Word: cranko
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...other new ballets-Ashton's La Péri and MacMillan's Noctambules-failed despite inspired and startling flashes of choreographic brilliance. The most ballyhooed premiere of all was Prince of the Pagodas (TIME, Jan. 14) by John Cranko, with music by Benjamin Britten (his first ballet score). Choreographer Cranko's splintered story had in it recurrent themes from Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, plus snatches of court intrigue reminiscent of King Lear viewed through the wrong end of the telescope. The stage was roiled by gaudy dancers, the sets were feverish with color, but despite...
...Prince of the Pagodas was a mixed bag of occasionally singing melody and frequently turgid choreography. For at least two acts, Britten's music was sonorous and strong, enriched by a variety of percussion effects and deft syncopation. Less successful was the work of Choreographer John Cranko, who all too frequently allowed the story to lose its way in symbolic labyrinths. The fantastic plot describes the betrayal of a Lear-like king by his wicked daughter, and the eventual restoration of the king's realm by the intervention of his faithful and beautiful younger daughter...
Cranks (by John Cranko; music by John Addison) is a pint-sized English revue with a Jeroboam's worth of frills. Three men and a girl squeal or kneel or sit with their backs to the audience, climb things while they rhyme things, weave about or dance or contort while singing ballads or blues. In a welter of shifting lights, one revue number slithers into the next while the performers act as their own stagehands...
This time there were four ballets new to the U.S. by the company's leading Choreographer Frederick Ashton, one by rising young John Cranko. Ashton's Scènes de Ballet was danced before a De Chirico-like architectural backdrop, proved as angularly abstract as the Stravinsky score in an intricate counterpoint of shifting groups. High point was the saucy, mincing solo of young ballerina Nadia Nerina, dancing like a flirtatious marionette to the lilting wail of an oboe...
...Real Home. John Cranko's Lady and the Fool was a romantic period piece set to little-known Verdi music-the story of an imperious beauty, well danced by statuesque Beryl Grey, who spurns aristocratic lovers and goes off with a clown. If the choreography seemed unoriginal and the story flimsy, the dandies were properly elegant, the flirts suitably flouncy, the clown appealingly...