Martha Martha Martha

"Embattled Garden," here performed by Lorenzo Pagano, Mariya Dashkina Maddux, and Lloyd Mayor of Martha Graham Dance Company; photo Christopher Duggan

How often should we expect the Martha Graham Dance Company to perform dances by Martha Graham? I might suggest something like 75 percent of the time. Founded by Martha Graham in 1926, here is the oldest dance company in America. Tasked with preserving and transmitting the repertoire of 181 works that Graham left behind at her death in 1991 at age 96, the company now offers the only means, for the most part, of seeing the dances of our most influential American on the modern stage. Yet over the finale weekend at Jacob’s Pillow Dance in Becket, Massachusetts, the number of Grahams by Graham stood at just 25 percent. Only one in four dances on the program was a Graham original, while the remaining work consisted of new commissions that ranged from the Grahamesque to the Grahamdiloquent.    

Things started off well with Graham’s own “Embattled Garden.”  Premiered in 1958, the dance reimagines the Garden of Eden as a fiery ménage à quatre among Adam, Eve, a serpentine “Stranger,” and Lilith, Adam’s first wife in midrashic literature. Explaining the program, Ella Baff, the Pillow’s Executive and Artistic Director, here celebrating her final season as head of the festival, called the work “vintage Graham” and jokingly asked, “Who needs reality television when you have high art?” She also reminded us of Graham’s own ties to the festival, since Graham herself had once studied dance at Denishawn with the Pillow’s founders, Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, whose portraits flank the barn-like stage of the Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theatre.  

There is an unmistakable “vintage” quality to vintage Graham. Today Graham dances can seem arch and overly expressionistic. Graham’s father studied mental disease, which might explain the epileptic quality to her movement that gets mixed in with long periods of stasis. Often, only some of the dancers are in motion on stage while the others strike a pose from the sidelines. Her music wasn’t always by the great Aaron Copland, either. For “Embattled Garden,” the bombastic score by Carlos Surinach is more MGM than Mahler. Its performance at the Pillow was made even worse by the recording, which sounded like a warped, out-of-circulation LP. (Without a live orchestra, dance in general needs to be mindful of the overamplification of recorded music.)

Despite these shortcomings, the set by Isamu Noguchi, unearthed from the Graham vault, was something else entirely that set the tone for the performance overall—a bold, tactile wonder unlike anything else now seen in dance. It was unmistakable Noguchi, just as this was unmistakable Graham—dance that seeks out the “communication and contemplation” (Noguchi’s words) between person and object. Color plays a bold role in the performance’s overall expression, something unfortunately missing from the black-and-white recordings that exist of Graham on stage, intensifying the mood and placing the work in an otherworldly, mythological light.

For this full effect we must see Graham in person, and at the Pillow, which I saw over a Saturday matinee, her Company delivered. Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch as the haughty Lilith and Lloyd Knight as the slithery Stranger descend from Noguchi’s tree to vex Abdiel Jacobsen’s self-flagellating Adam while making a woman out of Mariya Dashkina Maddux’s Eve. “Martha always wanted to leave behind a legend, not a biography,” wrote Graham biographer Agnes de Mille. Here is a Graham legend of Biblical proportion.

Martha Graham Dance Company in "Depak Ine"; photo Christopher Duggan

Regrettably the next dance up, “Depak Ine,” choreographed just last year by Nacho Duato, attempted to take on its own “essential systems of being—of life, death, decomposition, and rebirth,” but lacked Graham’s modernist rigor. Instead we got smoke machines and mood lighting set to a techno beat. Mouth-pulling and other forms of pseudo-lunacy dominate this ponderous cirque du fou that only picks up at the eventual “rebirth” of dancer Ying Xin, who for a lifetime, it seems, had lain dead on stage.

Ben Schultz and PeiJu Chien-Pott of Martha Graham Dance Company in "AXE"; photo Morah Geist

The third dance, “AXE,” by Mats Ek, was a light pas de deux with more pas than deux, and almost worked. Commissioned by the Festival, the dance begins with the rear curtain opening to reveal what appears to be a wooden backdrop but is, in fact, the back wall of the Shawn Theatre. Pillow stagehands humorously deposit a pile of wood mid-stage—a task that would be prohibitively expensive should this ever be performed in New York under the work rules of Local One. Dancer Ben Schultz then gathers some big rounds from the pile, rolls over a chopping-block stump, lifts up his axe, and for the rest of the performance beautifully splits the rounds into wedges. The action of this dancer performing a manual labor recalls the history of the Pillow itself, as Shawn’s dancers helped build the original campus. Among the chopping, PeiJu Chien-Pott appears as a fluttering moth or woodsprite perilously unnoticed by the woodsplitter. The setup is great, but the engagement between the two never comes together—or splits apart like the wood under that axe.

