Good Morning and Welcome to Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise
“The price of everything and the value of nothing”, Oscar Wilde, of course. The devastating fires in California are making me reevaluate. Objects, stuff, things, what we fill our homes with and what matters to us. Look around your living room. If it were about to be engulfed in flames what would you grab as you ran out the door? The cat, obviously, the husband, probably, and possibly the children. But what else?
I have friends in California and my heart breaks for them. Some have lost a lifetime of memories in homes which were their reward for a lifetime of effort. But setting aside the unimaginable loss of the certainties of their lives represented by their houses, what will they truly miss? The new kitchen? The sofa? The mahogany desk? No. Furniture can be replaced. Houses can be replaced.
What they will miss are the irreplaceables and they’re different for each of us. That grubby green no-longer-fluffy rabbit. Your son’s baby shoe. The wonky bowl your daughter made when she was 6. The family pictures from a time when pictures were in frames, not phones. The gift from a long-dead godmother, the painting your dad made, the snowglobe you bought on your honeymoon, the sketch of your mother when she was a girl, the poster of your first triumph, and more. What are they worth? In financial terms, nothing. But to you?
As I write this Monday morning, the Getty Museum is endangered and its future uncertain. What it contains is also priceless, centuries of art. Will that go up in flames too?
I’m trying to concentrate on this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise although my thoughts keep straying across the ocean to beautiful California which will never be the same again and to its people. They will now have to reevaluate the price and the value of everything they have lost.
Let’s concentrate on what is timeless – music, drama, song, film, art – and they’re all here on Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise this Monday.
There’s a movie star so beautiful that she couldn’t persuade her contempories to look beyond her face to her remarkable brain, an opera about another real woman who lived and died but is remembered in song, an artist who died 400 years ago but lives in the beauty he left behind, a new play about our world and its potential for disaster.
All this is available just by clicking the links beneath the pictures.
Hedy Lamarr – Actress and Inventor
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By all accounts, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was a difficult woman. As the film star Hedy Lamarr, she not only alienated the directors and actors she worked with but also all six of her husbands, none of whom lasted more than a few years.
Her problem, and problem it was, is that she was extraordinarily beautiful, which masked her intellectual brilliance, a fact that made her unable to persuade those who could have helped her that she was an inventor whose technical genius could have changed the direction of WW2 if the Allied powers had believed in her.
At the beginning of the War, along with pianist and composer George Antheil, Lamarr had the idea for a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers which they patented. The invention was offered to the Navy, who rejected it on the basis that it would be too large to fit in a torpedo and it was not put into operational use until after the War, and then independently of their patent.
Born in Vienna to a wealthy Jewish family, the young Hedwig was determined to make her own decisions. She decided to get into the movies. At the age of 18, her breakthough role was the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy . She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man. The film gained international recognition after winning an award at the Venice Film Festival. Considered overly sexual, it was banned in America and in Germany but she was on her way. Next stop, American theatre and movies.
Throughout her life she knew what she wanted and was ruthless about getting it. Having turned down a contract for $125 a week from Louis B. Mayer she then pursued him until he agreed to pay her $500 a week on a contract which made her a star. She had a leading role in nearly thirty movies. In her spare time, she studied science and technology. Among her many patented inventions was an improved traffic stoplight.
Hedy Lamarr was litigious. She sued everybody for every real or imagined issue. She died 25 years ago today. Not surprisingly, she died alone, a recluse, seeing nobody, estranged from at least one of her children, disowning another, and still furious with everybody. She was a kind of genius but the kind who can prove that looks aren’t everything.
Here, on YouTube, is a collection of Hedy Lamarr movies. Take a look at Algiers, made with Charles Boyer in 1938, her first Hollywood success, and you’ll see what the fuss was all about. If there has been a more beautiful woman in the history of cinema I have yet to come across her.
La Traviata – Palais Garnier
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150 years ago on this week, in January 1875, Paris's great opera house Palais Garnier opened its doors to the world. In the century and a half since, it has stood as one of the most important venues in all of opera and ballet, welcoming the world's greatest artists year after year, and hosting premieres of some of the most significant works in the repertoire.
Yet the Palais Garnier is not only a beacon of tradition—it has also tried to embrace innovation to keep opera and dance thriving, as in this sensational production of La Traviata, which remixes the beloved operatic masterpiece’s familiar love story for the digital age, adding social media notifications, all-nighters, texts, and parties to produce a reinterpretation for our modern era.
Whatever you think of the new interpolations, the gorgeous performances of Pretty Yende and Benjamin Bernheim as Violetta and Alfredo in Simon Stone's 2019 stage-directing debut at the famous opera house can’t be faulted.
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World – Digital Theatre
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Here’s an unusual contemporary play which blurs a true crime podcast with a thrilling ride down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, based on a 1978 book by the French critic Rene Girard, delves into the unsolved murder of Iranian pop star Fereydoun Farrokhzad.
Girard’s book of cultural criticism is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis.
Javaad Alipoor’s gripping production explores violence, digital culture and postcolonialism, revealing the limits of search engines in solving a decades old case.
Rent for £7.99 for 48 hours or subscribe monthly/annually.
Brilliance in Bloom – Sotheby’s
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The painter Jan Breugel the Elder died 400 years ago this week, on Jan 13, 1625, aged about 47. Son of Pieter Breugel, brother of Pieter Breugel the Younger, and father of, not surprisingly, Jan Breugel the Younger, painting was the family business and they were immensely successful.
Jan was a close friend and frequent collaborator with Peter Paul Rubens and together they were were the leading Flemish Baroque painters in the first three decades of the 17th century. Jan was court painter of the Archduke and Duchess Albrecht and Isabella, sovereigns of the Spanish Netherlands.
Cardinal Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, became Brueghel's lifelong friend and patron and, for him, he produced many of the landscape and flower paintings for which he became famous.
I was delighted to learn that he had three nicknames. They were, “Velvet” Brueghel, because of his mastery in rendering fabrics on canvas, "Flower" Brueghel, obviously because he was famous for painting flowers and other elements of nature, and "Paradise" Brueghel which recognises his invention of the genre of landscape painting depicting paradise.
This is an informative and delightful short video from George Gordon, Co-Chairman of Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings and Drawings department, to promote a sale of paintings of Jan Breughel the Elder in 2015. 400 years after his death I don’t think it has dated.
By coincidence in 2025, January’s Painting of the Month at London’s National Gallery is Jan Breugel the Elder’s “The Adoration of the Kings”, so go along and see it if you can.
The fires rage on. But art is forever. Or is it? Come back next week for more online arts. Please.
Ruth
Always interesting and so often Western Worldwide