Marieann Meringolo’s rich mellow slightly jazzy alto voice presents Michel Legrand’s romantically charged music with almost theatrical intensity. Legrand, famous for music for such films as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Yentl, needs someone like Meringolo to provide the necessary drama to his muse.
Feb 27, 2012 – A new documentary, The Wall Street Conspiracy by Kristina Leigh Copeland of Brown Saddle Films, has its premiere in New York March 1st. It exposes the massive scam of naked short selling.
I hated this 1956 play by John Osborne, one of the angry young men of England’s 1950s. That era was a bad time for women in the U.S. and according to the production directed by Sam Gold for the Roundabout Theatre Company, it was true in spades in England.
This pretentious play by the otherwise talented playwright Theresa Rebeck gives writers a bad name. Four wanna be novelists fork over $5000 to get ten lessons from Leonard (Alan Rickman), a failed writer turned book editor, who must represent every nasty, self-centered writer or editor Rebeck ever met.
This could almost be about any wealthy family, except it is not, because they are black. The Levays (we meet the father and kids but not the wife) are rich, because Dad is a neurosurgeon. So they’ve got a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. In case you doubted his wealth, there is a Romare Bearden on the wall.
The irony of Vivian Bearing, a profession of John Donne’s poetry, fighting a futile battle against Ovarian cancer, is caught in Donne’s most famous work, Death be not proud. It is a challenge that says mortals will cheat death through eternal life. Pulling an IV pole or sitting in a hospital bed, a red baseball cap covering a scalp made bald from chemotherapy, Cynthia Nixon is cynical and acerbic as the 47-year-old professor. She expertly portrays this unflinching woman’s struggle to keep her soul.
Playwright Athol Fugard is most known for distilling into intimate personal stories the physical and spiritual struggles against apartheid in South Africa. In this engrossing play he plies the same theme, but this time it’s not about blacks and coloreds, but about women and non-conformists. A society that keeps the former in thrall will without too much difficulty stomp on the latter. And Fugard asserts that they have to fight back as much as the racial victims.
