Word: 1890s
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This past week, while searching for a silver screen gem, I came upon one of West's most provocative performances, the scandalous She Done Him Wrong, released in the early 1930s. Taking place in a New York City dance hall during the "gay 90's" (that's the 1890s), the film tells the story of the "man eating," Diamond Lou, who can only be reigned in by the dashingly debonair Cary Grant...
What to do with the perfect play is invariably the problem directors and actors face when they sit down at those initial pre-production meetings prior to mounting The Importance of Being Earnest. Written in the late 1890s, the play fixates on the manners and morals of the pretentious and the manor-born, skewering all with some of Oscar Wilde's finest collections of epigrams and nasty asides. Spit out, stated dramatically or muttered politely, his words are most recently brought to life in a joyous flurry of understated malice by the cast at the Works Theater in Somerville...
...1890s The press barons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst engaged in a circulation war filled with sensational headlines and "yellow journalism." Hearst's papers helped foment the Spanish-American...
...world of calculators, that's something of a curiosity. But applied to everyday retail, it's a revolution. The idea of fixed prices is only about 100 years old. Before then nearly everything was negotiable. The last great retail revolution was mail order, led by Sears, Roebuck in the 1890s, and it solidified the idea of fixed prices, since buyer and seller were often separated by hundreds of miles of rail track. In the Internet age even buyers and sellers separated by 10,000 miles of fiber-optic cable are closer than those prairie purchasers were to Mr. Sears. They...
...shifts abruptly (and half-heartedly) to Gay Nineties Chicago in the second. The transformation of Marie's lover (Anthony Crivello, solid if a bit too modern) from itinerant seaman to rising machine politician is not adequately explained--nor is the matter of why an ambitious candidate in 1890s Chicago would find it advantageous to claim two mixed-race kids as his own. Most crucial, LaChiusa's multihued, melodically challenging music is more effective in evoking folkloric tradition than in helping us scale the cathartic heights this operatic show is aiming for. Amplified guitars, anyone...