Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Only the day before the phone call, the U.S. had launched its eighth successful satellite, Discoverer II. It blasted from its launching pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, its nose fitted with a 160-lb. capsule, its second stage jammed with equipment measuring the satellite's ability to stabilize itself in free flight (see SCIENCE). Significantly, the capsule was the first of its kind, a forerunner of the type that will later carry biomedical specimens and pave the way for the development of reconnaissance and man-in-space satellites...
With the possible exception of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Russia's Bolshoi Ballet is the most extravagantly praised and least frequently viewed wonder of the world. The company's triumphant London visit three years ago (TIME, Oct. 15, 1956) marked its first appearance on a Western stage. Last week, amid box office uproar (see SHOW BUSINESS), Impresario Sol Hurok finally welcomed the Bolshoi to Manhattan for the start of a nine-week cross-continent tour. The long-awaited look was not a disappointment. But, as with many such wonders, the anticipation was somewhat more exciting than the actuality...
...first U.S. tour. They selected the top 110 dancers from a total company of 250, including Ulanova's chief rival, Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who for rumored political reasons had not appeared in the West before. With them came 40 tons of scenery, scaled down to fit the Met stage (a third smaller than the Bolshoi's home stage), and a generous ham-perful of the meat-and-potatoes favorites with which the company regularly sells out its home season. Because of the difficulty of shifting the Bolshoi's ponderous sets on the Met's antiquated stage...
...Capulets (gorgeously decked out in Renaissance finery) and the peasant-supported Montagues (in modest, everyday clothes) is a marvel of rocketing energy and split-second timing. The carnival scenes give the Bolshoi's male dancers an opportunity to come bounding like handballs off the Met's stage in the high, open leaps that are their special glory...
Talking sleepily, the students file in. The room fills; one boy jumps to a stage, calls out, "Let's go." Stiffly at first, the class waggles fingers, wrists, arms and spines in a ragged ballet of calisthenics, then switches to vocal knee-bends: OHO, OHO; AHA, AHA; ZZZZHH, ZZZZHH ; UMPAH, UMPAH; OOOOH, OOOOH. The personage in whose honor the morning rites are performed is abrupt, autocratic, rumpled Professor Paul Baker, 47, head of Baylor University's department of dramatics. In the judgment of Actor Charles Laughton, an old friend, Baker is "crude, arrogant, irritating, nuts and a genius...