Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like Cats and Starlight Express, though, Phantom is likely to prove "castproof," for much of its attraction lies in its spectacular coups de theatre inspired by Victorian stage machinery. Among the highlights: a boat gliding across a gloomy underground lake, and a chandelier that appears to crash onto the audience at the end of Act I. The multiple trapdoors that create many of the illusions -- there are 102 tiny ones to accommodate the candles that rise from the gloom to illuminate the Phantom's subterranean realm -- are all controlled by computer. Says Will Bowen, assistant production manager in London...
...freezing temperatures were matched by an icy militancy among some vagrants. In Chicago, 30 homeless men broke into vacant apartments in a housing project and had to be chased out by guards. In Oakland, police arrested 17 protesters who were part of a group that seized three empty Victorian houses for several hours. Some cities have reacted to the winter plight of the homeless by opening doors that are usually shut after 5 o'clock. Washington's city council last week authorized the use of municipal buildings, including the city hall, as overnight shelters when the temperature falls...
Between trips, Lloyd Webber has overseen the continuing restoration of London's Palace Theater, a Victorian landmark that he bought for $2 million in 1983; expanded the dairy farm on Sydmonton Court, his estate in Hampshire, and planted 50,000 trees in an effort to reverse soil erosion; and with his wife, Soprano (and Phantom Star) Sarah Brightman, 27, acquired a nine-room duplex apartment on the 60th floor of Manhattan's Trump Tower, as well as a seaside villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in the south of France. He has indulged his hobbies of collecting pre-Raphaelite...
...notes gathered and transformed into the familiar overture. The curtain hung heavy. And then, just as the little girl behind me asked her mother, "Mommy, is it starting yet?" the curtain lifted. Large flakes of snow sunk to the stage where a chestnut seller, the epitome of a Victorian Christmas, was hawking his wares. Families and children paraded across the stage into the wings. The lights did not twinkle gold against soft blue-gray; the stage was just a stage, and all the dancers were players on it. The tree was nowhere to be seen...
...National Gallery a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved friend." In the same speech he characterized a planned Mies van der Rohe office building in London's financial district as a "glass stump." Opening a factory last May, he likened the new building to a Victorian prison -- to the delight of the workers, if not of management. But last week Prince Charles swapped his sniper's rifle for a shotgun and took his broadest aim yet at Britain's architects and planners. The charge: destroying London's historic skyline...