Word: steinbeck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from his own life. Rather than acting out his mid-life fantasies with the aid of a red sports car, Lamb buys an RV and sets out for a magic summer in quest of the heart of America, minor-league baseball. Writing in the spirit of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Lamb forsakes dramatic narrative for an endearing travelogue filled with small piquant details. His odyssey is oddly humbling. He encounters a boyhood hero, Hall of Fame slugger Eddie Matthews, now a sixtyish minor-league batting coach nursing a fearsome hangover and brooding that his young disciples "don't know...
AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE (PBS, March 20, 22). The anthology series opens its 10th season with a double dose of Broadway: Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim's musical twist on Grimms' fairy tales, and The Grapes of Wrath, the Steppenwolf Theater's adaptation of Steinbeck's Depression novel...
...GRAPES OF WRATH. This adaptation of John Steinbeck's landmark novel is everything that Broadway shows typically are not: political, conscience- stricken, expansive (the cast numbers 35) and epic. Much more realistic than the inspirational Henry Fonda film, the production by Chicago's Steppenwolf Company is flawed, sometimes slow, but deeply, achingly honest...
...John Steinbeck was haunted by the almost biblical travail of the Dust Bowl farmers, uprooted from their homesteads by bank foreclosures, trekking by the tens of thousands to the promised land of California, only to face brute exploitation as field hands. After two failed novels, he finally got it right on his third try, and after two years of developmental productions, Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe has finally succeeded in adapting his epic tale for the stage. The best measure of this portrait of a family in agony and dissolution is that it is actually better -- less sentimental and truer -- than...
...Frank Galati finds many small moments of decency, charity, humor and hope. He moves the 35 performers with cinematic grace and achieves great variety during a middle hour consisting largely of moving a rattletrap truck back and forth. The ordeal of the Joads remains evocative of its era, yet Steinbeck's themes prove contemporary: the vulnerability of unskilled labor, the soul-destroying impact of poverty and homelessness, the ease with which the rich and powerful subvert law enforcement to their own ends. The Joads pride themselves on being scrappers, but in this conflict they never have a chance...