Word: lavishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...open its 80th season, the Metropolitan Opera last week mounted a lavish new production of an old operatic warhorse, Lucia di Lammermoor. Designer Attilio Colonello created massive settings of gnarled, Sequoia-size trees and great Scottish castles. Costumes were dazzlingly extravagant. The male leads, swathed in layer upon layer of brocades, silks and laces, looked like overweight peacocks, but dashingly...
Quick Turn. Beirut's bankers prosper partly because they understand the unique needs and foibles of people for whom banking is a fresh experience. Many lavish spenders tell hoteliers and shopkeepers to send their bills directly to their banks, consider it an insult to have to carry credit cards to prove that they are good risks. The beauteous wife of Kuwait Millionaire Bader Almulla scorns checks, prefers to scribble notes on her calling cards ("Give this person $5,000"), which her banker is pleased to honor...
Mounting a lavish display of props, costumery and lighting effects, the Phoenix production camouflages the entire metaphysical tragedy and smothers the tensions in Marlowe's imagination, which was fearfully and longingly obsessed by the Christianity that his intelligence scoffed at and rejected. The cast gargles "Marlowe's mighty line" like polysyllabic mouthwash, except for James Ray's Mephistophilis, who, to give him his due, is devilishly good. By contrast, Lou Antonio in the title role is fumbling and playboyish. It is rather too bad that Faustus' pact with Satan should overlook mastery of the part...
...These Women, for all its faults, may well stand as a milestone in the career of Sweden's Ingmar Bergman. It is his first film in color. It is lavish in decor. Though it fails miserably, it is the work of a man who falls flat on his face with impressive aplomb. Behind a transparent disguise as a knockabout farce, it is Bergman's personal indictment of his own critics and public...
Like all drugs, the lavish praise and the secret ecstasies were dangerous. The "Words" of his title became the only realities, and "as a result of discovering the world through language, for a long time I took language for the world." Worse, as he constantly displayed his precocity, Sartre felt more and more that "I was a fake child. I could feel my acts changing into gestures. Playacting robbed me of the world and of human beings. I saw only roles and props." These are key concepts in existentialism today, though Sartre does not belabor the point...