Mel Johnson

I think that's what happened. It was just floating around, attached to a score of Gorsky's 1912 staging of Corsair in rehearsal form. I don't know if it were hurryup arranged by Bogatyrev or somebody for the Bourmeister staging, but I've seen photos of the debut of that production and there is definitely an Act III pas de deux for Siegfried and Odile. The Maryinsky Archives have been historically overworked and understaffed, not to mention underpaid, but to their credit, they don't throw things out! At least since about 1990, they've really caught up on the rest of the archival world, and things are easier to find than ever before.

But I don't think it was published with the score. I looked it up, and it was discovered as a repetiteur in '53, but a recording didn't happen until '59 or '60 by Yuri Faier and the Bolshoi orchestra.

The version dates from ca. 1953, so who knows how much it got "improved" between then and now, but that sounds like a logical choice. Anyway, wasn't it only 1957-60 that the TPDD music was rediscovered?

Given the factors of fast motion, bright lighting, and auditoriums of the "big barn" variety, ballet makeup even for juveniles has to be pretty ornate, and products change over the years, so all sorts of innovation creep in. Modern mascara is much gooier than the old variety, which was pretty much antimony and water, so the modern stuff serves to keep the false eyelashes in place much better than the old. For a good example of old-fashioned makeup, just look at publicity stills for stage plays from around 1910 (Otis Skinner's come to mind, and even movie makeups for George Arliss, which makeups were done mostly with greasepaint. They look almost like clown makeups. (Arliss kept playing juveniles into his seventies)

The Bourmeister production originally set on the ballet company of the Maly Opera uses the whole thing in order according to the 1877 score.

Now, Ballet Talk for Dancers may be all right, but any transient readers should be warned: The Gossip Rule is even stricter there, and the most inside information you're likely to get is the 14-year-old from Peoria who's having trouble with bourrées. Now that's REALLY TMI! The site is really for students and their significant mothers and others really close to them (who can send them to Summer Intensives and such).

Such a course as I envision wouldn't be limited to the Table encounters themselves, at either the "Board meetings" or the various "Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club" poker sessions. The Board seemed somewhat like Gottschalk's view of time: variable by location and circumstance. The Circle lasted from 1919 to 1932, but the members had achieved before and after that time. Required reading/viewing would include The Front Page, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and other works of the membership, including Mrs. Parker's friendship with people like W.E.B. Dubois, whom she clearly did not understand. The Circle did not merely attempt to set tastes, Samuel Johnson-like, but also reflected them, sometimes at an unfortunate level of common denominators. A consideration of their collective careers could make a helluva course, probably interdisciplinary. The format would, of course, be a symposium.

I don't know that Parker alone would constitute enough material for an entire course, but "The Algonquin Wits and Modernism" certainly would make a semester pass quickly. You could be sure that all the students would read the course material, especially with Edna Ferber there! Noël Coward: (to Ferber, wearing a "man-tailored" suit) Why Edna, you look almost like a man. Ferber: Why thank you, Noël, so do you.

If you want a genealogy of the Dolin choreography of "Pas de Quatre", it's based on the Keith Lester staging, which in its turn was based on the news reports of the time (1845) on the original choreography. The last person who could have known for sure what the Perrot choreography really was, Lucile Grahn, died in 1909, and Lester's staging didn't come out until the 1930s.

At 149 posts and counting, does anybody else believe that we've squeezed all the blood we're likely to get out of this turnip?

In order to join Actor's Equity, an actor has to put in Apprentice time somewhere, and clubs don't count. It has to be an Equity house. That's one thing that Goodspeed Opera has been doing well for a long time. Of course, there's always the open audition route, but they don't often, historically too, happen.

For persons of Italian heritage, "toi, toi, toi" (pronounced toy toy toy) is a version of saying "ptui, ptui, ptui" (spitting over the left shoulder) at the slightest hint of a good luck wish.

We tend to wish one another "MERDE!" When Ordinary Mortals wish us "break a leg" we smile, hoping further to deceive the theater gremlins.

I have never heard the latter expression, but "MERDE!" is a common good-luck charm among dancers. "Break a leg" is, after all, a rather crude wish, even for dancers - it's more popular among actors - but the even cruder "sh*t" works just fine on the theater gremlins who take a good wish and, being gremlins, turn it to evil. "MERDE!" carries with it the secondary wish "You go to hell!", just as it does in English.

You would be AMAZED at what managements of all sorts of businesses can consider "confidential internal information".

OK, we checked you out over there, and you should be good to go. No restrictions on posting. You should make sure which board you're posting to. If you're registered on one, you're not automatically registered on the other. I'll bump your Acosta post up to help you test.

Hmmm. Well, that's whack! I don't know what could be causing it. I'll check around and see if I can't help with that.

Whatever else, if a company were to debut today with a repertoire like that to choose from, I daresay it would receive a lot of interest from modern audiences! I'd go!

Hi, Josh. Aren't you already enrolled at Ballet Talk for Dancers as Dasa? If so, that's cool, and if you want to make posts similar to a blog entry there, that's also cool. Your Acosta post there was entirely appropriate and in the correct forum. Based on only the two posts of yours I've read, you're an articulate teen, and certainly worthy of respect and attention.

Many people are surprised to learn that the Royal Ballet School is not chiefly an RAD school. To be sure, they enter many candidates at every level of RAD, and many students from RAD schools are accepted by RBS, but they are not interchangeable entities. RBS has its own independent curriculum and syllabi.

I don't know if I'd call SAB's and POB's policy toward training "secrecy", but both places seem to have a tradition of an unwritten central organizing technical vocabulary (curriculum) with a detailed course content (syllabus) for each level of achievement. Systems like RAD and its immediate ancestor, Cecchetti, have that, but the SAB and POB's educational planning and execution seems to take place face-to-face, day-by-day, and with very little written down. France does have a National Conservatory Standard written down in some detail, which is said to echo the Opéra's methods fairly accurately, but who can say? Vaganova doesn't have any detailed writings by Madame, or much of any other source as a universal standard. Individial authors have published, but we are left to deduce the centrality of Vaganova's teachings pretty much on our own. Principles of Classical Ballet Technique is a pretty slim volume to act as a curriculum. And now in the US, ABT is setting out to establish a single common referent technique for teachers who have worked in what I call "International Eclectic" for the purpose of standardizing and improving the diverse languages of classical ballet for the United States. Good luck, says I, but the "free speech" tradition will prove difficult to buck.

"The Chairman Dances" never made it into the original production of the opera.

The present stage is what I call "traditionally" sprung with pine flooring laid over large hardwood girders and joists. The subfloor is supported by crossbraces toenailed to the supporting beams and is rather like the floors in MY house (built 1939) but of rather stouter stuff. It's not a bad stage, and as a matter of fact, when NYCB moved into Lincoln Center, they compared the stage at the New York State Theater unfavorably to the one at City Center because the former was "too hard". Modern sprung-stage flooring may have superseded the type found in the old places, but when you can find a classic stage, it's usually great!

I hope that they do some work to uncover the quirky painting on the first balcony lobby. Some time ago, the layers and layers of paint that had accreted over the original "Mecca Temple" wall paintings started falling off, and I hoped that management would conserve the early art. Sandscape, palm trees, pyramids, camels...I sometimes found myself humming, "We are the Sons of the De-sert....♫"

"Something familiar, something peculiar,/Something for EVERYONE, a comedy tonight!" "Everybody ought to have a maid,/Everybody ought to have a serving girl,/A loyal and unswerving girl to putter around the house." -A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum