American Ballet

European ballet is an immigrant whose Americanization is almost complete. Greeted with polite tolerance when it first came to the U.S. 29 years ago, ballet has now become so popular that no one is safe from such cult-lingo as cabrioles, entrechats and jetes. Not only is ballet the major business of three big companies--Ballet Theatre, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, International Ballet--and half-a-hundred local groups, but it has invaded Hollywood and Broadway.

Last week the Ballet Russe, after its biggest touring season (80 cities in the U.S. and Canada) was in the midst of a five-week Manhattan engagement. It was performing ballets in Diaghilev's best classical tradition. But the big novelty in Manhattan was a rowdy, corn-likkered, genuinely U.S. ballet: Frankie and Johnnie, an adaptation of a well-known U.S. folk ballad.*

Chicago, which saw some 50 performances of Frankie and Johnnie as a WPA Federal Theater project, had pronounced it a "wow" and as "native as a ballgame." Eastern balletomanes, seeing it for the first time last week, plunged into heated controversy about the strutting, nonclassical acrobatics and gun-toting melodrama. Critics couldn't agree on whether it was "good, lusty folklore" or merely a "dirty show."

Authors and star performers of the Midwest's little assault on ballet's classic tradition: raven-haired, energetic Ruth Page, high priestess of the dance in Chicago; and Technical Sergeant Bentley Stone, 34, a lanky South Dakotan who got a seven-day furlough from his Air Forces base in Kansas to dance "Johnnie." The Page-Stone team has authored two other U.S. ballets: Hear Ye! Hear Ye! (a nightclub murder) and Gold Standard (a sugar-daddy romance).

Now the property of the Ballet Russe, Frankie and Johnnie is scheduled for twelve Manhattan performances arid a subsequent road tour. Because, in its own vernacular, "it ain't got no moral," Frankie and Johnnie landed in the East at just the right moment to add fresh fuel to Manhattan's roaring theatrical censorship squabble (see THEATER). After the opening performance, censors tidied it up.

*Expert Carl Sandburg has uncovered no versions of Frankie's pith-&-vinegar saga, some with as many as 30 stanzas.

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