Word: les
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...thought so dark has lodged in the mind of Les Gordon, a rice grower near the town of Barham in the country's southeast. But the drought's baking breath has dried and cracked his fields. Gordon should have been harvesting last month across a good portion of his 1,600-hectare farm. Alas, there was nothing to harvest. With no rain in sight and no access to the depleted reserves of government-controlled water, Gordon last September didn't bother to plant a crop...
...land is lunar-like now," says Ian Brunt, who's on 120 hectares near the New South Wales town of Finley and has been rice farming for 32 years. "The tractor's throwing up clouds of dust." Les Gordon recalls the disenchantment among farmers in 1982 when state authorities limited farmers to 60% of their normal water allowance. Now, "I would kill for a 60% allocation," says Gordon, who still farms with his father, Henry. "Dad planted his first rice crop in 1949. No one around here has seen conditions like this before...
...while stalwarts like Grease and Bye Bye Birdie still top the schools' most-popular list (Little Shop of Horrors was actually No. 1 for 2007), a growing number of high schools are turning to more adventurous fare for their theatrical rite of spring: big, adult epics like Les Miz; irreverent satires like Urinetown; dark musicals like Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. "There's a sense of we want to do something new and edgy," says Jeff Knoedler of Newton South High School outside Boston. "There's only so many times you can trot out Oklahoma! Our kids are doing musicals...
...Broadway's new wave of family shows, from The Lion King to Wicked -which have turned on a new generation to the possibilities of theater. Also helping broaden the repertoire is the advent of specially adapted school versions of recent Broadway shows that are either too unwieldy - like Les Miz - or too racy - like Rent - for most schools. (Some shows even have elementary- or middle-school versions.) Some teachers contend, moreover, that youngsters in the new millennial generation are especially drawn to theater. "Today's kids are more team-oriented, and tend to be more upbeat," says Jane Strauss, National...
...school directors view these more adventurous shows and approaches as learning opportunities. High school versions often come accompanied by study guides; a production of Annie can help educate kids about the Depression and FDR's economic policies; Les Miz can be a window for a comparison of the revolutionaries of 19th century France with the Chinese students at Tiananmen Square. Travalino says her school's staging of Urinetown - about a future dystopia where citizens have to pay to pee - had an educational angle as well. "We have a student who started a recycling program," she says. "I thought, well, this...