Word: swanning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Annabeth Gish, who plays Rose. While Gish seems to have much emotion hidden inside her, she never allows any to surface. In real life, this way of acting is fine; on the screen it is boring. Gish seems to be a duckling on the verge of turning into a swan, but she never metamorphoses. Like the movie, she stays a duckling the entire way through...
...Swan Lake that is set indoors. A ballet version of Henry James' Washington Square, featuring, among many other intrusions, cartoon black minstrels and cowboys. Not what one might at first expect from so historic an institution as the Paris Opera Ballet, but both items came along on the troupe's first American appearance since 1948. Expectations for the visit ran very high. The company's school is considered one of the world's best, a preserver of both the French and Italian technique and dance vocabulary. The institution itself has an ineffable aura of glamour, and in three years...
...York run at the Metropolitan Opera House was mostly unsatisfactory, and a good part of the problem lies with Nureyev. The trouble began with his recension of Swan Lake, which was silly and eccentric and, worst of all, skewed to provide a fat role for the aging, painfully stiff company director. This version of the legend is not about the tragic love of the prince and the spellbound queen but about the prince's rebellion against his tutor, who doubles as the sorcerer Rothbart. The famous "black swan" pas de deux in the third act is now a murky...
...name stayed; the enthusiasms wandered. One year she made her society debut: "I thought of myself as an ugly duckling, tall and shy, and for that coming-out party I had turned into a tiny swan." The next year she was in Israel telling her mom, "I want to stay and help." Recalls Elizabeth: "This was at a stage when she wouldn't make her bed. But she had the Sigourney Serious Look -- and when you see it, you act." Now the Wasp princess trades in her deb gown for khaki and operates the potato-peeling machine at the Hill...
...imaginary Rapstone and its inhabitants, larger events are disclosed: sugar rationing after the war, ban- the-bomb marches during the edgy '50s, the rise of swinging London, the Profumo scandal, strikes, strife and the sinking of traditions in a new tide of commercialism. The fate of the Swan's Nest, an old inn in the vicinity of Rapstone, is symptomatic: "In the course of time it would be taken over by a motel chain, re-christened Ye Olde Swan's Nest and given piped music, colour TVs in every bedroom . . . an enlarged car park and the Old Father Thames Carvery...