They just ain't got that swing
Pacific Northwest Ballet, Sadler's Wells, London
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Your support makes all the difference.No one ever said it was easy choreographing to song lyrics. And no one ever said it was easy (or advisable) to persuade a Sadler's Wells audience to join a communal singalong after a ballet. Pacific Northwest, the Seattle ballet company that now ranks as the fifth biggest in the US, would have been on safer ground opening with a selection of Balanchine classics than the Jerome Kern medley it chose to show last Tuesday. PNB has a repertory bristling with Balanchine ballets rarely seen in London, but instead it brought Silver Lining, a big-budget, rhinestone-studded, full-evening creation by its artistic director, Kent Stowell. Too bad this labour of love takes 30 dimly glinting songs from the Kern legacy of the 1920s and 1930s and turns them to unrelenting dross.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and a choreographer gotta respond to the lyrics of a song if he wants to achieve anything beyond doodling and wafting about on stage. And that means either matching the words, or working deliberately against them, as Twyla Tharp did so memorably in her Nine Sinatra Songs. In Stowell's case, I boggle at the sensibility that can stage such lines such as "We two should be like a couple of hot tomatoes / But you're as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes" as a bog-standard romantic duet. Or set "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" in the same way, but now with the girl's skirt obscuring the boy's vision like a safety curtain every time he hazards a big lift. I'm sure it wasn't meant to be funny.
Five minutes into Silver Lining no one in the theatre can doubt the dancers' ability to lift their legs up past their ears, nor Stowell's sincerity in eliding slide and shuffle with standard ballet steps. But he might as well replay the first five minutes on a loop for all the variety he injects into the following two hours. A frenzied number of costume changes fails to relieve the monotony of mood and temperature. Only a couple of full-company ensembles (with an impressive 36 bodies on stage) build anything approaching a buzz to match the music – handsomely played by the Royal Philharmonic but dismally sung by the soprano and baritone soloists.
Were the old songs really so coy, so stodgy, so ... middle-aged? The morning after, I dug out my faded video copy of Swingtime, the Fred and Ginger film that includes some of the best mid-period Kern numbers, just for a reality check. Yes, the old lyrics are innocent; even the smoochiest stop short of sexy. But the strawberry blonde and the little guy with the grin are wild young things, full of crazy ideas, unsafe to be around. They would scarcely have recognised this dull, dire evening of theme tunes as theirs.
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