When A Chorus Line first splashed onto the Broadway stage in 1975, its creator, Michael Bennett, was routinely hailed as a genius, an innovator, and the best and brightest choreographer on the American musical scene. Some even felt that he was heaven-sent. At the heart of his more successful shows…
“But what I really want to do is direct!” reads a T-shirt popular among actors. Even though performers always aspire to creative control, playwrights were actually the theater’s first “directors.” It was only when productions began to tour (and plays were thereby wrested from a writer’s clutches) that actors began…
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…
In 1756, Voltaire wittily observed that “this agglomeration which…calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Likewise, of Nick and Jane it might well be said that this abomination which calls itself a charming romantic comedy is neither charming, nor romantic, nor a comedy…
When last we glimpsed the ruthless international assassin known as the Jackal, 24 years ago, he was a dead ringer for the suave British actor Edward Fox and he was hot on the trail of Charles de Gaulle, armed only with cunning and a sniper’s rifle concealed in a suitcase…
Even in the best of his movies, like that clever play on deja vu, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray never quite escapes the role of sketch artist–a comic built for short attention spans whose TV shtick is never quite big enough for the big screen, whose caricatures never quite grow into…
Thursday November 13 So zoo me: In the world of offbeat artist Dede LaRue, “Doberman Dominatrix” is just another day’s work, along with the irresistibly characteristic mixture of social commentary, brute rapture, surreal humor and plain old puppy love evinced by LaRue’s life-sized papier-mache animal creations. Her adorable, corpulent cats…
The term “Orwellian” is often used to refer to situations in which authority figures like police or even employers poke their noses into people’s private concerns, root out potentially incriminating information and then use that knowledge to manipulate somebody. To many people, that might constitute blackmail. To others, it’s simply…
Maybe it’s because it touches on hot-button issues that haven’t yet vaporized, as so many talk-show topics do. Maybe it’s because it’s a two-character play that’s relatively easy and inexpensive to produce. Or maybe it’s because David Mamet–always a perennial favorite among theater companies–wrote the Obie-winning drama. For whatever reason,…
For those of us living here in the Colonies, British slapstick has always been an acquired taste, and the Mother Country’s ever-so-popular TV character “Mr. Bean” takes more acquiring than most. Meanwhile, the producers of Bean, which marks the goggle-eyed buffoon’s first appearance on the big screen, have collected more…
The rebellious heroines of Deepa Mehta’s Fire have gotten viewers in the filmmaker’s native India a lot more worked up than Thelma and Louise ever dreamed of doing here. While women are applauding, hundreds of thousands of Indian husbands apparently see the picture as a threat to their happy homes…
Put brutally, The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frameup that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’s masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena Bonham Carter…
Writer-director Mike Figgis has mastered a kind of style I usually mistrust: Jumpy and almost free-associative, it begs to be dubbed “arty.” At Figgis’s best (say, Leaving Las Vegas), this mercurial mode can be sensationally effective, allowing him to leap from one supreme expression of extreme emotion to the next…
Thursday November 6 Pet project: It’s hard to understand how the animal urge ever got stuck with a negative connotation. After all, the birds and beasts have a much better grip on the natural order of things than humans do, and they exercise their urges merely because they’re supposed to…
Each of the artists in the Arvada Center’s current show Steel: Nature and Space gets plenty of room to stretch out. And that’s a good thing, since Robert Mangold, Andrew Libertone, Russell Beardsley and Carl Reed–four of the most talked-about contemporary sculptors in Colorado–create wildly different forms of sculpture. Oddly…
In 1965 a young African-American actor, Douglas Turner Ward, produced two one-act plays he had written, Happy Ending and Day of Absence. The double bill enjoyed a successful fourteen-month run off-Broadway, and its triumph precipitated Ward’s creation of New York’s Negro Ensemble Company, where he continues to serve as artistic…
Outstanding theater programs have a way of thriving in the face of adversity. Nowhere is that more true than in academia, where the general rule for arts programs is that you either have state-of-the-art facilities populated by meager talent or talented performers forced to toil in substandard conditions. In the…
In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
The Joe Eszterhas who wrote the screenplay for Telling Lies in America is a kinder, gentler soul than the hard-nosed hipster who got a couple million bucks for turning Sharon Stone into the lethal temptress of Basic Instinct or conceived that masterpiece of the cinematic arts, Showgirls. This new Joe…
The quirky documentarian Errol Morris finds human drama in strange places. His most renowned film, 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, made such a compelling case for the innocence of a convicted Dallas cop-killer that the prisoner eventually walked off death row. Morris has also examined the genius physicist Stephen Hawking…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’s supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter…
Thursday October 30 Where you been? Songwriters don’t come any tougher–or any more tender–than Austin musician Lucinda Williams, whose songs have been snatched up and made into hits by the likes of Mary Chapin Carpenter and Emmylou Harris. After holing up for months, painstakingly recording a long-awaited followup to her…
