Word: samsonized
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Unfortunately for opera lovers, the discord has already cost five weeks of performances, including the season premiere of Turandot, starring Luciano Pavarotti and Montserrat Caballe. It will be two or three weeks before the house reopens. For some productions, like Samson et Dalila, Das Rheingold and Gotterdammerung, the agreement almost certainly has come too late. A new staging of Queen of Spades, planned for next March, may also be scratched. Even so, there were few tears at Lincoln Center. If the accord had not come now, there might have been no season...
Back to the Brits. The Queen having recovered nicely from the recent unpleasantness, another Arab-directed group now plans to pinch a property of inestimably greater material value to the scepter'd isle. In The Samson Strike by Tony Williamson (Atheneum; 250 pages; $9.95), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine sets out to capture a vast oil platform in the North Sea that can pump 400,000 bbl. a day from its undersea wells. Unless the terrorists win the release of all political prisoners in Europeplus ?57 millionthey will waste the $400 million...
...handle the job, the terrorists pick Walter Grant, a brilliant, disgruntled mercenary who has been dismissed from the Special Air Service for torturing an Irish prisoner. Samson seems impregnable, but Grant knows otherwise. Captain Jonathon Stagg, Grant's sometime S.A.S. subordinate, sniffs something rotten in the North Sea wind but cannot pinpoint the terrorists' targetor persuade the mandarins of Whitehall that a catastrophe is gathering offshore. The battle of Samson (Stagg suggests that it be code-named Delilah) winds up as a duel of wits and weaponry between...
Then there are the stealthy moments. Another example from Samson and Delilah: I was one of the blinders, the people who blind Samson in the second act. There's a storm, the stage is dark--the ten of us have to prowl around the stage before we sneak up and pounce...
...visibly" upset. After that is the famous scene where he knocks the temple down. Samson stands between two pillars at the center of the stage. They have pillars with wire frames and canvas made to look like rock, and they hang from the ceiling. There are two men crouched behind the pillars, which are fake, so when he pushes his hands out, the two men do something and the pillars fall together. Then all these fake rocks fall, and I get hit by a rock and fall dead. But then, the frightening thing is, one of the two real pillars...