Word: ustinov
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Spartacus (1960). An early Kubrick film with plenty of pomp, violence and massive crowd scenes. Screenplay by black-listed writer Dalton Trumbo. With Laurence Olivier, Tony Curtis, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov. Ch. 56, 8 p.m. Color, 3 3/4 hours...
Terry-Thomas supplies the voice for Sir Hiss, who is appropriately gap-toothed, much to the advantage of his forever-flickering tongue. Peter Ustinov makes a pleasingly florid prince, his voice full of empty threat and tenuous regality...
...major innovation was Ustinov's abandonment of the traditional setting of the opera-the brocaded and balconied court life of old Seville-in favor of a Goyaesque countryside vision of 18th century Spain. "Like Goya," said Ustinov, "Mozart had a fine sense of the intense dark and light sides of life, often imprisoned so tightly together that it is frightening to ask too many questions. The people in Don Giovanni could have been the people staring at you from the depths of Goya's portraits." As for the don himself, said Ustinov, he is "not really my kind...
Though it was not an entirely successful approach-some first-nighters found Ustinov's somber lighting too unvarying, his crowd scenes too busy-Ustinov did manage to balance the bawdy with the foreboding in a psychologically adroit way. Costumes contrasted gaily and innocently with the ominous surroundings. The mood was like nothing so much as a folk festival in which the compassionate, suspicious, sacred, profane and foolish commingled...
...underline this conception, Ustinov allowed no cast bows after individual arias, no curtain calls at the end of Act I, and only one curtain call at the finale. Fine for the show, but a bit of a sacrifice for the exemplary cast (notably Roger Soyer as the don, Sir Geraint Evans as Leporello, and Heather Harper as Elvira) and Conductor Daniel Barenboim. Only seven years after rearranging a notable piano career to include the baton, Barenboim, 30, made an impressive operatic debut at Edinburgh, bringing forth from the English Chamber Orchestra a powerfully humane and often witty reading ideally geared...