The San Francisco Ballet's Program 5 is featuring two dances by the new wunderkind choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon, along with a world premiere by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson to Rachmaninov's "On a Theme of Paganini," and finishes with the return of last year's sensation, "Eden/Eden" set to a Steve Reich "video opera" about cloning.
First up on Saturday evening was a twenty-minute "distillation" by Wheeldon of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, "Carousel" that was everything Program 4's "West Side Story Suite" was not. In other words, it transformed the material into both a concrete story and a total abstraction about young and heedless love, and it didn't have the dancers aping Broadway hoofers like "West Side Story."
Plus, we didn't have to go into all the wife-beating and miserable behavior that makes the musical something of a trial, but concentrated on the yearning essence. The choreography and dancing by Dores Andrea, Joan Boada and a huge company portraying everything from carnival crowds to the carousel itself was splendid.
This was followed by another Wheeldon piece, a short Pas de Deux set to a minimalist 1978 piano-violin duet by the Estonian mystic Arvo Part. The playing by violinist Roy Malan and pianist Michael McGraw, along with the dancing by Sarah Van Patten and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba, were beyond exquisite.
Though I'm sure it was just fine, I skipped out on the Tomasson premiere to go home for dinner, partly because I'd read between the lines in Rachel Howard's review at SFGate and also Jolene's account at "Saturday Matinee" (click here to get to her smart theater/dance/music blog where she's currently worrying about the future of "classical" ballet).
I wrote last year about Scottish choreographer Wayne McGregor's "Eden/Eden," where he used a Steve Reich piece written for chamber orchestra, five singers, and prerecorded tape loops of scientists talking about ethical issues around cloning and artificial intelligence. I'm impressed McGregor was able to get the rights to the music without using the video that was created by Reich's video artist wife, Beryl Korot, but am happy that it was possible because the ballet, complete with its own video projections by Ravi Deepres, is some kind of masterpiece of its own.
The dancers and musicians put their all into it, and the back seats of the orchestra section were crammed with young ballet students who had snuck in to see the piece for the nth time. Quite a few audience members hated the ballet, which is understandable because much of it is so fast and so brutal, but the style fits the material, and the entire thing is mesmerizing. You've got one more chance to check it out, Tuesday evening, the 18th, at 8PM. And how can one not like a ballet whose costume designer's name is listed as "Ursula Bombshell"?
Like many other Californians, I am a racial and ethnic mutt...
...which may be part of the reason I am fascinated by mono-cultures...
...and how they fare in the American, multi-cultural diaspora.
On Saturday, the annual Saint Patrick's Day Parade for Irish-Americans made its way up Market Street to the Civic Center.
It's always a jolly affair, with lots of children and families involved, often playing instruments or dancing up the street.
I played golf at Lincoln Park with an Irish construction worker the other day, and his tales of going back to the mother country 15 years after he arrived in California for economic opportunities were fascinating, especially since Ireland has changed so dramatically over the last decade since its joining the European Union.
"With the dollar being worthless right now, I can hardly afford the place anymore," he told me. "And where there used to be mass unemployment, there are jobs all over the place. It's strange."
One of my favorite groups in the parade was the "Los Trancos Community Band," which was an ecccentric looking collection of what looked like old hippies.
I wonder if they play "Danny Boy."
Before the double-decker freeway that cut through the Hayes Valley came down in the early 1990s after it was weakened in the 1989 earthquake, the neighborhood was scary and crime-ridden, with crack dealing, murder and prostitution a daily occurrence. A rare oasis in the 1980s was the restaurant and bar The Blue Muse on Gough near Hayes Street.
As the neighborhood gentrified during the 1990s, with overpriced restaurants such as Jardiniere and Absinthe and Citizen Cake appearing, The Blue Muse felt oddly comforting and its bar became a sort of "Cheers" saloon for locals who could also eat a burger or appetizers at reasonable prices.
A couple of years ago, Sidney the proprietor (above) was bounced out of his lease without much warning and the space become a new restaurant called Breezy's that's more expensive and much less charming.
Finally, Sidney managed to find a narrow space on Grove Street in front of the Performing Arts garage where he reopened his restaurant a couple of months ago. The place mostly caters to older couples looking for an old-fashioned "fine dining" meal before the symphony, ballet and opera.
The restaurant is much smaller, but that's fine. Its bar area is cozy and gemutlich, and there's finally a place to gather with neighbors that's neither trendy nor overpriced nor filled with crazy drag queens like Marlena's down the street.
Plus, one of the coolest old food service dudes in town, Jonathan Kasper (above), is back in action on Thursday evenings. It looks like you really can go home again.
It was a bumpy night at the San Fracisco Ballet on Tuesday evening, which was devoted to "A Tribute to Jerome Robbins." The program featured his first ballet from 1944, the short collaboration with Leonard Bernstein about sailors on shore leave called "Fancy Free," continued with the 1970 "Into The Night" set to four Chopin piano nocturnes which he created for New York City Ballet, and finished with a "West Side Story Suite" which is a 35-minute condensation of the 1957 musical.
The first problem was when the big gold curtain got stuck and didn't want to go up. After a few hurried announcements over the loudspeaker and a ten minute delay, the curtain was raised into the flies where it stayed for the rest of the evening, leaving the undercurtain to do its job instead. Then, five minutes into "Fancy Free," a woman in a wheelchair in the rear of the orchestra section proceeded to pass out and thunk onto the floor, so we standees in the back watched fascinated as a small army of ushers and patrons attended to the poor woman before wheeling her out of the theater to an ambulance.
We didn't miss very much, because "Fancy Free" felt not only thin but just plain wrong at times. Instead of being a playful look at three sailors on shore leave in World War Two flirting with New York girls, it looked like they were trying to rape any woman who passed by, which was probably not what was intended. Plus, the Bernstein score was so derivative of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Copland (at the end) that it was a little embarrassing.
"Into The Night," with its three elegant couples on a bare stage against a starry backdrop, fared much better and was genuinely beautiful.
The "West Side Story Suite," which Robbins cobbled together for his "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" show in 1995 and which he restaged for the New York City Ballet, has been praised to the skies and since I mostly love the musical, I was looking forward to the performance, but it turned out to be godawful in all kinds of ways. First off, the orchestra under music director Martin West, didn't have a clue how to play the score. I've heard high school bands demonstrate a better grasp of its jazzy rhythms. Plus, the solo singing wasn't just inadequate, it was downright bad, though the troupe singing as a chorus sounded fine. Part of the problem is that though "West Side Story" has its operatic and balletic moments, it's still a Broadway musical, which is a whole different kind of singing and dancing than opera and ballet performers are used to. When Bernstein recorded the score with Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras, there was much the same problem. They didn't sound like Tony and Maria but rather like upper-class opera singers.
Similarly, the performers on Tuesday didn't look like jazzy juvenile delinquents but instead like exquisite ballet dancers. Plus, the staging was all wrong, with a hint of a set but none of the usual coups de theatre that make this piece so much fun onstage, such as colored streamers shooting from the flies during the dance in the gym, or the Jets and the Sharks climbing over a chain-link fence before and after the rumble. There was a fence onstage but the dancers just gestured towards it which was sort of silly, though not as silly as the final number, the "Somewhere" ballet which has always been the sentimental and gooey soft spot in what is generally a hard-edged show. The best version of "West Side Story" I've ever seen was in the late 1960s at a Santa Barbara Youth Theatre production, and I would urge you to see the show if it's ever performed by a high school or college with a good arts program near you. It really is the ultimate High School Musical, and tarting it up with professional ballet dancers and opera singers does the piece no favors.
