Word: shermans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Where does Dustin Hoffman, Hollywood's hottest leading actor, go to try his hand at Shakespeare? Where does composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who has had six megamusicals on Broadway in the '80s, launch his latest? Where does American playwright Martin Sherman (Bent) debut a work about his countrymen in exile...
Playwright Sherman, who has not made much of a splash in the decade since Bent, provides in A Madhouse in Goa the best new play of a fecund London year that has already brought new efforts from half-a-dozen top dramatists. Structurally, Sherman's show is two one-acts, but they are linked by one of the cleverest devices in memory. The first piece, A Table for a King, is an exquisitely painful tale of betrayals involving a pathetically dignified Mississippi matron, a sweetly awkward American college boy recovering from a thwarted homosexual infatuation, a casually seductive waiter...
Having enlisted the audience's sympathies, and its knowing nods that the first playlet shows what life is really like, Sherman reveals in the second half that Table is not reality but invention -- the plot, in fact, of a famous '60s novel that a Hollywood producer proposes to contort into an MTV- influenced musical. Sherman's sprawling, ambitious piece has any number of themes, most powerfully the idea that art comforts us by letting us focus on microcosmic disasters so that we can ignore the global ones. Dominating an exceptional cast are Rupert Graves as the young artist...
...West End is having its best season in years, with an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Dustin Hoffman's debut in Shakespeare and a fine new work by American playwright Martin Sherman...
...confess and plead guilty, but can the Feds convict anybody in a court trial? In attempting to try an important case stemming from the Ivan Boesky stock-fraud scandal, the Government is striking out. Last week the criminal stock-manipulation case against GAF and its vice chairman, James Sherman, ended in a second mistrial. After six weeks of testimony and more than 90 hours of deliberations, Federal Judge Mary Johnson Lowe decided the jury was hopelessly deadlocked...