Word: walcott
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...real-world controversy has been overshadowed by the show's creative travails. Simon had near total control of the project from the start, and he assembled a team of collaborators who were mostly Broadway outsiders. As co-writer of the book and lyrics he enlisted Derek Walcott, the Nobel-prizewinning West Indian poet and playwright. Morris, a leading light of modern dance, was persuaded to make his Broadway debut as choreographer. The lead roles were cast mostly with singers who had little stage-acting experience--including Panamanian musician Ruben Blades and hot young salsa star Marc Anthony (playing...
...approach. For others, it's just a very prestigious distraction. Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 laureate, complained that the prize destroyed her cherished privacy by turning her into an "official person." According to Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Gordimer's and Walcott's publisher), the prize can "inundate" a writer. "People," he says, "want a piece of your ass even more than they did before...
Judging by the pace at which they're working, both Gordimer and Walcott appear to be surviving the Nobel. Gordimer's new novel, The House Gun, which comes out this month, is a tense postapartheid family drama as vital as anything she has ever written. The protagonists are a white upper-middle-class couple who've managed to glide through their country's revolution without so much as a hair out of place. Then their adult son confesses to murder, and the stalled karmic wheels begin to turn. The story deftly brings home a tricky truth: peace...
...Walcott's daily life is hectic. As the co-writer of the book and lyrics for Paul Simon's long-awaited musical The Capeman, he has a Broadway opening this month--an unusually suspenseful opening. The Capeman, which tells the story of Salvador Agron, a Puerto Rican teen who killed two white youths in a Manhattan playground in 1959, has been plagued by a drumbeat of doomsaying in the New York media, last-minute changes and a postponed opening date. The Nobel curse may be chasing Walcott, but his productivity seems unaffected. His most recent book of poetry, The Bounty...
...winner is a great writer. Still, the Nobel does bring the one thing every writer can always use, besides a nice house on a bay: self-confidence. "You could say, 'Oh, yes, it was time the prize was given to a black woman or to a Caribbean writer,'" says Walcott. "But one likes to believe that it is based on merit, even if it sounds flattering to say that." Sometimes literature's kiss of death, it seems, can be the breath of life. --By Walter Kirn. With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York