Word: victorian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Instead, he stayed in Washington and waged his war from the Vice President's hilltop Victorian mansion. When it became clear he would lose the certification fight with Harris, Gore worked a phone list of more than 20 newspaper and magazine editors, as well as anchors and political directors at the networks. His jawboning paid off and helped assure that no one played the story as a clean or definitive victory...
...easier to tell rather than dramatize. But when Jane Eyre, the heroine of Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel, presents herself at the start of a Broadway show and addresses the "gentle audience," it is oddly refreshing. It promises something we rarely see in theater these days: old-fashioned, Victorian, what-happens-next? storytelling...
Modesty is a virtue, in Victorian novels as well as (in this age of falling chandeliers) Broadway musicals, but Jane Eyre's low-tech production is underwhelming to a fault. Characters are typically surrounded by darkness, as sets are wheeled in and out--a window, a chair, a broken chestnut tree. John Napier's design is often handsome, in its burnished browns and greens, but he and Caird don't seem up to the story's more difficult physical challenges: a fire set in Rochester's bedroom in the middle of the night, or Jane's first encounter with Rochester...
...melodic sweep of Andrew Lloyd Webber or the anthemic vitality of the Les Miz team, the music blends together into one pseudo-operatic murk. The lyrics, full of talk about spring mornings and secret souls, are no better, flattening Jane's spirit as firmly as any of her Victorian taskmasters. In the novel, for example, Jane makes a momentous decision, at age 18, to leave her stultifying school and strike out on her own. She writes up a newspaper ad seeking employment, trudges miles to town in the rain to deliver it, then treks back a week later to pick...
...artist's voice] could draw a word out into a long cello note or quaver like the lead fiddle in the pit of a Victorian melodrama...