| re: LONDON Last Week (Very long and maybe a spoiler or two) | |
| Last Edit: Delvino 08:05 am EDT 10/09/23 | |
| Posted by: Delvino 08:02 am EDT 10/09/23 | |
| In reply to: LONDON Last Week (Very long and maybe a spoiler or two) - sergius 08:26 pm EDT 10/08/23 | |
|
|
|
| Especially intrigued to get the report on the new Semmelweis. I saw the ill-fated Semmelweiss (different spelling) by Howard Sackler at the Kennedy Center in my youth, this very week, October 1978. In three acts and 19 scenes, running just under three hours, it was, to say the least, ambitious. But to my young eyes and ears, a great, harrowing story, if anything almost too well told. It had a self-annotating quality. But I never forget its power, and that production, starring Colin Blakely in the exhausting title part, Lee Richardson, Stefan Gierasch, Patricia Routledge, Barton Heyman, Maureen Silliman. It received lukewarm press and never arrived. I could never shake it, and pleased to learn that this new telling seems to have solved the storytelling problems in the subject's DNA. For what it's worth, this trip and the Private Lives mention offered me time travel: I saw Maggie Smith in the Coward play in June 1973 in London. I'd only seen Brodie, and I'll never forget her Amanda, opposite John Standing. I've never been able to hear anyone else's and recreate the experience. It's a devilishly hard play to nail, its zingers are well known but it has a lot of talky ground to cover to highlight them. Without an explosion at its center - which Smith was - it can feel almost staid and self-indulgent. And as noted, not all that funny. It remains my introduction to Smith, still a career defining performance. |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: LONDON Last Week (Very long and maybe a spoiler or two) - sf 12:19 pm EDT 10/09/23 |
| Next: | re: LONDON Last Week (Very long and maybe a spoiler or two) - KingSpeed 02:27 am EDT 10/09/23 |
| Thread: | |
Time to render: 0.100135 seconds.