Movies for Shut-ins Paddy Chayefsky’s Network

Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is a veteran news anchor on the evening news for UBS, the Union Broadcasting System, rated a pathetic fourth of four networks. His ratings have gone into the dumper along with UBS’s profit. He is fired for committing TV’s cardinal sin, low ratings. The news is given to him by the head of network news and longtime friend Max Schumacher (William Holden). Both are the face of TV from a prior day. Both are fossils. Beale snaps on that evening’s news broadcast. He announces on his show that next Tuesday he will commit suicide on live television. He is fired effective immediately. He pleads for one more show for old times’ sake so he can retire with dignity. His request is granted, but he uses his last hurrah to make things worse.

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Backstage Review: ‘Noises Off’ at At Good Luck Macbeth

To understand Noises Off it helps to know Murphy’s Law and O’Toole’s Commentary on Murphy’s Law aka O’Toole’s Corollary. Murphy’s Law says if anything can go wrong, it will. O’Toole’s Corollary says Murphy was an optimist. And if the purpose of theater is to hold a mirror up to ourselves so we can see clearly who and what we are then Noises Off tells us we are all doomed.

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Maestro Nicholas Carthy Interview.

Maestro Carthy will conduct the Reno Chamber Orchestra on Saturday and Sunday, January 25th and 26th. He was born in England in 1957 and studied music there. In 1981 he won an Austrian government scholarship to study at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. After he finished his studies he was appointed Kapellmeister at the Landestheater in Salzburg. He has worked with such famous conductors as Daniel Barenboim and Sir George Solti. He has been a music director of the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland and is currently a professor of music and opera at the University of Colorado and is a visiting tutor at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England.

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Backstage Review—Murder On The Orient Express

Agatha Christie made murder respectable. She took it out of the back alley and put it into the parlor where it belongs. Okay, so in this outstanding whodunit she put it into the parlor car and the sleeping coach. Who indeed killed Samuel Ratchett, a villain most foul, with eight stab wounds? Doesn’t this seem like overkill—literally? Ratchett is really sleazebag Bruno Cassetti who murdered the 5-year-old American heiress Daisy Armstrong. With a trainful of suspects, 8 of them, each with an alibi, only famed detective Hercule Poirot, who appears in 33 of Christie’s novels, has the chops to figure it out.

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