Ed Rampell News Today

VENICE, Calif. — Wolf Mankowitz’s The Bespoke Overcoat is a theatrical adaptation of “The Overcoat,” a short story written in 1842 by the Ukrainian-born Nikolai Gogol, who along with Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gorky is one of the most renowned contributors to Russian literature.

Radical attorney Stephen Bingham discusses Black Panther George Jackson, living underground in Europe and filmmaking.

Writer/director Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things, a tasty full-course movie meal that serves up spectacular cuisine and rarefied romance, is an acquired taste.

In two new films, the renowned German director dramatizes working class life in Japan and documents an antifascist artist from Germany.

Rustin, directed by George C. Wolfe and executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, tells the story of an almost-forgotten March on Washington organizer. The film follows Bayard Rustin and other activists as they make the march a reality.

Memory: Can love conquer all? Writer/director Michel Franco’s moving Memory is one of AFI FEST 2023’s most memorable movies. Jessica Chastain plays Sylvia, who works at an adult daycare facility and is first glimpsed in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where the recovering ex-drinker participates...

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Backstage at Carnegie Hall during the mid-1980s I found myself standing next to a tall, older gentleman. Looking up, I gasped, realizing I was in the presence of arguably the world’s greatest living playwright. I blurted out: “God bless you, Mr.

TOPANGA, Calif. — That splendid Arcadian Shakespearean reliquary, Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, is presenting four of the Bard’s dramas—Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Henry VI plus Richard III—compressed, compiled and edited into a single two-act play, Queen Margaret’s Version of Shakespeare’s War of the Roses, directed by Ellen Geer. A Shakespearean scholar and playwright, Ms.

LOS ANGELES — If you are a fan of plays featuring and exploring bravura acting, Hollywood history, LGBTQIA issues, creative stagecraft, feminism, anti-Semitism, one-person shows, illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and more, strap on those running shoes and dash, do not walk, to experience Garden of Alla...

BY Ed Rampell The multi-talented, widely admired performer Harry Belafonte died Tuesday, April 25, at age 96. He was born on March 1, 1927, in New York City as Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr. His ancestry is Jamaican and Martiniquan, and his paternal grandfather had Dutch Jewish origins. Belafonte’s career took off with the film Carmen