Author: The Rake

You’d suppose a writer has to be pretty damn good, not to mention lucky, to warrant dust-jacket blurbs from not one but two Nobel laureates. The U.S. publication of Laura Restrepo’s Delirium carries ringing endorsements from José Saramago and Latin American luminary Gabriel García Márquez, and also comes on the heels of a slew of…

Orson Welles did it, and Laurie Anderson, too. Now local director Jon Ferguson—best known for his 2005 hit, Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban—has taken up the challenge of adapting Melville’s epic for the stage. This is an undertaking that, he admits, could elude, haunt, and/or—much as with Captain Ahab—swallow him whole. Ferguson’s project got…

On the occasion of its fifth Walker-commissioned production, Britain’s Improbable Theatre abandons the relative safety of such lavish puppetry spectacles as Shockheaded Peter and The Hanging Man (performed here in 2000 and 2003, respectively) and instead harks back to its roots in scrappy, improvisational object theater. Animo, therefore, is not so much a play as…

In this approximation of a true story, Richard Gere plays Clifford Irving, the failed writer who conjured up the scam of … if not of the century, at least of the 1970s. Irving claimed to have interviewed Howard Hughes, co-written the recluse’s autobiography, and then walked off with a mint—until the aviator called him on…

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez team up to give us this two-and-a-half-hour pulp festival featuring two, count ’em, two turgid films shown back to back with faux-vintage trailers in between. The first is Rodriguez’s zombie flick Planet Terror, in which biological weapons are unleashed, sending scores of the undead to face … why, a one-legged…