Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Student playwright and co-director Michael Sonnenschein blends quirky characters, a complex plot and skillful direction in Happy Part, a tale of life, love and bowling. Bowling? Is this a subject for high drama? Well, not exactly. But Sonnenschein's dark comedy about frustrated aspirations in Tulsa, Oklahoma provides amusement and even a bit of truth in its own offbeat...
...cast and crew are entirely equal to the challenge of such an over-indulgent tale. They revel in the play. Modern productions of hardcore Elizabethan shlock tend to degenerate into a protracted joke at the expense of the crude plot. But Skin and Bone avoids this temptation. Rather than 100 minutes of dreary self-parody, the production flings itself into the play with gay abandon. Of course it still appears garish, over-the-top, even absurd; but it is not cast as simply worthless. The distinction may seem subtle, but it makes the difference between a snide exercise in self...
...lavished on his Henry V and little of the rowdy dazzle of Dead Again. He also misuses some wonderful actors, including his wife, Emma Thompson; she must put her radiance on hold to play a prematurely old maid who wants Peter to "fill me with your babies." Though the plot is a rehash of The Big Chill, you may ultimately begin wishing Peter's Friends were instead a remake of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. Which one of these egregious twits, you ask hopefully, will be the first to be killed...
...this isn't Rashomon, it's Trashomon. NBC, first with the most, painted Fisher's version in bold strokes, with no whitewash, and Noelle Parker was a fine Amy. ABC had the hottest sex, courtesy of a sulky, smoldering Drew Barrymore. Poor CBS had to hatch a Fatal Attraction plot without the sex, since Joey has never admitted to doing anything interesting. But the real subject of the Amy-thon was the Long Island accent and attitude -- Brooklyn with flashier threads. Try this at school, kids: "Din I awrea'y tell you? You have sex wit chooah body. You make...
...With a plot from Gogol and a play-within-a-play fiasco as funny as in Nicholas Nickleby, artistic director Daniel Sullivan and the actors of Seattle Repertory Theater hilariously send up censorship controversies, the regional- theater movement's fear of the National Endowment for the Arts and the widespread, pathetic dependence on A Christmas Carol as a holiday cash...