While I had been prepared for the departure from the company of J. Alden Talbot, I was saddened, nevertheless, when he left. Lucia Chase and the scene designer, Oliver Smith, became joint managing directors, with the result that there was precious little management and even less direction. We played a summer season in California, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, in conjunction with the City’s Art Commission, and at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. In Hollywood we rehearsed some of the new works to be given in New York in the autumn. They were five in number, and unequal both in quality and appeal. Only one was a real success. The five works were by an equal number of choreographers: Simon Semenoff, Michael Kidd, John Taras, Jerome Robbins, and Adolph Bolm. Semenoff’s work, _Gift of the Magi_, was an attempt to make a ballet out of O. Henry’s little short story of the same title, a touching tale of the pathos of a young married couple with taste and no money. For the ballet, young Lukas Foss wrote a workmanlike score, and Raoul Péne du Bois supplied a great deal of scenery, difficult to manipulate. Nora Kaye and John Kriza, as the young lovers, gave it a sweetness of characterization. But, despite scenery, costumes, properties, and sweet characterization, there was no real choreography, and the work soon left the repertoire. Michael Kidd’s first choreographic attempt for Ballet Theatre, and his first full-scale work as a matter of fact, was a theatre piece. A musical comedy type of work, it never seemed really to belong in a ballet repertoire. Kidd called it _On Stage!_ For it Norman dello Joio provided a workable and efficient score, and Oliver Smith designed a back-stage scene that looked like back-stage. The costumes were designed by Alvin Colt. Another first choreographic effort was young John Taras’s _Graziana_, for which I paid the costs. Here was no attempt to ape the Broadway musical comedy theatre. It was a straightforward, fresh, classical piece. Taras had set the work to a Violin Concerto by Mozart. He used a concise group of dancers, seventeen all told, four of whom were soloists. There was no story, simply dancing with no excuses, no apologies, no straining for “novelty,” tricks, stunts, or gags. It was, in effect, ballet, and the public liked it. Just what the title meant I never knew. My guess is that Taras had to call it something, and _Graziana_ was better than Number One.