Ka-thunk. That’s the sound of television pablum landing on my undefended prepubescent brain. And I became the pleasured slave of the half-hour segments about a twin set of tweens — Cathy who adores the minuet, the Ballets Russes and crepes suzette, and Patty who likes to rock ‘n roll, a hot dog makes her lose control.

Yes, the Patty Duke Show theme song forever emblazoned in my memory banks. What a waste of space.

By the time Tania, er … Patricia Hearst and the SLA blew through the insane wind tunnel that characterized the unwinding of the 1960s, I was still unaware, in suburban Pittsburgh, that faraway California was fomenting all this cultural chaos and disseminating it by television. 

The peculiarly American phenomenon — the relentless commoditization of the individual and promoting it in a culture driven by celebrity (exemplars: the two Patties) –  is Kennelly’s concern in “Patty the Revival.” The auteur and his many collaborators have fashioned a smart new musical that expresses ambivalence about the forces that shape our lives. 

“Patty” depicts a journey toward person hood. A large cast of characters cohabits the stage: shrews, nags, and friends. Three women share the lead role, viz, there are three Patties, plus a fourth, a shadow Patty, who haunts our girl. This trifurcation cleverly reflects Patty Duke’s twindom and Patty Hearst’s me or Tanya dilemma. Where, and who, is the real person?

Calling his “Patty” a “revival, Kennelly draws on the language and imagery of religiosity, the pentecostal. But it’s actually a new wave opera, a looney underground musical careening on uppers. To prove it, the best song of the evening, “Colors,” is inspired by Duke’s outré turn as Neely in the film, “Valley of the Dolls.” “Purple, pink, red, yellow and blue” moans the refrain.

I loved seeing”Patty”‘s all-girl cast crammed into Pilar Macchione’s Wonder Woman costumes, teetering on perilous platform shoes, in this garage-rock setting. The venerable performance space has been reconfigured into a new arrangement with a cool thrust stage designed by Lianne Arnold and wired by dedicated tech guy Ed Cha. By producing the whizz-bang “Patty,” Highways’ longtime artistic director Leo Garcia aims to draw the next gen into his shop.   

Wonderful performances with full-throttled song delivery (music by Jonathan Snipes with Kristin Erickson, many worked on the lyrics) and constrained but shapely choreography by Marina Magalhaes mark this show. Less successful were wobbly video wall projections that kept the viewer in a state of perpetual visual motion. I’m not sure where “Patty” takes us or how it resolves (despite a shocking kicker) and the show needs cutting. But its sharp mocking of the cult of celebrity, and the pleasure of watching the all-woman pack interact in funny, believable, yet girlish ways makes “Patty” worthwhile. We were waiting for the man in this paean to American girlhood, but he never showed up. It was all about Patty, rather the Patties. Or the Patty in us all.

_{photo credits: Highways Performance Space, Marina Osthoff Magalhães}

The 80-minute dance-drama, an adaptation of a Russian short story by Ivan Bunin, opened Wednesday night in Santa Monica.

It is touching to see this great stage artist in a vehicle that suits him so well. His silken physical presence lends weight to a play in search of some — steeped though it is in a dark, sombre setting of Europe of the 1930s. A somewhat flimsy, primarily visual vignette, “In Paris” ‘s tone poem revolves around a love story, more of a fantasy encounter. An absurd atmosphere prevails as Platonovich banters in a gentle voice with the excellent actress Anna Sinyakina, who plays the waitress Olga. Charming wordplay bobbles between the server and her client; for example, concerning the older gentleman’s soup selection — pickled cucumber, borscht, or cabbage.

One of the evening’s many striking tableaux had the Russian planted far downstage on the tilted, rotating plate of a stage. Preparing for his rendezvous with Olga (a movie date, how perfect), Nickolai lathers shaving cream on to his gaunt cheekbones, then performs a punctilious toilette. The famed Baryshnikov legs get good exposure, but more so, as he dresses, we’re privy to a highly personal ritual — a tightly wound gentleman fastening the myriad buttons that hold him together. For, in the play, Misha plays a repressed military man, a characterization he admits was inspired by the memory of his real-life father.

At evening’s end, I caught a broadcast of PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley in conversation with Misha, in which the former ballet dancer remembers his father, and his Latvian childhood. Since most Americans only know Baryshnikov as a perfect prince who virtually floated into our midst, this inkling of his real story fascinates.

A wonderful capper to “In Paris.”

