Word: showness
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...guess what? Now marking its silver anniversary (the company was founded by Montreal street performers in 1984), Cirque has done a show like the early ones. Kooza, from the Sanskrit word for "box," is light on elaborate production values, heavy on old-fashioned circus acts: jugglers, tumblers, contortionists, high-wire walkers... and clowns. Kooza's writer-director, David Shiner, has decades of intercontinental renown as a clown-mime; and his show throws a long spotlight on three of the breed. Nice change: they're all North Americans, and they talk - no Marcel Marceau winsomeness here. Surprise: they're fast, raucous...
...Every Cirque show, even one as primal as this, has a story line. Here, a boy in striped pajamas (Stéphan Landry) receives a big red box. He opens it and pop!, out springs Jack, a lithe, saucy, strutting trickster (Adam Mike Tyus). This Jack-be-limber cues an instant circus fantasia: 16 scamps in parade regalia (gold jackets, white pants, red fezzes) who launch into a charivari - the kind of tumbling act that populates your most soaring dreams, where you feel graceful and defy gravity. At the rear of the stage there's a three-story bandstand, which...
...That's the thing about Cirque du Soleil: the gasps of admiration its individual routines elicit, and the grand or simple design of each show, obliterate the cynicism of coolest, most derisive dudes. (Even Joel Stein has admitted to liking Cirque.) So Kooza can be recommended without reservation, even to those who can't stand clowns. And yes, the three in this show engage in a brief mime routine, but that's just to taunt you. Clowns do that...
...that seems like a good result," says Leonardo Madureira, a finance professor at Case Western Reserve University and one of the paper's authors. Analysts, though, are still much less likely to issue a "sell" rating on a company their firm has another connection to. That goes to show how difficult it can be to achieve impartiality. And with the end of mandatory independent research, there's one less engine pushing in that direction...
...Richard Besser, acting director of the agency, said health officials are closely tracking the spread of the swine flu, after additional cases of flu and some deaths were reported in Mexico. Preliminary testing of flu viruses in patients in Mexico and the U.S. show that the strains are similar. Of the 14 samples of suspected swine flu from Mexico that the CDC has tested so far, half are positive for swine flu, a form of influenza that normally infects pigs and can be transmitted to people. (Read about the history of the flu vaccine...