Word: saturnalia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...opening-night audience stared pop-eyed at some choice Saturnalia and orgies, at an Egyptian belly dance and a Greek striptease, at gladiatorial combat in the arena. In his experimental dance technology, Moiseyev brilliantly scrapped most of the cliché-laden movements and figures of Russian classical ballet, while retaining classical techniques of body control. Moreover, Moiseyev did away with the traditional counterpoint between soloist and corps de ballet, made mass dancing the ballet's main feature ("My hero," says Moiseyev, "is the masses...
What keeps The Red Room from becoming a sexual saturnalia is that it traces the contours of the heart as well as the flesh. Colette-like in its rhythms, Author Mallet-Joris' prose moves in sensuous counterpoint between "beauty, cruelty, voluptuousness and suffering, all equally delicious." What is not delicious about Hélène and what finally destroys her relationship with Jean is her feral determination to belong only to herself. Outwardly unmarred but inwardly depraved, she is a female Dorian Gray. But even with an unbeautiful soul, the game of love is scarcely over...
They have always been a problem. Back around 1730 the Corporation tried keeping the date of Commencement secret until a week or two before, and transferring the day to Friday, "so that the rest of the week would not be consumed in Saturnalia." However, as Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison continues, "this was held an intolerable grievance, not only by the public, but by the country clergy, for whom a Friday Commencement gave insufficient time to sober up and get home for the Sabbath...
...invited to come in fancy undress had decided to stay home because of the bad weather. Those that came, despite their Neanderthal getup, behaved as circumspectly and with the same dogged gaiety as any like group in Sacramento or Scarsdale. But to the zealous guardsmen the party was saturnalia run amuck, and so they reported to their commanding officer, who alerted the military at Malaga. But the military could find no law against private gatherings of cave men and their women, and unaware of the commotion they had caused, the party guests went home...
Jean Simmons sings sharp, in a voice that is not much better, but she flings herself into Sarah's saturnalia with a pelvic hullabaloo that should make the public forget about her upper register. Vivian Elaine, the only big name held over from the Broadway cast, is just right as the blonde who celebrates her anniversary (14 years engaged) by catching a cold in her Bronxial tubes; and when she screeches Take Back Your Mink ("to from whence it came"), the evening is made. Frank Sinatra, as Nathan Detroit, not only acts as if he can't tell...