Author Archive

A Good Music Man, a Dishonest Spitfire Grill

Written by Mimi Kramer on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

by Meredith Willson The Spitfire Grill by James Valcq and Fred Alley (closed) I wasn’t crazy about anything I found when I looked up "patriot" in Chambers Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms the other day. I found "chauvinist," "flag-waver," "jingoist," "loyalist" and "nationalist," none of which seemed to me to capture what I think is
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Rude Entertainment Is an Uneven Evening from the Usually Brilliant Paul Rudnick

Written by Mimi Kramer on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach is the first of the three one-act plays that make up Rude Entertainment, by the ever delightful and surprising Paul Rudnick, which the Drama Dept. is presenting at the Greenwich House Theater under the direction of Christopher Ashley. It posits an old-fashioned queen (Peter Bartlett) of the white-wine-and-wallpaper school,
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Revisiting the Ancient Eyewitness Accounts and Messenger Speeches in the Wake of Last Week’s Tragedy

Written by Mimi Kramer on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

"Heroes have the whole earth for their tomb." –Pericles, in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, 431 BC I reread Pericles’ Funeral Oration the other day. It has one or two good lines in it about death and heroism, which is the reason I mention it. I wasn’t actually looking for the Funeral Oration when
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Suzan-Lori Parks’ Heavy-Handed Topdog/Underdog Is Chiefly Grant-Bait

Written by Mimi Kramer on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

A friend of mine who went to see Topdog/Underdog, the new Suzan-Lori Parks play at the Public Theater, told me afterward she’d been surprised to find it so naturalistic in form. She’d been partly drawn by a photograph in the Voice that pictured the actor Jeffrey Wright got up like Abraham Lincoln in whiteface, wearing
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From Perigueux to Final Fantasy to A.I: How much realism should we demand?

Written by Mimi Kramer on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

I found myself checking up on the parts of a horse the other day. It was after the Daily News had carried an AP story about some new prehistoric art found in the Perigueux region of France–engravings thought to predate the Lascaux cave paintings by 10,000 years. It was a burial ground of some sort,
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Unstressed Syllables: Jim Dale Reads Harry Potter, Paul Newman Reads Tom Sawyer

Written by Mimi Kramer on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

What Jim Dale does with the name of the main shopping drag in the Harry Potter books is something an American would probably never do. The street is "Diagon Alley," which Dale–in the versions of the books he’s recorded for the Listening Library imprint of Random House Audio Publishing–somehow manages to pronounce with the emphasis
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Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, Or, Why We Need Quentin Tarantino Again

Written by Mimi Kramer on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

There’s a complicated scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper in True Romance, the Quentin Tarantino-scripted movie that came between Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, in which Hopper makes a speech that is at once so objectionable and at the same time such a beau geste that the audience doesn’t know how to feel and
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