She is perhaps the most widely known of the Muses, her name having entered general English as the adjective terpsichorean ("pertaining to dancing").
That the evening is salvaged, in its second half, by the terpsichorean rapture of Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering is peculiarly apt.
Several of the same elements, including the terpsichorean eagle, showed up in the "Salome" production that followed — a puzzling affair that was at once too garish (Salome presses the severed head of John the Baptist against her bare breast) and too vague (there's little sense of who these decadent people really are).
She also told reporters that the Bolshoi management was running, in effect, a terpsichorean escort service.
VPL is a place to clothe your inner ballerina fairy for a less clench-jawed and more terpsichorean winter.
So does Mr. Knechtges's choreography, which makes spirited use of basketball moves, the kinetics of cheerleading and a blissful evocation of ancient terpsichorean signage.
At the show's second performance, several players had yet to get the timing of their wisecracks down pat, while the enthusiastic dancing — some of it done on roller skates — at times seemed more of a scramble than a terpsichorean unity.
As Jimmy's pretentious fiancée, a terpsichorean artiste named Eileen Evergreen, Jennifer Laura Thompson appears to be copying Madeline Kahn's delicious cartoons of prissy heiresses from screwball comedies.
Indeed, despite talk of The Producers displacing The Lion King and running for decades, you wonder what it will be like several casts on, once the comic tornado that is Lane's Max Bialystock has left the show and, with him, Broderick's quaveringly sung but likeable Leopold Bloom, the accountant blessed with Astaire-like terpsichorean gifts.
In this area, his virtuosity is on the level of a Paganini, an Art Tatum, but it is so much more multifarious, combining the clowning of a Grock or a Grimaldi with the feather-light terpsichorean skills of an Astaire and the acting abilities of a Garbo or an Olivier.
As anyone who remembers the trouser-endangering terpsichorean skills he displayed in his youth will already be aware, if there's one thing Prince knows how to do, it's splits.
