Word: chockablock
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Chicago was chockablock with business seminars that week. Next door at the Marriott, muscular types in gold chains and shorts were studying health-club management. Downtown, engineers laid out a grand for four days of "Pneumatic Conveying for Bulk Solids." A company called the 1st Seminar Service lists 100,000 such seminars annually around the country. By its estimate, corporations send 8 million people a year for outside training, and think it is worth paying about $4 billion. The rustling sound of flip charts in action runs like a breeze through the cornfields from coast to coast...
...stage is chockablock with tenpins aloft, batons atwirl, trapeze and low- wire acts, fire eating and belly dancing, pratfalls, cartwheels and unicycling. Somewhere amid all this are the rudiments of Shakespeare's farcical plot about twin brothers and their twin servants and even a modicum of his language, although not without elaborate nose thumbing at his low and labored puns...
...contrast, Europe's buzzing controversies are full of life. West Germany, with the liveliest opera scene, is chockablock with radical restagings of the classics -- in extreme cases to such an extent that the original work is almost obliterated by the new context. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production of Berg's Lulu in Munich sets the action in a four-story madhouse with Wedekind's tawdry story played out in front of an onstage audience of gaping mummies. To be sure, London's Royal Opera and the Vienna State Opera remain committed to traditional opera staged in traditional ways, sung...
...often said of Lloyd Webber's musicals that the show is the star, and of Prince's stagings that the director is the star. Both dicta might apply to Phantom, which is opulently costumed, lushly scored, full of spectacular stage pictures and chockablock with pastiches of 19th century warhorse opera. But in the midst of all the mechanics there are 2 1/2 performances that achieve some emotional depth. Michael Crawford commands the stage as the Phantom, bringing complete conviction to such fantasies as a midair descent on a chariot of gilded cherubs and a boating trip on a subterranean lake...
Neither as chic as Paris nor as intriguingly edgy as Budapest, the Vienna of today is a cozy and polished metropolis. But at the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna was chockablock with giants of the age: Freud and Wittgenstein, Mahler, Berg and Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Hoffmann, Wagner and Loos -- as well as the young Adolf Hitler, a desperate artist-architect manque. Old cultural dogmas had been discredited, new doctrines not yet entrenched. Imminence was all. Artists and intellectuals all over Europe shared a sense of being on the very cusp -- between a smug century...