News

Michael C. Hall will headline a one-night night only reading of Will Eno's play Gnit, adapted from Henrik Ibsen's Peer GYNTMonday evening, June 20 at 7 pm at Csc 136 East 13th Street as part of the theater's First Look Festival Ibsen, presented in conjunction with the company current production of Peer Gynt, directed by John Doyle and runs through this Sunday, June 19.

Classic Stage Company, under the leadership of Artistic Director Brian Kulick and Managing Director Jeff Griffin, today announced that acclaimed actors and married couple Becky Ann Baker currently featured on Girls and Dylan Baker currently featured on The Americans have joined the cast of its upcoming production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, directed by Tony Award winner John Doyle, who becomes the company's new Artistic Director in July.

Off-Broadway's acclaimed Classic Stage Company today announced plans for its 2016-17 season, led by incoming Artistic Director John Doyle and Managing Director Jeff Griffin. Doyle, a Tony Award winner for Sweeney Todd and the director of Broadway's highly-praised new production of The Color Purple, assumes the artistic leadership of Csc beginning in July, succeeding Brian Kulick, who has led the company since 2003. For Csc, Doyle has directed Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Passion and Rodgers amp Hammerstein's Allegro, and later this season will direct Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt.

Brian Kulick will step down as the Artistic Director of Off-Broadway's acclaimed Classic Stage Company following the current 2015-16 season. Kulick will be succeeded by the company's current Associate Director, Tony Award-winner John Doyle. Doyle will assume the position in July of 2016. Kulick, who has led Classic Stage Company for twelve seasons, will direct two of the current season's mainstage productions Mother Courage and Her Children, starring Tonya Pinkins and Nathan the Wise, starring F. Murray Abraham. Doyle is directing the season's final offering, Peer Gynt.

Hannibal, Season 3, Episode 4, “Aperitivo”

Written by Nick Antosca and Bryan Fuller & Steve Lightfoot

Directed by Marc Jobst

Airs Thursdays at 10pm (Et) on NBC

Four episodes into season three, the reverberations of the season two finale are still being felt. Given the monumental nature of “Mizumono”, that feels appropriate, and the first trio of episodes of season three have dealt primarily with the Red Dinner’s emotional and psychological fallout for Hannibal and Will. These episodes have been full of dream imagery and projections, exploring the psychology of these characters and meditating upon their decisions and pasts through recurring visual motifs and stylish directorial flourishes more than dialogue or plot. With “Aperitivo”, that changes, giving audiences a much more concrete look at the fallout of season two for the characters left in Baltimore.

“Aperitivo” takes viewers through Hannibal’s victims one by one, starting with Chilton and Mason before moving on to Will,...

Trolls aren’t real, despite what some road signs in Norway might lead you to believe. They are mythological creatures in the stories of Norse folklore and fairy tales (such as “Three Billy Goats Gruff”) and stage plays featuring orchestral scores that are overused in movies, especially documentaries (“Peer Gynt”). Some of their origin comes through the telling of tall tales to explain geological formations around Scandinavia. Traditionally they’re gargantuan monsters who could be turned into mountains when exposed to sunlight. Other times they might be more human-size, because as with a lot of ancient, orally forwarded narratives, those of the trolls have changed organically over centuries. They could be any size, really, but one common trait they’ve all shared is that they’re ugly. In the movies, in particular, they’re a varied beast. Unlike easily defined mythological beings such as fairies and dwarves and vampires and dragons, trolls...

Twenty years ago, André Gregory gathered a group of great actors to rehearse Uncle Vanya; Louis Malle came in to film their work, almost as if he were shooting a documentary; and the result, Vanya on 42nd Street, was an astonishing fusion of theater and film—superb Chekhov, superb moviemaking. Gregory, Wallace Shawn, and Larry Pine have reunited for Henrik Ibsen’s A Master Builder, and, Malle being dead, Jonathan Demme has stepped into the breach. (The film is dedicated to Malle.) Demme doesn’t take a documentary approach, which I don’t think would work for this strange masterpiece—a play that marked the moment that Ibsen began to turn away from the naturalism of A Doll’s House and Ghosts and head back to the mythic, poetic realm of earlier epics like Brand and Peer Gynt. Gregory and Demme have turned A Master Builder into (pardon my invoking...

Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time for one reason: the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. Enjoy!

Special Mention:

Michael Jackson’s groundbreaking dance routines and unique vocals have influenced generations of musicians, dancers, and entertainers. He was one of entertainment’s greatest icons, and like most gifted individuals, he was always pushing boundaries, reinventing himself, and testing his limits. One of his biggest accomplishments was Thriller, a 14-minute...

Just as people might ask what we would like to see on our tombstone, so the more fatalistic among us might already be planning our last words. But last words don’t have to be all doom and gloom – they can be witty, profound, or just plain absurd.

Of course, it’s all a matter of opinions as to whether you want to go out with a laugh or with a tear. And there’s much debate about the authenticity of many last words, with Admiral Nelson’s “Kiss me, Hardy” being perhaps the most famously erroneous example (we’ll print the true one later). I’ve made every effort in this article to ensure that what people said is the truth, but I apologise in advance, to both you and them, if any of them turn out to be incorrect.

In each case I’ll provide a bit of...

Vivacious Irish actor best known for her role opposite Albert Finney in Tom Jones

The red-haired, vivacious and provocative Irish actor Joyce Redman, who has died aged 93, will for ever be remembered for her lubricious meal-time munching and swallowing opposite Albert Finney in Tony Richardson's 1963 film of Tom Jones. Eyes locked, lips smacked and jaws rotated as the two of them tucked into a succulent feast while eyeing up the afters. Sinking one's teeth into a role is one thing. This was quite another, and deliciously naughty, the mother of all modern mastication scenes.

Redman and Finney were renewing a friendship forged five years earlier when both appeared with Charles Laughton in Jane Arden's The Party at the New (now the Noël Coward) theatre. Redman was not blamed by the critic Kenneth Tynan for making nothing of her role as Laughton's wife. "Nothing," he said, "after all, will come of nothing.

Her mother was a celebrated Ellida. So was her sister. Is that why Joely Richardson is marking her return to the stage by playing Ibsen's difficult heroine?

One day last year, Joely Richardson was taken for lunch by Stephen Unwin. The artistic director of the Rose Theatre in Kingston, Surrey, wanted to discuss a role he had in mind for her – hoping to lure her back to British theatre after all the time she had spent on Us TV (Nip/Tuck) and in the movies (Anonymous, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).

"It quickly became clear," recalls Unwin, in the Rose's rehearsal room beside the Thames, "that the one I'd chosen wasn't going to be the right role. So we talked about what we might do instead. And I said, 'Well, there's Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, but you probably won't want to do that."

"And so I said,...

Famous for playing Tony Blair in three different films, as well as David Frost and Brian Clough, he is about to play Hamlet at the Young Vic. Yet the Welsh actor still remains practically anonymous

It is a source of unending amazement to me that so many celebrities regard an interview as an opportunity to boast about their brilliance, in the belief that this will convince readers they are brilliant. This is not a mistake Michael Sheen is in any danger of making.

The scruffy figure draws no stares or sideways glances when he arrives in the bar of the Young Vic theatre in central London. He looks smiley and unguarded, and so unlike a star that, for a split second, I panic that maybe I have greeted the wrong man. Sheen is famous for playing Tony Blair in three separate films, as well as David Frost in Frost/Nixon,...

Trolls are creatures of Scandinavian folklore, variously perceived as charmingly mischievous leprechaun-type figures (wooden toys dressed in folk costume are sold in gift shops) or as malevolent giants living in mountain caves (a famous example being the troll king in Ibsen's Peer Gynt). This funny, scary, highly individual horror flick in the "found footage" Blair Witch and Cloverfield style purports to be a documentary shot by a team of students investigating a series of strange killings in the Norwegian countryside. They stumble across a former naval commando, Hans (a brilliant, deadly serious performance by the comedian Otto Jespersen), who allows them to follow him around the country. In the manner of the special federal agents policing extraterrestrials in Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black pictures, he works for a secret government department charged with keeping trolls in their native areas and killing those who stray outside.

