Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in Singin’ in the Rain, or Laurey’s dream in Oklahoma!, whose first interpreter was its choreographer Agnes de Mille.
In our own century, Christopher Wheeldon, who started out as a dancer with the Royal Ballet, has had no difficulty straddling the divide between pointework and hoofing – or moonwalking, come to that. In the very same week that this mixed bill devoted to his work opened at the Royal Opera House, he nailed down an Olivier award for his choreography for MJ The Musical.
Given the man's prodigious range and output over almost three decades, a short evening of four works can only be a taster. But this programme has something to alert even the most seasoned Wheeldon-watcher. His trademark neo-classicism is most clearly present in Fool’s Paradise, from 2007 – the only piece to have been performed by the Royal Ballet before. It’s an exercise in luxuriant sculptural form of the kind that sends lighting designers to their gold-and-peach palette. Sure enough, when the first dancers appear in nude all-in-ones we can believe we’re in some kind of twilit Parnassus peopled by immortals. Yet there is human warmth too. When Vadim Muntagirov, crouching at the feet of Ella Newton Severgnini, runs his hands up the sides of her body from ankle to armpit, it’s both a framing gesture and startlingly sexy.
Joby Talbot’s score for orchestra, initially sombre, gets a turbo injection at the mid-point, the strings racing about in glittering glissandi, delivering a jazzy charge to the steps. Melissa Hamilton did some extraordinary things in the cast I saw, her legs assuming angles you didn’t know were anatomically possible. A typical Wheeldon feature is a lift in which the girl, hoisted high, holds an angled horizontal pose mid-air while turning slowly, like a coasting eagle. He used it to suggest helicopter blades in his early hit DGV, made just before this work, and the motif is endlessly adaptable. Equally gorgeous is the final tableau (pictured right), a tower of angled limbs.
During the first interval, a slightly reduced orchestra and its conductor – an ever more razzled-looking Koen Kessels, popular with the players – relocate to the stage. They make a useful backdrop for the two shorter pieces, both duets, which were conceived for a more intimate space and might otherwise look lost in space. Of the two, the second, for two men, is by far the more successful. Us, created for BalletBoyz in 2017, is a study in equality of effort and mutual support. Pairing similar bodies of the same sex – who might be brothers, close friends, or lovers – the important element is their muscular connection. For a full 10 minutes the men barely lose contact with each other. It’s hard to say how and why this translates into a nuanced emotional connection. Kudos to the two dancers I saw – Liam Boswell and Joshua Junker, pictured top – that it did.
At twice its length, The Two of Us, set to four Joni Mitchell songs, missed its mark by a mile. The dance itself is inoffensive, delivering some easy-on-the-eye solo noodling, first by a girl in a groovy see-through orange jumpsuit, then by a boy in less groovy see-through grey resembling garden fleece – but the music is dire. For a start, the heavy orchestration is misconceived. Isn’t Joni’s guitar a major part of the deal in her songs? But worse, much worse, is the delivery by a singer whose timbre, intonation, and especially diction come nowhere near the original we’re hearing in our heads. Julia Fordham may have once recorded an album at Joni’s studio, but it’s hard to think of a good reason why she was asked to do this gig.
Joy is restored in the 25-minute finale of the evening, a manufactured excerpt from Wheeldon’s own full-scale musical An American in Paris – effectively welding together the dream ballet sequence and the Seine-side duet for the romantic leads, Jerry and Lise. Whether or not the dancers of the Royal Ballet muster 100 per cent of the Broadway sass of the New York cast that won the show a Tony, it’s big, blowzy, energetic and fun, with its bright, Mondrian-inspired designs by Bob Crowley. Joseph Sissens with his exclamation-mark figure was on fire as Jerry, and Anna Rose O’Sullivan made a stylish Lise. Kessels, using the grander, denser concert version of Gershwin’s score, whips the players up to a terrific blast. But it still wasn't enough to get that travesty of “Both Sides Now” out of my head.
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