Hopscotching with Glenda

Annamaria on Monday

This past week, I was excited to attend my first ever Broadway opening night, courtesy of friend who is one of the backers of the show.  And doubly so because it starred Glenda Jackson as King Lear.  I had seen Jackson brilliant in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women last year and had always been a fan.  Gussied up and feeling very glam, I took my anticipation to the Cort Theater, only to be....  Sigh!  If you are interested, you can read reviews here and here.

My take: the director - Sam Gold created a production that did everything it could to diminish  both Jackson and the title character she played.  Inexplicably, the stage business, the set, the props, the costumes, even the physical size of the rest of the cast seemed to be (intentionally?) bent on distracting the audience from the diminutive but monumentally talented Glenda.

In our talk afterwards, my friend and I agreed completely on what we thought of the show.  As it turned out, so did the critics.  To distract him from his thoughts of the money he had invested in that disaster, I changed the subject to Glenda Jackson's film career.  I mentioned two of her movies that I wished I could see again, ones she made with the adorable Walter Matthau: "House Calls" and "Hopscotch."  I bewailed the fact that I could not find them anywhere.  My friend, being the person he is, found "Hopscotch" and had it shipped to me.  I watched it last night as an antidote to my disappointment last week.  It worked.

In the flick, Matthau plays Miles Kendig, a veteran CIA agent who has run afoul of his new boss Myerson (Ned Beatty).  Aided and abetted by his once lover Isobel Von Shoenenberg (Jackson), Kendig leads his former colleagues a merry dance before the wonderful twist at the end.

Matthau and Jackson are electric together on the screen.   An added part of the fun for me was, and is, the little jokes hidden in the names of the characters.  The novelist Bryan Garfield and his fellow screen writer Bryan Forbes put them in, I am sure, to amuse the likes of us here on MIE.

Here they are.  Many of you are much more knowledgeable than I.  I get some of them.  Tell me what you see.

• Walter Matthau as Miles Kendig
• Glenda Jackson as Isobel von Schonenberg
• Sam Waterston as Joe Cutter
• Ned Beatty as Myerson
• Herbert Lom as Yaskov
• David Matthau as Leonard Ross
• George Baker as Parker Westlake
• Ivor Roberts as Ludlum
• Lucy Saroyan as Carla Fleming
• Severn Darden as Leroy Maddox
• George Pravda as Saint Breheret
• Jacquelyn Hyde as Realtor
• Mike Gwilym as Alfie Booker
• Terry Beaver as Tobin
• Ray Charleson as Clausen