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edjames

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  1. From the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. "Dr. Handsome", real name Dr. James Hamblin, explains the virus outbreak to correspondent Bootsie.
  2. Telecharge and Ticketmaster will automatically process refunds to cancelled shows. Here's Michael Reidel's NYPost column on the Broadway shutdown: https://nypost.com/2020/03/12/the-show-will-go-on-how-broadway-will-survive-coronavirus/ The show will go on: How Broadway will survive coronavirus With the coronavirus outbreak, Broadway is facing its worst crisis since 9/11. But it got a lifeline, albeit a thin one, from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who yesterday prohibited gatherings of more than 500 people. That ruling allows Broadway producers, whose shows have been shut down through April 12, to collect insurance money. The payments won’t cover everything — and many shows may close or not even open — but as one producer said, “It’s something.” As the week began, Broadway seemed determined to stick to the old adage, “The show must go on.” But as the virus — and the panic — spread, producers were shocked to see so many theatergoers clamoring for refunds or new dates. (Telecharge will automatically refund purchased tickets for performances between March 12 and April 12.) After President Trump announced that he was prohibiting flights from Europe to America, the bottom fell out. Tourists buy nearly 65 percent of the tickets sold on Broadway, especially in the spring and summer. Until the coronavirus abates, very few people will be traveling anywhere. Actors Equity, which represents Broadway performers, advocated for a shutdown. An actor in “Moulin Rouge!” stayed home with a fever, and everybody backstage was fearful of his condition. It’s not been determined if he has the virus. Broadway producers met Thursday at noon to decide what to do, and everybody was “calm,” a source said. The producers realized Broadway had to close, but believe the industry can bounce back once the fear has abated. Broadway will go dark tonight amid coronavirus panic. Whether some of its new shows will survive remains to be seen. A few shows in previews don’t have enough cash reserves to see them through this storm. Tracy Letts’ new play “The Minutes,” which was to open on Sunday, was rumored to be in trouble. But a spokesman insists: “‘The Minutes’ will reopen on April 13.” Martin McDonagh’s “Hangmen,” which won great reviews when it played off-Broadway, was also in previews and could find itself in trouble. But its producer Robert Fox says: “We will be looking at the situation, and if there is potential to reopen, we will reopen along with the other plays that are in the same situation.” There were rumors that Broadway’s longest running show — “The Phantom of the Opera” — may have to close down for good. After 32 years, it’s dependent on the tourist trade, which will be thin for the next few months. But Andrew Lloyd Webber tells me that he has no intention of closing it. There are “huge plans to remarket and refresh it,” says Lloyd Webber, who plans to keep it open another 30 years. Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker were due to begin previews Friday in “Plaza Suite.” They both got sick with flu in Boston during the out-of-town tryout, and were understandably worried about opening during the coronavirus outbreak. (Broderick’s sister was just diagnosed with the virus.) But they’re both troopers and have let it be known that when Broadway is up and running again, they’ll be ready to perform. At the end of the day, that spirit is what will save Broadway. Not only has the Great White Way weathered 9/11, but it also survived the Great Depression, the financial crises of the 1970s and 2008 and another virus more deadly than coronavirus: AIDS. That one wiped out untold numbers of theater people. Broadway will come back, one press agent says, because “we’re good at staging comebacks.” And when it does, I see Patti LuPone, the star of the upcoming revival of “Company,” Broderick, Parker, Hugh Jackman and the casts of “Moulin Rouge!,” “The Book of Mormon,” “Wicked,” “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Hamilton” leading the charge. If only Elaine Stritch could be there to lead everybody in “I’m Still Here,” Broadway’s true anthem, now and forever.
  3. I saw it last year at the Atlantic Theater Co off-Broadway, with the original London cast, and I enjoyed it. I will be seeing it again.
  4. Just in case...I'd make sure I understood the cancellation policy. Also, check your travel insurance and credit card policies regarding trip cancellation/interruption. I wouldn't go and would put if off to another date in the future.
