Word: chaplinitis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wonder of some half-remembered childhood reverie, as well as some of the contemporary sass of Penn and Teller. But Le Cirque is not quite invisible. To make it appear full-blown, in all its winsome glory, the audience must supplement the inventions of its two creator- performers, Victoria Chaplin and Jean Baptiste Thierree, with creativity of their own. It is an aerobic workout for the imagination...
Premiered Stateside before a rapturous audience last week at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., Le Cirque will continue through Sept. 1, then move to Houston's Alley Theater from Sept. 4 through 18. The current show is a new version of the Chaplin-Thierree Le Cirque Imaginaire, which barnstormed Europe and the U.S. for more than a decade. Thierree, the show's resident jester and prestidigitator, and Chaplin, who does stunning acrobatics and uses modest props to transform herself into a virtual bestiary, credit audience reactions with shaping Le Cirque's evolution. Says Chaplin: "The circus, or vaudeville...
Mark Twain and Charlie Chaplin look-alikes, trailed by a freckle-faced Huck Finn, greet passengers as they come up the gangplank of the Mississippi River's newest paddle-wheeler, Emerald Lady. A Dixieland band lays down tune after tune, while a jokester on stilts tosses colorful doubloons. Waitresses with feathers jutting from their hair sashay through wood-paneled rooms, offering cocktails. As the riverboat pulls out of Fort Madison, Iowa, and steams up and down the Mississippi on a three-hour excursion into the 19th century, it is easy to get swept up in the hoopla. So easy that...
...Southern California. Most of the men who built the studios were Jewish immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe. Writers, directors, designers, cinematographers would make their names in Europe, then stow away to the States. And co-opting like crazy from the start, Hollywood made foreigners its greatest stars: Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, Cary Grant and Greta Garbo. So it is only fitting that the torchbearer, the sword wielder, the giant of American movies, should be an overgrown Austrian with a face and body out of a superhero comic...
Hollywood spending is likely to rise until some box-office disaster forces studios to retrench once again. When film legends Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists in 1919, a Hollywood wag famously quipped, "The lunatics have taken charge of the asylum." Today's top stars are seizing power by demanding -- and getting -- salaries and revenue-sharing deals that may be pushing the cost of movies to reckless heights...