Word: starlight
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Past Lloyd Webber extravaganzas concerned animals (Cats), machines (Starlight Express), wraiths (The Phantom of the Opera), icons (Evita) and divinities (Jesus Christ Superstar). His delicate and intimate new work, adapted from a 1955 novel by Britain's David Garnett, is about ordinary human beings learning life's painful lessons. The affections on display include the parental, filial and fraternal; but the emphasis is on the romantic, which takes place mostly between partners of unlike ages and is presented as primarily a process of teaching. Events are often melodramatic, but the tone is rueful and autumnal. From the opening moment...
...episodes test the viewer's patience, and there is considerably more wit in the film's sumptuous design than in its dialogue. But anyone with an educated eye and a child's love of hyperbole can take delight in Gilliam's images and incidents. Starlight spangles a lunar beach as the baron's ship drifts ashore for his interview with an Italianate creature (Robin Williams, unbilled and hilarious) who identifies himself as "the King of Everything -- Rei di Tutto. But you may call me Ray." The king's body is detachable from his head, which provokes schizophrenia of celestial proportions...
...Starlight is capricious. Its beam falls on the worthy and the fortunate, then moves restlessly on. In the era of the omnipotent film studios, performers were cushioned by long-term contracts and paternalistic moguls. A career was built through steady work in look-alike roles. But in these free-for-all days, actors -- and especially actresses -- are on their own. They are defined more as artists than as stars; they market their craft, not their luminous personalities. They may win star parts or, on a lark, show up in cameo roles. They may take a year off to work...
...Nunn as sole artistic director of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987, he had a daunting artistic legacy to equal. But, according to associates, Hands may have yearned just as much to emulate Nunn's commercial success -- and income -- as director of the musicals Cats, Les Miserables and Starlight Express. Hands committed himself to staging a most unorthodox venture for the R.S.C.: a $7 million musical adaptation of Stephen King's 1974 horror novel Carrie. In meetings, colleagues say, Hands was apt to recite costs and potential box-office income at various Broadway houses...
CHESS. Trevor Nunn (Cats, Les Miserables, Starlight Express) directs a fourth Broadway musical barn burner, mixing board games, romance, East-West relations and a superb rock score...