Mark Twain Tonight (Original Cast)
While the Ken Burns PBS machine kicked into high gear to promote the filmmaker's stylistically familiar 2002 hagiography of American literary and humor icon Mark Twain, veteran actor Hal Holbrook took a much more personal route, exalting Twain's legend worldwide for 50 years via his remarkable one-man stage show,Mark Twain Tonight!Indeed, Burns wisely incorporated Holbrook's legacy into his own film. But as longtime admirers of Holbrook's show will attest, the performances culled together here (from three Holbrook-Twain show albums) for their CD debut represent something more artistically transcendent than mere performance. They're exhaustively researched, cleverly edited, and shrewdly supplemented, and Holbrook does more than offer up dramatic readings of Twain's words; he eerily breathes life into the cantankerous, complex Missourian until the actor virtually disappears behind Twain's raspy voice, insightful vision, and razor wit. Ranging like a hungry coyote on topics from political shenanigans to smoking, hypocrisy, and the nature of man and his God, Holbrook gives us a restless, conscientious Twain--and some insights as uncomfortably timely in the 21st century as they were in the 19th.--Jerry McCulley