Word: magically
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Carl Bertoliho, a Boston magic shop owner and a close friend of Bigelow's says the escapist "eats, sleeps and breathes escapes." Bigelow's house in rural Massachusetts is filled with strange paraphernalia such as caskets, chains, manacles and torture chests. He even has a pet tarantula, that he hopes to work into his act someday. Apparently his wife and two children do not mind...
...everyone is so flamboyant, though. Jim Sommers of Chicago is a decidedly conventional figure, at least in this unconventional art. Sommers is one of the few escape artists who admits that escaping is partly artifice, as well as ability: escapes, he explains, are really just magic tricks, with more danger and uncertainty than usual. In fact, Sommers is really a magician who occasionally does escape work. His most memorable feat to date was a 1961 underwater escape in Lake Geneva, Wis. The escape was supposed to be a typical underwater box feat, of the Ron Fable variety--but Sommers performed...
...lust, all right, but in the person of Frank Langella as a demonic force from the nether world, there is also a doomed lyrical romanticism, a nocturne by Chopin, infused into the play. Tall, slender, incomprehensible as magic, garbed in a cape of Stygian splendor, with a face sculptured in alabaster, Langella's Dracula is no flittering bat but the noblest prince of darkness-the fallen Lucifer-as the play makes elliptically clear, whom only the Cross and the stake can bring to his apocalyptic destiny. Langella has always been a spectral, neurasthenic figure onstage with a temperament...
...such moments, Levanter resembles Guy Grand, the cartoon millionaire-sadist in Terry Southern's The Magic Christian-a similarity that does no credit to Kosinski. But Levanter is not content merely to engineer or observe acts of humiliation. He is also an avenging angel. At an Alpine ski resort he blows up the vacationing henchman who tortures the subjects of a Middle East potentate. He devises an excruciating end for a New York hotel clerk who betrays visiting Eastern European guests to their native apparatchiks. This deed over, Levanter privately gloats because authorities cannot discover a plot linking killer...
...especially after Watergate. Critics quick to seize upon any hinted impropriety around a President have laughed off Billy. No one has to suspect Billy of anything -he simply takes a certified check, in advance, then goes out behind the microphone, usually clutching a cold one, and exhales his ineffable magic: one-liners, snorts ("hee-unh, hee-unh"), the buffooneries of a quick-witted redneck (self-advertised). "I ain't the Carter that won't tell a lie," says Billy...