Word: rock
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...oddball juxtaposition: moral philosophy and gymnastics (Jumpers); Fermat's last theorem and Byron's love poetry (Arcadia); James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin (Travesties). "Tom said to me once that he decides on one play, and then shortly after decides on a different one," says Trevor Nunn, director of Rock 'n' Roll and several other Stoppard plays. "And then he lets them crash into each other." The Coast of Utopia, his nearly nine-hour trilogy about Russia's radical political thinkers of the 19th century, was a relatively straight-ahead historical journey (which is why this critic, at least, didn...
...With Rock 'n' Roll, which took London by storm last year and opens on Broadway Nov. 4, Stoppard is exploring two more of his passions, one old and one relatively new. The play spans a couple of decades in the lives of a group of Czech political activists and British academics and shuttles back and forth between Cambridge and Prague in the years between the 1968 Soviet invasion and the "velvet revolution" of 1989. It's an exploration of political repression and commitment (with a typically Stoppardian digression into Sappho's poetry), but also a celebration of the rebel rock...
...Rock 'n' Roll is the first stage work Stoppard has written explicitly about Czechoslovakia, where he was born in 1937 but which he left as a baby when his parents fled the Nazis, moving to Singapore and then India before landing in Bristol, England...
Stoppard's passion for rock music dates from his days in Bristol, where he would see most of the touring music acts that came to town--among them Frank Sinatra (who played the Bristol Hippodrome in the early '50s and didn't sell out), the Everly Brothers and Eddie Cochran, the rockabilly singer whose British tour ended when he was killed in a car crash in 1960. Like everyone else, Stoppard embraced the Beatles and Rolling Stones when they came along, but he admits to being a late bloomer when it came to Pink Floyd. "I ignored them completely...
With his sober blue suit and quiet way of talking, Andy (The Rock) Bloch might easily be mistaken for a smooth Washington lobbyist were it not for his tell. On his lapel is a red-white-and-blue ribbon speckled with tiny spades, diamonds, hearts and clubs. Bloch, 38, holds two engineering degrees from MIT and a law degree from Harvard. But he makes his living playing cards, and he was in Washington to improve the odds that Congress would lift its year-old ban on Internet poker...