Music: Another Streetcar

In Manhattan last week, ballet and modern dance were at holiday boil. The biggest crowds (up to 3,000 a night) wer piling in to see George Balanchine's New York City Ballet, which has found attendance so good that it has extended its "fall season" into January (TIME, Dec. 8). Among the other troupes keeping dance fans hopping were those of Spanish Dancer Jose Greco (flamenco in high heels) and Mexican Dancer José Limón (expressionism in bare feet).

The hit of the week, nonetheless, was a steamy ballet treatment of A Streetcar Named Desire, performed by the new troupe of Mia Slavenska and Frederic Franklin, onetime stars of the Ballet Russ de Monte Carlo.

Play and moviegoers unfamiliar with the tangled tale of Streetcar were hard put to follow the plot line, but found it gripping and disturbing nevertheless. Beaten Blanche Du Bois, danced by Slavenska, quickly revealed the incipient madness which, in the play, had a slower buildup. Thereafter, the dance action veered between Blanche's lurid inner life and the real life of a New Orleans slum: Blanche's wistful meeting with a potential suitor, a boisterous crap game, the taut marriage of her sister and brother-in-law (danced by Lois Ellyn and Franklin). Dramatic climax: a hair-raising chase through a series of shuttered doors.

The troupe also boasted several standard tiptoeing ballets, as well as famed Ballerina Alexandra Danilova as guest star. But Streetcar, composed by Modern Dancer Valerie Bettis, was clearly the breadwinner. The management sagely scheduled it for every performance except the first children's matinee. Midway in their one-week stand, Slavenska, Franklin & Co. decided to extend their run into January, then take Streetcar back on the road.