Word: curtain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fighting from the jungle redoubts against the Lon Nol government in Phnom-Penh, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge insurgents were shrouded in mystery. If anything, the mystery intensified last week as the rebels dropped what might be called a Khmer curtain over the country they had just conquered. As of week's end, ten days after the fall of Phnom-Penh, very little was known about the composition of the new regime, how it was running the war-torn state or what had become of the defeated leaders who were unable to escape. With normal lines of communication severed...
...week's end the new leaders began a three-day victory celebration and a week of mourning for those killed in the war. But no solid clues were forthcoming about future plans or policies. About all that filtered through the curtain was a statement by Samphan in his radio address that "we will be neutral and nonaligned." Yet Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge's figurehead leader, said in Peking that within a year or two most of Southeast Asia would be Communist or proCommunist, and that one of the Khmer Rouge's first tasks must...
...knew what she heard-a minute-long roar of welcome not experienced at the Met since the debut of Joan Sutherland in 1961. That was only the beginning. After Sills' showpiece aria "Si ferite, " the house went wild for 4½ minutes. At evening's end, the curtain calls went on for 18½ minutes. Out in the audience, opera-loving Comedian Danny Kaye let out several ear-piercing whistles and called for a speech. Confetti and roses floated down from the upper tiers; several bouquets came sailing across the orchestra pit. Sills fielded one with her right...
...together is its humor. The play is consistently funny. The laughs are disarming; this should be a sad if not pathetic story. But Butley himself could never allow that--he's too cynical, too intelligent, to allow sentiment to creep in. It is only after the final well deserved curtain call that depression begins to take hold, begins to work its way through the memories of the evening, until it seems to have consumed not just the collapse, but the entire story of Ben Butley...
...Arms and the Man the night before. "I had the curious experience of witnessing an apparently insane success," he laments in a letter to Henry Arthur Jones, "with the actors and actresses almost losing their heads with the intoxication of laugh after laugh, and of going before the curtain to tremendous applause, the only person in the theatre who knew that the whole affair was a ghastly failure." Poor Shaw was to tussle, with benighted audiences and thick critics for some time over the amusing play. His was a serious drama about the nature of love and heroism--albeit swaddled...