Mrs. Robinson and Symphony in C at the SF Ballet

After two years of pandemic shutdown, the San Francisco Ballet opened their 2022 season last Tuesday, just as Helgi Tomasson, the company's Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer for the last 37 years, is retiring.

Program 1 started with Tomasson's Trio, which he choreographed in 2011 to Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, a string sextet that was orchestrated for a larger ensemble. The music was lovely, the costumes were lovely, and the dancers immensely skilled, but like most pieces I have seen over the decades choreographed by Tomasson, there was a dramatic void at the center. (All production photos by by Erik Tomasson.)

The second, Adagio movement of the ballet featured what appeared to be two lovers, Luke Ingham and Dores André, eventually joined by Daniel Deivison-Oliveira and I thought we were watching a subtle battle between two men for a woman but according to the program Deivison-Oliveira was Death.

The second piece was a delayed world premiere of British choreographer Cathy Marston's Mrs. Robinson, a feminist take on the frightening seductress of the 1960s movie The Graduate. I never quite understood the mass popularity of that film and why it's such an enduring popular culture tale, but it obviously resonates with a lot of people. In the recent Mark Harris biography of movie director Mike Nichols, there's an interesting anecdote about the 36-year-old actress Anne Bancroft, a decade too young for the role of Mrs. Robinson, being guided by him.

"Do you like what I'm doing with my character?" Bancroft asked Nichols early on. "No, not at all," he said. "She's much too nice." "Why isn't she nice?" she asked. "I don't know why," he said. "But I can tell you how she sounds. I can do it for you." Nichols almost never gave line readings, but in a chilly, detached, almost uninflected tone, he said, "Benjamin, will you drive me home?" "Oh!" Bancroft said, her entire characterization clicking into place. "I can do that. That's anger." In this ballet version, Sarah Van Patten is less angry and more warmly sensual but trapped in her own life.

What made the ballet work on opening night was Joseph Walsh playing the Benjamin Braddock character originally bullied out of Dustin Hoffman by Mike Nichols. (The biography is definitely a warts and all affair.) Walsh's combination of playing at awkwardness while being supremely graceful was worthy of Buster Keaton, funny and beautiful at the same time.

Sarah Van Patten was lean, hungry, powerful, and exquisitely sexy. Between her and Walsh, the story became less a misogynistic sex farce and more about a couple that clicked together physically, with practical matters like age and family thrown out the window. The ballet was helped immensely by the score from British theater and film composer Terry Davies, which avoided sixties grooviness and leaned on the saxophone for Mrs. Robinson's period of sexuality and a delicate, lightly amplified guitar for Benjamin. The mid-century modern frame sets by Patrick Kinmonth that jutted in and out were entertaining and well-conceived.

The final ballet of the evening was George Balanchine's 1940s masterpiece set to Bizet's Symphony in C, written when the composer was a teenager in the mid-19th century and only discovered in the 1930s. It's since become a Top 40 hit on Classical Radio, and extraordinarily fun to hear live under conductor Martin West and the SF Ballet orchestra, especially when multiple human bodies are hurtling across the stage in abstract geometry for four movements, culminating in a finale with 52 dancers osntage who all seem to be doing their own thing while interlocking on a higher choreographic plane. It's great stuff.

Over the last 37 years, Helgi Tomasson has developed a ballet company that can creditably dance a work as difficult and complex as Symphony in C, and for that he deserves every accolade.