The Kansas City Star from Kansas City, Missouri • 115

Arts Entertainment Sunday December 12 1971 THE KANSAS CITY STAR Section ART BOOKS 3 EDITORIAL PAGES 10 11 FINANCIAL 8 9 12 MOVIES 2 4 MUSIC 5 STAGE 2 From Modest Origins A Huae Film 'Fiddled seems to me an inspired one He projects an elemental masculinity and wry vital wisdom that deepen the role beyond its more familiar Yiddish-comic treatment It can also be argued that it takes a broad screen to capture the lowering hugeness of Czarist Russia where the action is set Capture it the film does (using a Yugoslav location) with an impressiveness that no play could begin to match Nor could any live performance ever equal the polish of the film Admiring both the original musical and most of its tech of all those loyal partisans but it happens to be on the whole a most artfully rendered film version So it is neither easy for me nor a risk to the future to report that I much like the film At least not a fraction as much as I liked the stage show How to explain why? In one important way the film directed by Norman Jewison-directed with actually improves on any stage seen The choice of the Israeli actor Topol to play the long-suffering Jewish paterfamilias Tevye on the reviewed below opens Tuesday at the Midland) By Giles Fowler Th Star's Motion Picture Editor on the has a way of confounding time and tide having become one of few permanent fixtures Now it seems a safe bet that the movie too will be filling receptive and cash long after you and I are dust It is this certainty that makes criticism rather beside the point is not only backed by the fan-power -v-fev nical execution on film I can trace my disappointment only to something within the basic concept To me the very size costliness and painstaking reality of the picture are what undercut sustained enjoyment and made me wish the show had never gotten beyond the small-scale confines of the live theater Movie musicals have a built-in hazard in that film tends to impose literal realism on its subjects while the musical just work as a literal art In real life a man singing away on a busy street would be arrested) The best film musicals get around this by being unabashedly like the bizarre flights of Busby Berkeley or Fair with its dreamy wedding-cake decors is about some hard truth poverty pogroms a traditional helplessness before changing values but these have been poetically transformed through Joseph homely script and the endearing songs by Bock and Hamick On the stage where poetry is more at home those little conventions that separate theater from life are easy to accept On screen I found them too often jarring even where efforts have been made to reconcile realism and fantasy: The making of the symbolic for instance into a flesh-and-blood village musician playing recorded solos by Isaac Stern (Some village fiddler! think he could write his own ticket with the Imperial Russian Philharmonic Other things jar too as they never did in the stage show: The gaps between the ethnic authenticity of so much of the film and the show-biz flavor of so much of the music between the size and wealth of the movie and its humble ori-See on Page 2E Norma Crane and Topol as Golde and Tevye head the cast of "Fiddler on the Roof" in the film version produced and directed by Norman Jewison Written by Joseph Stein with songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Hamick the United Artists release also stars Leonard Frey Molly Picon Paul Mann Rosalind Harris Michele Marsh Neva Small Michael Glaser and Raymond Lovelock Mama and Papa In Fiddler The Sierra Leone National Dance Troupe directed by John Bunting-Braden is credited with being one of the best non-Westernized African dance companies Now on its first American tour since stellar appearance at tha New York World's Fair in 1964 the troupe of 40 dancers will appear at tha Capri Theater at 8 pm Friday Saturday and Sunday plus Sunday mat-nee at 2 Sierra Leone roupe for the Dance A Big Year Scanning the Arts By Madelyn Voigts A Member of The Star's Staff With a change of name and a change in format this has been a big year for the Kansas City Ballet And it is going to get bigger Margot Fonteyn may come Yuriko will be performing and teaching David Howard will be back to instruct There will be master classes lecture-demonstrations and workshops culminating with a gala performance at the Mid States Regional Ballet (MSRB) Festival to be held here April 13 to 15 The Festival is a symposium to be held for the first time by the Mid States Regional Ballet Association an organization the Kansas City Civic Ballet joined about the time it changed its name to the Kansas City Ballet In its first year of membership Kansas City was selected as permanent headquarters for the states represented in the association and ballet director Tom Steinhoff was elected MSRB president for two years two works it will present for adjudication Both were commissioned from vital young guest choreographers Joseph Albano 31 artistic director of the Hartford Ballet Company in Connecticut has created a jazz ballet entitled of to a spliced composite of rock songs In contrast David Howard 34 director of the Harkness School of Ballet in New York choreographed as a classic and lyrical ballet with no story line About the only similarity this year to the old format of is the traditional Christmas presentation of The first of two performances was given yesterday morning at the Plaza Theater Coupled with a modern work by Winifred Widener called for Love Inspired by the the holiday program will be repeated at 10:00 am Saturday at the same location See DANCE on Page 5E Consequently