Great Performances 20th Anniversary Special
October 09, 1992
· PBS Television
· 90 minutes
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Directed by: Gerald Gutierrez
A special presentation of this performing arts series. This program, hosted by actress Meryl Streep, opens with a montage of clips from the "Great Performances" series with musical accompaniment by vocalist Bobby McFerrin and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Streep makes opening comments from the auditorium of her alma mater, the Yale School of Drama, recalling the important role appearances on the series played in the early part of her career. She discusses the invaluable record "Great Performances" provides of artists' work and explains that for this special, several American artists were commissioned to create a short piece about their art.
Meryl Streep (Host), Mikhail Baryshnikov, Matthew Broderick , Blythe Danner, Leon Fleisher, Tony Goldwyn , Bill Irwin, Gladys Knight, Jane Krakowski, Robert LaFosse, Nathan Lane, Nancy Marchand, Kyra Nichols, Johnny Mathis, Cynthia Nixon, Seiji Ozawa, Jorge Pabon, Bernadette Peters, Charlie Rose, Twyla Tharp, Paul Sorvino
Wendy Wasserstein’s ode to the theater, “Kiss, Kiss Dahlings,” directed by Gerald Gutierrez, is slight and obvious, but Blythe Danner, Nancy Marchand and Cynthia Nixon are lovely as three mother-daughter generations seen in three different eras. Terrence McNally’s “Last Mile” is an audacious fillip from an opera buff. It takes place backstage at the Metropolitan Opera as a soprano (Bernadette Peters) prepares to make her Met debut and, while warming up for “Tosca,” confronts jitters, ghosts and the specter of AIDS.
Directed by the television veteran Paul Bogart, Ms. Peters, Nathan Lane, Paul Sorvino, Tony Goldwyn and Bill Irwin serve the playwright splendidly. Alan Zweibel’s “Simple Melody” is a clever mini-musical, with Cy Coleman as composer, about a boy pianist who, plugging away on a little tune, grows up to be not just Matthew Broderick married to Jane Krakowski, but also rich and famous. Moving away from theater pieces, there is “Not My Girl,” a Fred Astaire fantasy choreographed by Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet and danced by Kyra Nichols outside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. In “Zoetrope,” the photographer Annie Leibovitz uses Mikhail Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp to illustrate a complex movement study.
