Word: rouben
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Part 1 unfurls to the ominous tattoo of unaccompanied drums. Six Scots clans and one all-girl Canadian regiment strut forth for a radiant massing of the colors. Rouben Ter-Arutunian's kilts are ravishing in their tartan greens, blues, yellows, scarlets and burgundies. At first the clans, led by such soloists as Jacques d'Amboise, Karin von Aroldingen and Suzanne Farrell, yield the floor to each other for classical ballet variations on the reel, jig and sword dance. But what Balanchine weaves at the end is a counterpart in motion for the plaid costumes. As 70 dancers...
Hitchcock's Torn Curtain today at 7:30; Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight Sunday...
...there were a few directors who saw the new dimension to pictures as something more than just a way to hear subtitles. The great pioneer who weaved sound and image together was the legendary Ernst Lubitsch. Not so legendary now, but quite the early virtuoso was Rouben Mamoulian. Mamoulian seemed to be experimenting constantly. His most accepted successes were on the stage (he directed the original stage version of "Porgy and Bess" for example) but his pictures exude a creative excitement that seems to say to the pedestrian studio craftsman, "Well boys, here's a little trick you might pick...
...Reinking and Grey perform feats of theatrical valor, but their talents are wasted. Grey is given only one dance, which he executes with goat-footed guile, while Reinking courses across the stage like a thoroughbred in the stretch. The music races toward oblivion rather than anyone's ears. Rouben Ter-Arutunian's majestic scenery features a columned, rotunda-like set with a cascade of steps. This forces Onna White to choreograph dances in which the chorus troops trippingly, and repeatedly, up and down...
Clearly a lot of TLC went into the staging of Pulcinella, but to uncertain effect. Rouben Ter-Arutunian has tastefully re-created Picasso's costumes and his imposing backdrop-a blue-gray cubist evocation of a moonlit street in 18th century Naples. The vital young Jeffrey dancers, moreover, prance through the one-act ballet as if caught up in a marathon tarantella. But breathing life into this Pulcinella is rather like trying to revive a dead tree by gluing fallen leaves back onto its limbs...