Monthly Archives: October 2014

DON GIOVANNI: A Lyric Opera Triumph

Chicago’s great writer Saul Bellow loved the Lyric Opera. In 1979 he wrote a preface to a celebration of the opera company in which he quoted long-time Chicago drama critic, and opera enthusiast, Claudia Cassidy: “Without the Lyric,” she tells us, “Chicago would be underprivileged. A city, she continues, “is more than tall buildings, crowded […]

October 30, 2014 – 10:28 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Art, Current Events, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Opera, Poetry, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Theology | Comments (0)

Just Released…

October 29, 2014 – 2:37 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Books, from Paul, Men and Women, Theater, Uncategorized | Comments (0)

ST. VINCENT: Bill Murray Explains It All

Bill Murray has played a remarkable collection of curmudgeons and misanthropes – Tripper, Carl Spackler, John Winger, Dr. Peter Venkman, Frank Cross, Bob Wiley, Phil Connors, Frank Milo, Ernie McCracken, Wallace Ritchie, Herman Blume, and Raleigh St. Clair among them. All seem as warmups to Vincent McKenna in Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent. Vincent McKenna is […]

October 28, 2014 – 11:14 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in from Paul, Movies, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theology | Comments (0)

DON JUAN IN HELL: THE WOMAN WINS

Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw and a Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare are the only two plays I know which have individual acts which have been removed from the plays and performed alone as an evening’s entertainment – The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe (Act V […]

October 27, 2014 – 3:44 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in from Paul, Men and Women, Theater | Comments (0)

BIRDMAN: Macbeth’s Movie

Birdman’s artists – Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Antonio Sanchez, Emmanuel Lubezki, Douglas Crise, Stephen Mirrione – will be nominated for all of the major film awards, and they probably deserve to win. But Birdman is deliberately unlike other films: Birdman seeks to have no meaning. That’s right. The artists deliberately conspire to […]

October 24, 2014 – 3:05 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Art, Media, Movies, Theater | Comments (1)