Word: lucia
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...celebration across Lincoln Center, at the Metropolitan Opera House, where the American Ballet Theater put on a 40th anniversary gala evening. A.B.T. does this sort of thing every five years or so for fun and fund raising, but this gathering had special meaning: it marked the 35th year that Lucia Chase and Oliver Smith have directed the troupe; in September Mikhail Baryshnikov will replace them...
Chase has long been the dominant force behind the big, ambitious and at times unwieldy company with its temperamental stars and eclectic repertory. Choreographer Agnes de Mille remarked that "Lucia is nine-tenths granite," probably an accurate assessment, but a side of Chase that the public did not see. Formerly a ballerina, she became a self-effacing impressario who stayed out of the spotlight, gave insipid interviews when talking at all, and quietly went on ordering up the baling wire to keep A.B.T. going...
Thus it was an odd sight to see not one but ten Lucia Chases onstage at the close of a three-hour show that mixed short excerpts and pas de deux with bows by beloved former dancers like Irina Baronova, Muriel Bentley, Sono Osato, Nora Kaye, Annabelle Lyon, Violette Verdy. Against a deeply shadowed backdrop, Chase seemed to appear in her old roles: actually dancers were costumed as the young girl who dances the prelude in Les Sylphides, the greedy virgin in Three Virgins and a Devil, the doll in Petrouchka, the Columbine in Carnaval, the eldest sister in Pillar...
Then the real Lucia Chase finally appeared (only she knows how old she is, but she looked effervescent and radiant in a fluffy pink dress). Alone in the spotlight, she seemed ill at ease and quickly beckoned all the dancers out from the wings. She hugged old comrades and youngsters just up from the corps. Later she likened them all to her clan...
...crown of the first week's operatic offerings was the Figaro-tender, witty, effortlessly buoyant. The spectacle of servants outwitting their masters, so inflammatory in Mozart's day, was given charm and point by Baritone Walter Berry, as a rather phlegmatic Figaro, and Soprano Lucia Popp, as his pert fiancee. Baritone Hans Helm and especially Soprano Gundula Janowitz, as the count and countess, played along with aristocratic good grace...