Word: guignol
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Building a trustworthy bridge between civilized society and the Grand Guignol is tricky work, and Oates' success has varied from book to book. But American Appetites offers a thoroughly credible version of what is both unbelievable and disturbingly familiar. Her prose is headlong. There are cliches; sentences do not ask to be examined for artful felicities. Pausing seems beside the point. The rush is utterly convincing. Any definition of art that excludes this novel is probably too narrow...
...vehicle he chose was Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, a nightmare vision of the playwright's native South. Its Grand Guignol events -- religious hysteria, racial confrontation, abusive law enforcement, Klan night-riding and a climactic murder by blowtorch -- seemed at the 1957 debut to arise from Williams' inner demons. Three decades of civil rights struggle compelled a whole nation to see those demons as its own. Yet if the descent into lynch-mob madness echoes grim headlines, Hall has scrupulously avoided the common error of toning down Williams' expressionistic excess into unsuitable realism. In the first scene, the lighting changes with...
...Webber and Director Harold Prince, have proved the shrewdness of their unlikely impulse. Within two days after the $3 million spectacular opened in London's West End this month, the box office was virtually sold out until early 1987. Webber and Prince have daringly envisioned Phantom not as Grand Guignol but as an opportunity to turn the musical back toward what they term romance. Ironically, Lloyd Webber (Evita) and Prince (Sweeney Todd) have been leaders in the movement to push musicals beyond traditional boy-meets-girl accessibility. Yet their Phantom is unquestionably a love story, just as much...
...McKellen, a Tony winner for his portrayal of the jealous composer Salieri in Amadeus. Each production in Chicago has showcased the two principals and three comparably talented colleagues, Greg Hicks, Eleanor Bron and Jonathan Hyde. The stand opened with The Duchess of Malfi in a faithfully Grand Guignol rendition of Webster's Jacobean tragedy. Actors clad in funereal black moved menacingly amid the stately but decaying gray palatial sets; virtually the only color was a frequent splash of blood. The ensemble followed with an energetic rendition of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard...
Some art is wallpaper. Bacon's is flypaper, and innumerable claims stick to it: over the past 40 years it has attracted extremes of praise and calumniation. There are still plenty of people who see his work as icily mannered, sensationalist guignol. He is the sort of artist whose work generates admiration rather than fondness. The usual evolution of major artists in old age, whereby they become cozily grand paternal figures, patting their juniors on the back and reminiscing in autumnal mellowness about their dead coevals, has not happened to Bacon, who is apt to dismiss nearly everything painted...