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"Chicago Tribune" featured Pace University Actors Studio Drama School in "On the return of ‘Inside the Actors Studio,’ and the art of talking about craft"
"Chicago Tribune" featured Pace University Actors Studio Drama School in "On the return of ‘Inside the Actors Studio,’ and the art of talking about craft"
"Inside the Actors Studio," a show in which famous actors talk about their craft, returned to television Sunday on a new network, Ovation, and with rotating hosts in place of James Lipton, who created the show and captained its previous 22 seasons into his 90s.
Lipton, whose last “Actors Studio” ran on Bravo in January 2018, is a hard act to follow. With his combed-back, dark(ened) hair, wizard’s goatee and imperial eyebrows — he could play Dr. Strange’s grandpa — and pedagogical fanboy manner, he has personified the series. He’s been animated on “The Simpsons,” played by Will Ferrell on “Saturday Night Live.”
The reverential solemnity with which he describes even the slightest accomplishments of his illustrious guests has opened him to parody — see Ferrell, above — but he’s a believer. That Henry Winkler, who has won an Emmy for playing an acting teacher on “Barry,” is the new season’s first guest, feels fitting, as does the fact that his interviewer is Actors Studio member Alec Baldwin, who like Lipton is a big character, with a tendency to purr.
But what’s made “Inside the Actors Studio” notable from the start is that it takes its subjects seriously — even too seriously. (But that’s a feature, not a bug, and it may lead you to a new appreciation of the work of Pierce Brosnan, say, or Brooke Shields.) Indeed, the series records an actual “master class,” its audience made up of students from the Actors Studio Drama School, a graduate program cofounded by Lipton and now affiliated with New York’s Pace University. Of the sessions and the series, Lipton said that he vowed “we would not deal in gossip, we would deal in craft, which of course might make us dry and off the air in a year.”
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