Oscar weekend...with an Oscar winner!
Bear with some geeky backstory before I get to the geeky news. Last year around this time, I wrote a fluffy little story for the Gazette about a real-life Oscar statuette that's on display at the Smith College archives. It belonged to Nancy Hamilton, a 1930 Smith grad who won it in the Best Documentary category in 1956 for her film "Helen Keller in Her Story." Because I'm a total Oscar dork, I asked the photographer covering the story with me to take my picture with the statue (which didn't run in the paper, thankfully). The library made me wear gloves because all the gold plating was starting to wear off, but it was still awesome. As every winner says in the post-Oscar press conference it really is "much heavier than I expected! (At the bottom of this page, there is a photo of Helen Keller herself holding the same Oscar.)
The point of all that is to say that this year, I managed top that pre-Oscar close encounter by meeting (or at least being the presence of...) a real-life Oscar winner. And not some chintzy Best Editing winner no one's heard of, but the star of "Amadeus" and Best Actor winner for 1985, F. Murray Abraham!
"Murray," as those of us in the know call him, is starring in Broadway productions of those classics of Elizabethan anti-Semitism, "The Merchant of Venice" and "The Jew of Malta", both of which we saw for arts and culture class. ("Merchant" is excellent, "Malta" is performed as kind of a weird slapstick routine, but he's great in both.) After "Merchant" on Thursday, our professor arranged for us to meet up with the producer of the shows, Jeffrey Horowitz, at a bar across the street from the theater.
We had a really fascinating chat with Horowitz about the economics and politics of producing Shakespeare in New York. About halfway through, Murray happened to walk by and came over to talk to us for a few minutes. He recited some actor-y talking points about the magic of the theater ("the play you saw tonight will never be performed in exactly the same way again!") before heading off to meet his visiting son. Having just watched him for five hours over two plays, we were all appropriately star-struck. Here's a photo of him with Horowitz and our professor, Alisa Solomon (and my classmate Ann's hand holding the microphone).
Fellow Oscar fans, I say to you: top that! :) (Which you could do by meeting an Oscar winner who's been in a movie that anyone actually saw since getting the award, but no matter.)
More photos on our nascent class blog, including the whole lot of us in front of Keith Haring's famous (?) "Crack is Wack" mural in Harlem.
The point of all that is to say that this year, I managed top that pre-Oscar close encounter by meeting (or at least being the presence of...) a real-life Oscar winner. And not some chintzy Best Editing winner no one's heard of, but the star of "Amadeus" and Best Actor winner for 1985, F. Murray Abraham!
"Murray," as those of us in the know call him, is starring in Broadway productions of those classics of Elizabethan anti-Semitism, "The Merchant of Venice" and "The Jew of Malta", both of which we saw for arts and culture class. ("Merchant" is excellent, "Malta" is performed as kind of a weird slapstick routine, but he's great in both.) After "Merchant" on Thursday, our professor arranged for us to meet up with the producer of the shows, Jeffrey Horowitz, at a bar across the street from the theater.
We had a really fascinating chat with Horowitz about the economics and politics of producing Shakespeare in New York. About halfway through, Murray happened to walk by and came over to talk to us for a few minutes. He recited some actor-y talking points about the magic of the theater ("the play you saw tonight will never be performed in exactly the same way again!") before heading off to meet his visiting son. Having just watched him for five hours over two plays, we were all appropriately star-struck. Here's a photo of him with Horowitz and our professor, Alisa Solomon (and my classmate Ann's hand holding the microphone).
Fellow Oscar fans, I say to you: top that! :) (Which you could do by meeting an Oscar winner who's been in a movie that anyone actually saw since getting the award, but no matter.)
More photos on our nascent class blog, including the whole lot of us in front of Keith Haring's famous (?) "Crack is Wack" mural in Harlem.
posted by Ryan Davis | 2:17 PM
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