John Steinbeck News

Welcome to this week's edition of our new WEEKLY GROSSES ANALYSIS, part of our new Industry Insights section that will feature insider industry information, commentary and insights! Read on for all the weekly grosses statistics for the movers and shakers from the latest grosses , 7/20/2014.

If you thought Rex Reed's reviews of Melissa McCarthy were harsh, his recent assessment of James Franco's debut as a theater director is even more withering.

Proving their chops as Broadway draws, James Franco , Chris O'Dowd , Leighton Meester and Jim Norton set a second house record last week as their run in the revival of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men comes to a close.

The bigotry and fear greeting busloads of Central American mothers and children is almost word for word what Steinbeck's Joads heard 75 years ago.

Salinas, Calif., has a museum for its hometown literary icon, John Steinbeck. Asheville, N.C., has a museum in the home Victorian writer Thomas Wolfe lived in.

George and Lennie, Steinbeck's enduring characters in "Of Mice and Men," left their footprints in the fields and waterways of Monterey County.

SPEAKING UP: The experience of playing a woman who doesn't have a name, and who dies without anybody really caring, has been a difficult one for Leighton Meester.

The sugar program, a government-created cartel administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture , costs consumers an estimated $3.5 billion annually and has reduced employment by more than 127,000 jobs since 1997.

Here's a quick roundup of stories you may have missed today. 'I'm Not a Tart:' Of Mice and Men 's Leighton Meester Pens Feminist Essay Leighton Meester has penned a feminist essay about her character in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men .

Eternal prep-schooler Leighton Meester has written an excellent term paper for The Huffington Post about John Steinbeck's subversive feminism in Of Mice and Men .

Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner James Franco , BAFTA and Tony Award nominee Chris O'Dowd, Leighton Meester and Tony and Olivier Award winner Jim Norton star in John Steinbeck 's masterpiece about chasing the American dream, OF MICE AND MEN on Broadway.

Week 7 of the Broadway season held fairly steady over the previous week, showing a gain of $391,465 over the week before to a total take of $25,509,080, according to figures released by the trade group the Broadway League More than half the uptick came from increases for two star-driven dramas.

John Steinbeck called it "the mother road," the same stretch of highway the novelist sent his long-suffering Joad family hurtling west in "The Grapes of Wrath."

James Franco directs his "Child of God" star Scott Haze in Robert Boswell's drama about a young man wrongly convicted of rape, who re-encounters his accuser nine years later.

Twenty students gathered at the Alliance Theatre today to begin the thirteenth annual Collision Project.

Movies like “High Noon” and “The Searchers” are well-known Westerns, but would you think of “Double Indemnity” or the animated “Cars” movies fitting into the genre? Jeffrey Richardson, Gamble Curator of Western History, Popular Culture and Firearms at The Autry, asks the question about ... (more)

Michael Andrew Scott, Will Rose, and Gavin Sakae McLean Of Mice Men at the Eclectic Theater Photo courtesy of Michael E. Brunk Most of us had to read John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" at some point in school, whether we wanted to or not.

OF MICE AND MEN In real life, the Lennie character wound up in an insane asylum after stabbing his boss in the stomach with a pitchfork.

Final 4 weeks to see Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner James Franco , BAFTA and Tony Award nominee Chris O'Dowd, Leighton Meester and Tony and Olivier Award winner Jim Norton in John Steinbeck 's masterpiece about chasing the American dream, Of Mice and Men .

By John Steinbeck. Through July 12, at Eclectic Theater, 1214 10th Ave., Seattle; $12-$25 .