Perhaps I’m nit-picking, but this is the typographical equivalent of sloppily tied ribbons on a dancer’s toe shoes, or unfinished seams on her tutu. It’s not fatal, but it’s sloppy, and it’s wrong. It’s obvious someone banged out these texts on a computer, much as I’m typing now. While it’s been somewhat acceptable to leave out proper quotation marks in emails or even Web pages, in signage it’s just sloppy, especially when meant to evoke an era when such a mistake was unthinkable. It’s even painfully easy to fix; a minute’s work in any text editor would suffice, or there are many writing programs smart enough to automatically fix quotation marks.

Why am I carrying on so about this? In a previous life I was a desktop publisher, and I still notice typography. As City Ballet just spent more money than I’d care to contemplate getting a new logo that’s based entirely on typography, you’d think someone there would notice, too. Lincoln Kirstein would’ve. But I wouldn’t go on so about this admittedly fine point if it weren’t emblematic of the close-but-no-cigar Double Feature. Just as the signage undercuts itself through ignorance of typography, the ballet, despite its tremendous investment of artistic and creative capital, undercuts itself through a misunderstanding of what made silents so special.

It’s true that both silent movies and ballet are, well, silent. But otherwise, they’re utterly different languages. Though Stroman’s translation is in places brilliant, the conceit becomes frayed and thin well before the last curtain. The pacing and scale of ballet is diametrically opposed to the silents,’ and in too many places Double Feature plods when it needs to sing.

Thanks to the celluloid miracle of editing, silent-film editors were masters of time and space, and developed a language of quick-paced exposition and rapid-fire shifts of viewpoint. Stroman evokes this at the beginning of The Blue Necklace, with its marvelous dancing chorines in Louise Books wigs high-kicking to “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” She shifts our viewpoint giddily from the house to backstage in a transition no less magical for its simplicity. Later, she has that ballet’s heroine change from a child to a young adult in the blink of an eye (or twitch of a feather duster). But despite these triumphs, Double Feature gets bogged down in exposition, sometimes in nothing more than the time and space needed to move dancers from place to place. It’s not so much that it actually takes longer to tell its stories than real double feature, but that it feels longer. Silents also brought their viewers close to their stars in a way impossible, I think, to be recreated onstage. I can’t imagine how Stroman might’ve made an on-stage analog for the powerful intimacy and economy of silent-movie acting. Instead she creates a hybrid, silent, danced vaudeville.

That’s not to say Double Feature isn’t plenty entertaining. It is. William Ivey Long’s designs and costumes are a perfect blend of Twenties-style realism and ballerina fantasies. Glen Kelley’s arrangements of familiar tunes by Irving Berlin and Walter Donaldson are perfectly lush and sentimental. Stroman’s made some brilliantly charming and inventive choreography and some meaty, melodramatic roles which City Ballet’s dancers play for all they’re worth, yielding performances that are both unforgettable and not-to-be-missed. In The Blue Necklace, Ashley Bouder, Megan Fairchild and particularly Damian Woetzel bring down the house, as do Tiler Peck and Tom Gold in Makin’ Whopee. Oh, and a dog. Stroman creates one coup du theatre after another, and, while some have complained of her limited fluency with ballet, I couldn’t care less. Her most wonderful bits practically ignore technique. They don’t need it. Indeed, I enjoyed parts of my second viewing of Double Feature tremendously, but that was because, having seen it before, I didn’t expect it to be any better than it was, and I could enjoy the fun parts without dwelling too much on the ballet’s shortcomings.
 

Maria Kowroski and Ashley Bouder in The Blue Necklace
© Paul Kolnik

The Blue Necklace is the first feature. It’s a silly, hyperbolic tale of Maud (Ashley Bouder), the child given up at birth by the movie star Dorothy Brooks (Maria Kowroski), and raised by a social climber, Mrs. Griffith (Savannah Lowery) who tries foist off her own daughter, Florence (Megan Fairchild) as Brooks’ daughter instead of Maud, by virtue of the eponymous necklace left with Maud by Brooks. Also moving the plot along is the matinee idol Billy Randolph (Damian Woetzel). As previously mentioned, The Blue Necklace starts with that wonderful chorus line. Stroman also stages a street scene replete with dancing newsboys, flash-wielding reports and sundry cityfolk with a fluency that puts Christopher Wheeldon’s similar endeavors in An American in Paris to shame. There’s also Bouder’s first appearance, in which Skyla Shreter, an SAB student playing the young Maud vanishes with her feather-duster behind a couch and Bouder, the older Maud, pops up like a jack-in-the-box, in a frenzy of happy, allegro housecleaning. Later, at a charity ball thrown by Brooks, Woetzel makes the grandest of grand entrances, and wows the partygoers with a marvelous solo that’s about Rudolph’s grace and star-power. Much of the time, Woetzel is dashing about the stage with consummate wit and attitude, and the solo’s not so much about tricky steps as it is about Woetzel’s ability to beautifully inhabit a cutaway tuxedo and incarnate the word dashing.

