Word: primally
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...named Homer (Curt Bois) recalls the days, once upon a time, when a poet had listeners, drawn into a circle; now he has only solitary readers, unable to warm themselves at the long-ago communal campfire of art. A visiting Hollywood actor (Peter Falk) teaches a new friend some primal joys, simple things: "To smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together, it's fantastic!" In a traveling circus, a pretty trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) chafes at the gaudy "chicken wings" she must wear in her act. As she stares in her mirror and considers the pleasures men take...
...bolder than any dream, children shuddered through a skein of traumas that Walt had devised for them: the outrage of kidnaping (Pinocchio), the ridicule of deformity (Dumbo), the death of a mother (Bambi). Long before the '80s scourge of slasher movies, Disney's were the true horror films, offering primal nightmares and blessed release. And the young were their eager victims. When Snow White premiered at Radio City Music Hall, the management reportedly had to reupholster the seats because they were so often wet by frightened tots...
...long after, the future vagabond and his brother were sent to boarding school in England where, he recalls, "as English boys who had barely heard of cricket we were natural targets." Classmates branded him a liar when he told them of warriors and lion hunts. Rejected, he withdrew into primal memories of Abyssinia...
These rational factors go only part way in explaining the extraordinary anticipation that Phantom has aroused. The show apparently taps into yearnings for a transporting sensory and mystical experience: in a word, for magic. On that primal level, despite considerable and at times embarrassing shortcomings, Phantom powerfully delivers. The story may be muddled, the characters sketchy, some performances shallow and the music often slushily derivative. So what. For those who seek an equivalent to a ride through the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World -- seemingly a vast proportion of today's Broadway audience -- Phantom is a brilliantly manipulated journey, scary...
...extravagant, dangerous, ridiculous garden of the '60s, when the young were "forever young," as Bob Dylan's later anthem said, fierce and primal juices fired through the nerves. Complexity fell away. Deferrals of pleasure and deferences to age, the old Confucian virtues that had made their way into America through the Protestant ethic, blew away at the concussion of youth. "Don't trust anyone over 30" became the slogan of the conspiracy...