Word: ustinov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FESTIVAL (NET, 8-9 p.m.). Peter Ustinov conjures up a lively portrait gallery of his ancestors in "Ustinov on the Ustinovs." Repeat...
WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Peter Ustinov, Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier, and Charles Laughton star in the film about pagan Rome, Spartacus (1960). The second half is shown on Sunday Night Movie...
...Ustinov succeeded where others had failed by playing the opera, as he put it, for "what's on the surface." It turned out to be a poetic, elfin romp, somewhat in the spirit of Beni Montresor's enchanting 1966 production for the New York City Opera. Said Ustinov: "Too many directors try to make another Parsifal out of The Magic Flute...
...crosses a river without there being a river on the stage," he says. "A work like The Magic Flute should lead everyone to the depth of his own temperament, and so I prefer to have the public imagine the river." There is no river to imagine in Ustinov's Magic Flute, but there is much else. Sarastro's temple of wisdom is suggested by four golden columns and a clear egg-yolk backdrop rather than the usual bombastic temple architecture. The other sets consist primarily of a variety of shrublike trees positioned differently for each scene...
...everything was left to the operagoer's imagination. The three little boys who act as Tamino's guardian angels arrived and departed in a dirigible. Occasionally, Ustinov indulged in his love of sight gags, and not always to good effect; there were some murmurs from the audience when Papageno made his first entrance from the prompter's box. But Heinz Joachim in Die Welt summed up the critics' response: "At long last the Hamburg State Opera has cleaned out both the antiquated conceptions and modern profundity that block the view of Mozart's Magic Flute...