For at least 15 minutes of "Fortune's Fool," which opened last night at the Music Box Theater, Mr. Bates brings out the Roman candles, and it is a spectacle no lover of acting should miss.
It's music that makes you want to get into an eyeliner-smearing, sobbing, public spectacle of a lover's tiff… in theory.
This blissfully staged dinner-party scene accounts for about 15 minutes of "Fortune's Fool," directed by Arthur Penn from Mike Poulton's adaptation, and it's a spectacle that no lover of acting should miss.
The film presents the spectacle of both the lovers and the despot, though it falters in its exploration of the consequences of their collision.
Here, instead of the drawn game that standard county cricket often peters out into, was a run-chase and a guaranteed result; a spectacle that even baseball-lovers could recognise as such.
Lovers of sonic spectacle could feel shortchanged by the relatively slight proportions.
Within a few years, the spectacle of so much raw emotion — lovers grieving, families and friends in mourning, the disciplined rage of Larry Kramer and ACT UP — had humanized a population commonly depicted as soulless narcissists.
Wriggling through the hundreds of locals, journalists and visiting oenophiles who strolled among the booths of 130 or so producers with glasses outstretched, I marveled at the improbable spectacle of Croatia as a wine lover's destination.
But until then, this life-and-death spectacle continues to grip local residents, plant lovers and the curious alike in this rural village known for its antique shops and horse shows.
Sometimes it requires only a stronger pair of spectacles to cure the lover, and he who had the imagination to picture a face, a figure twenty years older would perhaps pass through life very undisturbed - Human, All Too Human.
