With a third season of Mad Men still up in the air for 2009–hey Lionsgate, take your time in cutting a deal with Matthew Weiner–it is nice to see that AMC has planned ahead to fill the gaps in their programming slate. The network has recently wrapped shooting on its six-hour mini-series remake of Read More
A year without a new play by Sir David Hare can’t be all bad—and so it happily proved.
Top of my list is the stunning, imaginative achievement of Gregory Burke’s Black Watch—the first docudrama about war I’ve seen to successfully turn reportage into art, and the first play about the Iraq war to tell Read More
Australian pop gal Kylie Minogue and Sir Ian McKellen, the bankable British thespian who recently starred in a production of King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, were named to Queen Elizabeth II’s New Year Honours list. Mr. McKellen was elevated to Companion of Honour, the order of 65 leading members of the arts, Read More
The achievement of Ian McKellen’s King Lear is that he’s the first I’ve seen to fully convey the horribleness of monstrous old age. At 68, the very fit Mr. McKellen needs all his phenomenal stamina to scale the peaks of the exhausting role. But was ever there a “ruin’d piece of nature” like this demented, Read More
I have very good news. Simon Russell Beale has unexpectedly taken over the role of King Arthur in that mad pleasure of a show, Monty Python’s Spamalot, and his smashing performance is a wonder to behold. It may even be the most amazing debut in a Broadway musical I’ve ever seen.
Mr. Beale is Read More
Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, from his own screenplay (in Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese with English subtitles), is quite simply an incomparably sublime work of art, a triumph of lyricism over narrative in the cinema, and the most exquisite homage to the beauty of women it has ever been my privilege to witness on the screen. Yet Read More
Notes toward enjoying August Strindberg’s grotesque tragicomedy or marital blood sport, Dance of Death, starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren as Edgar and Alice in perfect, abusive harmony:
You won’t want to miss these two great actors at the top of their game, that’s for sure. But my surprise in seeing the renowned play for Read More