Abdiel Jacobsen of Martha Graham Dance Company in "Echo"; photo Christopher Duggan

The final piece, “Echo” by Andonis Foniadakis, also from 2014, was the most successful of the program’s contemporary offerings. Foniadakis plays off the classical myth of Narcissus, who falls in love with his reflection, by using two male dancers, on my day danced by Lloyd Mayor and Lorenzo Pagano, as a mirrored pair. Pagano was especially engaging as the reflection, smirking and at times reaching out to Mayor’s Narcissus as though pulling him into the water. I found their engagement to be more memorable than the relationship between Narcissus and Echo, danced by Chien-Pott as the nymph who loves him but can only repeat what he says. Yet the corps was brilliantly deployed as blue ripples, spinning out Narcissus’s watery reflection in flowing skirts by Anastasios Sofroniou. 

It could be argued that each of these three contemporary dances, based in myth, had a Graham-like component, but should they all be shown at the expense of Graham herself? After Graham’s death, the Graham Company went through a very public legal battle to gain control of her dances from her designated heir, nearly going out of business in the process. It would be a shame to think it was all destined for the Company vault. Under the direction of Janet Eilber since 2005, the Graham Company has followed what has become conventional wisdom in arts administration by actively pursuing new work. One may think Graham doesn’t fully translate to the world of contemporary dance. Without seeing more of her work on stage, we might never know otherwise.    

Ted Shawn Theatre; photo Christopher Duggan

A Modernist in Paris

James writes:

The phrase “Inspired by the Motion Picture” does not generally inspire confidence on Broadway. More often than not, we’re talking about a popular movie repackaged for the discount crowd. But what if your inspiration is “An American in Paris,” the 1951 Academy Award-winning MGM musical starring Gene Kelly? And what if you are the English choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, one time dancer and resident artist at New York City Ballet? 

In the case of “An American in Paris,” the new musical that opened this week at the Palace Theatre, we are talking about something truly inspiring. In his Cast Notes, Wheeldon says he “honors the artists whose film inspired this new stage version.” That film, directed by Vincente Minnelli from a script by Alan Jay Lerner, was a lightweight romance between an American painter Jerry Mulligan, who stayed in Paris after the liberation, and a French girl, Lise Bouvier. The plot revolves around a cast of supporting characters that includes Jerry’s society patron Milo Roberts (who is interested in more than his paintings), a successful French singer named Henri Baurel (who is engaged to Lise), and a composer friend named Adam Cook (who helps sort it all out).

What set the movie apart was its final fifteen minutes. In what has been called the greatest dance number on film, and with a production that cost of half a million dollars, the painter Jerry Mulligan, played by Kelly, dances with Lise, played by Leslie Caron, through a dream sequence of Paris as imagined through his artwork. The score for the number is George Gershwin’s 1928 symphonic poem, “An American in Paris,” which gives the film and the musical its name.      

Wheeldon began here and built out his musical from this balletic denouement. A new book by Craig Lucas also adds some true grit to the story. The 1951 musical did little to acknowledge the war. For that matter, it barely acknowledged the twentieth century: Jerry still lives in the Paris of La bohème. On Broadway we are now clearly contending with the hangover of war, with characters with new backstories and new last names: Lise Dassin (Leanne Cope) is a Jewish refugee hidden by Henri’s family, who fought for the Resistance; Adam Hockberg (Brandon Uranowitz) is an injured Jewish American GI, Jerry is suffering from shell shock. Sometimes Lucas overly burdens the story: it was smart to recast Henri (Max von Essen) as a struggling singer, but an insinuation that he “does not fancy women” and therefore hides his own secret muddies the plot; Hockberg also overly plays up his own impotence. 

Yet overall these additions give the musical a modern urgency that propels the performance. It starts in a swirl, with the Nazi flag of the occupation pulled down and turned back to the colors of the Republic, all in one flowing movement. With costumes and sets by Bob Crowley, the scene changes are seamlessly handled by the performers, who wheel out and dance around the mobile set pieces. Backdrop projections imagine Paris as a sketchbook that gets redrawn through each scene.

Robert Fairchild, the NYCB principal who, like his sister, has (temporarily?) traded Balanchine for Broadway, fills out Kelly’s shoes as Mulligan. Those are fast, muscular, and multitalented shoes to fill. While Kelly could perform equally well as singer, dancer, and actor, Fairchild is a dancer first and foremost, arguably one of the best ballet dancers of our day. His voice, however, is only serviceable as a soloist. The decision to add additional Gershwin songs for him to lead, such as “Fidgety Feet,” was a mistake. Additionally, no one else could ever have Kelly’s megawatt presence, and Fairchild’s theatrical range is limited, even compared to the other actors on stage.  

Fortunately the musical is driven by its forceful choreography. For this the production looks much more closely than the film to the history of Parisian modernism. Here Mulligan is something of a Sunday painter until Milo Davenport (Jill Paice) convinces him to work in abstraction. A comical dance within the dance called “The Eclipse of Uranus” gives a nod to dance’s early avant-garde. As the play progresses, the sets also become more abstract, leading to a minimalist pas de deux between Jerry and Lise danced to Gershwin’s eponymous number. In this way the musical pays ultimate tribute to Gershwin’s radical 1928 tone poem. As Gershwin said of his composition, “My purpose here is to portray the impression of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city and listens to various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere.” Here is a musical that makes it new all over again. 

