Word: wildebeest
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Taymor's imaginative ideas seem limitless. Actors wear masks atop their heads and manipulate life-size puppets, in bold defiance of conventional stage literalism. Dance numbers brim with vibrant, African-carnival colors; the big action sequences, like a wildebeest stampede conveyed by wheels and masks, dazzle with their allusive originality. Some of the most striking images are the simplest. Women with grass headdresses stand in a row and sway to manifest wind in the African savanna. When the lionesses grieve over the death of their King, Mufasa, they pull ribbons of fabric from their eyes to suggest tears...
...Minneapolis, Taymor had to have emergency gallbladder surgery. Then, she faced a host of technical problems, from malfunctioning props to elaborate scene changes that couldn't be made quickly enough. For the first few preview performances, the show was forced to insert a pause just before the big wildebeest stampede to give the crew time to change the set. (Taymor has since inserted a new scene to bridge...
...grass came in," she told stage manager Jeff Lee one afternoon, referring to the women wearing grass headdresses to represent the African savanna. A burst of unexpected applause from the audience covered up a key musical passage. Timon wasn't lighted properly in the waterfall scene. The wildebeest costumes were shedding...
...Moses vibrated with a current that contained no thought or premeditation. There was nothing in him of the third eye or the conscience or the sense of sin, but only an animal impulse to kill the lion. Moses went springing after the lion as the lion springs after the wildebeest...
...truth was that pinchik had not felt comfortable in the shoes but he could never bring himself to say no to a salesman. "I want to be liked," he admitted to Blanche. "Once I bought a live wildebeest because I couldn't say no." (Note: O.F. Krumgold has written a brilliant paper about certain tribes in Borneo that do not have a word for "no" in their language and consequently turn down requests by nodding their heads and saying, "I'll get back to you." This corroborates his earlier theories that the urge to be liked at any cost...