_{Photo credit Angela Weiss/Getty Images}

Watch Dancer-actor Mikhail Baryshnikov, Part 2 on PBS. See more from Tavis Smiley.

A range of music, not quite jazz, rather, unidentified art songs, came between. The slow-tempo’ed ruminations clustered ’round the low notes of the grey-haired pianist’s keyboard.

Feeding a rhapsodic house of worshipful fans, Jarrett offered an assortment of repertory, all digestible, ranging from 8 to 10 minutes. “This is the new, short me!” he proclaimed in one of several appealing commentaries delivered from a standing microphone ten feet from his piano.

Jarrett is a highly introspective performer. Alternately hunched over the keyboard, then weirdly (and wonderfully) rising to standing position while still playing, he noodled and extracted harmonies. The slender pianist at times wrenched away from the keyboard, twisting his torso and turning his face to the house. Sometimes he wailed with his voice.

Even boogie woogie, even walking blues, all that he touched was shapely and controlled. There was a sameness, at worst, but the evening came to a crescendo during three encores.

Having been roundly warned by a stern voice on the p.a. system against talking, photo-taking, cellphone ringing, or the worst of all, god forbid, coughing, the muzzled audience nonetheless gamely drank it in. They seemed awestruck. In the end, they loudly demanded not one, not two, but three encores from Jarrett who charmingly offered the Arlen ditty as his farewell. The love connection between artist and audience was thus sealed.

Along with his rapturous playing, Jarrett rapped. Getting the thumbs down was Kenny G; saxophonist Albert Ayler got a thumbs up. Jarrett admitted to having been self indulgent in his salad days. Apropos his new-found musical brevity, he said, “When it’s over, it’s over!”

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Amidst a clutter of books, art supplies, burning candles, and oversized classical paintings, propped onto surfaces or hanging from walls, habitués of Classical Underground, the monthly musical salon, went through their paces. They sipped, noshed, and schmoozed.

The hubbub was a pre-concert affair; once the music started, a connoisseur’s hush-hush  prevailed. Settling into seats — mostly folding chairs, some of the cozy overstuffed variety –- a few hundred classical-music junkies focused on getting their fix. A roster of musical prodigies — primarily imports from the Russian academy still in their mid-thirties, several on the brink of major classical careers — delivered an exquisite line-up of chamber music deploying killer technique and sublime interpretation rarely seen at close range. Now in its fifth season, the still-vital “Classical Underground” served up this bohemian repast -– top notch music plumped out by food, wine, and passionate, if a somewhat kooky, arts discourse.  

What music. The pairing of pianist Alexander Kobrin with cellist Boris Andrianov formed the program’s core. The bespectacled Kobrin, buttoned down, but with a dry wit, proved a fine foil for Andrianov, whose expressive Russian face oozed ecstasy as he extracted sweetness from his vintage (1740) cello. Together, both men, laden with musical chops, plunged into the program opener, the Beethoven Cello Sonata #4, its themes of melancholia chiming forth right up front. Bowing at an extreme angle, the cellist pursued Beethoven.

Kobrin, the first-prize winner of the Van Cliburn and Busoni piano competitions, as well as a prize winner of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, soloed in a spot-on, if rather insistent and hammering, reading of Beethoven’s “32 Variations in C Minor.” Classical Underground guru-in-residence Laurence Vittes (Steele calls him, “Comrade Laurence”) informed the audience that the work reflects Beethoven’s enormous improvisatory skill.

Boris Martinovich, an animated Croatian bass-baritone, bellowed, accompanied by the sweet Kanae Matsumoto on piano. An expressive actor-singer, Martinovich shared two Italian aria, the first, from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” and then an encore from Verdi. So solid, so golden. Listening, your heart vibrated.

A highpoint was the premier of “intro Version” by Anna Drubich, a darkly pretty and poised female pianist/composer, her work performed by the young Russian cello virtuoso Evgeny Tonkha. This duo also played a work by Rodion Shchedrin, a contemporary composer married to the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. Playing Glazunov, Tonkha’s rapture surfaced: his eyes closed, his mouth moved slightly, a light sweat broke out. What a vision.

The major musical happening, however, was Andirinov and Kobrin reuniting for Benjamin Britten’s “Cello Sonata” written by Britten for himself on piano accompanied by cellist Mstislav Rostroprovich. Vittes introduced the piece as a dialogue between the two instruments, calling it “a work about friendship and love,” then adding, “it’s just right for tonight.” The cellist journeyed through the work’s six rich movements, at one point, putting down his bow and plucking, then, in the third section, “Elegia,” plummeting the depths of his instrument. When this bit was over, the host, Steele, sitting nearby, leaned toward me and murmured, almost wincing, “That’s really beautiful.” And so it was, as Britten had his players crawl through sound and time and space, a ghostly march reduced at moments to note-by-note, but always moving inexorably ahead.

