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- <text id=90TT2857>
- <title>
- Oct. 29, 1990: Critics' Voices
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
- Oct. 29, 1990 Can America Still Compete?
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- CRITICS' VOICES, Page 24
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> TELEVISION
- </p>
- <p> WIOU (CBS, debuting Oct. 24, 10 p.m. EDT). Yet another
- network series about TV's favorite subject: itself. John Shea
- plays the news director of a struggling station, where a
- pompous anchorman (Harris Yulin) paws female reporters under
- the desk. Lou Grant would have furloughed them all.
- </p>
- <p> MOTHER LOVE (PBS, debuting Oct. 25, 9 p.m. on most
- stations). Diana Rigg, classy host of PBS's Mystery! series,
- gets into the whodunit herself this time, playing a scheming
- woman who adores her son (James Wilby) as much as she hates his
- father (David McCallum).
- </p>
- <p> MUSIC
- </p>
- <p> NEIL YOUNG AND CRAZY HORSE: RAGGED GLORY (Reprise). Yes,
- yes, Neil Young's been through more changes than the Dow Jones
- industrial average, but when he locks in, he's tough to beat.
- He locks in here. Backed by his favorite band, Young cooks up
- his best set in years: the sound is rough-hewn as ever, and all
- the fury is intact.
- </p>
- <p> JOHN JARVIS: PURE CONTOURS (MCA). Ten cuts to make the local
- fern bar tolerable. This Nashville keyboardist is so uncannily
- adept and writes such stay-put melodic riffs, he's likely to
- give New Age music a good name. He can certainly make it swing
- and even--stand back--rock a little.
- </p>
- <p> THEATER
- </p>
- <p> MISS EVERS' BOYS. Kenny Leon, new artistic director of
- Atlanta's Alliance Theater, is only the second black to run a
- major regional theater. In a splendid staging of this true
- story about a government syphilis experiment in which blacks
- went untreated, he demonstrates his great gifts.
- </p>
- <p> THE MISER. Philip Bosco does everything one could ask in the
- title role of Moliere's satire, except the indispensable: lurch
- into believable love-struck madness when his cherished cashbox
- is stolen. Other actors in this Broadway revival swoop and
- flutter and generally diminish the text, save for splendidly
- real and moving bits by John Christopher Jones as a
- long-suffering servant and Adam Redfield as a splenetic one.
- </p>
- <p> BOOKS
- </p>
- <p> RABBIT AT REST by John Updike (Knopf; $21.95). Harold
- ("Rabbit") Angstrom is 56 and ailing in what the author says
- is his farewell to the character whose life, from high school
- basketball star to successful Toyota dealer, mirrors
- middle-class America of the past four decades.
- </p>
- <p> BURGUNDY by Robert M. Parker Jr. (Simon & Schuster; $39.95).
- A magisterial but awkwardly organized tasting guide to recent
- vintages from this French province by America's leading wine
- critic. Parker, as always, is pungently direct in designating
- picks and pans: a 1985 Romanee-Conti, scored a perfect 100, is
- "utterly mind-blowing," while a 1987 Echezeaux, rated 69, is
- "woody, stemmy, green and thin."
- </p>
- <p> ART
- </p>
- <p> COURTLY SPLENDOR: TWELVE CENTURIES OF TREASURES FROM JAPAN,
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. To celebrate the enthronement of
- Japan's new Emperor, Akihito, a selection of 60 objects--among them scrolls, sculpture and a lacquered wood saddle with
- inlaid mother-of-pearl--illustrating the court's role as a
- patron of the arts. Through Nov. 25.
- </p>
- <p> MEXICO: SPLENDORS OF THIRTY CENTURIES, Metropolitan Museum
- of Art, New York City. This monumental show bites off more than
- it--or you--can chew. But it makes you want to go to
- Mexico, to know this vast, vivid, fierce visual culture better.
- Through Jan. 13.
- </p>
- <p> MOVIES
- </p>
- <p> REVERSAL OF FORTUNE. A high comedy of manners about Claus
- and Sunny von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close as
- if they were Noel Coward lovers gone to hell in a Lamborghini.
- The death-styles of the rich and famous have rarely been
- portrayed with such cauterizing sympathy.
- </p>
- <p> TO SLEEP WITH ANGER. A charming wastrel (Danny Glover)
- brings the dark past into the restless heart of a middle-class
- black family. Charles Burnett's drama is an acute and
- beautifully played evocation of the down-home ghosts that may
- haunt and taunt any urban family.
- </p>
- <p> ETCETERA
- </p>
- <p> THE VOYAGE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE, by Dominick Argento.
- Encouraging news for American composers. This 1976 work, one
- of the finest American operas ever, gets a new production from
- the Chicago Lyric Opera. Through Nov. 19.
- </p>
- <p> NEXT WAVE/NEXT DOOR. The Brooklyn Academy of Music's
- supersmart, avant-garde Next Wave Festival presents four
- theater and dance troupes from Montreal, all of them attuned
- to BAM's exploration of new forces in art. Through Nov. 18.
- </p>
- <p> WHITE OAK DANCE PROJECT. Boston is the kickoff town for this
- 18-city tour of new works by the brilliant young modern
- choreographer Mark Morris. The big draw? Mikhail Baryshnikov,
- who will dance every night. Other cities include Minneapolis,
- Toledo, Savannah, Miami and Detroit. Through Nov. 19.
- </p>
- <p> THREE RIFFS ON A SOULMAN
- </p>
- <p> LISTEN UP: THE LIVES OF QUINCY JONES. Who is this guy with
- the omnipresent name? There are now three chances to find out:
- an audacious documentary directed by Ellen Weissbrod, currently
- in theatrical release (Warner Bros.); a book, which expands
- with razzle-dazzle graphics the biographical contents of the
- film; and a CD (Qwest/Reprise), packaged with the book, which
- represents the first-ever compilation of Jones' polymorphous
- music, ranging from jazz to soul, pop to funk, performed by
- talents as various as Sarah Vaughan and James Ingram. The
- movie, the book and the CD, all produced and coordinated by
- Courtney Sale Ross, offer no definitive portrait. But they do
- provide a vivid personality sketch in bold--and, in the film,
- often demanding and dazzling--strokes of a man who's written
- and played fine music, produced films (The Color Purple) and
- records (Michael Jackson's Thriller) and generally become an
- immutable force of show-business nature. Sort of a David O.
- Selznick as soulman.
- </p>
- <p>By TIME's Reviewers. Compiled by Andrea Sachs.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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