PNB's Broadway Festival: The rich and familiar melds with the new

Broadway Festival, Pacific Northwest Ballet’s admirable venture into musical show-biz opened last weekend at Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall with a program rich in iconic American music and dance. A decidedly mid-20th century affair, it had familiar tunes and lyrics from Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and the ground-breaking jazz of Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond. It also had the work of two great American masters of movement, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. The most pleasant surprise of the night, however, was Christopher Wheeldon’s lyrical and elegant Carousel (A Dance).

Rather than following the story line of Carousel, the great 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical replete with class struggle, domestic violence and belated redemption, Wheeldon created a new, more abstracted pure dance work that referenced the narrative of the original using the music, The Carousel Waltz and If I Loved You, but with a more dreamy vision that softened the harshness of the original story. With his complete set of skills, one can see why the Englishman Wheeldon, at age 36 a former dancer and resident choreographer with New York City Ballet, and now director of his own company, is so much in demand by ballet troupes.

Thought of as a "contemporary" ballet dance-maker, he is as much a neo-classicist, with Carousel (A Dance) displaying his sure hand with ensemble work and pas de deux — the latter performed beautifully at this performance by Jodie Thomas and James Moore — and with his gift for expanding a generic vocabulary into a more organically unfolding movement style that fit the PNB dancers well. The work was originally choreographed for New York City Ballet for a one-time only event in 2002, but its success landed it in that company’s repertoire, and its PNB premiere this past weekend. The lovely costume design by Holly Hynes, particularly the women’s flowing dresses, added much to the dance’s allure.

Slaughter on Tenth Avenue was the oldest dance on the Broadway Festival program, and looked it. Created by George Balanchine in 1936 as the closing number of the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, Slaughter is a charming period piece, choreographed by this Russian artist only three years or so into his new life in the United States after many triumphs with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, and a peripatetic life after that company’s demise in 1929.

In Slaughter we see Balanchine the showman who went on in the following 10 years to choreograph for several more Broadway musicals, including three more Rodgers and Hart shows, as well as Hollywood films. He pulls out all the stops in this final dance number of On Your Toes, a show with a book about gangsters mixing it up with a ballet company.

The ballet number Slaughter on Tenth Avenue is considered by many as the first dance in a stage musical to advance the narrative of the show, rather than simply acting as what was sometimes called "moving scenery." It parallels a similar impact that Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan’s choreography had in the Fred and Ginger film musicals of the time. In the ballet, set in a tawdry night club, "The Hoofer" falls in love with a "Striptease Girl," only to have her killed by her jealous "Big Boss," who is slain by The Hoofer, who in turn is supposed to shoot himself in despair.

The version of Slaughter on Tenth Avenue performed by PNB is the one restaged in 1967 as a stand-alone ballet for Balanchine’s own company, New York City Ballet. It is certainly not a great dance, or even a very complete dance when seen without the rest of On Your Toes, but audiences certainly enjoy it, and it must have been fun for Balanchine and the dancers. This particular dance marks an important point in the development of Balanchine's career, as well as that of the American theater.

It’s half character acting, half ballet dancing with a European sensibility, informed more than a bit by the music hall, with perhaps a touch of Kurt Weill. Viewed at the time primarily as a Russian venture, ballet in this country in the 1930s had not yet forged a distinctly American identity.

It is for these reasons that Slaughter stood out in the Broadway Festival program, but it also had a theatrical conceit going for it: bookends from the original play, with one of the characters planning a hit on The Hoofer before the ballet actually begins, to take place at the very end of the ballet. It was fun for the audience to see Jonathan Poretta play the part of a bad boy ballerino, faux-Russian accent and all, setting up the hit in front of the curtain before it rises, and at the end, James Orza as The Hoofer refusing to stop dancing lest he be plugged by the goon with the gun now sitting up in a balcony box of McCaw Hall.