Two teens, an island, and some strategically placed palm fronds: Blue Lagoon returns!
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| Indiana Evans (Emma) and Brenton Thwaites (Dean) star in the Lifetime original movie Blue Lagoon: The Awakening. |
Blue Lagoon: The Awakening (Lifetime, Saturday at 8 p.m. ET) is the fifth screen adaptation of Henry De Vere Stacpoole's 1908 novel. In the book, as in the famous 1980 version with Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins, the protagonists are cousins Emmeline and Richard Lestrange. Shipwrecked in the South Pacific as children, they make like Robinson Crusoe and his girl Friday; surviving into adolescence, they make like unsupervised teenagers. In the original, Emmeline and Richard satisfy their erotic curiosity below a monolithic statue, one of those impassive Easter Island types: "At his base, in his shadow, looking as if under his protection, lay two human beings, naked, clasped in each other's arms, and fast asleep. One could scarcely pity his vigil, had it been marked sometimes through the years by such an incident as this. The thing had been conducted just as the birds conduct their love affairs. An affair absolutely natural, absolutely blameless, and without sin."
Clearly, BL:TA, a Lifetime original, doesn't want too much to do with all of that. The movie, less than sensational, prudently tempers the story's most sensational material. Who wants the headache? Who needs the hassle if you're working at Lifetime's level—outside of genre fantasy, below rigorous artistry? Producing a light entertainment about underage incest is clearly more trouble than it's worth. Here, the protagonists are not cousins living in an earlier century, just attractive schoolmates whose boat party goes awry, stranding them in a photo shoot for Hollister.
Emma Robinson (played by Indiana Evans) is a dimple in a prissy chin below eyes of honor-roll liveliness. Dean McMullen (Brenton Thwaites) is a bad boy and a new kid: "I heard he got kicked out of the last school he was in." (In terms of Breakfast Club membership, she is a straight-up Molly Ringwald, while he is a chuck steak seasoned with hints of Judd Nelson's defiance and Emilio Estevez's athleticism, and also a saffron-y touch of Ally Sheedy's slackerly strangeness.) She has a mother played by Denise Richards. He has a rich and withholding father but compensates with full wavy hair. Dean cuts quite an insouciant figure in the lunchroom, where he idly plays with a priapic jackknife and props his Chuck Taylors on a cafeteria chair.
Where earlier lagoon-maroons have explored Melanesia, our new heroes go astray in the Caribbean, much to the relief of the production's accountants. While doing a Habitat for Humanity-type deal in Trinidad, Emma and Dean join a flock of students sneaking off to a cruise—red Solo cups, blue Carnival feathers, a three-hour-tour. There is a raid, and a run for it, and a misadventure in a dinghy. Soon, within the show, cable news is frantic with hysteria about teens lost at sea, as if the ticker is crawling with sharks or underlining the way that Lifetime is braiding a patented girl-in-peril tale with a mother-in-pursuit quest. The eyes of Denise Richards well with tears beneath a canopy of mascara as she resolves never to quit searching for her daughter. The eyes of Denise Richards plead for the assistance of Christopher Atkins, who makes a cameo as a high-school teacher and wears a look of avuncular concern, as opposed to what he wore in the 1980 version (a loincloth and tribal beads, mostly).
Meanwhile, Emma and Dean wash up in the new Eden. Amid squabbles and flirting, they learn to fend for themselves in the wild. Offscreen, apparently, Emma discovers a Sephora that will sell her pink lip gloss while Dean frequents a nearby body-waxing salon. As a reward for their good grooming in the face of mortal peril, the characters get to have sex. One depiction of intercourse finds the camera peering at innocent skin through a gap in some strategically placed palm fronds. It's as if we're snooping—the implicit creepiness of which dents the effort at decency.
The actors playing the BL:TA duo are healthy and wholesome, if not terribly expressive; perhaps the matter is that both are Australian, and it's all they can do to keep their accents under control. Or maybe it's that both are fluent in English, and it's all they can do to keep from cracking while reading their dialogue. Perhaps the performers are waterlogged: Emma and Dean spend a lot of time caressing in the plunge pool of a waterfall, and they spend an eternity rolling in the spume of surf. "Should we feel guilty?" Emma wonders, in a sudden pout of introspection. About the fornication? No, that's absolutely natural, absolutely blameless. But you kids should be ashamed of the moment where Dean, as if in accordance with a tribal mating ritual, declares the constancy of his love while standing out in the rain. What a drip.
