Grownup Nutcracker

"I'm running a restaurant." says the New York City Ballet's Choreographer George Balanchine. "I have to serve a different dinner every night, and I can't overburden the kitchen. But once a year I want to give a banquet." Last week Balanchine served up the biggest banquet of his career to an audience that paid up to $100 a head. The occasion: the premiere of Balanchine's most ambitious ballet, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Although Balanchine has created 55 works for his City Ballet, and by his own count "made up enough steps to feed the world for 100 years.'' he had never before attempted a ballet as massive as the evening-long Midsummer Night's Dream. (His longest previous effort: The Nutcracker, which as a children's matinee attraction has become the most lucrative work in City Ballet's repertory.) Moreover, in turning to Shakespeare. Balanchine had violated one of his own favorite theories--that ballet should be pure dance and should not tell a story. But what attracted him was not so much the Shakespeare plot as Mendelssohn's familiar incidental music to Midsummer Night's Dream (the overture was written when the composer was only 17). Balanchine had wanted to work with the music ever since he first heard it as a boy in St. Petersburg, and he got his chance when City Ballet patrons raised $80,000 for a new production.

Balanchine started-by using only the Midsummer Night's Dream music, but as the ballet grew he tossed in other bits and pieces of Mendelssohn--the overtures to Son and Stranger, Athalie, Fair Melusine, the Symphony for Strings No. 9, the "First Walpurgis Night" from Faust. He did all the choreography in two months and was still tinkering with the ballet almost to the time the curtain went up.

Midsummer Night's Dream proved to be first-rate spectacle and only intermittently good dance. The sets, by Designer David Hays, were superb--particularly his stylized forest of plate-sized green leaves, spread in a gigantic canopy across the stage--and the costumes by Karinska were as opulent as any the City Ballet has ever displayed (the corps de ballet's wispy costumes cost $400 apiece; Oberon's gold lame tunic, $1,200). With a cast of nearly 100, most of the emphasis was inevitably on swirling group movements and splashy stage effects: clouds of smoke pouring over the footlights into the orchestra pit, Titania coming onstage with a magnificent retinue. There were also some deft characterizations and some fine bits of choreography: a fluent, elegant pas de deux between Conrad Ludlow and Violette Verdy, an elastically lyric solo by Edward Villella as Oberon, a wonderfully comic and closely knit dialogue of movement between Melissa Hayden as the Queen of the Fairies and Roland Vazquez as Bottom, wearing a donkey's head.

But Midsummer Night's Dream went on too long. Mendelssohn's music soon began to sound too sugary, and Balanchine, although unfailingly clever, offered few novel ideas. Nevertheless, he and the City Ballet had produced a sure crowd rouser ("Every night," said Balanchine, "I go to bed and say 'Thank you, Mr. Mendelssohn' "). Chances were excellent that Midsummer Night's Dream would become exactly what its backers hoped--"a Nutcracker for grownups."

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