Music: Ballet Theatre

This season Manhattan has seen more spins, leaps, foot-twiddles than it ever had before: 14 weeks of Russian ballet. Last week the Russians (two troupes managed by Impresario Sol Hurok) were on tour. In a smallish theatre a plushy audience (which included Mr. Hurok) beheld a ballet company which seemed as corny as they come. The coryphees were wildly out of step with one another and with the music. The men wore tights, jackets and bow ties which looked like three-a-day vaudeville. The prima ballerinas, apparently a haughty Italian, a frizzy-headed Frenchwoman, an intense Russian, wobbled in their pirouettes, fought for the spotlight, mugged and ogled. It was like an off night, and a dreadful one, in the Russian ballet. The audience roared. It was meant to. The ballet was Gala Performance (choreography by Antony Tudor), a new act presented by the young, immensely talented Ballet Theatre.

The Ballet Theatre made its grand jete (soaring leap), into Manhattan a year ago. Last week it began its second Manhattan season, none too well-heeled, but hopeful of an extended engagement at the Majestic Theatre. Besides Gala Performance, it had some other new ballets: Three Virgins and a Devil (by Agnes de Mille), a Daliesque-Italian-primitive trifle in which a monkey-like Satan deftly garners three damsels; an enlarged version of Billy the Kid (by Eugene Loring, with music by Aaron Copland), a rich, loamy piece of Americana; Pas de Quatre (Anton Dolin), reconstructing the performance which the four greatest 19th Century ballerinas gave before Queen Victoria.

The Ballet Theatre is not quite a U. S. grass-roots enterprise. But neither is it hog-tied to the St. Petersburg-Paris-Monte Carlo tradition, as Mr. Hurok’s ballets are. Founded by scholarly Princetonian Richard Pleasant, secretary of the old Mordkin Ballet, the Ballet Theatre has had many backers including Dancer Lucia Chase, widow of President Thomas Ewing Jr. of big Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Co. Among the ballerinas, best are Philadelphia-born Karen Konrad and beauteous 22-year-old Texan Nana Gollner.

The Ballet Theatre works in a West 53rd Street mansion which once belonged to Financier George Blumenthal. When the troupe first moved in, a red, yellow and purple flag labeled BALLET THEATRE hung from the house. It lasted only 20 minutes. Police, dispatched by St. Thomas Church on the corner, ordered the banner hauled down because it jutted too far over the sidewalk.