A Helluva Show

Clyde Alves, Tony Yazbeck, Jay Armstrong Johnson and the cast of On the Town

CITY JOURNAL 

March 26, 2015

A Helluva Show
by James Panero

A new production of On the Town captures the spirit of New York City.

With music by Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the original 1944 production of On the Town was a celebration of the freedom and energy that New York City represented in wartime. The musical rightly brought fame to its three wunderkind creators, all in their twenties, who drew their inspiration from the Jerome Robbins ballet Fancy Free.

Now, as the spectacular, must-see revival of On the Town returns to Broadway at 42nd Street’s Lyric Theatre, the musical reflects a city that has itself been revived in a synergy of past and present. Then as now, it’s the right time to see On the Town. After all, could there be a greater paean to urban life? The ultimate love interest in this musical of three American sailors on shore leave is, of course, “New York, New York, a helluva town,” where “The Bronx is up, but the Battery’s down” and “the people ride in a hole in the groun’.” The city captivates and animates the storyline, beginning with that famous opening number. One sailor, Chip (Jay Armstrong Johnson), calls the city “a visitor’s place!” and announces his ambitious touring schedule (“10:30 Bronx Zoo, 10:40 Statue of Liberty”).

The famous places to visit are so many, 
Or so the guidebooks say. 
I promised Daddy I wouldn’t miss on any. 
And we have just one day. 
Got to see the whole town 
From Yonkers on down to the Bay.

Ozzie (Clyde Alves), meanwhile, has other attractions in mind: “Manhattan women are dressed in silk and satin,/ Or so the fellas say;/ There’s just one thing that’s important in Manhattan,/ When you have just one day.” A poster on the subway convinces Gabey (Tony Yazbeck), the shy sailor, to seek out Ivy Smith (Megan Fairchild), the winner of “Miss Turnstiles for the month of June.” The sailors’ 24-hour trek spans Carnegie Hall and the uptown museums to midtown nightclubs and Coney Island. Eventually, they assemble together with their dates—the fizzy anthropologist Claire de Loon (Elizabeth Stanley) with Ozzie, the brassy taxi driver Brunhilde “Hildy” Esterhazy (Alysha Umphress) with Chip, and Ivy Smith with Gabey—only to have to say their goodbyes at the Navy docks just as another three sailors slide down the gangplank, singing the same opening tune.

The team behind this current On the Town—lead producers Howard and Janet Kagan and director John Rando—captured the revival spirit of both the musical and the city with a promotional music video released last summer. The video closely tracks the familiar opening shots of the 1949 movie film version starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. Rather than running off their ship onto the Brooklyn Navy Yard, though, our three sailors emerge in their starched white suits running down the gangplank of the Intrepid—the sea, air, and space museum in the aircraft carrier docked on the Hudson River. Then these spirits of World War II-era New York are seen singing and dancing around today’s city. Some locations have thankfully changed little since the 1940s—the Brooklyn Bridge, Coney Island, Bethesda Fountain, the Statue of Liberty, the American Museum of Natural History. Yet, for their bike ride through Central Park, the sailors rent Citibikes. And between shots of Chinatown and a carriage ride through the park, they visit the Apple Store on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. If anything, the city looks far clearer and better than it did on film 60 years ago.

The preternatural and, at times, winking exuberance of this revival gets carried through the musical, which is lavishly staged with a live 28-piece orchestra at the Lyric. The revival is surprisingly faithful to the original Broadway production. Each performance begins with the cast, led by Phillip Boykin, joining the audience in a rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” This patriotic feeling continues throughout the show, especially as Stephen DeRosa, on the night I attended, singled out a veteran in the audience for special recognition of his service.

But just like the original musical, this revival is far more red-blooded and grittier than the sanitized Hollywood production. Not only did “helluva town” get changed to “wonderful town” in the 1949 film, but many of the best musical numbers were cut, in particular Hildy’s “I Can Cook Too,” which includes a full serving of double entendre (“I’m a man’s ideal of a perfect meal/ Right down to the demi-tasse./ I’m a pot of joy for a hungry boy,/ Baby, I’m cookin’ with gas.”) A new cast recording of this revival has just been released by PS Classics.

In addition to the possibilities presented by the city (where density and public transportation play a leading role), On the Town also hints at the more desperate side of the urban experience, especially for the women. Ivy Smith, a celebrity in the eyes of Gabey, is being hustled by an alcoholic dance teacher (Jackie Hoffman) who insists that she debase herself working at an after-hours gentlemen’s club on Coney Island to pay for her classes. Claire de Loon cracks in an unhappy marriage, which her fly-by-night relationship with Ozzie finally destroys. Hildy, fired from her job as a taxi driver, lives with a sick roommate in an apartment overlooking a brick wall.

Yet for its lows, the New York of On the Town is ultimately one of great heights, finally reached in the dream dance sequence between Gabey and Ivy. Inspired by the heated choreography of Jerome Robbins, the nine-minute pas de deux, choreographed by Joshua Bergasse, finds the dancers sweating it out in a boxing ring before soaring into one another’s arms. That Ivy is danced by Fairchild, the famous principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, speaks to the talent that only a city can gather. Here is a production that only Broadway can stage and a story that only New York can tell.