  5. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/arts/olivier-awards-juliet-salesman.html ‘& Juliet,’ a Jukebox Musical, Leads Olivier Award Nominations Though panned by critics, a show based on the songs of the pop producer Max Martin is up for nine awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys. LONDON — “& Juliet,” a musical that uses the songs of the chart-topping pop producer Max Martin to retell “Romeo & Juliet,” dominated the nominations for this year’s Olivier Awards — the British equivalent of the Tonys — that were announced in London on Tuesday. The musical, which includes songs by Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, secured nine nominations, despite reviews that were mostly lukewarm at best. Matt Wolf, in a review for The New York Times, said that “& Juliet” made very little plot go a long way, before adding: “I confess to hardly being the preferred demographic for a show that clearly wants to rival the Broadway-bound ‘Six’ in the pop-anthem sweepstakes.” “It’s essentially glorified panto,” wrote Dominic Cavendish wrote in The Daily Telegraph, referring to the campy British theater spectacles that popular around Christmastime. “Whether it outlasts the panto season, that is the question,” he added. The nine nominations for “& Juliet,” including best new musical, put it one ahead of Trevor Nunn’s revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2018 before transferring to the West End. “Musically, geopolitically, emotionally, this Fiddler raises the roof,” wrote Mark Lawson in The Guardian. The nonmusical categories were led by two plays: a revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” starring Wendell Pierce, and a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” at the Duke of York’s Theater. Both gained five nominations. “Death of a Salesman” was expected to do well, having won praise from critics. Directed by Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell, it reimagined Willy Loman, the doomed title character, as a black man in a white man’s world. “What’s most surprising,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review for The New York Times, “is how vital it is.” “If this ‘Salesman’ had been retooled to be solely about race, it would shrink and oversimplify Miller’s play,” Brantley added. “Instead, race expands and exacerbates Willy’s suppressed fears that the world regards him as outcast, a loser, a clown.” Pierce was nominated for best actor, and will compete with James McAvoy, nominated for “Cyrano de Bergerac” at the Playhouse Theater, Andrew Scott for “Present Laughter” at The Old Vic, and Toby Jones for “Uncle Vanya” at the Harold Pinter Theater. The best actress category sees Phoebe Waller-Bridge nominated for a revival of “Fleabag.” She is up against Hayley Atwell for “Rosmersholm,” Sharon D. Clarke for “Death of a Salesman” and Juliet Stevenson for “The Doctor” at the Almeida Theatre, which transfers to the Duke of York’s Theater in April. The best new play category includes nominations for Lucy Prebble’s “A Very Expensive Poison,” about a Russian assassination on British soil, and Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,”about Jewish life in Vienna, at Wyndham’s Theater through June 13. They will compete against Robert Icke’s “The Doctor” and “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman novel. The winners are to be announced in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London on April 5.
  6. Well, they did get everyone's attention and there's been a lot of buzz about this production. Not unlike last year's production of Oklahoma. Today's NYTimes talks about the "new" choreography: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/theater/revivals-broadway.html
  7. Perhaps I should have said "happier note?" Yes, alcohol, drugs and eventually TB did her in. You don't always have to stick to the hardcore facts. It doesn't have to be strictly factual. Its show biz and liberties are often taken. In this case the show "could have" ended the show when she returns to work with Mack Sennett and they "go off into the sunset..." Just venting...but in a related Broadway experience... Right now I am so pissed off at Telecharge that I'm fuming. I've had problems with the site since yesterday afternoon and without fixing my login problem (they keep sending me a temp password email!). It doesn't fix the issue. They offered to let me purchase over the phone but wouldn't waive the service charge. When they finally did offer to waive the service charge, they wouldn't refund it until after I saw the show in mid-April. I told them to forget it and I'll take a run to the box office. The Telecharge manager wouldn't even get on the phone line. Poor customer service!!!!
  8. The performance last night was good. The score is sublime and proves just how genius Jerry really was. The acting was OK, but by the end of the show, you understand why it doesn't work. They have been tweaking the script for decades. It ends unhappily, and I think that's a major problem. People don't want to go to a musical comedy and end up depressed. Shame. Would have loved to have seen Robert Preston tackle the lead role.
