After yesterday’s article about The Plow That Broke the Plains, I found myself with a desire to write something about a more cheerful side to the music of Virgil Thomson. I decided to continue my pursuit of YouTube uploads of ballet performances, many of which have been provided by John Clifford, formerly a principle dancer with the New York City Ballet and subsequently the founder and Artistic Director of the original Los Angeles Ballet. I selected a ballet that will allow me to flesh out several additional interesting aspects of ballet history, one of which should be of interest to local readers.
The ballet I selected was “Filling Station.” As observed in Balanchine’s New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, this is “not only one of the first modern ballets on a familiar American subject; but one of the first ballets to employ American music, scenery and costumes by an American, and American dancers.” It was commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein for his Ballet Caravan, which would subsequently become the New York City Ballet, co-founded by Kirstein and George Balanchine. The ballet was given its first performance in 1938 and was revived for the New York City Ballet in 1953.
The YouTube video was made from this revival production. It was shown on a television series called Max Liebman Presents, broadcast on October 10, 1954. Liebman has his own Wikipedia page, on which he is described as the “Ziegfeld of TV;” but it occurred to me that most readers probably know as little about Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. as they do about Max Liebman! A name more familiar to local readers will (hopefully) be that of Lew Christensen, who both choreographed “Filling Station” and danced the leading role of Mac, the filling station attendant, in the original production. He would later come to San Francisco in 1940 when his brother William invited him to become Director of the San Francisco Ballet School, and the two of them would purchase San Francisco Ballet (SFB) in 1942. Lew would remain with SFB until his retirement in 1975.
In the 1953 revival Jacques d’Amboise took over the role of Mac. As Clifford’s notes on the YouTube Web page observed, he was 21 years old at that time; and he is consistently easy-going as he rises to every challenge that Christensen packed into the choreography. Mac is almost entirely the center of attention; and his personality is clearly grounded in the music that Thomson composed for him, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
The overall narrative amounts to a day-in-the-life story of the sorts of characters Mac encounters. These include a pair of truck drivers that are Mac’s friends, a state trooper, a clueless motorist that cannot handle directions and has to deal with an overbearing wife and a child with ideas of her own, a pair of “swells” that appear to have enjoyed a “night on the town” experience in broad daylight and are more than a little tipsy, and a gangster. The male “swell” is danced by Todd Bolender, who was a master of choreographed comedy and would later go on to run the Kansas City Ballet and the school associated with the company. The gangster is danced by Richard Thomas, father of “the other Richard Thomas” (who will always be remembered as John-Boy Walton) but also co-founder (with his wife Barbara Fallis) of the New York School of Ballet.
The narrative is more about the personalities than about any action. The only real plot element involves that gangster collecting loot from all of the other patrons of the filling station. There is confusion when Mac turns out the lights, and the stage is filled with flashlights pointing in all directions. When a light is aimed at the gangster, he fires his gun. When the lights come back on, the state trooper has nabbed the gangster; and the female “swell” is lying on the ground. She is carried off in a cortege but waves at Mac before she is taken off the stage.
All this unfolds in only about a quarter of an hour. Nevertheless, in that brief period there is a vast repertoire of choreographic versatility, the only exception being the state trooper, endowed with just the right degree of rigidity by John Mandia. I suppose many present-day viewers might find this more than a little corny; but, however many clichéd rabbits may get pulled out of Christensen’s hat, the intricacy of both the steps and their executions makes this a thoroughly satisfying account of how ballet began to come of age in the United States.
No comments:
Post a Comment