|
|
|
|
|
|
Local Life
Rob Dunbar is Oscar-ready
(so to speak) by BETH LEARY He hasn't won an Oscar, Emmy or Tony, but for Rob Dunbar,
Chestnut Hill's resident poet laureate, it's only a matter of time. Dunbar has not only written and produced for TV, theater
and off-Broadway, but he is also a novelist, performer and screenplay
author. His most famous play to date is BATS!, a one-woman tour-de-force that traces the career of a 'B' movie star — from ingénue to golden years where the character ends up as hostess of old horror movies, wearing a turban and smoking with a cigarette holder a la Norma Desmond. Karen Scioli, famous for her Stella vampire character on KYW's Saturday Night Dead in the 1980s, was the star of the show. BATS! played at the Society Hill Playhouse in 1998 to SRO audiences. This play truly has a life of its own and has now been published by Moose Enterprises Theatre Publishers in book form. Dunbar's most successful novel, published in 1992, was i>The Pines>, a murder mystery set in the New Jersey Pine Barrens with the infamous Jersey Devil. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it 'dark, foreboding,... High-risk gamble rescues new Coyote Crossing By Len Lear Imagine working 24/7, practically 365 days a year for six
years, to create a business, defying all odds while you are building
equity and accumulating net worth. Then imagine that you take every
penny you've earned to a casino, where you bet it all on one spin of
the roulette wheel. In a way, that's what Carlos Melendez did. I first visited his restaurant, Coyote Crossing, at 800 Spring Mill Rd. in Conshohocken, in December, 1996, one month after it opened. Despitee... Lord not heavenly
in entertaining "Phila. Story" by CLARK GROOME If you play Tracy Lord, you're damned if you do and you're
damned if you don't. It can't be easy for an actress to take on a role
forever associated with Katharine Hepburn and Grace Kelly, two of the
brightest stars ever to walk in front of the footlights or a camera. It takes an extraordinary talent to overcome the memory of
their performances and the temptation to mimic their unique and wonderful
styles. The problem is that almost every movie buff of a certain age has
seen The Philadelphia Story in one or both of its film incarnations.
The original movie starred Miss Hepburn in a cast that included
James Stewart, Cary Grant and Ruth Hussey. Others will remember the story's remake as High Society, in which the locale was moved from Philadelphia's Main Line to Newport, Rhode Island. It was led by Grace Kelly... Graham's world premiere:
superb dialogue, unclear focus by CLARK GROOME When Bruce Graham writes a play, you can be sure it's
going to be well written. That, however, is all you can be sure of.
Graham never writes the same play twice. While that doesn't sound
so unusual, take a look at some of the great playwrights of our time
— Athol Fugard, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, for example
— and you can see repeated themes: the inhumanity of apartheid
for Fugard, the strong women (read mother figure) in Williams and,
in Miller's work, the villainy of the corporate world. In Graham's work all are different: skinheads in one, race track habitus in another, small time politicos in yet another. Philadelphia has been blessed to be the launching pad for most of the Delaware County's native's plays. His latest, According to Goldman, is currently being given its world... "Tooth & Claw" tasty but not completely satisfying by CLARK GROOME Michael Hollinger"s Tooth and Claw is a
well-written and well-meaning play that is getting a well-acted
and well-directed world premiere production at the Arden Theatre.
Something, however, is missing. The Wyncote-based playwright"s latest effort tells
the story of the conflict between the director of the Charles Darwin
Research Station in the Galapagos Islands and the local fishermen.
The director is charged with protecting the endangered tortoises,
which inhabit these ecologically sensitive islands close to the
bottom of the world. The fishermen, needing to survive, are harvesting millions
of sea cucumbers, an environmentally necessary part of the Galapagos
ecosystem. If too many sea cucumbers are lost, then the tortoises
will be endangered because the food they eat depends on the food
chain being uninterrupted. The tension between the needs of the endangered animals and the fishermen... |