Word: spectacularity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley: "This is a very good bet. If they can prove it, it will wipe out a number of theories on the formation of large-scale structure in the universe." Declared Hyron Spinrad, another Berkeley astronomer, more simply: "If true, it's spectacular...
...economic background should serve him well. Despite a spectacular average annual growth rate of more than 9% over the past two decades, Taiwan's economy now stands at a potentially hazardous crossroads. With an average manufacturing wage of $535 a month, the country can no longer claim to offer cheap labor by Asian standards, yet it has been slow to invest in higher- technology fields. Exports of textiles, a key industry, last year grew by an impressive 23%. But other sectors have been hurt by a 40% rise since late 1985 in the value of the New Taiwan dollar against...
Like Cats and Starlight Express, though, Phantom is likely to prove "castproof," for much of its attraction lies in its spectacular coups de theatre inspired by Victorian stage machinery. Among the highlights: a boat gliding across a gloomy underground lake, and a chandelier that appears to crash onto the audience at the end of Act I. The multiple trapdoors that create many of the illusions -- there are 102 tiny ones to accommodate the candles that rise from the gloom to illuminate the Phantom's subterranean realm -- are all controlled by computer. Says Will Bowen, assistant production manager in London...
...Webber was on his own in his next project, an audacious attempt to set T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to music. He turned to the innovative director Trevor Nunn and the brilliant designer John Napier to transform his plotless feline frolic into the spectacular Cats. Nunn found that the increasingly confident composer's sense of musical structure was "fantastically theatrical" and that what Lloyd Webber required of his collaborators was "ways in which his musical conception could be given a narrative or some character validation...
...spectacular road show and an accompanying ad campaign, which reportedly cost GM a total of $20 million, are an unabashed effort to polish up the company's rusty image during a period of declining sales and slumping profits and to bolster employee morale after a two-year wave of layoffs. Kicking off the affair with what he called a "progress report," Chairman Roger Smith, 62, asserted that GM is rebuilding consumer confidence in its cars with competitive pricing, superior technology and eye-catching style. The vehicles around him, Smith said, were proof of a "GM that can maintain its world...