Murder at the Met

Agnes de Mille had made a flying leap from ballet to Broadway--and Broadway had cheered her dances in Oklahoma!, Carousel and Brigadoon. But could she as gracefully jump back? Last week, in the Metropolitan Opera House, a Ballet Theatre audience was cheering her Rail River Legend, too. The critics joined in.

It was Choreographer De Mille's first all-out try at murder. She had long been fascinated by the story of Lizzie Borden, the Fall River (Mass.) spinster who was tried in the '90s for the ax murder of her father and stepmother. Last year ("because I was feeling gloomy and murderous") she started building a ballet to show in Freudian terms how a young girl might get worked up to murder. One difference: her heroine commits the murders onstage and hangs; Lizzie Borden was acquitted.*

In style and feeling, Fall River Legend reminded some balletomanes of Antony Tudor's somber Pillar of Fire. But it had plenty of De Mille trademarks too: miming, scurrying, fast-paced freshness.

Star of the evening was Cuban Ballerina Alicia Alonso, who only five years ago had to quit dancing because she was going blind (operated on three times, she lay flat on her back with eyes bandaged for a year, finally regained her sight). Alicia, the best of the younger classical dancers, had seldom done modern dance before. But, right after dancing the queen in Swan Lake, she returned to the stage as Lizzie, to sub for ailing Nora Kaye. Alicia, as much as Agnes, made Fall River Legend an opening-night success.

* The death of the last surviving witness in the trial was reported last week. Maid Bridget Sullivan, who died in Butte, testified that when she came upon Miss Lizzie shortly after the murders, her hair was in order and there were no bloodstains on her dress. That testimony helped clear Lizzie Borden--even though gossip about her never died, living on in a well-known jingle:

Lizzie Borden took an ax

And gave her Mother forty whacks;

And when she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

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