He was a professional clown — white makeup, red rubber nose and all — and the opening of his act involved having his son pop out of a steamer trunk Dad carried onstage on his back.
In "Barnum," he implied the colossal scale of Jumbo the elephant by letting the parts suggest the whole, constructing legs and a trunk that were tugged onstage by two stilt walkers.
Contrary to expectations Diana Damrau, who sings the ingénue Gilda, had expressed her willingness to climb into the open trunk of a fantail Cadillac onstage.
In no other theater exhibition could such a trunk belong so well, since Robbins onstage so often showed such an acute sense of theater life offstage.
On the heels of "Trunk Muzik," he's fully ascendant, and onstage here, he had the bearing of an artist used to a far more enthused reception, which is to say a rowdier one.
Rooney was different: he was, proverbially, born in a trunk as the child of vaudevillians, brought up onstage, pushed by a stage mother, learning shtick as second nature — but Rooney was also a real movie star, whom the camera loved.
After anemone-like figures onstage are transformed into whirling tree trunks and so on, a theater of marvels opens up into a universe of mysterious performers suspended in the air.
At the moment we're filming one about me putting a girl in a trunk of a car, which I've never told onstage, but it's a true story.
Onstage, a man in a furry cloak blew something that looked like an elephant trunk and sounded like a didgeridoo.