  9. Here is a recap of major media reviews: https://www.broadwayworld.com/reviews/West-Side-Story
  10. MSN says: “West Side Story,” one of the most beloved and enduring Broadway musicals of all time, has often been seen on the Great White Way since it premiered more than sixty years ago, but never quite like this. The revolutionary musical has been reimagined in equally revolutionary fashion this season." https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/emmys/e2-80-98west-side-story-e2-80-99-reviews-radically-reimagined-production-e2-80-98mortally-divided-e2-80-99-but-e2-80-98bold-e2-80-99/ar-BB10fhkN
  11. LA Times says "kinetic, bloody and modern to the core." and "this intrepid reworking of “West Side Story” marks more than a return to form for Van Hove. The production, which set its official opening for Thursday at the Broadway Theatre, restores the vitality to a musical that can seem ersatz and lumbering when treated like a museum piece." https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-02-20/ivo-van-hove-west-side-story-broadway-review
  12. Alas, closing notice for March 15 has been posted. Shame, a truly great play. Broadway’s ‘The Inheritance’ to Close on March 15 Acclaimed in London, the two-part play about gay culture and the legacy of AIDS drew a chillier response in New York, where it is set. “The Inheritance,” an ambitious two-part play exploring contemporary gay life, will end its Broadway run on March 15 after a twisty journey that saw the show soar in London but sink in New York. The play, written by Matthew Lopez and directed by Stephen Daldry, was inspired by E.M. Forster’s masterful novel “Howards End,” and similarly explores issues of class and real estate through the intersecting relationships of a small group of people. In “The Inheritance,” which is set in and around New York City, the intergenerational relationships are shadowed by differing experiences of the AIDS epidemic. The play, which began previews Sept. 27 and opened Nov. 17, is presented in two parts, each running nearly 3 hours and 15 minutes. At the time of its closing, there will have been a total of 46 previews and 138 regular performances (each part is counted as a single performance). The play, with Tom Kirdahy, Sonia Friedman and Hunter Arnold as lead producers, was capitalized for about $9.1 million, according to a spokesman, and will close at a loss. It opened in New York to mixed reviews, and struggled at the box office; during the week that ended Feb. 16 it grossed $345,984, which is just 33 percent of its potential, and played to houses that were only half full.
  13. Alas, another troubled musical at Encores. This review by Laura Collins-Hughes in today's NYTimes revisits this revival. Despite the troubled book, the music is a highlight. I'm seeing it tonight. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/theater/mack-and-mabel-review.html
  14. A rather "tepid" opening night review by Ben Brantley in the NYTimes. I'm seeing it in about 3 weeks, so we'll see. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/theater/west-side-story-review-sharks-vs-jets-vs-video.html
  15. The love of my life and I went to Radio City last night (Valentine's Day) and saw the Josh Groban Radio City Music Hall concert. As usual, Josh was great but ideally we could have done with a little less yak, yak, yak and more singing. Josh will be "in residency" at Radio City this year. Josh had two special guest join him last night. The first, downtown diva, Brigette Everett, as usual, left me cold. I don't understand her appeal and her performance last night was stupid. The second, however, was just the opposite. A young, twenty-something handsome cellist who goes by the stage name "Eyeglasses." According to Josh's introduction, he is a street musician here in NYC and frequently plays on the subway. But, he also is a second year medical student at MT. Sinai and majors in Ophthalmology (hence the name "eyeglasses") Well worth looking out for. Trust me, very handsome and very talented! He has a number of very good YouTube videos: https://www.facebook.com/EyeglassesStringMusic/photos/pcb.2680122388761509/2680122262094855/?type=3&theater
  16. TDF is a wonderful organization, but tickets are assigned by the box office and on more than one occasion I've sat in the last row of the theater. Sometimes it works just the opposite and I've been center orchestra. I think it depends on the individual theater box office, and the demand at an individual performance. The worst theaters for TDf seats seem to be, for me, The Hudson theater, and the Helen Hayes. It's the luck of the draw. Because I am a huge Laurie Metcalf fan, I bought a ticket online last month and I'm seeing it up close on April 1 (yeah, I know it's April Fools Day!). Really looking forward to it. I had hoped to see Eddie Izzatd, but Rupert Everett sounds intriguing. And, as always, Russell Tovey is nice eye candy.
