Word: off-broadway
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...Off-Broadway has long been the Gay White Way. When Broadway, in the postwar era of Tennessee Williams, William Inge and Edward Albee, addressed homosexual themes, it did so in the metaphorical closet. The modern gay writer can address his dreams and demons directly; and in the aids plague, he has a suitable subject for domestic tragedy. Today the gay sensibility -- acerb, lusty, nostalgic, poignant -- dominates high drama and low comedy...
...off-Broadway is also attracting top stars and prestige playwrights. This month Vanessa Redgrave opens in Vita and Virginia and the Joseph Papp Public Theater premieres Sam Shepard's Simpatico. In December the Public has a new Hal Prince musical, The Petrified Prince. January brings a trio of one-acters by Woody Allen, David Mamet and Elaine May. Neil Simon, a Broadway pillar for a third of a century, made news recently when he said that mainstem plays had become too expensive to produce. Now even he is off-Broadway bound...
...political significance in the story of a Belfast punk (Paul Ronan) obsessed by the grit and grace of Jimmy Cagney. It finds none of the above, lost as it is in a muddle of moralizing and attitudinizing. But it shares a potent theme with the season's cannier off-Broadway ventures: that star worship is a virus, carried by the popular media and infecting anyone who has a little talent and big gaudy dreams. The difference is that, in many other shows, the Warner Bros. star whom the hero might dream of being is not Cagney but Bette Davis, patron...
When actors become singers, the results can be as painful to experience as a dental appointment with a meat packer who moonlights as an orthodontist. Actress Rebecca Pidgeon (who starred in the plays Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna off-Broadway) has released her first U.S. album, The Raven. Her husband David Mamet (who is the author of the plays Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna) wrote or co- wrote lyrics to five of the CD's songs with her. All of this suggests an unlistenable vanity project...
...Hate Hamlet had a catchy premise: a TV actor daring to play Hamlet is haunted by the boozy ghost of John Barrymore. The off-Broadway hit and soon- to-be movie Jeffrey is giddy buffoonery, infused with the pain of gay men's sexual yearning in the age of AIDS. His new The Naked Truth is a big step backward. Loosely based on the flap over the late Robert Mapplethorpe's erotic photos, it has nothing fresh to say about culture wars, Republican hypocrisy, women's self-imposed lack of liberation or any of its other thematic targets. Its best...