Word: backdrop
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Through the Roof. The huge State Fair Music Hall (capacity: 4,100) was almost a quarter empty when La Callas appeared, shimmering and glowing in a Venetian-gold gown with diamonds glittering at her ears. Behind her was a black-bordered set with a sky-blue backdrop, creating the effect of an immense shadow box. Callas had committed herself to a murderously difficult concert of eight operatic arias. All week she had kept trying to cut the number down to three, but Impresario Kelly held firm, and eight it was. She opened with a Mozart aria from The Abduction from...
Behind these small lives and bourgeois problems, history unfolds like a rolling backdrop. There are vignettes of barbed wire and mud from the trenches, glimpses of the headlines and early newsreels of the period, episodes of the air war with the Parisian night crisscrossed by searchlights and rocked by the thud of primitive bombs. Author Troyat, Russian-born but an adoptive Frenchman since his youth, writes out of a passionate love of France. His Pierre and Amelie in their simplicity and capacity for goodness seem closer to the gentle peasant folk of Tolstoy than the rapacious villagers of Balzac...
Over the intricate rhythms of drums hovered the fluid notes of a single bamboo flute and the wailng chant of a solo male voice. Against a plain black backdrop swirled brilliantly costumed dancers, unfolding exotic tales of lust and vengeance, ecstasy and evil. The occasion: the Broadway opening, prior to a U.S. tour, of the Indian dance group headed by Shanta Rao (rhymes with...
...momentous confrontation, set before a backdrop of high feeling and history. The rebellious governor of the state of Arkansas, defying U.S. courts and U.S. law, went to plead his case before the President of the U.S. There was quiet, friendly talk behind closed doors; there were smiles and handshakes for the camera, then politely worded, carefully prepared statements. Through all of these devices the result was clear: the President of the U.S. had flatly insisted that the governor of Arkansas must bow to the law and withdraw from his position of rebellion...
...problem faced by Designers Walter Netsch and Gordon Bunshaft, partners of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was to provide shelter and suitable surroundings for three services-Protestant, Catholic and Jewish-under one roof, and relate the chapel to the academy's other buildings and its majestic mountain backdrop. The solution is an ingenious example of contemporary Air Force Gothic. Rising tall and bright in its sheath of man-made aluminum against the surrounding peaks of the Rockies, the chapel stands in solitary splendor, its 19 spires soaring in contrast above the flat-roofed buildings spread out on the campus...