Section A · Page 8
The University Daily Kansan
Monday, December 7, 1998
Entertainment
Dramatic plays receive mixed response
By Augustus Anthony Piazza Kansan staff writer
The two one-act plays performed by the ExtraCommunicative Minstrels created a dark mood for the Java Break audience Saturday night.
"It's Christmas, when everything has a happy ending, but this doesn't't," said Kari Jackson, Lawrence resident.
The plays performed were I'm 36 and I can Smoke if I Want, written by Richard Gaeta, Lawrence resident and Candle Moth, written by Andy Stowers. Lawrence senior.
Gaeta's play is about a group of mentally and physically disabled adults who live together in a home for the disabled. The characters share with each other the abuse they faced in their lives.
Stowers' play is about a man who struggles with his inner voice about whether or not to end his relationship with his girlfriend.
Laura Graham, Lawrence resident,
played Barbara, a woman who lives in the home and wants to escape the abuse that she has confronted.
About 50 people attended the performances.
"I have never played a person with a disability." Graham said. "I was nervous because it's hard not to portray the character as the stereotype."
Frank, played by Trevor Ruder, Lawrence senior, looks down on Dawn, played by Sarah Bardakjian, Lawrence resident, in E.M.U. Theatre's "Candle Moth." About 50 people attended two performances by E.M.U. Saturday night. Photo by Augustus Anthony Pizzaza/KANSAN
Trevor Ruder, Lawrence senior, who played Frank in Candle Moth, said the audience reaction Saturday night was not as good as it was during the other performances.
E. M.U. performed the shows Wednesday through Saturday nights.
"I thought we did good, but the audience was dead," Ruder said.
The dramas performed were something new for the acting group, which put on a series of comedy scripts in August during its inaugural performances.
"It was kind of a challenge because I had only done comedy." Ruder said. "It was a completely different acting approach."
A new stage set-up also distinguished these shows from the August performances.
"There were a lot more seats, and I think you could see better," said Cynthia Evans-Dahlberg, director of the
play I'm 3m and I Can Smoke if I Want.
the next E.M.U. event is tentatively scheduled to take place in six months but not at the Java Break, 17 E. Sev.
enth St. It will be a full length play that will be held in a bigger venue that has not been determined yet, Evans-Dahlberg said.
Psycho remake does not touch caliber of original film
Commentary
By Jeremy M. Doherty Kansan movie critic
Let's get the obvious complaint out of the way: The muchballyhooed remake of Hitchcock's Psycho is one of the absolutely dumbest ideas to come out of Hollywood in years.
That being said, director Gus Van Sant's effort — or rip-off, depending on where you stand — is hardly the disaster that Hitchcock disciples are praying it will be.
And why not? It uses more or less the same shooting script that Joseph Stefano penned in 1960. Chris Doyle's cinematography cleverly recreates the voyeuristic edge of the original's black-and-white images.
Van Sant even hired Danny Elfman, one of the best film scorers working today, to beef up the strings-only arrangement of the original, which, of course, was written by the late Bernard Herrmann — arguably the greatest film scorer in Hollywood history.
For the uninitiated: Phoenix secretary Marion Crane (Anne Heche) steals $400,000 from her company and heads north to be with her lover (Viggo Mortensen). One evening, she stops at the Bates Motel, a ramshackle, earily quiet dive that sits untouched along an unused highway. There, she attracts the attention of Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn), the motel's manager, who lives in constant
PSYCHO
Kansan rating: **1/2 out of**
*****
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Rated: R for a big kitchen knife and one deeply shower stall
fear of and devotion to his domineering mother. After deciding to return to Phoenix and accept responsibility for her actions, Marion hops into the shower, where she at last is introduced to Mrs. Bates and one big kitchen knife.
Van Sant's casting of the remake consistently hits more often than it blunders. Vaughn's Norman is a tad more perverted and far less quirky perverted and the stuttering, wishy-
washy Norman played by Anthony Perkins. Heche's take on Marion Crane is pluckier, more assertive than before — at least until the shower scene, where her performance suddenly shifts to a half-hearted mimicry of Janet Leigh's scream queen.
For all his efforts to provide a modern-day counterpart to a classic, Van Sant's film is cold — an exercise in cinematic theatrics lacking an emotional core. Watching this Psycho, I had trouble making a connection between it and his other films. For a director who — for better or worse — never before has forgotten to leave his signature on a finished product, he's neglected to inject his own personality into this thriller.
When he does experiment, Van Sant makes bold, if ill-advised choices. Case in point: In both versions, Norman spies on Marion through a hole in the bathroom wall while she's preparing for her shower. In this Psycho, Van Sant has Vaughn masturbate as Heche undresses, which expresses Norman's sexual frustrations but destroys any element of mystery once the murders begin.
But this rendition is always engaging; by using the original script, it could never be boring. But why bother with this movie when Hitchcock's version did it first — and better? It's like choosing an Elvis impersonator instead of the King himself.
Sabbath revisits former lineup with new tour
By Jaime Holguin The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Guitarist Tony Iommi sits in a midtown hotel room, reflecting on Black Sabbath's 30-year history. Next to him is singer Ozzy Osbourne. Years ago, both vowed never to share the same stage again.
Black Sabbath is the band that pioneered heavy metal music with its amplified dirges brimming with cryptic lyrics and bone-crushing riffs. During the early 1970s, the band's exploits became synonymous with the hard-rock lifestyle of all-night parties, groupies and exhausting tour schedules.
On the band's first American tour, Iommi and Osbourse knocked down a hotel wall in Virginia.
Now Osbourne and Iommi are getting ready for Black Sabbath's North American tour to promote a new record that is appropriately titled, *Reunion*.
"We were angry guys," Osbourne explains. "And we just thought, 'Hey let's just score everybody.'"
The tour is the first to feature the original lineup since Osbourne left the band in 1978. It is scheduled to begin on New Year's Eve in Phoenix.
"I always felt that the original Black Sabbath was unresolved," says Osbourne, his eyes hidden by tinted eyel glasses. "We just kind of flicked it away."
If a recent in-store signing for the new album is any indication, the reunion tour will attract as much attention as the band's first American tour nearly 30 years ago. The line of Black Sabbath fans stretched a block long at a record store in Times Square.
"We got our success from the people," Osbourne says. "Everyone said we wouldn't last five minutes, said we couldn't play, couldn't sing, couldn't write songs. Lo and behold, 30 years later, we're more popular than ever."
Mounting egos led to Osbourne's departure in 1978. While iommi continued to record and tour as Black Sabbath, succeeding lineups never commanded the attention of the original.
"We've all been around long enough in different lineups, but when we get back in this one, there's no comparison," Iommi says.
Since the breakup, Osbourne has enjoyed a contriversial, prosperous solo career.
In 1992, he announced his retirement from music but returned to the road three years later with a Retirement Sucks tour.
"We all have to carry on somehow," Osbourne says.
"We have to survive and feed the family, you know."
We have to survive and feed the family, you know. His solo career is on indefinite hold while he and his old chums decide how longer to extend the reunion.
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