Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...TIME WHEN BROADWAY CAN'T lure even Neil Simon back for a return engagement (America's most popular playwright will have his next work produced off-Broadway), it may seem odd to find it putting out the welcome mat for Moliere. Yet the adventurous Roundabout Theatre Company has resurrected two one-act plays by the 17th century French master, dubbed them The Moliere Comedies and fashioned a sprightly, entertaining evening. These are slight, early works by the author of Tartuffe and The Misanthrope, but in a fallow Broadway season, Moliere Lite is better than nothing...
DIED. GEORGE ABBOTT, 107, playwright, director, producer; in Miami Beach, Florida. Abbott was easily Broadway's longest-running hit-from a $45-a-week turn as a soused college student in 1913's The Misleading Lady to the rethinking of his 1955 box-office smash Damn Yankees for its current revival. In between were well over 100 productions in which George Abbott was named somewhere in the program, including a succession of bona fide classics: Where's Charley?, Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pal Joey. All of them were marked...
Schedrin's lazy, impotent score is loutish when it is not downright sullen. The finale-in which the degenerate playwright Quilty scrambles around his mansion in a drugged stupor, stopping to pound out a few chords on his piano before Humbert Humbert (Per-Arne Wahlgren) shoots him-is a scene worthy of Shostakovich in his manic, trumpets-and-snare-drums mode, but all Schedrin can muster is forced-march noodlings. As for the vulgar libretto, Schedrin wrote it himself but neglected to secure rights from the Nabokov estate. The copyright problems were eventually sorted out with the stipulation that...
...probably. But wordplay soon swamps a vigorous plot. Much traditional writing is, you might say, in this book linguistically taboo, a vast anomaly calling for a radical, slightly wacky approach to put things right. To wit, this famous soliloquy that a world-class playwright wrought for a moody Scandinavian scion: "Living or not living: that is what I ask." Or an alcoholic bard's notoriously rhythmical night thoughts: "'Twas upon a midnight tristful I sat poring, wan and wistful/ Through many a quaint and curious list full of my consorts slain." A mournful coda follows: "Quoth that Black Bird...
Bring on the chamber pots and powdered wigs! Don't be turned off by a dry title announcing a seemingly dry period of history. "The Madness of King George" is a wild ride in a staid carriage. Virtually identical to British playwright Alan Bennett's very successful original stage play, Nicholas Hynter's film is not only great entertainment, but quality cinema...