Music: Wow Americana

Ballet Theatre’s* first jaunt abroad in four years was beginning to look like a triumphal tour.

In Germany last month, an audience largely of G.I.s in the Rhein-Main Air Base gymnasium cheered every number to the rafters. Berlin audiences, seeing their first American ballet since the war, bravoed Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free (although the critics chewed their whiskers, muttered about “acrobatic distortion”). At the Edinburgh Festival a fortnight ago, it seemed to Directress Lucia Chase (TIME, May 8) that “everybody liked everything”; Edinburgh’s Lord Provost sent an enthusiastic thank you to Harry Truman, who had given his blessing to the tour. Last week, after a Ballet Theatre opener at Covent Garden, the London Daily Mail solemnly observed that the U.S.’s No. 1 ballet company was “what is popularly known as a wow.”

British balletomanes cheered once more for Fancy Free, Pillar of Fire and other modern numbers that Ballet Theatre had presented on its previous visit four years ago. They also found something new to rave about in Agnes de Mille’s carefully repolished Rodeo (music by Aaron Copland). An elegant first-night audience got so far into the roughriding spirit of the thing that they obeyed the program notes, beat their hands in time to the “Running Square Dance” sequence.

The Daily Express found Choreographer (Oklahoma!, Carousel) de Mille’s eight-year-old Rodeo “a shorter Oklahoma! without singing.” Said the Times: “This treats a typically American subject in a way that, by its wholeheartedness, its unembarrassed and unembarrassing vulgarity . . . synthesizes, and yet still adds to the essence of American culture . . .”

Said Lucia Chase, “We realize this is what they want from us, but sometimes we wish they would let us do a little more classical ballet just to show what we can do.” There would be plenty of chance elsewhere: Ballet Theatre still has Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Rome, Milan, Venice, Alexandria and Cairo on its calling list.

*The name by which it has been known for ten years. Its long-legged new name, adopted on the eve of its foreign tour: the American National Ballet Theatre.