Word: hal
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Ashmedai is the story of a demon who corrupts an idyllic kingdom that has been at peace for 500 years. The work is really more a theater piece than an opera. The evening owes its success mainly to Hal Prince's (West Side Story, Cabaret, Fiddler on the Roof) making his debut as an operatic director. He is a master of illusion. There is a scene of villagers applauding a fire-eater that visually recalls Bruegel, a ridiculous pas de deux between the queen and a giant rooster. In a final Princely touch, darkness envelops the opera house. Then...
...compensation, Pakula has developed a series of incisive actors' moments that to a degree belie Hoffman's contention that this is not "an actor's film." Hal Holbrook is brilliant as Deep Throat, giving him an arrogance and condescension that make that famous nonperson's behavior explicable. So is Jane Alexander as the edgy mouse of a bookkeeper whom Bernstein persuades to talk about the slush fund at the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. Penny Fuller and Lindsay Anne Grouse appear as newspaperwomen who help out with leads at key moments?the former dizzily, the latter with...
...bear out," as he once put it. That the end product so closely reflects his first vision of the film is a tribute to what a friend calls his "bulldog tenacity" in bending many wills to his own. "He supposedly has the world by the tail," observes Hal Holbrook, "but most people who have the world by the tail don't swing it quite so heavily or quite so publicly. I respect him for that, for taking that risk." It seems probable that a large number of people who know him less well will come to feel the same...
...police force, then struggling ineffectively against a crime surge that had made Atlanta one of the homicide capitals of the U.S. But today the top cop is being cheered more than he is being jeered-even by some of his harshest early critics. Says Hal Gulliver, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Constitution, which vehemently opposed his appointment: "Eaves must be doing something right...
Says Aronson: "The Japanese artist has a peculiar way of seeing things. For instance, the white backdrops in Pacific Overtures are the way in which the Japanese depict clouds. Since this is a play about issues and not about people and moods, Hal and I decided on white lighting. The white shows everything on stage. It has a crispness, a simplicity, a directness about it." The entire show is lit by the harmony and taste of Boris Aronson's vision...