Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...middle-aged matrons nattering across a backyard fence about their ability to conjure spirits. That very perception of character seems to have guided Geraldine Page in a less malevolent but equally necromantic role, the ghost-summoning Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's larkish Blithe Spirit, which was revived on Broadway last week. The cast includes Richard Chamberlain, Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey, all in good form, but this is Page's show. In a career including eight Oscar nominations, culminating in a 1986 Best Actress award for The Trip to Bountiful, and countless memorable stage performances, Blithe Spirit stands...
...Broadway audiences were chilled by The Bad Seed. The title character of that melodrama was a homicidal moppet whose appearance was so angelic that no one but her mother suspected the hidden crimes. British Novelist B.M. Gill has given the premise a sardonic twist: in Nursery Crimes, wicked little Zanny repeatedly confesses to several murders but is so widely disbelieved that she concludes her sins are minor, subject to a penance of three Hail Marys. At home, at school, in church and even among the police, grownups fail her. The story's most compelling relationship unfolds between Zanny...
August Wilson's first commercially produced work, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, ran more than eight months on Broadway, won the 1985 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play and marked the emergence of a substantial new voice for the American theater. A self-taught man who dropped out of school in the ninth grade, Wilson, 41, announced ambitions for a cycle of ten plays meant to reveal black life in each decade of this century. Ma Rainey depicted the self- imposed racial isolation of a 1920s blues singer. His second play to reach Broadway, Fences, which opened...
...remains to be seen whether the money was well spent: advance ticket sales are holding steady at $5.6 million, and the production has already broken house records at the Gershwin Theater, Broadway's biggest. But weekly operating costs exceed $300,000, and according to Producer Martin Starger, Starlight would have to play to almost 90% of capacity just to recoup its investment within a year...
...which opened in London in 1984, comes from a glittering team: Director Trevor Nunn, Set Designer John Napier and Lighting Designer David Hersey, who mounted Nicholas Nickleby, plus Composer Lloyd Webber and Lyricist Richard Stilgoe, who had joined the former trio to devise Cats. In reconceiving the show for Broadway, the creators had some smart ideas: instead of a gloomy, abandoned train siding, the gaudy set now represents a panorama of the U.S., dotted with highlights a child might recognize, from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge; the recorded narration too is now by a child: Braden...