Word: simulacrums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vegas is Disney World up 30 notches times 30 hotels. It's the ultimate postmodern landscape--a dizzying simulacrum of our collective consciousness. In other words, it is pop culture. Just take a virtual journey down the Strip--the pirate-themed Treasure Island, the luxurious tropical visions at the Mirage, the canals (with gondola rides!) and warm cannolis at The Venetian, the Arthurian legend at Excalibur, the cobblestone streets surrounding Lake Como at the $1.3 billion Bellagio, etc. etc. Where else in the world can you wake up and look out one window and see the Eiffel Tower (a half...
...before directing Returns, Burton made Edward Scissorhands, which stands to date as his most unusual, as well as his most personal, work. This fairy tale involves a mad scientist (played by Burton's idol, Vincent Price) creating a simulacrum of a young man (Johnny Depp) in his laboratory. He gives the boy scissors for hands until he can finish his work but dies before attaching the new hands. The boy lives a lonely life in the castle until he is discovered by an Avon lady (Dianne West), who takes him home to the pastel-colored suburbia below. The boy, dubbed...
...course, when wilderness is so intensely managed, it ceases to be wild. It becomes a toothless simulacrum. It becomes a park. On an increasingly crowded planet there is probably no alternative. It is simply an unhappy fact of life on the cusp of the 21st century...
That it does in Wilson's production, and gloriously. Ignoring Stein's simulacrum of a plot (the lives of 16th century Spanish saints), Wilson treats the opera's Dadaesque musings as a delicate dreamscape, filling the stage with characteristically elliptical images. Some, such as a levitating illuminated triangle, are familiar from earlier Wilson spectacles, while others--fluffy sheep that slowly ascend into the heavens, where they become clouds--are new. Robustly conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, the opera's simple Midwestern melodies provide an ideal complement to the graceful stage pictures, while the cast, headed by soprano Ashley Putnam...
This has a good effect on Juan, whose long incarceration has, understandably, made him depressed and withdrawn. In his condition, as he slowly realizes, he doesn't need or want a simulacrum of his old life back; what he requires is an energizing new deal from a fresh pack. Oddly (and luckily) enough, Carmela is coming to the same conclusion at the same time, propelled by the appearance of a cop (Chazz Palminteri) who starts responding to her wistful, if discreetly displayed, charms as well...