Word: spartacus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...never executed, but audiences have enjoyed panopticonic vision for years. Countless films and TV plays have made the state pen almost as familiar a setting as Tombstone-the hostages with shivs at their throats, the leader in the besieged cell block on the phone to the warden, the Spartacus-in-denims who invariably fails to make it out of stir. Giving the old plot a new twist, Novelist William Wiegand (who teaches creative writing at Stanford) has produced a tale of a prison riot that is at once a violent melodrama, a psychological quiz and a political morality play...
This new respectability not only covers Fast's current works, but extends backwards to include the novels written during his card-carrying days. The novel sold to the movies this week is Spartacus, which Fast was forced to publish himself in 1951 because nobody else would. Evidently, then, the silence that boxed him in during the early Fifties was not imposed to eliminate Communist propaganda...
Scrapping the Clichés. The Bolshoi's new extravaganza, with its 400 onstage musicians and dancers, tells the story of Rome's slave uprising as outlined by Sallust and Plutarch, ending in the betrayal and death of the slaves' leader, the gladiator Spartacus (a favorite historical character of Karl Marx). Composer Khachaturian, a Stalin Prizewinner, diplomatically finds the ballet apt "at a time when many peoples are fighting for liberation and colonial rule is crumbling...
Troubling the Audience. If Spartacus should prove the beginning of a revolution in Russian ballet, the Bolshoi Company clearly has the talent and technique to extend it. Most of the first-rate young dancers in last week's production (including Julia May Scott, daughter of an American Negro and a Russian mother) were unknown to the West. They were drawn from the corps de ballet on the theory that they would be less hidebound by classical technique than the older dancers (an exception: famed Soloist Maya Plisetskaya, dancing the courtesan Aegina). Lavishly supported by the government, the Bolshoi currently...
Undisturbed by the traditionalist reaction against Spartacus, the Bolshoi is planning to encourage the shorter ballet form that has been the vehicle for most new choreographic ideas in the West. Says Artistic Director Alexander Tomsky: "We are not after a ballet that merely delights the eye; we are for ballet of deep feeling. We want to trouble the audience...