Word: harolds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...HAROLD W. STRAUB Bethesda
Forced to grope into theatrical history for an apt comparison, for a composer who was to the mainstream of Broadway music what Bacharach is to that mainstream now, I'd settle on Harold Arlen. Arlen too had a popular bent, wrote songs consciously and expressly for Negro singers, was by nature incapable of the straight, bright, terribly Broadway, Broadway tunes of which any second-rank Cole Porter creation is the perfect example, and on all these counts had to be regarded as an organism slightly foreign to the theatre (Mr. Arlen will of course forgive the laws of parallelism...
...actor and a director are the play's most impressive assets. In the central role, Donald Pleasence gives a performance of atomic power and blinding virtuosity; Harold Pinter directorially chills the stage to doom temperature. The very first scene bursts on the playgoer with somber eclat. In an elegant private chapel, dim as a catacomb, a finger of light rests on Pleasence as he kneels rapt in prayer. The Verdi Requiem saturates the air like incense. Suddenly, the stage is ablaze with light, louvers are turning, and the backdrop becomes a penthouse view of Manhattan's skyscrapers...
...indulges in acridly anti-Semitic remarks. With bewildering rapidity, his accented spray of words veers from the clever to the vulgar to the mad. In a sense, Goldman is the kind of Angst-ridden creature a very bright student might have constructed after making a close study of how Harold Pinter fashions his characters. Since Shaw acted the mentally disturbed older brother in Pinter's The Caretaker, the influence is scarcely surprising...
...always understood that I'd play the lead and that Harold Pinter would direct." Pleasence partially modeled his performance on a well-known, dictatorial movie producer, whom he prefers not to name. "I used him as a model for a quality I don't have-authority. I can't even get a waiter in a restaurant." Pleasence considers Goldman one of his three best performances-the other two being Davies in Pinter's The Caretaker ("I had the image of an alley cat in mind") and the title role in the Broadway production of Jean Anouilh...