Splash for "Little Spinach"

Good Italian ballerinas are about as scarce as Russian boccie bowlers. But audiences at La Scala last week cheered a 23-year-old dancer, daughter of a Milan streetcar conductor, who was all but stealing the stage from Britain's famed Margot Fonteyn. Occasion: the world premiere of Fantasy at Grand Hotel, starring Ballerina Carla Fracci.

Ballet at La Scala was for years behind the rest of the world, with choreography and staging sometimes below the level of New York's Radio City Music Hall. But Choreographer Leonide Massine's appealing work demonstrated that La Scala is trying hard to catch up. The ballet opened against a backdrop of black-and-white hotel exteriors reminiscent of Ludwig Bemelmans drawings; the story then moved to nightclub, courtroom and prison as it told of a girl who is wooed by a gangster, framed in a gangland shooting, sentenced to death, but liberated by a previous lover. The short piece was lavishly costumed--busboys in scarlet monkey suits, red-robed judges, policemen dressed in dominoes--and it amply displayed Ballerina Fracci's hard-edged, superbly controlled style.

At one point, wearing a white chiffon gown, she danced an elaborate counterpoint to her female accuser with sensuous assurance; at another she fluttered behind prison bars like a captive bird. In one of the ballet's climactic scenes she danced a sexy blues number provocatively clothed in a low-cut gown. "Perhaps," said Carla, who is so thin that her fans call her "little spinach," "the dress was not exactly adapted to my physique." But at ballet's end, fans applauded through nine curtain calls, echoing the success she has found all over Europe in the four years since she emerged from La Scala's ballet school. The daily Avanti found that Carla "has now fully arrived as a prima ballerina," and one critic noting that she is related to Verdi, observed: "No wonder she's so good; she drinks her morning espresso out of a cup that once was Verdi's." Few present would dispute the recent judgment of the London Daily Mail: "She will be one of the greatest ballerinas of our time."

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