Word: elba
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...Flying Eagle. The Holy Week of which Aragon writes is the chaotic, rain-drenched and rumor-filled week between Palm Sunday and Easter in 1815. Napoleon, having just escaped from Elba, was marching up to Paris to begin the historic Hundred Days, which were to end with Waterloo. And as Napoleon approached-"the Eagle flying from steeple to steeple," rallying to his standard the regiments sent against him-King Louis XVIII, fat and fatuous, was fleeing north toward the Belgian border amid a confusion of loyal musketeers and grenadiers...
...Elba...
...fear, and Wolfe's melodramatic style is well suited to convey the unreality of it all. Trotsky liked to say that the snowy volcanoes he could see from his windows were not extinct but dormant. But could the Red Napoleon really believe that his walled house was an Elba, not a St. Helena? He had tasted power, and missed it so much that he was delighted when simple Mexicans thought of him as a prince who had fallen (hence Wolfe's title...
This year's Hasty Pudding show is a mass of incongruities: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, thinly disguised, hob-nob with a Marxist chambermaid; an Irish plumber appears in the midst of the expatriate rich on the isle of Elba; a sexy French singer takes a copy of Dr. Zhivago into the shower with her. Yet somehow all these strained touches combine to make an evening...
Terry Blanchard, as Elba's version of Elsa Maxwell, John Spooner, as Walrus, Duchess of Wopping, the Baltimore girl who made her debut in the YWCA and grew up to "rock an empire," and Amyn Khan, an Yma Sumac, whose attraction for men--all men--is fatal, are marvelous. All of them can sing, all of them can act, and all of them have excellent parts. The scene in which they get together to protest that each is really a "Lady at Heart," is a high point of the show...