Results tagged “michaelmckean”

Native New Yorker Michael McKean is so identified with his ensemble work in Christopher Guest’s films – This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration – that it’s easy to forget that he created the iconic Leonard 'Lenny' Kosnowski in Laverne & Shirley some 32 years ago. What a long, strange career it’s been, with parts in almost-entirely forgotten films like Steven Spielberg’s 1941, hits like Clue and, in the 90s, a stint as the oldest person to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. In between there’s been a whole lot of supporting roles (his IMDB page counts 174 in film and television) as well as plenty of stage work; in 2004 he took over for Harvey Fierstein in the Broadway production of Hairspray. McKean is now onstage again and very funny in the must-see revival of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, which also stars Eve Best, Ian McShane and Raúl Esparza.

When Harold Pinter’s masterpiece The Homecoming first premiered on Broadway some four decades ago, the dramatized hostility was met with equal hostility from the bourgeois audience, as witnessed by the playwright himself:

One of the greatest theatrical nights of my life was the opening of The Homecoming in New York. There was the audience. It was 1967. I'm not sure they've changed very much, but it really was your mink coats and suits. Money. And when the lights went up on The Homecoming, they hated it immediately. 'Jesus Christ, what the hell are we looking at here?' I was there, and the hostility towards the play was palpable. You could see it.

Continue reading "Opinionist: The Homecoming"

The most exciting story in New York theater this year had nothing to do with the Broadway stagehands' strike, it was the vibrant growth of what used to be called “experimental theater”, a movement that can now really only loosely be defined by what it’s not: non-naturalistic and not made for TV, with an emphasis on bold physicality, collaboration and, sometimes, multimedia.

Some fun Guest stuff for all you bastard people: A Fame Audit from Fametracker, an interview with Movie City News and Caryn James' feature on the retrospective in today's Times. It seems that Guest has always wanted to just do only three "mockumentaries" and that he doesn't really like TV except The Office. And Gothamist once shared an elevator with Guest when he was promoting Almost Heroes (Matthew Perry and Chris Farley as 18th century explorers - not being shown in the tribute). Guest asked us what we thought of his seersucker suit, and Gothamist couldn't help ourselves when the words "It's kinda Matlocky" came out. But we didn't mean Matlocky in a bad way!