The troll lore Hans expounds is convincing,...

It was reported that director Barry Levinson and actor Al Pacino would reunite for the mobster film “Gotti: Three Generations.” It seems the pair will reunite for a different film first. Deadline is reporting that they will reunite in the movie adaptation of the Philip Roth novel “The Humbling.” The production will begin in the fall. Here is the book’s synopsis: Everything is over for Simon Axler. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, “are melted into air, into thin air.” When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. “Something fundamental has vanished.

Al Pacino is set to reteam with director Barry Levinson for a new film called The Humbling, which is based on a book by the same name written by Phillip Roth. The story centers on a character named Simon Axler played by Pacino, "a famous stage actor in decline who is revived when he retires to his upstate New York farmhouse and shacks up with a much younger woman." Levinson is currently on the hunt to cast the lead female character. It should be interested who they get, Pacino must be pretty excited to get some steamy screen time with a hot young actress.

The movie is scheduled to start shooting in the fall. Levinson recently finished a low budget horror film called The Bay, and after he is finished with this new film, he will start shooting Gotti: Three Generations, which Pacino will also have a role in. 

Here's...

It's musical chairs in key positions at British theatre, plus BBC Philharmonic cut short Japan tour, and Peter Lennon's rocky road

All change in theatreland

They're playing musical chairs at some of Britain's most creative playhouses – and at quite an interesting time for all our subsidised theatres, as the funding landscape changes. Josie Rourke's departure for the Donmar Warehouse leaves a vacancy at London's the Bush; meanwhile, Dominic Hill, artistic director at the Traverse in Edinburgh, is hopping over to run the Citizens theatre in Glasgow, where his talent for punchy reinvention of the classics (think of his production of Peer Gynt for the National Theatre of Scotland) ought to prove an asset in his bid to make the Citz "the most exciting and provocative theatre in Scotland". That leaves an intriguing vacancy at the Traverse – an extremely important theatre for its nurturing of the brilliant Scottish playwrighting scene,...

Actor best known as the private detective Frank Marker in the television series Public Eye

For 10 years, the actor Alfred Burke, who has died aged 92, starred as the downbeat private detective Frank Marker in the popular television series Public Eye (1965-75). The character was intended as a British rival to Raymond Chandler's American gumshoe Philip Marlowe. Tough, unattached and self-sufficient, Marker could take a beating in the service of his often wealthy clients without quitting. "Marker wasn't exciting, he wasn't rich," Burke said. "He could be defined in negatives."

An ABC TV press release introduced the character as a "thin, shabby, middle-aged man with a slightly grim sense of humour and an aura of cynical incorruptibility. His office is a dingy south London attic within sound of Clapham Junction. He can't afford a secretary, much less an assistant, and when he needs a car, he hires a runabout from the local garage.

Playwrights and actors do it with words. Choreographers and dancers—at least the good ones—do it without uttering a word. Creating characters, no matter how you do it, comes from intelligent, thoughtful research and analysis; thorough preparation; and a willingness to keep delving.Nancy Raffa, currently ballet mistress for American Ballet Theatre, is appearing onstage in "The Sleeping Beauty." Despite her tiny—even for a dancer—frame, she's not dancing the title role, also known as Aurora. She is dancing a role that, for the past many decades, has been danced by men. She is the witch, Carabosse, who crashes the christening and curses Aurora with the prediction that when Aurora is a teenager, she will prick her finger and die. Speaking by phone with Back Stage, Raffa eloquently and in detail describes creating this fascinating character through dance."The Sleeping Beauty," presented by American Ballet Theatre, runs July...

