Theatre News and Reviews: July 23, 2009

THEATER REVIEW | 'PEASANT OPERA', NYTimes.com, July 23, 2009

Some Village Folkways: Incest, Murder, Adultery

In a Play From Budapest, Incest, Murder and Other Folkways -

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Bela Pinter’s ribald sendup of opera blends Hungarian folk songs with the conventions of baroque music, to strange but surprisingly satisfying effect.

The naked cowboy with the sequined phallus would be a startling apparition just about anywhere, with the possible exception of a gay strip club, but he seems a particularly incongruous vision in the humble Hungarian village of “Peasant Opera,” the quirky musical melodrama that opened Tuesday night at the Clark Studio Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Written and directed by Bela Pinter, a leading figure from the theater world of his native Budapest, with music by Benedek Darvas, the show is a ribald sendup of opera that blends the earthy sounds of Hungarian folk songs with the ordered conventions of baroque music, to strange but surprisingly satisfying effect.

Read more http://theater2.nytimes.com:80/2009/07/23/theater/reviews/23peasant.html?th&emc=th

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Salon.com

Thursday, July 23, 2009 06:23 EDT
Kevin Spacey needs a "Shrink"

One way of looking at Kevin Spacey's film-acting career is that most of it happened in another century and he has moved on. A two-time Oscar winner in the '90s -- for best supporting actor in "The Usual Suspects" and best actor in "American Beauty" -- Spacey has literally and figuratively left Hollywood behind, devoting most of his energies to directing the Old Vic Theatre in London, where he has lived since 2003.

As Spacey has told various interviewers, he didn't see how his movie career could possibly top what he had already accomplished, and he was tired of living in hotel rooms and making three or four films a year. From his days at Chatsworth High School in Los Angeles (where he played Captain von Trapp opposite Mare Winningham's Maria in "The Sound of Music"), theater was his first love. In the same year when he won his Academy Award for "American Beauty," he also won a Laurence Olivier Award for his role in the London-Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's play "The Iceman Cometh." (Truthfully, it might be the most memorable stage performance I've ever seen.) In retrospect, it looks as if two roads lay before him at that moment and he chose the one less traveled. So it is that the man once viewed as the greatest American film actor of his generation was recently ranked at No. 10 on the Daily Telegraph's list of "the 100 most powerful people in British culture."

Read more http://www.salon.com:80/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/07/23/spacey/index.html?source=newsletter

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