home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- <text>
- <title>
- (1982) Theater
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1982 Highlights
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- January 3, 1983
- THEATER
- BEST OF '82
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>Cats. Some adore it. Some deplore it. The lyrics of T.S. Eliot,
- the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber and the spectacular stage
- effects of Director Trevor Nunn and Designer-Costumer John
- Napier have made Cats a conversation piece and a flaming
- megahit.
- </p>
- <p>The Dining Room. Clear-eyed, touching and buoyantly funny, A.R.
- Gurney Jr.'s drama compassionately graphs the decline of the
- Wasp, a breed apart.
- </p>
- <p>Extremities. William Mastrosimone's menanacing melodrama about
- rape brought a low-voltage year to a high-voltage end.
- </p>
- <p>Foxfire. Those who hew to goodness and revere the customs of
- their forebears are rarely met with on a New York stage. Here
- they are in this tale of Appalachian tenacity, fashioned by
- Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn. And who better to memorialize
- their griefs and joys than Cronyn and Jessica Tandy?
- </p>
- <p>Good. How does a liberal-minded German classics professor
- become Eichmann's right-hand man at Auschwitz? In C.P. Taylor's
- play, the gifted Alan Howard makes the insidious slope to hell
- plausible and harrowing.
- </p>
- <p>"Master Harold"...and the Boys. To each of his dramas, South
- Africa's Athol Fugard brings a tormented conscience, a touch of
- the poet and scalding honesty.
- </p>
- <p>Monday After the Miracle. This is a tale of fiercely kindled
- passions and the bittersweet bondage of entwined destinies. It
- takes up the saga of Helen Keller, Annie Sullivan and John Macy,
- the man Annie wed, some 20 years after the events in Playwright
- William Gibson's earlier The Miracle Worker. Karen Allen, Jane
- Alexander and William Converse-Robert irradiate their roles.
- </p>
- <p>Plenty. With envenomed wit and mocking disillusionment, modern
- British playwrights have sung an elegy in the graveyard of lost
- Empire. David Hare has added a tantalizing ingredient: an
- infernally mysterious woman whose moods and manners displace
- each other as if she were trying on hats. Kate Nelligan brings
- her to effulgent life.
- </p>
- <p>A Soldier's Play. Charles Fuller's drama of tensile strength
- about a World War II black outfit stationed in Louisiana that
- gets involved in a racial whodunit. The central character,
- brilliantly portrayed by Adolph Caesar, is a black Regular Army
- noncom who is as tough as bully beef.
- </p>
- <p>Torch Song Trilogy. Son of a Brooklyn handkerchief maker,
- Playwright Harvey Fierstein began working as a drag queen in
- East Village clubs at 16. As he enacts the key role, he vividly
- evokes a mode of life that is alternately hilarious and
- heart-wrenching.</p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-