Word: witnesses
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...commercial viability came with last season's best musical, Falsettos, which centers on a father who leaves his wife and son to take up with a male lover who dies of AIDS. While it sounds grim, the show is in large part a cheerfully neurotic comedy; its mordant wit in the face of death is yet another index of a gay aesthetic. The producers have shrewdly emphasized the show's celebration of families of all kinds in testimonial ads touting it as fit for rabbis and priests, Midwestern tourists and suburban firemen. Having long since turned a profit on Broadway...
Well, it works. This isn't the best Shakespeare on film -- a photo finish between Olivier's Richard III and Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight -- but it may be the best movie Shakespeare. The skirmish of will and wit between Benedick (Branagh, never so charming a screen presence) and Beatrice (his wife Emma Thompson, here tart and intense) plays like a prime episode of Cheers. The characters' passions seem not revived but experienced afresh. There is wrenching melodrama in the perfidy that estranges the innocent lovers Hero (Kate Beckinsale) and Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard, a wonderfully vulnerable puppy-lover...
...speech is vintage Rudnick -- a party wine with a bouquet of sentiment and the kick of rude truth. To the tart social wit of gay writers from Oscar Wilde to Joe Orton he adds irrepressible high spirits -- a tonic when so much of literature has the terminal glums. This Renaissance jester is a yea-sayer, a missionary for joy. "Usually when I'm asked why I write," says Rudnick, 35, "I reply, 'To avoid a day job.' But the truth is that there are people in real life I want to honor. It's easy to write about despair...
...here is Rudnick, spinning his bedside stories to people in desperate need of the bright light of his wit. In the age of AIDS, there is something heroic about the task he has set himself: to put the gay back...
...Picasso's joining two tin half-spheres -- kitchen colanders -- to form the cranium of Head of a Woman, 1929-30, or Gonzalez's recycling what appears to be a pair of scythe blades as the wings of a creature midway between angel and praying mantis, is to witness plays of the dreaming, free-associating, punning mind that seem fundamental to modernism. Iron, in the form of objects that could be almost randomly brought together, favored wit and invention. Gonzalez, though he could make small sculptures with the finesse of jewelry, loved the contrast between the harsh and the delicate -- rough...