On Mar 23, 9:09 pm, "Kevin M." <[email protected]> wrote:
> I miss Spalding Gray, and I don't know of anybody who can do what he > did. KNBC weatherman Fritz Coleman has done two outstanding > monologues, and you can't help but compare them to Gray's work, but > Coleman never seemed to catch his big break. Craig Ferguson is a good > storyteller, but he lacks Gray's ability to weave a narrative thread > through an entire hour (or more). The first DVD set of "An Evening > With Kevin Smith" contained a fair amount of monologues, and there was > often an attempt at a callback here and there, but the amount of > preparation Gray did seems unlikely to be matched by anyone else for a > while. Despite my distaste for solo theatre, I was a big fan of Gray's, and saw him a number of times -- including his run of "Interviewing the Audience" in Los Angeles, where he'd pick random folks out of the audience to talk to. On the night I was there, one of the interviewees had been Charles Manson's defense attorney. Now, that said, despite Fritz Coleman's work (and I'm glad to know he can do something other than being a pathetically unfunny weatherguy), solo theatres and monologues are far from rare beasts -- especially in San Francisco. The Marsh Theatre is pretty much devoted to it (my wife will have a short run of her show-in-progress in June), and there are three or four other such venues in the area, turning out literally scores of solo performers annually. Gray was near the top of the heap, but he has plenty of company -- many of whom (Anna Devere Smith, to name one) do it much better. --Dave Sikula -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tvornottv+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.
