Word: curtain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...curtain rose last week on what could prove the final act in a drama of tragicomic ineptitude: the "vodka putsch." Remember the three days in August 1991 when a dozen communist leaders imprisoned Mikhail Gorbachev and seized control of the Soviet Union? After the scheme fell apart, one conspirator drank himself into a stupor, another shot himself dead, and a third made a break for the airport -- where he was arrested with the key to his new Kremlin office still in his pocket...
...seems to be the season for savvy playwrights to slip. Neil Simon's musical adaptation of his The Goodbye Girl left out the good parts, David Hwang's Face Value closed in preview, and now Lanford Wilson (Talley's Folly, Burn This) has opened REDWOOD CURTAIN, a would-be poetic musing on ecology, Vietnam, capitalism and multicultural heritage. If you think something is deeply sick in the national soul, then the play, for all its philosophical incoherence and melodrama (about a Vietnamese immigrant seeking her ex-G.I. father), may speak to you. If you live in the world most...
...beyond salvation. Then he leaps up and runs off, pursuing an apparition of Jesus into the heart of backstage darkness. This leaves the theologically precise to wonder whether they are supposed to have just witnessed the Second Coming. But no. It's just the start of the curtain call...
That seems likely. To be sure, there is much to cavil about in conception and execution, above all the fact that Andrews does not get enough to do. Looking chic and ageless, taking command without commandeering center stage, she electrifies the audience at the first-act curtain with Could I Leave You? and again near the finale with Getting Married Today. She acts rather than belts, taking time and not challenging her vocal reach as she did at the 1991 Tony Awards (satirized by Forbidden Broadway, to the tune of I Could Have Danced All Night, as "I couldn...
...album closes with Epilogue (Nothing 'bout Me), a swinging, carefree ditty in which the singer takes a parting shot at his would-be analysts. Like a puppeteer peeking out from behind the curtain, Sting dares the listener to "Pick my brain, pick my pockets/ Steal my eyeballs and come back for the sockets/ Run every kind of test from A to Z/ And you'll still know nothing 'bout me." It's a fittingly elusive coda from pop's most mercurial bard...