Home :: Books :: Arts & Photography  

Arts & Photography

Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
The Glass Menagerie CD

The Glass Menagerie CD

List Price: $24.00
Your Price: $16.32
Product Info Reviews

<< 1 .. 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 >>

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The successful play
Review: In this semi-autobiographical play, the domineering matriarch of the Wingfield family tries to find a "gentleman caller" for her daughter. This is a "memory play"; in memory everything seems to happen to music, the character, Tom, continually shifts from narration to his "in scene" character. He is a dynamic character. This technique makes the drama a most effective selection for audio. The cast is extraordinary throughout, with each performer deftly handling the most subtle nuances of Williams's poetic realism. The production and direction of the performance are equally engaging. Through the use of sound effects and evocative music, the listener is swept into the troubled, poignant world of these haunting characters

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: The Glass Menagerie...NOT
Review: This was a play that I did not enjoy reading one bit. I found Laura, Tom, Amanda and Jim to be terrible characters added to an already terribly boring and predictable plot that was excruciatingly difficult to bear. Concurrently, Tennesse Williams struggled hardcore so I am not surprised. Peace out.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An excellent play
Review: This play is one of the most moving, realistic works ever written. Each character is given such an intricate psychology that they feel real.You are able to empathise with each character's pain, hope and reality. For those of you who say it is boring, don't read classics anymore. The play is not about plot but about REAL people in REAL situations with profound symbolism and harsh, harsh reality. From start to finish, this play shapes itself. Every word must be there. Every scene has to exist or the meaning would be lost. Real life isn't exciting, it is filled with emotion and thoughts that no other writer has ever been able to potray so well as Tenesse Williams. This is definately his finest work and a true gem in American Literature.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: An outcry to the world
Review: Widely recognized as a work of a true master, "The Glass Menagerie" was pieced together from Williams' own tortured life and is an in-depth study of futility and failure. Centering around the life of the protagonist, a hopeles young man with grand aspirations, stuck forever in a menial job at a shoe-box factory, his pathologically shy sister Laura, and his mother Amanda, who still thinks herself a young woman. The play is quite depressing and, unlike many others, does not have a happy ending. The projector seems to be a wonderful device for conveying the characters' thoughts. The sets is also wonderfully constructed, leaving much to the imagination while conveying the overall sense. I would also recommend watching the film (with Paul Newman), which is near-perfect.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Much better than I'd expected, but it's not exactly classic.
Review: When I was young I saw two astonishing Kazan movies and thought Tennessee Williams was a genius, the greatest playwright who ever lived. I didn't realise then that a script is of minor importance to great films.

Then I read his Collected Prose - florid, flat, dead things - and I assumed he was a pretty bad, overrated writer whose continuing reputation was largely thanks to an awesome Brando performance.

So I approached this play with extreme negativity, and I was pleasantly surprised. Much of it is unbearable - the control-freak stage directions, written with the most pretensious, unreadable floweriness imaginable, pointing out to us all the film's themes and observations like we're idiots, stressing obvious effects; the rather misogynistic wallowing in victim-glorification; the trite metaphors that are actually explained within the play.

But, especially in this written version, there is a lot of fun. Even when I admired Williams, I always thought that what you saw is what you got. There didn't seem to be much irony, and once you've realised that Tom, gay, spends most of his nights on the docks with willing sailors, you've pretty much grasped the subtleties.

But Williams here subverts his own play by making hilarious use of a screen to print flippant, bathetic legends or illustrative slides over the action, making ridiculous the ostensible play. The whole thing is in Tom's head anyway, and he seems to mock his own nostalgic emotion. It's impossible to be caught up in Laura's despair when you've got a sniggering screen gloating behind her.

Unfortunately, Williams abandoned this device for performance, and The Glass Menagerie has been ossified as the grim tragedy it so obviously isn't. While his preface urging this play as experimental theatre is risible to anyone who's read Beckett or Ionesco, it at least shows that he recognised his own narrow limits.

That's not to say that the play itself has no merits. Williams could, I admit, have a wonderful way with dialogue, that builds up a strange emotional power based on banalities. The main characters are sympathetically drawn, and occasionally break out of their simplistic conception. All in all, much better than I'd feared.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Boring...
Review: This book was well written by a great aithor, but the plot was boring and could have had much more excitement. I read this twice, and did not enjoy it either time. There are many other plays out there to read, do not choose this one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: For those of you who don't like it- PLEASE READ
Review: If you hated this play, chances are, you didn't understand it.With the characters, the plot was inevitable. Have any of you actually read about Tennessee Williams and his life? Its has AMAZING comparisons to his real life. Amanda is stuck in the past, how can she be looking for a suitor? Laura is amazingly timid, and she, like the rest of the family members, lives in her fantasy world, so shy she can barely bare reality. Tom is trapped in-between his fantasy world, reality, and responsibility. Think about it from Amanda's point of view, not just Tom's. For those of you morons who hate the book, not all books have happy endings, just TRY to understand the book before you judge.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Read it yourself.
Review: This play is awful. I have read many plays in my time, but this one takes the cake. Oddly enough, the characters were wonderful. They were well thought out and if they would have been given a different story, I probably would have LOVED it. I still recommend this book, it teaches you a valuable lesson that can not be learnes at too early an age.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: -What i thought of it-
Review: I enjoyed the book, The Glass Menagerie. It wasn't too long and it was very interesting to read. This was my favorite out of all the summer reading books i had to read. One reason is that it is written as a play. The play focuses on three main characters: Amanda, the mother, her daughter Laura, and her son Tom. I also liked it because it is one of those books you can't put down. I found myself wondering what was going to happen next. I perceived the atmosphere of this play to be a sad one. It's not like a sudden tragedy had occurred, but just their day-to-day life seemed hopeless. I felt sympathy for the characters. I wanted to give them help and support at times! Amanda and Tom always fought with one another. Tom was sick and tired of the way he had been living. He wanted real adventure instead of just watching it on the movies. Laura, on the other hand, was content to sit at home with her glass menagerie. Their mother, Amanda, had become so obsessed with finding a gentleman caller for Laura that everything else almost didn't matter anymore. Amanda always reminisced of how she had so many gentleman callers in her day. She wanted the same for Laura. But Laura was much different than her mother was. It wasn't that easy for Laura to meet gentlemen. Amanda needed to realize and accept that. I was impressed by this play. It was filled with emotion and diverse characters. They were almost oblivious to reality. They had their own worlds and expectations of what life should be. Their struggles to make their lives better were desperate and real. In the end we don't really know how everything turns out, but we were left thinking that anything could happen.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Interesting Symbolism
Review: The three main characters, mother Amanda, daughter Laura, and son Tom interact interestingly. Amanda, a woman of the South, truly wants the best for her children. Laura, the shy and crippled child, shys away from her mother's "high" expectations and retreates to the comfort of her Glass Menagerie. Tom finds and escape from the atmosphere his mother places over the house in the movies, but would like to find real adventure some day. Will the gentlemen caller that Tom brings be Laura's (and Amanda's) answer to happiness?


<< 1 .. 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 >>

© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates