Ballet to Broadway: Wheeldon Works: An evening of unexpected delights and disappointments
'Wheeldon Works'? He sure does. Extravagantly talented, protean and industrious, the Yeovil-born wonder has a CV that's packed to the gunwales with goodies. With Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2011), The Winter's Tale (2014) and Like Water for Chocolate (2022), the Royal Ballet's 'artistic associate' has done more than any other choreographer to keep the three-act ballet alive and kicking. All the while, has also created a wealth of shorter, rich abstract ballets on both sides of the Atlantic. And, as the 'kicker' to this new programme suggests, he is also eminently at home in the world of song and dance.
The fact that the Royal Ballet is now dedicating an entire evening to his cannon shows the esteem with which it (rightly) holds him. What's more, three of these four pieces are company firsts − I can't think of a comparable bill at Covent Garden in my lifetime.
The one piece the company has danced before (if only six times), Fool's Paradise also proves the most successful. Not because of the Royal's prior experience of it, but simply because this 2007 work offers dancers and audience alike the most to get our collective gnashers into.
A well-judged 30 minutes long, it's the sort of shorter piece that Wheeldon is particularly good at: multi-movement, simultaneously complex and lean, entirely abstract but also hinting at narrative undercurrents.
Performing in spacy beams of light and in all manner of contrapuntal permutations, the nine dancers slink and coil in and out of each others' space and embrace, mostly following the mood of Joby Talbot's dramatically cinematic score, occasionally pushing against it. Narciso Rodriguez's pointedly plain, flesh-coloured costumes have an anonymising effect on the performers (all excellent, little Viola Pantuso once again marking herself out as a name to watch), heightening the piece's ritualistic edginess, and it all builds to a climax that's a mini-masterpiece of sculpture-in-dance.
A closing, kaleidoscopic knickerbocker glory to that opening, near-monochrome study in moodiness, An American In Paris is the 25-minute work-within-a-work from Wheeldon's Tony Award-winning 2015 show of the same name, which he adapted from the cherished 1951 film. Extravagantly designed and lit by Wheeldon regulars Bob Crowley and Natasha Katz, with the house orchestra clearly relishing Gershwin's jazzy luxuriance, it's a slender but hugely energetic choreographic mash-up of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, with an astute dash of Gene Kelly's princely-everyman swagger.
A stage Billy Elliot in his youth, Cesar Corrales pounces on the latter: not just a fantastic, virile ballet dancer, but also a born showman, he here displays just the right kind of grin-inducing braggadocio. As his innamorata Lise, standing in for his regular and also real-life partner Francesca Hayward, Anna Rose O'Sullivan dances with her usual pin-sharp briskness, but looks slightly ill at ease in this display of old-school Hollywood-meets-Broadway pizzazz.
And what of the two shorter, similarly titled pieces that fall in between? With the entire orchestra here lining the back of the stage, and displaying a looser, more contemporary-dance idiom, The Two of Us (2020), is a little, 'variety'-tinged romantic journey that plays out to four songs by Joni Mitchell, here delivered live by veteran pop singer Julia Fordham. Lauren Cuthbertson and Calvin Richardson are super as the couple, though I struggled on Friday with Fordham's fluttery delivery. Technical issues with the sound on the night mightn't have helped, but you craved the original recordings.
Us, meanwhile, is a romantic duet for two men − still an astonishingly rare dance trope − that Wheeldon created in 2017 for the BalletBoyz. Intimate and intense, the steps are lovely, generating vivid little vignettes of mutual support and empowerment, and Matthew Ball and Joseph Sissons make a great deal of them. Keaton Henson's score is on the dirgey side, though.
So, a bill that shows Wheeldon at his most mercurial, if not always playing the strongest possible hands. Still, the evening flies by, and his Alice returns next month − if you really want to see what all the fuss is about, there's no better rabbit-hole to fall down.
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