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

Orza played his role with fine panache, and Carla Korbes brought technical fluency to the Striptease Girl, though too perky for the distanced sultriness the role seemed to demand, especially when compared with Vera Zorina (Balanchine dancer-wife No. 2 of four) performing the part in a brief film clip from the 1939 film version shown at McCaw at the start of the evening. Everyone else in the PNB version was having a grand old time, abetted by the terrific orchestration of the Rodgers score by Hershy Kay.

The Big Enchilada of the Broadway Festival was the PNB premiere of Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story Suite, dances from his landmark musical that premiered on Broadway in 1957. This suite, restaged by Robbins so as to tie the dances together when out of the original context of the whole show, had its first performance in 1995 with New York City Ballet, when Robbins was in the final stages of his illustrious career and had settled in as a resident choreographer of that company.

With music by Bernstein and lyrics by a young Sondheim, these dances have worked their way deeply into the fiber of American popular culture. When a theatrical trailer for the 1961 film version was shown prior to the dance, many in the Broadway Festival audience snapped their fingers along with the Jets’ leader Riff (Russ Tamblyn).

Therein lies the challenge for a ballet company. When we snap our fingers, we know the reference to the Jets. When we see that iconic moment, arm reaching up, leg lifted to the sky, head flung back, we know it is George Chakiris of the Sharks. We know it is West Side Story. We know the movie, and we know the play from high school productions, college and community versions, and the recent staging at our own Fifth Avenue Theater. More than any other dance piece in this concert, we came to see what we already knew. And we came to see how PNB would do.

When I was a young dancer in New York in the mid 1960s, it was not often that a ballet or a modern dancer crossed over into musical theater. This was the province of "gypsies" who could deliver a number to the second balcony. It happened, of course, but the thinking at the time was that you needed different sets of technical skills and performance qualities.

I don’t know how exclusive the different camps of dancers are these days, and certainly the range of PNB’s repertoire is quite demanding on its dancers, so it was intriguing to me, and I’m sure to many others, to see how dancers of the 21st century would do at performing the cool, percussive "jazz dance" vocabulary of a half-century earlier.

In watching the trailer from the film version, there were snippets of The Prologue, in which we first meet the Sharks and the Jets on the streets of New York. I was amazed at how these dancers hit a movement, like a still photo, then release so quickly out of it as if they had never really stopped moving, even for a microsecond. How every movement is so clean and clear. How deeply low they go to the ground and still keep their legs under them, and how fast they change directions, speeds and levels. How they drive the beat of the music, even dance around it, rather than waiting for it to come to them.

Some say there are only two kinds of dancing, good and bad, and that all that changes is style. However, the style of the dancing in West Side Story Suite is key to its success. I noticed in the program notes that these dances had been set on PNB by two former New York City Ballet dancers, now specializing in setting the works of Robbins and Balanchine on other companies. Therefore, West Side Story Suite was taught by ballet dancers to ballet dancers, making it another step removed from the original, which itself fused jazz, ballet and vernacular dance. And throw in the changes wrought by Robbins over time, known as a constant tinkerer with his choreography, ask some of them to sing, and you get a real test for the PNB dancers, some of whom projected a real sense of style, of place and time, others less successfully so.

I think of these dances as, for the most part, showcases for men, yet some of my favorite performing in PNB’s version was from the women. The same Carla Korbes who was too pallid for me in Slaughter proved as Anita, the top girl of the Sharks, that she was nicely up to the Latin-inflected Dance at the Gym and America, perhaps owing something to her real-life upbringing in Brazil. She was joined in America by the splendid swivel hips and sass of Lindsi Dec. I also liked Sarah Ricard Orza, who showed us how a starry-eyed young Maria should walk towards Tony when she first lays eyes on him across the gym.