Serious & Sad

It was the most eagerly awaited premiere of the Manhattan ballet season. The three young collaborators, Jerome Robbins (choreography), Leonard Bernstein (music), Oliver Smith (sets) had teamed together twice before. Their good-natured, casual Fancy Free, was still, after two and a half years, one of the Ballet Theatre's best attractions. Then they joined hands in a musical comedy, On the Town, and it became a Broadway hit.

Last week Ballet Theatre put on the trio's latest, Facsimile. The scene was described simply as "a lonely place"; the cast as "three insecure people" and "some integrated people." Choreographer Robbins described Facsimile as "serious and sad." It involved a lonely girl in a bathing suit (shapely Ballerina Nora Kaye) and two young men who come along and make love to her, quarrel over her and then leave her. The set was a sparse Daliesque landscape.

To a frantic score by Lenny Bernstein, the three "insecure people" (the integrated ones never appeared) rolled on the floor, kissed indiscriminately, tussled. Then the two men tossed Nora Kaye back & forth like a shuttlecock until she fell sobbing on the floor (on opening night, she went down so hard that many seat-holders thought she had sprained her ankle). At this point, Ballerina Kaye cried out "Stop!"

One unkind Manhattan ballet critic felt that she had said everything that needed saying.

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