Word: caste
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Capraesque hero with little to be optimistic about, since he was also a classic American loser. That's a fine start, but the film then marches in staid chronological order: Ed made this bad film, then this one, then a third. It focuses on the director's curious cast of hangers-on (played here by Bill Murray, Jeffrey Jones, Lisa Marie and others). They were all, as Wood's psychic sidekick Criswell intones in the 1965 Orgy of the Dead, "monsters to be pitied, monsters to be despised, from the innermost depths of the world!" But Burton treats them with...
...theatergoers at Harold Prince's wonderfully imaginative new Broadway production can ignore all of the above. Handsomely cast for both musical and dramatic effect, lavishly constructed by set designer Eugene Lee and cogently if somewhat briskly conducted by Jeffrey Huard, this Show Boat is a near perfect staging of the work that had announced to the world the maturity of American musical theater. The alleged racial bias in the plot, which occasioned protests during the tryout of the Toronto production last year, is nowhere to be found here. To see Show Boat is to experience how potent the Broadway ideal...
...superb cast is led by Mastroianni, whose world-weary charisma so comfortably bears every man's crimes and charms. But finally it is the film's images that seize the memory. You won't soon forget the bleached radiance of a seaside wedding reception, the shadows caressing Dona Leonor on her midnight raid to smash dwarf statues on a nearby lawn, the face of a girl who wonders if she is the pawn of a lady's possessiveness or the beneficiary of a gentleman's genial lust...
Jones' most ambitious dance piece is Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land, a three-hour multimedia performance work that requires a cast of 50. The first half is an interpretative summary of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel about the horrors of slavery, using both narrative and mime. (In the racially mixed company, Simon Legree is often played, ironically, by a black dancer.) The second half explores the nature of religious faith in an age plagued by evils like AIDS. It includes gospel singing, minstrel-show dancing and an improvised, unscripted conversation on whether the disease...
...Contract with America" signed by Republicans last week gives them a clutch of red-meat issues with which to energize voters angry at the Democrats and encourages those voters to turn out -- a particular concern in midterm elections, when only about 35% to 40% of those eligible cast ballots. Already, Democratic candidates have been spooked by high Republican turnout in the primaries -- and low turnout among Democrats. "The Republican base vote is more motivated than ours this year," said Donald Sweitzer, political director of the Democratic National Committee. "We don't have a lot of sexy, hot- button issues...