Word: assoluta
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...soprano cannot always be prima donna assoluta, but Maria Callas, 49, does not stop behaving like one. With only three days to go before her first concert in eight years, Callas bowed out with an eye infection, plunging London Impresario Sandor Gorlinsky and 3,000 fans, some of whom had paid over ? 100 a ticket on the black market, into purgatorio. Before her vision clouded, however, Callas had seen Gorlinsky schedule her old archrival Soprano Renata Tebaldi, 51, for a London recital just 17 days after her own comeback...
Died. Mathilda Kschessinska, 99, prima ballerina assoluta of the Russian Imperial Ballet at the turn of the century and mistress of the Czarevich before he became Nicholas 11; in Paris. Isadora Duncan described her as "more like a lovely bird or butterfly than a human being," and Nijinsky tore at his costume in a jealous rage when she upstaged him in a 1911 performance of Swan Lake. Though regarded as a national heroine in Czarist Russia, Ksches-smska's close association with the royal family-she later married Nicholas' cousin Andre and became Princess Ro-manovsky-Krassinsky-made...
Dame Margot Fonteyn is indisputably a prima ballerina assoluta. The Stuttgart Ballet now ranks among Europe's best dance companies. Its director and chief choreographer, John Cranko, is possibly the reigning master of story ballet. Put them all together and what do you get? What you get, sad to say, is a campy, overripe, overdecorated disaster called Poème de I'Extase, which was given its American première last week at the Metropolitan Opera House...
...Bolshoi Ballet detailed a 39-star detachment from its massive, 250-strong company to occupy the Metropolitan Opera as soon as the Royal Ballet left. Leading the company was Maya Plisetskaya, a ballerina assoluta of the broad, open Moscow style, which makes the sheer physical act of moving beautifully through space look like a natural way of life. The Russians offered virtuoso, bravo-catching nights of pinpoint turns, rock-steady balances and astronautic high leaps. But there was little to praise in the undernourished bits, snippets and shards of 19th century choreography that provided the vehicles for the Bolshoi...
SWEET CHARITY is spectacular Gwen Verdon, who proves that she is still the dancer assoluta of the U.S. musical stage. Bob Fosse's choreography is fresh, kinetic and witty, but the book, written by Neil Simon, is consistently stale, as if he had heard rather than written the gags...