Word: manors
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...James Bond is everywhere in the enormous stage built for 007 films in London's Pinewood studios. You can even find Sean Connery dropping in to snack in the cafeteria. But recently a different action hero has set up residence. Major space on the lot was given to Croft Manor, a Victorian mansion decorated with grand staircases, stained-glass windows and prehistoric pottery. In one corner, there's a glass-walled computer room filled with a dozen flat, plasma screens that monitor the solar system. Beside them sits an evil-looking robotic biped that serves alternately as sophisticated jukebox...
...anyone who has played the smash-hit video game Tomb Raider can tell you, Croft Manor is the home of Lara Croft, the aristocratic female archaeologist with an eye-popping physique and an Indiana Jones-size taste for travel and adventure. Croft aficionados, though, have never known the place to look this high-tech, or this highly detailed. They have also never met its other inhabitants: the butler, the sardonic tech geek who lives in a trailer out back, or Lara's late father, Lord Croft, who will appear in his manor's observatory packed...
...makes the game, hung around to be sure West didn't stray too far from the Croft mythology. Adrian Smith, the man who first typed the code that brought Lara into being nine years ago, traveled to the London set to give his blessing. Smith was impressed that Croft Manor's Old Library was stuffed with genuine, dusty old books on archaeology that visitors to the set could actually pick off the shelf and read...
...sometimes there's a noisy kind. At Marian Manor Elementary, one of the participating El Paso schools, a fifth of the teachers quit rather than follow the new plan, which required them to attend meetings in their free time and spend their weekends at workshops. But more often the tensions are subtler tussles over turf and authority. "Now I answer to two bosses, the college and the school district," says Russell Perkins, Rosemont's principal. "And sometimes I just have to tell them not to look over my shoulder...
...theater itself offers an ideal setting for the production. Janie Howland's design is such that the Agassiz Theater looks like an extension of her set, which depicts a sitting room in the Sidley Park manor house. In the 19th-century scenes, 23-year-old tutor Septimus Hodge (Austin Guest '04) instructs 13-year-old Thomasina Coverly (Sarah Thomas '04), the precocious daughter of Lord and Lady Croom, the aristocrats who own Sidley Park. Jana Howland's costume design evokes the complexity of period dress through relatively simple outfits, which seem credible but not overwrought. In the present-day scenes...