Saturday, April 16, 2011

Topsy-Turvy is Back

Very good news: "Topsy-Turvy" has been re-released on DVD. As Terry Teachout notes in The Wall Street Journal:

"Topsy-Turvy" is the smartest backstage movie ever made, a deeply knowing fictional study of how a theatrical production takes shape. The acting, especially that of Jim Broadbent as the irascible, anxiety-ridden Gilbert, is as convincing as it is possible to be. But "Topsy-Turvy" is also a cinematic scrapbook of Victorian life, a probing portrait of what it felt like to be a Londoner in 1885, the year "The Mikado" opened. We visit the office of Richard D'Oyly Carte and notice with surprise that he has a phone on his desk; we dine in Victorian restaurants, sit in Victorian parlors, go backstage at the Savoy Theatre and watch a prop man shake a piece of sheet metal to simulate the sound of thunder. Detail is piled on imaginatively re-created detail, and by film's end you feel as though you've taken a stroll through a vanished world.

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