  17. Sunday's NYT has an article featuring four of the swans and how they were inspired to preform in this productin: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/arts/dance/matthew-bourne-swan-lake.html
  18. Sunday's NYT has an article featuring four of the swans and how they were inspired to preform in this productin: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/arts/dance/matthew-bourne-swan-lake.html
  19. As expected this production was thrilling. Every time I see it I am left in awe. The choreography, the cast, the sets and the costumes make this a spectacular production. The audience loved it and there were repeated curtain bows. The lead dancers are on a rotation schedule. I saw Tom Broderick, as the Prince and Matthew Ball, as the Swan. Both were absolutely terrific! Also worth mentioning are Katrinia Lyndon, as the Girlfriend, in a funny and almost steal-stealing performance, and Nicole Kabera, as the cold and distant Queen. The supporting cast of dancers are wonderful As a tale of homo-erotic love, this show hits the mark. The young Prince is besotted with the Swan/Stranger and his fantasies are realized in dramatic and thrilling dance sequences. The cast works hard. The swans (all gorgeously buff and muscular) are drenched in sweat by the end of the performance. It was another great evening of Matthew Bourne's genius. I am seriously thinking of getting another ticket.
  20. NYTimes review was good: Review: Camp and Compassion in ‘The Confession of Lily Dare’ Charles Busch’s mash-up of mother-love weepies finds both pathos and hilarity in the tough talk of Hollywood divas. For all their freedoms and frank carnality, the movies of Hollywood’s pre-Code era — roughly 1929 to 1934 — were often about sacrifice. A woman’s sacrifice, to be sure: her honor in exchange for a man’s, her happiness for her child’s. As the Great Depression took grip, such stories taught America to reframe deprivation as duty, just as Hollywood, entering the sound age, was teaching itself how to speak. One result of the coincidence was the emergence of a new kind of actress, emoting vividly in a stagy accent acquired somewhere between Bryn Mawr and Broadway. Those clipped tones and eccentric pronunciations eventually became part of the drag vocabulary — and they certainly are part of the joy of “The Confession of Lily Dare,” Charles Busch’s delicious mash-up of pre-Code weepies that opened on Wednesday at the Cherry Lane Theater. Only when spoken in the manner of a woman fudging her origins could words like “feminine” (fem-i-neen) and “avalanche” (ah-vuh-lonzh) become such pungent punch lines. Yet Busch, himself a feminine avalanche — and a reluctant “drag legend” — doesn’t really impersonate Ruth Chatterton, Miriam Hopkins, Helen Hayes and the other stars who played harlots, murderesses and mothers forced to give up their children in movies like “Madame X” (1929), “ ” (1930), “ ” (1931) and “ ” (1932). Nor when Busch adds bits of Mae West, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford into the mix does he bind himself to the style of any one of them. Instead, playing Lily at various ages and in various predicaments, he offers something of a group portrait of these divas, always hovering at the midpoint between spoof and homage. Beyond the externals that echo each woman in particular roles — the accents, the gestures, the hairstyles and gowns — there is an insider’s bemused love of them all. So, too, with genre. “The Confession of Lily Dare” is not based on any one mother-love film but rather, it seems, on a hundred. The turn-of-the-20th-century plot naturally begins with an orphan, Lily, whose mother is killed in an ah-vuh-lonzh. After showing up at the San Francisco home of her only remaining relative — Rosalie Mackintosh, a tough-as-nails madam (Jennifer Van Dyck) — she befriends the help: Mickey, a gay piano player (Kendal Sparks); Emmy Lou, a plucky prostitute (Nancy Anderson); and Louis, an upstanding bookkeeper (Christopher Borg). Louis is not upstanding for long; after getting Lily pregnant, he promptly dies in the 1906 earthquake. To support her fatherless baby girl, Lily appeals to Blackie Lambert (Howard McGillin), who describes himself with a twinkle as “a shady character from a once prominent family who adds a veneer of class to whatever room he’s in.” He remakes Lily as Mandalay, a cabaret sensation whose big number is a spot-on Dietrich pastiche (by Tom Judson) called “Pirate Joe.” But before long Mandalay winds up in jail, taking the rap for Blackie over the theft of some diamond earrings. I hardly need explain how the baby, Louise, is adopted by a pair of wealthy San Franciscans, and how Lily, now going by Treasure Jones, reinvents herself post-prison as a madam like her aunt, but kinder. (She scrapbooks.) Suffice it to say that when Louise (Van Dyck again) grows up to be an opera star, Lily