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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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010289
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01028900.001
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1990-09-22
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THEATER, Page 102BEST OF '88
CHESS
London's frantic multimedia hit was rewritten for Broadway as
a tender, doom-struck musical meditation on how East-West politics
crush individuals. Trevor Nunn's trademark cinematic staging gave
narrative clout to the best rock score ever produced for the
theater.
THE COCKTAIL HOUR
Playwright A.R. Gurney is at his peak in this charming Wasp
family comedy about a writer's relatives yearning for privacy,
transplanted intact from San Diego's Old Globe. Nancy Marchand
glows as the slightly sozzled matriarch.
DINNER AT EIGHT
The classic dawn-of-the-Depression satire was hauntingly
revived by New Haven's Long Wharf Theater. A superb cast of 24
included Elizabeth Wilson as the pathetic social climber and
Charles Keating as the broken-down actor immortalized on film by
John Barrymore.
EASTERN STANDARD
Insider trading, bag ladies, AIDS and nouvelle cuisine --
everything '80s gets skewered, then sentimentalized, in this
stylishly acted and wittily observed Broadway satire spawned at the
Seattle Repertory.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe adapted Steinbeck's novel of the
Dust Bowl into an absorbing three-hour docudrama marked by ruthless
unsentimentality about the Joad clan, clinging haplessly and
disastrously to folk wisdom and totemic faith in the family.
KING LEAR
At the Stratford Shakespeare festival in Ontario, director
Robin Phillips and star William Hutt brilliantly reinterpreted the
title role as a dotard whose authority has long faded and whose
daughters' stern discipline is common sense in the face of
senility.
M. BUTTERFLY
Politics makes the strangest of bedfellows in this operatically
showy and entrancingly acted Broadway drama, based on the real-life
romance between a transvestite Chinese opera performer (B.D. Wong)
and a French diplomat (originated by John Lithgow) who believes his
love is a real woman.
MIRACOLO D'AMORE
Clowns and choruses, nudes and birdsong enlivened Martha
Clarke's surreal fantasy of love and violence, a montage of
painterly and powerful images first seen at the Spoleto Festival
U.S.A., in Charleston, S.C.
NOTHING SACRED
George F. Walker wryly adapted Turgenev's Fathers and Sons so
that student anarchism in 1860s Russia paralleled the polemics of
Marxist collegians in 1960s America. Tom Hulce (Amadeus) starred
in the first of a raft of U.S. stagings, at Los Angeles' Mark Taper
Forum.
SPOILS OF WAR
In Michael Weller's poignant memoir, off-Broadway and briefly
on it, Kate Nelligan gave the performance of the year as an Auntie
Mame mom, mingling furtive boozing and strutting glamour, dignity
and desperation.