There, Wolfe spools out a masterful extended metaphor: that the country crashing into and emerging out of the Depression is like a cicada, which as it enters "the last stage of its life cycle," goes through a magnificent transformation, becoming a winged creature and "leaving behind the brown and lifeless husk from which it came".
The two leads can cut a rug with the best of them, while among the rest of the cast Heather Mitchell plays Scott's mother as a gorgon in pink maribou feathers, while Drew Forsythe as her husband Doug makes a magnificent transformation from a sad sack punctuating the action with squirts from his breath-freshening dispenser, to the manic hoofer seen in a cleverly-staged flashback to 1967.
I was struck by this today as we sat in a local and very well done production of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," and I looked over at my child in the soft glow of the stage lights as she sat taking in this heartfelt story that portrays the magnificent transformation of Scrooge's hardened heart into one overflowing with generosity and joy.
In that moment, a transformation happens as magical as the most magnificent pantomime transformation anyone could ever imagine, even though, on the stage, nothing changes.
Still, improving America's image overseas is not rocket science: witness the transformation among Indonesians after the magnificent relief effort that Washington led following the great tsunami.
Yet the happy version of global transformation was coherent and persuasive, and the magnificent expansion of wealth and freedom after 1991 swept all doubts away.
The best example of the magic that saved Fisk was the transformation of an untrained student chorus into a magnificent singing group that raised more than $150,000 -- more than $2.5 million in today's dollars -- and kept the university afloat.
I've been reduced on certain magnificent days to just drifting on the shoulder, gawking at the transformation of ordinary seawater into muscled swell, into feathering urgency, into pure energy — impossibly sculpted, ecstatically edged — and, finally, into violent foam.
Makeup drawings show Quinn's transformation into a Mongol emperor for the 1965 film "Marco the Magnificent".
