Word: deviled
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...many other Cubans, tourism is a pact with the devil. They remember how they felt exploited by rich foreigners before 1959. At the Tuxpan disco, the only Cubans allowed in are pubescent girls dressed in scanty Lycra minis who have bartered their company to rum-swilling tourists for a meal. It makes Julio Gonzalez angry even as he takes their money...
...personnel, he let profits plummet as the staff, heavily padded with relatives and friends, ballooned. Once faced with the capitalist notion of being fired if he failed to meet his budget, Julio straightened out. "No one had ever been fired for anything before," says Donnelly. "Now Julio is a devil of a capitalist...
Recipe for theatrical disaster: take a moldy 19th century German opera about a Faustian pact with the Devil and turn it over to a composer of hobo rock, a legendary writer from the Beat Generation, and a director who specializes in performance pieces for the art crowd. But don't go away. A pop opera of very odd sorts called The Black Rider is a triumph for its three collaborators, Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs and Robert Wilson...
...rarely has opera received a shaking like this. The victim is Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz (The Free-Shooter). First performed in 1821, it was the granddaddy of all German Romantic operas, with its setting of a folktale about a forester who accepts magic bullets from the Devil to win the hand of his beloved in a shooting contest. For Waits, Burroughs and Wilson, what the opera provided wasn't an Ur-text but a pretext...
Their hero is Wilhelm, a hapless clerk whose trousers have a way of falling to his ankles just when they shouldn't. Their Devil is Pegleg, a swallow- tailed lowlife who learned his wiles behind the footlights of some sleazy Weimar cabaret, a la Joel Grey. They are surrounded by weirdos who make the Addams Family look like the Waltons. Among them: Wilhelm's inamorata, the robotically hysterical Kathchen; her fright-wigged father Bertram; an overbearing uncle who, in a hilarious non sequitur, tells the story of how Hemingway sold the movie rights to The Snows of Kilimanjaro...