Category: Drama

Princess Ida: An Academy of Song

Antique illustration of court scene in first act of "Princess Ida" featuring the Princess, Gama and the Warriors Three.

A mysterious book-length poem called The Princess by Alfred Tennyson became a popular craze in England about a century and three-quarters ago. The title of this book barely hints at the complexity of the story inside — a story within a story, a poem inside a poem, featuring a crew … Read the rest

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Midsummer in Winter

I fell particularly in love with Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” when I saw it performed in Central Park in New York City — a perfect setting, long ago, outdoors on a summer night, with William Hurt as a bemused but domineering Oberon.

I loved the play not for its … Read the rest

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Our Rhinoceros Year

In the play called Rhinoceros by the Romanian dramatist Eugene Ionesco, two men are sitting in a cafe in a small French town when the improbable news arrives that a rhinoceros was seen in town. Soon the two men look out the window to see several rhinoceroses rampaging through the … Read the rest

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Timothy Spall as J. M. W. Turner as Mike Leigh

As Mike Leigh’s majestic new movie Mr. Turner begins, the famous British artist J. M. W. Turner’s father buys pigments for his son in a dusty London shop. The vast psychedelic arrays of glass jars filled with powders of viridian, chrome, cobalt, barium and ultramarine seem as magical as Diagon … Read the rest

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Boyhood: Richard Linklater’s Natural Cinema

In 2002, filmmaker Richard Linklater selected a six-year-old actor named Ellar Coltrane to be the star of his new movie Boyhood, which was expected to take twelve years to film.

Linklater also cast seasoned actors Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke to play the boy’s divorcing parents, and signed his … Read the rest

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