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Terrence McNally - An Obituary

Terrence McNally – Playwright, librettist, screenwriter Born November 3, 1938; died March 24, 2020   Terrence McNally, who has died aged 81 from complications of Covid-19, was a Tony award winning playwright, whose slow burn of a career moved through controversy to commercial success. In the former, his early play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1965), put gay relationships at its centre at a time when such matters were taboo enough to provoke critical venom. Much later, McNally’s depiction of Jesus and his apostles as gay in Corpus Christi (1998) provoked protests, death threats, condemnation by the Catholic League and attempted cancellation of its scheduled premiere at the Manhattan Theatre. In terms of commercial success, his 1987 play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, saw McNally adapt his two-hander about a one-night stand between a short order chef and a waitress into a film starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. His book for Kiss of the Spiderwoman

Sleep: Perchance to Dream? – Max Richter, Lockdown Lifestyle and the Road to Urban Eden

When Max Richter’s eight-hour composition, Sleep, was first broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 in September 2015, I decided to go full method, and listen to it in bed. The result of this was that within a few minutes of lying in the dark with the light off while Richter’s neurologically inclined epic washed over me, I promptly fell asleep. Richter’s performance that night alongside soprano Grace Davidson and five string players took place between midnight and 8am in the Reading Room of the Wellcome Collection in London. Played in front of an audience lying in beds rather than seated, Sleep formed the climax of BBC Radio 3’s Science and Music weekend. It was composed, as Richter described it, as “a call to arms to stop what we’re doing.” Ergo, my response in nodding off so rapidly, before drifting in and out of conscious and unconscious hearing over the next eight hours, was probably the point of the exercise.   Whether this happens again when Sleep is rebroadcast this coming Easter