\”Enigma Variations,\” directed by French Canadian Daniel Roussel and starring Donald Sutherland as the author and Jamey Sheridan as the reporter, is that rare work in which every prospect pleases.
\”It\’s an Italian-Jewish mother thing. They don\’t understand that you\’re not hungry anymore!\”
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Alfred Uhry, 61, is a Southern Jew who defines himelf as someone who grew up in a community of genteel Southern Jews who wished they were Episcopalian.
John Barrymore\’s career can be divided into four acts.
\”The Cider House Rules,\” which stretches over two nights and six hours, is a bit like a marathon race, in which the runner gets off to a slow start, picks up speed in the middle distance, and breaks the tape in a dazzling finish.
The trick in Henrik Ibsen\’s \”Enemy of the People\” — now in a Royal National Theatre production at the Ahmanson — is realizing that a play which is ostensibly about water contamination and environmental pollution is really about political corruption.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, with front-runners such as T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry and Archibald Macleish, there was a concerted effort to revive language in the American theater. The buzzword was \”heightened speech\” and, although all of these writers essentially wrote verse, producers tried to steer clear of the word \”poetry.\” They sensed that American theatergoers would recoil from any attempts to have anything as exotic as that foisted upon them. Just as, at around the same period, when they were risking capital on shows like \”The Most Happy Fella\” and the early works of Gian Carlo Menotti, they avoided the word \”opera.\” Music-drama seemed a safer rubric.
Jewish roots in predominantly Catholic Poland can be traced back to the 11th century. But when an estimated 88 percentof the 3.3 million Jews in Poland died in the Holocaust, the country\’s thriving Yiddish theater, literature and culture ceased to exist as well.
Although the surface of Patrick Marber\’s play\”Dealer\’s Choice\” appears to be concerned with the exigencies ofpoker, on a subtextual level it is about surviving the punishments ofcruel gods.
One of the strangest anomalies in the theater is that of the successful turkey — plays that are essentially trivial, gauche and insubstantial, but still manage to achieve a certain kind of notoriety and even commercial success.\”Shear Madness,\” which has been playing for 15 years in Boston, is such a play; so was \”Kvetch,\” which completed a seven-year run in Los Angeles, the same city in which \”Bleacher Bums\” ran for 11 years.\”Abie\’s Irish Rose\” racked up 2,854 performances on Broadway –although it\’s depth could be measured with the first digit of one\’s pinky.
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