By Jed Gottlieb

Cirque and the Beatles: ‘All Together Now’ – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Cirque and the Beatles: ‘All Together Now’
By Michael Machosky
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, October 25, 2008

There were so many things director Adrian Wills had to consider when he started filming “All Together Now,” a documentary featuring the partnership between the Beatles and the troupe Cirque du Soleil.

How to film rehearsals, how to arrange interviews, how to edit the footage that showcases the music from “LOVE,” the album of remixed Beatles songs, set to staging by Cirque.

One thing Wills hoped for, but couldn’t count on, was the personal investment of those involved. Whether it was the living Beatles — Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — producer George Martin, the acknowledged fifth Beatle, or George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, who championed her late husband’s dream of staging the show, Wills was blessed with extraordinary perspectives that give the film a heightened poignancy.

“All the stories I was trying to tell had emotional arcs to them,” Wills says.

“All Together Now,” which was released Tuesday on DVD, is available exclusively at Best Buy stores for $24.99.

Wills, whose previous projects include films featuring surf guitarist Dick Dale and Quebec-based writer Michel Tremblay, began filming Cirque du Soleil during rehearsals in Montreal, and then in Las Vegas at The Mirage, where the show is still being staged.

In Vegas, Wills found the heart of his story. He interviewed Martin with his son, Giles, who, because of his father’s hearing loss, acts as a surrogate pair of ears. He filmed Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono acting as advocates for and guardians of the music of George Harrison and John Lennon. He talked to Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr about the legacy of the band that was together only for nine years.

“You really felt like you were watching people who were involved for the right reasons,” Wills says, noting that possible financial gains from the project were never broached. “You had Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, who didn’t listen to the music every day. But, they were listening to it now, because they wanted to make sure it was going to work. All of a sudden, it was an active process for them, being a part of the Beatles, as opposed to a passive process.”

There are many moving moments throughout “All Together Now.” Notable are interviews with Michael Moloi Tumelo, a Cirque trouper from South Africa who had not heard of the Beatles prior to the show, and Dominic Champagne, who had to surmount a couple of handicaps.

“Giles and George Martin, when they first got involved with Dominic were like ‘Oh boy, here we go,’ ” Will says. “‘We’re with a guy named Champagne in Vegas, and he doesn’t speak English, he’s French, and how is this going to work?’ What Dominic did is took intensive English courses and learned everything about the Beatles. He knew everything. … And they became friends, him, George and Giles.”

Especially notable is an interview Wills conducted with McCartney in a Las Vegas hotel. Barefoot and unguarded, McCartney allows how he wakes up some mornings struck by the notion that he actually was in the Beatles and that “there are only four people who can say that.”

McCartney, Starr and the extended Beatles family were filmed watching the opening night of “All Together Now,” and their reactions are among the film’s most striking and revelatory. Starr is particularly animated throughout, but one moment truly surprised the director.

“I didn’t know Paul McCartney was going to be singing along to ‘Sgt. Pepper’,” Wills says, laughing. “You hear ‘We hope you have enjoyed the show’ and he’s singing along to it, which is amazing. That’s where documentary becomes a pleasure. You can write stuff, but it’s never going to be as good as what really happens and what people really feel. … We looked at each other and thought ‘This is gold.’ “

When Wills started filming “All Together Now,” he approached it as a project he wanted to do and would shape. But soon after he started filming — and especially after he met Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono — Wills began to see the documentary in another light.

“I was looking at the Beatles as a family,” he says. “A family that had gone through strife, through fights and had also gone through some deaths. And now they were being brought together through their history. I thought that was a beautiful story to tell instead of looking at them as myths, as mythic characters. They’re actually human beings who have gone through this and made things that were incredible. And all of it was done in nine years. … There was such a beautiful chemistry between them and George Martin.

“When you get down to it, the thing that changed the world was this shared experience,” Wills says. “And what I was watching in this show was the same sort of thing — Olivia would come with her son, Dhani, or Olivia and Yoko would talk about their kids They knew what they were passing on and were also responsible for that.”

Michael Machosky can be reached at mmachosky@tribweb.com or 412-320-7901.

These words cannot possibly do
justice to the photographs of Annie Leibovitz, which are eloquence
personified.

As principal photographer for Rolling Stone magazine from
its raw beginnings, Leibovitz – who as a young girl aspired to be an
art teacher – documented an art form (rock ‘n’ roll) and a generation
(hippiedom and, later, post-hippiedom) like no one with a camera before
or since. Having survived the excess and turmoil of those times, she
moved on to Vanity Fair, where she’s made high art out of
Hollywood’s porcelain dolls and politics’ soulless power brokers.

Her story is vividly told in the documentary “Annie
Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens,” which arrives Tuesday on DVD. Directed
by her sister, Barbara, the film is a visual feast for devotees of
Leibovitz as well as for anyone who appreciates photography.

But more important, “Life Through a Lens” takes us into the heart
and mind of Leibovitz in ways that will stay with you long after its 83
minutes have expired.

Both Leibovitz and those who know her best testify to the impact
that the late essayist/novelist Susan Sontag had on her life. Not only
did Sontag, who succumbed to complications from leukemia in 2004, share
a relationship and a passion for expression with Leibovitz, but she
also taught Annie to view the world also with keen, intellectual eyes,
and taught her as well the fragility of life. It was she who persuaded
Leibovitz to take photographs in Sarajevo as the war there devastated
its people.

