Word: magic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Before the decade was half over, Walt Disney Productions had acquired financially troubled Great Britain and turned it into a theme park, the United Magic Kingdom. In Italy, 65% of the population was living blindfolded in cellars and the trunks of cars, and kidnap victims were accepted as legal tender. Mexico's oil reserves made it a land of opportunity, and streams of unemployed migrant U.S. business executives - "whitebacks" - turned the teeming slums of Mexico City into hotbeds of conservative unrest...
Though motivation never appears to be in short supply in Harvard rowing, the varsity heavies gained an extra incentive when coach Ted Washburn's freshman boat stunned an Eli crew that had romped at the Sprints. Parker's crew then had to prove that the Thames magic remained intact...
...rare best, the theater possesses the uncanny ability to restore and sustain the virginity of a child's imagination. The unmarred innocence of true belief. The faith in magic and miracles. The trust that humankind issues from the hand of God in luminous purity. The hope that life will some day safely return to that hand, however manacled, tormented and casually degraded by the world's flagrantly iniquitous ways...
...both the music and text were upstaged by the magic. Several of Houdini's feats, including his water-can escape, were authentically and grippingly duplicated by Mark Mazzarella, a 19-year-old college sophomore. But the cost of going for such theatrical pizazz was a loss of psychological depth. Houdini offered almost no plot, almost no human interplay. Throughout the evening, a large portrait of the magician stared out at the performers from the ear of the stage, as if challenging them to account for his mysterious driven nature. The tricks, the career, the public appropriation...
...there is no denying the opening scene's strong visual impact. Indeed the production generally serves the eye a good deal better than it serves the ear. The play contains a lot of magic and spectacle, handled most ingeniously (and without the 140-man stage crew that Charles Kean needed in 1857). When Miranda is put to sleep, she slumbers levitated a couple of feet above ground. The instantaneous appearance and disappearance of the banquet (borrowed from Book II of Vergil's Aeneid) is truly miraculous, as are the periodic flashes of St. Elmo's fire all over the place...