The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 87

Mt JPfnlaMpfita Inquirer Section Albums 61 Going-Out Guide 66 On Movies G2 New Films C3 Radio TV Week Update IP A A 0 I Sunday, March 27, 1994 A new spin on old musicals Lewitsky dancers: This week By Clifford A. Ridley INQUIRER THEATER CRITIC the troupe will be in the city as both dancers and teachers. Lewitsky, precise in dance, life EW YORK You had to hand it to Rodgers and Ham-merstein. In their first tragically romantic libretto, its soaring score, and its seamless interplay between them (evident in such scenes as the hero's seven-minute soliloquy and the 12'2-minute sequence that begins with "You're a Queer One, Julie Jordan" and continues through "If I Loved it completed the process that Oklahoma! began: Transforming what had been musical comedy into musical theater. "Oklahoma is about a picnic," Stephen Sondheim once said.

"Carousel is about life and death." Given a show so tantalizingly close to perfection, you'd think that no one would want to tamper overmuch with the balance of things. What more could one find, after in a piece of such richness and humanity? Quite a lot, it seems. The Carousel that opened Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont, a long-See MUSICALS onG11 By Nancy Goldner INQUIRER DANCE CRITIC Bella Lewitzky knows what she's about. After a quick scan of the menu during a lunchtime interview last week, she snaps it shut, places it precisely at the table's edge, and commands the waitress to bring the vegetarian platter on pita: "No hummus in the pocket, please, and Broadway show, they defied convention by having a character die in the second act. In their second, Carousel, they had the hero die in the second act except that he wasn't really a hero at all, at least in the traditional sense.

He was, in fact, an out-and-out rotter, a weak ne'er-do-well whose idea of providing for his unborn child was to commit armed robbery. When the robbery went sour, he killed himself rather than be captured. This was a musical? It was indeed not just a musical, but a musical that today, 49 years after it was first produced, remains many critics' all-time favorite. With its no trench tries of any kind, anywhere." The startled smile on the waitress' face suggests this is the first time she has taken an order that precludes further questions. In art as in lunch.

Lewitzky's choreography, which will be performed by the Lewitzky Dance Company 3 ftj Bella Lewitsky will lecture here this week. ff 7 'A 1 1 -i- A "Guys and The revival (with Lewis Stadlen and Lorna Luft on tour) is a comment on 1950 original. Thursday through Saturday at the Annenberg Center as the culmination of a week-long residency here, is as meticulously conceived as her sandwich order beginning with the fat content. Her dances are lean. Everything that needs to be in a dance is there; everything that doesn't need to be there isn't.

Her dances are focused and intense. And so was Lewitzky herself as a performer. I never saw the 78-year-old dance in her heyday, but as late in her career as the early 1970s her articulation was extraordinary. She never threw her arm or leg into the air; she placed it not there, or there, but there. She burned a hole in every molecule of air her body touched.

So definitive and self-aware was her dancing, only a confluence of instinct and experience could account for it. More recently, instinct and experience conspired to put Lewitzky in' See BELLA LEWITZKY on G8 i Review: Television Final season for 'House ofEliott' Li "My Fair The new show, with Melissa Errico, restores some astringency of its source, Shaw's "Pygmalion." The 49-year-old show, an all-time favorite of many critics, has been reimagined. In its new Broadway production the cast includes Jon Marshall Sharp and Sandra Brown. Breaking into Hollywood is made easier by gunfire By Lee Winfrey INQUIRER TV WRITER One of cable television's most admired series, The House of Eliott, begins its third season tonight. It's also the final season, even though its co-creator would prefer that it continue.

The House of Eliott, a period piece of superb design, resumes at 8 on the Arts Entertainment channel. Ten one-hour episodes will be presented this season. The series is about two sisters who run a prominent London fashion house in the 1920s. The co-creators are Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, who created the greatest PBS drama series of all time, Upstairs, Downstairs. Marsh achieved video immortality on that show for her portrayal of maid Rose Buck.

Jean Wadge won a 1993 CableAce Award for costume design for her creations on Eliott, one of the most visually sumptuous series anywhere on TV. Wadge has returned for the 'final season, and her dresses continue to be the definition of sophistication and flair. Also richly deserved, but unaward-ed, is a CableAce for choreographer See CABLE SERIES on G8 I V' sirens and the crack of bullets, but like the prostrated boy all we can see is the reflection of gun flashes and blue emergency lights high on the walls of surrounding buildings. It's a remarkably original image that transforms a cliche confrontation into a moment that reinforces and enriches the theme of Flight of the Innocent. And it proclaims the arrival of yet another spectacular talent in the gangster genre, a field renewed in recent years by the and profitable work of a group of neophyte directors.

Flight of the Innocent, Quentin Taran-tino's Reservoir Dogs, John Singleton's See DIRECTORS on G11 By Desmond Ryan INQUIRER MOVIE CRITIC In Carlo Carlei's blistering debut, Flight of the Innocent, the Italian police finally catch up with the men who kidnapped and murdered a millionaire's son. It is the middle of the night in the empty central piazza of a small town. As the cops screech into the square, veteran moviegoers await the inevitable shootout, with its flying bodies and chattering Uzis borrowed heavily from earlier, and invariably better, gangster movies. Instead, Carlei shoots the gunfire from viewpoint of a 10-year-old boy who has been wounded by the thugs. We hear the 1 u.

By telling "Flight of the Innocent" through the eyes of a boy in peril, played by Manud Colao, Carlo Carlei put an original slant on his gangster saga. V'.