LINCOLN CENTER
David Koch Theater
New York City Ballet
A Midsummer Night's Dream - Balanchine
Carolyn and I saw and enjoyed NYCB's Balanchine's choreographed Midsummer Night's Dream a few years ago. It's a big, fun story. But, what we both were struck by was the Pas de Deux in the 2nd act. It was so simple and beautiful. There were no big, fast, high, leaps or movements, just a man and a woman gently being, walking together in unadorned balletic fashion. Carolyn and I knew at that very moment that we'd just seen something special.
Here it is! So simple, so beautiful.
This is not the pas de deux I am referring to but it's from the ballet...
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Music by: Felix Mendelssohn
- Choreography by: George Balanchine
- Principal Casting: TITANIA: Teresa Reichlen; OBERON: Daniel Ulbricht; PUCK: Troy Schumacher (replaces Sean Suozzi); HIPPOLYTA: Megan LeCrone; THESEUS: Silas Farley; TITANIA’S CAVALIER: Russell Janzen; HELENA: Lauren King; DEMETRIUS: Zachary Catazaro; HERMIA: Erica Pereira; LYSANDER: Chase Finlay; BUTTERFLY: Indiana Woodward; BOTTOM: Cameron Dieck; DIVERTISSEMENT: Sterling Hyltin, Amar Ramasar
Enter the enchanted land of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a lush forest besieged by quixotic love triangles and feuding fairy kingdoms, awash with magic at every turn.
Review: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Nodding Off With the Mortals
The evergreen sweetness of George Balanchine’s 1962 ballet of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has many sources. There’s the Mendelssohn music that Balanchine chose, abuzz with summer sounds and the confusions and harmonies of love. There’s Balanchine’s expert storytelling, with its honeyed comedy and deft interweaving of fairies and mortals. There’s the embodiment of so many of those fairies by children (students from the School of American Ballet), one of the most enchanting uses of children in all of ballet.
Yet this “Dream,” in which fairies and mortals alike are frequently dozing off or being put to sleep by magic, can itself drift toward sleep. And so it was at the David H. Koch Theater on Tuesday, when New York City Ballet began its annual weeklong run of the work.
By NEW YORK CITY BALLET on May 25, 2016. Watch in Times Video »
The sedative ingredient was hard to identify. As conducted by Andrew Litton, the music was newly vibrant: agile in its scurrying, full-bodied in its braying and sweet thunder, hushed in its lullabies. And apart from Andrew Veyette, who looked uncharacteristically sloppy in Oberon’s fearsomely fast and difficult solos — dampening their usual jolt of excitement — the performances were good, if not especially inspired.
This cast does have special graces. Taylor Stanley, who was just promoted to principal, is especially good as Bottom, funny and touching even with his face hidden in the head of an ass. And the all-dance second act, the slightly dull wedding party that happens after the story has been wrapped up, is justified and lifted to another plane by Tyler Angle and Tiler Peck’s as-good-as-it-gets rendition of the pas de deus.
This sublime duet, Balanchine’s harmonious rebuke to the foolish entanglements of Shakespeare’s lovers, is all about intimacy and trust. Mr. Angle and Ms. Peck, sturdy but never stolid, keep afloat on a singing line through balances, low lifts and quarter turns, sustaining an ideal of love into the gentle ecstasy of the final dips.
Soon afterward, we return to the forest and the fairies and fireflies at dusk. The final image is supposed to be of Puck in flight, but on Tuesday, something happened with the harness and the ropes, and Antonio Carmena’s Puck stayed grounded, accidentally emblematic of an evening a little short on enchantment.
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