Word: ballets
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...music takes four hours to sing. There are 13 major scene changes. A cast of hundreds is required, including two choruses, a corps de ballet and three stage bands. Also hunters on horseback, ships sailing out of the harbor, a stream that turns into a waterfall, several ghosts and, most of all, a wooden horse...
With a smile and a hint of boyish pride, the stout man in horn-rimmed glasses ushered Galina Ulanova into the three-room hotel suite. For the leading dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, freshly arrived in New York on a first visit to the U.S., only the finest would do. In her refrigerator Ulanova found champagne, caviar and other necessities of the ballet life. Everywhere she looked there were flowers. In the sitting room stood the biggest surprise: a specially constructed exercise bar backed by floor-length mirrors. "So, my dear," said the man, "you can practice here...
...full name was Solomon Isaievich Hurok. To his friends he was Sol. To the public, though, it was "S. Hurok Presents," an emblem that invariably appeared atop the newspaper ad, billboard poster or concert program. Beneath it ran names like Artur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern, Margot Fonteyn, the Royal Ballet, the Old Vic and, of course, the Russians he so ably promoted and profited by in the U.S.: Pavlova, Richter, Oistrakh, the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera...
...worked hard on his own legend, Hurok eagerly boasted about what he considered his greatest accomplishment: "Bringing ballet to America and the American public to the ballet ... back when they called it 'toe dancing.' " His often hilarious way with the English language did not hurt his image either. "If people don't want to come," he once said while discussing the mystery of box-office appeal, "nothing will stop them." Hurok also authored two autobiographies (Impresario, S. Hurok Presents) about a life that began, like those of so many of his artists, in Russia. When...
...honesty, and his appreciation of the diversity of urban life, are scarcely rooted. Lumet lets us glimpse the man's Old World Italian family (his father and brother are cobblers) and his Greenwich Village girlfriends. He creates locker-room comedy out of Serpico's love for opera and ballet. But the crucial gap between his personal life and public service, and the despair that drove him to paranoia and defensive put-ons are only vaguely rendered, like a plainclothesman's arrest sheets...