Ballet Russe

Ever since last winter the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo has acted like a French Cabinet in a crisis. Only expert bystanders have been able to puzzle out its complicated tangle of splits, mergers, lawsuits, reorganizations. Last week, as the troupe, now sponsored by Universal Art, Inc., started its U.S. season in Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, balletgoers got their first chance to see the practical results of this confusion and commotion.

Notably absent from the programs was the name of Colonel Wassily de Basil; notably present was the familiar trademark of Concert Manager Sol Hurok. Long-nosed Leonide Massine was still choreographer, still danced with his wonted spirit. But of the Ballet's four familiar prima ballerinas--Tatiana Riabouchinska, Irina Baronova, Alexandra Danilova and Tamara Toumanova--the first two were missing. In their places were two newly acquired slim-limbed bids for U.S. favor: diminutive, British-born Alicia Markova (Alice Marks), and Nini Theilade (pronounced Tay-lah'-de), an exotic, Javanese-born tripper of mixed Danish, Polish, German and Hindu extraction.

Three brand new ballets, all built by Leonide Massine, were shown Manhattan audiences during the first week:

Saint Francis, most ambitious and startling of the three, was a colorful, ingenious mixture of secondhand religious fervor with syrup of ballet: it caused terrific applause. Saint Francis had the advantage of a score by famed self-exiled German "Kulturbolschewist" Paul Hindemith (TIME, March 14), which proved to be not only top-flight Hindemith but the finest contemporary ballet music Manhattanites had heard since the palmiest days of Igor Stravinsky. To its subtly suggestive, drypoint phrases, Saint Francis (Choreographer Massine), in a medieval setting, pursued his ideal of Poverty (paradoxically embodied by demure, eye-filling Ballerina Theilade), tamed a big bad wolf, ardently embraced his very tangible ideal, and ended by miming a fervent hymn of praise to the sun.

In Gaite Parisienne, most ingratiating of the new ballets, the tinseled, Second-Empire melodies of Jacques Offenbach set off a riot of color and horseplay, in which the ubiquitous Massine danced the part of a visiting Peruvian roustabout.

Seventh Symphony, most pretentious of the three, used Beethoven's great opus as an accompaniment for somewhat irrelevant but agreeably spectacular choreographic capers.

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