Comeback in Manhattan

In the ballet business, as anywhere else, nothing succeeds like success--and Manhattan's Ballet Theatre has learned it the hard way. It was bad enough when Ballet Theatre's financial backing ran low in 1948 and the group had to suspend for a season. Its morale suffered other blows when such dancers as Nora Kaye and Melissa Hayden switched to George Balanchine's rival New York City Ballet. Last week, nonetheless, Ballet Theatre was forgetting hard times and making a strong Manhattan comeback.

It had solved the star problem by coaxing ageless Ballerina Alicia Markova (born Alice Marks) back into the fold to be guest star. It also commissioned Broadway-famed Choreographer Agnes de Mille to do a new number, Harvest According, and got its own ballet master, Edward Caton, to whip up another, Triptych. It was again scheduling an "American Composers Night," when Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Morton Gould and Virgil Thomson would conduct their own ballets.

Biggest news was Markova's return after six years away from the company and three away from Manhattan. Her best role is in a masterly old bit of nonsense, Giselle, which she still dances better than anybody else. She floats about the stage as a peasant girl in love with a disguised nobleman, goes mad convincingly, and rises from the dead with incredible grace. Perhaps her leaps are not very high any more, and she spends little time on the tips of her toes, but every motion is polished and her feet are almost as expressive as hands. When she takes her curtain calls, the audience sounds like a rooting section.

Agnes de Mille's new ballet takes off from the Walt Whitman line: "Life, life is the tillage/And death is the harvest according." Choreographer de Mille works out her ideas in three scenes, "Birth," "Games" and "The Harvest," the last in a Civil War setting. The ballet critics were giving it mixed notices ("A great new ballet," said the Herald Tribune. "Just run of de Mille," cracked the Daily News). But audiences seemed to like its romping "Games" scene and its suddenly gripping finale, where the heroine finds herself mateless and alone in a crowd of reunited soldiers and wives.

Moreover, the audiences were trooping in well for all performances; company regulars such as Alicia Alonso, Mary Ellen Moylan, Igor Youskevitch, John Kriza were drawing just as well as Markova. Midway in its three-week season, Ballet Theatre breathed easier, estimated that it would take in $150,000 (last year, $97,000), for its best season yet.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.