Depictions of the afterlife are infernally difficult to get right on screen, with a vision of heaven more often provoking laughter than awe. Intriguingly, those rare movies that manage to transcend this perennial pitfall often settle for strangely down-to-earth solutions. Think of Powell and Pressburger's sublime 1946 drama A Matter of Life and Death, in which David Niven's doomed airman pictures heaven as a fully functioning celestial bureaucracy replete with receptionists, waiting rooms, escalators and courtrooms. Crucially, although the film was in colour, the directors chose to shoot the heavenly sequences in black and white, a brilliantly counterintuitive move that somehow made the intangible seem all the more familiar. Fifty years later, director Danny Boyle would take a leaf out of Powell and Pressburger's good book when making A Life Less Ordinary, which painted a monochrome-inflected picture of heaven as a downtown cop shop peopled by earthy angels who seemed...

DVD Playhouse—April 2010

By

Allen Gardner

Ride With The Devil (Criterion) Ang Lee’s revisionist take on the Civil War is awash in moral ambiguity, along with some stunning cinematography, production design, and fine performances. Set during the Kansas-Missouri border war, Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich star as two friends who join up with the Confederate-sympathizing Bushwhackers, finding an odd ally in a former slave (Jeffrey Wright). While it’s fascinating to see America’s bloodiest conflict through the eyes of a foreigner, thereby allowing much of the previously mentioned ambiguity a certain latitude, the film never loses the bad taste it leaves for one simple reason: it asks us, the audience, to side with not just the Confederates, but some of the lowest trash that made up the dregs, and the fringes, of the movement. Big points for audacity, but snake eyes on the story itself. Singer Jewel is impressive in her film debut.

A stark adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel brings out all its harrowing yet ultimately life-enhancing qualities, writes Philip French

In the past, some of it not too distant, people the world over have thought during times of plague and famine that they were living in the last days of our planet. For most of us today, such visions are of a future where a nuclear holocaust, global warming or some other man-created calamity threaten the imminent end of life on earth. In his masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman brought together both experiences by projecting the nuclear angst of the 1950s (a major cinematic subject at the time) on to a Sweden of the Middle Ages visited by the black death. Earlier, the 1936 film based on Hg Wells's Things To Come foresaw a world war in 1940 that would return Britain to a dark age of tribes battling for depleted resources.

Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre is staging an elaborate new theatrical version of Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece Jane Eyre for the holiday season! The production opens on December 3rd in the Charity Randall Theatre at the Stephen Foster Memorial in Oakland, and runs through December 20th.

Young Jane Eyre is abandoned by cruel relatives and left to her fate at the harsh and imposing Lowood School. She grows into a plain but intelligent young woman, and travels to the mysterious Thornfield Hall to work as governess. The Byronic master of the gothic mansion, Edward Fairfax Rochester, sweeps her off her feet -- but a dark secret from his past threatens to tear them apart. Will true love overcome all obstacles? Written in 1847, Jane's inner strength and determination to overcome adversity make her one of the most endearing heroines of classic literature.

A family-friendly adaptation by Pict Associate Artist Alan Stanford...

Gorilla Rep will present the World Première of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt with a new translation & adaptation by Laura Lynn MacDonald, on Thursdays & Saturdays, from August 6 - 29 at Summit Rock in Central Park. The production will be directed by Gorilla Rep Artistic Director, Christopher Carter Sanderson with original music by Andre-Philippe Mistier. There will be no intermission, but audiences will be able to leave & rejoin the performance in progress.

Actress Maxine Cooper Gomberg has died at her home in Los Angeles. She was 84.

Best known for playing fictional private eye Mickey Spillane's secretary in 1955 film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly, Gomberg - then known as Maxine Cooper - was also a social activist.

She died of natural causes on 4 April.

Moviemaker Robert Aldrich cast the actress in Kiss Me Deadly after seeing her in a Los Angeles theatrical production of Peer Gynt. She also had small roles in the director's films Autumn Leaves and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?...

On January 26th, production began on the UK indie, Straw Man. After an intense two-week shoot, the film wrapped on Sunday, February 8th, and has been in post-production ever since.

Fango's new International contributor, "Penny B. Dreadful" recently caught up with actor Leslie Simpson, who portrays The Lone Man in the film. The busy actor, known for his role as Private Terry Milburn in Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers, has also appeared as a creepy Crawler in The Descent, along with a role in Marshall's Doomsday, and can be seen in Hammer's Beyond The Rave. Leslie took took time out to update us on the status of Straw Man, along with some of his other upcoming projects.

