Word: star
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rival Hasbro, has been relying on acquisitions for sales growth. Last year Mattel purchased Learning Co., a maker of educational software with sales of $850 million, for $3.8 billion, and Pleasant Co., maker of American Girl, for $700 million. Not to be outdone, Hasbro picked up Galoob, maker of Star Wars figurines, and Micro Machines for $220 million, Furby founder Tiger Electronics for an additional $335 million and Pokemon licensee Wizards of the Coast for $325 million. When that becomes your business--buying ideas and then marketing the hell out of them--you had better be good...
That's bad news in an industry that relies on hits to get kids and parents into the stores. This year, for example, Hasbro and retailers were betting on products licensed from Star Wars' prequel Phantom Menace to drive sales into the crucial fourth quarter, which accounts for half of all toy sales. However, the force has not been with the Star Wars line. "It was very strong in May and June, during the movie's release," says Leslie Rauch, a senior buyer for Target stores. "But since then, it's become nothing more than a boy's action figure...
...seen an influx of popular, prominent and well-rounded gay characters without Ellen-esque audience or advertiser cavils. Indeed, there's so much cachet in being gay that even straight characters are trying it. On Fox's Action, scheming movie producer Peter Dragon received oral sex from a star to whom he passed himself off as gay, and in what promises to be a head-turning second episode of Fox's Ally McBeal on Nov. 1, Ally engages in steamy lip-wrestling with another woman...
...liberated. The Vagina Monologues, which has been staged around the world, most notably with an all-star cast in New York City last year, is now off-Broadway, being performed solo by its author. Shorn of the somewhat overbearing I-am-woman-hear-me-roar vibes of the celebrity-studded version, its strengths as a one-woman show become apparent. Sitting on a stool with only a few lighting effects for embellishment, Ensler can soar to Rabelaisian heights (giving a bravura impression of every type of orgiastic moan) or move us with quiet compassion (a woman in her 70s describes...
...disparate styles into a tightly unified idiom all his own. There are times when the openhearted lyricism of a Leonard Bernstein would have been welcome, but the lean, laconic score keeps the action moving, lending Miller's kitchen-table naturalism a freshening touch of poetry. Add in Josephson's star-quality performance as Eddie, the exemplary staging of Frank Galati (who directed Broadway's Ragtime) and Santo Loquasto's angular set--the Brooklyn Bridge as painted by Franz Kline--and you get a no-nonsense tragedy whose final curtain falls with the tight-lipped impact of a police report...