Word: lear
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PETER SELLARS HAS BALLS. His King Lear drives Shakespeare's poetry to a North Hollywood parking lot, yanks it from the back seat and stabs it helter-skelter while the gods guffaw. But Sellars' production fails because it attempts too much, his ambition exceeds his grasp. Far from letting the play breathe, he beats it about the neck with a crowbar, adding abrasions and welts until he obscures his own intentions. By any interpretation, Lear should not be an interminable, mired melodrama set in a tempest of technology. Sellars' Lear is a tragedy of excess...
Finally, however, Redford the musical comedy director goes home and Redford the Shakespearian director returns. The last scene is as difficult to present as the eye-gouging scene in King Lear. Redford stages it identically to the courtroom scene, with Hermione on a pedestal above the rest of the players. It is a beautiful idea, uniting the play--allowing the virtue of Hermione to conquer all this time around. Clemenson once again masters the complexity of his role, as he wondrously discovers that the statue is in fact his living wife...
Football games, no matter what the outcome, are something of a filling station for the Lear Jet engine of Princeton's alumni drive...
Lampoon President Andrew S. Borowitz '80 praised Yorkin for his work with Norman Lear on productions such as "All in the Family" and "Sanford and Son." "This is the first 'nice' award the Lampoon has given in recent memory--maybe more than recent memory," Borowitz added...
...Lear leaves you with a lot of questions about the place of innovation on the Shakespearean stage. No one would argue for a theater of sterility, shunning all new ideas as "deviations from the author's intentions." But when you have a competent group of performers, and at least one actor of stature and brilliance who can use a play like Lear as a personal vehicle, it seems a cheat to squander the resources on half-baked ideas, directorial interpretations that aren't followed through, and "innovations" that clash with each other. Cain should either have moved in and molded...