Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...curtain of Manhattan's City Center opened on a ballet set-a large, white Chopin medallion suspended like a full moon against velvety blackness- but the first figure the audience saw, a hefty man in swallowtail coat, headed across the stage to play Chopin on a grand piano. Yet it was a ballet after all, a new one called The Concert. Made up of Choreographer Jerome (Peter Pan) Robbins' irreverent ideas of what might go on in a listener's wandering mind during a musical evening, it turned out to be the funniest farce in a blue...
Inspired Import. In Vienna people arrive fashionably late at the theater, and operettas hold off their big numbers for the end. What worried Prawy was Kate's big ballet scene, which opens the show. This scene alone, he felt, might mean success or failure. As the scene ended on opening night, there was dead silence. Prawy, an old hand at the claque game, clapped once-and started five minutes of thunderous applause. After that, Kate was in. The musicians swung as lightly as if they had not been raised in three-quarter time; the American principals sang in pleasingly...
...Board Chairman Pat Weaver thought up the idea of Wide, Wide World, he planned to put TV cameras in diving bells, on skis and surfboards, atop mountains and deep in caverns. In a creative frenzy, he cried: "Let's get the Sadler's Wells Ballet to do an outside original in an exciting locale, like on a fleet of barges being towed around Manhattan, with the symphony orchestra on the first barge, and cameras with telescopic lenses spotted ashore to zoom in from the Empire State, the Statue of Liberty, the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge on a particular scene...
...parodies. In the course of the show he spoofs English madrigals and Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, with a small comment on Bach chorals thrown in between. His talent, however, is no less evident in some warm long songs and the music for the large production numbers. For these ballet scenes, Liz Keen contributes some amazingly expert choreography...
...chatty and dawdling as a rural postman. But as against the flails and wind machines that keep most Broadway comedies in motion, The Ponder Heart catches a fresh and genuine creative breeze. For the most part, too, it moves along without having to wear either the pretty-pretty ballet slippers of fantasy or the hobnailed boots of farce. In a good production, David Wayne's Uncle Daniel is outstanding: he plays the part, not with small studio strokes, but with a fine, freewheeling manner and a whole-grained physical sense...