Silently and without warning, as the manager had foretold, the train pulled out, leaving a dozen, including four leading artists, behind in an Oregon tank town without clothes or tickets.
By dint of a dozen telephone calls and as many telegrams, the nightgown-clad D.P.’s were picked up by a later train. After fourteen hours in day coaches, crowded with regular passengers, they arrived at the San Francisco Ferry, still in their nightclothes, thirty minutes before curtain time; they were whisked in taxis to the War Memorial Opera House. The curtain rose on time. The evening was saved.
It had its amusing side. It was one of the many hardships of wartime touring, merely one of the continuous headaches, although a shade on the unusual side. It was also yet another example of the utter lack of discipline and consideration in the company, and of the stubborn refusal of some of its members to cooperate in the cause of a fine art.
Another of the many incidents having to do with the difficulties of war-time touring was one in Augusta, Georgia, where no hotel or other housing accommodations could be found, due to the war-time overcrowding.
Most of the company slept, as best they could, in the railway station or in the public park. It is recorded that Alicia Markova spent the night sleeping on the sidewalk in the entrance-way to a grocer’s shop, wrapped in newspapers and a cloak by the company manager, while that guardian angel spent the night sitting on the edge of an adjoining vegetable-stand, watching over her, smoking an endless chain of cigarettes.
This attitude was but an indication of the good sportsmanship the youngsters evidenced on more than one occasion, proving that, au fond, they were, on the whole, good “troupers.”
While I had been prepared for the departure from the company of J. Alden Talbot, I was saddened, nevertheless, when he left. Lucia Chase and the scene designer, Oliver Smith, became joint managing directors, with the result that there was precious little management and even less direction. We played a summer season in California, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, in conjunction with the City’s Art Commission, and at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. In Hollywood we rehearsed some of the new works to be given in New York in the autumn. They were five in number, and unequal both in quality and appeal. Only one was a real success. The five works were by an equal number of choreographers: Simon Semenoff, Michael Kidd, John Taras, Jerome Robbins, and Adolph Bolm.
Semenoff’s work, Gift of the Magi, was an attempt to make a ballet out of O. Henry’s little short story of the same title, a touching tale of the pathos of a young married couple with taste and no money. For the ballet, young Lukas Foss wrote a workmanlike score, and Raoul Péne du Bois supplied a great deal of scenery, difficult to manipulate. Nora Kaye and John Kriza, as the young lovers, gave it a sweetness of characterization. But, despite scenery, costumes, properties, and sweet characterization, there was no real choreography, and the work soon left the repertoire.
Michael Kidd’s first choreographic attempt for Ballet Theatre, and his first full-scale work as a matter of fact, was a theatre piece. A musical comedy type of work, it never seemed really to belong in a ballet repertoire. Kidd called it On Stage! For it Norman dello Joio provided a workable and efficient score, and Oliver Smith designed a back-stage scene that looked like back-stage. The costumes were designed by Alvin Colt.
Another first choreographic effort was young John Taras’s Graziana, for which I paid the costs. Here was no attempt to ape the Broadway musical comedy theatre. It was a straightforward, fresh, classical piece. Taras had set the work to a Violin Concerto by Mozart. He used a concise group of dancers, seventeen all told, four of whom were soloists. There was no story, simply dancing with no excuses, no apologies, no straining for “novelty,” tricks, stunts, or gags. It was, in effect, ballet, and the public liked it. Just what the title meant I never knew. My guess is that Taras had to call it something, and Graziana was better than Number One.