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New York In A Tizzy Dept: The Times was ablaze this week over the City University of New York’s decision to deny Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Tony Kushner an honorary degree over his alleged inflammatory remarks about Israel. This morning the paper reports their repentance, after other past recipients like Michael Cunningham and Barbara Ehrenreich threatened…
Continue readingIt took a special child actor to get Oscar nominated for playing someone named Skippy, but back in the 30s Cooper’s stardom rivaled that of his co-star in The Champ, Wallace Beery (above). Later he became a pretty decent grownup actor (TV’s Studio One in the 50s, Superman as Perry White) and a respected director. Always…
Continue readingIn the powerful revival of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, villains abound: there’s institutional homophobia fed by a conformist über-het society; New York’s red-tape bound local government led by a bachelor mayor rumored to be gay (Ed Koch, though never mentioned by name—oh, those pesky libel laws); the gay community adrift in a sexual roundelay…
Continue readingSerpico was the first Sidney Lumet film I saw in a movie theater. It was also the first film to make me cry. The scene that got me was the one towards the end where the title character (in an Al Pacino peak) lies in a hospital bed, a bullet hole in face, the result…
Continue readingAngels Fall. Burn This. Balm in Gilead. The Fifth of July. Redwood Curtain. Lanford Wilson wrote these and more; when I saw them back in the 80s I felt privy to what seemed a golden age of theater. To experience his plays is to witness the theater at its most human, but also its most…
Continue readingRead the late Mel Gussow’s glowing obit in the NY Times. And the Los Angeles Times. RIP, Liz…
Continue readingCrazy for Hugh: Any tunesmith who wrote The Trolley Song, The Boy Next Door and, enduringly, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, could die happy. Retrospect: Check this link to hear Garland sing The Trolley Song in Meet Me In St. Louis. RIP, mister…
Continue readingThe theater is schizophrenic, I mused after a recent matinee of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. Only a month before I’d seen Daniel Sullivan’s exemplary revival of The Merchant of Venice—it goes without saying that the shows were as different as night and day, but sometimes such dichotic experience makes us realize the range of…
Continue readingWith MM in the delightfully daft Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)–she called it her favorite film. RIP.
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