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SPORTS LIFE AUTOS GETTING TO KNOW THEIR TRAVEL ‘KING AND I’ CHARACTERS
L awrence J ournal -W orld - USA TODAY SATURDAY, APRIL 11, 2015
THEATER
LIFELINE CAUGHT IN THE ACT Actress and WildAid ambassador Maggie Q talks to her fiance, Dylan McDermott, during a press conference on the ‘Stop Using Rhino Horn’ campaign in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Kelli O’Hara and co-star Ken Watanabe take on the beloved Broadway musical
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Forget million-dollar jewels and mile-high heels. The best accessory on the red carpet? A cute dog, of course. Hilary Swank proved that at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ 18th annual Bergh Ball in New York Thursday. THEY SAID WHAT? THE STARS’ BEST QUOTES “I think Kanye is sick. He’s the only rock star left.” — Mumford & Sons’ Marcus Mumford tells ‘Billboard’ about Kanye West.
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IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY WHO’S CELEBRATING TODAY?
NEW YORK In a preview performance of the new Broadway revival of The King and I, leading man Ken Watanabe almost tripped over leading lady Kelli O’Hara’s gown. The near-accident occurred during the famous number Shall We Dance?, in which O’Hara’s character — an English widow who becomes governess and teacher to the King of Siam’s large family — is guiding Watanabe’s monarch across the floor. “My dress weighs about 45 pounds, and he got his feet caught under it,” recalls O’Hara, chatting with Watanabe in the lobby of Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, where the production opens April 16. “And he started to go down — but then he did a full back somersault and landed on his knees. “The audience loved it. There were probably people who thought it was choreographed that way.” Offstage and on, the two make an unlikely couple. The blond, wholesomely beautiful O’Hara, who turns 39 next week, is a beloved Broadway veteran with five Tony nominations to her credit — including one for another Lincoln Center Theater revival of a Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, 2008’s South Pacific. Watanabe, 55, is a Japanese film star known to American audiences for roles in Letters From Iwo Jima and The Last Samurai, which earned him an Oscar nomination. The King and I marks not only his first musical and the first time he has sung publicly, but “my first time acting onstage in English,” says Watanabe, who at a few points during the interview consults a translator seated beside him. The actor is one of 46 Asian cast members in the production, directed by Bartlett Sher, another South Pacific alum. Only five of the performers — among them OHara’s standby, Betsy Morgan, and Jake Lucas, the young actor cast as Anna’s son — are nonAsian. Watanabe notes that rich roles have been less than abundant recently for Asian actors, on stage or screen. “About 15 years ago, people in Hollywood had a lot of curiosity about Asia. Now that the Chinese market has gotten so big that it can’t be ignored, there is a tendency to base the story in China, film it in China or cast Chinese actors over other Asian actors.” Authenticity was important to Sher, say his leads, as was making
EILEEN BLASS, USA TODAY
Ken Watanabe and Kelli O’Hara are the Rodgers and Hammerstein dynamic duo in the Broadway revival of The King and I.
the racial, cultural and gender conflicts in the 1951 musical fresh for a contemporary audience. Rodgers and Hammerstein based the show on Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam, a novel inspired by the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, whom King Mongkut of Siam (now Thailand) enlisted in the 1860s to teach his children and wives. “R&H would put these huge, important themes inside the mask of a musical,” O’Hara says. “You have the issues of gender equality, of East meeting West, of colonization. ... The king is trying to work with the French and English as equals, to coexist with them.” Watanabe was drawn to the
notion of the king — a role made famous by Yul Brynner — “ruling a small country, asking, ‘How can I survive in the world?’ ” O’Hara and Watanabe’s fellow performers include a number of children, one only 6 years old. “We’ll be going into the last scene of an evening show, at 10:45 or 10:50, and I’ll see them yawning,” says O’Hara, a mother of two. “And you think, ‘My gosh, it’s two or three hours past what a child’s normal bedtime would be.’ “They are professionals, and we treat them with respect,” O’Hara says. “But there are times I just want to mother them, to hold them. I think some of them appreciate that — especially the little ones.”
Oh the humanity! ‘Ex Machina’ is real thing Man, machine and story pass the test STONE BY WIREIMAGE; REST BY GETTY IMAGES
Joss Stone is 28. Joel Grey is 83. Jennifer Esposito is 42. Compiled by Alison Maxwell
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When sci-fi hits that sweet spot, it can be endlessly thought-provoking. Such is the case with the stylish, tense and terrifically acted Ex MOVIE Machina, a complex REVIEW CLAUDIA drama about artifiPUIG cial intelligence. Alex Garland, the screenwriter of 28 Days Later and Sunshine, makes an auspicious directorial debut with this suspenseful mystery. Oscar Isaac is deliciously offputting as Nathan Bateman, a reclusive Internet genius and the billionaire owner of Bluebook, the world’s most popular search engine. Nathan oversees his empire from a remote scenic location. He’s simultaneously brilliant, charming and infuriating, with an underlying sense of ill-defined menace, even when he’s being friendly. Alicia Vikander plays his robotic creation, Ava. She’s at once inquisitive, knowing and innocent, and Vikander nails the part with an alliance of subtle virtues: wide eyes, understated machine-like movements and an
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STARS Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno DIRECTOR Alex Garland RATING R for graphic nudity, language, sexual references and some violence RUNNING TIME 1 hour, 48 minutes Now showing in select cities
DANIEL IANDIN, A24
Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, left) faces off with his boss, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), in Ex Machina. air of inscrutability. Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a good-natured programmer at Bluebook who wins an internal competition to spend a week with the big boss at HQ, which also is Nathan’s sprawling home, surrounded by dramatic waterfalls and woodsy solitude. Shortly after he arrives, however, Caleb learns he’s not there to bask in nature or soak up what he can learn from his genius boss. Nathan explains that Caleb has been summoned to test the artificial intelligence of Ava, an astounding creation with a lumi-
nous human face, shiny chrome skull and artfully arranged translucent mesh-and-metal body. Caleb’s assignment is to administer the “Turing Test” (developed by computer pioneer Alan Turing, who moviegoers will remember from The Imitation Game), which determines intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. He’s tasked with assessing Ava’s level of humanity in a series of interactions. He also must decipher the unnerving eccentric behavior of his host.
For a first-time director, Garland seems assured. His sharp, sparse dialogue and meticulous direction are equally compelling, and the three lead performances are top-notch. Vikander has a wise but dreamy quality as a robot determined to understand humans. Gleeson is the Everyman surrogate here, the film’s emotional center who may be more than the computer geek he seems. And Isaac is breathtaking in his ability to manipulate and keep Caleb — and the audience — off-guard. Garland infuses the film with a Hitchcock-like sense of dread that mounts throughout but never feels heavy-handed. An intricate, enigmatic tale, Ex Machina unfolds at just the right pace and raises profound questions about the nature of humanity, both real and fabricated.