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Neil Munro (actor)
Neil Munro (1947–July 13, 2009) was a Scottish-born Canadian director, actor and playwright. Acting career Born in Musselburgh, Scotland, Munro moved to Toronto at an early age. After graduating from the National Theatre School of Canada in 1967, he quickly established himself as one of the most compelling theatre actors in Canada, performing with Toronto Arts Productions, the National Arts Centre (where he played Hamlet, touring the role nationally), the Citadel Theatre, Theatre Calgary, Tarragon Theatre and the Toronto Free Theatre, as well as at the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Festival. Directing and writing In 1985, Munro decided to retire permanently from acting for the stage, and to concentrate on directing and playwriting, appearing as an actor only occasionally on film, television and radio. His most notable appearances include ''The Jonah Look'' (which he also wrote), ''Beethoven Lives Upstairs'' (as Beethoven), ''John and the Missus'' and '' Dancing in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Musselburgh
Musselburgh (; sco, Musselburrae; gd, Baile nam Feusgan) is the largest settlement in East Lothian, Scotland, on the coast of the Firth of Forth, east of Edinburgh city centre. It has a population of . History The name Musselburgh is Old English in origin, with ''mussel'' referring to the shellfish.Musselburgh was famous for the mussel beds which grew in the Firth of Forth; after many years of claims that the mussels were unsafe for consumption, a movement has been started to reestablish the mussel beds as a commercial venture. The ''burgh'' element appears to derive from burh, in the same way as Edinburgh, before the introduction of formal burghs by David I. Its earliest Anglic name was ''Eskmuthe'' (Eskmouth) for its location at the mouth of the River Esk. Musselburgh was first settled by the Romans in the years following their invasion of Scotland in AD 80. They built a fort a little inland from the mouth of the River Esk, at Inveresk. They bridged the Esk downstre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beethoven Lives Upstairs
''Beethoven Lives Upstairs'' is a 1992 HBO Original Historical fiction Film produced and directed by David Devine. Based on a very popular children's audio recording written and directed by Barbara Nichol, the film stars Illya Woloshyn as Christoph, a young boy who develops a friendship with composer Ludwig van Beethoven ( Neil Munro), a boarder in the boy's parents' house. The film was shot in Prague in the Czech Republic and has been broadcast in over 110 countries in numerous languages and has sold over one million DVDs. The film is used extensively, thanks to its American Library Association's reviews and awards, in U.S. and Canadian elementary and middle school music classrooms. The film went on to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Program in 1993, was nominated for 4 Gemini Awards, won the New England Film Festival, and was presented the Award of Excellence from the U.S. National Board of Film Review. ''Beethoven Lives Upstairs'' was also admitted ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Granville Barker
Harley Granville-Barker (25 November 1877 – 31 August 1946) was an English actor, director, playwright, manager, critic, and theorist. After early success as an actor in the plays of George Bernard Shaw, he increasingly turned to directing and was a major figure in British theatre in the Edwardian and inter-war periods. As a writer his plays, which tackled difficult and controversial subject matter, met with a mixed reception during his lifetime but have continued to receive attention. Biography Early life and acting career Harley Granville-Barker was born in London, England on 25 November 1877. He left school at 14 and began a career in acting. As his career blossomed, he seemed to excel in roles that were a culmination of intelligence and romantic dreaminess. This landed him many roles such as; Tanner in ''Man and Superman'', Cusins in ''Major Barbara'', Marchbanks in '' Candida'', and Dubedat in '' The Doctor's Dilemma''. To be more specific the Dubedat and Cusins cha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Seagull
''The Seagull'' ( rus, Ча́йка, r=Cháyka, links=no) is a play by Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, written in 1895 and first produced in 1896. ''The Seagull'' is generally considered to be the first of his four major plays. It dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev. Like Chekhov's other full-length plays, ''The Seagull'' relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully developed characters. In contrast to the melodrama of mainstream 19th-century theatre, lurid actions (such as Konstantin's suicide attempts) are not shown onstage. Characters tend to speak in subtext rather than directly. The character Trigorin is considered one of Chekhov's greatest male roles. The opening night of the first production was a famous failure. Vera Komissarzhevskaya, playing Nina, was so intimidated b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rashomon (play)
''Rashomon'' is the name of several different stage productions, all ultimately derived from works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Source material Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's two short stories "Rashomon" (1915), also known as "The Rashomon Gate", and "In a Grove" (1922), also known as "The Cedar Grove", were famously fused and adapted as the basis for Akira Kurosawa's 1950 award-winning film ''Rashomon'', screenplay by Kurosawa and frequent collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto. In 1951 the film won an honorary International Academy Award, following the success of the film in winning a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in the same year. The Kurosawa and Hashimoto screenplay deviates from Akutagawa's original stories in a number of ways, most notably by allowing a note of hope to triumph over Akutagawa's dark pessimism. Neither Akutagawa's story nor any of the plays based on it share anything with the popular traditional Rashōmon (Noh play) (c.1420) about a man who climbs the rajō ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Petrified Forest
