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More Broadway: Hamilton

4/11/2016

Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton

In a great stroke of luck, some very generous friends took me to see Broadway’s juggernaut Hamilton this past Saturday night. Hamilton fever has been raging for quite some time in NYC, and the show is completely sold out for the foreseeable future. The show’s website kindly explains that there is absolutely no way to purchase tickets, it can only suggest the daily lottery. After failing at the lottery on and off for months, I figured I was just going to miss the boat on this one. So, when I got the serendipitous offer to actually go I wondered if the show would be able to deliver on all its hype and exclusivity. In short, it’s terrific.

From the opening number—a tight, energetic ensemble piece which deftly covers lots of expository ground, introduces the cast, and summarily presents the main conflicts in Alexander Hamilton’s life—to Eliza Hamilton’s quiet, grief-stricken denouement, I knew I was watching the work of a master. That would be Lin-Manuel Miranda, who conceived of the musical, wrote the book and lyrics, composed the music, and also plays the title role. I never saw In the Heights, his earlier Broadway hit, but I have been intrigued every time I have run across other facets of his talent: his impassioned NY Times op-ed about Puerto Rican poverty, his heartfelt Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Rita Moreno, his impressive free-style rapping on the late night talk circuit, and his bouncy music for the latest Star Wars’ revamped cantina scene.

Miranda’s influences in Hamilton are myriad, yet the synthesis of his disparate ideas and genres is seamless. Hamilton recasts the founding fathers as swaggering minorities engaged in epic, policy-focused rap battles. But then the music also ranges to almost calypso at times, with smooth R&B accents for Aaron Burr and sappy Brit-pop for the whiny King George. But even with all these competing ideas and energies, the show reminded me most of a completely different work in a completely different genre: the

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An American in Paris

3/16/2016

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Robbie Fairchild and Leanne Cope, photo by Matthew Murphy

I finally made it to see An American in Paris on Broadway last week, right before my NYCB colleague Robbie Fairchild ended his Tony-nominated run in the lead role of Jerry Mulligan. I’m afraid I can’t claim much objectivity where this production is concerned—I’ve danced with Robbie often, I’m friendly with his co-star Leanne Cope, and I’ve known the show’s director/choreographer Christopher Wheeldon since I was 15 years old (I was also a beatnik in the original cast of his An American in Paris ballet in 2005)—but with that partiality established, I thought I’d share some of my impressions from the performance anyway.

Overall I had a wonderful time at the show, and I would recommend it to anyone. It made me so happy to watch Robbie, who clearly was having a ball. I fully expected him to be good, from years of watching him excel in Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story Suite and George Balanchine’s Who Cares?, and he did not disappoint. He looked like he was born to be up there, and his all-American look was perfectly suited the part of the yankee in Paree. Robbie is taking a breather from Broadway at the moment, but I suspect he’ll find his way back to The Great White Way someday.

Leanne Cope danced the role of Lise Dassin, his love interest, and I was completely blown away by her too. She has a luminous face with large, doll-like eyes and beautifully shaped legs and feet. Her British lilt was replaced with a convincing French accent, even in song, and her voice rang out crystal clear in “The Man I Love.” In the climactic ballet sequence towards the end of the show she was as confidently sexy as she was shyly sweet in her earlier scenes, an impressive display of range. She had the miserable task of switching back and forth between character heels and pointe shoes between nearly every scene, and I don’t know how she managed to do it so quickly and so often!

Robbie and Leanne’s balletic dream pas de deux was the highlight of the performance. That an intimate ballet number was the capstone in a big production (competing with splashy ensemble tap numbers, etc.) is a testament to Chris’s skill in partnering choreography, as well to the

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PNB (and Pite!!!)

2/27/2016

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Emergence, photo by Angela Sterling

Last night I caught the second program offered by the Pacific Northwest Ballet at City Center this week. It was a contemporary bill anchored by William Forsythe’s 1996 classic The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, which was made for Ballet Frankfurt and joined PNB's rep last year. Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt was the evening’s common denominator, for David Dawson and Crystal Pite, the other choreographers represented on the program, both danced there under his directorship.

I must first write about the closing piece on the program, Crystal Pite’s Emergence, because it was one of the best ballets I’ve seen in a while and I am really excited about it. Emergence, Pite explains in some of the most thought-provoking and cogent program notes I’ve come across, is about the parallels between the complex hierarchies of the ballet world and species like bees and ants in the natural world. Pite cites semiotician Steven Johnson and biologist Thomas D. Seeley, but Emergence made me think most of the works of myrmecologist E.O. Wilson. Wilson is one of my favorite authors, and his application of ant behavior to the understanding of human civilization is fascinating. Pite seemed to me to be working some of his theories out onstage. Emergence was also evocative of Jerome Robbins’s The Cage, about a tribe of matriarchal insects who eat their mates after copulation. It is a tremendous work, and if you had told me that someone was making another bug ballet I would have said good luck; but Emergence was as compelling as The Cage without feeling at all derivative.

