The BEST episodes of Great Performances season 14
Every episode of Great Performances season 14, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Great Performances season 14!
Great Performances, a television series devoted to the performing arts, has been telecast on PBS since 1972. The show is produced by WNET in New York City. It is one of the longest running performing arts anthologies on television, second only to Hallmark Hall of Fame. Great Performances presents concerts, ballet, opera, an occasional documentary, and plays. The series has also won many television awards, including an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and an Image Award, with nods from the Directors Guild of America and the Cinema Audio Society.
#1 - The Gospel at Colonus
Season 14 - Episode 2 - Aired 11/8/1985
A renowned collaboration between experimental theater director Lee Breuer and composer Bob Telson, THE GOSPEL AT COLONUS retells Sophocles' classical tragedy Oedipus at Colonus through the medium of modern gospel. This filmed version of the much-lauded 1985 Philadelphia performance traces the epic storyline of the original text, while also interweaving aspects of Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and the Christian salvific narrative. Taking up the dramatic tension and emotional turmoil of classical tragedy and infusing it with passionate, inventive performances and an electrifying gospel and soul inflected musical montage, the production also features an unforgettable cast, including Javetta Steele, Isabell Monk, Robert Earl Jones, Carl Lumbly, Clarence Fountain and the Blind Boys of Alabama (who collectively play Oedipus), and, as the Messenger (and here Pentecostal preacher), Morgan Freeman. Freeman's commanding oratory to a rapt live audience recasts classical rhetoric in an African-American gospel mode, impressively fusing Hellenistic myth and Christian parable.
#2 - Follies in Concert
Season 14 - Episode 10 - Aired 3/14/1986
The incomparable Stephen Sondheim brought his sensational "Follies" to the stage in 1971 where it was hailed as "monumental theater" by The New York Times.
#3 - Grown Ups
Season 14 - Episode 11 - Aired 5/9/1986
Jake, a successful journalist, has difficulties living up to the expectations of his family. He struggles to re-define his life as he attempts to cope unsuccessfully with his troubled wife, his demanding child, his parents, and his sister at a family reunion. A re-staging of the 1981 Broadway play by Jules Feiffer, first aired 25 November 1985 under the "Broadway on Showtime" banner.