Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...recognition, including a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. He has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Smith, and generously given foreign authors an English-speaking readership, translating works by, among others, Anna Akhmatova, Jorge Luis Borges, Andrei Voznesensky and Joseph Brodsky. His words have been sung on Broadway, set to Leonard Bernstein's score in the musical Candide (1956). And last fall Wilbur became the second person, after Robert Penn Warren, to assume the title, established by an act of Congress in 1985, of poet laureate...
...best director of a musical for Cats, people wondered what he could do for an encore. After four years, during which Nunn was busy directing with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in London's West End, in opera and in film, the answer emerged: he could top himself on Broadway. Within four days he opened not one but two megamusicals. Starlight Express earned him yet another Tony nomination for directing; so did Les Miserables, for which he won a Tony...
...have three musicals among the 14 on Broadway is extraordinary. Last week Nunn became unique: he opened a fourth. Chess, which links a Soviet-U.S. summit, a world chess championship and a doomed international romance, has already racked up advance sales of $4 million. If it overcomes bumpy reviews -- which also beset Starlight and, to a lesser degree, Cats -- Nunn will parallel what he has achieved in London, where the same four shows have been running for years...
...Broadway version of Chess is daringly different from London's gaudy expressionistic phantasm. That show's chess matches are displayed on 128 video screens and refereed by a surreal punk; the production hopscotches from a Tyrolean resort to British boardrooms to Bangkok's red-light district, each cartoonishly evoked. Nunn took over in London, two weeks before rehearsals started, when the late Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line, Dreamgirls) was stricken with AIDS. Says Nunn: "By the time I came into the project, it was designed and cast, and the basic narrative decisions had been taken...
...Broadway, Nunn insisted on a completely new book and an equally new look. Central to his vision is a set made of towers painted to look like concrete and placed on turntables so they swivel to become a hotel lobby, an airport, a convention hall, a bedroom. To some extent these spaces resemble one another, but that is Nunn's point. Where the London Chess suggests the survival of kitschily various cultures, the Broadway version implies the triumph of a soulless international pragmatism that finds its perfect expression in interchangeable, neobrutalist architecture...