How much would you pay for a painting with nothing on it? Would it be "art"? Marc's best friend Serge has just bought a very expensive - and very white - painting. To Marc, it is a joke, and as battle lines are drawn, old friends use the painting to settle scores. With friendships hanging in the balance, the question becomes: how much is a work of "art" worth? A Tony Award winner for Best Play and Oliver Award winner for Best Comedy.
Includes interviews with translator Christopher Hampton, and actors Bob Balaban and Brian Cox.
An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:
Bob Balaban as Serge
Brian Cox as Marc
Jeff Perry as Yvan
Directed by Peter Levin. Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
Throughout his life, Franz Liszt burned the candle at both ends. A child prodigy who became the greatest keyboard virtuoso of his time, he was also a prolific composer, whose output ranged from hundreds of piano pieces to symphonies, tone poems, songs and oratorios. Mixing the colorful letters of Franz Liszt with some of his most ecstatic piano music, Odyssey of Love depicts his tempestuous relations with the two most important women in his life.
Acknowledged as one of Britain's finest pianists, Lucy Parham first came to public attention on winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year, since when she has performed extensively throughout the world.
An L.A. Theatre Works performance featuring Rosalind Ayres, Martin Jarvis and Lucy Parham.
Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
Simon Russell Beale stars in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of John le Carré's first novel, which introduced his most famous character, George Smiley.
This dramatisation, set in London in the late 1950s, finds Smiley engaged in the humdrum job of security vetting. But when a Foreign Office civil servant commits suicide after an apparently unproblematic interview, Smiley is baffled. Refusing to believe that Fennan shot himself soon after making a cup of cocoa and asking the exchange to telephone him in the morning, Smiley decides to investigate - only to uncover a murderous conspiracy with its roots in his own secret wartime past.
Starring the award-winning Simon Russell Beale as Smiley, and with a distinguished cast including Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron and Anna Chancellor, this tense, thrilling dramatisation perfectly captures the atmosphere of le Carré's masterful début novel.
It's San Francisco, 1928, and Sam Spade is a wisecracking, womanising Private Investigator. Missing husbands and unfaithful wives are his usual stock-in-trade, but when the beautifully distressed Miss Wonderley calls he gets involved in a dangerous caper most people would run a mile from.
Miss Wonderley asks Sam's partner, Miles Archer, to shadow Floyd Thursby, whom she maintains has kidnapped her sister. But then Archer is shot dead, and Miss Wonderley's story turns out to be a lie - just like her name, which is actually Brigid O'Shaughnessy. And Miss O'Shaughnessy keeps on lying.But one thing's for sure: she does know about the Maltese Falcon, an ancient statuette which has attracted more than one interested party.
With a bunch of heavies at his elbow and the police on his tail, Sam needs to think fast if he's to outlive the person who killed his partner...
Tom Wilkinson, Jane Lapotaire, Peter Vaughan and Nickolas Grace star in this stylish dramatisation of Dashiell Hammett's classic detective story.
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia merges science with human concerns and ideals, examining the universe’s influence in our everyday lives and ultimate fates through relationship between past and present, order and disorder and the certainty of knowledge. Set in an English country house in the year 1809-1812 and 1989, the play examines the lives of two modern scholars and the house's current residents with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier.
The New York Times calls Arcadia: “Tom Stoppard’s richest, most ravishing comedy to date. A play of wit, intellect, language, brio and emotion,” and The Royal Institution of Great Britain calls it: “the best science book ever written.”
Includes an interview with Steven Strogatz, the author of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos and professor at the Cornell University School of Theoretical and Applied Mathematics.
An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:
Kate Burton as Hannah
Mark Capri as Chater
Jennifer Dundas as Thomasina
Gregory Itzin as Bernard Nightingale
David Manis as Cpt. Brice
Christopher Neame as Noakes and Jellaby
Peter Paige as Valentine
Darren Richardson as Augustus
Kate Steele as Chloe
Serena Scott Thomas as Lady Croom
Douglas Weston as Septimus
Directed by John Rubinstein. Recorded at the Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.
Arcadia is part of L.A. Theatre Works’ Relativity Series featuring science-themed plays. Major funding for the Relativity Series is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.
Henry may be the wittiest playwright of his generation, but he’s hopelessly naïve when it comes to understanding love and infidelity. Writing about betrayal is one thing, living with it is another. After Henry leaves his wife for another woman, he’s confronted with being the cuckold himself. Both dazzlingly clever and emotionally naked, Henry’s search for the “the real thing” in art and love demonstrates beautifully why both are worth the effort in the end.
An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:
Andrea Bowen as Debbie
Matt Gaydos as Brodie and TV Director
Carolyn Seymour as Charlotte
Simon Templeman as Henry
Douglas Weston as Max
Joanne Whalley as Annie
Matthew Wolf as Billy
Directed by Rosalind Ayres. Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
The Gospel story as you've never heard it before.
Everyone knows the story of Jesus' life as told in the Gospels - and perhaps because it is so familiar, we have forgotten what an extraordinary life it was.
Through these five plays, the story is pieced together as if from the memories of those who were there and saw events for themselves: Jesus' mother Mary, his closest friends, the Jewish High Priest, and the Roman Governor. They recount the events they witnessed as if theyhad happened just the other day - and the effect on their own lives. How James and John first encountered Jesus by the lake; the three astonishing years of his ministry; his trial and ignominious death; the wholly unexpected resurrection; and finally, his mother Mary looks back to his obscure birth and the portents that accompanied it. And so the tale regains some of its freshness and even shocking nature.
Each play is followed by a short interview feature, Witness: Behind Luke's Gospel, presented by Ernie Rea and examining the themes of Luke's Gospel.
Featuring Tom Goodman-Hill as Jesus, Paul Hilton as Judas, Peter Firth as Peter, and Penelope Wilton as Mary.
Michael Flynn, a middle-aged red-headed law school drop-out, lives in Vancouver on a weather beaten sloop. Working for a lawyer named Sam Greene, Flynn gets involved in some strange situations, occasionally butting heads with Sam's attractive and stubborn niece Willie Greene.
