Dance

...He is unfortunately given mini-sermons---on ecology, for instance--which, although perfectly fine in what they have to say, rob Rogers of his comic method--deceptive statement following deceptive statement, upended finally by a barbed closing line...

...Peterson...

...The Follies pretty much ignores the real making of Will Rogers...

...he looks at people more closely than abstract forces and shows how their delirious idealisms, misreadings, and impulses led to several years of horror that point directly to the events of the 1930s and 1940s...

...For Ms...

...Neither of the new songs, presumably by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, seems up to their original score, but that may be because I could sing-along with the other numbers...

...Trusting to the biographical approach and keeping faith with Alexis de Tocqueville's skeptical, tragic sense of events, he seems to want little to do with contemporary ideologies or methods, pre- ferring to immerse his readers in the "chaot- ic authenticity" of textured stories...

...Since Citizens is so beautifully paced, the reader may wonder what's going on in Schama's latest volume, the brain-teas- ing Dead Certainties...

...There is a new song for Tune to sing and dance, "A Giant Step," celebrating Albert's escape from his possessive mother, and "Spanish Rose," Chita Rivera's fine number, has been replaced by "He's Mine," a duet between Rose and Albert's mother...

...I remember feeling a little cheated back in 1960 when there was no song for the marvelous Kay Medford, who originally played the part...

...Francis Parkman, a scholar who lived and breathed the destiny of General Wolfe, is in many ways the central figure of Schama's book: a chronically ill man who wrote a monu- mental work while contending with family tragedy and his own depression, he stands as an emblem of intellectual conquest, a 13 September 1991:519...

...The dance concert they were about to present was Martha Graham's last present to the world, to be opened after her death...

...hen Tommy Tune received his Tony awards for best direction and best choreography, the television show cut away from New York to the West Coast where Tune was appearing as Albert Peterson in Bye Bye Birdie...

...Graham introduced students, 516: Commonweal When the dancers left the stage at the end of "Primitive Mysteries," the lights that had bathed the children in "To the Future" two hours earlier slowly dimmed and Ms...

...The rest of the cast was just as good, and the company boasted a class director (Gene Saks) and design- er (Peter Larking), whose charming set resembled giant and very fluid children's building toys...

...Soon the children began to jump, scoot, turn, twirl, stomp, stop and start, leap and bound into the air, onto the ground, in lines and clusters and circles of all lengths and sizes...

...And this was a moment that many dreaded...

...Up until very recently, at the end of each of her concerts, Ms...

...It was a specially invited audience...

...Schama is the Mellon Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard, and his gifts as writer as well as his deep learning make him an extraordinary figure in the scholarly world, someone with boundless enthusiasm for everything connected with modem his- tory--manners and morals, debt manage- ment, art, curiosities and ironies of behavior of the powerful and the obscure...

...it jumps from passages that employ authorial interference to sections that are fabricated interior monologue assigned to people in the past...

...It was a signature Graham exercise, by means of which Ms...

...The choreography is by Edmond Kresley, who was one of the teen-agers in the original show, and he deserves commendation even as one suspects that Tommy Tune had a hand and a foot in the staging of his own numbers...

...Joseph's Church of Yorkville and is associate producer of Parish Video Library, Sparkill, N. Y Contending narratives, plausible truths imon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, published in 1989, is a sweeping, dramatically presente 4 story reminiscent, in its style of telling, of the great narrative histories of the nineteenth and twentieth century: Macaulay on England in the late seventeenth century, Michelet or Carlyle on revolutionary France, Barbara Tuchman or Edmund Wilson on political currents in the early twentieth century...

...like others, I had a personal reason to be there...

...Although Ann Reinking, the other star, had left the cast, her replacement, Lenora Nemetz, was attractive and accomplished and even looked a little like Chita Rivera, the original Rose...

...The other is about a mid- nineteenth-century Harvard chemistry pro- fessor, John Webster, who doubtless killed another Harvard man, Dr...

...Rogers's celebrity, however, was not that of the opening number...

...Graham's absence settled over the hall...

...The first death was heroic, worthy of historical paintings and panegyrics...

...I love the earth and the world I live in...

...Taxi horns blurted, couples dashed out of restaurants and toward theaters, boys and girls in shorts careened up West 55th Street on those newfangled roller blades, men and women in every imaginable costume, from business suit to halter top, navigated their ways through the crowd that was now flooding through City Center's doors...

...Indeed, he was one of the best known Americans of the 1920s and '30s...

...Like them or not, you cannot deny their mastery of storytelling...

...GARY SE1BERT Gary Seibert, S.J., is in residence at St...

...They all bent over and touched the floor, shook their heads and bounded up and bellowed, "I love the earth...

...Really, he is as important as I am...

...They began to pound their chests, then swooped their arms up above their heads and reached from the pits of their stomachs through expanded chests and out through their arms into their fingers, and with an athletic "second effort," reached up a tad more, and shouted, "I love the sky...

