The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet by Deborah Bull & Luke Jennings

Author:Deborah Bull & Luke Jennings
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571260959
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

When Balanchine created Who Cares?, it was still unusual to set a classical ballet to a suite of show-tunes. Today it is a commonplace, but almost all such productions fail outright. Avid for the razzle-dazzle of Broadway, but constitutionally locked into balletic puritanism (and constrained by a balletic budget), choreographers come up with a hybrid product which plays to the strengths of neither. Balanchine avoided this trap because he knew both worlds well. He had worked on Broadway and he had worked in Hollywood, and had nothing to prove in either. In Who Cares? he was not creating show-dances, he was creating classical ballet to show-tunes, and it is as a ballet like any other that the piece must be approached. Choreographically it is witty, fluent and urbane, and Balanchine’s moves cleverly underline the music’s delicate structural complexity. Visually it is something else. The stage is dominated by a clichéd Manhattan skyline (by Jo Mielziner, 1970) and the costumes (redesigned in 1982 by Ben Benson) are cheap-looking pastels. Maybe some day some healing hand will strip the production back to its bones, and replace Hershy Kay’s overstated orchestration with Gershwin’s original piano score, but until then this choreographic gem will have to languish in an imperfect setting.

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