After the playing of this grown-up masterwork, the two young cellists, Andrianov and Tonkha, engaged in splendid horseplay, sputtering in cello duets that resembled cowboy music.

The C.U. experience is for the musically – and otherwise – adventurous. Located at the crosshairs of two massive Los Angeles freeways, the 110 and 405, the loft sits in a blandly bizarre industrial park. It’s a weird trip, off the beaten track. The Steeles launched the concerts as cozy artists parties, but they’ve expanded; now, disparate strangers mingle. Doors open well before the show when the smorgasbord is laid out (everyone is encouraged to contribute). Initially it feels like a train station. But barriers fall quickly as the room warms with the sound of gorgeous music.

Till our next visit …

Read this article on The Huffington Post.

With “Pina,” German cinema legend Wim Wenders joins the recent ranks, which include American documentarian Frederick Wiseman (“La Danse”), the Briton Mike Figgis (“The Co(te)lette Film”), and indie guy Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan”), in crafting rapturous, high-tech paeans to the art form. Wenders’s current wonder is shot with 3-D technology and there’s a lot of excitement over the cinematographic skill employed.

On the surface, “Pina”’s vast and generous showcase of Bausch’s Tanztheater ensemble seems to serve dance well. Beyond beautifully photographed, it’s sumptuous and cannot be more visually engaging.

The best parts, the brilliant bits, of “Pina,” may emanate not from the choreographer but from the filmmaker. Wenders removes Bausch’s work from the theater, and places it in the startlingly tidy German countryside (everything in this film is immaculate). A dancer frolics in the grass, toying with her colorful chiffon skirt. A duet transpires on a stunning glass-walled outdoor platform. Back in the city, the man and woman twirl at street level, beneath an elevated commuter rail track. Also gripping are the sequences shot in the mills and factories of Wuppertal, the central German town where the dance company is based. A male dancer, flopped onto the platform of what looks like a steel mill, moves his limbs like a broken puppet. Industrial supply cars glide silently behind him. What a vision. There’s an extremely wry sequence — gee the whole thing is so severe you dare not laugh out loud — clowning in a tram car. This material is amazing to watch, memorable, transcendental. Bravo, Wim Wenders. [review continues below photo]

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Bausch is admittedly not my favorite dance maker. What on earth is she trying to say? Even if I got part of it, it would be acceptable. I see that she’s gathered a colorful tribe, and employs a theatrical, plastic visage to make it all human. But I don’t recognize the people. The look doesn’t help me — unkempt hair, loose breasts, grandma sack-style dresses, lingerie-slips, ball gowns worn by bohemians. The male contingent is even weirder, in retro suits with bare feet. The staring, hanging, clinging, clawing, dropping and, above all, the suffering – to what end? It’s strikes me as very sad. The old-tyme music distracts, excuse me but I don’t care to reminisce on Germany in the 1930s. I fail to meld as an audience member with this artist, perhaps my inadequacy.

The studio and theater scenes, delivered in bits and pieces, are grounded in Bausch’s signature work, the unbearably opaque “Cafe Muller,” which has not aged well. Dancers sliding down walls, overturning chairs, the purposeful ugliness feels irrelevant.

So what’s at the heart of this movie? Not a documentary, it provides no artistic context. The film assumes Pina Bausch matters – a lot. I was waiting to hear from the grizzled German dance critic, a chain-smoking “Sprockets” guy, who’s devoted a lot of time thinking deeply about Bausch’s art. But he’s not in the picture. Instead, the precious explanatory moments are allocated to sound bites by infatuated dancers, e.g., “Pina told me ‘be more crazy’ …” Touching because the grief-stricken dancers memorialize Bausch so soon after her death, nonetheless, these commentaries are not of real use to civilians.

Does “Pina” deepen our connection to a mystery-plagued art form? That’s what I care about. Dance needs fewer Martians and more Earthlings; less obfuscation, more clarity. We need humane, direct communication with audiences. At the screening I attended, the response was muted. I wondered how many new dance friends “Pina” had made.  

_{Photos: ©Neue Road Movies GmbH, photos by Donata Wenders. A Sundance Selects release. Apologies to the photographer.}

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• Prepare for “Pina”:  Watch Sprockets.

