Frankie and Johnny in Chicago and Some Problems of Attribution
Chicago has long had strong theatre and music traditions, and at times has been an important dance city, even if for somewhat mysterious reasons it has never had a resident ballet company to equal the Chicago Symphony, the opera, or the newer Steppenwolf theatre company. Certainly there have been many distinguished teachers there, from Adolph Bolm, Laurent Novikoff, Andreas Pavley, and Serge Oukrainsky through Edna McRae, Berenice Holmes, Bentley Stone, and Walter Camryn to Maria Tallchief. The one important ballet to be created in Chicago, however, came out of a heady mix of the Depression, the WPA Federal Theatre Project, local artistic politics, and two of Chicago's most durable dance figures, Ruth Page and Bentley Stone. The subject was as American as Carl Sandburg, although rather less respectable, being based on the song about which Sandburg remarked, "If America has a classical gutter song, it is the one that tells of Frankie and her man."' The story of the creation of this ballet also raises a number of interesting points in attribution as part of the complex workings of collaboration in dance, especially apportioning the credits for choreography and design. Frankie and Johnny was first shown on a program presented by the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration