Word: mckellen
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...MCKELLEN ACTING SHAKESPEARE...
...McKellen is perhaps the most respected classical actor of his generation in England (and the creator, on Broadway, of the sinuous Salieri in Ama-deus), but an adolescent's enthusiasm and wonder animate every moment of Ian McKellen Acting Shakespeare, the one-man divertissement in which he opened last week on Broadway for a five-week engagement. First concocted in 1976 and intermittently toured ever since, the show is an amalgam of personal reminiscences, theatrical lore and selections from Will Shakespeare's Greatest Hits. It gives McKellen a sort of actor's holiday untrammeled by directorial "concepts...
...attempt to demystify and de-mythify "the Bard" (a phrase that would never escape his lips unless they were twisted satirically), McKellen establishes two reference points between himself and Shakespeare. The first is that they were both helplessly smitten by the theater at tender ages. (He imagines a boyish Shake speare falling in behind a touring theatri cal company announcing its presence by parading down Stratford's main street; he recalls himself manipulating a cardboard Laurence Olivier and Jean Simmons in a toy-theater production of Hamlet.) The second is that both grew...
...entrails of a Rumanian castle, a malefic beast has been stirring for a millennium. Now it is 1941, and a platoon of Nazis have let the evil genie out of his battlements. On the side of Good, sort of, are a frail Jewish scholar (the great English actor Ian McKellen, sporting an accent that sounds like south central Iowa) and a preternatural Watchman (Scott Glenn), whose eyes go quilted when he gets really mad. With all these adversaries crossing swords, neither the Nazis nor the narrative stands much of a chance...
Still, critics were kind and generally encouraging about the first week's programs, which ranged from a tedious game show to Walter, a stops-out original television film starring Ian McKellen as a retarded outcast assaulted during his first night in a mental hospital by a hunchbacked midget. All the shows will be developed for Channel 4 by independent producers; by subsidizing 20 full-length features for the Film on Four series, Chief Executive Jeremy Isaacs hopes that his channel can help rejuvenate the country's languishing movie industry. As Britain settles in with Channel...