Before she’s found out as an imposter, Florence dances a painful duet with Griffith which is all about the fact that Florence can’t dance a step. It’s amusing casting against type for the virtuoso Fairchild, and she plays the role to the hilt, standing with her feet rooted to the floor in a duet with the flummoxed Griffith, as Woetzel tries gallantly to overlook Fairchild’s feet of lead. Later, when Bouder’s Maud is revealed to really be Brooks’ daughter, they have a grandly romantic duet together, ending with Woetzel kneeling to kiss Bouder’s hand in a quote from Balanchine’s Diamonds. Debuting as the wicked Mrs. Griffith, Lowery was appropriately tough and avaricious, and more evil than Kyra Nichol’s original performance. The Blue Necklace ends with Kowroski and Bouder in one of ballet’s rare mother-daughter duets. If this happy-ever-after ending took its time in arriving, for both the characters and audience, it was still better late than never.

Makin’ Whoopee, the second “feature,” starts with great promise, as Jimmy Shannon (Tom Gold) woos Anne Windsor (Tiler Peck, another debut), around a cycle of seasons, each time losing his nerve before he can pop the question. Peck is a tremendous actress, and brings this particular cardboard-cutout role a surprising depth. Gold, for his part, is all comic oblivion and slack-jawed pratfalls, a far cry from the “Great Stone Face” of Buster Keaton, who made this same story into a famous silent comedy. Overkill is Makin’ Whoopee’s theme, as it leaves few lilies ungilded as when Gold must compete with an overly affectionate trained dog, along with Peck. The scenes with Shannon and his business associates (Amar Ramasar and Robert Fairchild) become quickly tiresome as they fret about their potential financial ruin, then greet with glee their potential salvation in the form of Shannon’s inheritance, which stipulates he must marry by seven pm that day. Of course Shannon and Windsor become the happy couple, but not before he offends her and finds himself looking for a bride off the streets, with predictably grim results. Noteworthy among his many failures are Irene (Rachel Piskin), a perky nymphette who’s happy to be married until she’s carted off by her mother, and the sultry, seductive Flossy (Teresa Reichlen), whose flirtation with Gold ends in a punch from her boyfriend.

When Shannon’s story hits the newspapers, he’s deluged in a flood of would-be brides, and, as they say, hijinks occur. It seems like half City Ballet’s corps, both male and female, chases Gold from wing to wing and back again, with some obligatory references to Swan Lake along the way. It’s alternately exciting and exhausting, and by the time Peck and Gold are united, a bit numbing. What should be a delicate romantic bon-bon becomes a quarter-pounder with fries. Despite their need for tighter pacing, each half of Double Feature stands well enough on its own, and I left wondering if it would be technically feasible to present The Blue Necklace on its own, as a sort of Single Feature. Then I wondered what ballets one could possibly pair with it (or Makin’ Woopee), and gave up. For better or worse, this is a package deal.

Unless you’ve been hibernating for the past few years, you know that Susan Stroman is the premiere dance/theater choreographer of the day, and justifiably so. With few exceptions, everything she touches turns to gold. She has a string of Broadway hits to her credit, not the least of which is “The Producers,” and her all-dance “contact” played to sold out houses and won several Tony Awards.  But to my knowledge she has not been known as a choreographer for a ballet company. She is now.

“Double Feature”, a pair of pieces on the same theme that she created for New York City Ballet last year (but which I was unable to see until its presentation this season) is a wonderful escape – just like the old-time “double feature” movie presentations that she uses as the theme around which her “double feature” ballets are constructed. No matter that there is little choreographically inventive or exciting about either piece – that’s not the point. And no matter that she may be criticized for focusing more on style than on substance -that’s not the point either. Stroman is a master of concept and execution. She creates and crafts entertainments. And her works, though more audience-accessible than some, are no less works of art.

In brief, “Double Feature” tells two stories in the style of grade-B silent movies. With few exceptions, everything is in black and white or varying shades of grey. A screen placed behind the action provides intermittent written commentary to explain or propel the action forward, just as in silent movies. And the musical accompaniment sounds like the kind of music that might have accompanied silent films (except the arrangements are infinitely richer and more evocative than one would have seen at a silent movie).

