AboutEnnis grew up in Cincinnati, the sixth of ten children. In his first life he was an actor and singer; embarking on his second, he completed his BA at Empire State College, where he was a Richard Porter Leach Fellow.
Read moreSunday April 5 is your last chance to catch Martha Clarke’s The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Minetta Lane Theatre. From its hypnotic opening promenade, as actors enact the evolution of beasts into humans, to its climatic high-flying ascent into a Dantéan hell, this artful interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting (a recreation of a…
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He made you hear the twisted murmurings of colonial India, the elegiac Russian winter and the swirling Arabian desert sands. His film scores comprised the breadth of modern cinema: Lawrence of Arabia, The Longest Day, The Tin Drum, A Passage to India, Fatal Attraction, Dr. Zhivago, Witness and Ghost. There were three Academy Awards and…
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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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“My writing is concerned with the soul, with the unknown forces of the psyche. A British writer said I write under the skin, which I liked. In a spiritual sense, the real life of man is going on inside. It’s not what he says or does, it’s something else. The only way, I think, one…
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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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In recent years I’ve had my issues with Oscar. The caveats have ranged from the relentless campaigning, to the bone-crushing length of the show itself (sorry, I’m a big fan of sleep on a Sunday night). Somehow the Oscar telecast had lost its sense of occasion; true, I’ve also missed a time when movies…
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Back in the early 90s my ex and I joined forces and built a cabaret act, the type of thing a New York performer does when he gets tired of waiting for someone else to give him a job. As we poured through material I recalled a tune I’d heard on one of Lena Horne’s albums. The…
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