Word: versions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Great fortune and power breed myths and demonizations. The Rothschilds were called, with admiration and loathing, "the Kings of the Jews and the Jews of the Kings"--sometime pariahs and masters of the universe. The bright version of the Rothschilds--benefactors of progress, multilingual cosmopolitans, patrons of the arts, sponsors of Rossini and Balzac, vintners of Mouton and Lafite--was shadowed by a vicious anti-Semitic twin, the view that culminated in Hitler's speeches about "the rapacity of a Rothschild." The family became an all-purpose and surreal villain. Karl Marx vilified the Rothschilds as a quintessence of capitalist...
Such affronts to modern sensibility are not whitewashed in Peter Ackroyd's brilliantly conceived biography The Life of Thomas More (Doubleday; 447 pages; $30). Jarringly inconsistent with the figure idolized in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, as well as its multi-Oscared 1966 film version, the sins are nevertheless integral to the man who emerges from Ackroyd's book, which was a No. 1 London Times best seller earlier this year and has been climbing several U.S. lists since being published here last month. Thomas More is not hagiography. Yet here is the paradox...
...seemed to augur a new era of hip, youthful Broadway shows. Wrong. The Broadway musical after Rent has looked pretty much like the Broadway musical before it. The only recent show that seems aimed squarely at the teen market is the hopelessly square Footloose, a clunky stage version of the 1984 movie...
...spirit too. Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth centers on a pair of drug-addled New York City teens who wrangle over what to do with the $15,000 one of them has stolen from his father. The dialogue and acting--a kind of slacker version of Abbott and Costello--are unrelentingly naturalistic, even as the play betrays a sentimental streak. A grittier take on youth culture is Trainspotting, Harry Gibson's riveting stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh's cult novel about disaffected Scottish youth, which was also the basis for the 1996 film. Staged with stark efficiency...
...have never before been released commercially in any format. Deacon scoured the archives--and his own collection--for rare and historic performances. He passed over Alexis Weissenberg's famed 1971 recording of Scriabin's Nocturne for the Left Hand, and hunted down the master of Weissenberg's obscure 1950 version of the piece, which, says Deacon, is "perhaps the most poised and beautiful recording ever made...