Word: extravaganza
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Manhattan-Christmas industrial complex dates back at least three-quarters of a century. Seventy-five years ago this week, Radio City Music Hall opened, and the following December this grand movie-and-vaudeville house unveiled its first Christmas extravaganza, staged between showings of a film. At first there were just two scenes: the March of the Wooden Soldiers, featuring the dancing corps of Rockettes, and an elaborate retelling of the Nativity story and the journey of the Magi. (The numbers were designed by Vincente Minnelli and directed by Russell Markert, who imported the Rockettes from Missouri.) The Music Hall shut...
...world is staring at China. It is not only awaiting the extravaganza of the coming Olympic flame, but also scrutinizing every minute detail of China’s governmental and environmental wrongs. Instead of progress and achievement, the world sees a polluted country unable to stop choking on its own secondhand smoke. Such negative publicity may serve to bring awareness to China’s gilded image in the wake of Beijing 2008, but it does not do justice to China and its efforts at change...
...Director-choreographer Susan Stroman, meanwhile, seems to have used up most of her best ideas in The Producers. There's nothing in Young Frankenstein that comes close to, say, the chorus of old ladies doing time steps with their walkers, not to mention the "Springtime for Hitler" extravaganza. The big "Puttin' on the Ritz" number, with the monster (Shuler Hensley) stepping out in top hat and wails, comes the closest. But give Irving Berlin a lot of the credit - with a small nod to Astaire's "Bojangles in Harlem" number from Swingtime...
...however, by the very end of the night, find the old, gaudy patriotic spirit stirring within me, burbling about with all the cheap Heineken I had guzzled at an American bar’s Fourth of July extravaganza. I was disconcerted at first with all the loud, brutish American men in their polo shirts that could barely contain their oversized muscles, and the unelegant, embarrassingly drunk and skankily dressed American girls who squealed in a language I definitely could not understand. But as I got drunk, I came around to it all, and by the time the national anthem started...
...that's changing, with the festival's launch leading one critic in The Observer to christen Manchester, "the beating heart of cultural Britain." Typical of the festival's eclectic offerings was last week's opening salvo entitled "Monkey: Journey to the West," a kind of circus-opera extravaganza, with a set designed by the pop group Gorillaz. Based upon a 16th century Chinese legend of a monk and a wondering monkey, it featured a riveting score by Damon Albarn, of Blur fame, plus a troupe of Chinese acrobats and martial artists...