Opening with the first day of rehearsals of the London production of “Sweeney Todd”, this ninety-minute documentary focuses on the rehearsal process with the musical’s director, composer and actors.
Category: Theatre
Over the course of one day in August 1912, the family of retired actor James Tyrone grapples with the morphine addiction of his wife Mary, the illness of their youngest son Edmund and the alcoholism and debauchery of their older son Jamie. As day turns into night, guilt, anger, despair, and regret threaten to destroy the family.
Set in the backyard of a blue-collar South Philadelphia neighborhood early in the summer of 1973, the comedy-drama focuses on the 21st birthday celebration of Harvard student Francis Geminiani. In attendance are his divorced blue collar father Fran and Fran’s widowed girlfriend Lucille, next-door neighbor Bunny Weinberger and her overweight son Herschel, and Francis’ classmates, the wealthy WASP Hastings siblings; Judith (who seeks romance with Francis) and Randy (the object of Francis’ unexpressed affection), who have arrived unexpectedly, much to their friend’s dismay. All are dysfunctional to varying degrees, and the interactions among them provide the play with its comic and dramatic moments.
The story opens in 1911 at Dr. Seward’s sanitarium. A sensual and charismatic vampire known as Count Dracula has already slain several girls on the English countryside. Abraham Van Helsing, with the help of Dr. Cedric Seward, Lord Gordon Godalming, Jonathan Harker, Freudian psychologist Helga Van Zandt and the reluctant Renfield try to stop Count Dracula from making the lovely Wilhelmina his next willing victim.
Peter Sallis is the escaped convict with a fetish for women’s underwear, hiding out in a remote Welsh cottage on a snowy night. Peter Vaughan is the investigating policeman. But all is not as it seems. Tense, unusual and largely forgotten TV play from 1975, due to it only being screened regionally.
3-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep, Swoosie Kurtz, and Jill Eikenberry star as former classmates at a reunion seven years after their graduation from Mount Holyoke College, who assess whether they have achieved their youthful goals. In a flashback, the friends – all part of a group dubbed “uncommon” because they were expected to be “amazing” before they reached thirty – relive their senior year and examine the influences that shaped them. Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s first play illustrates facing adulthood at the height of the women’s movement.
Perfectly Frank is a delightful stroll through the tunes of Frank Loesser, composer of songs for stage and screen. Cloris Leachman does a marvelous job here, as does Jonelle Allen and the rest of the cast, but be prepared also to be stunned by the smoldering and smart Vicki Frederick doing a fantastic take on The Boys in the Back Room, the tune made famous by Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again. A must see for musical theatre fans!
The tension arising between the demands of AIDS activism and Gregg Bordowitz’s increasing desire to explore aspects of his own life outside the framework of AIDS resulted in the appropriation of a work from the Soviet avant-garde: Nikolai Erdman’s play The Suicide. The protagonist, Semyon, as he tries to unyoke himself from the enforced optimism of a bureaucratic order that prohibits any discussion of disappointment and despair following the revolution.