Word: slaving
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spectators perhaps the most tasteless evening ever endured at the Met. The occasion was the U.S. premiere of the Bolshoi Ballet's Spartacus, an extravaganza so preposterous it was hard to believe a professional dance company was responsible for it. The story dealt with Rome's slave revolt, as reported by Appian and Plutarch, and ended with the death of the slaves' leader, the gladiator Spartacus (once referred to by Karl Marx as "the most splendid fellow in all ancient history"). The choreography was by the Kirov Ballet's Leonid Yakobson, the music by Stalin Prizewinner...
Spartacus, in fact, was more pantomime than dance-and silent-screen pantomime at that. From the first sledgehammer chord, accompanied by the projection of Rome's Colosseum on the scrim curtain, spectators might well have guessed that they were in for triumphal processions, slave girls, gladiators and courtesans, eye-rolling, tooth-gnashing and a dose of belly dancing. By Scene 2 of Act I, 16 corpses were sprawled about the stage...
Princess & Politics. Dirksen and Ropp produced two other notable theatricals. One was a one-act allegory called The Slave with Two Faces, in which Ev cavorted on stage wearing a ram's-head mask, black socks, short black tights and nothing else. "I remember thinking," recalls one witness, "that the party lines would be buzzing tomorrow." The other was Percy MacKaye's A Thousand, Years Ago, in which Ev played a pulsating lover panting after the charms of the Princess of Pekin. He won her, of course-and he kept he, for the "princess" was played...
...agitators among the island's 2,350,000 population. Some have gone over to Fidel Castro's Cuba; Campos' wife Laura, and one of his aides, Juan Juarbe, serve as members of Castro's delegation to the U.N., where they picture Puerto Rico as "the slave state of the Americas." The rest sit around dreaming up ways to make a noise far out of proportion to their numbers...
...film is as faithful as a slave to Meredith Willson's Broadway hit musical. Indeed, at one point a theater spotlight is used to light up the hero and his girl, with the rest of the screen in darkness. The hero is Professor Harold Hill (Robert Preston), a 1912 conman in the corn-belt town of River City, Iowa. Preston's tactic is to whip up enthusiasm in small towns for starting a brass band, sucker parents into buying the instruments and uniforms, and then skip out without teaching the young Sousaphiles a note. Preston is a musical...