''The Petrified Forest'' is a 1936 American film directed by Archie Mayo and based on Robert E. Sherwood's 1935 Broadway drama of the same name. The motion picture stars Leslie Howard, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. The screenplay was written by Delmer Daves and Charles Kenyon, and adaptations were later performed on radio and television. The film is set in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Plot In the midst of the Great Depression, Alan Squier, a failed British writer, now a disillusioned, penniless drifter, wanders into a roadside diner in the remote town of Black Mesa, Arizona, at the edge of the Petrified Forest. The diner is run by Jason Maple, his daughter Gabrielle, and Gramp, Jason's father, who regales anyone who will listen with stories of his adventures in the Old West with such characters as Billy the Kid. Gabrielle's mother, a French war bride who fell in love with Jason when he was a young, handsome American serviceman, left her "dull defeated man" af ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Front Page
''The Front Page'' is a Broadway comedy about newspaper reporters on the police beat. Written by former Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, it was first produced in 1928 and has been adapted for the cinema several times. Plot The play's single set is the dingy press room of Chicago's Criminal Courts Building, overlooking the gallows behind the Cook County Jail. Reporters from most of the city's newspapers are passing the time with poker and pungent wisecracks about the news of the day. Soon they will witness the hanging of Earl Williams, a white man and supposed Communist revolutionary convicted of killing a black policeman. Hildy Johnson, cocky star reporter for the ''Examiner'', is late. He appears only to say goodbye; he is quitting to get a respectable job and be married. Suddenly the reporters hear that Earl Williams has escaped from the jail. All but Hildy stampede out for more information. As Hildy tries to decide how to react, Williams comes in through the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saint Joan (play)
''Saint Joan'' is a play by George Bernard Shaw about 15th-century French military figure Joan of Arc. Premiering in 1923, three years after her canonization by the Roman Catholic Church, the play reflects Shaw's belief that the people involved in Joan's trial acted according to what they thought was right. He wrote in his preface to the play: There are no villains in the piece. Crime, like disease, is not interesting: it is something to be done away with by general consent, and that is all here isabout it. It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us. Michael Holroyd has characterised the play as "a tragedy without villains" and also as Shaw's "only tragedy". John Fielden has discussed further the appropriateness of characterising ''Saint Joan'' as a tragedy. The text of the published play includes a long Preface by Shaw. Characters * Robert de Baud ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lord Of The Flies
''Lord of the Flies'' is a 1954 novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. The novel, which was Golding's debut, was generally well received. It was named in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching number 41 on the editor's list, and 25 on the reader's list. In 2003, it was listed at number 70 on the BBC's The Big Read poll, and in 2005 ''Time'' magazine named it as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005, and included it in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time. Popular reading in schools, especially in the English-speaking world, ''Lord of the Flies'' was ranked third in the nation's favourite books from school in a 201 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Newton
Christopher Newton (11 June 1936 – 20 December 2021) was a Canadian director and actor, who served as artistic director of the Shaw Festival from 1980 to 2002. Early life and education Newton was born in Deal, Kent, England and educated at Sir Roger Manwood's School. After graduating from the University of Leeds with a B.A., he moved to the United States for further study at Purdue University in Indiana and the University of Illinois, where he earned his M.A. in 1960. Summer jobs at the Vancouver Festival in 1959, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the next two summers, led Newton into acting. Bucknell University hired him as acting head of theatre department, where he continued to learn acting on the job. Career Newton performed with the Canadian Players, at the Manitoba Theatre Centre, the Vancouver Playhouse and the Stratford Festival. At Stratford, he played such roles as 'Oberon' in '' A Midsummer Night's Dream'' and 'Aramis' in ''The Three Musketeers''. He als ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Georges Feydeau
Georges-Léon-Jules-Marie Feydeau (; 8 December 1862 – 5 June 1921) was a French playwright of the era known as the Belle Époque. He is remembered for his farces, written between 1886 and 1914. Feydeau was born in Paris to middle-class parents and raised in an artistic and literary environment. From an early age he was fascinated by the theatre, and as a child he wrote plays and organised his schoolfellows into a drama group. In his teens he wrote comic monologues and moved on to writing longer plays. His first full-length comedy, ''Tailleur pour dames'' (Ladies' tailor), was well received, but was followed by a string of comparative failures. He gave up writing for a time in the early 1890s and studied the methods of earlier masters of French comedy, particularly Eugène Labiche, Alfred Hennequin and Henri Meilhac. With his technique honed, and sometimes in collaboration with a co-author, he wrote seventeen full-length plays between 1892 and 1914, many of which have become sta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the " Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. He remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna Hall, Susanna, and twins Hamnet Shakespeare, Hamnet and Judith Quiney, Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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