Word: ghostly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ABOUT to say that Platoon, Oliver Stone, Marilee Martin, Paul Newman, or Michael Caine didn't individually deserve their statuettes. But taken together, the fact that five sentimental favorites won major awards says something strange about the Oscars. The Academy seems to have given up the ghost of objectivity...
...most chilling thing about those women might be their normality, as if they were plump, 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...
...medium with the gift of raising the dead. Her manner is so much the grasping fraud that the audience is stunned when she delivers the goods. Indeed, she is stunned herself: there are few funnier sights than Page striding across the stage in pursuit of a ghost whose presence she senses but cannot see, snuffling at the wraith's ectoplasm like a spaniel who just knows a squirrel is somewhere nearby...
...handcuffs. Not long ago, the "go for it" mentality of untrammeled capitalism was a virtue in the culture of Reaganism. Now that culture is being questioned. The Rambo story, which was a cartoon of Reaganism's individualist machismo, has been discredited by the escapades of Oliver North. The enduring ghost of Viet Nam returns not in the cretinous revenge fantasies of Sylvester Stallone but in Platoon, a movie that confronts the ambiguous mess and tragedy of America's mission in Viet Nam. The show that has captured Broadway is Les Miserables, with its themes of suffering and redemption...
...Goodspeed Opera House, which in 1984 restored Kern's Leave It to Jane, will unveil a Secaucus-enhanced edition of Gershwin's Lady, Be Good! With the Broadway musical on the British dole and with revivals like 42nd Street reminding theatergoers of better days and more hummable tunes, the ghost of Broadway past is ready to come home in triumph. Now, wouldn't that be something to sing about...