dirac

A nice appreciation in the Times.

Budd Schulberg, novelist, screenwriter (and HUAC songbird, alas) has died at age ninety-five.

Sondheim must have been pea green with envy. (And you're right, Alexandra, I suppose I was picking nits a bit.)

Ivypink, the music for Chaconne is the ballet music Gluck composed for his opera Orfeo ed Euridice (not the first version produced in Vienna, but the version known as the “Paris” version; they liked their ballet in Paris). It is possible to find the ballet music on some of the opera recordings self-described as the Paris version, but not all. You have to read the box or the product description very carefully. I don't have a lot of time right now but others may have more details. I have two different LPs with the ballet music standing alone. One was conducted by Pierre Monteux, the other one I can’t remember. I prefer the second one, so I’ll try to dig it up. I’ve never found the ballet music alone on CD and if it’s available I’d be interested to know about it. Welcome to the board.

Yes, that was Holly Howard. She was never interviewed, as far as I know. Too bad. Balanchine seems to have been absolutely mad about Zorina. She was special, I think. I loved the pictures in Tallchief's book of the two of them on holiday in Oklahoma. Balanchine must have felt he was really seeing America!

Currently dipping into Hunting Eichmann, two biographies of Roger Casement, and The Real Nureyev.

Respectfully, Alexandra, I don't think it's a quibble at all - it's true that the shows Simon mentions resemble rock concerts in certain aspects but musical theater and concert performances are still distinct. There is a difference between an actor appearing in the audience, or coming through the audience, as part of a show and a pop musician doing something similar. We can agree to disagree on that. But my central point was that an actor making such an entrance is not necessarily inviting a mobbing.

It was an actor, not a pop star, who made his entrance through the auditorium in this instance. He was one of the stars of ‘Dirty Dancing’ and he may well have been directed to do so in order to make his appearance more sensational, or it could be in the book as written for the stage. I've seen performers make such entrances and it's not necessarily an invitation to be mobbed. (Had The Beatles tried such a stunt, however stodgy the venue or audience, during those years, they might have put themselves in physical danger. )

And with cell phones it's much easier to do now. People seem to assume they have a sort of right to do it.

Absolutely - but one of the things a good autobiography can do is allow the writer to look back and reflect on past events, which there wasn't necessarily time or freedom to do while they were happening.

Kent is a special case – she always kept some distance from Balanchine ‘that way’ and it was not for lack of interest on his part. We do know that Balanchine had a number of affairs apart from the marriages and more well known muses. I'm sure that Balanchine was devoted heart and soul to each lady in turn, but if these had been only 'affairs of the heart' then it wouldn't have been necessary to bring such fierce pressure to bear upon the young Suzanne Farrell. From what Tallchief did describe of their marital life, I thought that was actually a not so veiled hint that there wasn’t much excitement in the bedroom. Yes, a candid (auto) biography is not necessarily a mean-spirited or salacious one. Yes, definitely. There does seem to have been a kind of friendly competition between Mary Ellen Moylan and Tallchief, for example, which Tallchief “won," and Moylan's departure from the company seems to have been related to this. It would be interesting to hear more about that and how Balanchine dealt with personalities and problems.

Off topic - I can understand not liking ‘Movin’ Out’ – wasn’t crazy for it myself - but I don’t think Tharp intended creating a show of the kind Simon is describing, although it contains some of the same elements of such shows.

I guess it would depend on what is meant by ‘this kind of behavior' and which kind of 'theater.' Mashinka’s original post brought up the issue of whether the behavior of audiences in the U.K. has undergone a sea change for the worse recently, and we can certainly expand the range of the query to this side of the water. Misbehaving children are in a different league from gentlemen pleasuring each other and peeing in inappropriate locations, though. I can't say that I've seen any change for the worse in manners apart from issues already explored elsewhere on BT - cell phones, etc. And people do insist on bringing their young children almost everywhere these days, I have noticed.

Farrell danced the role in the sixties, when Adams was phasing herself out of the company - she assumed many of Adams' old roles. Von Aroldingen took over the role in Liebeslieder when Farrell left, and Balanchine didn't revive it when Farrell returned to the company in the seventies.

