Word: off-broadway
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...impresario is all but ended in the commercial theater. Practically everything that comes to Broadway nowadays is funded by committee and imported wholesale from somewhere else. Off-Broadway, however, the American theater's boldest, most ambitious, quirkiest, most pedantic and at times most infuriating showman holds sway more forcefully than ever. Joseph Papp has built, at the New York Shakespeare Festival, a personal barony more than an institution. Although he sometimes describes his $14 million annual operation as the biggest "regional" theater in the nation, its six-theater complex and staff of 125 stand in the shadows of his outsize...
...equivalent of a Save the Children billboard on Sunset Strip: "Won't someone please nominate this girl for an Oscar?" But Hunter, 29 and 5 ft. 2 in., is no late entry in the prima donna sweepstakes. She is a hardscrabble sprite from Conyers, Ga., a dues payer from off-Broadway (Beth Henley's The Miss Firecracker Contest) and off-Hollywood (Joel and Ethan Coen's Raising Arizona) whose only eccentricity, says Joel Coen, "is how easy she is to work with." She has built a boutique gallery of daft characters: nymphets and star children who swagger like cowgirls...
...fondly. The accomplished performers who wrote the show and some of the musical selections -- Mark Hardwick and Debra Monk (who collaborated previously on the 1981 off-Broadway hit Pump Boys and Dinettes), Mary Murfitt and Mike Craver -- are all Middle Americans by upbringing, not New York City wise guys. They've been there. When Debbie sings an ode to shopping malls and interstates called Ohio Afternoon ("Ohio fun . . . diesels dragging out on Highway 1"), she gets all misty. When Mark and Mike have at a couple of Zez Confrey ivory ticklers like Dizzy Fingers and Coaxing the Piano, their doofus...
...outside his character, always allowing Tom to find the humor in his too-rapid success, locating a dimness behind his eyes when Tom is asked a tough question -- and for Tom, poor soulless sensation-to-be, all questions are tough ones. As for Hunter, she graduates with honors from off-Broadway (The Miss Firecracker Contest) and off-Hollywood (Raising Arizona) to fill the center of this demanding movie with cracker charm and elfin steel. Hail, Holly: daredevil actress...
What Weeds does with its grabbag of serious and silly, comedy and melodrama is defy convention. This confusion is deliberate and although the movie's attempt to be provocative often borders on the offensive, destroying formulas is a worthwhile endeavor. When the play finally gets to Off-Broadway, the fictional New York Times reviewer says "It's a strange, wild piece." It sure...