Word: victorian
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...architectural style is Victorian Gothic, its penology just plain gothic. Or maybe Visigothic. It is a place designed not to reform but to drive you crazy. Cool is what you need to survive here, and supercool is what you need to maintain a semblance of humanity. Andy, who insists he has been wrongly convicted, looks fragile. But he has a lot of tensile strength, as the joint's brutal homosexual ring ultimately finds out. He has even more mental strength, patiently working up -- for 19 years -- an escape attempt that will not only bring down the insufferably pious and hypocritical...
...from being dreary, impeccable modern. According to acoustician Derek Sugden, "Wood can be death unless it's stiff and thick. A softer grain will absorb low frequencies, which means there can be no richness in the sound." He and the Hopkinses decided to use pitch pine left around from Victorian warehouses. Waxed, it has a rosy glow. The modified horseshoe design solves the intimacy problem. Says soprano Alison Hagley, who plays Susanna in Figaro: "It's really more a circle than a horseshoe, and onstage I feel part of that circle. The audience is my friend and I am theirs...
Mandela, as someone once observed, is a combination of African nobility and British aristocracy. He has the punctilious manners of a Victorian gentleman. (His aides sometimes chastise him for rising from his chair to greet everyone who approaches him.) His patrician nature is on display most prominently in his dealings with President F.W. de Klerk, whom he has often treated as a kind of bumbling equerry. At the end of the first day of negotiations for a new constitution in 1991, Mandela gave De Klerk a withering dressing down: "Even the head of an illegitimate, discredited minority regime...
Unfortunately, such glimpses of sharp humor tease but do not deliver. Gilbert's libretto satirizes Victorian England, and his allusions were blunt and meaningful to contemporary audiences. A modern staging also needs some deeper dimension to do justice to the operetta. this Iolanthe shows possibilities but does not explore them; the campiness factor, the battle between sexes, or its interpretation as the first Jungle Fever could all be developed further. As it stands, Fairyland has as much bite as a flat scene on the back of a Crayola box, and the Lords react to its inhabitants the same why they...
...Silas Marner in ninth grade. That is a shame. Middlemarch is truly among the greatest books ever written and is, as Virginia Woolf put it, "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Its author, whose given name was Mary Ann (later Marian) Evans, was a Victorian feminist who lived openly with a married man and pursued a career as a writer and editor...