Word: playwrighting
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Mozart's death has been variously ascribed to rheumatic fever, uremia and even murder by poisoning. Alexander Pushkin wrote a play that pinned the guilt on Mozart's musical rival Antonio Salieri, and Rimski-Korsakov turned the literary libel into a miniopera. Playwright Peter Shaffer recently gave the Salieri legend a new stage life with Amadeus, in which Mozart has the sex habits of a randy poodle and the court manners of John McEnroe...
...door. I think only someone with no imagination can imagine him." One would like to read this as an equivalent to Mozart's A Musical Joke or dialogue from the theater of the absurd. In fact, the German-born author, 66, is best known as a painter and playwright with an intellectual kinship to Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco...
...Ullmann has proved under the direction of Ingmar Bergman, she is an actress of depth and stature. This time, however, she seems mostly at sea, or up the fjord. Director John Neville (who also chews through the role of Pastor Manders) has staged Ibsen as if the playwright were the resident bard of the Vincent Crummies Acting Company from Nicholas Nickleby: all pregnant pauses, awkward gestures, broad hints and unexpected laughs. Neville's Ghosts seems to have taken a wrong turn in the provinces and wound up, startled and unprepared, on the main stem. -By Jay Cocks
...fact, because Shakespeare created such a full and multi-faceted character in the longest role of his longest play, many have treated Hamlet as a real historical figure. The playwright Percy Mackaye (Harvard 1897) even went so far as to write a quartet of verse dramas to explain what had happened in the royal Danish household during the 30 years leading up to the events offered by Shakespeare...
...demands of the difficult Closet Scene. This is a perfectly credible portrayal, though I think an ideal Queen would show more sensuality. When Hamlet is duelling, the Queen is supposed to comment, "He's fat, and scant of breath." Coe has, however, changed the first adjective to "hot." The playwright's text tells us three things about the physical Hamlet--that he wears a beard, is 30 years old, and is fat (the role was written, after all, for the portly Richard Burbage, who first played Lear and Othello). It is still hard to get away from the 19th-century...