Word: play
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MILES DAVIS: AURA (Columbia). Miles used to play jazz -- a melody with a beat. Now he's into music whose electronically enhanced formlessness resembles nothing so much as the sound track of a space movie. That would be great if only we had the flick to go along with...
...male buddies, poised at the uneasy boundary between youth and middle age, sprawl in an overdecorated apartment and dish the dirt about opera singers. None can meet their fierce standards except Maria Callas (a performance by whom provides the play's title). They admire her for blending technique and emotion and, more deeply, for enduring a sad life and lonely death. Other artists, they say, impersonate the passion and hysterics of opera; she lived them...
When the action shifts to his minimalist pad, where he surprises his lover in bed with a boyfriend, he caroms between Noel Coward worldliness and Edward Albee combat, hinting at suicide, half attempting murder. In earlier versions of the play, the bloody pathos of opera found a parallel: the abandoned man stabbed his lover, then held him in a last embrace. That ending felt arch. This one feels anticlimactic, void of release. So does the end of an affair, an event McNally chronicles with specific detail and authentic, universal pain...
...most accomplished, acclaimed and ambitious performer of his generation. In 1984 he dazzled audiences as the youngest actor ever to play the title role in Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC ). He starred in the Masterpiece Theater mini-series Fortunes of War. He built his own repertory company and led it through sold-out seasons in London and the provinces. He has written two plays and an autobiography, Beginning. He even married his leading lady, TV star Emma Thompson. No doubt about it: Branagh has conquered Britain...
...student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Branagh displayed the salesman's knack of charm and fearlessness -- the seductive intelligence, so crucial to performing, managing and directing. He wrote to Olivier for advice on the role of Chebutykin in Three Sisters. He took notes on playing Hamlet from John Gielgud. He determined to play the Dane at a performance attended by the Queen and Prince Philip. Later, preparing his RSC Henry, he won an audience with Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace to discuss the isolation felt by a national leader. Wooed and won by the young actor, Charles became...