The ballet is integrated into the plot of the musical by the device of having two gangsters watching it from box seats in the theatre in which it is staged. They have orders to shoot the leading dancer (played by Ray Bolger in the original production). The dancer, who has been warned just in time, evades them by suddenly dancing at full speed even after the ballet actually ends, and finally two police officers enter and arrest the gangsters.
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue was danced by Bolger and Tamara Geva in the original stage production of On Your Toes, and by Eddie Albert and Vera Zorina in the film version. In Words and Music, the 1948 Technicolor film biography of Rodgers and Hart, the ballet was danced by Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen, with a somewhat revised, more tragic storyline, and new choreography by Kelly (in Kelly's version, the boyfriend, in addition to killing the dance hall girl, also kills the hoofer).[1]
The first television performance of "Slaughter" was on NBC-TV's Garroway at Large program in 1950 or 1951, with the NBC Chicago studio orchestra under the direction of Joseph Gallichio.[2]
Lew Stone conducted the BBC Dance Orchestra in a 1936 BBC broadcast performance of Rodgers' score which was the work's radio premiere.
Theatre organist George Wright recorded the composition for his second album for HiFiRecords, George Wright Encores.
An arrangement of Rodger's theme is part of the soundtrack of the 1957 crime thriller Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, which borrows the title but is otherwise unrelated to the 1936 stage play.
Buddy Cole recorded a version with the Monty Kelly Orchestra shortly before his death in 1964.
Jazz singer Anita O'Day performed a vocal (scat) version on her Verve album Incomparable.
The Ventures recorded an instrumental rock version of "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue", based on the score of the ballet. It was released as a single in 1964, and appeared on their album Knock Me Out the following year. The single became a minor hit in the United States, peaking at #35 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.[4]
The British instrumental pop group The Shadows released their version in November 1969 (b/w "Midnight Cowboy" (John Barry) Columbia DB8628).
Electronic Realizations For Rock Orchestra, the first album released by synthesizer pioneer Larry Fast under the project name of Synergy, featured an electronic rendition of the ballet.
James Last recorded the ballet on his 1975 album Well Kept Secret, featuring Larry Carlton on lead guitar.
Mick Ronson chose the ballet as title track to his debut solo recording Slaughter on 10th Avenue. Ronson was lead guitarist of David Bowie's legendary band, "The Spiders From Mars" and knew and liked the music from his childhood piano training. He continued to play the song the rest of his career.
Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composer who worked primarily in musical theater. With 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, Rodgers was one of the most well-known American composers of the 20th century, and his compositions had a significant influence on popular music.
Raymond Wallace Bolger was an American actor, dancer, singer, vaudevillian, and stage performer who started his movie career in the silent-film era.
Choreography is the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies in which motion or form or both are specified. Choreography may also refer to the design itself. A choreographer is one who creates choreographies by practising the art of choreography, a process known as choreographing. It most commonly refers to dance choreography.
Michael Ronson was an English musician, songwriter, arranger, and producer. He achieved critical and commercial success working with David Bowie as the guitarist of the Spiders from Mars. He was a session musician who recorded five studio albums with Bowie followed by four with Ian Hunter, and also worked as a sideman in touring bands with Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. A classically trained musician, Ronson was known for his melodic approach to guitar playing.
George Balanchine was a Georgian-American ballet choreographer, recognized as one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th-century. Styled as the father of American ballet, he co-founded the New York City Ballet and remained its artistic director for more than 35 years. His choreography is characterized by plotless ballets with minimal costume and décor, performed to classical and neoclassical music.
The Nutcracker, Op. 71, is an 1892 two-act classical ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child's imagination. The plot is an adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The ballet's first choreographer was Marius Petipa, with whom Tchaikovsky had worked three years earlier on The Sleeping Beauty, assisted by Lev Ivanov. Although the complete and staged The Nutcracker ballet was not initially as successful as the 20-minute Nutcracker Suite that Tchaikovsky had premiered nine months earlier, it soon became popular.
