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No fun to be found in the papers this weekend. Jack Cardiff, the groundbreaking cinematographer of many films, but notably, The Red Shoes and one of my favorites, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, said goodbye. So did Beatrice Arthur, an actress who did her strong woman number in the TV series Maude and…
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Haul out the superlatives for Every Little Step. James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo have made a documentary that on its surface is about the casting of the 2006 revival of Michael Bennett’s 1975 Broadway smash, A Chorus Line. A wise man once said the theater is a metaphor for life, but one doesn’t…
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…well, yes, I was Jack Wrangler’s butt boy…I’m totally kidding. But I actually worked for him back in 1997, under circumstances more akin to an ass-kicking; I was a replacement for one in a trio of boy singers who backed the female lead in a review called It Could Happen to You: The Songs of Jo Stafford….
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The clock is ticking in 33 Variations, the gentle, thoughtful play starring Jane Fonda at Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theater. Playwright Moisés Kaufman explores the dual dilapidations of two characters who straddle past and present, fiction and history: musicologist Katherine Brandt (Fonda) and Ludwig Van Beethoven (Zach Grenier) both find themselves rushing to complete works (her…
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A strange week, ending with a Manhattan snow shower on the day the city held a wake for an actress whose end qualifies as legitimate tragedy. Such events upend us like unexpected storms; for me, it unlocked the genesis for the elegiac aspect of this blog. Back in the early nineties I was appearing as…
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A Redgrave’s been felled. Natasha, a daughter of Vanessa, suffered injuries resulting from a skiing accident. This lovely actress was scheduled for an upcoming NY revival of A Little Night Music; the rumor is, she’s suffered brain damage, and is in critical condition. Hope they’re not true–still harbor ecstatic memories of her in Cabaret, and…
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The author of screenplays (To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies) and plays (The Trip to Bountiful, The Young Man from Atlanta, Dividing the Estate). What delicate, human worlds he gave us. What a towering talent. RIP.
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With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame—George Eliot…
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Through HAIR, I learned that there was such a thing as Broadway. By 1969, covers of the songs had invaded the airways via The Cowsills, The Fifth Dimension and Three Dog Night, but somehow the show’s original cast album also made its way into our home. It was a departure from my steady diet…
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Delaney Bramlett, Freddie Hubbard, Bernie Hamilton, Daniel Nagrin, Ann Savage, and Edward Purdom—this list of high-and-low cultured show folk said their last goodbyes at year’s end. Now Pat Hingle’s gone, a character actor whose work spanned TV, film and the Broadway stage. So many memorable performances (he was unforgettable as the hood who burned a…
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