Happy Impromptu

The newest ballet in Manhattan last week started off as relaxed as a picnic, and seemingly just as impromptu. As the curtain went up, a man in a grey double-breasted suit strolled on to the nearly bare stage, clarinet in hand. Taking his time, he eventually reached a stool in a downstage corner. He tootled a few warm-up phrases; then the orchestra in the pit joined in a discreet background from Aaron Copland's Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra. Thereafter, Jerome Robbins' Pied Piper kept its happy air of the impromptu, but it was scarcely relaxed.

A boy and girl in rehearsal clothes came on next, and approached the "Piper" with wide-eyed caution. He soon had them both in a trance. At a sudden flurry of notes, they staggered away, responding to every spasm of the music like so many puppets on strings.

More & more dancers edged onstage and fell under the spell of the tootling clarinet. Miming to the music, tiny, red-haired Janet Reed led her cohorts through a lithe trance that almost stopped the show. By the time Jerome Robbins himself danced on with Tanaquil LeClercq to join in some hilarious, supine calisthenics, the audience was having trouble deciding whether to hold its sides or pound its palms. It wound up at the curtain alternately doing both. Brilliant Choreographer Robbins had clearly brought the New York City Ballet a smashing new hit.

Whether he intended it that way or not, Robbins had also fashioned a perfect note-for-note caricature of Aaron Copland's plain and homely music. In doing so, he may have saved an otherwise inconsequential piece from oblivion.

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