(Woolfe) ★ 'Turandot' (Saturday) For old-school spectacle nothing beats Franco Zeffirelli's lavish production of this Puccini opera.
(Tommasini) 'Turandot' (Friday) For old-school spectacle nothing beats Franco Zeffirelli's lavish production of this Puccini opera.
In the instance of the school shooter, that spectacle, that it is such an intense spectacle for us, arises from something else we share with him: a clear understanding of childhood as a time of security, of schools as a site of safety and as society's organ for its own reproduction.
It was a school field kind of spectacle at times – scruffy, naive, mindless; two groups of players conceding possession time and time over and one of them scrambling home with the afternoon's singular moment of class.
Cole, who founded the American style of Romantic landscape that was to be called the Hudson River School, put the chromatic spectacle of America's fall leaves into the history of painting with Falls of the Kaaterskill and Shroon Mountain.
Staged against the backdrop of a giant jigsaw puzzle in two cavernous Victorian school halls, the multimedia spectacle evokes a world gone terribly awry, where nothing fits or works yet everything seems on the go.
Anyone expecting laser lights, simulated fire or the levitating prom gown of the telekinetic Carrie will have to keep searching for bootleg videos of the short-lived Broadway run, for this revival hews to the original vision of a fable about high school instead of the spectacle that became so ridiculed that it inspired a book about Broadway's biggest botches, "Not Since Carrie".
Like many, I look back at school with rose-tinted spectacles, most likely because I hadn't begun to even consider the possibility of coming out till long after.
At one point, we were treated to the spectacle of a school of common dolphins leaping gracefully alongside the prow.
And the movie audience, like the 19th-century novel-reading public, can relish, with only slight queasiness, the sadomasochistic spectacle of boarding school cruelty.
Perhaps most fascinating is "plump, prettyish" Daisy Cavanaugh, hovering throughout as both specter and spectacle, removed from school but ever present via her video.
