Actress on Tiptoe

Since the revival of Russian-style ballet in this country 16 years ago, U.S. balletomanes have seldom had to go hungry for classical numbers. But for a broader menu ranging from the serene and classic to the troubled and modern, they have gone more & more over the last ten years to the best U.S. company, Ballet Theatre. Last week, after starving for a season while Director-Dancer Lucia Chase hunted up angels, Manhattan ballet fans packed into the Metropolitan Opera House for an opening-night feast.

After a classical Swan Lake and the sprightly Fancy Free, they got the main course: Agnes de Mille's Fall River Legend, with Nora Kaye, the big-eyed little ballerina who has made Fall River one of Ballet Theatre's signatures as well as one of her own. She spun through the story of the gentle, murderous New England spinster ("Lizzie Borden took an ax . . .") like something out of a Freudian nightmare, and her audience loved it.

Going Places. At 29, little Nora Kaye is the closest thing ballet has to the theater's Tragedienne Judith Anderson. Her father, Gregory Koreff, onetime Moscow Art Theater actor, fascinated her as a child with his living-room characterizations ("in the Stanislavsky tradition") in the family's East Side apartment. But because her mother wanted her to dance, and because she liked dancing better than school, Nora headed for the Metropolitan

Opera Ballet School. By the time she was a nimble 15, Nora was a regular member of the Met's corps de ballet.

At 17, she quit, bored with ballet and convinced that it was "something dragged up from 300 years ago that didn't make any sense and wasn't going any place." She went a few places herself--a few blocks up Broadway to kick up her heels in such musicomedies as Virginia, Great Lady and Stars in Your Eyes. When Ballet Theatre started up in 1939, she tagged along to auditions with her roommate. What Choreographer Antony Tudor was doing was just the thing for Actress-Dancer. Nora Kaye: in his emotion-packed ballets she could combine the best she had learned from her actor-father with the best of ballet. With the premiere of Tudor's Pillar of Fire in 1942, Nora came to full flame.

Going Along. Nora now has a new interest in the classical. This week she will try her first Giselle at the Met. Says Nora: "I used to think Giselle was just silly. Now I find her rather sweet and pathetic."

Nora also has a new fan. Last summer, when Impresario Sol Hurok's secretary asked her to meet another of Hurok's clients, she snorted "A musician? Bah! They're all such egotists." Top-rank, young (29) Violinist Isaac Stern felt the same way about ballerinas, even though he had never paid much attention to ballet, had only seen a part of Les Sylphides once when Hurok had dragged him along. Nora and Isaac, married in November, now think there are exceptions.

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