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| Hearsay: |
Homecoming dance ruined by young punks bent on disruption and the spread of loose morals. Mr. Kamal Al-Solaylee, you may have the coolest name in arts journalism, but you’ve just broken one tender lady’s fragile heart here.
while I strongly believe that what the all-female production has done is heroic, I don’t think the mission was accomplished as successfully as I hoped it would. I don’t mean to rain on this homecoming parade, but watching the show again – I reviewed its world premiere in Stratford-upon-Avon on Aug. 2 – convinced me of two things. Yes, it’s come a long way since and, sadly, it has also hit a glass ceiling it may never be able to break through. It’s a case of hard work and determination struggling against genetics and destiny.
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September 24th, 2007 at 9:56 am
I just saw the play on Saturday and he’s absolutely right. It’s just not so great. It has gained some emotional depth re: the maids but lost much of the intellectual pleasure — for example, the challenging insistence that stories are unreliable, and for good reasons, and the reader must come to terms with that. Also in the book even though we know the story we are so engaged by Penelope’s personality and the new perspective she offers us, that we are in suspense — what will we learn that we didn’t know before? This is lost in the play — her personality and the plot are both refined to the point of boredom and predictability. And the Gene Kelly dance numbers? Bad choice…
Atwood, in spite of being a poet, has never been a very poetic writer, and although the writing is very functional there is no beauty there. And beauty, in art as elsewhere, has a power that cannot be replaced by any other element.