Word: showman
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...season's main song-and-dance items, Ziegfeld and Winnie, are biographies with vapid books and recycled songs. The portrait of Showman Flo is slack and bland, the glimpse of Churchill in wartime likely to appeal only to those with nostalgia for buzz bombs. In the wings: mostly revivals, including Can-Can and Brigadoon. Bemoans Producer Cameron Mackintosh (The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables): "It's Mausoleum Alley here." In part, the West End is the ironic victim of its own past successes. Fourteen shows now running in London have been playing for a year or more...
...voice of baseball on radio in Des Moines, of Hollywood flickering off the screen, of Sacramento, of Washington, and now of Moscow: friendly, unhurried in the midst of planned chaos. He ventures the thought that so many shared while watching him co-star with his fellow showman Mikhail Gorbachev in Red Square. "I never expected to be here," the President says...
...demonstration of "psychic surgery." The blood had been donated by a volunteer before the show; the "diseased tissue" consisted of shreds of lamb heart, hidden in a tray behind the table and manipulated by the facile hands of a master magician: James ("the Amazing") Randi, 59, conjurer, showman, crusader and America's most implacable foe of flummery. The props and the techniques are those used by the so-called psychic surgeons of the Philippines, who promise miraculous, painless, lifesaving surgery to lure desperately ill people to their clinics. But what the sufferers get is sleight of hand, not surgery...
Walt Disney was of course more than America's story-spinning uncle; he was the canniest businessman in Hollywood. His credo might have been the Jesuits': Give me a child before he's seven, and he will be mine for life. Once this shaman-showman had seized kids' minds, he could raid their piggy banks. And on that mountain of pennies he could build an empire. His cartoons and feature films sired comic books, toys, hit songs (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, When You Wish upon a Star, Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah) and the ubiquitous Mickey...
Among the faculty who motivate the high achievers is Jaime Escalante, a math instructor whom Tostado praises as a "teaching genius." He is all of that -- a showman, math scholar, father figure and cheerleader. Each Escalante class starts with warm-up music (We Will Rock You) and hand clapping as pupils ceremonially drop yesterday's homework into a basket. Advanced-placement students proudly wear T shirts and satin jackets proclaiming their membership in the elite, college-bound corps. During lectures, Escalante bounces around the room, challenging, explaining, applauding...