Hasta La Gadget!

NEW YORK (AP) — Rod McKuen, the husky-voiced “King of Kitsch” whose avalanche of music, verse and spoken-word recordings in the 1960s and ’70s overwhelmed critical mockery and made him an Oscar-nominated songwriter and one of the best-selling poets in history, has died. He was 81.

McKuen died Thursday morning at a rehabilitation center in Beverly Hills, California, where he had been treated for pneumonia and had been ill for several weeks and was unable to digest food, his half-brother Edward McKuen Habib said. Until his sabbatical in 1981, McKuen was an astonishingly successful and prolific force in popular culture, turning out hundreds of songs, poems and records. Sentimental, earnest and unashamed, he conjured a New Age spirit world that captivated those who didn’t ordinarily like “poetry” and those who craved relief from the war, assassinations and riots of the time.

“I think it’s a reaction people are having against so much insanity in the world,” he once said. “I mean, people are really all we’ve got. You know it sounds kind of corny, and I suppose it’s a cliche, but it’s really true; that’s just the way it is.”

His best-known songs, some written with the Belgian composer Jacques Brel, include “Birthday Boy,” ”A Man Alone,” ”If You Go Away” and “Seasons In the Sun,” a chart-topper in 1974 for Terry Jacks. He was nominated for Oscars for “Jean” from “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and for “A Boy Named Charlie Brown,” the title track from the beloved Peanuts movie.

Frank Sinatra, Madonna, Dolly Parton and Chet Baker were among the many artists who recorded his material, although McKuen often handled the job himself, in a hushed, throaty style he honed after an early life as a rock singer cracked his natural tenor.

McKuen is credited with more than 200 albums — dozens of which went gold or platinum — and more than 30 collections of poetry. Worldwide sales for his music top 100 million units while his book sales exceed 60 million copies.

He was especially productive from 1968 to 1969, releasing four poetry collections, eight songbooks, the soundtracks to “Miss Jean Brodie” and “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” and at least 10 other albums. Around the same time, his “Lonesome Cities” album won a Grammy for best spoken word recording and Sinatra commissioned him to write material for “A Man Alone: The Words and Music of Rod McKuen.”

With his sharply parted blond hair, sneakers and jeans, McKuen was recognized worldwide and thrived in every medium: movies, music, books, television, stage. When not writing or recording, he appeared on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson and other talk show programs, formed a film production company with Rock Hudson and toured constantly until he took an extended break in 1981.

“I was tired. I peaked. I left when I was on top,” McKuen told the Chicago Tribune in 2001. “One year, I did 280 concerts.”

He had no formal musical or literary training, but often turned out a song or poem per day and prided himself on writing verse that anyone could understand. The work seemed to call for accompaniment by a single, sad guitar or a sobbing chorus of strings. Among his most quoted phrases: “Listen to the warm” and “It doesn’t matter who you love, or how you love, but that you love.”

The words written about McKuen were as notable as his own. Often compared to “Love Story” author Erich Segal, he was dubbed “The King of Kitsch” by Newsweek, while the magazine Mademoiselle preferred “Marshmallow Poet.” A National Lampoon parody interspaced mock verses with dollar signs.

The escapism of his work was contrasted by an early life well in need of escaping. Born in Oakland in 1934, he hardly knew his father, who left the family when he was a baby, and McKuen recalled being terrified of his alcoholic stepfather. By age 11, McKuen had run away and he would spend his teens doing everything from ranching to roping horses in a rodeo, while writing poetry in his free time.

After serving as a propaganda writer in the Korean War, McKuen wound up in San Francisco, where his friend Phyllis Diller helped him find work in the growing nightclub scene. He went on to sing with the Lionel Hampton band, acted in a handful of movies and TV shows, read poetry on the same bill as Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers and had a minor hit single in the early 1960s with the dance parody “Oliver Twist.”

Without critical approval or a book or recording contract, McKuen proved that an artist could thrive on word of mouth alone. He sang in bowling alleys to promote “Oliver Twist,” and his self-published collection of poems and lyrics, “Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows,” sold tens of thousands of copies before Random House acquired it.

