Showgoers know Agnes de Mille as the choreographer who jimmied ballet right into the plot of Oklahoma! and started a Broadway trend; balletomanes know her as the one who has done most to bring oldtime American themes to the ballet stage (Rodeo, Fall River Legend). Last week Choreographer de Mille was off on a new tack: with her own company of 19, she set out to test a hunch that there is room for an outfit offering dance, pantomime and song in a repertory rich in American themes.
Audiences in Baltimore and Washington were the first to sample the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre, and they found it something like an intimate revue. One number among the evening's half a dozen or so, Hares on the Mountain, is an affectionately sardonic sketch of an old mountaineer who sings:
Young women, they'll run like hares on the mountain,
If I was but a young man, I'd soon go hunting.
As he sings, a pair of willowy girls dance teasingly across the stage, only to be followed by a trio of hillbilly hags who bring the dreamer down to earth. In Gold Rush (from Paint Your Wagon), the girl dancers, cast as lighthearted trollops, swirl happily into a mining town and pair off with the men—only to be left in the lurch when the lode runs out. In Short Lecture and Demonstration on the Evolution of
Ragtime, a stiff-legged couple does a droll burlesque of oldtime dance routines while a narrator delivers a mock lecture on the subject. Audiences leave the theater well entertained, if not exactly enlightened.
One expert who shares Agnes de Mille's conviction that there is a sturdy potential audience for such a blend of dancing and humor is sage Sol Hurok. Impresario Hurok has put up the money to get the show on the road, has booked it into 107 cities in the next six months for what should be the most ambitious tour of its kind in entertainment history.
De Mille & Co. still have some adjusting to do. In Washington's barnlike Constitution Hall (capacity: 4,000), they were unable to use scenery because of local fire regulations. Moreover, they found that numbers planned for smaller and more intimate theaters threatened to get lost in the vastness. "We're just finding out which numbers carry and which don't," says Agnes de Mille.