Word: ballet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...President Nathan Pusey turned up, sedate in white tie and tails. Of the 60 guests, 40 were in 18th century costume, and their names made a roll call of Boston's social top drawer. Occasion: a performance of selections from French Composer Jean-Philippe Rameau's comic ballet Platée (1745), with French Tenor Michel Sénéchal in his U.S. debut. Place: the 60-seat, century-old Varieties Theater in the Brookline mansion of Boston Socialite Mrs. George Shattuck, one of the few surviving private stages...
Take Me Along could do with more dancing, but a gay Aubrey Beardsley ballet, a sort of absinthe-coated peppermint stick, wickedly whirls all Actor Morse's callow, adolescent sex fantasies-Salome and George Sand, Lysistrata and Camille -into one. As the show proceeds, certain scenes are repeated, certain songs are reprised. But from the outset, Take Me Along puts its trust in mood rather than momentum. Rather than shattering the funny bone, ravishing the ear or dazzling the eye, it just leaves a nice taste in the mouth...
...especially the glittering pair for the Contessa, worn with stunning stylishness by Lisa Della Casa, have a grand line that is perfectly suited to both the Opera House stage and the spirit of Figaro. Against the predominantly gray background of the settings, the pastel dresses of the chorus and ballet and the vibrant yellows and reds of the principals' costumes produce wonderful, eye-filling tableaux...
...Festival, however, was not a series of rallies--only the four were staged in ten days. The total impression of the Festival was diffuse, ranging over the entire breadth of Vienna, and, for the average impressionable delegate, an orgy of cultural events dominated by the Russians (e.g. the Leningrad Ballet) and the Communist Chinese (e.g. the Peking Circus). Dozens of such events were running each day in all available auditoriums in Vienna, and in the evenings Eastern and African folk performers appeared in neighborhood parks across Vienna...
...characters like houses; they have the lived-in look. As early as Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's writing was rich in fringe benefits. There is his animistic imagery: a stopped clock face wears "the waxed moustache of ten minutes to two," the first spring zephyrs are "cold-limbed ballet-girls waiting in the wings." There is the unflinching refusal to sacrifice art to the urgencies of politics: "Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936-it was always year 1." There is the verbal clowning, e.g., "optimystics," "sexaphone." Wit and humor often sugar-coat horror in Nabokov...