Word: versions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...version tries to address these concerns. Playwright Wendy Kesselman (My Sister in This House) has done a thorough reworking, including material from the expanded edition of the diary published in 1991 (with most of the material restored that Frank had deleted), adding more Jewish references (a Hanukkah song is sung in Hebrew) and in general giving the play a less sentimental, more astringent tone. "I thought it was crucial to bring out the darker side," says Kesselman...
Directed with a delicate hand by James Lapine, the new version is underplayed, almost muted, yet gripping in its down-to-earth immediacy. Perhaps because Natalie Portman's Anne is a little short on stage charisma, the story shifts slightly away from her and more toward the complex ensemble of people coping with their terror and with one another. George Hearn as Otto Frank has a hushed dignity; the Van Daans (Harris Yulin and Linda Lavin) seem less foolish and more touching than before. The play was a professional Broadway job to begin with; now it sometimes reaches poetry...
Will the play's detractors be satisfied? Ozick hasn't seen this version but is hopeful that the changes will remedy a play that has been "deeply damaging to the world's psyche" because it found rays of light in a historical event that offers "only darkness." Melnick, who has seen it, finds the new version better but still historically flawed. (The staging of the Franks' arrest, he points out, was more factually accurate in the old version.) The rest of us can simply appreciate that a Broadway drama still has the power to move us, and to cause...
...moguls are doing too well to worry. Mike Curb--the Californian who, in another life, produced hits by the Four Seasons, the Osmonds and Debby Boone (her version of You Light Up My Life was the '70s' top-selling single) and, from 1978 to 1982, served as Lieutenant Governor of California--has struck country gold on his Curb label with Tim McGraw (Indian Outlaw) and ridden Rimes to multiplatinum. Curb sees the payoff beyond the pain: "If a record is different, it's going to be harder to get it played. But you get a bigger return when...
...this is not a giant, if slightly melted, version of a Hershey's Kiss. It's the venue for figure skating and short-track speed skating, dubbed White Ring because of its shape as seen from...