McKuen slowed down over the second half of his life, and many of his books fell out of print. But he continued to publish poetry, remastered old musical recordings and gave occasional concerts. He provided voiceovers for the Disney movie and TV series “The Little Mermaid” and appeared at Carnegie Hall in 1995 for an 80th birthday tribute to Sinatra. Artists continued to record his songs, including the former Gene Ween, Aaron Freeman, who in 2012 released an album of McKuen covers called “Marvelous Clouds.”

McKuen did at times take on social and political issues. He opposed the Vietnam War, wrote a poem about the Watergate scandal and supported civil rights and equal rights for gays. Often described as a loner, he was reluctant to discuss his own romantic preferences beyond saying he did have them.

“Cats have it all,” he once wrote, “admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it.”

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Associated Press writer Robert Jablon contributed to this report from Los Angeles.

Here’s what I said about Kevin Costner when I reviewed his low-key actioner 3 Days to Kill just over a year ago:

Getting older has been good for Kevin Costner. As the one-time Robin Hood’s face has grown more creased and weathered with the passage of years, it’s allowed him to leave behind some of the trappings of superstardom that first propelled and then constrained him during the ’80s and ’90s, leading him to the much more fruitful and fulfilling character parts that await all leading men eventually.

I stand by every word of that. In fact, Costner’s performance in writer-director Mike Binder’s otherwise forgettable melodrama Black or White only helps underscore that earlier point. As an actor, Costner is just imminently watchable. Even in material such as this, that really doesn’t measure up to his performance, I can still find a particular joy in just watching his choices as he works through a scene. Nonetheless, just as with 3 Days to Kill, I sometimes wish he’d pick a better variety of projects with which to fill his dance card.

Now, to give Black or White (which Costner himself financed) its due, it does make an honest, earnest try at addressing the considerable racial divide that continues to effect so many facets of life in this country. But unlike, say, last month’s Selma, which depicted historical events to offer commentary on our present moment, Binder uses relatively recent history (per a title card, the film is based on true events) to tackle issues of class, race, and the resentments that can power divisions in both. Admirable goals, certainly, but undone by a simplistic, borderline insulting approach that leaves both sides of its argument feeling undernourished.

The film begins with Elliot Anderson (Costner) coming to terms with the sudden death of his wife (Jennifer Ehle), and becoming primary caretaker to his mixed-race granddaughter Eloise (Jillian Estell), whose mother — Elliot’s daughter — died during childbirth. This situation becomes more complicated when Eloise’s paternal grandmother Rowena (Octavia Spencer) sues Elliot for custody of the girl, believing she’d do better with her black family in South Central than her white grandpa in Beverly Hills. What follows is a two-hours of Do The Right Thing by way of a heavy dose of Kramer vs. Kramer.

The soap opera nature of the thing is only heightened when Eloise’s drug addict father Reggie (André Holland, also in Selma) reappears after being absent for most of the girl’s life, and asks Elliot for a payout to disappear, potentially paving the way for her grandfather to retain custody. It’s the kind of storytelling maneuver that’s intended to add complexity to the drama, but just makes apparent all the machinery at work to contrive new ways to hold off the climax juuuust a little bit longer. “You’re a stereotype!” Rowena’s attorney brother Jeremiah yells at Reggie at one point, in a bit of dialogue that’s about as on-the-nose as it gets.

My problem with Black or White isn’t that it’s tackling a hot button topic like race relations. I wish more movies would, to be honest. The more we have these kinds of conversations, the greater the likelihood of achieving real progress. Rather, what bugged me is the way the deck is so obviously stacked in Elliot’s favor, both within the world of the film and in the eyes of the moviegoer. It’s plain to see that Eloise is loved by her grandfather, and she obviously doesn’t lack for anything, which essentially forces the audience to view Rowena through the same antagonistic lens Elliot does. We’re never not on his side.