Penny B. Dreadful: Thanks for joining us, Leslie. First off, what is Straw Man, who's behind the project, and how did you get involved?

Leslie Simpson: On the surface Straw Man is...

Modern dancer/choreographer Pearl Lang has died, aged 87.

Lang, who took over a string of roles from dance pioneer Martha Graham, passed away on Tuesday in Manhattan, New York after suffering a heart attack while recuperating from hip surgery.

After concluding her studies at the University of Chicago, Lang moved to New York in 1941, when she was accepted into the Martha Graham Dance Company and created parts in several of its productions. She later took over Graham's own role in works including El Penitente, Appalachian Spring, Letter to the World and Clytemnestra.

Lang was a member of the company until 1952, when she founded the Pearl Lang Dance Theater.

In addition to her contributions to modern dance, she performed in several musicals throughout the 1940s and '50s, including One Touch of Venus, Carousel, Finian's Rainbow, Allegro and a revival of Peer Gynt, starring Academy Award-nominated actor John Garfield.

Lang also choreographed for the Dutch National Ballet, the Boston Ballet and the Batsheva Dance Company of Israel, and taught dance at prestigious universities including Yale, the Juilliard School and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, where she last taught in December.

She is survived by her husband, actor Joseph Wiseman, two nieces and a nephew.

Gates Of Gold, a new comedic drama by Frank McGuinness will hold its American Premiere at 59E59 Theaters. Previews begin Thursday, February 19, 2009. The official opening will be on Sunday, March 1, 2009. Produced by Artists Theatre Group, Inc., Warren Baker and Sally Jacobs, the production is directed by Kent Paul. Written by acclaimed Irish author Frank McGuinness, who earned a Tony Award nomination for Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, and received a Tony Award for best revival in 1997 for A Doll's House, Gates Of Gold is an acerbic duel between Hilton Edwards and Miche?l MacLiamm?ir, fashionable and eloquent theatrical trailblazers who founded Dublin's Gate Theatre. Gates Of Gold is funny, witty, deeply moving and a vibrant celebration of art, love, and, finally, life itself. This production marks the American premiere of Gates Of Gold, which starred Alan Howard in Dublin and William Gaunt in the West End. Frank McGuinness was born in Buncrana,...

The Public Theater (Artistic Director Oskar Eustis; Executive Director Andrew D. Hamingson) announced initial casting for Christopher Durang's Why Torture Is Wrong, And The People Who Love Them and Craig Lucas's The Singing Forest. Nicholas Martin will direct Why Torture Is Wrong... with a cast of seven that includes Amir Arison, David Aaron Baker, Kristine Nielsen and John Pankow. Mark Wing-Davey will direct a cast of nine that includes Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis in The Singing Forest. The cast for Why Torture Is Wrong..., which runs March 24 to April 26, will include Amir Arison (Queens Boulevard at Signature), David Aaron Baker (Dead Man's Cell Phone at Playwrights Horizons), Kristine Nielsen (Crazy Mary at Playwrights Horizons), and John Pankow (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at The New Group). Early casting for The Singing Forest, running April 7 to May 17, will feature Olympia Dukakis (Academy Award winner for Moonstruck) as Loe Reiman.

By Aaron Hillis

Joachim Trier's mother was a documentarian, his father a sound department tech, his grandfather a Cannes-selected filmmaker, and his distant cousin Lars von Trier, so is it any surprise that the feature debut of this Copenhagen-born, Norwegian-based director has already turned out to be one of the year's best imports? An invigoratingly kinetic punk rock ode to young intellectual camaraderie that's as funny and sexy as it is haunting and sad, "Reprise" knocks chronology and narrative structure on their standardized asses to detail the friendship between twentysomething writers Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner) and Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie). Beginning with the two dreaming rebels standing at a mailbox about to ship their first novels to publishers, "Reprise" digressively dazzles in the moments long after, way before, and several hops in between as one becomes famous, the other hustles in his shadow, and the pressures of reality bring them...