Posts From Author: kinky boots

Pride (In the Name of Love)

Pride, a great new British movie directed by Matthew Warchus, is as warm and witty as Billy Elliot or Kinky Boots but as fierce as a rampaging Ken Loach. It’s 1984 and the miners’ strike has begun in opposition to the government’s proposed closure of twenty mines. “One isn’t here to be a softie,” explains then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the short montage of archival footage, spliced with shots of picket lines and police vehicles, that begins the film. If you’ll excuse the puns, this is a rich seam of recent British history for TV- and movie-makers, and oft-mined. Billy Elliot covers the same period as Pride, while Brassed Off, set a decade later, examines the aftermath of the unions’ collapse. But Warchus and writer Stephen Beresford have found a totally new angle. Lesbian and Gay Pride, in 1984 in its thirteenth year, is still very much a protest march at this point; a demand for civil rights and tolerance. So it’s extraordinary that a group of lesbian and gay activists should seek to ally themselves with the National Union of Mineworkers. Yet that’s what happened. Eyes and ears on the ground are provided by Joe (George MacKay), a young man from Bromley just turned twenty, […]
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The Bon Mots of Michael Riedel

Nothing generates as much excitement around town as a smash hit musical. Or, if you’re a bit of a vulture (and I am), a complete fiasco wherein millions of dollars are lost, people are at one another’s throats and reputations are ruined. — Michael Riedel, in an article from September 2003 Michael Riedel was our guest at last week’s Seriously Entertaining “Are You For Sale?” at City Winery. He spoke with wit and love of the late Jacques le Sourd, a critic-colleague of his whom he had known for many years. (In)famous for his outspoken, occasionally outrageous criticism, Riedel has worked as theatre critic for the New York Post for more than 15 years. To celebrate his SpeakEasy debut, we take a look at his work in the Post and on his PBS show Theater Talk. ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ on target to kill at Tonys A recent one to kick off, covering the musical adaptation of Woody Allen’s 1994 movie Bullets Over Broadway, which is currently in previews at the St. James Theatre. Part of what makes Riedel’s work so entertaining is his acknowledgement of his own reputation. It was there in his work on the TV show Smash, whose […]
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