When Luciano Pavarotti sang this bel canto tour de force, he stunned his audiences by tossing off those notes with astounding power.
"Steps in the Street" had, to an astounding degree, more force when revived by itself in 1989-90, near the end of Graham's life; the current version, effectively led on Saturday night by Andrea Murillo, is impressive but far from overwhelming.
The experience chronicled between these two moments is as astounding in its emotional force and as haunting and mysterious as anything seen in American movies in recent years.
In what followed, his leaps were astounding, his turns radiated force, and he covered more space in circuits of jumps than anyone else.
The director, Peyton Reed, infuses every scene with sparkling verbal and visual invention, and the dénouement is a vertiginous duet for director and actress, a three-minute tour de force of astounding simplicity.
Agriculture occupied an astounding 19percentt of the work force (in the U.S. the figure was 3percentt), yet even in a good year the country imported millions of tons of grain.
By keeping its knee-slapping, gasp-inducing and heart-tugging elements in quietly accelerating balance, this Obie-winning solo piece about growing up with the Pickle Family Circus lands an uproarious, astounding and affecting tour de force.
Maya Foa, the head of their death penalty team, told me, "Eight months after Andy Tsege's abduction by Ethiopian forces, it's astounding to see that British ministers knew he was being tortured from the start but still chose to make nice with their Ethiopian counterparts.
The effect is astounding, sublime.
The implications were astounding: Not only was there a cosmic force that seemed to be stronger than gravity, albeit only at gigantic scales, but also this force--later dubbed dark energy--seemed to constitute more than three-quarters of everything in the universe.
