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Company
Pacific
Northwest
Ballet
Choreographer
Kent Stowell
Music
Russell Warner
Design
Ming Cho Lee
Costume
David Murin
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Sadler's
Wells
2
- 6 July 2002 |
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Intended as
a tribute to the music of Jerome Kern
as well as a twenty-fifth anniversary
celebration for Pacific Northwest Ballet
in 1998, Silver
Lining was choreographed by the
company's Artistic Director Kent Stowell.
It is a two-act mixed performance, with
soprano Valerie Piacenti and baritone
Erich Parce singing Kern favourites,
including – either as vocal or
instrumental – "Can't help Lovin'
Dat Man", "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes",
"Look For The Silver Lining". Kern's
work belongs to the mainstream history
of American musical theatre, and it
naturally suggests its great allied
tradition of dance – think Fred
Astaire and Gene Kelly – and that
is what Stowell offers: a reprise of
familiar because long-enjoyed song and
dance in the popular American style.
There
is nothing wrong in itself with an evening
of this kind, for audiences with a taste
for it – except that it is little
more than a sentimental journey, nostalgic,
kitschy, undemanding and for the greater
part banal. It certainly does not look
at home on the stage where one is used
to seeing the work of Pina Bausch and
Jiri Kylian, and it seems a million
miles from Alvin Ailey's extraordinary
energy and inventiveness filling the
same space just a few days before, with
a finer evocation of the best in American
movement.
There
is nothing to fault in the company.
Technically accomplished, the dancers
are mainly tall – more miles of
arms and legs between them than in any
other known company – and therefore,
because they are well trained, they
are graceful and expressive. If one
had to cavil at the dancers it is that
the mannerisms of the male troupers
were too deliberately camp to capture
the nuances of the Kern stories they
were supposed to be illustrating. The
live orchestra was excellent in its
purling stream of Radio 2 favourites
from Kern's easy-listening pen –
but in the end the high point of the
evening was neither music nor dance,
but a magic trick in which a dancer
(one of the best in the troupe) seemed
to vanish inside a box of separable
and partitionable halves. For the rest,
the evening was an expression of everything
most anodyne, shallow and infantilistic
in American theatrical culture: the
little-girl voices of the chorus, the
sexless pertness of the dancing, the
saccharin sameness of each number –
only the costumes and the backdrops
changed – so that the only thing
that seemed to vary the string of clichés
constituting the whole was the not infrequent
jarring of a tasteless note, such as
the wince-making "Edinboro Wriggle",
which defies description.
Even
Homer nods; so Sadler's Wells might
be allowed a week of Silver Linings
now and then, despite their being nothing
but the basest metal.
AC Grayling |
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