via The Wall Street Journal
A Comedic Ballet With Legs
Jerome Robbins's 'The Concert' is in a category all its own
"Death," one showbiz quip has it, "is easy; comedy is hard." However savvy Jerome Robbins might have been in the mid-1950s as a still-budding master of both musical-theater dances and of classical ballet, he could hardly have predicted the staying power of "The Concert," the comedic ballet he created to Chopin in 1956 and called "A Charade in One Act" and subtitled "The Perils of Everybody."
Once his hilarious take on would-be concertgoers hit its stride with a 1971 restaging for his home-base company, the New York City Ballet, "The Concert" showed itself to be a deathless ballet comedy. In recent years, over a dozen ballet companies nationally and internationally, including one in Perm, Russia, have eagerly performed the work.
Robbins said that he wanted "to denude certain pieces of their banal titles -- 'Butterflies,' 'Raindrops,' etc. -- perhaps restoring them to their purity by destroying their fabricated interpretations." In the well-coordinated scheme of "The Concert," visual as well as choreographic details work toward the same lighthearted ends.
Irene Sharaff's costuming dresses the cast of 21 men and women in faded Smurf blue. Think of sleek, mannequin-like silhouettes all around, with the men in virtual longjohns and the women in matching tights, leotards and pointe shoes. To individualize the cast of basic baby-blue characters -- who during the ballet's early years Robbins identified by such names as "A Young Man," "A Realist," "An Usher," etc. -- Sharaff delineated each one by accessorizing the uniforms with telltale details, such as hats, scarfs, jewelry, gartered socks, vests, neckties, eyeglasses, Hussar helmets, butterfly wings and insect antennae.
Saul Steinberg designed two fancifully caricatured drop-curtains in 1958, which are, respectively, in place at the start and then at the end of "The Concert" to help place the action specifically in a theater. Today's productions of the ballet sometimes use the witty curtains created by Edward Gorey for the Royal Ballet's 1981 staging.
The nine Chopin pieces -- lullaby, waltz, mazurka, prelude, etc. -- which are sometimes given as orchestrated selections, underscore and define the moods and foibles of the ballet's characters. The ballet's audience eventually finds that the dancers -- on a bare stage that is set only with a grand piano and its glum pianist -- are being presented as audience members, too: attendees at a piano recital.
Robbins's main female character is a dreamy, svelte young woman with flowing hair and a hat, à la Garbo in "Camille." His chief male character is a world-weary, cigar-chomping man who's henpecked by a culture-vulture wife. These central characters have moments in the ballet's separate episodes that tell us about them individually as well as about their relationships to each other.
Another key part in the suite is played by the female ensemble in what has become known as "The Mistake Waltz," arguably the most side-splittingly funny scene of them all. Set to the "Waltz in E-Minor (posthumous)," it reveals a six-woman ensemble that just can never get it together to sustain the choreography's symmetries.
As he shows elsewhere in his ballet, Robbins bears down on the gags he sets up by devising layer beyond layer of repeatedly humorous situations. Just when you think you've laughed yourself silly over a string of irregularities derailing the intended harmonious patterns, another wrinkle appears, which gives way to still another. In the waltz's final moments -- including those after the music has subsided to silence and the posed pretty grouping is seemingly set and balanced -- one wayward dancer subtly rewafts her arms into their really required position so hypnotically that you can't believe you didn't see this coming.
Subsequent to his lilting trainwreck of a waltz, Robbins addresses the so-called "Raindrop Prelude" (Opus 28, No. 4) head on, wittily using its association with precipitation as inspiration for an almost hallucinatory landscape animated by the closing and opening of plain black umbrellas. Later in his career, in 1972, Robbins created a self-consciously Zen-like world for his Asian-theater-inspired "Watermill." But this scene in "The Concert" -- in which brolly-bearing men and women amusingly take cues about the weather more from one another than from the elements themselves -- conjures more Eastern serenity than all the Asian accoutrements and glacial theatrics in "Watermill."
The closing scene of "The Concert" turns one's private smiles again to more raucous reactions. The whole cast has now acquired silky, painted butterfly wings, including the put-upon husband, who tries to make time with the whimsical, music-loving beauty, all to the robustly orchestrated Ballade (Opus 47, No. 3). Eventually, the now-outraged wife reappears, more or less kicking her way back into the picture before being flattened amid a cymbal-crashing musical climax.
Finally, the valiant on-stage pianist takes up a butterfly net in hopes of snaring all the maddening characters, only to have them get away to make us laugh another day.
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