Word: requiems
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ironist's step back. By making fun of the obsequiousness and desperation found in the lower circles of show-business purgatory, they are chiseling epitaphs on epitaphs. They haunt cemeteries of frayed hopes and failed jokes; they rob graves of moldering bits of business; they read the requiem for popular entertainment. They are the children of television, the nephews and nieces of Vegas, the grandchildren of baggy-pants burlesquers-and they have turned on their elders with the fury of a patricidal Greek...
...while eating a doughnut, parading in drag, leading a children's crusade through a Florida shopping mall. Hardly Working has grossed $10 million at the box office, in part because parents are taking tots to see "the original Jerk." They find themselves attending not a revival but a requiem...
Soldiers wielding automatic rifles patrolled the dusty plaza outside as 14 priests celebrated a requiem Mass in the village church of Chalatenango, El Salvador. Local children, black-veiled peasant women and silver-haired men filled the pews alongside relatives of the deceased. Inside the coffins lay the bodies of two New York nuns, Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke. Along with another U.S. nun, Sister Dorothy Kazel, and a lay worker, Jean Donovan, they had been murdered by right-wing terrorists who regarded their relief activities among the poor as "Communist work...
PERHAPS THE MOMENT of transcendence missing from this production--the moment when the burden of action falls on the audience, not a purgation but a punch to the jaw--is sabotaged by the presence on the same program of another work, The Berlin Requiem, which, as presented, is so starkly untheatrical that it makes you feel uncomfortable merely to be sitting in the theater. Hastily substituted for two Samuel Beckett pieces at a late date, The Berlin Requiem is a series of seven songs devoid of light, hope, and in the end life itself. It is a work of music...
...Berlin Requiem presented on stage might prove a worthwhile experiment; but on a double bill it undercuts its competition, turning its audience from theater-goers into listeners. Between the stern, subterranean gloom of the Requiem and the moral topology of The Seven Deadly Sins, the evening of theater becomes oppressive--more oppressive than necessary, even to portray Brecht's oppression-filled world...