Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...calendar that his fertile middle years may be drawing to a close, Neil Simon has seemed in recent writing to seek a greater resonance between his plays and his most personal recollections, and to yearn for the respect that accrues to a creator who examines himself. His 21st Broadway play, which is still running, was Brighton Beach Memoirs, a depiction of life in Brooklyn in the 1930s in a lower-middle- class Jewish household much like his own. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as best play, and was justly likened to Ah, Wilderness! and Our Town...
...those who loved the character, Broderick's endearingly klutzy impersonation, Gene Saks' straightforward staging and the humanity of the author's reminiscence, Simon last week brought them back in the second Broadway installment of a planned autobiographical trilogy. Biloxi Blues sends Eugene to Mississippi for basic training in 1943. He faces authority and danger, anti-Semitism and assimilation. He methodically loses his virginity with a prostitute (Randall Edwards), less for pleasure than as a rite of passage, then rediscovers his innocence in the chaste embrace of a Catholic schoolgirl. He confronts the chasm between his diary jottings and literature...
Though Moore is adept at slapstick humor, his longterm aspirations are in a more serious vein. In the future, Moore hopes to work for a theater that is both popular and able to convey a message. "I don't like meaningless Broadway entertainment, but I also don't like to go and set there and feel stupid, trying to figure out the director's meaning." Moore thinks that avant-garde theater is becoming too elitist and inaccessible, and terms it "pretentious...
...Broadway premiere in 1957, the city-gritty updating of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet by Composer Leo nard Bernstein, Lyricist Stephen Sondheim and Choreographer Jerome Robbins was hailed as much for its quasi-operatic score as for its savvy lyrics and explosive, streetwise dances. Now comes a new Deutsche Grammophon recording, conducted by the composer, that makes the show's higher musical aspirations unabashedly explicit...
Writing an operatic Broadway show was considered box-office poison 30 years ago, but Bernstein was up to the task. "Chief problem (is) to tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between realism and poetry, ballet and 'just dancing,' " noted the composer in his log the year before it opened. In Candide (1956), he had attempted such a synthesis, but that show was crippled by a bitter book that was vulgarized in its later revisions. With West Side Story, however, Bernstein's command of popular idioms, his soaring lyric gifts and technical skills got free rein in a show...