As Haglund walked to the Met last night, the skies darkened, the rain started to fall, and the temperature mercifully sank several degrees below the day's high of 97. Relief at last. Inside the opera house, the heat, passion, and emotional wreckage from a week of Giselles followed by a week of Lady of the Camellias was about to get some comic relief as ABT presented Alexei Ratmanksy's The Bright Stream in New York for the first time. The company's premiere performances of the production took place in Washington D.C. last January. (See H.H. review ABT's The Bright Stream – A Collective Riot.)
While this ballet may be about the lives of happy farm workers on a Soviet collective farm and their encounter with a band of visiting entertainers, there are places in it where you could expect Tim Conway to wander in and set up a dentist's chair or rush in to perform artificial respiration as a member of the aged Sun City Fire Department or to begin his story about the elephant in the ballerina skirt who had a circus dwarf as a lover. Audience members don't need to know anything about Stalin's social engineering debacle in order to enjoy The Bright Stream to its fullest. They just need to know how to laugh.
At last night's New York premiere, Paloma Herrera, Marcelo Gomes, Gillian Murphy, David Hallberg, Craig Salstein Victor Barbee, Martine Van Hamel, Roman Zhurbin, Maria Riccetto, Misty Copeland, and Jared Matthews kept the comedy and spectacular dancing coming full-farce for two hours while the audience roared. Gomes, as the husband with the wandering eye, and Herrera, as his wife who deployed an identity-switching scheme designed by Murphy's ballerina character to teach him a lesson, were one of three central couples. They enjoyed an elegant PdD in Act II as Herrera pretended to be someone else and Gomes professed his love for her. These days, the same undercover sting would probably play out on Twitter.
The subplot saw Barbee's dim-sighted Old Dacha Dweller, married to Van Hamel's Anxious to be Younger than she is Dacha Dweller, chasing amorously after a ballerina, who by that time was Hallberg disguised as a Sylph complete with romantic tutu and boat-sized pointe shoes – no doubt, the two most coveted roles in the whole ballet. So good was Hallberg in his Romantic portrayal of the Sylph that at the end of the performance, Gillian Murphy tried to push him forward to take a bow with all of the other ballerinas. The playoff between Hallberg and Barbee was reminiscent of the brilliance of the Conway and Harvey Korman skits. The Sylph took such care in his feminine portrayal but every so often couldn't resist throwing off a few macho tricks which heightened the Old Dacha Dweller's amorous energy.
Other sub-skits involved Craig Salstein's Accordion Player lusting after Maria Riccetto's innocent schoolgirl, and Misty Copeland's Milkmaid deliciously persuading Jared Matthew's Tractor Driver to try to milk the cow.
There was a tremendous amount of challenging dancing for the corps – all highly entertaining with phrases that one might expect to see in dances by Russian folk troupes like the Moiseyev. While the women wore de-sheened pointe shoes, the men were in jazz shoes or character boots which facilitated revolutions in pirouettes and athleticism in all their dancing. The only shoe satin seen the entire night was on Hallberg's Sylph's and on Van Hamel's Anxious to be Younger Dacha Dweller's feet. Whenever ABT's women take the sheen off of their shoes, everyone's feet look more uniformly lovely and those who wear off-brands are less conspicuous.
The choreography, while, yes, steppy and peppy, was wonderfully musical and illuminated musical accents in the Shostakovich score in a literal way that we don't, regrettably, see much of anymore in new work. You've got to be able to execute all kinds of attitude turns upside down and inside out in order to succeed in Ratmansky's choreography. Thankfully, the ABT dancers can and do, and make it all look wonderfully easy.
The home team casts coming up are too good to pass up: Carreno, Kent, Simkin, and Boylston tonight and Part, Abrera, Stearns, and Hammoudi Saturday night. Julio Bragado-Young will be the Old Dacha Dweller at some point – not to be missed. Everyone repeats next week.
This is a fantastic ballet to drag the uninitiated to, because it sometimes has the feel of a Broadway production to it. It's great for the kids, too. The only problem Haglund envisions with it is that repeat viewings may not be as strong as with other classical dramatic productions, because once you've seen the jokes, they aren't as funny the second, third or fourth time around – except if you're watching Tim Conway. One way to keep the public's interest in returning to The Bright Stream would be to continually exchange the roles among the cast. Once familiar with the ballet, the public would trip over itself to see Gomes or Cornejo as the Sylph.
The Gianmarco Lorenzi tulle Pump Bump Award is bestowed upon Hallberg and Barbee – may they someday truly find one another.