Word: shrew
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Speed-the-Plow. Gould is called on the netherworld carpet for seduction and abandonment of a woman who, when summoned to testify, proves insufferable even to the great adversary. Mamet may mistrust all women -- his essay "True Stories of Bitches" featured his mother, sister and wife -- but this shrew is a giddyingly specific blend of utter unreason and serene self- righteousness. Still, her sins pointedly do not excuse Bobby's. Mamet may josh about the devil but plainly believes in evil -- and finds it entrenched in the heart...
...anti-Nazi adventurer in Julia and a fierce literary agent in Prick Up Your Ears. Onstage in the summer of 1986 in London, she demonstrated her range by alternating as the worldly queen in Antony and Cleopatra and the humiliated, housebound maiden in The Taming of the Shrew. If anything linked those two roles, it was only the pained look they shared, that unforgettable gaze from those grave and piercing eyes as they take in the unimaginable perfidy of the world...
...erotic tension. No can do, at least in the business of romantic comedy. Kevin Wade shows this in his smart screenplay, which is full of the atmospheric pressures that allow stars to collide. Director Mike Nichols knows this in his bones. He encourages Weaver to play (brilliantly) an airy shrew. He gives Ford a boyish buoyancy and Griffith the chance to be a grownup mesmerizer. When Tess and Jack kiss, Nichols has Griffith kick one leg back in the old-fashioned signal of innocent lust...
...this end he enlists his best friend Aldo (John Turturro) to tame the shrew with roses and sweet talk. Cyrano did better. Janice stands on a moonlit balcony, takes a look at the flowers, snorts "What faw?" and tosses them to the ground. Her contempt stokes Aldo's ardor and Huey's too. As their older friend May (Helen Hanft) notes wistfully about the triumph of love over logic, "I'll never again have the courage to be that stupid...
...performers are not stars, and the attraction that draws some 450,000 theatergoers a year -- about 45% of them from the U.S. -- is the shows themselves. The staging can be as traditional as a Richard III in doublets and armor or as giddily updated as The Taming of the Shrew transported to 1950s Italy. Shakespeare, which makes up at least half the schedule, can be complemented by the sober heft of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral or spritzed with My Fair Lady in an ingeniously extravagant production that bejewels the stage with chandeliers, dinner jackets and hats. Oedipus...