Word: kopital
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...theater, Arthur Kopit wrote the End of the World in 1984, a serious comedy in which one of the characters says, "So I sometimes think, now it's all over and we're up there in the big debriefing space in the sky, and the good Lord decides to hold a symposium 'cause he's curious: How did this thing happen? And everybody says, 'Hey, don't look at me, I didn't wanna do it!' The end result being that everyone realizes no one wanted to do it!' " Other signs of the times are noisier. Video games enable players...
...only pleasurable jolt in this revival of Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit's 1982 musical, based on Fellini's 8 1/2. Sure, there's film star Antonio Banderas making his Broadway debut as the director, and Chita Rivera, in a supporting role, drawing the obligatory cheers for still being able to lift her leg onto his shoulder at age 70. But the show prompts the same question it did 20 years ago: Why turn a movie with one of the greatest film scores ever written (by Nino Rota) into a Broadway musical with mediocre songs...
WHEN A GOOD STRAIGHT PLAY IS TURNED into a musical, the basic question is whether music adds anything. In the case of Arthur Kopit's WINGS, a 1978 succes d'estime about a former pilot and air-show wing walker whose mind has been frazzled by a stroke, the answer is an emphatic yes -- sometimes. In the new version off-Broadway, Jeffrey Lunden's score provides evocatively dissonant metaphors for what is going on inside the afflicted woman's head. But when Arthur Perlman's book and lyrics guide her into banal emotional bonds with a therapist and fellow patients...
...that the story has limitations. The Phantom can sing only one kind of song to Christine: I-adore-you-and-you-ab hor-me. Poor pastel Raoul can never be much more than a Parisian Freddy Eynsford-Hill. And yet -- in the magnificent Lloyd Webber version, the appealing Yeston-Kopit or even the lame Ken Hill -- the story works. The Phantom and Christine sing ) their volcanic sentiments in a plot as spare and potent as legend...
...these little Phantoms are springing up," says Hill, "purely because of the enormous success of Andrew's show." Yet very few theatergoers attend other Phantoms in the belief they're getting the Lloyd Webber. "People are coming to our show," Kopit says, "not because they can't get tickets to the Webber version, but because of the Phantom story. There is something dreamlike and mythic in the story of an innocent girl and a dark, foreboding, romantic figure who gets her under his power. We can identify both with the girl and with the deformed figure, who is perhaps...