Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet has been a favorite of Russian audiences ever since it was premiered at Leningrad's Kirov Theater in 1940. It has plenty of pageantry, a familiar, heart-wrenching plot sufficiently removed from the realities of the Socialist state to be acceptable on all levels, and a fat part for Russia's legendary Prima Ballerina Galina Ulanova, now 46. The Russians, well aware that...
West yearns for a good look at Ulanova, have trimmed and tailored Prokofiev's work into a 96-minute color film. The Ballet of Romeo and Juliet. This week the film, the first feature-length movie of an entire ballet, which took a 1955 Cannes Film Festival grand prize, begins its first limited showings in the U.S., will be shown nationally next fall. It has its shortcomings as cinema, and it has a storybook languor that seems old-fashioned in contrast to the fast pace of U.S. ballet, but it makes excitingly good on its promise of a look...
Edited by Conductor Johnson and Music Teacher Perso. Secrets was scaled down to a trim 23 minutes, highlighted by The Ballad of Mort, the Whale, Lobster Dante, Ballet of the Octopus and Sea Horse Gallop, a tap dance in 6/8 time, as well as Susan Freiberg's Minuet of the Shrimp. The local critics disdained to cover the premiere, but Conductor Johnson thought Sea Secrets good enough to be shown to a music publisher. Said he: "It is beautiful in its whimsicality...
...thousand hens lay all at once, and oil explodes from a dry well) and for a few high-class variety numbers. Lena Home and Cara Williams provide the best of these, though Frankie Laine's performance is not without its morbid fascination, and Hermes Pan's ballet about Frankie and Johnny has a sort of hatpin wickedness-even though Ballerina Charisse succeeds in blunting the point...
...Prague. Aboard it were the latest emissaries from the West: nine U.S. Protestant churchmen representing the National Council of Churches. The Americans, in Russia for ten days of talk with Russian churchmen, were whisked off to lush quarters in the Sovietskaya Hotel, taken that night to The Bronze Horseman ballet at the Bolshoi Theater. Since, for the Americans, it was Lent, and Sunday at that, they seemed a little discomfited. "When in Rome," said one wryly, "do as the Romans...