The first piece, titled “The Blue Necklace”, is a reinvention of Cinderella, but with enough subtlety that it also appears to fit neatly into the framework of silent film themes. In this story (the libretto, for this as well as the second piece, is by Stroman and Glen Kelly), a rising star named Dorothy Brooks has become pregnant. With no source of support, Dorothy is forced to give up her child. Dorothy decides, reluctantly, to leave the child on a church doorstep. Momentarily thereafter, a Mr. Griffith reluctantly deposits his own child on the church steps, but, seeing Dorothy’s child, changes his mind and takes both his child and Dorothy’s back home with him, to the consternation of his wife, who wanted to abandon her own child (whether out of lack of love or poverty is unclear – one of the few mistakes in the piece) but is now obliged to raise two of them.

Eventually, Mr. Gilbert dies, and little Mabel, Dorothy’s daughter, is raised by the widowed Mrs. Griffith. Mrs. Griffith treats Mabel like a servant, forcing her to remain closeted at home. Cinder-Mabel cleans house, and dreams of being a dancer. The “step-sister”, Florence, is an idiot. The story proceeds much like Cinderella, except the prince’s ball is a charity ball sponsored by Dorothy, the prince is Billy Randolph, a Fred Astaire-type movie star guest at the ball, and the glass slipper is a blue necklace that Dorothy left with baby Mabel at the church (the necklace is really blue – perhaps a nod to the occasional colorization in black and white movies).

The piece starts slowly, with short vignettes (again, much like in silent movies) recounting the preliminary events, leading up to the Cinderella story. Maria Kowroski, as Dorothy Brooks, was as much a fairy godmother as mother, and her dancing was lovely, but more restrained than Mabel’s (glowingly portrayed by Ashley Bouder). Megan Fairchild danced the “evil stepsister” Florence with delicious humor, and Damian Woetzel was the silky-smooth, debonair Billy Randolph. As Young Mabel and Young Florence, students Tara Sorine and Isabella Tobias were simply superb: their dance pedigrees are apparent. And it was wonderful to see Kyra Nichols once more (I hadn’t seen her dance for several years); she still looks fabulous, although her character, Mrs. Griffith, was more one-dimensional (stern) than it needed to be.

A choreographic high point of the piece, aside from Bouder in general and Woetzel’s effortless tour de force, was Stroman’s gentle treatment of Mabel’s release from captivity. Upon unlocking the house door (after finding a key left by her adoptive father, who anticipated his wife’s cruel heart), Mabel dances first out the door, then back inside, and then out again, like a caged bird suddenly released but not sure that it really wants to leave the cage that it has known all it’s life. It was a wonderful moment.

But perhaps the best part of “The Blue Necklace” was the meshing of Stroman’s choreography with the wonderful Irving Berlin classics, arranged by Mr. Kelly. The action came alive as dance theater, rather than just a mimicking of a silent movie, when Stroman’s steps merged with Berlin’s melodies. What may have been just a slick idea became enchanting.

“Makin’ Whoopee”, the second piece in the “Double Feature,” is high quality slapstick choreography; more of an extended guffaw than the heart tickler that is “The Blue Necklace”. And because it is shorter and tighter, it appears somewhat better constructed. The story is simple – boy loves girl, boy can’t bring himself to propose to girl, boy inherits $7M (enough to rescue his law firm from a fate worse than malpractice) on condition that he marries by the end of the day, boy goes back to girl and proposes, girl rejects him because she thinks he’s only doing it for the money, boy seeks bride, brides come out of the woodwork because of the money, boy fails, but in the nick of time girl reconsiders and marries him. Ta da.

But “Makin’ Whoopee” is much more fun than that summary would indicate. Tom Gold, as Jimmie Shannon (the boy) made the most of the deceptively simple-looking choreography, dancing like some mad scientist’s hybridization of Baryshnikov and Buster Keaton. As Anne Winslow (the girl), Alexandra Ansanelli looked sugar-sweet, but didn’t have much to do other than look like the ballerina next door. Albert Evans, Seth Orza, and Arch Higgins shined as Shannon’s dancing legal eagles, and Dana Hanson, Ellen Bar, Jessica Flynn, Carla Korbes, and particularly, Rebecca Krohn did wonderful little comic cameos as girls whom Shannon attempts to propose to.

But the best part of “Makin’ Whoopee” was the extended gag of brides of all sizes, colors, and sexes emerging from the rafters in response to a newspaper article about Shannon’s $7M dilemma. The would-be brides, all dressed in bridal gowns (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), emerge first one at a time, then a few, then an onslaught. And suddenly, all these brides are chasing Shannon back and forth across the stage, mimicking scenes (and choreography) from Act II of Giselle. The brides were Giselle’s Wilis, and Shannon was Albrecht. From one glorious in-joke to another, it was all I could do to keep from laughing hysterically.

The piece succeeds on any level, with or without knowledge of the ballet references, but being able to get the joke made the dance all the richer. And, as in “The Blue Necklace”, Stroman’s use of supporting music (this time by Walter Donaldson, as arranged by Kelly), less lush but more effervescent than the Berlin music, matched the slapstick, hyper-energized style of the piece.   And then there was this dog. A real dog. Straight out of those cute trained dogs in silent movies. Rumor has it that he graduated last year from SAB, but that couldn’t be confirmed.

