Word: arcadia
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...illuminated man's earliest days, and the big news in sports was comebacks (Northwestern?). Even in politics, Colin Powell harked back to an era when presidential candidates could emerge, Ikelike, untainted by the usual rough-and-tumble. Still, the year also had much that was new: Toy Story and Arcadia, Smashing Pumpkins and smashing TV courtroom drama (some of it real life). All that and some nifty Nikes too. So step up, 1995, and take...
...ARCADIA Tom Stoppard's complex, lucid drama--brought to Broadway under Trevor Nunn's direction after a lengthy London run--shuttles adroitly between the present and the 19th century, the allure of mathematics and the promptings of lust, broad comedy and large-scale tragedy. Stoppard's masterpiece demands comparison not just with other Broadway arrivals this year but also with the best in postwar English and American theater...
...Arcadia, first staged two years ago in London, has survived the passage to Broadway intact, although the acting was generally superior in the original production. While perfectly sufficient, the present Thomasina (Jennifer Dundas) doesn't bring to this brutally taxing role of doomed prodigy quite the dancing-flame intensity that Emma Fielding did. And the new Septimus (Billy Crudup) has the aplomb but not the haunted intellectual uneasiness Rufus Sewell conveyed. A pleasing surprise, however, is Robert Sean Leonard, playing Valentine Coverly, a modern-day biologist and computer scientist. As Claudio in Kenneth Branagh's film Much Ado About Nothing...
...pluses and minuses of the Broadway production (directed, as in London, by Trevor Nunn) should not obscure the fact that in Arcadia we have been given a major English drama, one of those by which, ultimately, the theater of our time may be evaluated. It is a play that holds up beautifully not only on the stage but on the page. When Thomasina, hungry for a new mathematics, exclaims, "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell," we might have stepped into an Auden poem. When...
...Arcadia offers the heartening spectacle of a dramatist who, with commendable industry, has found the unusual but handsome vessel into which most of his obsessions neatly fit. And Stoppard makes it look easy. With Arcadia, he has fabricated a work as simple as a perfect cube and as complex as the physics of a breaking wave. Or make that the physics of the turbulent air in a room where many people are clapping...