Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...idea so commercially shrewd and creatively dubious that you naturally assume it came from an American. But it was British playwright and director Terry Johnson (Dead Funny; Hysteria) who decided to take Mike Nichols' 1967 film The Graduate and put it onstage. With Kathleen Turner re-creating Anne Bancroft's role as Mrs. Robinson, the show weathered mixed reviews to become a box-office hit in London. Now it has come to Broadway, with Turner joined by a couple of young Hollywood stars, Jason Biggs and Alicia Silverstone. The show serves up the familiar story of a directionless college grad...
...actor and playwright in his youth, Pope John Paul II knows that the simplest gesture can move an audience. From a bold wave to his countrymen in communist Poland in 1979 to his quietly slipping a note in Jerusalem's Wailing Wall two decades later, this Pope has always found ways to keep the world watching. But last week it was John Paul, 81, who had to do the watching. Struggling with an arthritic right knee and symptoms of Parkinson's disease, the Pope for the first time in his pontificate stepped aside and let others lead several...
...ancient Greeks had the same suspicion. The 5th century B.C. playwright Euripides portrayed the oppressed and frustrated women of Thebes, egged on by the wine god Dionysus, abandoning their babies in the cradle and their weaving on the loom to run off into the hills for nights of wild drinking and dancing, further enlivened by the women's enthusiastic dismemberment of any living creatures they came upon. At one point the queen mother, in her wine-addled frenzy, rips apart her own son, the king, leaving the audience with one clear lesson: keep the women indoors and those wine-filled...
...character in the same harsh light the movie uses to third-degree the actors' faces, and, often, is paraphrased later for a residual kick. (The movie's dialogue structure couldn't be tighter if you poured a quart of scotch down its throat.) The 20-year gag about the playwright was that he had sold out, gone soft: "Odets, where is thy sting?" Well, it's here...
...this talent: it seemed so, potentially, right. Playwright John Guare: "The House of Blue Leaves," "Six Degrees of Separation" and the 1981 Lancaster movie "Atlantic City." Composer Marvin Hamlisch: "The Way We Were," "A Chorus Line," "They're Playing Our Song," "The Goodbye Girl" - all pulsing odes to Manhattan. Director Nicholas Hytner and designer Bob Crowley have confected some of the most enchanted theatrical evenings of the last two decades. Still I wondered: why a musical? Broadway songs are for what you can't say, for what's in your heart. Sidney, J.J. - what heart? And their success, which...