High brow, low brow(?): Balanchine's Don Quixote & Xanadu

Waited in line for 2 hours on Tuesday to catch the New York Public Library's screening of George Balanchine's Don Quixote (a "hot ticket" according to Joan Acocella in last week's New Yorker), an archive black-and-white film with bad sound, not ideal picture but which nevertheless captures the historic and magnificent first cast. Turns out I didn't necessarily have to wait so long as people who showed up minutes before the screening got in, but it was worth it to wait for in any case. Farrell's dancing was magnificent: mature, confident and entirely musical already at only 19 years old - as a viewer outside commented after the screening, she already "had it all" at the very early beginnings of her career. She had this luminescent presence whenever she was on screen, and I kept trying to figure out whether it was because she had more lighting on her, or if she was herself simply radiant as a performer. A little bit of both perhaps? Other highly memorable moments came from seeing other NYCB legends in the ballet's divertissements and subsidiary roles: a teeny child Judith Fugate as a young Chistian girl in Act 1's puppet theater, Suki Schorer stopping the show in the Mauresque Pas de Deux divertissement in Act 2, or Mimi Paul's exquisitely supple variation in the Act 3 dream scene... the list goes on.

There was a personal reason for me to try and see this film, as I was lucky enough to be an intern at the Kennedy Center when Suzanne Farrell restaged the Balanchine Don Q a few years ago. I arrived late in the process, really only experiencing Suzanne and the company when the production arrived from Toronto for tech, load-in and performance (they had staged and rehearsed at National Ballet of Canada's studios). Still it was fascinating to see Farrell put the piece together, positioning dancers in the set, describing why they had to stand certain ways so that lighting would accentuate a certain mood - then I soft of listened in when she gave her final set of notes to the company after the final dress rehearsal before the first night. My principal duty during the show was to shuttle the child supernumeraries around backstage. They played the puppets in Act 1, and showed up in little dream bits throughout - I'd bring them to one side of the stage, run around to the other and catch them as the ran off, then brought them back upstairs. I also watched the thing seven times in between all this; there was an alternate child wrangler but I ended up having so much fun that I stayed for all the performances, "hiding" from my boss who thought I had gone home. So anyway, I wanted to see what the original production looked like, and of course see Farrell dance in her original role.

The ballet itself is rather long and dark: this is certainly not the bright and peppy Petipa version focusing on Kitri and Basilio, but rather a more intense, even very religious psychological study of Don Quixote himself and his dream of the ideal - embodied of course through Dulcinea/Farrell the ballerina. I ended up admiring several parts of the ballet over time, especially divertissements and the dream scene. I can respect the value of the much darker elements (ie an entire fantasy funeral procession for the Don at the very end, complete with men carrying a large cross) in the canon of Balanchine work, though I can't say its the most fun story ballet evening one is likely to encounter.

The film is a remarkable historical document, if not of the ballet itself (the camera ends up missing a lot with darkness or too-close zooming) but then of the remarkable dancers that danced it and gave it life. I noticed, too, in the original production how much more the men stood out - there was virtuoso dancing, and lots more character to their movement as well. In the revival the men were pretty faceless, taking more of a supporting cavalier role. The audience that can be heard on the film seemed ecstatic about the performance - it was a gala performance after all - compared to the more muted reactions that Farrell's restaging got. Hugely interesting to see.

Meanwhile, Wednesday afternoon I saw Xanadu at the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway. It was immensely silly and frothy, a very fun afternoon, some might call it low brow in comparison to the ballet film but it totally fulfilled that part of me that needs to see a cheesy, splashy musical. The show is loosely based on the (by all accounts) awful movie-musical of the same name, where a Venice LA street artist is visited by muses and decides to open the disco roller rink of his dreams... lots of 80s music and fashion and a very fun theme song. The staging just amps up the kitsch in a winking, hilarious way, so it's fun. I mean, it's really not all that great of a story, and the material isn't anything to write home about either, but with a cast of huge talents including Kerry Buttler, Mary Testa and Jackie Hoffman, I couldn't help but be won over by their hilarious performances. Leading man Cheyenne Jackson was unfortunately out, but his replacement in the lead role, Curtis Hollbrook, played the airhead artist role just fine without being particularly memorable; perhaps with an understudy in the role, the show's focus shifted to the women. I should say, though, that I'm very glad to have only paid half-price for the show, getting the ticket at the TKTS booth... not sure if it's necessarily worth the $110 all-tickets price.

Seeing a play tonight - Manhattan Theatre Club's Mauritius at the Biltmore. And tomorrow, the Met Opera's Lucia di Lammermoor open house.