Word: chaplins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there. “Aurélia’s Oratorio” is full of such bizarre moments, which combine to create a poetic and wonderful production. Aurélia Thierrée’s practically one-woman show, written and directed by Victoria Thierrée Chaplin and running at the American Repertory Theatre through Jan. 3, is a surreal evening of intricate choreography, acrobatics, and optical illusion. At the start of “Oratorio,” the stage is dominated by its red velvet curtain and a large chest of drawers, offering little hint...
...felt trapped in working-class Blackpool, the Coney Island of England, and so won a scholarship to Cambridge. He loved jazz and American movies, so he got a grant to study at Yale and Harvard, and within a year the most famous person in the world, Charlie Chaplin, asked him to collaborate on a screenplay. He chafed under authority, so he got the BBC to let him do a Letter from America, in which he'd talk for 15 minutes a week on whatever he liked; that gig lasted for 58 years. What he didn't like was his drab...
...stars, and to the stars saying he was from the Guardian. Both claims were premature but prescient. He'd stay at the paper for the next 70 years, and he instantly befriended the cinemarati. One of his first film works, which he dubbed All at Sea, was of Chaplin on a yacht with his young protegee, Paulette Goddard, "as trim as shiny as a trout." The Little Tramp, like Cooke an English emigre, asked him to work on a script about Napoleon. (Later the actor-director told Cooke, "It's a beautiful idea, for somebody else," and that was that...
...hanging out with the alpha males - Kirk and Clark and Doug Jr. - and jostling for the attention of the dominant females - Kate and Marlene and Bette. He didn't stint with the booze and the Lucky Strikes, lost his virginity to a bonobo (a cruel joke played by Charlie Chaplin) and snorted "star-powder" (a homeopathic remedy, they told him). And despite his star billing, Cheeta had to put up with some pretty cutting social prejudice. At one typically drunken lunch party, Cheeta recalls, "Sylvia [Fairbanks] had pressed some bananas on me, and made a rather snippy observation when...
Although he's nursed the slights for a few decades too long - most of his targets are dead, after all - Cheeta's comebacks have sharp teeth: Chaplin is a humorless "demi-ape"; Mickey Rooney gets pegged as "a cacophonous cartoon of glutinously faked ebullience" who basically stole Cheeta's act; and Rex Harrison ... well, frankly, his opinion of the gentlemanly English star who, as Dr. Dolittle, at least tried talking to the animals, is as mean-spirited as it is unpublishable on a family-oriented website. Far better is his elegant demolition of Mrs Fairbanks, who, he writes...