Word: ballerinas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Grand Hotel is set in the poshest spot in Berlin in 1928, the very year that Threepenny premiered. In this rarefied place, even victims are privileged: a bankrupt baron (David Carroll), an embattled industrialist (Timothy Jerome), a ballerina in decline (Liliane Montevecchi) and her dogsbody, a closet lesbian (Karen Akers). A dying accountant, played by Michael Jeter with a dazzling mix of febrile weakness and life-grabbing gusto, has enough money to live out his waning days in luxury, while a typist (Jane Krakowski) who moves from man to man always has her looks to fall back...
...libretto depends too heavily on whether the industrialist will turn crooked to save his neck (anyone can see he will) and on a love match between the baron and the ballerina that ends almost before it has begun. Director- choreographer Tommy Tune provides a pretentious last-minutes ballet between characters introduced as love and death. Despite these shortcomings, Grand Hotel is the musical winner of the season, bringing to mind, if not quite matching, the kinetic narratives of Harold Prince, Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett in their heyday. Tune takes a set more cluttered than Threepenny's -- fluted columns...
...Marius Petipa, is strictly cut and paste; the plot went down with the ship. But Le Corsaire provides the occasion for some florid dancing, especially in the hands of bravura technicians like Tatyana Terekhova and Farukh Ruzimatov or a poet on point like Altynai Asylmuratova, the company's reigning ballerina...
Beyond technique lies the elusive area of style. Kirov dancers seem to know viscerally how to put across the drama in the music. A ballerina may fall off point more than her American counterpart, and her fouettes may veer out of control. But apparently this bothers neither her nor her bosses. The dancers display an endearing, innocent pleasure in the least of their achievements; a chaste young demi-soloist, having completed her variation, will milk the audience for applause -- and get it. At the New York City Ballet such deportment would be considered inexcusably vulgar...
...tour, Scotch Symphony, Balanchine's musings on La Sylphide, worked best with Yelena Pankova, 25, as the sylph. A springy dancer blessed with a high, light jump, she seemed to grasp the choreographer's oft repeated injunction: respond to the music and "don't think -- do" the steps. Senior ballerina Galina Mezentseva tried to make a romantic story out of this plotless work and as a result looked...