It has been very much the vogue during the past several seasons, and even the usually sapient George Jean Nathan has upon occasion fallen in with the fashion, to forecast the practically immediate elimination of serious ballet from legitimate theater entertainment and its relegation to the specialized stage and concert hall. No sooner had ballet achieved its enormous vogue through the agency of Agnes De Mille's arrangements for Oklahoma! than it was almost universally modish to say that the whole thing was only temporary and that, by next season at the latest, ballet as a dominant part of the score would have vanished entirely from the Broadway scene.
The 1947 contribution to the infallibility of Broadway seers in this particular matter and field of prophesy comes in the form of a new and overwhelmingly acclaimed musical at the Ziegfeld Theater called Brigadoon in which a series of ballets directed by this same Miss De Mille not only completely dominate the evening, but very nearly run such incidental interludes as may be provided by individual actors off the stage entirely. Brigadoon is conceived in mystic vein and is seldom light, let alone hilarious, but it has Manhattan by the heels and does it through the agency of ballet piled on ballet.
The public may, as the wise money has said for the past five years, be tired to death of ballet and unwilling to support any show with ballet in it, but the public certainly has an odd way of proving it. If the public, on this basis, should continue to grow increasingly bored with ballet, the most profitable thing for a producer to do next year will be to eliminate all actors and singers whatsoever from his cast and present pure ballet and nothing else.
Shirtcuff Jottings:
- The Plaza Hotel, New York's citadel of Edwardian good living and upholstered bon ton, is planning to celebrate its fortieth anniversary in October, and plans are being drawn up by Serge Obolensky for a full week of fiesta and promotional gala with national publicity and appropriate hurrah.
- The other Plaza note of the moment is the return in the capacity of managing director of Frank Wangeman from his two-year tour of duty at the Town House in Los Angeles, another outpost of the ever-crescent Hilton Hotel circuit.
- The spring list of E. P. Dutton announces the publication of Champagne Cholly, a biography of the late, great Maury Paul, last of the important society editors, by his onetime assistant, Eve Brown.
- Miss Brown was in Paul's most intimate confidence, and most of the town's uppercase names are mentioned so that the book is certain in advance of a degree of success and may be sensational.
- Snootiest of the new shops bidding for the boulevardier trade is Bronzoni, Ltd., which manufactures to order nothing but house robes and lounging pyjamas from fabrics designed by Brooke Cadwallader.
- Odd McIntyre, who collected bathrobes as some people collect stamps, would have liked it.
- The member chevaliers of the very exclusive Confrèrie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, the top-flight tong of muffin-munchers and vintage-sniffers, again have their own bottling of a celebrated Burgundy: Clos de Vougeot 1937. Not many individuals or organizations have their privately bottled wines in these shabby times.
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