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Why does John Merrick get a room in the London Hospital for the rest of his life? Because he’s charming and he’s witty, while the pinheads next door to him didn’t fare that well.
Dramatist Jeffrey Hatcher didn’t become a working adaptor until the mid-1990s. He saw that some of his playwright friends were doing it and he thought: “Why not me?”
Terraferma is well-meaning, properly on the side of human rights, but also schematic and thematically heavy-handed.
Leon Fleisher was part of an outburst of great North American pianists. Many were ill-fated, but, as this commanding box set proves, Fleisher stayed the course.
The pleasure of Talley’s Folly is in its details, the give-and-take of the dialogue, the smaller and larger revelations they tease out of each other, the characterization of the two human creatures dancing their dance.
“A great novel makes for the best script an actor could imagine,” said actor Colin Firth recently, on accepting an award for his reading of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. Many theatergoers would agree.
Satoko Fujii’s quartet could go from 0 to 100 at the drop of a hat, but only once in a while, and nearly always at the perfect time.
Musician Levon Helm’s folksy ideas about life, the anecdotes he shares, his reverence for American music and for the friends and comrades who gather around him, are inspirational.
In Hesitation Marks, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor foregoes trendy flourishes. He might have delivered a set of competently-made, stripped-back industrial tunes. But the end result is monotony.
Commentary: “Deluge” — How Vermont Survived Tropical Storm Irene
I fully support the themes that Peggy Shinn explores, articulated in Deluge’s subtitle: this one small state did save itself.
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