Word: ayckbourn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Michael Gambon is one of the best, though American audiences have seen little of him. Acclaimed for his work in everything from Uncle Vanya to several of Alan Ayckbourn's most provocative comedies (A Chorus of Disapproval, Man of the Moment), Gambon is known here mainly as the star of Dennis Potter's admired TV mini-series, The Singing Detective. Now he's making his long-overdue U.S. stage debut, in a Broadway production of David Hare's Skylight. All the ingredients are there for stage magic; unfortunately, too many of the wires and trapdoors are clearly visible...
Director Richard Eyre adds a couple of jarring physical outbursts (she angrily flings a load of silverware; a bit later he scatters a pile of books), but Hare hasn't pulled his weight. Glad to have you, Mr. Gambon; bring an Ayckbourn play the next time you're in town...
...Chicago's Goodman Theatre. (Look for long, circular conversations between Faust and the devil.) Terrence McNally (Master Class) is tackling the book for Ragtime, a musical based on E.L. Doctorow's novel, which begins a pre-Broadway run in Toronto in December. And Britain's prolific Alan Ayckbourn (Absurd Person Singular; Woman in Mind) wrote the book for and is directing a revamped version of By Jeeves, based on the P.G. Wodehouse character, at Connecticut's Goodspeed-at-Chester theater. The musical was a flop back in the 1970s, but its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, seems to have done...
...Alan Ayckbourn's book builds, with deft comic logic, from a tangle of mistaken identities to the climactic remark, "There's a cat-burgling pig in my bedroom!" Lloyd Webber's tunes are inventive and sweetly chipper. The effect is of two precocious lads putting on a genial public-school charade. By Jeeves may not be lighter than air, but it's surely lighter than Guerre...
Play is a verb to Alan Ayckbourn, the consummate games player among modern writers for the theater. This time (in a production that brought his Scarborough company to Chicago) the stage is a time machine, carrying women 20 years forward or backward in their hectic lives. But beneath the formal ingenuity, Ayckbourn finds depth, despair and, finally, redemption. A serious farce from a man who takes comedy into the shadows...