Oscar Wilde

California's unchallenged reputation for attracting and embracing eccentrics of all shapes and sizes was already well established when Oscar Wilde brought his one-man traveling circus to the Bear Flag State in March 1882. Not surprisingly, he killed in California. Wilde, perhaps the first international celebrity who was famous primarily for being famous, would have been right at home in today's world of carefully manufactured stars, of "American Idol," "The Voice" and "Dancing With the Stars.

Re "Wilde about California," Opinion, May 5 Roy Morris Jr. opens his otherwise interesting piece on Oscar Wilde's 1882 trip to San Francisco with a most unfortunate analogy. If readers come away with the impression that Wilde was of the same ilk as Paris Hilton or the "Jersey Shore" gang, he has done a disservice to Wilde and to your readers. Wilde left us plays that are routinely enjoyed more than a century after he wrote them. Hilton and Snooki will have left us only embarrassment at the vacuousness of our popular culture.

Re "Wilde about California," Opinion, May 5 Roy Morris Jr. opens his otherwise interesting piece on Oscar Wilde's 1882 trip to San Francisco with a most unfortunate analogy. If readers come away with the impression that Wilde was of the same ilk as Paris Hilton or the "Jersey Shore" gang, he has done a disservice to Wilde and to your readers. Wilde left us plays that are routinely enjoyed more than a century after he wrote them. Hilton and Snooki will have left us only embarrassment at the vacuousness of our popular culture.

California's unchallenged reputation for attracting and embracing eccentrics of all shapes and sizes was already well established when Oscar Wilde brought his one-man traveling circus to the Bear Flag State in March 1882. Not surprisingly, he killed in California. Wilde, perhaps the first international celebrity who was famous primarily for being famous, would have been right at home in today's world of carefully manufactured stars, of "American Idol," "The Voice" and "Dancing With the Stars.

A California tour of "Oscar Wilde's Salome: The Reading in Concert," which would have featured Al Pacino and Marisa Tomei in a reprise of a 2003 Broadway production, has been canceled before most of it was even announced. A San Bernardino booking for April 25-27 was announced late last week, and other performances were being planned for San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco and two venues in Los Angeles. But the entire tour is now off because of scheduling conflicts, the producers said.

Like the career of its subject, London's latest musical began in a blaze of publicity, set tongues wagging and ended, prematurely, in disgrace. Written, produced and directed by Mike Read, a radio DJ whose fame peaked in the 1980s, "Oscar Wilde" set out, according to its publicity material, to chart Wilde's "tragic descent from idolization to isolation." The script was written entirely in rhyming couplets. It opened Tuesday at the 500-seat Shaw Theatre.

When it was released in 1960, this timeless British film only had minor distribution and was up against the near-simultaneous "Oscar Wilde," with Robert Morley. Morley resembled Wilde more closely than Peter Finch (pictured, with Yvonne Mitchell), but Finch here is remarkable. Written and directed by Ken Hughes, this is a captivating period piece that introduces us to Wilde at the height of his fame and fortune.

"Wildeweek," a festival of free events related to Oscar Wilde, begins today at 7 p.m. with Martin Hyland's "A Wilde Hour of Vice and Virtue" at Fiesta Hall, Plummer Park, in West Hollywood. The rest of the schedule: * Thursday: "Salome," presented by Bite Ltd. at UCLA, 8 p.m. * Friday: "A Wilde Hour of Vice and Virtue," First United Methodist Church, Hollywood; "A Woman of No Importance," presented by Little Brother Sam, USC; both at 8 p.m.

You might not figure Oscar Wilde for the marrying kind, but "Oscar Wilde's Wife" begs to differ. Ronda Spinak's ironically titled historical drama at the Odyssey Theatre attempts to rescue from obscurity the woman who not only married the scandal-plagued homosexual aesthete but also bore him two children and remained loyal through his disgrace--at the cost of her own identity. Why?

When Oscar Wilde said "There is no sin except stupidity," he might well have had most dimwitted American productions of his "The Importance of Being Earnest" in mind. But the staging at A Noise Within is no ordinary Victorian froth fest. This one does the gentleman quipster proud. Co-directed by Sabin Epstein and Art Manke, this astute and well-crafted interpretation is more than up to the Glendale classical repertory company's enviable par.

