The Devil's Due

The girls from Miss McClellan's and Miss Williams' finishing school once saw Billy Sunday do his stuff at a revival meeting. Like the others, Ruth Page came away humming Brighten the Corner Where You Are. Last week Choreographer Page brightened a corner of Broadway with what she remembered of that meeting.

At Manhattan's City Center, balletomanes found her new "dance sermon" Billy Sunday (or Giving the Devil His Due) good, saucy fun, if not always good ballet. Ballet Russe's stars Frederic Franklin and Alexandra Danilova not only danced, but spoke--and to everyone's surprise, spoke well.

Billy Sunday had made the choreography easy: he used to act out most of the parables in his sermons himself. Ruth Page had lifted three of her four episodes from Billy's own love stories from the Bible (Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar), updated them to Billy's own times, the 19205. As a blowsy Mrs. Potiphar, Ballerina Danilova brought the house down.

Critics found the music (by Remi Gassman) weak and stumbling, but Billy was the brightest thing the dilapidated Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo has done this season. Three Manhattan churchmen also had a word to say about it: they found Billy Sunday sinful. To 38-year-old Choreographer Page, who once toured with Pavlova, the charge was nothing new: her lusty Frankie and Johnny had to be tidied up by New York censors, is still banned in Boston. Says she: "The Bible is filled with sex, especially the Old Testament. And anyway, you can't be very sexy on your toes."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.