refuses to ruin the girl’s career by revealing her besmirched maternity, even unto death. Still, mother and daughter are somehow bound: When Louise cannot find in herself the required sensuality to play the courtesan Violetta in “La Traviata,” Lily, in a marvelous double lip-sync to the aria “Sempre libera,” “teaches” it to her telepathically. Still, mother and daughter are somehow bound: When Louise cannot find in herself the required sensuality to play the courtesan Violetta in “La Traviata,” Lily, in a marvelous double lip-sync to the aria “Sempre libera,” “teaches” it to her telepathically. (The apt costumes for everyone else are by Rebecca Townsend.) In the same way, the multiple roles that some cast members play (though Anderson and McGillin are perfect in just one role each) function as both thrift and humor. Borg, for instance, is not just Louis the accountant but a pervy German baron, an Italian vocal coach and an Irish priest with a taste for opera. Having to distinguish them from one another pushes each to riotous extremes. Where Busch never stints is in the diamond precision of the overripe patois, studded with boneyards, gin blossoms, the clap and the “agony box.” (That's a piano.) As Treasure Jones, Lily refuses to let her doughboy clients get drunk: “We owe it to their mothers to protect their livers.” And awaiting her final fate she imagines the shame she might have brought on her daughter had the truth been revealed. “My mother a bordello madam. My mother a murderess. My mother … a cabaret performer.” That’s the Busch touch: mordant and winking ( ) yet oddly, genuinely moving. If he is unafraid of the clichés of disowned genres, and inhabits so lovingly the women who uttered them, perhaps that’s because they actually had more to say than the dismissive term “weepies” (or, for that matter, “camp”) implies. Turns out that sacrifice is something we really did need to learn. Who’s weeping now? The Confession of Lily Dare Tickets Through March 5 at Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, primarystages.org. Running time: 2 hours. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/theater/confession-of-lily-dare-review-charles-busch.html
  21. Seeing this ballet on Friday evening. Center orch seat. This will be the fourth time I've seen Matthew's Swan Lake! Highly recommended.
  22. I dunno, maybe Jessie Green was in a lousy mood, but I expected a better NYT review. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/theater/grand-horizons-review.html Review: In ‘Grand Horizons,’ Marriage Is a Long-Running Farce Bess Wohl’s new play puts a Neil Simonesque spin on the story of a couple considering divorce after 50 years. To call “Grand Horizons” one of the brightest shows to hit Broadway in years is not to tout its intelligence, which flickers. Rather, I mean that it is blindingly lit, no doubt in deference to the theatrical wisdom that defines comedy as what dies in the dark. And, boy, does “Grand Horizons” want to sell itself as comedy. Not witty comedy with its verbal arabesques, nor intellectual comedy with its Paris Review name-checks, nor meta-comedy with its scrambled plotlines — but the vanilla kind that once dominated commercial theater. It’s not entirely meant as praise to say that this Second Stage production is a big-laugh, blue-joke, bourgeois lark of the type Neil Simon mastered until the times mastered himand the genre petered out. There’s a reason it did, and perhaps what the playwright Bess Wohl is attempting in “Grand Horizons,” which opened on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a last-ditch act of reclamation: a boulevard comedy for a cul-de-sac age. She has certainly furnished the play with all the original equipment. For starters, there’s the zingy premise: Over dinner one night, Nancy, a retired librarian approaching 80, turns to Bill, her husband of 50 years, and calmly announces that she wants a divorce. “All right,” he answers, continuing to eat as the audience roars. That Nancy is played by Jane Alexander, and Bill by James Cromwell — both actors with heavy résumés — suggests something darker may be in store. So does the occasional sound of gunshots seeping through the thin walls of the cookie-cutter house in the retirement community that gives the play its sarcastic title. That noise turns out to be coming from a television next door; it is merely misdirection like “Grand Horizons” as a whole, whose lunge at gravitas is too little, too late. At least in part, that’s because Wohl and the director, Leigh Silverman, so overplay the sitcom style at the start. Following Nancy’s declaration and Bill’s acquiescence, their sons, Ben and Brian, descend in a flurry of this-isn’t-happening hysteria. Ben (Ben McKenzie) is the stereotypical firstborn, overburdened and bossy; Brian (Michael Urie) the stereotypical baby, overindulged and whiny. Both insist that