The dialogue and scenarios parody Russian novels, particularly those by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, such as The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, and War and Peace. The use of Prokofiev for the soundtrack adds to the Russian...
THE MARBLE QUILT By David Leavitt Houghton Mifflin. 241 pp. $24 Many of the stories in David Leavitt's new collection are born out of the realities of death and disease -- and the often maddening illogic of both -- in the...
Theatre On love and death Hammerklavier Jermyn Street Theatre ID Almeida The Illustrious Corpse Soho Theatre Here's a prediction. Yasmina Reza's Hammerklavier isn't going to break any box-office records. The author of Art has written a tender, lyrical novel about love, grief,...
Thailand's new military-appointed government has threatened to shut down an operatic version of the Hindu epic Ramayana, ostensibly over fears one of its scenes may bring bad luck. "Ayodhya" premiered Thursday night and is scheduled for repeat performances on Saturday...
Academy Award-winning composer Howard Shore, Placido Domingo and director David Cronenberg are forming an unlikely trio to create an unlikely opera _ "The Fly."A co-production by the Theatre du Chatelet and Domingo's Los Angeles Opera, "The Fly" will premiere in Paris on July 1, 2008,...
"Love and Death" is a curious olio of nightclub patter, revue sketches and one-liners, most of them quite funny but uneasily stitched together. What comes out resembles a movie only as something midway between a crazy quilt and a potato sack resembles a suit of clothes. Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that: like anything else, film can accommodate a great many forms or lacks of form of a madcap, one-shot, sui generis kind. But there is a grave problem with "Love and Death...
Woody Allen's imperially funny new picture is named "Love and Death," a coupling of big concepts that says at once where the story is set. We are obviously going to be in the land of "War and Peace," of "Crime and Punishment," of "Fathers and Sons," though we turn out to be not really so much in Russia as in Russian literature. It is a literature seen through Woody Allen's unique prism of the grandiose but hesitant, as if it were being re...
