New Wings for Firebird

Manhattan's bustling little City Opera Co. (TIME, Nov. 3, 1947 et seq.) proved it knew how to give the classics a new shine. Last week it was the turn of City Opera's bright young sister outfit, the City Ballet Co., to show it could do the same with the dance.

At the roomy, rococo City Center theater (converted from an old Shrine auditorium), the curtain went up on Marc Chagall's Firebird sets, and the audience gasped with pleasure. The brilliant red-and-blue sets, commissioned four years ago by Impresario Sol Hurok for Ballet Theatre, had been picked up by low-budget City Center at cut-rate. But the sets, gay though they were, were the oldest feathers on the new Firebird.

Diagonal Demons. From the pit, Igor Stravinsky's 40-year-old score blazed as never before: Stravinsky himself had cut down the instrumentation from the original no pieces to 55, given the score new warmth, color and compactness. Choreographer George Balanchine had scrapped Fokine's original Russian-folk-dancy choreography completely, put his more Oriental Bird and Prince on more acrobatic tiptoe.

The flashing first-scene duet of tall, part-Osage Indian Ballerina Maria Tallchief (the fourth Mrs. Balanchine*) as the Firebird and Francisco Moncion as the Prince brought a touchdown roar from the audience. In the second scene, Balanchine managed to move the evil Kostchei and his 40 demons back & forth diagonally in four groups, so that City Center's scant (40-ft.) stage always seemed full of excitement but never cluttered. Throughout, it was the most stunning ballet production Manhattan balletomanes had seen in many a moon. With the final curtain, the audience set up the kind of clamor that let Choreographer Balanchine, Conductor Leon Barzin and the whole cast know it.

Spread Out. The City Ballet Co., which started out three years ago as Lincoln Kirstein's subscription-based Ballet Society, last year became the third active unit in Manhattan's burgeoning City Center of Music and Drama. Organized on a share-the-budget basis with the opera and City Theater, Balanchine's dancers managed only ten ballets in their first season. But City Center fans and balletomanes spooned those up like crepes suzette.

To Manhattan Tax Lawyer Morton Baum, chairman of City Center's executive committee (and a director of the Metropolitan Opera as well), the enthusiasm seemed to justify a little spreading out. This season Balanchine was able to add to his repertory four ballets, including Firebird and a smashing new Bouree Fantasque premiered later in the week.

"Real American." Now that he has a permanent home in which he can polish old works and plan new ones, Russian-born Choreographer Balanchine, a U.S. citizen for ten years, hopes he is on the road to a permanent American ballet company, something like Britain's national ballet, the Sadler's Wells (TIME, Oct. 17). One step in the direction of making it a "real American" ballet was the addition to the staff this season of bright, witty, U.S.-born Choreographer Jerome (Fancy Free) Robbins.

With more ballets, Balanchine figures he can extend his season beyond its skimpy three weeks each fall and spring, keep his already devoted dancers eating a few more square meals a year. That too would be all right with Budgeteer Baum. He believes that City Center, which now operates 30 weeks a year (14 weeks of opera, eight of theater, six of ballet, two of modern dance), should operate a minimum of 40 weeks. And, says he, "I'll take 52 weeks straight if I can get them."

*Dancer Vera Zorina divorced him in 1946.

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