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Because the local production has nudity, too.
A Chattanooga Theatre Centre production of the musical "Hair" -- various national productions of which have included a brief nude scene -- opens this weekend, and "Equus" begins final rehearsals for its presentation at Barking Legs Theater.
All this comes in the same city that was the subject of a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court case, Southeastern Promotions v. Conrad, which found the city used prior restraint -- suppressing speech before it occurs -- to ban a national touring presentation of "Hair."
But it's 37 years later. A touring production of "Hair," an homage to 1960s counterculture and sexual revolution, has since played in Chattanooga, nudity and all. As has "Oh! Calcutta!" another controversial play from the 1960s that features nudity and simulated sex.
The country, in general, seems to tolerate more from its movies, television shows and Internet content. Yet nudity in a community stage play here, where family values generally rule, has been practically nonexistent.
Legally, the nudity may or may not be a big deal, said Deputy City Attorney Phil Noblett.
Adult-oriented establishments, in general, must be licensed by the city, he said, citing sections 11-421 through 11-449 of the city code.
"Whether this constitutes that is another issue," Noblett said. "Mere nudity may not do that. It may not be a big deal."
When it came to their productions, the Chattanooga Theatre Centre and the Ensemble Theater arrived at different conclusions on whether to include the nude scenes.
"Hair" director Scott Dunlap said theater officials' understanding of the law after consultation with an attorney was that theaters had no special dispensation when it came to a display of nudity -- that it would be judged similar to other adult establishments. However, he said the nature of community theater was the deciding factor against it.
"We certainly debated it," he said. "It's always voluntary [in 'Hair' productions] on the part of the cast. It's a choice for the actors. But do we allow our actors to have the choice? Superimposing was that actors would want to bring parents or friends."
Posey, on the hand, had no choice if he was to present "Equus." The rights forbade nude-colored body stockings, underwear or pasties.
"We had to sign an agreement with the publisher, saying we would honor the convention fully," he said.
Posey also said Ensemble board member Leigh Anne Battersby, an attorney, told him their chances of any trouble over the production were remote.
"Could we be arrested? Yes," he said. "Would we be tried? No."
According to the city code, a violation of the adult-oriented establishments article is "a definite sum not exceeding $50."
NUDITY IN CONTEXT
The fuss is over a 20-second scene, normally done behind a scrim, in "Hair," and five to seven minutes at the end of a 21/2-hour show in "Equus."
The message of "Hair" is not that people should be naked, though "it's certainly a purposeful, provocative image of freedom," Dunlap said. The nude scene at the end of the musical's Act I was inspired, he said, by an actual incident in which two men took off their clothes to antagonize police during an informal Vietnam anti-war gathering in New York City's Tompkins Square Park.
"That's a lot of back story to explain 20 seconds," Dunlap said.
The musical also has profanity and simulated sex acts, depicts the use of illegal drugs and shows an irreverence for the American flag.
"In the grand scheme of things, [the nudity] is not that important to the piece," Dunlap said. "There's lots of other things that are shocking and taboo -- plenty of other things to be upset about."
In "Equus," a psychiatrist attempts to treat a young man who has a pathological religious fascination with horses. Toward the end of the play, the young man, in a psychiatric session, reveals and begins to act out a sexual tryst in a stable with a female friend. It is then that he removes his clothes, and he remains nude as he agonizes over what the horses may have seen. Eventually, he blinds them.
Posey said a onetime professor told him "Equus" might be performed with clothes throughout, but his reading of the script said otherwise. And the publisher's demand cinched it.
He and his two co-producers debated the use of the play with its mandatory nudity as, subsequently, did the theater's board and the board of the faith-based St. Andrews Center, where the theater is housed.
Ultimately, Posey said, he made the decision to move the production to Barking Legs Theater.
"I'm still not sure everyone's 100 percent behind [the production]," he said.
"DESENSITIZED"
In the 1975 case, the municipal board charged with managing Memorial Auditorium and the Tivoli Theatre -- headed by then-Commissioner of Public Utilities Steven F. Conrad -- concluded "Hair" would not be "in the best interest of the community," according to the case summary.
The promoter of the show, Southeastern Promotions Ltd., was denied a preliminary injunction to reverse that decision by the U.S. District Court, then turned down again in a full hearing by the District Court, which said the production contained obscene content not entitled to First Amendment protection. That decision, in turn, was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case on prior restraint, not on the play's merits.
Today, ticket sales for the Theatre Centre's "Hair" are ahead of the pace of last year's "Rent," which sold out 10 shows, Marketing and Public Relations Director Jan Belk said late last week.
"That doesn't mean every show will be sold out," she said.
But apparently, in the years since the show was banned at Memorial Auditorium, standards have changed -- whether that's for better or worse depends on who is asked.
Raleigh Wooten, who has lived in Chattanooga 45 years and served as minister at several churches, including Ware Branch Church of Christ for the past 15 years, said the country's standards in general have loosened since the original "Hair" case.
"We have such a total exposure now on the Internet and the television," he said. "That's the direction we have gone."
Sonia Young, a longtime Chattanooga Theatre Centre backer, said people have become "desensitized" to nudity.
"Nudity is not a problem," she said. "It's not what I'm concerned about. A whole generation has seen it on television. Young people don't bat an eye at it."
The language in "Hair" is less to Young's taste but won't keep her from seeing it. Its history of a time and place and its memorable songs make it attractive, she said.
As to "Equus," the nudity doesn't bother her, but the simulated blinding of horses does. She said she didn't like the Broadway production with Radcliffe and doesn't plan to see it here.
However, Young said, "we can't just always do 'Annie.' There has to be a balance. You can't just keep doing all of the old favorites."
CASTING THE ROLES
"If we'd done an open audition," Posey said, "God knows what we'd had."
York said the director asked him how he would feel about being nude in a play and gave him the script to read.
"I'd heard about it," he said of the script, "because I was a Harry Potter fan. The only thing I knew was that [Radcliffe] was nude."
Once he read it, said York, like Gallo a graduate of the Professional Actors Training Program at Chattanooga State Community College, "everything changed. I said, 'Yeah, it makes sense there is nudity.'"
At the end of the play, as the psychiatric session builds to climax, he said, "[the character] is bare -- his soul, his mental [state], his physical [state]."
"Equus" with Radcliffe was staged so the frontal nudity was somewhat gratuitous, Posey said. Even the promotional photographs showed the actor shirtless, he said.
"The play is not about sex," he said. The Broadway staging "works against us. It doesn't do us any good."
Because nudity "scares even me," Posey said, "I wanted to find a very comfortable way to do it." What resulted, he said, "is really tender" and "not gratuitous."
_____________________________________________
Clearly, BL:TA, a Lifetime original, doesn't want too much to do with all of that. The movie, less than sensational, prudently tempers the story's most sensational material. Who wants the headache? Who needs the hassle if you're working at Lifetime's level—outside of genre fantasy, below rigorous artistry? Producing a light entertainment about underage incest is clearly more trouble than it's worth. Here, the protagonists are not cousins living in an earlier century, just attractive schoolmates whose boat party goes awry, stranding them in a photo shoot for Hollister.
Emma Robinson (played by Indiana Evans) is a dimple in a prissy chin below eyes of honor-roll liveliness. Dean McMullen (Brenton Thwaites) is a bad boy and a new kid: "I heard he got kicked out of the last school he was in." (In terms of Breakfast Club membership, she is a straight-up Molly Ringwald, while he is a chuck steak seasoned with hints of Judd Nelson's defiance and Emilio Estevez's athleticism, and also a saffron-y touch of Ally Sheedy's slackerly strangeness.) She has a mother played by Denise Richards. He has a rich and withholding father but compensates with full wavy hair. Dean cuts quite an insouciant figure in the lunchroom, where he idly plays with a priapic jackknife and props his Chuck Taylors on a cafeteria chair.
Where earlier lagoon-maroons have explored Melanesia, our new heroes go astray in the Caribbean, much to the relief of the production's accountants. While doing a Habitat for Humanity-type deal in Trinidad, Emma and Dean join a flock of students sneaking off to a cruise—red Solo cups, blue Carnival feathers, a three-hour-tour. There is a raid, and a run for it, and a misadventure in a dinghy. Soon, within the show, cable news is frantic with hysteria about teens lost at sea, as if the ticker is crawling with sharks or underlining the way that Lifetime is braiding a patented girl-in-peril tale with a mother-in-pursuit quest. The eyes of Denise Richards well with tears beneath a canopy of mascara as she resolves never to quit searching for her daughter. The eyes of Denise Richards plead for the assistance of Christopher Atkins, who makes a cameo as a high-school teacher and wears a look of avuncular concern, as opposed to what he wore in the 1980 version (a loincloth and tribal beads, mostly).