Suddenly, into the theater and up an aisle rushed an entourage. Burly body guards surrounded a familiar figure. It was the matriarch, Katherine Jackson, appearing only days after the sentencing in the murder trial of her fifth son, Michael. Her third son, Jermaine, 56, hastened by her side as the group of about eight filed into the theater’s only empty row. The house lights dimmed and the stage came alive.

Janet Jackson, 45, had held the show for her mother’s arrival. In a welter of mixed feelings for this beleaguered American show-biz family, the performance began.

Jackson, a hearty trouper, plunged in, delivering a nearly two-hour concert sans intermission. Warbling in her soft but steady voice that occasionally fluttered to the top of her range, she led a stageful of performers — seven dancers, a six-piece band and three back-up singers — through a tightly packaged evening of her hit songs primarily from the 1990s. Out they poured, one after the other, Pleasure Principle, Control, What Have You Done For Me Lately, Miss You Much, Nasty, Escapade, When I Think Of You, That’s The Way Love Goes, Scream, Rhythm Nation. The five-time Grammy award winner, literally dressed in battle gear, anchored herself on this impressive bedrock of pop music.

It was wonderful to see Jackson looking healthy and well after the haunting vision of her brother’s decline. In the intimate 1,127-seat McCallum we got a good glimpse of her. Her widespread Kohl-lined eyes dotting her sweet diamond face, she shook her headful of Shirley Temple curls (only, jet black), sometimes scrunching it with her hand. All of this bobbed prettily atop her fulsome figure. The Jackson family’s remaining scion carts the baggage of a myriad body looks — from anorectic to plump. While she was not an ounce overweight, on Thursday she arrived fully loaded. It was fun to watch — her padded hips, shapely butt, long haunches, and lovely feminine torso.

But would someone please take “control” and dress this beautiful woman for the stage? Jackson’s costumer presented her in tight grey jeans, a white jeans jacket and laced combat boots, which, despite expressing the earthy side of her character, looked dated. It was fine as a specialty look, but not over the long haul of the evening. Not one thread in it moved, for one problem.

Janet Jackson is not her brother. You notice this. Hey, only one genius per family. Both in voice and in movement, she lacks MJ’s crystalline brilliance, his quicksilver quirkiness. She’s more studied, earthy, solid. But as one audience member, Steven, 49, of Los Angeles, noted after the show, “It was genuine. She worked her butt off.”

“Phenomenal,” said his friend Audie, also in his forties, from Palm Springs. “For 45 years old — the energy, the effort. You can see she loves her fans.”

A lovely interlude had Jackson seated on a stool with a hand mike, crooning ballads, Come Back to Me and Let’s Wait Awhile, with its romantic urging for a couple to be patient. Here her voice shone through, breathy and vulnerable. She needs coaching on hand movements however. 

Christopher, 31, of Palm Desert said, “What a show. She had great energy. She got the crowd going.” He added, emphatically, “She’s sweet.”

“I loved how she showed respect to her family,” said Paul, 60. “She was gracious.”

Prior the performance, Carl, a Palm Springs city worker said, “She’s on my bucket list, you know when you get older there are those you want to see. I’ve followed her since the good times. And this is an excellent venue. I would not go [see her] in a huge stadium.”

Local residents were thrilled that Jackson chose to perform at a small venue in their community. “It’s huge,” said Earl, 41, of Palm Springs, attending in a group of 15 family members, “She sells out stadiums.”

Karina, 29, of Rancho Mirage said, “I thought it was amazing. It was a dream. I grew up watching her on “Good Times.” I loved her since I was nine. We’re so honored that she came here.”

Jackson said in a statement, “So many communities are facing cutbacks in the arts and this beautiful place continues to grow and offer programs to the people who live in the Coachella Valley. That speaks to my heart, especially because of their outreach to young people.”

Adding to the evening’s wonderful vibe, Jackson’s presence helped raise $1 million for the McCallum, a result, according to a spokesman, that the theater has not garnered since 2008.

Read this story in The Huffington Post.

_{Photo credit: Marc Glassman for McCallum Theatre}

Hey, we liked it anyway! Pictured below, you’ll find:

• your humble, hard-working arts·meme correspondents, Debra and Larry, enjoying the evening;
• groovy audience participation in the pageant — a pretty girl in the lobby, a derriere-challenged “Iris” cast member seeks her seat … um, in a manner of speaking.
• Hollywood Boulevard’s dearly departed denizens rising from the sidewalk to join in the fun.

