album wasn't written for stadiums. Nor was it written for his band; Max Weinberg plays on eight of the 12 cuts, but no one else is on more than three. Clarence Clemons has one vocal. Spare Parts ends with an instrumental Bruce might have filled at one time with a sax; scribbled on hotel stationery from his room at the Capitol Tokyu Hotel in Toyko.

He is on a solo concert tour that winds through Japan, Australia and New Zealand and ends in December. "I was sent forth for the world, for the children. But have mercy, for I've been bleeding for a long ime now," Jackson wrote in a childish scrawl replete with spelling and punctuation errors. "Most people don't know me, that is why they write such things in wich (sic) most is not true. I cry very, very often because it hurts and I wory (sic) about the children, all my children, all over the world.

I live for them." He referred to "an old Indian proverb" to warn against continued attempts to expose what many fans view as weird details of his personal life. "Do not judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccosins (sic)," he wrote. nounced as "lies" reports that he underwent plastic surgery and received hormone injections in a quest for eternal youth, saying such stories cause him to "cry very, very often because it hurts." The 29-year-old aging Peter Pan, in what he said would be his only discussion of his private life, told People magazine, "I was sent forth for the children." "I live for them," he scrawled in a short note, signed only "M.J.," which was excerpted in the magazine's Oct 12 issue, published Sunday. The entertainer labelled as "lies" reports that he used chemicals to make his skin lighter, female hormones to keep his voice high and plastic surgery to transform his entire body and that he bathes only in Evian bottled water, People said. Jackson? remarks came in a two-page letter Wjchael Jackson I live for children.