Word: umber
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...1600s, Venice became the home of the new art form. The locale was appropriate: opera was more comfortable in that city of intrigue and sensuousness, and Titian red was better suited to its grand theatricality than the umber of Tuscany. Monteverdi settled there and wrote at least six operas; by 1700 there were 16 opera theaters among the canals. In the mid-19th century, the new music had progressed so far from its simple start that Hector Berlioz recalled: "... horses, cardinals under a canopy . . . orgies of priests and naked women . . . the rocking of the heavens...
Sandblasting is no solution; it leaves behind it a whitened area that merely invites a new literary effort. But a new technique has now been devised, which combines light sandblasting with a stain made of umber and regional soils, and Box Canyon will soon look almost the way it did before-with the addition of a fence to keep the public at arm's length...
Equipped with a kaleidoscopic face, a pliant body and Umber vocal cords, Williams simply runs through a cast of character sketches unseen since the early days of Jonathan Winters. "Earthquake!" he will yell, jumping up and down, before he rushes out to the audience to heckle himself. Within seconds, he is back onstage, giving a beautiful basso profundo rendition of Shakespeare, followed by rapid-fire impressions of a go-go boy, Long John Silver and characters from a Japanese science-fiction movie. "It's madness all around," he explains. "But the center is very calm, like the center...
When Dwight Eisenhower began to paint by the numbers, thousands of aging Americans who had harbored a secret conviction that they were latent Rembrandts set up easels and began to daub burnt umber and indigo onto keyed spaces of their canvas kits...
...their benighted circumstances, in which the truth shines like a spotlight. For the first half of the evening, the stage has been shrouded in melancholy: dim lighting, failed hope, blunted ambition. But in the intensely personal, Ziegfeld-like "Loveland" sequence, lights and color suddenly challenge the eye, an umber paintbox opened in the sun. This visual dazzle is reminiscent of Vincente Minnelli's movie musicals ?notably the focal ballet in An American in Paris. Onstage, it has never been mounted with such unfailing skill...