Word: showman
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...impresario is all but ended in the commercial theater. Practically everything that comes to Broadway nowadays is funded by committee and imported wholesale from somewhere else. Off-Broadway, however, the American theater's boldest, most ambitious, quirkiest, most pedantic and at times most infuriating showman holds sway more forcefully than ever. Joseph Papp has built, at the New York Shakespeare Festival, a personal barony more than an institution. Although he sometimes describes his $14 million annual operation as the biggest "regional" theater in the nation, its six-theater complex and staff of 125 stand in the shadows of his outsize...
...then out of the north rode one who could. "Garth Drabinsky is both a showman and a visionary," Kagan says. "There were theater magnates before him, but none who radiated his charisma or generated such controversy." In 1979 the Toronto native co-founded Cineplex with 18 theaters. Today it is the largest chain in North America, with 1,643 "screens" (nobody calls them theaters any more) and 14,500 employees. Revenue has quintupled in five years; profits have doubled in a year. Drabinsky did it with street fighting and upscale smarts. In his first Los Angeles venture, for example...
...plans to showcase revivals at a smaller midtown theater. "We made the Regency a lot newer, and it will gross almost four times as much in its first year." Not a man to be convinced that the Regency was the stuff that dreams are played in. The visionary showman sounds here like an old-time movie villain -- a Darth Grabinsky -- or an urban-renewal slumlord wondering why the family inside doesn't want its home bulldozed...
Hollywood -- and America -- may be faint of telltale heart. Drabinsky isn't, though. He knows that his toughest competition is himself. Ah, but what if a younger, hungrier showman comes along? No sweat. "If there's a young Garth Drabinsky out there," says Drabinsky, "A) he's welcome to try, and B) I'd probably hire...
...irate hunter -- he displayed the bravura resilience of a born loser. This master thespian could play an existential hero (Duck Amuck), a base canard (You Ought to Be in Pictures), a hard-breathing hoofer (Show Biz Bugs) or a World War II draft dodger (Draftee Daffy). Wily farceur, dynamite showman, he made 126 pictures before retiring in 1968. For years he could be seen only on kiddie TV shows or -- oh, the ignominy of it all! -- commercials. But now he has returned, pretty much in triumph, to the big screen. Daffy Duck in The Duxorcist...