Word: stuttgart
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Near Perfection. The failure, though disappointing, will hardly dampen the Stuttgart's tour. Ever since Cranko, now 43, took over the company ten years ago, he has been building a formidable repertory of splendid, full-length dramatic works. Romeo and Juliet was his first success, done to the traditional Prokofiev score. Typically, Cranko stripped the story of many a nonessential, involved the whole town of Verona in the clash of families, including a market-square fight with tossed oranges. He skipped the implausible intricacies of Romeo's exile and Friar Laurence's muddleheaded planning and then...
...Cragun (as Kate and Petruchio). Shakespeare's antic frolic, set to a score composed of snatches of Scarlatti music, subtly explores a remarkable range of domestic feeling from dominance to submission and finally to partnership. For Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the fourth full-length storybook ballet that Stuttgart is offering U.S. audiences, Cranko discards the whole Tchaikovsky opera score in favor of a graceful montage that helps make the ballet a romantic matinee idyll...
Hardly anybody had ever heard of the Stuttgart Ballet-a small dance com pany paid for out of public funds to supply divertissements occasionally interspersed in operas-until the Württem-berg State Theater director, Walter Erich Schäfer, had the insight to hire John Cranko and give him his head in 1961. Cranko started by firing half the dispirited little company he inherited, then went shopping all over the world for incipient talent to train. He also began establishing procedures which are, in the customarily authoritarian world of classical ballet, curiously family-like and informal. Deliberately, Cranko...
Celebrated Creation. In some ways the men he has assembled are Stuttgart's strongest asset. Richard Cragun, born in Sacramento, Calif., and trained in Canada, Britain and Denmark, has vast reserves of power, grace and masculinity that make him one of the best dramatic male dancers anywhere. Egon Madsen, a youthful Dane with a baby face, skillfully alternates with Cragun in many dramatic roles: when Cragun is Romeo, Madsen is Mercutio and vice versa. Backing them both up in the rotational order is a German dancer, Heinz Clauss, whose black-clad Eugene Onegin seems as subtly menacing...
Cranko's most celebrated creation, however, is a dancer, not a dance. Marcia Haydée, 5 ft. 3 in., in her pre-Stuttgart days-at London's Royal Ballet School and later as a disconsolate member of the Marquis de Cuevas Ballet -weighed 138 pounds and was known as "the fat Brazilian." Today, at 100 pounds, she has an angular, spindly body that, in repose, sometimes suggests a Mary Poppins more than a Carmen or a Kate. But in motion she ranks among the world's top ballerinas. She is also, certainly, one of the world...