Word: playwrighting
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...Arthur Miller's next opening night is not on Broadway but at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where composer William Bolcom and librettist Arnold Weinstein have teamed up with the celebrated playwright to turn A View from the Bridge into an opera. Bolcom, whose eclectic tastes run from ragtime to Sondheim, is just the man to set it to music. "I've written some flat-out tunes," he says happily, "and there's even a doo-wop quartet." The cast includes soprano Catherine Malfitano, one of the most powerful actresses in American opera. "She plays a woman who makes...
...setting is a 19th century, New York City theatrical company, but this utterly beguiling film has a European manner about it. Everyone in it is either darkly obsessive or madly grand. The story--Turturro is a playwright struggling to finish a play--is an excuse for a lot of ill-considered, utterly forgivable behavior by a wonderful cast, in which Katherine Borowitz is calmly radiant as the company's leading lady, Christopher Walken deliriously funny as a drama critic. The direction is self-consciously sober, lending an odd, artful weight to the prevailing giddiness...
...such places Cambodia has the air of a society with no laws, where some protective coating, some layer of civilization, keeping Darwin's jungle remote, has been torn away. The local paper reads as if it had been written by a Jacobean playwright with a taste for black irony. A motorist crashes into the Independence Monument, it says, the seventh such fatality this year. More than 12,000 "ghost soldiers"--nonexistent employees--have been found on the Ministry of Defense payrolls. A Frenchman here to help Cambodia is charged with running a brothel full of underage boys...
...this case anyone able to track down the novel from which the movie has been rather faithfully adapted by Kubrick and co-writer Frederic Raphael would have been more in the know. Titled Traumnovelle (Dream Story), it was first published in 1926 by Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese playwright, physician and friend of Freud's, and has been available in paperback in the U.S. since 1995. Like a lot of the novels on which good movies are based, it is an entertaining, erotically charged fiction of the second rank, in need of the vivifying physicalization of the screen and the kind...
...years ago to make her TV fortune. Returning to New York theater for the first time since, she brings to life two vividly drawn, uncompromising characters, both as blinkered to the moral implications of their acts as Ally McBeal is relentlessly self-aware. The Mametesque monologues (LaBute was a playwright before directing his first feature, 1996's In the Company of Men) are a bit formulaic but somehow richer and more convincing than the occasionally forced misanthropy in his films...