Emergence, which was choreographed for National Ballet of Canada in 2009 (PNB acquired it 2013), opens similarly to The Cage with a woman—a wonderful Rachel Foster—writhing spasmodically in a spotlight on an otherwise dark stage. She is attended by Joshua Grant, also excellent, who peels her off of the floor. The two perform a twitchy, eerie pas de deux before disappearing through a hole in the center of the backdrop. The scenery, by Jay Gower Taylor, resembled a hive or a nest, and the central hole from which dancers continually emerged or retreated was a long tube with honeycomb lights at its core.

A swarm of men in black pants with tattooed backs and black headdresses then floods the stage and commences pulsating, sharp movements to the distorted, mechanical score by Owen Belton. With their faces covered in black netting they indeed resembled bees, but the headgear also

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TROY'S GUEST POST: The Mozartiana Gigue

2/5/2016

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Anthony Huxley in the Gigue, photo by Paul Kolnik

When we dancers learn roles, any part really, there are steps, musicality, patterns, formations, style, and often character to master. Last night, I had the opportunity to debut in the special role of the Gigue in George Balanchine’s Mozartiana, set to Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 4. A little bit of backstory: Balanchine choreographed this ballet in 1981, less than two years before he died. Many consider it to be his last masterpiece. Fascinatingly enough, Balanchine first choreographed a ballet to the Mozartiana music in 1933 for his short-lived company Les Ballets 1933, which seems to have only been performed for a few years following. (It had its American premiere in 1935, only a few months after Serenade.) This is especially fascinating to me, because that’s nearly fifty years! No tapes, no videos, no Vimeo. We know the Gigue originally had multiple dancers in it, but I’ve never seen any footage—if it exists—of any elements from this production. Was it completely different, or did certain things stick with him for most of his life? Balanchine was my age when he first choreographed to this music. He had really only just begun his choreographic career in America. Did he know what was in store for him? I can barely wonder what I’ll be doing in 50 years.

But back to the Gigue as we know it today: you run out to center stage, the conductor makes eye contact with you and beats one measure for nothing with her baton, two triplet beats of 6/8, and it begins simply enough with three poses on the one beat of each triplet. A second voice enters and you begin dancing to each beat. The third voice joins and the syncopation begins, one two one two one two one two three one, before you join back up to the swing of the triplets for a nice balancé step. Then before you know it, you’re flying around the stage in a vaudevillian, topsy-turvy step,

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JARED'S GUEST POST: Liebeslieder Part II

1/28/2016

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Jared and Wendy Whelan, photo by Paul Kolnik

Liebeslieder: Public/Private

As the curtain closes on the first section of Liebeslieder and the ballerinas rush away backstage, the ballet shifts from a public experience to a private one. It reminds me of that point in the television show Downton Abbey when, after dinner, the women disappear to another room and the men are left to drink and smoke cigars at the table. But instead of cigars and brandy, the men in Liebeslieder only take off their gloves, possibly grab an Altoid from the ready supply kept at the stage manager's desk, and use a tissue to dab the sweat off of our brows. We then reconvene onstage to talk, and to wait for our ballerinas.

The ballerinas, meanwhile, are working much harder. They rush to their dressing rooms, take off their gloves and shoes, change dresses, and hastily put on pointe shoes. Careful preparation of the pointe shoed-foot is a ritual repeated many times daily in a ballerina's life, but during this pause they have to wrap the paper towel around their toes, shove their foot in, and tie the ribbons as fast as they can because we're all waiting for them. It’s always a contest with the stage manager as the judge: "who will come back to the stage ready to dance first?"

After the last ballerina rushes to place, the curtain rises but the mood is changed. We see the couples in their same starting positions as in the opening of the first section, but the lights are dimmer, and the women are now wearing romantic-length chiffon tutus whose layers of tulle reach to mid-calf, and the aforesaid pointe shoes. Again we start dancing in a circle and lifting the women, but almost immediately Balanchine has the ballerinas weaving away from their partners and back again. You get a sense that this is a more tempestuous world, where the couples relate to one another and themselves in a more unguarded manner. Finally each ballerina starts to run offstage, her original partner catches up with her and escorts her off, and one couple is left onstage to dance a pas de deux.

While the pas de deux in the first half are danced in front of the rest of the cast, in the second half each couple’s pas de deux is danced alone onstage. This, in addition to the pointe shoes and exposed legs of the ballerinas, conveys a sense that the couples are finally able to express their true feelings—which were perhaps only alluded to in the first section. So instead of polite embraces and distanced waltz positions (one of the favorite corrections in the first section that we always receive is to hold the girl as far away from us as we can), the couples give each other full

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More Broadway: Hamilton

An American in Paris

PNB (and Pite!!!)

TROY'S GUEST POST: The Mozartiana Gigue

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