Word: shipful
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...good case for the art-song approach but something less than a good musical. McDonald emotes powerfully and sings beautifully as the title character, the voodoo-practicing daughter in a family of mixed-race Creoles, who sets the tragedy in motion when she becomes the lover of a white ship captain and bears him two children. The racial theme--"I was a servant in my father's house," says Marie's brother, describing their white father's rejection of them--is provocative without pontification. And there are fluid and poetic bits of staging, as when Marie casts a voodoo spell...
That is the essence of life illuminated on the decks of Her Majesty's Ship Pinafore, ruled by the fair and just Captain Corcoran. Aboard, there is, save for that towards the reviled presence of Dick Deadeye, little animosity. There is tension to be sure, because Corcoran's daughter Josephine is in love with a seaman, Ralf Rackstraw, but she is betrothed instead to a much, much older man, Admiral of the Queen's Navy, Sir Joseph Porter. The Captain himself is in love with dear little Buttercup, but cannot marry her because she is a poorly Bumboat woman...
...more uneven edges--which are few and far between. For instance, the stage is just a little too cluttered. In terms of width, the Agassiz Theater is a small space to begin with, but coupled with the fact that almost half of the performing space is reduced with the ship's quarter deck, the outcome is a cluttered stage. In crossing the ship, the sailors must take great pains to avoid the females' hoopskirts (their costumes are appropriately gaudy, but slightly oversized for the space allowed). Accordingly, director Marisa Echeverria's '00 choreography is fairly simplistic, an acquiescence...
...disappointed people and some heavily trafficked web sites. NASA has all but given the last rites to its latest probe now that Mars Polar Lander has for the fourth straight day obstinately refused to phone home. Couple that with the failure three months ago of its sister ship, the Mars Climate Orbiter, and you could forgive space agency officials for feeling more than a little grumpy today...
...more than a little worried. While this is hardly the first or even the most expensive ship ever to be lost around the Red Planet (that would be the billion-dollar Mars Observer, lost en route in 1993 and now presumably doing its observing outside the Oort cloud), NASA officials have to be concerned by the timing of these high-profile failures. Tuesday, the agency announced it would reevaluate the Mars program, a move that could delay or even abort NASA's ambitious plans to send a lander and an orbiter to Mars every 26 months for the next decade...