people so nearly dead as their parents have no business splitting up. “How much else even is there?” Ben sputters. “Grand Horizons” is filled with thin jokes like that, the kind that do not hesitate to sell character reality up the river in exchange for a chuckle. Ben’s wife, Jess (Ashley Park), is a nonstop satire of touchy-feely therapists as seen less in life than in other plays; she urges her in-laws, who were never physically close, to begin the healing by holding hands. And Brian — especially in Urie’s by now predictable performance — is a tired burlesque of the dithery, narcissistic gay man who turns everything he touches into silly drama. Indeed, he’s a drama teacher, currently directing a school production of “The Crucible” that features 200 students. The parents are more complexly written — and more compellingly acted — but even so, Nancy’s insistence that, after a loveless marriage, she deserves a chance at authentic joy is as often as not played for dirty-talking-old-lady laughs. Alexander, with her patrician aplomb, does this beautifully; you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a woman who once played sing the praises of cunnilingus. But not everything beautifully done makes sense beyond its immediate context, and often the context seems woefully contrived. Though Bill is a classic sourpuss, Wohl has him enroll in a stand-up comedy class at the recreation center — largely, it seems, to let him tell a great old joke about St. Peter welcoming four nuns to heaven. Cromwell underplays this, and everything else, as if to avoid setting off believability alarms. Also taking the stand-up class is Carla (Priscilla Lopez), whose free-spiritedness, meant to show up Nancy’s primness, is mostly demonstrated by her wearing a garish scarf. (The costumes are by Linda Cho.) Alas, the scarf is merely a fuchsia herring; Carla is just like everyone else, getting big laughs with cute sex talk. I could go on — there’s a mortifying scene in which Brian brings home a man for a hookup — but I have to remind myself that Wohl is in fact one of our cleverest playwrights, exploring the outer limits of naturalism in search of new ways of expressing new feelings. Both “Small Mouth Sounds” and “Make Believe,” which are as suggestive and shadowy as “Grand Horizons” is obvious and glary, were on recent Top 10 lists of mine. Like them, “Grand Horizons” is perfectly structured, mimicking the classic works of stage comedy with a stupendous Act I curtain, a neat Act II surprise and a final beat that would be haunting if the road leading to it were not so littered with extorted laughs. Nor can the production, including that alarming lighting by Jen Schriever, be faulted; Silverman seems to have staged the play exactly as Wohl intended, stopping shy only of a laugh track to get the audience coughing up yuks. But what is it Wohl really intends? She’s too serious a playwright to be trying to game the market — though “Grand Horizons,” with its pace, pedigree and cast of six, is likely to be performed in regional and amateur theaters for years. Nor do I think it is purely a botch, a mess that got that way by itself. The constraints of its genre are too bizarre not to have been chosen deliberately, just as Wohl deliberately constrained “Small Mouth Sounds” by setting it at a wordless spiritual retreat, and “Make Believe” by using the playacting of children as a medium for dramatizing mistreatment. “Grand Horizons,” then, may be doing something similar. The genre that Simon buffed to a high polish in works like “Plaza Suite” — a three-part marriage farce that returns to Broadway this spring— was built on cracks in American confidence that by 1968, when the play had its premiere, were beginning to undermine faith in our fundamental institutions. Those cracks having now become chasms, Wohl can use the falseness of Simonesque stage comedy to dramatize the falseness of her real subject, which is not divorce but marriage. Nancy calls it a stray dog, a boa constrictor, a box you can’t claw your way out of: “Don’t respect it because God knows it doesn’t respect you.” Unfortunately, her realization that she can no longer tell the requisite wifely lies — the ones that say her husband and children are infinitely excusable — comes too late in her life, as too late in the play. “The first part of love is truth,” she concludes. If only it were the first part of “Grand Horizons” as well. That might have been genuinely funny. Grand Horizons Tickets Through March 1 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 212-541-4516, 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
  23. Personally, I think this thread belongs in Literature.
  24. It was an Xmas gift and is on the pile of "to be read" books....
  25. Attended Spunk last night and had a great time. Beautiful boys and hot men.
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