Word: shaffer
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...been institutionalized after blinding six horses one night in the stable where he works on weekends. Equus is the imaginary horse god, the product of Alan's tangled mind and troubled childhood and it is Dysart's task to exorcise it from him. The question on which Peter Shaffer's play turns is, simply, does Dysart want...
...Frederick Brisson, 71, theatrical and film producer who oversaw some 20 Broadway shows, including the Tony Award-winning The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955), then turned many of them into successful movies, and who was also responsible for the first appearances on Broadway of Play wrights Peter Shaffer (Five Finger Exercise, 1959) and Harold Pinter (The Caretaker, 1961); of a stroke; in New York City. Brisson was married for 35 years to Actress Rosalind Russell, until her death...
Playwright Peter Shaffer selected this twisted musical battle as the unlikely subject for his 1979 stage hit, Amadeus. The story of Salieri an artist driven mad by his own in adequacy, entranced audiences--and Shaffer himself. Three years later, Shaffer was probing the dense story once more as the screenwriter for a film adaptation of the award winning play. And that film, which opened this week, is no less indicate provacative than the play--and perhaps even the musicians who inspired it. To the richly layered stage production, Shaffer--and director Milos Forman--have added yet another coating of deceit...
...vindication of Salieri's frustrated quest for immortality. If audiences did not gain any greater impression of his gain any greater impression of his musical talents, Salieri at least became unforgettable in the depth of his jealous passion. But translated to the screen, Amadeus becomes Mozart's own. Shaffer and Forman preserve the intensity of the Salieri-Mozart rivalry, but the film is permeated with the pulse and rhythm of the headstrong child who could compose "as if taking dictation...
...result is a grand, sprawling entertainment that incites enthrallment for much of its 2 hr. 38 min. Shaffer's screenplay retains many of the play's epigrammatic fulminations, deftly synopsizes whole sections, transforms Mozart's father from a hectoring apparition to an onscreen tyrant, and provides a thrilling new climax in which the dying Mozart dictates his Requiem to a Salieri racked with guilt, jealousy and awe. If the operatic excerpts occasionally impede dramatic flow, they capture the Mozartian spirit as well as comment, with typical Forman bravura, on the theme of an oaf who makes miracles...