Word: brilliante
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...While Fox Weber initially worked with Balthus on the book, he writes that "to keep my freedom once I realized I was writing about someone as unscrupulous as he is brilliant, almost as talented at lying as he is at painting--I pretty much stopped meeting with Balthus." It is interesting that although the biography is technically Fox Weber's work, this seems somehow scandalous. Fox Weber is the artist here, right...
...what ensues is a battle between two equally valid, but ultimately incompatible, forms of beauty--the understated and the grand. Ivanov is a play about the unspoken wars that rage inside our consciousness. But Yeremin's Ivanov is about another sort of battle: an almost literal fight between a brilliant text and a brilliant, but misguided, production...
...which make Chekov's rural social philosophers seem as though they could just melt into the landscape, and you have a two-hour-long painting on the stage. Yeremin's staging makes every use of this artistic ingenuity. His actors move more like dancers than farmers. Yeremin has a brilliant sense of space, horizontal and vertical. The simple act of swinging in a hammock becomes a study of one man's motion across an empty plane. In Yeremin's hands, the A.R.T.'s corps of performers become points in space--tiny, beautiful additions to the landscape, like the figures...
...center of Yeremin's production simply cannot hold. Yeremin turns the speeches Chekov meant his characters to address to one another into performance pieces directed at the audience, turns moments of quiet, embarrassed emotional confessions into visual spectacles. Gone is the intimacy that makes Chekov brilliant and the nuance that makes him profound. Ivanov the play is too beautiful a play to be treated so harshly. And Ivanov the production is too gorgeous to engage in such a struggle. Chekov and Yeremin are both brilliant, but their brilliance is not of the sort that can be reconciled...
Bernstein's brilliant melodies coupled with Stephen Sondheim's moving lyrics tell a story of injustice, poverty, crime and, yes, stereotype. But that story is intentionally told to reveal the assumptions inherent in society, to point them out to the audience in order to combat them, not to perpetuate them, as the Amherst petition's signers would have us believe...