Dickensblog

Congratulations, 'Edwin Drood'!

Broadway's Tony Award nominations were announced this morning, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood picked up five: Best Revival of a Musical, Best Director (Scott Ellis), Best Leading Actress (Stephanie J. Block as Edwin), Best Featured Actor (Will Chase as Jasper), and Best Scenic Design (Anna Louizos). The winners will be announced June 9, in a live ceremony on CBS.

Drood also received seven Drama Desk nominations: Outstanding Revival of a Musical, Outstanding Actor (Jim Norton as the Chairman), Outstanding Actress (Block), Outstanding Featured Actor (Andy Karl as Neville), Outstanding Featured Actress (Jessie Mueller as Helena), Outstanding Set Design (Louizos), and Outstanding Sound Design (Tony Meola). The Drama Desk winners will be announced May 19.

Congratulations and best wishes to the nominees!

That's quite a choice

A street in Kings Cross, London, may be named after either Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, or Amy Winehouse.

Dickens & Dostoevsky, debunked

That story about a meeting between the two writers that's been floating around for the past few years has finally been confirmed as a hoax . . . and a complex hoax it was, according to the Times Literary Supplement. (Slate has a shorter version of the story.)

Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton in 'The Atlantic'

I have an article in The Atlantic today, about Mikhail Simkin's attempt to prove that there's no substantial difference between Dickens's works and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's. Click here to read it!

Dickens quiz

This is a tough one! From the Oxford Dictionaries Blog:

"The Oxford English Dictionary, as a historical dictionary, aims to give the earliest example of a word in English, and then show its subsequent development through illustrative quotations and uses many quotations from Dickens in doing so. In fact to date there are 9,218 Dickens quotations in the OED, making him the 13^th most quoted source (just marginally ahead of William Caxton). Take our interactive quiz to see if you can tell which words have their first quotation from a work by Charles Dickens, and which make you cry What the dickens?"

I got 7 out of 9 right, but mostly through sheer guesswork!

'Hard Times' wrap-up

In brief -- this was a fairly good adaptation, all told. The cast, with a few exceptions, was really excellent, with Bill Paterson's Stephen and Beatie Edney's Louisa being the standouts. And even though it looked like they'd been given about $1.50 to spend on the sets, somehow they made it work. (I can't say as much for the soundtrack, though, which sounded equally cheap and much less effective.) The biggest problem, by far, was the uneven pacing. I wouldn't recommend this film before reading the book -- it would be easy to get lost in the "muddle," as Stephen would say. But it makes a decent supplement to the book.

'Mr. Pip' trailer

The trailer for Mr. Pip, in which Hugh Laurie would like to introduce us to Mr. Dickens, is now available.

'Hard Times,' part four

And we're into the home stretch. Nice little monologue in a mirror for Richard E. Grant. Still don't feel that his look is quite right, but I really can't fault his acting. He's done a fantastic job. Sissy's acting, however, strikes me as a little flat. And she wears her hair down for no reason, a la Billie Piper in Mansfield Park.

'Hard Times,' part three

Only had time to watch a little bit tonight, but I wanted to keep the momentum going, so here's a post on that little bit!

'Hard Times,' part two

The sets for this movie are sparse, but effective. You see Stephen walking past a never-ending brick wall with humungous "VOTE FOR THOMAS GRADGRIND" posters every few feet, you don't need much else.

Finally Harriet Walter gets a full scene. She's not an actress I would have thought of for this role, but she makes a good thing of it, in a quiet, austere way. And she's a nice foil to Bill Paterson's passionate Stephen.