At the climax of “Intimately Wilde,” a not-yet-disgraced Oscar Wilde struggles over a Savoy dinner with his increasingly vitriolic lover, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. A bewigged judge overlooks the growing fracas from a jurist's box like an ominously impassive vulture. It's the stylistic peak of playwright Terra Taylor Knudson's nonlinear study and one of several sequences worth the show. Unfolding during the last 24 hours of Wilde's two-year term in Reading Gaol -- we are his inferred turn screws -- “Wilde” encapsulates the downfall of the great Victorian aesthete without over-reliance on the letters, diaries and such.

London's Café Royal, born in 1865 and reborn through the decades as a party place where Oscar Wilde hallucinated on absinthe and David Bowie celebrated the “retirement” of his alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust, is about to be reborn again. In its new life, the Café Royal will be a luxury hotel that mingles historical gravitas with contemporary interior design. The new Café Royal, due to open Dec. 1 after a four-year closure for revamping, includes 159 guest rooms, two fancy restaurants, a brasserie, an indoor pool and a spa. Oh yes, and a café.

THERE'S the "Salome" everybody is talking about -- you know, the production of the Oscar Wilde play that will open Thursday at the Wadsworth Theatre, starring Al Pacino and directed by Estelle Parsons. It's a staged reading, duplicating a 2003 Broadway production that was developed at the august Actors Studio in New York. Then there's the other "Salome" -- not by Wilde, but definitely something of a theatrical wild card.

Oscar, is that you? And is that still your play? Though we're not officially informed until the final credits roll, Oscar Wilde's classic "Lady Windermere's Fan" is the basis of "A Good Woman," starring Helen Hunt, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Wilkinson. The film is well intentioned and mildly diverting, but in attempting to modernize its story it has lost many of the things that make the original so memorable and not gained much in return.

A California tour of "Oscar Wilde's Salome: The Reading in Concert," which would have featured Al Pacino and Marisa Tomei in a reprise of a 2003 Broadway production, has been canceled before most of it was even announced. A San Bernardino booking for April 25-27 was announced late last week, and other performances were being planned for San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco and two venues in Los Angeles. But the entire tour is now off because of scheduling conflicts, the producers said.

A landmark London courthouse where celebrities pleaded their cases is being recycled as a ritzy hotel. Instead of paying a fine to get out, you'll pay $325 and up per night to get in. Quirky touches in the Courthouse Hotel Kempinski testify to its former life as the Great Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court in the Soho district. Iron gates divide the lobby from the lounge. The judges' benches, witness stand and dock of No. 1 Court survive in the soon-to-be-opened Silk, the main restaurant.

Issuing all of Oscar Wilde's writing in one volume sounds like a good idea. Although "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "De Profundis" and the major comedies have remained more or less constantly in print, "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," his collections of maxims and much of his poetry have been less readily accessible to the general reader. Unhappily, the concept proves more satisfactory than the execution: At 2 1/2 pounds, the book is unwieldly and too heavy to hold comfortably.

If you saw "Gross Indecency" at the Mark Taper Forum, you know that the trials of Oscar Wilde make up some of the most scintillating and highly dramatic subject matter ever to be borrowed from real life for the purpose of theater. A courtroom drama in which the English language's leading quip-meister is tried for sexual deviance is the kind of stuff movie moguls would drool over. And they are.

A handwritten chapter of Oscar Wilde's novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," written by the author at the behest of his publishers and including the scandalous visit of the title character to an opium den, has been sold for $132,000. The heavily revised text was one of several pieces of memorabilia auctioned Friday on behalf of a private seller by Sotheby's. A signed first edition of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" fetched $770,000.

Like the career of its subject, London's latest musical began in a blaze of publicity, set tongues wagging and ended, prematurely, in disgrace. Written, produced and directed by Mike Read, a radio DJ whose fame peaked in the 1980s, "Oscar Wilde" set out, according to its publicity material, to chart Wilde's "tragic descent from idolization to isolation." The script was written entirely in rhyming couplets. It opened Tuesday at the 500-seat Shaw Theatre.