You’ve probably never heard of Honeyman and the Brothers Farr, but Canada has. Quebec, the same province that gave birth to The Arcade Fire and Rufus Wainwright, was also the breeding-ground for this group in 2006. Simon Honeyman, Eric Farr and James Farr bring together elements of classical, blues, folk and flamenco in a unique songwriting collective.
Their debut album, “Behind the Veil, Behind the Veil” (2010) is a contemplative, acoustic-based ramble between and beyond these genres. Though the band has drawn audiences mostly in Montreal and Ottawa, they have been steadily gaining fans beyond Canadian borders, particularly for their cover of The Avett Brothers single “Live and Die,” a simple and gorgeous rendition of the song that combines a single guitar with lush vocal harmonies. This past fall The Avett Brothers chose the cover as the winner of a contest that challenged musicians to submit YouTube videos of their version of the song.
The group is notable especially for its tenor vocals, which frequently blend Simon and Garfunkel-style a cappella or over string/piano accompaniment. We’re looking forward to their next album release, which is scheduled for sometime this year.
Check out the group’s winning cover of “Live and Die” below:
There’s no detail that we don’t see in Tom Hooper’s production of “Les Misérables.” From the docks of Toulon to the back alleys of Paris, Hugh Jackman’s prosthetic teeth to the raindrops on Samantha Barks, the film is gorgeous to look at. But in his zeal to show as much as possible, Hooper misunderstood one big difference between live theater and film.
“Les Misérables” is essentially a large production. The story originated in Victor Hugo’s 1900-page novel; its first Broadway score from 1987 score clocks in at almost three hours; the title literally references a huge peasant population. The music, and the performers who do it right, are at home with big theaters and large audiences.
On a screen, “Les Misérables” needed space to breathe, and here it gets smothered. The camera work relies so heavily on close-up that it produces comical results. Eddie Redmayne as Marius has a beautiful tenor voice, one that competes with his gesticulating chin for attention in the close-range “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.” In an early number, Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean sings squarely into the camera for a good minute. The results are awkward, to say the least. What the film medium does do is allow the musical to inhabit real spaces in a fresh way. Between the sewers of Paris and the mountains of rural France, the setting is an amazing visual whirlwind.
I was also glad to see the writers respect the music. Claude-Michel Schönberg’s and Alain Boubil’s original score remained largely unchanged apart from the deletion of “Dog Eats Dog” and the addition of a new song they composed for the film.
Musical theater buffs will try to compare these performances with the show’s original cast, which is generally a mistake. Vocally, most of this cast can’t come close, but they bring something good to the table.
Jackman, a veteran stage performer, gives a strong performance as Valjean, unfalteringly good without being pious. Samantha Barks as Eponine delivers such a lovely performance that it manages to sidestep Hooper’s awkward directorial choices and comes through as the strongest in the film. Anne Hathaway’s performance as Fantine managed to live up to the hype it has received and was overall impressive.
Russell Crowe as Javert, however, is such a vocal disaster that even his acting skill cannot overcome his inability to sing the role. Redmayne and Aaron Tveit as Enjolras give strong performances and work well as the pair of revolutionaries, which almost made up for Amanda Seyfried’s shaky performance as Cosette.
If you don’t enjoy musical theater, you probably won’t like this movie. It’s definitely worth seeing though, mostly for Jackman and Barks, not to mention the adorable Daniel Huttlestone as child-revolutionary Gavroche. Broadway’s original Valjean, Colm Wilkinson, also makes a great cameo as the bishop whose kindness is the catalyst for all of Valjean’s subsequent actions.
In the final montage, Hooper finally pulls back and lets us see the hundreds of ensemble members we’ve been watching, and it’s in this last shot that “Les Misérables” finally feels at home on the screen. By giving it some space, Hooper finally lets the musical be what it is: grand and breathtaking.
Tufts has decided, in the wake of the March 11 earthquake in Japan and subsequent concern over about radioactive leakage from nuclear plants, that it will not cancel its study abroad program in Kanazawa for its spring semester, Dean of Arts and Sciences Joanne Berger-Sweeney informed the school in an email today.
“We weighed the relative risks, as we now understand them, against the benefits of continuing the program and we believe the overall situation has stabilized enough to warrant continuing the program,” Berger-Sweeney wrote.
The email cited Kanazawa’s distance from Fukushima, where the leaking plants are located, as one for the decision.
The city is also on a separate power grid from the rest of the country and is not undergoing blackouts, the email said, although the university will continue to monitor the safety U.S. travel advisories and reconsider if the situation worsens.
The seven Tufts students studying abroad in Japan are safe after Friday’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami hit the country’s east coast, according to Director of Programs Abroad Sheila Bayne.
Five students are studying at the Tufts program in Kanazawa, located on the West Coast of Japan, while two other students are attending Kansai Gaidai University, a non-Tufts program in Osaka, Bayne said.
Ezra Salzman-Gubbay, a junior studying in Kanazawa, said while other foreign students are returning home, he will stay in Japan.
“After the news about the explosion at the nuclear plant in Fukushima, some of the other international students made the decision to return to their countries,” he said. “Clearly everyone is having a unique reaction.”
Members of the Tufts community filled Cabot Auditorium Tuesday night to hear Eliezer Ayalon’s story of survival during the Holocaust.
The event was sponsored by Trustee Emeritus Bill Cummings and his wife Joyce, who recently created a $1 million endowment to use for a Hillel-run Holocaust and Genocide Education program.
“There’ll come a time in your lifetime when people will not be able to meet and hear survivors of the Holocaust tell their story,” Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, executive director of Tufts Hillel, said. “But you can now, and you can tell these stories to your children.”
Ayalon, born in Poland in 1928, survived life in a ghetto, five concentration camps and a two-day-long death march during the Holocaust. His hometown of Radom, Poland was turned into a ghetto in 1942, just before German forces forced his family to leave for a Polish concentration camp. Ayalon himself was sent to a concentration camp soon after and lived in a total of five different camps between 1943 and 1945. More =>>
