Word: hacks
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Alakazam the Great! (Toei-American International) is a wild, nonsensical, hack-chop-you're-dead fairy story, cartooned in Japan and dubbed in the U.S. It is not as well drawn as the cartoons Walt Disney used to do, but Disney has neglected the field for live films and amusement-park management, and six-year-olds should howl happily at the replacement. The hero is an emetic little monkey (U.S. adapters thoughtfully assigned Crooner Frankie Avalon to provide his voice) who sets "out to conquer the world. Along the way he collects some traveling companions, including a prince...
...tears and laughter. He wanted to make his theater a crucible of social change, and he merely convinced theatergoers of the tenacious durability of man's unchanging nature. If he had succeeded, as Biographer Martin Esslin points out, he would have been merely "a flat and boring party hack." Failing, he became a great moral puzzle, a seething controversy, and one of the most significant writers...
...play offers a plethora of variations, added to by hack writers for more than half a century. Presented with a wide choice of scenes--farcical and tragic, relevant and irrelevant--a director must choose among them to carry through single theme. Word Baker, who is directing the Boston University production, uses everything and the result is rather disunified to say the least...
...with particular relish, and in the course of the evening makes almost every known move on the board. Now the opportunist wheedles, now the demagogue roars; now a responsible leader advises, now a deft misleader distorts. The nose puncher swaggers forward, the back stabber lies in wait; the party hack mumbles Yes, sir; the man above party shouts Never! In the play's high-stake memory test, wherein the nominee's years-ago Communist flirtation is set against his chief assailant's years-ago sexual misstep, the one man would kill anyone to win, the other...
...gubernatorial race, Massachusetts does not stand to gain, whether Volpe or Ward triumphs; both are hack politicians. Only O'Connor can provide a change from the sterility in Massachusetts politics...