Word: theatered
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This true-life joke is repeated in Charlie Kaufman's film about a madly ambitious theater man, Synecdoche, New York. So people have been anticipating the death of one of the 20th century's most revered and mysterious playwrights - the near equal to his fellow Nobelist Samuel Beckett, with plays that achieved far more commercial success than Beckett's - for quite some time. Now they can stop. Pinter, who had long been ailing from cancer, died on Christmas Eve at 78. (See the top 10 plays and musicals...
...more suggestive, dangerous, theatrical, eloquent. Like Beckett, he renounced the flossy rhetoric of such postwar playwrights as Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh for a back-to-basics starkness - a two-men-on-a-stage simplicity that Aeschylus would have admired. In its citation, the Swedish Academy said Pinter "restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles...
Abraham Lincoln went to the theater one night in 1865, and Andrew Johnson became President the next morning. Because Johnson hadn't been elected to office, Congress became very angry whenever he vetoed a bill - who did he think he was, anyway? - and in 1867 the House Judiciary Committee drew up a long list of complaints about him and recommended that he be impeached. The vote never passed and was shelved until 1868, when Johnon fired a political rival, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton - in violation of the Tenure of Office Act, which said that the President couldn't remove...
...brought to the stage in several important ways. For one thing, it's not a musical - which means no Elton John or Howard Ashman-Alan Menken songs to build a Broadway score around. More crucially, it is the first of the computer-animated films to be turned into theater - which presents different challenges. The romantic sweep and handcrafted classicism of Disney's earlier films could in no way be translated literally to the stage - and that inspired directors like Julie Taymor (The Lion King) and Francesca Zambello (The Little Mermaid) to come up with unique, often inspired stage equivalents. Computer...
...terrific performance. Sutton Foster, a Broadway superstar slumming here as Princess Fiona, is fine, but overall the production, directed by Jason Moore (Avenue Q), is surprisingly ordinary: the gigantic, eye-batting dragon, for example, looks as if it could have been put together by a hardworking community children's theater group...