...Tune is, as usual, a beguiling performer, and if his Albert is more on the surface than the confused, harried character that Dick Van Dyck played, he is still a joyful presence in an admirable revival of a first-rate American musical...

...its episodes seem jagged...

...the needles he gave to celebrity worship have not blunted with time...

...It is characteristic of Tommy Tune's energy that with two Broadway successes running at once (Grand Hotel is the other), he had become a performer again, taking his tapping feet on the road in a revival of a 1960 musical...

...a dance class, a Martha Graham dance class...

...The intimate of the rich and powerful, the idol of ordinary people, the "Cowboy Philosopher," as he----or his publisher--sometimes called him, built his fol- lowing through radio, lectures, his newspaper column, finally the movies...

...Graham, gloved hands gently on at her sides, her hair often bejew- eled, center stage, aglow in a gown by Halston...

...The connection between these two dead certainties--which soon emerge as quite uncertain in the reader's mind is Francis Parkman, George Parkman's nephew who became a renowned historian specializing in the British-French conflict in Canada during the eighteenth century...

...Graham would take a curtain call that went like this: When the applause for the dancers of the program's final ballet had crested and began to subside, the act curtain would sink a foot deeper into the stage floor and then zoom up to reveal a glittering Ms...

...What stay in my mind are Keith Carradine's performance and the imaginative staging by Tommy Tune, which pays tribute to the Follies form even as it goes about its business of making a 1990s' musical of a genre which had its best days before World War I. Carradine is an extremely personable per- former, suggesting both the folksiness that went into the Rogers persona and the calculation that created it...

...One is about General James Wolfe, the fallen leader of the English forces in the French and Indian War and a martyr to the British idea of empire in the New World...

...David Castronovo he brings his humane and rather conser- vative intelligence to bear on the topic of revolutionary violence...

...The audience left the theater and were assaulted by a hot, humid, and blinding New York rush hour...

...Perhaps "Spanish Rose" was dropped because the 1990S felt no need for the mandatory Spanish number that graced 1950s' musicals, but I suspect that the substitution was put in for the sake of Marilyn Cooper, who plays Mrs...

...It is a show that I enjoyed even though I find now that I remember little of Cy Coleman's music or the lyrics of Betty Comden and Adolph Green...

...There was no attempt to update the show---except for one throw-away line--and Michael Stewart's book is as funny as ever...

...Graham had become famous for her final bows...

...My recognizing the distance between the man and his depiction in the Follies is not intended as a criticism of the musical...

...By general request from those around me, I did not...

...Slowly the light began to dim on the empty stage...

...In Citizens DEAD CERTAINTIES (UNWARRANTED SPECULATIONS) Simon Schama Knopf, $21,333 pp...

...It is a device that would have served Carradine, too, even though he makes no attempt actually to imitate Rogers...

...I am suspicious of made-for-touring revivals with a star turn (The Fantasticks with Robert Goulet confirmed my worst forebodings), but the new Bye Bye Birdie, which I recently saw in Philadelphia, turned out to be a delightful production of a show that I have liked since I first saw it more than thirty years ago in a pre-Broadway try-out, also in Philadelphia...

...Suddenly, the children were facing the audience, standing stone-still in rows from stage apron to back wall, each child about an arm's distance from the next...

...And Schama deals with two stories that seem quite distant from each other...

...Its chapters are unevenly proportioned...

...I had no suspicion of how important the man is," said Bernard Shaw, who met Rogers when he was playing in London in 1926...

...Adrift in this ocean of New York street life, I found myself chanting, "I love the sky...

...the second was surrounded by ugly details, on both sides, that threatened to cling to old Harvard --Parkman's miserly fanaticism, snobbish Boston Brahmin denial, and the grisly mat- ter of Dr...

...Parkman's (probably) dismem- bered body...

...n a Monday afternoon this past June, one month after Martha Graham died, thirty-two boys and girls between the ages of eight and twelve strode confidently onto the stage of New York's City Center to be greeted with a rousing ovation...

...GERALD WEALES DANCE BREATHING IN & OUT MARTHA GRAHAM, R.I.P...

...George Parkman, an eminent physician and exacting land- lord, in a quarrel over a loan payment...

...This afternoon, as the applause crested, the curtain remained BOOKS up...

...Filled with personalities, highly developed intellectual and social contexts, and juicy anecdotes, Schama's Citizens--like those classics of readability--is what first-rate historical narration used to be like before our own age of academic scholarship, bar graphs, elaborately deployed methodolo- gies, and endless qualifications couched in jargon...

...The show does try to indicate the fame of the man with an opening number, "Will-a-Mania," that unhappily suggests that his was the fame of a pop star or--more likely--a soft drink, peddled through a hard-sell musical TV ad...