Word: ashton
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...stars with the brightest shine were born in Surrey and Fifeshire: dark-haired Margot Fonteyn (TIME, April 15, 1946) and red-haired Moira (The Red Shoes) Shearer. The leading male dancer, Robert Helpmann, is somewhat of a foreigner-from Australia. Chief Choreographer Frederick (Cinderella, Facade) Ashton was born in Ecuador of British parents. Some of the ballets had unmistakably British subjects, among them The Rake's Progress (De Valois) and Hamlet (Robert Helpmann...
...second show, the band went back to the sweet and swoony, and it was lucky they did. The Chicago Herald & Examiner's redoubtable Critic Ashton Stevens covered the performance, closed his review with the line that, for dancers, has identified Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians through two decades: "The sweetest music this side of heaven." Probably because Guy has kept it the same old sweet and danceable way ever since, he has survived-while ripplers, swingsters, hoppers and scoffers who called him the "King of Corn" fell by the wayside. And because he survived, and earned a reputation...
British connoisseurs were appalled by the fakery (see cut). In a joint letter to the Times, Leigh Ashton, director of the Victoria' & Albert Museum, and other esthetes spluttered: "Reductio ad absurdum of the mania for the fake antique. These cars are ridiculous." Moaned the Manchester Guardian: "There are times when the British love of tradition seems not merely exaggerated but quite...
...hours, an eager-to-be-enchanted audience found plenty of reason to be. With her thistledown lightness and grace, pert, piquant Moira Shearer (dancing star of the movie Red Shoes) danced well and looked the part of Cinderella. Her two ugly sisters, one of them danced by Choreographer Ashton himself, couldn't have been uglier, and her prince (Michael Somes) couldn't have been more charming. Reported the London Daily Mail: "The curtain calls seemed to go on almost as long as the performance...
Most of the calls were for the Sadler's Wells top choreographer, lean, 42-year-old Freddie Ashton, whom London critics were quick to praise as "the first Englishman to devise a full-length ballet." He had used most of the gay, though sometimes brittle and bony score that Prokofiev had composed on a Kremlin commission during the war, but he had taken nothing of the Bolshoi Theater's spectacular and even longer ballet. A typical difference: while Ashton has his hero stay close to home, the Russians sent their Prince Charming chasing around the world after...