Meanwhile, Emma and Dean wash up in the new Eden. Amid squabbles and flirting, they learn to fend for themselves in the wild. Offscreen, apparently, Emma discovers a Sephora that will sell her pink lip gloss while Dean frequents a nearby body-waxing salon. As a reward for their good grooming in the face of mortal peril, the characters get to have sex. One depiction of intercourse finds the camera peering at innocent skin through a gap in some strategically placed palm fronds. It's as if we're snooping—the implicit creepiness of which dents the effort at decency.
The actors playing the BL:TA duo are healthy and wholesome, if not terribly expressive; perhaps the matter is that both are Australian, and it's all they can do to keep their accents under control. Or maybe it's that both are fluent in English, and it's all they can do to keep from cracking while reading their dialogue. Perhaps the performers are waterlogged: Emma and Dean spend a lot of time caressing in the plunge pool of a waterfall, and they spend an eternity rolling in the spume of surf. "Should we feel guilty?" Emma wonders, in a sudden pout of introspection. About the fornication? No, that's absolutely natural, absolutely blameless. But you kids should be ashamed of the moment where Dean, as if in accordance with a tribal mating ritual, declares the constancy of his love while standing out in the rain. What a drip.
_____________________________________________
"Equus" is undressed in a clothes-minded town
Blame it on Harry Potter. Had not so much been made of the full-frontal nudity of "Harry Potter" star Daniel Radcliffe in the Broadway play "Equus," the upcoming local production of the psychological drama by Peter Shaffer might not be such a big deal, said Ensemble Theater producer Garry Posey.Because the local production has nudity, too.
A Chattanooga Theatre Centre production of the musical "Hair" -- various national productions of which have included a brief nude scene -- opens this weekend, and "Equus" begins final rehearsals for its presentation at Barking Legs Theater.
All this comes in the same city that was the subject of a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court case, Southeastern Promotions v. Conrad, which found the city used prior restraint -- suppressing speech before it occurs -- to ban a national touring presentation of "Hair."
But it's 37 years later. A touring production of "Hair," an homage to 1960s counterculture and sexual revolution, has since played in Chattanooga, nudity and all. As has "Oh! Calcutta!" another controversial play from the 1960s that features nudity and simulated sex.
The country, in general, seems to tolerate more from its movies, television shows and Internet content. Yet nudity in a community stage play here, where family values generally rule, has been practically nonexistent.
Legally, the nudity may or may not be a big deal, said Deputy City Attorney Phil Noblett.
Adult-oriented establishments, in general, must be licensed by the city, he said, citing sections 11-421 through 11-449 of the city code.
"Whether this constitutes that is another issue," Noblett said. "Mere nudity may not do that. It may not be a big deal."
When it came to their productions, the Chattanooga Theatre Centre and the Ensemble Theater arrived at different conclusions on whether to include the nude scenes.
"Hair" director Scott Dunlap said theater officials' understanding of the law after consultation with an attorney was that theaters had no special dispensation when it came to a display of nudity -- that it would be judged similar to other adult establishments. However, he said the nature of community theater was the deciding factor against it.
"We certainly debated it," he said. "It's always voluntary [in 'Hair' productions] on the part of the cast. It's a choice for the actors. But do we allow our actors to have the choice? Superimposing was that actors would want to bring parents or friends."
Posey, on the hand, had no choice if he was to present "Equus." The rights forbade nude-colored body stockings, underwear or pasties.
"We had to sign an agreement with the publisher, saying we would honor the convention fully," he said.
Posey also said Ensemble board member Leigh Anne Battersby, an attorney, told him their chances of any trouble over the production were remote.
"Could we be arrested? Yes," he said. "Would we be tried? No."
According to the city code, a violation of the adult-oriented establishments article is "a definite sum not exceeding $50."
NUDITY IN CONTEXT
The fuss is over a 20-second scene, normally done behind a scrim, in "Hair," and five to seven minutes at the end of a 21/2-hour show in "Equus."
The message of "Hair" is not that people should be naked, though "it's certainly a purposeful, provocative image of freedom," Dunlap said. The nude scene at the end of the musical's Act I was inspired, he said, by an actual incident in which two men took off their clothes to antagonize police during an informal Vietnam anti-war gathering in New York City's Tompkins Square Park.
