Balanchine Takes it on the Chin

Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, George Balanchine’s choreographed interpretation of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream returned to the San Francisco Ballet (SFB) repertoire, this time, hopefully, for a full run of eleven performances. Readers may recall that, all but the first of the performances scheduled for the spring of 2020 had to be cancelled due to COVID. Since that time, there have been major changes in repertoire under the new leadership of Artistic Director Tamara Rojo. Sadly, the traditions of the repertoire of major twentieth-century choreographers, such as Balanchine, have not fared particularly well (Frederick Ashton having been the most recent casualty); and last night was a particularly disappointing experience.

The entire evening could be distilled down to a single adjective: boring. The entire first act, which Balanchine conceived as a distillation of the entire Shakespeare play, plodded its way from episode to episode, bringing to mind little more than that one-damned-thing-after-another epithet. Mind you, much of the time is spent with corps de ballet of fairies, who had little to bring to the narrative; but even those ensemble pieces lacked any sense of fresh energy (let alone the ephemeral nature of the characters they were intended to portray). Where the characters themselves were concerned, particularly the twists and turns of the “love quadrangle” was little more than muddle, while the tension between Titania and Oberon was flimsy, and Puck’s intrusions tediously offered little. Only Bottom’s ass-head engagement with Titania allowed for a giggle or two.

The divertissement for the second act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the corps led by Frances Chung and Angelo Greco (© The Balanchine Trust, photograph © Chris Hardy)

For those unfamiliar with this ballet, the second act departs from Shakespeare to provide an “entertainment” for the wedding celebration. This basically took the form of a multi-movement divertissement, drawing upon works by Felix Mendelssohn to supplement the music he had composed for the Shakespeare play. However, as had been the case with the fairies in the first act, the dancing came across as little more than routine (an adjective that would never have been applied to Balanchine when he was in charge of the New York City Ballet). The result was, in the immortal words of Dorothy Fields, “as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes.”