Originality and liveliness are the keynotes of the Ballet Theatre, the weapons with which producers Lucia Chase and Oliver Smith hope to fight the two other major companies operating in 1946. As far as can be told from its brief Boston stand, the group has lost none of the freshness which has made it distinctive since its birth eight years ago.
The company will need every esthetic and material resource at hand to last through the fight to the finish now being waged. When the Ballet Theatre finally broke from impresario Sol Hurok last spring, it found itself for the first time happily without that gentleman's strong hand at its throat, but it also found itself without the financial organization which Hurok has built up through the country. The results have become apparent already, and they seem to be serious. In its first two stops of the 1946-47 season, New York and Boston, the Ballet Theatre has arrived in town just after Hurok's boys, a hodge-podge bunch he calls The Original Ballet Russe.
As audiences this week in the Opera House have shown, it is as much convenience as artistic value that makes people go to the ballet. When one company merely follows the other around from place to place, much of the ballet interest will have been used up by the first group before the second ever arrives. It is very probably this skimming off of much of Boston's dance money that is the cause for the incredibly small audiences seen in the Opera House since Monday. It is a sad fact, but an obvious one which Miss Chase and Mr. Smith ought to absorb, that no city in the United States except New York is likely to support two ballet companies running within hailing distance of one another.
According to the publicity stream, the Chase-Smith company is emphasizing Theatre in its productions this year. There is no doubt that the settings and other theatrical aspects of its productions are excellent, but the overwhelming assets of the Ballet Theatre still lie in its repertoire and subordinate dancers. No one can approach a list of productions including Pillar of Fire, Fair at Sorochinsk, Fancy Free, Interplay, the new Facsimile, and a wide range of more familiar numbers. Ballets like Fancy Free have retained surprisingly well the fresh impact that made them famous originally, and the Ballet Theatre still treats them with just the right combination of wit and energy.
In addition to its originality of repertoire and excellence of staging, the Ballet Theatre is distinctive for the well-rounded capabilities of its dancers. With no name stars as big as Markova, Dolin, or Danilova, it depends on skillful and hard-working dancers like Nora Kaye, Alicia Alonso, Lucia Chase, Igor Youskevitch, Michael Kidd, and Antony Tudor and a well-trained corps de ballet. The total effect is of a well-knit group instead of a ragged base with a few added lights, such as the Original Ballet Russ and Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo companies illustrate. With improved financial acumen and a few breaks, therefore, the Ballet Theatre should easily outdistance its two chief opponents in the 1946-47 ballet sweepstakes.
Ballet sweepstakes.