Yes, he’s dealing with a drinking problem, but all that ends up doing is give him the shadings of an arc, unlike poor Octavia Spencer, reduced to wincing and mugging on the sidelines, playing a character so thinly-sketched that she and her entire oversized brood feel like they escaped from a sitcom. Without giving anything away, Black or White concludes pretty much the only it can given the way the chessboard has been set up for us. While it attempts some measure of high-minded resolution to the many complicated issues it raises, it’s simply casting too wide a net to feel truly satisfying. In trying to be color blind, it just comes off as tone deaf. C-

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If you go by Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, revived at Classic Stage Company, you might conclude the revered Russian literary man was more of a city lover. As we used to say to someone stating the obvious, “What was your first clue?” Here, it’s the script’s implication that for many of the characters, a month in the country is about all they can take. Then they eagerly hit the road for parts unknown.

Love found or not found or found but not requited or love requited but not licit are the reasons these people scatter or are forlornly left behind is what unfolds chockablock on the estate that Arkady (Anthony Edwards) owns during Russia’s 1840s and over which his wife Natalya (Taylor Schilling) presides.

As with almost anything Russian of the period, languor seems the prevailing attitude while anxiety roils unexpressed underneath. That’s certainly what afflicts Natalya as she yearns for Aleksey (Mike Faist), the student tutor circulating with his chest hanging out much of the time. The sole person with whom she feels truly comfortable is wise and tolerant family friend Rakitin (Peter Dinklage).

Star-crossed hopefuls Natalya and Aleksey aren’t the only ones with eyes for the wrong or, at least, the unresponsive person. All the hopeful or reluctant couples spend Turgenev’s first act, as it’s presented here, setting out their various conflicts in interesting but not necessarily spellbinding modes

It’s in the livelier second act wherein the skewed love(?) affairs simmer and boil. They get off to a start when local Shpigelsky (Thomas Jay Ryan) proposes marriage to Natalya’s companion Lizaveta (Annabella Sciorra) by impressing on her that he’s not only unromantic but devoutly anti-romantic.

Their down-to-earth tete-a-tete becomes the amuse-bouche for the delicately contrasting trysts and confrontations that follow head over heels. Chief among them, of course, is the Natalya-Arkady-Aleksey triangle about which Arkady is actually in sympathy and during which Rakitin eventually sees the need to take gallant conciliatory measures. The other impending, though not heart-throbbing union concerns young estate ward Vera (Megan West), who’s looking for someone more entrancing than 48-year-old Bolshintsov (Peter Appel).

Because the entwined conflicts have such get-me-outta-here repercussions for the addled participants, the only one left on stage at curtain is Arkady’s aging mother Anna (Elizabeth Franz), sitting forlornly as if a symbol of an abandoned age–not unlike Firs at the end of The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s much later portrait of rural Russian discontent.

Erica Schmidt directs the production with an appealing light touch, which might be due in large part to John Christopher Jones’s new translation. This means that though Natalya is in trying throes, Schilling–on leave from Orange is the New Black–radiates warmth throughout. Dinklage–on leave from Game of Thrones–never seems completely to drop the intensity with which he habitually performs but is fine. So’s Anthony “ER” Edwards, although Arkady’s presence is limited and would benefit from more writing.

(By the way: Note that Schilling, Dinklage and Edwards are known nowadays for their television work. It’s a pleasure to see them in the flesh and probably not a bad ticket-selling incentive, either.)

The entire cast–Faist, West, Appel, among them–comes off extremely well. A special word needs to be said about Ian Etheridge, who plays 10-year-old Kolya with gusto and charm.

But about Mark Wendland’s set: very curious. A drawing room, where much of the action occurs, is represented by several pieces of furniture, among them a chaise longue on which Natalya can stretch her languid self. Inexplicably suspended above the playing area, however, is a floorless room with gossamer walls and two doors.

It remains in place from beginning to end. Why? Is it intended to imply that the estate’s walls have been lifted so spectators can snoop at what’s going on inside. Or is it just there to suggest that after abiding in the country too long, even the Arkady house is trying to get away