Word: ivey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...conjure spirits. That very perception of character seems to have guided Geraldine Page in a less malevolent but equally necromantic role, the ghost-summoning Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's larkish Blithe Spirit, which was revived on Broadway last week. The cast includes Richard Chamberlain, Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey, all in good form, but this is Page's show. In a career including eight Oscar nominations, culminating in a 1986 Best Actress award for The Trip to Bountiful, and countless memorable stage performances, Blithe Spirit stands as a highlight...
This decidedly common touch is in keeping with Director Brian Murray's sour vision. At the center of Blithe Spirit is a love triangle: smug, conventional Ruth Condomine (Ivey) is in love with her novelist husband Charles (Chamberlain); so is hoydenish Elvira (Danner), his late wife, whom Madame Arcati accidentally materializes; and all three of the Condomines are passionately in love with themselves. Most productions of Coward tend to be as glittery and brittle as spun glass. Murray brings the proceedings down to earth: these are not natural aristocrats but peasants with money and a veneer of polish, and when...
...high school or embark on a national tour. (In one of Playwright Furth's slyer jokes, the unnamed play the boy is invited to join is recognizably A Streetcar Named Desire.) The father, who lacks a high school diploma, harangues his family about education and ambition. The mother (Judith Ivey) wants her children to choose for themselves. He makes his points with force; she wins hers with guile. Precious Sons resembles a "well-made play," much like those William Inge wrote, except that Furth emphasizes reconciliation and renewal rather than catharsis...
...assembly line as an exhibition hall for his competitive drive and skill. As the youth, Rapp makes the stage glow in what could have been a formulaic speech about his having yearned to be an actor even before he knew that the profession existed. The finest performance is Ivey's as the play's forceful center, the clangy-voiced, flighty, phrase- turning mother with a heart of gold and a will of molybdenum. She always gets her way. Perhaps the best measure of the play's impact is that audiences depart eagerly debating whether she was right...
...husband. Angrily but without self-pity, he makes the case of the drudge-aholic whose toil supports his spouse's self-realization but whose reward is often a diagnosis that he has an intimacy problem. Like such other New York stage stalwarts as Mary Beth Hurt and Judith Ivey, he is well cast and directed by Frank Perry. They are figures who seem really to live in this landscape. Susan Isaacs' adaptation of her own novel is a socially observant example of an almost vanished genre, the comedy- mystery with blessedly discreet romantic overtones...