Yes, your friend's sense of ballet history seems a bit off, cubanmiamiboy, as Tallchief was indeed the first American to become an international ballet star! Surely any dancer would want to talk in detail about roles made on her, as her intimate knowledge of those roles would go beyond anyone else's. Nothing wrong with that. The missing links are Le Clercq and Adams, both of whom worked with him, along with Tallchief, at a time when he could be said to have been in his prime. It is interesting that none of Balanchine's wives and lovers ever wrote anything even resembling a tell-all, although Tallchief does hint at a few things if you read between the (vast) spaces in the lines of her story.

I smell a sequel to The Poseidon Adventure. And I do mean smell.

I wouldn't want them taken away in cuffs for a first offense, but behavior like that does cross the line and should be objected to. If you were routinely subjected to the sound and spectacle of couples feeling each other up during performances you might feel less mellow about it. No, such behavior is certainly not limited to London. Never seen it at the ballet, though.

Excellent point and quite right, but my reference to the gallery gods was intended not so much in relation to the texters and the drunks but to theater etiquette in general – that is to say, it wasn’t always the custom for everyone to sit down and shut up at the theater or opera – the house lights did not go down and there was no sacral hush, for the ‘upper’ orders as well as the lower. The obstreperousness of the gods is related to their involvement in the performance, but they are also vocal because at that time and in that place it was okay to be. No matter how young and engagé you are, you can’t behave as they did at the theater today unless the circumstances are special ones. Not that it would be desirable for them to do so, and of course, the theater is no longer the popular art it was.

vipa wrote: Fog of War is a fascinating film, although I couldn’t decide if Errol Morris was going too easy on McNamara or just giving the old sharpie enough rope to hang himself with. The Thin Blue Line is remarkable, too. Terry Zwigoff’s film about Robert Crumb is one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen – truly revealing. Robert Flaherty’s techniques wouldn’t be acceptable in documentary filmmaking today, but Nanook of the North and Man of Aran are beautiful pictures. PeggyR wrote: I saw that. Reminded me a bit of chess club. Thanks for posting, all. Any others?

Thanks, miliosr. That article sounds beyond depressing. Ryan O’Neal was an appealing young actor back in the day and he turned into a middle aged lunk hitting on his own daughter. “Bon vivant,” my foot. Get a load of Farrah’s curlers in slide 2.

It’s like many of those Sacha Baron Cohen routines, which play off the determination of everyone else in the room to be as polite and impervious to outrage as possible. I’m surprised Baron Cohen hasn’t thought of it. And audiences used to be even rowdier. Think of the "gods" in the gallery in Les Enfants du Paradis.

Going off topic to note that no forgiveness is needed, leonid. The peasant class was the peasant class, after all.

Surely no one said otherwise, leonid – the central point was not that tall people did not exist prior to the mid-twentieth century, but that with changes in nutrition and other environmental factors people in the aggregate are becoming taller and norms in height – what people consider to be “tall” – are changing. Nor was I disputing that the height of the dancer doesn’t make a difference in the rendering of the choreography, which is a factor in contemporary dance as well – recall Suzanne Farrell’s remarks about the adjustments she and Peter Martins had to make when performing “Other Dances,” roles made on two much smaller dancers, Makarova and Baryshnikov. Well, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, apologies for the hoary cliche. Emploi is at the heart of the art form. Some very great dancers can transcend the categories (although not always), but the categories are there for good reason. Thanks for making those useful points regarding opera, richard53dog.

These are my choices? Maybe it is getting bad out there.

I think canbelto makes a good point. As observed earlier in the thread, people are getting taller over the decades (and centuries) and it's simply not possible or even desirable for companies to conform to such rigid standards. And although it may well distort the choreography as you say, leonid, it seems to that's inevitable to some extent - over the years bodies change, styles in attractiveness and physicality change, training changes. It's absolutely true that Pavlova was considered tall (and skinny) back in the day, but that only serves to highlight that things are very different today.