Word: alda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...there's a juicy villain: Dr. Robert Gallo, the National Cancer Institute researcher who raced furiously against the French to be the first to identify the AIDS virus. As portrayed by Alan Alda, Gallo is a self-glorifying skunk who dreams up publicity releases for himself before he has anything to publicize. "From this day," he muses to an aide after a good day in the lab, "Dr. Robert Gallo makes the first gigantic strides in winning the -- what, the war or the battle? . . ." The characterization is overdone, but the picture of the competitive underside of medical research operations rings...
...into the widower's apartment looking for clues, shadowing him on the street, eventually even catching sight of his supposed victim (she suddenly materializes on a passing bus). Her husband flaps along, squawking wisecrack warnings, but in time she persuades him, as well as a couple of bystanders (Alan Alda and Anjelica Huston), that something fishy (and much more convoluted than a simple murder) is going on. In a grand farcical sequence, all these characters manically manipulate tape recorders carrying provocative pre-recorded messages designed to elicit a confession from Paul...
...Alan Alda's unsinkable niceness tempered Neil Simon's unyielding self- criticism in a surprisingly funny and engrossing play about a writer who prefers to deal with people as characters inside his head, so he can summon, alter or dismiss them at will...
...Baldwin and Amy Madigan in A Streetcar Named Desire; Glenn Close, Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss in Ariel Dorfman's politically inflamed Death and the Maiden; fast-rising Larry Fishburne, direct from the angry film Boyz N the Hood to Wilson's wistful Two Trains Running; Judd Hirsch; Alan Alda; Jane Alexander; Raul Julia; Gregory Hines. It has been a season of bountiful musicals -- Crazy for You for Gershwin nostalgia, Jelly's Last Jam for show-business angst and racial relevance, Falsettos for AIDS poignancy and artistic perfection, Man of La Mancha and The Most Happy Fella for old times...
There's nothing wrong with star casting when the role fits, as it does with Baldwin and Alda and Hirsch. When a show really goes wrong, performers are rarely the problem, anyway. Last week's biggest Broadway fiasco was a ponderously staged pedantic pageant from stage luminaries -- writer John Guare, actors Stockard Channing and James Naughton and director Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Like all Guare's plays, Four Baboons Adoring the Sun deals with ordinary people's inability to accept ordinariness, their yearning for mythic and epic significance. But it thwarts itself by hanging...