Outdoor Sensation

Last week Nijinsky was in a Swiss insane asylum, Ida Rubinstein was aging in Paris, Leon Bakst was dead, but Michel Fokine was in Manhattan watching another Scheherazade which he had produced on ten days notice. Fokine's Scheherazade was the indoor sensation of Paris in 1910 and the outdoor sensation of New York in 1934. Jammed to capacity, Lewisohn Stadium seated 15,000, gave standing room to 2,000. Police reserves were called to handle a crowd of 10,000 who jostled outside the gates, were unable to get in. Quick to seize the advantages of an un suspected popularity, the Stadium Concerts management announced a return engagement of Fokine dancers.

Prize performer at the Stadium was a onetime Fokine pupil named Albertina Vitak. She danced "Zobeide," the part in Scheherazade originally written for Ida Rubinstein. Rubinstein, never a great dancer, was never able to dance the whole ballet. Olive-skinned Albertina Vitak with smooth ease cringed, skipped, loved, pleaded from the first to the final bar.

Born of Czech parents in Chicago 27 years ago, she took her first dancing lesson when she was 12. She danced in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922, in This Year of Grace (1928). Two months of Hollywood under harddriving, gum-chewing Albertina Rasch were followed by a two-year break down. She is married to William R. Kaelin who is in the treasurer's office of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. She hates noise and night clubs, practices her dances an hour a day even when she has no job.

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