On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance STEPPING OFF THE SCREEN BY LAURA A. JACOBS Two recent re-creations, Twyla Tharp's Singin' in the Rain and Roland Petit's The Blue Angel, have demonstrated what one might have thought was...
...The character of Rosa should be anything but dispassionate...
...The backdrop was admirably simple: a skyline of university spires and smokestacks handcut out of undyed canvas...
...Her legs may be as eloquent as Marlene Dietrich's cheekbones, but she could hardly suggest content where it was missing in the steps...
...Makarova promised a new version of Rosa...
...Singin' in the Rain, at the Gershwin Theater on Broadway, is like a pop-up book of the MGM hit...
...The show is more dimensionally vibrant than its model yet less spontaneous, because the film within a musical travels little new ground...
...Tharp's choreography never achieves a coherent point of view, something she usually comes to naturally...
...Josef Svoboda's scenery suggested a changing sensibility—the Belle Epoque dissolving into a machine-bent world...
...Though they are probably too idiosyncratic for other dancers to find room in, Petit's solos, moving from swoons to frigid gestures, projected Raat's kinky conventionality...
...Makarova's problem was not merely due to the lack of drama in this highly theatrical work: She was splendid last spring in the American Ballet Theater's LesSylphides, another undramatic piece...
...Makarova was poised and skillful in her various pas de deux, yet she projected no emotion...
...In the famous numbers Tharp has merely reproduced the original choreography of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen...
...It ends with Lamont and Don Lockwood (Don Correia) making love for the camera while snarling at each other under their breath—a good metaphor for how craftsmen trudge along in the absence of inspiration...
...The big production number in Act II, replacing the movie's "Gotta Dance" dream ballet, contains parodies of Kelly's work in other movies...
...Most of her time was spent pouting and primping, or mincing about the stage while kicking things with the insouciant tip of her toe...
...she gave us Betty Boop with blonde hair...
...If only Petit had put some spice into Natalia Makarova's Rosa...
...Petit is himself a virile performer who can project nuance amid aggressive impulses...
...There was never a sense of why Rosa is drawn socially to Raat, or physically to any of the younger men...
...Craftsmanship appears to be what Twyla Tharp concentrated on as she put her version of the work together, for inspiration is not much in evidence...
...the braggadocio of The Pirate and the erotic overtones in so many of his pas de deux (he took himself quite seriously as a romantic lead...
...the songs, script and many dance steps are borrowed without alteration...
...The title showstopper is such a studied duplicate it seems strained and overly literal...
...The scene where studio technicians experiment with a new microphone, eventually placing it on Lina Lamont's (Faye Grant) breast, is staged with energy and finesse...
...One of dance's proven wits, she surely could have reinvigorated " Make 'Em Laugh.'' Perhaps reverence got in her way...
...On Dance STEPPING OFF THE SCREEN BY LAURA A. JACOBS Two recent re-creations, Twyla Tharp's Singin' in the Rain and Roland Petit's The Blue Angel, have demonstrated what one might have thought was obvious: Gorgeous productions are not enough to give old films a new life on stage...
...She, after all, was the reason for the show...
...His Professor Raat, fussy and authoritarian in the beginning, was still fussy but broken at the end...
...Sylphides, however, rose out of the Romantic tradition, a very fertile ground for ballet...
...Singin's best moments are those that succeed in reanimating the movie's exuberance in the rounder focus of theater...
...Taking risks at the wrong moment, Tharp dilutes the number with "Court at Frolic," a tedious roller-skating sequence, when a Busby Berkeley-type extravaganza would have been much better...
...Although in his own case and that of the corps Petit often managed to capture the mood of the novel on which TheBlueAngelis based, Heinrich Mann's Professor Unrat, in trying to evoke Rosa he was unable to see beyond classical syntax into Modernism's cabaret of images...
...The brooding expressionism that darkened Roland Petit's treatment of The Blue Angel, done with the Berlin Ballet in a limited engagement at the Metropolitan Opera, was a far cry from Singin's brightly lit scenes o f Hollywood in its early sound years...
...Petit's choreography rarely equaled Svoboda's evocative sets...
...In choreographing the male corps he used a regimented, mechanistic style—a new pulse for a new society...
...In pacing, tone and temperament it stays close to the original...
Vol. 68 • September 1985 • No. 12
