Word: plisetskayas
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...Opera House is destined for the wrecker's ball in May-that is, if it lasts that long. Last week the visiting Bolshoi Ballet practically tore down the house all by itself. Most of the acclaim was lavished on the Bolshoi's wing-footed Prima Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. On opening night she danced the dual role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake, and on the next night performed in the U.S. première of Petipa's Don Quixote-altogether a feat that is roughly comparable to Sandy Koufax pitching both ends of a doubleheader...
...part, Caroline Kennedy, 4, sat rapt and on her best behavior as she and her mother* watched Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet limber up for their evening show at Washington's Capitol Theater. She curtsied politely to Ballet Master Asaf Messerer and shook hands with Prima Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who looked pretty funny in her woolly leg-warmers. But two hours of Bolshoi can be tough on the best behaved little girl, and Caroline got a mite fidgety. She struggled out of her pink sweater, kicked her red Mary Janes back and forth, wriggled up into Mama...
...gladiator Spartacus (once referred to by Karl Marx as "the most splendid fellow in all ancient history"). The choreography was by the Kirov Ballet's Leonid Yakobson, the music by Stalin Prizewinner Aram Khatchaturian, the role of the heroine danced by the Bolshoi's gifted Maya Plisetskaya. But the collaboration only underlined the Bolshoi's greatest weakness: an inability to respond to the fresh dance ideas that have swept so forcefully through Europe...
...Villa of Crassus provided an excuse for a seduction scene (by Ballerina Natalia Ryzhenko) and some writhing by 15 Cadiz dancing girls, all of them bare considerably south of the navel. Khatchaturian's thunderous score omitted scarcely a single cliché of film music, and not even Plisetskaya was equal to the absurdities of her role as Spartacus' wife. As Spartacus himself, the Bolshoi introduced a giant (Dmitry Begak) who danced just about the way a giant might be expected...
...closing, let me forewarn balletomaines that though Maya Plisetskaya, second only to Ulanov in the Bolshoi Ballet, does make an appearance, it is a very short one. For 75 seconds, she dances through a droopily choreographed pastiche of ballet and burlesque. She does not, for quite understandable reasons, seem at all interested in the shoddy proceedings...