Boston Ballet, Wang Theatre, Boston, March 5-15, 19-29, April 2-12, 1998

Dance Magazine, August, 1998 by Iris M. Fanger

BOSTON BALLET WANG THEATRE, BOSTON MARCH 5-15, 19-29; APRIL 2-12, 1998 REVIEWED BY IRIS M. FANGER

Premieres by Lila York, resident choreographer Daniel Pelzig, and Lazlo Berdo, a principal dancer with the company, enlivened Boston Ballet's annual spring repertory season, which included nine contemporary works spread over a six-week period.

Leave it to York to have the chutzpah to envision the milieu of Ode to Joy, the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, as a Depression-era union hall filled with a large company of workers down on their luck. Framed by Santo Loquasto's vast arrangement of walls, ramps, an oversized entrance, and hanging rows of industrial lamps devised to dwarf the inhabitants, the dancers moved out from the opening crowd pose into small groups, battling each other. Loquasto also designed the costumes, which bring to mind those by Natalia Gontcharova for the 1923 Les Noces for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

The ballet seems to refer to a specific period in our history, but it could have been set in Soviet Russia, circa 1930. The theme is universal: the human propensity for conflict until a charismatic leader takes charge. Nadia Thompson and Olivier Wecxsteen were a pair of unhappy lovers; Robert Wallace was the peacemaker, dancing alone through the crowd as either a mad fool or a Christ figure. For a change of pace, Zachary Hench led six raggedly dressed men in a soft-shoe routine that Ray Bolger would have loved.

York wins points for the audacity of her thinking as well as for a choreographic conception as grandiose as the music. The work was beautifully sung by Boston's Chorus Pro Musica stationed in the pit. Music director and principal conductor Jonathan McPhee is to be congratulated for the fine musical environment of the entire spring series.

Think Paris in the springtime, Gene Kelly, American tourists wearing shades and screaming colors, the Mona Lisa, and sidewalk cafes, and you'll get the general idea of Pelzig's forty-five-minute take on the City of Light, whose title is merely an icon resembling the Eiffel Tower. Prevented by the George Gershwin estate from naming the ballet with the title of its accompaniment, An American in Paris (augmented by the Concerto in F and the song "Watch Your Step") because a Broadway musical with the same name is in the works, Pelzig nonetheless gives us a Paris in postcards, in a pop art series of spectacular set pieces including an eighteen-foot-high French poodle designed by Robert Martin Pakledinaz created a kaleidoscope of witty, Day-Glo-colored costumes.

The ballet feels as if it was choreographed in snatches, except for two gorgeous pas de deux at the end. The steps aim hard to remember, other than personality poses that establish in the broadest sense the identities of the many characters. These include a cutie-pie Ugly American (Paul Thrussell), a sophisticated artist (Viktor Plotnikov) who falls in love with a French woman (Larissa Ponomarenko), and a woman in chic black (Nadia Thompson) accessorized with a cell phone. Pelzig loves storytelling and is good at it, so he can't resist a happy ending to the ballet, at least for some of the characters.

Sandwiching Berdo's fledgling work, Four Hands, set to Rachmaninoff, between revivals of Twyla Tharp's Waterbaby Bagatelles and York's 1996 hit for the company, Celts, was an error akin to giving the farm team rookie a tryout in the World Series. Berdo deserves a showcase as he learns, but not this one.