JOFFREY BALLET OF CHICAGO.

JOFFREY BALLET OF CHICAGO AUDITORIUM THEATRE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS OCTOBER 14-24, 1999 REVIEWED BY NANCY G. MOORE In its outstanding fall season, the Joffrey Ballet recovered and improved upon elements that have made it one of the nation's most treasured ballet companies. It boasts thirty-two engaging dancers who all get their chance before the footlights in an imaginative repertory that would provide a remarkable history of European and American ballet if they were staged all in one year. The October 21 performance, dedicated to American ballet pioneer Ruth Page, was a classic Joffrey evening. Spectators were led first into the drawing-room elegance of Suite Saint-Saens (1978) by Gerald Arpino. After an icy sip of Sir Frederick Ashton's Monotones II (1965), they were served a heated Tarantella--the Balanchine ballet originally created in 1964 for Patricia McBride and Edward Villella. Next came a strobe-lit display of astonishing leaps in David Parsons' splendid anti-gravity machine, Caught. Topping these preliminary treats was the Joffrey revival of Frankie & Johnny, first presented in 1938 by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone at the Great Northern Theatre as part of Franklin Roosevelt's WPA Federal Theatre project.

Variously described as a "feminist" or "vernacular" ballet, Frankie & Johnny toys with the stereotype of a streetwalker who kills her cheating lover. There is, of course, another guilty party named Nellie Bly but it is Johnny who gets shot, not Nellie. The Joffrey revival includes the original music by Jerome Moross, the tenement-barroom set, and many of the Paul duPont costumes--purposely drab in keeping with the work's dramatic naturalism. Smoke rises from rooftops as the dance begins and when Frankie and Johnny appear in their relatively bright outfits, they look like figures in an old television show where color has been added. To the credit of Larry Long and Greg Begley, who staged the Joffrey production, this Frankie & Johnny restores the burlesque tone of the original without obscuring its underlying social critique. Especially with Main Wilkins and Willy Shives in the leading roles, and Sam Frankie as the Bartender, attention shifts slightly from the melodrama of the jilted lover to the social forces that drive lovers apart.

As in 1938, the Bartender is a grotesque figure with a large, padded stomach that he heaves up obscenely with hands high on his thighs. Frankie teasingly displays her legs and parades just out of reach, forcing him to retaliate with the truth about Johnny. This news produces a mad scene that the Joffrey production has illuminated as never before. Frankie comes unscrewed like a broken marionette. Her limbs flop mechanically in and out as her own body begins to betray her. The artifice of her life is exposed, along with that of the wealthy male clients who frequent the bleak tenement behind her. Frankie's solo reveals a dark and cynical view of urban America. In contrast, the cartoonish murder scene that follows is quite agreeable. This may be the version of Frankie & Johnny that Ruth Page and Bentley Stone imagined but couldn't fully realize for fear of completely alienating their Depression-era audiences.