the Kansas City Ballet its board of directors and guild will play host for three days in April to 500 dancers and artistic directors from Michigan Wisconsin Minnesota Ohio Indiana Illinois Iowa North Dakota South Dakota Nebraska Kansas and Missouri (the Denver Ballet an ex-officio member represents the Vi state) Also here will be the national board of the regional ballet movement in the United States Twenty-three ballet companies from the aforementioned states will compete next month for the privilege of appearing at a gala performance to be held at the Music Hall the final night of the Festival Doris Hering MSRB adjudicator for the Festival and critic for Dance Magazine will travel from state to state in January to review each of the presentations and to select the five or six best works to be presented at the gala The Kansas City Ballet has been busy all fall learning the Jojjtph Albano demonstrating In an era when nothing gave an American community greater status than a railroad the crowning panache of glory was a railroad depot disguised as Norman castle a Greek classic temple a French chateau from the banks of the Loire or an Egyptian temple Lucius Beebe A spokesman for Amtrak was quoted now some time ago to the effect that no fewer than 10 of the major passenger terminals our own included had been found much too large for their expected future volume of traffic and so might eventually have to be replaced by smaller structures less costly to maintain (By all means be practical) Since then several suggestions have been tentatively advanced for dealing at the local level with that unwelcome prospect Among them only one thus far would seem to involve actually tearing down Kansas Union Station The sense of civic shock which has greeted even the possibility of demolition I suspect can hardly have surprised officials of either the Kansas City Terminal Railway or its parent companies Ours may be a city notoriously careless about salvaging the monuments of its past But the Union Station? That was manifestly something else again A repository of so much recent history and so many personal associations surely nothing could happen to take it away from us after all these years! On the other hand the owners clearly face an economic dilemma Of the various resolutions yet put forward easily the most attractive at least from my point of view would be to employ this strategically-located facility as the hub for a network of rapid transit lines extending out in all directions over existing or newly-acquired rights of way But as the proprietors might well ask who is to organize and implement such an ambitious project? Where is the necessary leadership to come from? When you get right down to it what is so special about our Union Station aside perhaps from its sentimental value for a passing generation? Fifty-seven years is no great age even in the Middle West And progress progress Or is it? The benefits that would accrue from relieving the ever-increased congestion on our highways (and its attendant pollution) certainly appear to represent one powerful consideration But there anothen factor to be taken into account by any cormpfety that likes to think of itself as a particularly agreeable place In which to live? The late Mr Beebe I submit was only partly right Granted that he spoke from the record when he talked in Trains We about the curiously irrelevant design of many American railroad stations Those quasi-monstrosities however were of an earlier age Ultimately our native architects stopped fumbling about with such pretentious disguises and evolved a style that still ranks among their finest achievements The building Jarvis Hunt was commissioned to plan belonged to this happy period After a succession of essentially uninspired subterfuges of one sort or another the breakthrough had finally occurred only a few years before with the opening of present Union Station in 1907 That structure of course was specifically designed for its monumental environment But other cities long to be outdone By 1910 New York already had its famous Pennsylvania Station And suddenly everything that had preceded the spacious edifice at 33rd and Seventh Avenue elsewhere across the country save In the capital commenced to look old-fashioned if not obsolete Rarely had a change of architectural pace caught on so quickly During the next 15 years at least three more important passenger terminals were erected the United States Each of them the Grand Central in New York (1913) our Union Station (1914) and accommodation of the same name bore an unmistakable family resemblance while differing somewhat in detail As far as I know moreover they were to be the last of their kind We Kansas Citians it has always struck me were exceptionally fortunate So skillful was handling of materials and proportion so expertly did he combine space with light that today more than half a century later his station remains a building of notable dignity and an example of American industrial architecture at its best What city be legitimately proud of such a possession? What city be anxious to assure its preservation? All of which no doubt is easy to say Nevertheless the 64-dollar question persists Can we as a community summon to tnis task the same type of effective voluntary collaboration that brought the railroads here in the first place a hundred years back or just the other day against tremendous odds finally secured our new medical school? Perhaps once again we need to remember the admonition of an early-day civic leader Robert Van Horn you know said: never assisted a lazy man fortune never smiled on ad indolent HaJfill David in double image.