Word: mimes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sure they're pasty, effete and live in the past, but the great thing about the English is that they seem smart even when acting stupid. ROWAN ATKINSON's inane mime character, Mr. Bean, washes up on American shores Friday in Bean. Atkinson realizes that Bean's immature antics may not appeal to everyone. "Most of my friends don't have time for Mr. Bean," he says. "For those who prefer their humor more verbal, more literary, or indeed harder or ruder, Bean is not their thing...
...dresser with a special affection for angora sweaters; Don Juan De Marco, where he plays a schizophrenic who escapes from dismal reality by impersonating, with sinuous delicacy, an enviably proficient Latin lover; and Benny & Joon, in which he's an illiterate and nearly speechless waif with a genius for mime. What is perhaps most striking about these characterizations is their fundamental sobriety, disciplined intensity and hints of Depp's other main line, which consists of making something quite hypnotic out of a passivity enlivened by nothing more than watchful alertness. He used this strand in his oddly matched pair...
...might appear that Disney has hakuna matata'd right off the deep end. Taymor's highly stylized theater work--using masks, puppetry, mime and other non-Western techniques--seems as far from classic Disney animation (and from those dancing teapots in Broadway's Beauty and the Beast) as one can imagine. Taymor admits she was surprised when Thomas Schumacher, a Disney vice president, first asked her if she would like to develop a theatrical concept for The Lion King. "I'm sure if they find something that doesn't work, they'll tell me," she says. "But they asked...
Taymor, 43, who has the long-haired, unadorned look of a college student and a precise but passionate way of describing her work that recalls your favorite professor, started acting at the age of 11, studied mime in Paris and worked in theater while majoring in mythology and folklore at Oberlin College. Her theatrical vision was shaped most decisively by a four-year stay in Indonesia, where she absorbed a whole non-Western ethic of theater. "I was so inspired by being in a culture where theater was the fundamental form of communication," she says. "In Bali, ritual performances...
...Tsarist Russia's belle lettristes gives the play a contemporary edge without sacrificing any of its subtlety. The primitive set places the dialogue and acting center stage. But like Chekhov's antihero, the Cornerstone takes it all too far. At one point, the director, Bill Rauch, injects a gratuitous mime sequence, in which Konstantin (or Cam, as he is now called) jumps into an imaginary lake and wades laboriously away to the tune of pre-recorded gurgles. Similarly, although the adaptation's reduction of the cast from 10 to five works fine for the first three acts, in the final...