Lewis Whittington writes about the performing and film arts for many publications. He is a renegade dance, theater and opera queen, a jazz-head and a civil activist.
Film
“The close-up says everything. It's then that an actor's learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously, at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away and your face ...
Television
Magic Color Clock from the Metropolitan Museum of Art The Americanization of the groundbreaking British series, Queer as Folk, has been a hit and miss affair. Desperate to stay at the head of the ...
Television
How queer can Queer As Folk be as Showtime’s hottest series? It depends. If you are an activist transsexual lesbian fighting for a seat on the city council to represent sexual minorities, it probably offers nothing much. Yet, this ...
Film
For years public television stations would dust off the great episodes of The Judy Garland Show from the early 60s or recreations of her triumphant stage show Judy at Carnegie Hall, to raise pledge money. They even would rerun ...
Film
“History is about to crack wide open…Millennium Approaches!" announces the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg to the writhing body of Roy Cohn (notorious crony to Hoover, McCarthy and Nixon) who is dying of AIDS. It is one of countless brilliant ...
Theater
Can anyone find a theater story to tell that avoids the backstage cliches? What about a musical about the stage as seen through the eyes of dusty literary lion Henry James? It would give even the ballsiest writer pause.Yet, ...
Theater
Cassandra Wilson continues to open up possibilities of what a jazz singer of her talent and vocal temperament can do. Her recently released CD, Glamoured,contains several tunes that you wouldn’t think could be jazz tracks. On tour for Glamoured, ...
Television
The new 7-part BBC America series The Vice starts off looking like a Prime Suspect knock-off. With pounds of lurid exposition and character baggage, it quickly becomes a tug of war between "gripping" storylines and arrested character development. This ...
Books & CDs
If James Gavin's biography Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker was fiction, it would have a shot at being the great American novel. The bootstrap story of a poor trumpeter (with missing teeth) who couldn’t ...
Film
The Mysterious Death of General Sikorski DVD The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (2003), Tom Standage From the first ...
