Music: Balletomania

Last week the Russian Ballet’s shrewd, chunky Sol Hurok clasped his hands over his ample paunch and sighed with content. His Ballet Theatre had just opened Manhattan’s annual ballet season at the Metropolitan Opera House. His Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was to join it a week later at the same stand. While balletomanes roared approval in accents as thick as borsch, more staid Manhattanites took stock of the first of five brand-new ballet productions, mooned nostalgically over such puff-skirted favorites as Swan Lake and Sylphides, such latter-day spectacles as Petrouchka and Bluebeard.

Two new ballets by Choreographer Massine (lured from the Ballet Russe to do the job) provided the first week’s novelties. Both left connoisseurs somewhat frigid. The first, Aleko, a hodgepodge of good-natured Slavic confusion, told the story of a youth who died of unrequited love for a gypsy. The second, and more elaborate, was Don Domingo, a Mexican extravaganza. Three months ago Choreographer Massine in a burst of good-neighborliness gave Don Domingo to the Mexican public. The Mexican public promptly tossed it back to Choreographer Massine amid loud critical catcalls. The Manhattan critics did the same. Don Domingo proved chiefly that the Ballet Russe’s Massine is rapidly losing ground to the Ballet Theatre’s deft dancemaker, British-born Antony Tudor, in a Fifth Avenue shop window.

Though less star-studded than the Ballet Russe of the glittering ’30s, the Ballet Theatre’s 1942-43 roster contains three first-magnitude dancers: curvesome, Russian-born Irina Baronova; lithe, British-born Alicia Markova (real name Alice Marks); British-born Anton Dolin (real name Patrick Healey-Kay).

By week’s end the Ballet Theatre was doing the biggest business in its recent history and losing money hand over fist. Of its $30,000-a-week budget, only a fraction was coming in at the box office. The rest was coming from the company’s dance-daft angel, Lucia Chase, widow of Yonkers’ carpet tycoon, Thomas Ewing Jr. Unlike most ballet patrons, Angel Chase is a professional ballerina, dances bit solo roles, solemnly draws a $75 weekly paycheck while regularly losing an estimated $150,000 a year making up the Ballet Theatre’s deficit. A trouper who once used to pirouette with famed Dancer Mikhail Mordkin, Ballerina Chase spends her winters touring with the company, has a summer home at Narragansett, occasionally throws quiet parties for her dancer colleagues. Otherwise she works her shapely legs off rehearsing, washes her own tights, spends her time on the sidelines cheering on the other members of the troupe. To Ballet Boss Hurok, who has managed everything from a peddler’s pushcart to Isadora Duncan, Angel Chase is the answer to an impresario’s dream—art’s ardent athlete, a check’s most beautiful signature. Says Sol of their joint enterprise: “The Ballet Theatre combines financial respectability with artistical principle.”