Word: melissa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Balthazar (TIME, Aug. 25, 1958). Most of the same characters are still loping through the bedrooms and back alleys of Alexandria: Pursewarden, the slightly mad novelist-diplomat; Justine, the dark-browed, amoral Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire Coptic Christian husband; Darley, the sad-sack Irish schoolteacher; Melissa, the tuberculous Greek dancer. But the protagonist of this new book is a relative newcomer, David Mountolive, who returns to Egypt as British ambassador after having lived there in his youth...
Again the novel's narrator is Darley, a seedy, itinerant Irish schoolteacher. Again the plot concerns his sexual and soulful involvements with Justine, a feline Egyptian Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire husband; Melissa, a tubercular Greek dancer. There is also an assortment of other exotics, who seem to have crawled from beneath a blistered and immemorial stone of Alexandria-Scobie, the transvestite policeman; Toto de Brunei, who dies with a hatpin rammed through his brain; Capodistria, the goatish sybarite; hare-lipped Narouz, who carries a severed head in his saddlebag; Pursewarden, who has discovered "the uselessness of having opinions...
Space & Time. In Justine, Narrator Darley drew what he thought were final conclusions from his own experience: he supplied answers as he saw them to Justine's nymphomania, Nessim's seeming complaisance and incipient madness, Melissa's tortured love. In Balthazar, an all-seeing, cabalistic doctor gives a rude shake to this picture and, as in a kaleidoscope, all the parts fall into radically changed patterns. Darley learns that Justine only pretended to love him, that he was used as a decoy to conceal her passion...
Showstopper: a wacky session in which tiny Ballerina Melissa Hayden piccoloed about on her toes, and lanky Jacques d'Amboise bounded around in great, oompah leaps to the Liberty Bell and El Capitan marches...
...games. The dancers tie themselves up in little knots and delight in getting out of them gracefully. As the music mocks itself-in a trumpet jeer or a pizzicato poke-the dancers mock the music with a hop, skip or bump. Most dramatic bits: Canadian-born Melissa Hayden's stunning solo variation and a languorous, sensual pas de deux exquisitely danced by Virginia-born Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell, a talented Negro member of the company. The whole work takes less than 25 minutes, but it unmistakably shows Composer Stravinsky, 75, and Choreographer Balanchine...