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Our close-to-stage seats put us in the firing line of a barrage of smiling, well-rehearsed, incredibly handsome and beautifully dressed performers. Beyond their clever design, the costumes fit so well; memorable are the ladies’ aquamarine gowns, quel couleur, and the natty, sequined unitards that show up toward show’s end. Heck, some of the girls even have sequins in their lipstick. Everywhere you look, something witty to watch.

The cast includes an entire Chinese village of acrobats who bend, not like pretzels — because pretzels break. Instead, Danny Elfman’s bubbly, yet epic, musical score provides the strong backbone of “Iris.” The music, half recorded (live musicians roost in the Kodak boxes), is tinged with sweetness and I think it’s nice that he quotes from Leonard Bernstein. “Iris’s” pleasing tone seems to stem rather genuinely from concern for the audience; this shouldn’t be noteworthy, but it is, right down to the final mise-en-scene in which trapeze artists zoom around in the Kodak Theatre rafters (do shopping mall theaters have ‘em? rafters?). This thoughtful staging gives the peanut gallery a good look-see.

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Some sequences are messy. The comedy send-up on the Academy Awards, an easy target given that Cirque occupies the house that Oscar built, is an example. If “Iris” is truly meant to be about film history, then keep the humor steeped in film history, not cross dressing, viz., lose the juvenile fruit routine. Why not engage L.A. talent, like our film history funny man, Michael Schlesinger, as a consultant? Schlesinger could sort this out and lend local authenticity, which the show lacks.

Speaking of the audience pleasing, thanks for letting us schmooze, throw back a whiskey, and visit the toilette during the intermission, an old-fashioned theater convention that has lately gone missing. Bring back intermissions.

Bienvenue à Los Angeles, Cirque du Soleil.

The gifted duo, Jodi Melnick, a former Twyla Tharp dancer, and David Neumann, a dance-theater-comedy specialist, created the absorbing work on a commission from the Pillow, and it caps a shared evening of their individual choreography.

“July” is on view literally down wind from the Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theater where Trisha Brown, the high priestess of post-modern dance, celebrates the fortieth anniversary of her company. One cannot but note an implicit passing of the baton, a generational shift all the more meaningful for taking place at Ted Shawn’s former Berkshires farm, where so much American modern dance history has transpired.

Melnick has worked as an assistant director to Trisha Brown, creating and restaging two operas, Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’, and Scrainno’s ‘De Gelo a Gelo’.  And Brown’s husband, the video artist, Burt Barr, contributes the luminous set design of Melnick’s marvelous “Fanfare,” which opens the program.

“July” begs a description of its players, two very different dancers. Melnick vacillates in performance as subtly as light refracts through a prism; in one moment, the slender redhead projects a flinty, hard edge. Then, womanly heat arises from her long twisting torso. On third glance, she’s gone — a ghostly, fragmented figure remains. It’s fascinating watching Melnick, and while she moved in the shadows of “Fanfare”‘s electric-fan projections, I found myself wishing it would go on all night.

Melnick shares the evening with her former SUNY Purchase classmate and longtime platonic pal, the classically good-looking Neumann. In his first outing, “Tough the Tough,” Neumann is all distinct form and boyish clowning. Trundling around the stage loaded down with folding chairs, he takes a great pratfall, absurd and laugh-out-loud funny, mostly because it’s so predictable.

In “July,” he’s putty in Melnick’s hands; mostly, he melds with her idiosyncratic way of moving that has no discernible start or ending point. She cleaves to him, he molds around her, sees her, caresses her, often without touching her, merely by his presence.

In an extraordinary sequence, shown in the photo at right, Neumann, on his back, offers Melnick the flat of his flexed foot. She accepts this invitation, and balances on a perch that in the real world would be not too stable, but when the muscular Neumann is behind it, she’s secure. Balancing there, she crawls down his leg using her arms; he supports her, and the two rock gently, as over a wide gaping crevasse. He’s her foundation, she cradles in the shell of his receptive body. The simplicity, the originality, the giving of physical form to an ephemeral such as trust between a couple — it’s what dance does best.

Whether by intention or accident, “July” augurs a return to, or perhaps a renewed version, of chivalry and respect between a man and a woman in the art form. For dance, reflecting changes in society, has journeyed far, too far for my taste, toward a flattening of gender differences. (To be fair, this prevails more in the contemporary ballet world, in which we often see crude interactions that border on the physical abuse of women.)

