Word: playlets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...actors," Stroman explains. "It's almost like a dance company and an acting company coming together." The feel is that of a trio of exquisitely tooled MGM-style production numbers, but updated (Fred Astaire didn't use the F word in The Band Wagon) and given emotional weight. Each playlet is peopled with lonely hearts longing to reach out to someone, and when they finally touch, your own heart will do all the singing necessary...
...police station, Calista Flockhart doesn't take long to shed her Ally affectations. Talking in a flat Midwestern twang, she recounts with grueling matter-of-factness how she was seduced by a teacher at age 13, had a baby, was abandoned by him and took revenge by...well, the playlet is called Medea Redux. Enough said...
...failed great actor or a great bad one? But onstage, he relaxes a bit. He knows the spectators are creating their own close-ups, so he plays piano: softer and with nuance. He gets to the tiredness of Erie and to the semisweet-chocolate heart of this frail playlet, and transforms O'Neill's monologue into a ripe conversation with the audience. So again, go figure: Al Pacino, film star, was made for the stage...
...with romantic misdemeanors. Still, there's something icky in Allen's compulsion to write scripts about fiftysomething guys ready to dump their wives for nubile waifs the approximate age of Soon-Yi Farrow Previn. This is the plot of Allen's 1992 Husbands and Wives, of his brutally funny playlet in the off-Broadway Death Defying Acts, and of his exasperating, finally engaging new film, Mighty Aphrodite...
Sure Thing, the opening playlet, is 40 cunning variations on meeting cute. A young man approaches a young woman seated at a restaurant table. Every time he or she says something clumsy or frosty a bell rings (ding!), the actors freeze and the process ratchets back a step. Movie-wise playgoers with a sense of deja vu will wonder if this isn't Groundhog Day all over again. Well, worry not about Ives' originality or his consistency. Sure Thing was first seen in 1988, five years before the Bill Murray comedy. Further, all six of the Timing pieces are ingenious...