New York City Ballet.

NEW YORK CITY BALLET 

NEW YORK STATE THEATER, LINCOLN CENTER NEW YORK, NY NOV 25, 2003-FEB 29, 2004

From its opening night winter gala onwards, through the customary Nutcracker, to the closing two week bombardment of The Sleeping Beauty, New York City Ballet's winter season was hardly business as usual. The entire 2003/04 season is to be dedicated to the centenary of the company's founder. George Balanchine, born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on January 22, 1904, with this first segment dealing with Balanchine's origins and roots.

The company presented all three of the full-evening Tchaikovsky classics, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker, plus Coppelia and a fresh revival of Harlequinade, together with a selection of early Balanchine, and even an ill-judged staging of Michel Fokine's Chopiniana. However, the two major events of this winter season were the world premiere of Susan Stroman's full-evening work Double Feature, and a redesigned staging of Balanchine's 1967 masterpiece Jewels.

Stroman's piece is actually two contrasted ballets combined into one seamless entertainment, and it has all the quality and look of a major bit, Broadway-style, that pays tribute to Balancbine's own Broadway roots. Stroman found her inspiration in silent movies, instinctively noting the commonality of expressive technique between the silent actors and the silent dancers. Then she went to the style of American pop music that Balanchine himself appreciated, and, together with her fellow librettist and music arranger Glen Kelly, devised two extraordinarily neat stories.

The first, "The Blue Necklace," is a wildly comic melodrama set to Irving Berlin, a sort of tinseltown Cinderella story, featuring a betrayed mother, an abandoned baby, a wicked stepmother, and, finally, a silver-screen prince. The second, "Makin' Whoopee!," has Walter Donaldson music and is based on the play "Seven Chances," in which a meek Buster Keaton-like hero has to gel married in 24 hours in order to inherit millions.

Balanchine believed--it was his "no mothers-in-law" principle--that only the simplest of stories are suitable for dance, and neither "The Blue Necklace" nor "Makin' Whoopee!" have simple stories. But Stroman and Kelly, taking up the example of the silent movies, very adroitly bring back those old title cards that used to tell in jerky sequence the onrush of the plot The same movie concept is pursued by Robin Wagner's sets, William Ivey Long's costumes, and Mark Stanley's lighting, which made the staging wonderfully stylish in black and white and various shades of gray.

Although Stroman did an earlier short piece for City Ballet, Double Feature marks the first time she has been given a complete company of sixty, and she just lets them fly. Although her use of classical technique tends toward the classroom simplistic, and her original invention is meager, there is a craftsmanship about her choreography, and it uses the superb dancers with a devil-may-dazzle daring that few classicists would risk. And it pays off. Indeed the dancers--all but swept along by the music vibrantly orchestrated by Doug Besterman and Danny Troob and idiomatically conducted by Andrea Quinn--dance with a carefree zest unusual on the ballet stage.

The dancers were all terrific, with outstanding performances coming from a piquant Ashley Bouder as the Cinderella girl and a coruscating Damian Woetzel as her Hollywood prince in the first section, and Tom Gold, with masterly comic timing, as the dumb-luck hero and a perfectly perfect Alexandra Ansanelli as his prim sweetheart in the second. But everyone was so good--Kyra Nichols, Maria Kowroski, Megan Fairchild, Jason Fowler, Albert Evans, Sean Suozzi, and Arch Higgins all found a place in Stroman's sun, as did a real live Boston terrier and two little girls from the School of American Ballet, Isabella Tobias as the mean stepsister, and an astonishingly accomplished Tara Sorine as the infant Cinderella-girl.

Nearly ferry years ago, George Balanchine nave his New York City Ballet and the world a new three-act ballet, Jewels. There was no story just wonderful dancing, for "Emeralds" to the music of Faure, for "Rubies" to a jazzy Stravinsky, and for "Diamonds" to the chandelier blaze of Tchaikovsky. It triumphed then and triumphed again this season when it reappeared for the first time since 1999. It now has been given three new and spiffily magnificent settings by the original designer, Peter Harvey, each cheered by the first-night audience.

So the new production looks marvelous, but the ballet's genius remains in its dance variety--three Fantasticated, varied, yet austerely assured demonstrations of the jewel-like riches of classic ballet's basic vocabulary. Here we had Kowroski, new to her role, staunchly partnered by Philip Neal, glittering magnificently in "Diamonds," Miranda Weese and Jenifer Ringer, also a newcomer to the work, silkily elusive in "Emeralds," and the jauntily assertive Woetzel in "Rubies," which also boasted terrific role debuts from Ansanelli and the young Teresa Reichlen. Was this cast the match of that first all-star line-up from back in 1967? Different, certainly, but, on balance, certainly as good. This was City Ballet at its grandest. And alter native casts Stephen Hanna and the injury-plagued Robert Tewsley in debuts in "Emeralds," Peter Boal superbly couth in "Rubies," and Charles Askegard gallantly partnering a somewhat shaky Kistler in "Diamonds"--by and large kept up the exceptional work.

The most splashy revivals were Peter Martins' own staging of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. Swan Lake, with choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, had been around for only eighteen years when Balanchine joined the Imperial Ballet School in 1913. Of course that production, the acme of ballet romanticism, was a very far remove choreographically, scenically, and even esthetically from the Martins version. Unusually long, although cast in only two acts, this staging, first seen five years ago, has oddly and inappropriately abstract settings (designed by the Dane Per Kirkeby), and retains hardly any of the original choreography. Its new replacement proves coldly inferior. The company danced it without much period style or feeling--this is not nearly so effective as City Ballet's other grand Russian classic, The Sleeping Beauty.

This, Martins has staged in a version close to the original 1890 choreography by Petipa. The three intermissions of the original have been reduced to one, and there have been a few, very few in fact, musical cuts. City Ballet had not given The Sleeping Beauty for four years, and opened the run with a case led by Ringer and Neal as Aurora and the Prince who wakes her from her long sleep. City Ballet danced it very well, although their customary speed--so essential for Balanchine--could be moderated for the leisurely eloquence this ballet demands. Here, speed too much resembles baste.

The best performances came from Ringer as a charming, unaffected, almost unaccentuated Aurora, Kowroski as a gracious Lilac Fairy, and a superbly dashing and stylish De Luz as the Bluebird--excellent earlier as both Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Frantz in Coppelia--and who was matched at a later performance by tire powerfully elegant Adam Hendrickson. It is interesting to note how many good men City Ballet is nowadays attracting.

An expanded version of this review is on www.dancemagazine.com.