In “July”‘s version of Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” these two handsome creatures — she with flaming red hair, he with hair coal black — project a vision of masculine strength coexisting with feminine mystery. Kudos to Jacob’s Pillow Artistic Director Ella Baff for her vision in pairing the two downtown dance makers, enabling “July” to come to pass in the Duke’s beautiful natural setting. I suspect that after seeing “July,” couples of any sexuality will go home and be nice to each other.

_{Photo credit: Cherylynn Tsushima for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival}

Even the three-day closure of the mighty 405 freeway proved ineffectual against the strong arm of ABT. A huge, ballet-besotted audience showed up anyway. Filing into the indoctrination chamber (aka the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, named for the capitalist roader), they were submerged in a tale about happy peasants living communally — on a collective farm. “Bright Stream” goes on to portray how a troupe of visiting dancers engages their agrarian comrades in that most subversive of Marxist tactics — state-funded art.

[above left, Carmageddon; below right, Asaf & Sulamif Messerer in The Bright Stream, 1935]

Two hours later, the dazed viewers exited the Chandler, marching in lock step and clutching, in raised fists, dance writer Joan Acocella’s New Yorker essay on Ratmansky (“the most sought-after man in ballet”).

“He is the new Balanchine. Ratmansky is the new Balanchine,” they intoned, transfixed. They then swapped their BMWs for tractors, Calvin Kleins for aprons, fascinators for babushkas, IPods for pitchforks.

In the glare of Los Angeles’s blinding sunlight, they pondered what they’d seen.

A new story ballet, well, kind of new. The restaging of a 1935 socialist realist ballet with a sad political history, a rare item, a ballet with blood on its hands, if not blood, then the ruined careers of three artists. Uncle Joe (Stalin), you see, didn’t fancy it. And you thought Alastair Macaulay was a terror! Here’s Acocella:

Shostakovich never wrote another ballet score; Fyodor Lopokov, the choreographer, lost his job; and Adrian Piotrovsky, the librettist, was sent to the Gulag, where he died.

This painful pageant our friends at ABT delivered, with little or no context, as a cheerful spectacle of peasants, pirouettes and pique turns. And our audience (we live in paradise), who can barely discern Stalin from Lady Gaga, or a collective farm from the Santa Monica Promenade, gobbled it up. The Soviet Union was all long ago and far away.

“The Bright Stream” must hold deep meaning for the Russians and for them it’s a noble reexamination. But niggler that I am for history, even the Russians restaging “Bright Stream” strikes me as complicated. I wish I had seen the Bolshoi dance the work in Orange County in 2005, because revisiting Stalin’s failed experiment in collectivism (millions died) seems like their business, and not ours. It is ABT’s picking up of this project that leaves me so ambivalent.

The dance market, weary of the past twenty years of European balletic abstraction, is clamoring for old-fashioned, readable, full-evening story ballets. No one, it seems, but Ratmansky, is up to the task. Lucky guy, he’s flavor of the month; there’s been a bidding war for his services across Lincoln Center; and ABT got him. New York critics have proclaimed him king, the heir to Balanchine’s throne, and it’s smooth sailing from there.

Acocella even states that the reason Ratmansky is a great choreographer is that he eschews the (weird) dance inventions of the past two decades; he’s reverted to glissade-assemblé… the nuts and bolts of the classical vocabulary. There are layers upon layers of cultural revisionism going on here!

I’m wondering what this Stalin-era relic, rendered toothless by Ratmansky, has to do with America, or American Ballet Theatre. Is it camp? “Real” Russian ballet? (I get the joke! I have a sense of humor!) ABT’s new Nutcracker? Most importantly, can it exist outside its history, an assumption implicit in ABT’s championing it?

I was seated Thursday night next to George Chakiris, the star of Robbins’ “West Side Story,” yes, based on Shakespeare, but brilliantly reconstituted in an American milieu. I felt a tinge of embarrassment watching “Bright Stream” next to him, like, why is ABT doing this? I keep musing that Balanchine came to the U.S. and made “Stars and Stripes” and “Western Symphony.” He choreographed to Gershwin and wore cowboy shirts. He worked, like a zealot, on Broadway and in Hollywood.

It’s startling how far afield ballet has strayed in this country. My beef is not with Ratmansky, although faced with his serviceable but not art-dappled choreography, I’m unconvinced. It’s with ABT.

_{Thank you Ismene Brown of TheArtsDesk for the great historic photo.}