Word: broadbent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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STARRING: Jim Broadbent, Allan Corduner DIRECTOR: Mike Leigh OPENS...
...Gilbert and Sullivan need a hit. Princess Ida is just not doing the sort of business they're used to. But Sullivan (Corduner) wants to write something more serious than comic operettas. And Gilbert (Broadbent) keeps trying to recycle stale story lines that his collaborator (and the critics) dismiss...
Besides the quartet (pianist Alan Broadbent, drummer Larance Marable and tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts, along with Haden), there are guest vocalists on a few of the cuts (Shirley Horn and Bill Henderson) and a chamber orchestra on others. But it is Haden's spooky, unpolished vocal on Wayfaring Stranger, the closing track on this superb album, that provides a surprising but characteristically intrepid coda, a valedictory from a musical explorer who can find new territory anywhere he wanders...
Olive is talentless and threatens to ruin what Shayne considers his very own pure piece of art. The rest of the play's cast, however, is superb, including the fabulous (albeit aging and gargantuanly self-obsessed) Broadway superstar Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest), as well as Warner Purcell (Jim Broadbent, of "Enchanted April") and Eden Brent (Tracey Ullman). Moreover, this is a chance to direct his own play on Broadway, and Shayne accepts the compromise...
...theater was a robust and glamorous institution. They're all here, doing their best to bring David's neo- O'Neillian work to life: the wise, temporizing, desperately undercapitalized producer (Jack Warden); the aging ingenue (Tracey Ullman), complete with ill-tempered lapdog; the agreeably self-destructive leading man (Jim Broadbent); above all, the Great Lady of the Theater ("I don't play frumps or virgins"), portrayed by Dianne Wiest in a boldly swooping performance...