Stage Door: Sally Field in The Glass Menagerie

by Dancin' Dan

This is not your parents' Glass Menagerie.

It's not uncommon for theatrical "reinventions" to take place nowadays. Ivo van Howe has made it into a cottage industry of sorts, creating an intimate, visceral A View From the Bridge and a raw, elemental The Crucible in recent years. Sam Gold is of the same cloth. He made his name with an audacious revival of Look Back in Anger at the Roudabout in 2012, won the Tony in 2015 for his sensitive in-the-round staging of the musical Fun Home, and most recently directed a searing Othello with David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig off Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop.

But all those pieces benefit from a stripped back, in-some-cases radical rethinking. Tennessee Williams's memory play is a much more delicate thing, announcing as narrator Tom Wingfield does right at the start that this is a subjective work of art, a piece of memory that may or may not represent what actually happened. Productions of it generally take after the play's quietest character, the "crippled" Laura - they are generally fragile, gossamer things, as light and airy as a thought or memory hanging in the air in front of us...

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Tweetweek at the ballet with a wacky neighbor and frosted pop tarts

Two Tweets that are consuming most parts of my brain at the moment...  

I still think about how different things would be if BURLESQUE ended with 'Simple Song #3' and YOUTH ended with 'Show Me How You Burlesque'.

— Guy Lodge (@GuyLodge) August 28, 2016

Dear Anne — You sang “At The Ballet” to perfection! Besides your beautiful voice, I remember your glowing face xo B pic.twitter.com/SClszOQkHs

— Barbra Streisand (@BarbraStreisand) August 31, 2016

Babs getting verklempt over Hathaway is too camp for even me.

I mean. Between those two tweets who can we think of anything else now? Okay we'll try after the jump with tweets on tv feminism, Sully anticipation, Sally Field's range, and finding Mr Darcy...

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1984: Year of the Heroic Farm Wife

As we look back at 1984, please welcome new contributor John Guerin to talk about a famous Oscar triple...

In 1984, 60% of the Best Actress category was farm wives

In May 1985, after scoring Oscar nominations for playing distressed farmwives in Country and The River, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek testified before the U.S. House of Representatives and urged senators to help aid farmers during a devastating agricultural crisis. After a toxic combination of faulty economic policies, mounting debts, high interest rates, and a declining Midwest population, American farmers were experiencing financial hardship unseen since the Great Depression. Both Country and The River offer visions of farm families under such pressures, pitting family and community against unyielding forces of nature and government.

Can you remember the last time an actress testified before Congress after starring in a politically-minded film?

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Beauty vs Beast: Spaceman Blues

Jason from MNPP here - it's time for another "Beauty vs Beast" y'all! Today's we're talking Pixar because of two reasons -- first off their sequel Finding Dory is out this weekend, prepped to splash magic across the summer box office. And next off it's the 63rd birthday of Tim Allen today, whose greatest role (give or take a Galaxy Quest) came divorced from his physical being, his essence siphoned into Pixar's patented pixels and then tossed into the greatest toy box there ever was with 1995's Toy Story. Can you imagine a world with Buzz Lightyear or Woody the well-meaning cotton-stuffed cowpoke? I thought not. But try to remember that once upon a time they were more at each other's throats than anything else, and then take your sides...

PREVIOUSLY Last week we stormed onto the primary-color-coated set of the soap opera satire Soapdish, maneuvered ourselves between the divas and dimbulbs, and asked you to choose between the Queen Bee and the Crazy Bitch - well with 60% of the vote once again Celeste Talbert (Sally Field) has made her way to that podium. Said Sawyer:

"'What am I, 70, David? Why don't you just put me in a walker? Buy a goddamn walker and put me in it!' #celesteforever"

Beauty vs Beast: The Sun Also Sets

Jason from MNPP here with this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" - I think I must have had fever of the brain (to the lay-person that's called Kopfgeschlagen) last week because somehow I didn't take advantage of the 25th anniversary of one of my most favorite comedies of ever, Michael Hoffmann's Soapdish, the fizzy slapstick tale of backstage shenanigans at a daytime soap opera full of narcissistic psychopaths. Somewhere in the late 90s I wore out my VHS I watched this movie so many times - Soapdish is one you could stand me in front of a crowd, tell me to go, and I could perform the entire thing from start to finish, from crawdad butts to Tawny the Tweety-Bird Couturie.

The cast is to a tee in top form - even semi-cameos like Carrie Fisher's classic bitch Betsy Faye Sharon leave impressions so sharp I can summon up their character-names on command. But it's the poisonous rivalry between show queen Celeste Talbert (Sally Field) and "Nurse Nan" Montana Moorehead (Cathy Moriarty) that gives this Soap its eternal dishiness...

PREVIOUSLY With what could turn out to be her final X-Men movie we took the opportunity to say goodbye to Jennifer Lawrence's two blockbuster turns, and Katniss carried the day to the tune of about 80% of your vote - said Tom:

"I thought she was quite good in First Class (and looked great in that mod costuming). But it seems that her heart was always more focused on Katniss than Mystique. She openly expressed that she doesn't really wish to return to the role. She never seemed bored as Katniss, a complaint often lodged at her in regards to her X-Men performance."