Word: broadway
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...transferring his 1982 Broadway play to the screen, John Pielmeier has achieved a sort of Jane Fonda Workout of rewriting. He has stripped it of dialogue fat and added muscle and connective tissue. The piece, which took place on a bare stage, now roams through a handsome Quebec abbey and beyond. Within or outside the convent, however, Agnes would be a girlish anachronism. She is of another age--perhaps 13, perhaps the 13th century. She believes, like a medieval ascetic, that any seeker of sanctity should flagellate the sins out of her body, and she is convinced that the child...
...Broadway, Amanda Plummer gave a performance that was horrifying and inspiring in its hurtling physicality. Her Agnes was a voluptuary of angelic possession, and Plummer easily stole the show. Norman Jewison's direction goes for narrative suspense and coherence over emotional jolts, so now Agnes is merely first among equals. All three stars do smart, honorable work: Tilly, her childlike faith traumatized by the rude stirrings of womanhood; Fonda, the reluctant exorcist fiercely questioning her old God and, no less, herself; and Bancroft, a strict but up-to-date nun, with reserves of iron and irony...
...read a mogul's mind? Somebody saw this most theatrical of Broadway musicals--one that exists uniquely on a stage, with no sets and only one glitzy production number--and decided it could make a hit movie without what is known in Hollywood as a radical rethink. Somebody figured that the sad, frayed lives of show-biz gypsies (always described, never shown) would strike a responsive chord in today's party-time teens. Somebody counted the Oscars and box-office grosses of Gandhi and determined that a British director in his 60s would be just the man to bring this...
...Chorus Line, which continues to wow 'em on Broadway a decade after it opened, is hardly a perfect musical. The songs are functional, not indelible. The dialogue wallows in the least engaging of performer emotions, narcissism and self-pity. The plot asks you to believe that performers in a musical are selected on a kind of psychiatrist's casting couch, spilling their secret sordid pasts to the director. Yet the thing worked onstage as a puissant metaphor for shab-elegant show biz, where exhibitionism and humiliation dance in precise sync, where each passion must be displayed nakedly and clothed...
DIED. LANE SMITH, 69, character actor whose work included stage, film and TV performances (including the original Broadway production of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross) but who won his greatest fame late in his career for his exacting, critically hailed portrayal of Richard Nixon in the 1989 docudrama The Final Days; of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease; in Los Angeles...