Word: mimes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Shah could be worth seeing for its originality alone. It's not often a world-renown Tai Ch'i master (Mark) joins a gymnastic/hip-hop performance team in a play directed by someone trained as a mime...
...surreal mud masks. Taking up clubs and spears and bows, they crouch and advance, ghostly, out of the Stone Age (which they inhabited until the day before yesterday) and into a clicking horde of tourists from a cruise ship that docked on the coast this morning. The "mud men" mime ferocity for a little while; then they mingle shyly in the crowd of rich white aliens and try to make sense of the paper money the strangers offer for weapons and boar's-tusk necklaces. It may not be too many months before the mud men start accepting the American...