Word: spartacus
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Wince & Wait. By that time, Richard Burton was a long way from the Old Vic. As his stage career fanned to promise and even moments of greatness, he salted his interludes with movies. Everyone does this. Sir Laurence Olivier was in Spartacus. But Burton's serious work on the stage began to atrophy as he gave himself increasingly to films, playing opposite an odd assortment of ladies?Lana Turner, Olivia de Havilland, Jean Simmons?in weak pictures wherein he was miscast. Given his professional fears and the economic spareness of his beginnings, it is not hard to understand...
...howling Romans to the Colosseum with a show that featured 60 lions, 30 leopards, 10 tigers, a rhinoceros, and 2,000 gladiators resolved to battle to the death. Today in the U.S., the beasts are all in zoos and the only gladiators around are the extras in Spartacus. But every Sunday from September through December, before their TV sets and in stadiums from coast to coast, some 40 million Americans are enraptured by a modern-day spectacle that even the Romans would enjoy. The game is professional football, now established as the spectator sport...
Hopeless from the Start. On the whole, the audiences seemed to like the absence of decorations that overwhelm the dancers in Bolshoi productions such as Spartacus. Said Composer Aram Khachaturian : "If Balanchine had done the choreography for my Spartacus, it wouldn't have been a flop." Balanchine politely disagreed. Spartacus was hopeless from the start, he said, because it was based on a false conception. Like much of Russian ballet, it subordinated music and dancing to plot and decoration, whereas ballet should be music and dance - first, last and foremost...
...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...
...scene (by Ballerina Natalia Ryzhenko) and some writhing by 15 Cadiz dancing girls, all of them bare considerably south of the navel. Khatchaturian's thunderous score omitted scarcely a single cliché of film music, and not even Plisetskaya was equal to the absurdities of her role as Spartacus' wife. As Spartacus himself, the Bolshoi introduced a giant (Dmitry Begak) who danced just about the way a giant might be expected...