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Reagan is now clearly the world's pre-eminent leader. He has five successful years as President under his belt. That is too long to dismiss as mere luck. The derisive labels of "amiable dunce" and "the Teflon President" lie shattered and discredited. The open contempt that the likes of Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill had for Reagan's limited grasp of the issues and his lack of understanding about his programs looks irrelevant these days. The endless reports about staff conflicts and personality clashes within the Administration, however true, turn out to be footnotes. The vaunted foreign...
...Soviet proposal for a moratorium on nuclear-weapons testing had sat on the table since July, disdained by the Reagan Administration as a mere propaganda ploy. But with the Kremlin's self-imposed (and rather self-serving) testing freeze due to expire on Jan. 1, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev sweetened the offer. If the U.S. agreed to join the Soviets in a testing halt, he wrote President Reagan on Dec. 5, U.S. inspectors would be welcome in the Soviet Union to resolve questions about cheating...
Stratford's style serves well for Lear, a robust and propulsive production of a play that is explicitly about great emotions. But the hard gloss reduces the subtler depths of Twelfth Night to mere giggles and kickshaws. Seeing these productions together may enable modern audiences to understand why earlier critics revered the Bard's tragedies but undervalued his comedies, overlooking their moral complexity and their glimpses of humiliation and pain in commoners' everyday life. The stress on low comic exaggeration also robs Twelfth Night of much of its social consequence: there is little sense that the battle between Sir Toby...
...election, just 11% of the nation's black voters cast their ballots for Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter. In 1984 Reagan received a mere 9% of the black vote against Walter Mondale. Yet last week a New York Times/CBS News Poll showed that a startling 56% of the blacks interviewed approved of the way the President was handling his job. Overall, the poll gave Reagan the highest approval of his presidency...
Krainik's secret is "constant vigilance." She pares each opera's budget line by line, until expenses are balanced by box-office receipts and fund raising. This may seem like mere common sense, but in opera it is a radical approach. Of necessity, she chooses the repertoire carefully and conservatively, this season balancing ham-and-eggers like Butterfly and Traviata with Otello and Die Meistersinger, the lone German entry. "What I've learned," says Krainik, "is that you can have all the art you want if you've got the money...