Chekhov's Gun

I found myself having to read Boris Godunov so that I could make any sense out of Eimuntas Nekrosius' latest production .  He was originally going to stage it in Moscow with a Russian cast but when Russia annexed Crimea, Nekrosius chose to cancel the production and reset it in Vilnius with a Lithuanian cast. It came out last May, 2015, but my wife and I only got around to seeing it this past weekend.  Lithuanian theater is very different in that you don't get long running shows, but rather recurring shows.  It must make it tough on actors as one has to hold a whole repertoire in his head, as one could very well be performing one play one week and entirely different play the next week.  Each director has his core actors, but they draw actors from each other quite often.  It is quite impressive seeing these actors take on so many roles during the theater season. Unfortunately, Boris didn't translate very well to the modern era.  In my opinion, this ...

In an effort to kickstart this blog again, I recently received a copy of Roadside Picnic , which inspired Tarkovsky's Stalker .  I saw the movie years ago, and quite frankly couldn't make heads or tails of it, so am hoping that the book will help me put together some of the pieces before doing another viewing.  It was interesting to read that I wasn't the only one interested in the classic Soviet sci-fi novel.  WGN bought the screen rights to it and is planning a television series based on the novel.   A video game has also been designed around the theme. Neither of the Strugatsky Brothers are with us anymore, but for decades they were kind of like the Coen Brothers of Soviet science fiction, turning out a great number of novels in the genre dating back to 1958.  They were mostly collaborative efforts, but there were a few solo novels as well, with Boris penning the last work in 2003. Soviet sci-fi is what propels Victor Pelevin, one of my favorite w...

It is hard to imagine what BBC expected when they signed a young director, Tom Harper, to do War & Peace .  The 35-year-old director did do Demons , but it was based on the fabulous adventures of van Helsing, not Dostoevsky.  There is little in Harper's resume to suggest that he was up to the task, which I suppose is why BBC enlisted veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies to adapt the novel to the television screen. Suffice it to say young Tom is no Sergei Bondarchuk.  I question whether he even read the book, but rather adapted Bondarchuk's enthralling epic film to the television screen.  This new version was more about scenography than acting, with the characters pretty much reduced to stand-ins for the roles.  There were a few big name actors like Paul Dano, Jim Broadbent, Stephen Rea and Gillian Anderson, but for the most part these were newbies or actors you hadn't heard about unless you tune into BBC programming. Lily James was the star of the sh...