Word: beachful
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Marvin Neil Simon was born July 4, 1927. He grew up not in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, but in Washington Heights at the northern end of Manhattan. The family never had much money, he says. "There were definite class distinctions depending on where you lived. People next to the park who got a breeze in summer were considered wealthy. All of our rooms faced walls or the backs of houses." Simon's father Irving, like the father in the trilogy, worked in the garment industry. Recalls Simon: "Like Willy Loman, he learned to ingratiate himself with his customers. He wasn...
...everybody ready out there?" came the cry. Then the countdown: "Five! ... Four! ... Three! ... Two! ... One!" And a jubilant roar: "We did it!" In the glow of a Florida sunset, a herd of screaming children stampeded into Indian Harbour Beach's just completed playground last month and began scrambling over the turreted fortress of mazes and bridges, slides and ladders, tire tunnels and sand-boxes. As the youngsters gamboled, beaming parents and teachers stood along the periphery, exchanging handshakes and hugs...
First in this new voice was 1983's Brighton Beach Memoirs, an ultimately comforting but nonetheless troubled vision of Simon's boyhood during the late 1930s. The show accumulated honors: the New York Drama Critics Circle prize for best play, a hit production at Britain's National Theater that transferred last week to London's West End, and a film version, also written by Simon, that opens nationwide in the U.S. on Christmas Day. Next Simon wrote 1985's Biloxi Blues, an astringent look at World War II Army recruits (including himself) whose macho bravado often obscured a lack...
...American in its rhythms, its idiom, its fabric of detail. In Simon's first two decades as a playwright, that ethnic quality frequently encumbered his attempts to evoke a more general view of the human condition. This time he fully succeeds. In a decade already much enriched by Brighton Beach and Biloxi Blues, Broadway Bound is the best American play of the 1980s...
Appropriately, it benefits from an impeccable production. Gene Saks and David Mitchell, who respectively directed and designed the earlier plays of the trilogy, have renewed their contributions to the aura of heightened naturalism. Jonathan Silverman, who replaced Matthew Broderick as Eugene in Brighton Beach and Biloxi Blues and in the Brighton Beach movie, adeptly handles the dancing sequence, and he is exquisitely funny as the family listens to his and his brother's first radio sketch: he keeps covering his face, then peering out with mounting horror as he realizes that they realize that he meant...