Union Pacific

When in May 1869, on a bare shoulder of Utah the late great Leland Stanford swung a silver maul at a golden spike (which he missed), history was made. The fire bell in Sacramento rolled to the rope. The first of 220 cannon shots was fired on Fort Hill, San Francisco. A two-mile parade stumbled into step in Omaha. Decorations blazed from the wooden lamp posts of Chicago. The chimes-master of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street in New York played "Old Hundred" on his clanking choir, and President U. S. Grant received a telegram reading: "The last rail is laid, the last spike is driven, the Pacific railroad is completed."

When last week on the stage of the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia Dancer Eduard Borovansky of the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe heaved a silvered wooden hammer at the head of a gilded wooden nail (which he hit), history was also made. But history of a lighter mood. Union Pacific, the first U. S. ballet to reach the repertory of the great Russian school of dancing made famous by Serge Diaghilev, had had its world premiere.

American the ballet was in theme rather than execution. The theme was the construction of the two railroads, the Union and the Central Pacific, which Leland Stanford's ill-aimed blow symbolically joined together. But both music and choreography--breath and flesh of any ballet--were the work of Russians: the music of Nicholas Nabokov, 31-year-old composer of Alsace and Paris; the choreography of Leonide Massine, 36-year-old master of the present Russian ballet. Only the libretto by Archibald MacLeish, the stage sets by Albert Johnson (The Band Wagon, As Thousands Cheer) and the costumes by Irene Sharaff (Eva Le Gallienne's Alice in Wonderland) were native American.

Librettos (more accurately, scenarios) for ballet are generally, for some mysterious reason, the work of poets though the spoken word plays no part. Origin of Union Pacific was Mr. MacLeish's satiric poem, "Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City," which celebrated the building of the transcontinental lines by immigrant labor, satirized the role of the promoters & capitalists:

It was we laid the steel on this land from ocean to ocean:

It was we (if you know) put the U. P. through the passes

Bringing her down Into Laramie full load:

Eighteen miles on the granite anticlinal

Forty-three foot to the mile and the grade holding. . . .

The ballet, making use of the fact that the Union Pacific was built from East to West largely by Irish labor, the Central Pacific from West to East largely by Chinese, and that their convergence was punctuated by ill-feeling and bloodshed, finds its drama in the fighting of the men, its humor in the pomposity of the promoters. The gentler interest essential to ballets (or at least to ballerinas) is supplied by the prostitutes who followed the advancing lines in box cars variously entitled "Hell on Wheels" or "Moving Town" and plied their trade in an itinerant canvas saloon called the Big Tent. In the first two scenes Irish workmen on the eastern section and Chinese workmen on the western section build the line, ties and rails being represented, with sardonic inference, by the bodies of dancers. In the central scene against the background of the Big Tent and the dances of Mexicans, gamblers and gals, workmen of the two gangs develop a rivalry for the favors of a particularly toothsome lady (Delarova, wife of Massine) into a general brawl. And in the final scene the two gangs, back now on the roadbed, race for the point oi meeting where, resplendent in stovepipe hats and borne on the cow-catchers oi paper engines, the capitalists of New York and San Francisco prepare for the ceremony of the golden spike.

The music matches the book. Based upon such popular songs of the period as "O Suzanna." "Jones's Band," "Lady Gay" and even "Yankee Doodle," it has the lusty coarseness, vigor and vitality of the events. Mr. Nabokov is definitely a modern composer but his characteristic manner merely serves to twist the too familiar tunes into phrases of surprise and humor and occasionally of unsuspected loveliness. The choreography has the same essentially American twist. It is deft, rapid and inventive, realistic rather than symbolic, but sufficiently stylized to make the realism count. Its high point, a bar-keeper's dance on Negro motives danced by Massine himself, ranks with Massine's own Miller's Dance in The Three-Cornered Eat as one of the highest reaches of modern choreography. In Philadelphia it brought yells of excitement from an audience famed for its ability to restrain enthusiasm.

Judged by its Philadelphia reception, the first U. S. ballet to reach the Russian repertory is a resounding success. Describing the prolonged ovation for dancers, choreographer, composer and librettist the Public Ledger said: "The scene was a triumph the like of which has not been witnessed at a first night in Philadelphia for many years."

Boston will see Union Pacific this week, Chicago next week, Manhattan on April 25, 26, 27, Paris sometime in May. Whether Paris, with its traditional preference for the toe-dancing and voluminous skirts of the classic ballet, will applaud the enthusiastic and intentional vulgarity, the vivid colors, the harsh humor and breathless pace of the U. S. production, is another question.

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