Word: stage
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...biggest resident theater company in North America is not to be found in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago. Nor, as stage cognoscenti might suppose, is it in a thriving regional center like Minneapolis, home of the Guthrie, or a festival city like Ashland, site of the Oregon Shakespearean Festival. The champion -- as measured cumulatively by number of productions and performances, size of troupe, total audience and budget -- is located in an unpretentious town in the Canadian province of Ontario, about 90 miles from the skyscrapers of Toronto. It is a place that began with scarcely any claim...
...most part, the performers are not stars, and the attraction that draws some 450,000 theatergoers a year -- about 45% of them from the U.S. -- is the shows themselves. The staging can be as traditional as a Richard III in doublets and armor or as giddily updated as The Taming of the Shrew transported to 1950s Italy. Shakespeare, which makes up at least half the schedule, can be complemented by the sober heft of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral or spritzed with My Fair Lady in an ingeniously extravagant production that bejewels the stage with chandeliers, dinner jackets...
...Lear, the young players are joined by William Hutt, 68, perhaps Canada's most distinguished stage actor, in what may be the performance of his career. His king is no autocrat but a dotard whose authority has long been a polite fiction. His plans for dividing the kingdom are a surprise to no one; his daughters' resistance to his extravagant wanderings are no meanness but utter common sense in the face of senility; the brutality they eventually show is brought on by invasion and civil war, both instigated by their holier-than- thou sister. Hutt superbly manages Lear's transition...
...have decreased, as that part of the Carnival celebration has changed from a family costume party to another stop on the relentless tour of all- purpose American event-attenders. Mardi Gras turned a corner in 1969 when the Krewe of Bacchus was formed by restaurant and hotel operators to stage a parade tailored specifically for tourists -- a spectacle considerably more lavish than the parades of the old-line krewes. The king of the parade each year was not some anonymous banker, secure in the knowledge that anyone who counts knows who's behind the mask, but somebody like Jackie Gleason...
...nine members of Team B, including its chairman Richard Pipes, would become members of the Committee on the Present Danger, a hard-line anti- detente group. Everyone knew the board was stacked -- Ray Cline, a CIA loyalist, called it a kangaroo court. But its alarmist estimates helped set the stage for the vast defense expenditures that began under Carter and peaked during the buying frenzy at the Reagan Pentagon...