Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Billy Elliot, the new British film about an 11-year-old from a coal-mining town who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a prime example of elevated kitsch. Written by playwright Lee Hall, Billy echoes most of the manipulative inspirational films of the past 20 years. The movie could be called Chariots of Flashdance, Strictly Ballet, Smile--Life Is Beautiful! Audience members, already primed to love a losers-win story about a poor boy with big dreams, don't have to bring anything to the film, because director Stephen Daldry does all the work for them. Sentimental movies...
...over a decade ago he was still on the wrong end of the tear gas and water cannon as a firebrand anti-apartheid leader. The conference's host, Czech president Vaclav Havel may be feeling a little nostalgic, too - after all, back in '68 he was just another Absurdist playwright trying to overthrow the system...
DIED. BEAH RICHARDS, 74, Oscar-nominated actress who this month won an Emmy for a guest appearance on The Practice; of emphysema; in Vicksburg, Miss. Richards received her Oscar nomination for playing Sidney Poitier's mother in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. A poet, playwright and minister's daughter, she once said, "I always relate the theater to the church... Like the church, the theater must always be an exploration for truth...
...many jolly musicals in this dour Broadway age, but this fall there are two. Seussical is joined by The Full Monty, based on the hit Brit film about blue-collar guys who try to make a few bob as strippers. David Yazbek (from TV) and playwright Terrence McNally wrote the show. There's also an old-fashioned sweeping romance: a Jane Eyre from pop balladeer Paul Gordon and some of the folks behind Les Miserables. All you composers working on more versions of Martin Guerre and The Wild Party can put them aside. The musical is perking up. Broadway might...
...Walking, with superstar mezzo Susan Graham as Sister Helen Prejean, the spiritual adviser who brings salvation to a death-row inmate, the role for which Susan Sarandon won an Academy Award. The score is by Jake Heggie, a gifted purveyor of bittersweet art songs, and the libretto is by playwright-opera buff Terrence McNally (The Lisbon Traviata, Love! Valour! Compassion!). Will this brand-name opera be agitprop or art--or both? Whatever the results, the timing of the premiere at the War Memorial Opera House on Oct. 7, less than two months after Texas' controversial double execution, could scarcely...