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Black Tuesday Darker on WednesdayAmerican Ballet Theatre
Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.
Opening night (Wednesday April 11, 2001)
Theme and Variations, Sleeping Beauty Act III and
Paul Taylor's Black Tuesday
by Alexandra Tomalonis
A cast change, a few more (or less) lights, and dancer confidence made Paul Taylor's new Black Tuesday seem a deeper, richer work at its second airing. Very dim lighting at the opening hid the men sleeping "Under the Arches" and made their initial slither into the light much more creepy; the final scene, where the dancers thrust hands out of darkness and into individual spotlights at the end of "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?", added a needed exclamation point to the ballet. It's not that darker is necessarily better, but in this instance, where Taylor is probing the underbelly of Depression Era popular songs, it certainly doesn't hurt.
One major cast change gave the ballet a better balance. On opening night, except for Ethan Stiefel, the dancers were relatively inexperienced performers, and although they threw themselves into the work and danced it with energy to burn, there wasn't very much wattage. Stiefel's long, final wail of a solo seemed to come out of nowhere, following a series of cute vignettes. Last night, Giuseppe Picone, in the "Are You Making Any Money?" was anti-hero to Stiefel's hero, a happy pimp who loved his underworld life and could survive anything, find money anywhere. Picone represents the era's winner; Stiefel, dancing for his life against a sky full of twinkling stars, the loser. In the Depression, Everyman was a loser.
Generally, the dancers are settling into the ballet, and it seemed more taut last night because of this. "(I Went Hunting) and the Big Bad Wolf was Dead" had felt about three stanzas too long on opening night. On Wednesday, Marian Butler repeated her role as the girl who gets to play "bang bang" with a finger gun, and seemed so much more confident that she pulled the number together. Like most ballets, Black Tuesday is improved by star performances and this one, where ghosts of old movies linger at the edges, cries out for them. If there were stronger personalities elsewhere--a woman with more perfume in the "Boulevards of Dreams" sequence, for example--the ballet might make its points more clearly. By the time Black Tuesday gets to New York, however, the kinks should be out and ABT will have a fine --and much needed--new addition to its repertory.
In comparison to the new Taylor, Theme and Variations and, especially, Sleeping Beauty Act III are looking unloved. Gillian Murphy is the company's Girl Next Likely, and her Theme was beautifully danced: crisp and strong and light. She's still very young, and the pas de deux (with Jose Manuel Carreno) is, as yet, emotionally external. Carreno, one of the company's finest dancers, wasn't quite at his best last night.
Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Belotserkovsky led Sleeping Beauty with a lot of style, but the performance generally was slack. It's really just the third act, plopped down as though everyone had seen what preceded it, not restaged into a proper one-act "Aurora's Wedding." There's no court; the King and Queen walk in unattended. A few courtiers sit or stand at attention during the divertissement, but there isn't the slightest hint that this is a wedding or that anyone is happy that a dynasty has been saved. Yan Chen and Joaquin de uz--another mismatched couple; she's all long lines and he's a short, sturdy jumper --danced well in the Blue Bird divertissement. Michele Wiles, an extremely promising young dancer, was gorgeous as the Diamond Fairy. Wiles has matured a lot in the last year. She seems totally at ease with herself -- her height, her place on stage -- and she danced beautifully.
The program repeats tonight; the company will dance four peformances of Giselle Friday through Sunday afternoon.