ABSTRACT
The art movement, which invaded the revue field in the Greenwich Village Follies and the Joseph Urban décors for the Ziegfeld Follies, was also expensively manifest in several pretentious and serious-minded exotic spectacles. F. Ray Comstock and Morris Gest made a contribution in the way of Oriental pageantry in Aphrodite, which occupied the Century Theatre for 148 performances in 1919-20. Henri Février, composer of Monna Vanna, an opera that gave Mary Garden one of her most scarlet roles, wrote part of the music, along with Anselm Goetzl. Michel Fokine devised the choreography, and Léon Bakst had a hand in designing the costumes. A “drama of profane love,” Aphrodite displayed a gorgeous exterior, but was hollow inside. It reached its climax in a bacchanalian ballet, to Moussorgsky music, danced on a floor of rose leaves. Mecca (1920), staged by the same producers shortly after the closing of Aphrodite, had even less impressive music by Percy Fletcher, but the touch of Fokine and Bakst was again in evidence. Considered the most stunning extravaganza of its time, Mecca exploited Egypt and the Arabian Nights terrain. As a “blaze of color,” nothing like it had been seen on the American stage since Scheherazade.
