Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...principals and other speaking players will be supported by a chorus of 20, and orchestra of 20, and a corps de ballet, Bell said...
...enjoyably folksy songs and dances are the best part of an evening that is, after never less than indifferent, and somehow never dull. Rumor has it that a new ballet will be inserted, and this sounds like a fine idea. If enough desultory backchat is cut out to make room for it, if director Vincent J. Donehue can do something about several performances, if the lyrics to more of the songs become audible, if a great deal of miscellaneous tinkering is successfully accomplished, Juno might be okay...
Under Peter Glenville's firm direction, this misanthropic drama thrums with barbaric violence, yet unfolds with the stylized gravity of ballet. Rashomon is rich in theater craft-Jo Mielziner's doom-dappled lighting, Laurence Rosenthal's eerily instrumented score, Oliver Messel's turntable forest of disenchantment. Apart from a U.N.-like babel of accents, the brilliant cast often achieves a triumph of mime over matter. Radiant, in white kimono, as netted moonlight, Claire Bloom is part lotus flower, part flower of evil. Noel Willman's samurai is a bred-in-the-bone aristocrat...
...this featherweight libretto, Composer Shostakovich set a blandly melodic score. The operetta's high points were provided by the choreography: a dream ballet in which a defeated schemer cavorts near one of the coveted apartments, a wild Lindy hop by two of the triumphant apartment hunters. Tame by Broadway standards, the dances proved to be crowd rousers on opening night. Otherwise, Composer Shostakovich's first excursion into musical comedy got only tepid applause. The Moscow cognoscenti diagnosed Cheryomushki as an unequal contest between composer and librettists, with Shostakovich's music clearly coming out the loser...
...artists to perform without interruption, even dispensed with an M.C. The cast: Actor Maurice Evans narrating for the uncanny Baird puppets (TIME, Dec. 29), Opera Star Renata Tebaldi (two exciting arias from Madame Butterfly), the piano team of Gold and Fizdale and members of the New York City Ballet. Warmest, most memorable part of the show: Singer Harry Belafonte's spellbinding finale. In a full-throated 18 minutes of folk songs, Belafonte proved once again that he is exactly as advertised: the most compelling balladeer...