New York City Ballet (NYCB) is a ballet company founded in 1948 by choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine and Jerome Robbins are considered the founding choreographers of the company. Léon Barzin was the company's first music director. City Ballet grew out of earlier troupes: the Producing Company of the School of American Ballet, 1934; the American Ballet, 1935, and Ballet Caravan, 1936, which merged into American Ballet Caravan, 1941; and directly from the Ballet Society, 1946.
Tenth Avenue, known as Amsterdam Avenue between 59th Street and 193rd Street, is a north-south thoroughfare on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It carries uptown (northbound) traffic as far as West 110th Street, after which it continues as a two-way street.
Vera Zorina, born Eva Brigitta Hartwig, was a Norwegian ballerina, theatre and film actress, and choreographer. Today, she is chiefly remembered for her films choreographed by her then-husband George Balanchine. They include the Slaughter on Tenth Avenue sequence from On Your Toes, The Goldwyn Follies, I Was an Adventuress with Erich Von Stroheim and Peter Lorre, Louisiana Purchase with Bob Hope, and dancing to "That Old Black Magic" in Paramount Pictures' Star Spangled Rhythm.
On Your Toes (1936) is a musical with a book by Richard Rodgers, George Abbott, and Lorenz Hart, music by Rodgers, and lyrics by Hart. It was adapted into a film in 1939.
Slaughter on 10th Avenue is the debut album by English guitarist Mick Ronson, then-guitarist of David Bowie's backing band the Spiders from Mars. It was released in February 1974 by RCA Records.
Tamara Geva was a Soviet and later an American actress, ballet dancer, and choreographer. She was the daughter of art patron and collector Levkiy Gevergeyev and she was the first wife of the well-known ballet dancer and choreographer George Balanchine.
Apollo is a neoclassical ballet in two tableaux composed between 1927 and 1928 by Igor Stravinsky. It was choreographed in 1928 by twenty-four-year-old George Balanchine, with the composer contributing the libretto. The scenery and costumes were designed by André Bauchant, with new costumes by Coco Chanel in 1929. The scenery was executed by Alexander Shervashidze, with costumes under the direction of Mme. A. Youkine. The American patron of the arts Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge had commissioned the ballet in 1927 for a festival of contemporary music to be held the following year at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Robert Alton was an American dancer and choreographer, a major figure in dance choreography of Broadway and Hollywood musicals from the 1930s through to the early 1950s. He is principally remembered today as the discoverer of Gene Kelly, for his collaborations with Fred Astaire, and for choreographic sequences he designed for Hollywood musicals such as The Harvey Girls (1946), Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), Show Boat (1951), and White Christmas (1954).
The Suzanne Farrell Ballet is a ballet company housed at the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., and founded in 2000 by Suzanne Farrell, one of George Balanchine's most celebrated ballerinas, and a former New York City Ballet principal dancer. Until 2017, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet was a full-fledged company produced by the Kennedy Center and had performed there since 1999 in addition to presenting extensive national and international tours. In September 2016, the Center announced that the company would be disbanding at the end of 2017, citing "possibilities of new expansion" and indicating that Farrell would likely return to "full-time teaching."
Circus Polka: For a Young Elephant was written by Igor Stravinsky in 1942. He composed it for a ballet production that the choreographer George Balanchine did for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The ballet was performed by fifty elephants and fifty ballerinas. In 1944, Stravinsky published an orchestration of the piece, which is now part of the repertoire of many orchestras.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a 1964 studio album by organist Jimmy Smith, released on the Verve label. Smith is accompanied by a big band with arrangements by Oliver Nelson and Claus Ogerman.
Valentina Kozlova is a Soviet-born Russian American ballerina and founder of Valentina Kozlova International Ballet Competition. In 1979, while on tour as a young principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, Kozlova defected to the United States, where she became a principal dancer with New York City Ballet and later, opened her own ballet school. Perhaps best known as a lyrical and expressive ballerina, Kozlova is also renowned as a private coach, producing students who have gone on to garner prestigious prizes and positions in companies such as Boston Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Washington Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Universal Ballet, and the Cuban National Ballet.
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue may refer to:
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