Bolshoi at the Met

With the possible exception of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Russia's Bolshoi Ballet is the most extravagantly praised and least frequently viewed wonder of the world. The company's triumphant London visit three years ago (TIME, Oct. 15, 1956) marked its first appearance on a Western stage. Last week, amid box office uproar (see SHOW BUSINESS), Impresario Sol Hurok finally welcomed the Bolshoi to Manhattan for the start of a nine-week cross-continent tour. The long-awaited look was not a disappointment. But, as with many such wonders, the anticipation was somewhat more exciting than the actuality. In the initial performances at least, the visitors demonstrated a technique linked to a floridly Victorian style that was frozen on pointe some 30 years ago--though in Galina Ulanova, they possess a prima ballerina who is still a true wonder of her time.

The Bolshoi's managers spared no pains for their first U.S. tour. They selected the top 110 dancers from a total company of 250, including Ulanova's chief rival, Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who for rumored political reasons had not appeared in the West before. With them came 40 tons of scenery, scaled down to fit the Met stage (a third smaller than the Bolshoi's home stage), and a generous ham-perful of the meat-and-potatoes favorites with which the company regularly sells out its home season. Because of the difficulty of shifting the Bolshoi's ponderous sets on the Met's antiquated stage, the company abandoned the idea of a repertory run. Its offering to the glittering opening-night crowd and for the next four performances: Sergei Prokofiev's gargantuan Romeo and Juliet, stretching on for 3 1/2-hours.

Butterfly Under Glass. First done by the Bolshoi in 1946, Romeo and Juliet seems to Western eyes a curious dramatic anachronism, a bit like a brilliant butterfly under glass. As much emotion-laden pantomime as dance, it retraces virtually every twist and turn of Shakespeare's familiar plot in 13 scenes before a series of sumptuous but often ponderously literal sets. The heavily orchestrated score, boldly conducted without score by Conductor Yuri Faier (he is almost blind, can see only the dancers' silhouettes), is unabashedly romantic, gently moving in its lyric flights, occasionally distracting when the onstage movements are too welded to its melodramatic moods. The acting style is sometimes reminiscent of Theda Bara and the silent films: the wildly staring eyes and clawing hands of grief, the shaking fists upraised in righteous anger. At one point, Romeo stands with roses in one hand and a human skull in the other, registering alternate hope and despair with the instantaneous reflexes of a Pavlovian dog.

For all that, Romeo and Juliet is at times an exciting dance drama. The mass dueling scene between the Capulets (gorgeously decked out in Renaissance finery) and the peasant-supported Montagues (in modest, everyday clothes) is a marvel of rocketing energy and split-second timing. The carnival scenes give the Bolshoi's male dancers an opportunity to come bounding like handballs off the Met's stage in the high, open leaps that are their special glory.

Feather on a Cloud. What stitches this De Mille-like grab bag together is the wonderfully sensitive performance of Ulanova as Juliet. Only moderately complex in choreography, Juliet is chiefly a vehicle for the kind of slowly unfolding dramatic projection in which Ulanova excels. At 49, she no longer attempts physically demanding roles, thinks of herself as a "dancing actress." And as Juliet she passes visibly from a romping child to a tremulous adolescent to a mature woman, marking the changes with increasingly contained movements and gestures. Her mature love for Romeo (sensitively danced by Yuri Zhdanov) is beautifully summed up in a lift in which she seems to hover light as a feather in his hands, while she stares down into his face as from a cloud. Ballet fans curious for comparison could see another Juliet--Ballerina Raissa Struchkova--perform the role at the Bolshoi's second performance. A sparkling technician, Struchkova gives the role more flair than Ulanova, but sacrifices some of the sense of fitfully stirring life that Ulanova's performance suggests.

At the final opening-night curtain, the audience gave Ulanova & Co. a standing ovation, were applauded in the Russian custom by the dancers. But before Manhattan took full measure of the fabled Bolshoi company, it would have to wait for the performance of another, far different ballet: Prokofiev's The Stone Flower, recently premiered in Moscow and reported to be the Bolshoi's most ambitious effort yet to open its doors to the fresh dance ideas that have swept through Western Europe and the U.S. And then it would also have to see some of the classic ballets--Swan Lake, Giselle's Act II, the "Tartar Dance" from The Fountain of Bakhchisarai--where the dance, not the drama, is the thing.

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