We all know the celebrities Leibovitz has photographed over the
years – the Rolling Stones, Demi Moore, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Patti Smith, Jack Nicholson and many more – but “Life
Through a Lens” brings into focus the affection Leibovitz has always
had for her family, and for the simple fabric of life unrelated to
power, glamor or decadence.

Possibly the documentary’s most moving moments, however, do revolve
around a subject Leibovitz photographed on two separate occasions, the
final time on the last day of his life: John Lennon.

The indelible image of the ex-Beatle, naked and in a fetal position,
caressing his wife, Yoko Ono, was taken mere hours before Lennon was
shot to death outside his home in New York City in 1980. It would
become a Rolling Stone cover without words and without peer.
You’ll swallow a throb in your throat when you hear both Leibovitz and
Yoko Ono recounting that day and night, which turned from heart-rending
to harrowing, and tragic.

For Leibovitz, who just this month turned 59, it’s one chapter in an
already rich book – of photographs, of memories, of lives. “Life
Without a Lens” is a portrait of Leibovitz herself, and one that’s
worthy of her.

Visiting London in the week that the rand hit 19 to the Pound was
nerve-wracking. Tuna sandwiches from Marks & Spencer suddenly cost
R60, the summer dress I bought on sale for an emergency garden party
turned into the sort of fashion splurge I envy lawyers for, and worst
of all, the book stores at Frieze Fair — the art fair to begin and end
all art fairs — became just about inaccessible on my silly writer’s
budget. I hear the rest of the world, all in London last weekend to
attend Frieze, felt the pinch too (although the trails of Porsches and
Jaguars surrounding Regents Park, where the fair was held, suggest
otherwise). Artwork prices at Frieze were astronomical as expected and
works flew off the prefabricated walls on days one and two. But on days
three and four, purses snapped shut, gallerists began to frown and
artist Norma Jeane’s smoker’s booth filled up with anxious puffers.

According to Yoko Ono, however, things can’t possibly be so bad. And
even if they are, the solution is simple: make love not war. Ono was
invited to deliver a keynote lecture at this year’s Frieze on the
enduring legacy of her performance art of the 1960s and 1970s. The
promise of seeing Yoko in the flesh just about lured me to London — not
that I’m a great fan of Yoko per se, but because of her
connection to the Fluxus movement, of which I am a great fan. George
Maciunas and Nam June Paik, ostensibly the movement’s two most
prominent figures, have both passed on to the giant magnetised TV in
the sky. So I am left having to settle for Yoko Ono.

To my dismay, she said nothing about Fluxus (I had no idea just how
“reluctant” a member of the movement she was). In fact, she said almost
nothing at all. She began her “lecture” with the sort of performance
that puts people off performane art — she had some blindfolded, topless
young man muscled onto the stage by an assistant. She then made him
stand on a blank canvas and bullied him into thinking he had destroyed
a thing of value. After she dismissed him she screened a video on her
latest global intervention project, the Imagine Peace Tower
in Iceland and its portable equivalent, the Onochord. The Image Peace
Tower is a light sculpture that beams vertically into Iceland’s cloudy
sky over Reykjavik. The idea was originally John Lennon’s (although
Iceland was probably not his preferred location), a fact that Ono
doesn’t let us forget throughout the video. The whole thing is laced
with unnecessary shots of the couple and of Lennon’s iconic mug, and is
set to blaring snippets of the song Imagine. I distinctly had the sense
that Ono was trying bizarrely to vindicate herself of charges of having
ruined John Lennon and sponging off his Beatles fame, by doing
precisely that — sponging off his fame.

Between shots of Ono in construction gear overseeing the
installation of the Imagine Peace Tower and Lennon’s penetrating gaze,
we have an introduction to the Onochord project, Ono’s global effort to
spread love, peace and harmony in trying times — through the twinkling
of torches. The Onochord is a plastic torch about the size of a
cigarette, attached to a handy key ring, and it is meant to be flashed
at other people — your lover, your mother, the Metro cop who pulls you
over for unpaid fines — so that they will know that you love them. Ono
was not sparing in her demonstration of how the Onochord works. It
clearly needed much explaining that the designated numerical sequence
of flashes (one flash, two flashes, three flashes) means “I love you”.
See a video demonstration here.

The point of both the Imagine Peace Tower and the Onochord is to
spread “love”, and for Ono, erotic love, filial affection, anxiety,
rage and indifference seem to blur into one vague sentiment that can be
encapsulated in a flickering light. Her rationale for the intervention?
“Art is better than making war machines. You are either in the war
industry of in the peace industry. We are all in the peace industry and
shouldn’t criticise how each other do [sic] it. … Art is action and we
do it and we can change the world.” Indeed.

Ono also offered a slice of global political analysis, which was
just about my favourite part of the whole talk. She observed, “Before,
the whole world was on the brink of something bad. But now we are on
the threshold of a new age.” This was punctuated by a bit of
torch-flashing: “So, I … [flash] … love … [flash, flash] … you! [flash,
flash, flash]”.

Each member of the audience was given their very own Onochord, which
I now carry around attached to my car keys in the hope that I might be
able to sublimate my road-rage into happy twinkles. Maybe she could
send a couple more over for Lekota and Zuma and their respective
supporters, and we could all just get along.