Word: bards
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...urban bard shuffles through a series of post-industrial pop-up books, from automotive rustoramas to garish circuses, unleashing his barbed tongue on esoterica like Dead Kennedys song titles and spaghetti westerns...
...experience, many remain careless or indifferent about birth control. About 15% of pregnant teens become pregnant again within one year; 30% do so within two years. "You ask, 'Why didn't you come in for the Pill?' and they say, 'I didn't have time,' " says an exasperated Kay Bard of Planned Parenthood in Atlanta. "Their lives begin to spiral out of control...
...serves well for Lear, a robust and propulsive production of a play that is explicitly about great emotions. But the hard gloss reduces the subtler depths of Twelfth Night to mere giggles and kickshaws. Seeing these productions together may enable modern audiences to understand why earlier critics revered the Bard's tragedies but undervalued his comedies, overlooking their moral complexity and their glimpses of humiliation and pain in commoners' everyday life. The stress on low comic exaggeration also robs Twelfth Night of much of its social consequence: there is little sense that the battle between Sir Toby Belch and Malvolio...
Among more conventional stagings of the Bard's work, the R.S.C. offers an electrifying Richard III with Anthony Sher hurtling around the stage as a disabled but untrammeled personification of evil and, at the company's other home in Stratford-Upon-Avon, a darkly funny As You Like It, again dazzlingly directed by Noble. His splendid, spare, Freudian production uses a flowing white sailcloth draped about the stage to represent a snowstorm, a dream-scape, a bower and a marriage tent...
...nicely gnarled ogre to play. Day-Lewis, who can make lunatic intensity seem a form of sainthood, finds in Jack a lion whose majesty is in the severe wounds he has inflicted and been afflicted by. The film is Jack's ballad, and Day-Lewis its roaring, charismatic bard. --By Richard Corliss