ARCHIVES

Dalton Trumbo’s words inspire his son to create a moving portrait of courage; The Thing About Men is a felicitous blend of musical and farce.

She may not offer much in the singing and dancing departments, but Melanie Griffith does inject a certain breathy star power into Chicago.

A rehash of Sylvia’s Plath’s life, Edge doesn’t have any; a revue featuring the songs of a risqué chanteuse, on the other hand, has both edge and life.

Henry V in Central Park has the usual Shakespeare Festival excesses and foolishness—along with a few decent performances.

John Simon reviews The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and Eight Days (Backwards).

Ingmar Bergman bids farewell to the theater with Ibsen’s haunting modern classic; Ellen McLaughlin makes Aeschylus seem contemporary.

Jules Feiffer looks at the child of communists as she approaches adulthood in the fifties, but it’s hard to tell what he sees. Intrigue With Faye isn’t very . . . intriguing.

An unlikely sexual roundelay in the south of France provides the frisson of Marsha Norman’s Last Dance; for Douglas Carter Beane’s Mondo Drama, more is clearly less.

In “Master Harold” . . . and the boys, Athol Fugard turns a fox-trot into a haunting allegory of racial equality; Humble Boy has bees in its stylish bonnet.

Vanessa Redgrave’s journey into madness isn’t long—she’s gone from the beginning of Eugene O’Neill’s shattering masterpiece; Woody Allen comes up short in Writer’s Block.