Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Posters went up and box-office business hummed across the U.S. and Canada. Britain's renowned Sadler's Wells Ballet Company was heading across the Atlantic for its third tour of America. The company flew in to New York last week determined to give more than half a million fans their money's worth; among other things, it cleared through customs scenery and costumes for ten productions, plus 4,530 ballet slippers, i.e., about 50 pairs for each dancer...
...result, as eye-filling as ever, was an example of what Sadler's Wells likes to do best: the full-length romantic ballet in classical style. The ballet chorus, dressed in autumn colors as peasants, in regal purples and crimsons as court maidens, in severe white as swans, made a gorgeous frame for the principal action. Among the brightest spots: Fonteyn's touching pantomime as the bewitched swan-princess and her vicious precision in her alternate role as the magician's wicked daughter; Dancer Somes's hurtling leaps in the court scene; a new "Neapolitan" duet...
...guests, including some 50 princes, 20 dukes, 95 counts, 35 marquesses and one sad and shopworn King (Peter of Yugoslavia), were all supposed to dress in the same (circa 1750) style, but many seemed as vague about their century as they did about their host, Ballet Impresario George de Cuevas, Marquis de Piedrablanca de Guana, who was spending a cool $75,000 to entertain them. Elsa Maxwell, who came only a couple of centuries too early in a red wig as Don Quixote's donkey-riding Sancho Panza, called him "that wonderful Italian who is doing so much...
...thing all his guests knew for sure about him is that he is married to a granddaughter of the late John D. Rockefeller. The marquise, 61, spends most of her time these days lying abed and munching chocolates, leaving her husband the marquis, 68, to his parties, his ballet and his eleven white (unhousebroken) Pekingese...
...Look Black." All but one of the Pekes were left home last week, but the marquis' ballet dancers were on hand to entertain his guests with a performance of Swan Lake. For a while real swans were considered, but the marquis felt they might fly away inopportunely. To make sure nothing else flew away, he had 200-odd private policemen on hand to watch his guests and their estimated $9,000,000 worth of jewels. The cops were impeccably clad as 18th century plainclothesmen, but not all the guests were so socially correct. Washington Socialite Gwendolyn Cafritz burst...