All in all, Stroman’s “Double Feature” is a delightful evening, or perhaps weekend movie matinee, at NYCB. Of course, we’ll never know if Balanchine would have appreciated Stroman’s style (though I suspect he would have), but Jerome Robbins most certainly would have loved it. Indeed, in addition to “Giselle,” I saw echoes of and evolutions from both “Fancy Free” and “The Concert“ in Stroman’s choreography. Perhaps “Double Feature” is not blue blood ballet, but it is a ballet of deceptive character as well as pure fun, and a welcome addition to the NYCB repertory. I understand that “Double Feature” will be repeated during next spring’s NYCB season, and I would recommend it wholeheartedly. And bring the kids.

What stood out from tonight’s performance? Mozartiana and Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, both choreographed by George Balanchine, are both ballets in the classical tradition. In Vento, choreographed by Mauro Bigonzetti, is very much a contemporary ballet that at times crosses over into modern dance. The dancers, some of whom danced in both a classical and a contemporary peice back to back, attacked each with equal vigor. I was especially struck by the precision of the solos in all three dances.

If you like graceful movement amplified by glittery costumes, Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 is for you. If you are a New Yorker, you will probably like Mozartiana because everyone dresses in black, just like everyone else in New York City. Mozartiana had more than several nice moments, and I like the sort of big showy numbers where a multitude of dancers (i.e. more than 20) move in unison - as found in Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 - as much as the next dance obsessed person, but I was especially taken with In Vento. The opening and closing group images were arresting, and everything else carried me through from beginning to end.

While tonight had plenty of great dancing, the dancing was only half of the event. Tonight was Society in C’s semi-annual Soiree (it may actually be only annual, but I am trying to send them a hint to hold this event more often). Society in C is NYCB’s patron group for younger members and those older members who recognize value when they see it. The evening started with cocktails and finger food at a private reception in the patron lounge before the first act. Several dancers as well as NYCB staffers were in attendance to converse at length. The reception continued during both intermissions. I ended up participating in three stimulating conversations. Three ballets seen from excellent seats, three conversations and some very drinkable wine: you can’t beat that for the relatively modest ticket price.

Well, that’s not entirely true. They could have done one better: we could have gone out social dancing after the show. Fortunately, you only have to wait about six months for such an opportunity. No, I am not talking about the iPhone. I am, of course, talking about Dance with the Dancers. Sterling Hyltin, one of NYCB’s soloists, attended the reception. She is one of this year’s Dance with the Dancers’ Chairpersons. In the course of conversing intelligently and articulately about various important topics (dance, opera, where to see ballet in Europe, Saratoga, training, Sleeping Beauty, preparing for many back to back performances, etc.), she gave those of us who had the privilege of talking to her a glimpse of this year’s theme. I am not going to let it slip here, but suffice it to say it will be different from previous years, far away and right here on the mezzanine of the New York State Theater as usual. I have said that Dance with the Dancers is the best event, with both performance and social dancing, of New York City’s charity circuit, and I am confident that, as usual, it will be a contender for that title this year.

Sofiane Sylve and Charles Askegard in NYCB’s Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2Photo courtesy of Paul Kolnik

Wendy Whelan and Nicolaj Hübbe in NYCB’s MozartianaPhoto courtesy of Paul Kolnik

Elegant evening dresses and the sparkle of jewels brought grace and glitter to a week of charity galas. On Tuesday the New York City Ballet’s opening night performance was followed by a supper dance on the promenade of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. Patty Davis Raynes organized the evening. Guests were ushered into the party by a Brazilian samba band, which made for a merry entrance.

On Monday night, a seemingly endless buffet of inviting food stretched around three sides of the Hilton Hotel’s Grand Ballroom at a gambling benefit for United Cerebral Palsy of New York. Susan Kaskel, chairwoman of the benefit, and a crowd of calorie watchers read the labels on the food at two tables. One label read: ”Lobster with mussel mustard. Fat points 8, calories 350.”

The night before, a thousand or so supporters of the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Riverdale section of the Bronx honored Henry A. Kissinger at a dinner dance at the Waldorf-Astoria. Saul T. Steinberg was chairman of the party, which was also attended by some residents of the home. It is not often that the recipients of a benefit get to go the party.

Earlier Sunday evening, Jacqueline Onassis slipped into a white crepe jacket and a long sequined skirt to greet guests at the Municipal Art Society dinner at the Century Club.

The dress was a bit more flamboyant on Friday night, with numerous large ruffles worn by guests at the Spanish Institute dinner dance at the Pierre.