THE NEW YORK STATE THEATER IS ONE BLOCK FROM BROADWAY

Double Feature
New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
New York, New York
May 17 and 18, 2008

By Michael Popkin
copyright 2008 Michael Popkin

NYCB is dancing Susan Stroman's Double Feature again this week; they danced it last winter too, along with Peter Martins' Thou Swell and both Christopher Wheeldon's Carousel and An American in Paris.  All of these ballets belong together; their mutual orientation towards Broadway unites them.  It's a City Ballet tradition the company tells us:  Balanchine and Robbins worked there; and anyway it's a natural place to look for venacular material in New York.

The results demonstrate both the defects and the advantages of this approach.  The defect is that Broadway itself lacks inspiration at the moment.  Look up and down Broadway in recent years and you see little new that's solid; instead it's juvenile items like The Lion King; pabulum like Hair Spray; or at best safe revivals of old hits like A Chorus Line or South Pacific (the latter is being brilliantly revived right now at the Vivian Beaumont Theater).  You're not going to find the seeds of serious art here, if that's what you're looking for, but instead a thin, slick look; at best a revival of something older, which you might also have inferred from the fact that Wheeldon, in search of Broadway material, had to draw on two such old war horses; while Martins had recourse to a suite of Richard Rogers' songs.

But Double Feature reflects to a degree the positive qualities associated with this.  It's professionally put together and good entertainment; but most of all it's a successful platform for some strong dancing by City Ballet.  Damian Woetzel continues to give inspired performances in his role as the matinee idol Billy Randolph in The Blue Necklace (the first of the two parts of Stroman's program), a role where I suspect Stroman is slyly playing off of, even parodying, Woetzel's stage personality and dance style; he's always been one to lay it on a little thick when the spirit moves him.  Sara Mearns, taking over Maria Kowroski's role in the same ballet this week, looks if anything even better in it than Kowroski did (though Mearns' costume in the opening scene is surely the most unflattering thing on her that she's ever been asked to wear on the stage).  And while much of the choreography for Ashley Bouder as Mabel (the lost child) is formulaic, even trite - it's interesting to see her reprise what was a seminal role for her.  Back in 2004, Stroman actually choreographed Mabel on Janie Taylor; but when Taylor injured herself (actually she's never danced the role) Bouder went into it at the last moment and gave the series of performances that more than any other brought her to the attention of the general public beyond the small circle of ballet aficianados who already knew her as a powerhouse.  It was her "Star is Born" moment and not least of all because it displayed her serious side.  Bouder's got gravity - a sense that she knows how to "conceive of life as tragedy" (in Yeats' words) - and she's often at her best when she forgets to smile.

The use of super-titles to tell the story in Double Feature - the silent movie device that is Stroman's central structural idea in the ballet (she uses projections showing brief quotations above the action either to set the scene or to provide dialogue) - is actually quite interesting because the use of titles in the silent movies served the same purpose as mime did in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century ballet.  Ballet melodramas and the early silent movies have common historical roots.  There are even direct analogies for ballets like The Blue Necklace, where the plot revolves around a lost baby and a final scene where the child is recognized by her mother because of a distinctive blue necklace, in 1840s ballets like La Gipsy (a Fanny Elssler vehicle) where a lost child with a scar on her arm (Elssler) was saved from death when her father recognized the scar.  It's an old melodramatic device.  In ballets like La Gipsy the dialogue was mimed; in the early silent movies written titles were employed.  By using titles here on the ballet stage, Stroman merely reconnects the dots and lets the audience read what it would otherewise have a hard time understanding in the traditional mime language.

But it's Makin Whoopee, the second half of Stroman's program, based on the Buster Keaton movie Seven Chances, that's an even greater treat in this production.  The plot of the man who must get married by seven o'clock on his birthday in order to inherit seven million dollars flows seamlessly through a compact series of scenes; you can't get the score of Walter Donaldson songs out of your head; the dancing is admirably assimilated in the narrative; and you leave the theater charmed, and with an appreciation for Stroman's mastery of staging, narrative, and dramatic effects.  Her use of the ballet vocabulary is more fluent here than in The Blue Necklace.  Tom Gold continues to give the performances of his career in the leading role; and all of the vaudevillian touches - including the trained dog - go off without a hitch.

Copyright 2008 by Michael Popkin
Photo:  Tom Gold in Makin' Whoopee by Paul Kolnik

Comments

[Flo]

Actually Taylor did perform "The Blue Necklace." See Dance View Times 2/28/05, New Cast by Leigh W.

[bedroom furniture]

great man :D