Word: borodin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Aleksandr Borodin's first musical since Prince Igor hit the boards in 1890 is an entertaining show, in spite of some remarkably shoddy ingredients. Unlike Igor, Kismet's big assist comes from Minsky rather than Rimsky. With the vigorous cootch dance that shocked Elinor Hughes on opening night, bare-tummied slave girls paraded "for sale or for rent," and a number of jokes like, "Call me in the harem; I'll be lying down there," Kismet is often indistinguishable from Harem Nights at the Old Howard. Further debits are abominable lyrics ("We'll coo adicu without undue ado"), a script...
...joins Drake in the slaughter of a smutty little horror called "Oasis of Delightful Imaginings" ("The breeze that cools the dunes there has an opposite effect on the pantaloons there."). Doretta Morrow is piquant as Kismet's sole ingenue, particularly in "Stranger in Paradise," the most successful hybrid of Borodin and Tin Pan Alley...
Though far less fortunate than the plunder of Gricg a few years back, the raid on Borodin produces a few trophics. At worst, there are atmospheric interludes of Hollywood Baghdad music, which permit the "Princesses of Ababu" to cavort around a palace pool obviously built in manual training class. At best, there are agreeable melodies to be ruined by the lyrics, and two lively numbers, "He's In Love" and the first act Finale. In any case, the music helps Kismet to whirl with amiable vulgarity through thirteen scenes, and the New York businessman will probably find the show...
Died. Mikhail Markovich Borodin (real name: Mikhail Gruzenberg), 68, top international Communist agent during the '20s; of unannounced causes; somewhere in the Soviet Union. Born in Byelorussia, he joined the Bolshevist underground at 19, in 1906 fled from Czarist police into exile in the U.S. Back in Russia after the 1917 revolution. Borodin soon went abroad as a Communist legman, fomented abortive "workers' revolutions" in Spain (1919) and Mexico (1920), directed Communist infiltration of labor unions in the U.S. and Scotland. In 1923 came Agitator Borodin's big assignment: advising (and infiltrating) China's struggling revolutionary...
...Summer Symphony (Sat. 6:45 p.m., NBC). Laszlo Halasz conducts music of Mozart, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov...