Word: prima
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...evening a fortnight ago a tall, slim, sandy-haired man in street clothes sat on a desk in the wings of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House and watched the Sadler's Wells Ballet performance of Apparitions. From time to time, when she wasn't on stage, prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn came over to talk to him. TIME's Chandler Thomas, having sat through five performances of different ballets out front, wanted to see how ballet looked from backstage. He was getting ready for this week's cover story on Miss Fonteyn...
...witnessed the first successful attempt in years to return elegance and the classical spirit to the Western ballet. Both had been brought to the U.S. by England's Sadler's Wells Ballet. With its gifts, Sadler's Wells had also brought Margot Fonteyn, its prima ballerina, a dancer fit to be ranked with the alltime greats...
...still seriously studious. Even after tough evening performances like Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake she rarely misses the ritual of morning class, where she stretches at the bar like the other dancers. She is completely unaffected-a quality which helps set the atmosphere backstage. Explains Frederick Ashton: "When the prima ballerina doesn't put on airs, obviously anyone else trying to would only look ludicrous...
...Paris, Mary Garden, 72, said that she would make a lecture tour in the U.S. this fall, her first trip back in 18 years. Her subjects: music, the opera, and singers. Said the onetime prima donna, whose hip-swinging versions of Thais and Salome still linger in the memories of old-time operagoers: "I will speak as I feel...
...Funnyman Milton Berle was getting no laughs out of Met Soprano Dorothy Kirsten. Cried the prima donna: "He hired a girl in a hideous blonde wig and passed her off as me. Then he played a screeching record . . . and had the girl mouth along with the words. The result was just awful . . . The image was most unattractive . . ." Dorothy even made threats to sue for "plenty . . . Imagine putting on that horrible-sounding mess and telling everybody I was doing it . . ." Said Milton, through his lawyers: "She is unfamiliar with the actual facts . . ." Then he began trying, still unsuccessfully at week...