"That's a lot of back story to explain 20 seconds," Dunlap said.
The musical also has profanity and simulated sex acts, depicts the use of illegal drugs and shows an irreverence for the American flag.
"In the grand scheme of things, [the nudity] is not that important to the piece," Dunlap said. "There's lots of other things that are shocking and taboo -- plenty of other things to be upset about."
In "Equus," a psychiatrist attempts to treat a young man who has a pathological religious fascination with horses. Toward the end of the play, the young man, in a psychiatric session, reveals and begins to act out a sexual tryst in a stable with a female friend. It is then that he removes his clothes, and he remains nude as he agonizes over what the horses may have seen. Eventually, he blinds them.
Posey said a onetime professor told him "Equus" might be performed with clothes throughout, but his reading of the script said otherwise. And the publisher's demand cinched it.
He and his two co-producers debated the use of the play with its mandatory nudity as, subsequently, did the theater's board and the board of the faith-based St. Andrews Center, where the theater is housed.
Ultimately, Posey said, he made the decision to move the production to Barking Legs Theater.
"I'm still not sure everyone's 100 percent behind [the production]," he said.
"DESENSITIZED"
In the 1975 case, the municipal board charged with managing Memorial Auditorium and the Tivoli Theatre -- headed by then-Commissioner of Public Utilities Steven F. Conrad -- concluded "Hair" would not be "in the best interest of the community," according to the case summary.
The promoter of the show, Southeastern Promotions Ltd., was denied a preliminary injunction to reverse that decision by the U.S. District Court, then turned down again in a full hearing by the District Court, which said the production contained obscene content not entitled to First Amendment protection. That decision, in turn, was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case on prior restraint, not on the play's merits.
Today, ticket sales for the Theatre Centre's "Hair" are ahead of the pace of last year's "Rent," which sold out 10 shows, Marketing and Public Relations Director Jan Belk said late last week.
"That doesn't mean every show will be sold out," she said.
But apparently, in the years since the show was banned at Memorial Auditorium, standards have changed -- whether that's for better or worse depends on who is asked.
Raleigh Wooten, who has lived in Chattanooga 45 years and served as minister at several churches, including Ware Branch Church of Christ for the past 15 years, said the country's standards in general have loosened since the original "Hair" case.
"We have such a total exposure now on the Internet and the television," he said. "That's the direction we have gone."
Sonia Young, a longtime Chattanooga Theatre Centre backer, said people have become "desensitized" to nudity.
"Nudity is not a problem," she said. "It's not what I'm concerned about. A whole generation has seen it on television. Young people don't bat an eye at it."
The language in "Hair" is less to Young's taste but won't keep her from seeing it. Its history of a time and place and its memorable songs make it attractive, she said.
As to "Equus," the nudity doesn't bother her, but the simulated blinding of horses does. She said she didn't like the Broadway production with Radcliffe and doesn't plan to see it here.
However, Young said, "we can't just always do 'Annie.' There has to be a balance. You can't just keep doing all of the old favorites."
CASTING THE ROLES
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| Christy Gallo |
Posey said he is fortunate the actors who will be nude, Haden York, 21, and Christy Gallo, 30, were precast before Ensemble even secured the rights to the play.
York had been in a previous production the theater did, and Gallo is one of Posey's co-producers."If we'd done an open audition," Posey said, "God knows what we'd had."
York said the director asked him how he would feel about being nude in a play and gave him the script to read.
"I'd heard about it," he said of the script, "because I was a Harry Potter fan. The only thing I knew was that [Radcliffe] was nude."
Once he read it, said York, like Gallo a graduate of the Professional Actors Training Program at Chattanooga State Community College, "everything changed. I said, 'Yeah, it makes sense there is nudity.'"
At the end of the play, as the psychiatric session builds to climax, he said, "[the character] is bare -- his soul, his mental [state], his physical [state]."
"Equus" with Radcliffe was staged so the frontal nudity was somewhat gratuitous, Posey said. Even the promotional photographs showed the actor shirtless, he said.
"The play is not about sex," he said. The Broadway staging "works against us. It doesn't do us any good."
Because nudity "scares even me," Posey said, "I wanted to find a very comfortable way to do it." What resulted, he said, "is really tender" and "not gratuitous."
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Skin Diamond: Too Cute For Porn (Interview)
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Finding Your Passion Takes Faith and Sacrifice
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| A professional ballerina |
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