by Leigh Witchel
We don’t hear as much about it nowadays, but there’s a ballet company in between New York and Philadelphia: American Repertory Ballet. It’s been in Princeton under a few names since 1963, and former American Ballet Theatre principal dancer Ethan Stiefel is the current artistic director. Its current connections are equally to Philadelphia and New York: former Pennsylvania Ballet principals Julia Diana Hench and Ian Hussey are Executive Director and Rehearsal Director, respectively.
Its home theater, the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, opened in 2019 and is a lovely mid-sized house. The small company (the program only listed 11 dancer on full contract) is making a bid for more status: Stiefel premiered his version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The production used an orchestra and singers, but the hook was that ABT ballerina (and Stiefel’s wife) Gillian Murphy would dance the lead. No, not Titania. Oberon.
Even with that corkscrew twist, this version seemed to take more from Ashton’s “The Dream” than Balanchine. It was a single long act of a bit over an hour: a children’s matinee version of the tale. Stiefel added a few personal touches, but much of what he did seemed to be propelled by wanting to do the ballet with not quite enough dancers.
The scenery by Howard Jones was a pared-down version of what’s familiar: the Green World of the forest with a rotating bower at the back for Titania. The musical arrangement mixed Mendelssohn’s incidental music with Erich Korngold’s reorchestration of it for the 1935 Max Reinhardt film. There was a fanfare to begin, then into the overture.
The choice of casting Murphy as Oberon seemed to be less focused on gender and more on resources. Stiefel built the part not traversing ballet’s gender lines, but as a ballerina role. She wore a skirt, danced on pointe and was partnered. She just happened to be Oberon while doing it.
Stiefel didn’t have a lot of bodies to spread around plus he was trying to even out the opportunities so the men got to dance. Titania, Clara Pevel, had Ashton’s quartet of attendants, but here the changeling “youngster” was Nanako Yamamoto in a blond wig, pointe shoes and a tunic with electric lights on it. She also had a retinue of four, so there was a female corps of eight in total.
Puck, Aldeir Montero, had a posse of five elves who moved heavily, often in a squat. The scherzo became a quest for the magical flower, which worked, but Stiefel had the elves stomping about to the lightest music of the scherzo. They seemed like rustics. Murphy’s solo work during the scherzo was transition steps and then fouetté turns.
Musicality was a question throughout the ballet; this is the most gossamer, airy music, but there wasn’t much air in the choreography. The fairies seemed to be accenting everything into the floor and felt earthbound. During “You Spotted Snakes,” Pevel and Yamamoto jumped in syncopation but neither seemed to be able to get a rhythm on the beat so they both looked labored. Murphy went on in the scherzo to a manège of soutenus and jetés en tournant. Montero stole her thunder with beats.
The lovers, renamed Mia and Sanders plus Elena and Dimitri, showed up. Janessa Cornell Urwin’s designs for Mia and Sanders seemed to place them as hiking through the Tyrol. Elena and Dimitri were low comedy. Elena was scheming and co-dependent; that would only work as broad slapstick. Erikka Reenstierna-Cates had a putty face and got sharper and sharper with her timing as she went on. She distracted Hernan Montenegro and stole a kiss; he let her crash to the ground. Then he pretended to faint in order to make his escape by rolling and crawling away.
Seth Koffler was Bugzy, a naturalist in search of insects in the forest. The elves held him down as they transformed him into the donkey Bottom in front of us. It made them look like thugs. Koffler didn’t go on pointe; he wore sneakers and alas, one legging came off mid-dance. His duet with Titania was sometimes funny, but weirdly thought out. A fairy brought him a prop carrot, but Stiefel saw their pas de deux as an awkward social dance: part waltz, part jitterbug and part tango. Pevel and Koffler’s comedy acting wasn’t big enough to make that work.
Puck’s foul-up with the lovers turned into a brawl, and the lovers got funnier with more stage time. Annie Johnson was furious and confused as Mia, but the mess was untangled so quickly it felt extraneous. We were at the end of the narrative, but unlike Balanchine, Stiefel didn’t continue into formal dances, just more stuff, using the finale of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 (what Balanchine used for “Scotch Symphony”), then back to the Nocturne for a resolution. Murphy got to reenter at the conclusion with a beautiful Russian pas de chat. In one of the most interesting departures, Bottom’s solo after he became human again was closer to Ashton’s monologue of bewilderment, but then the music sped up and Koffler broke into a frenzy.
Some things just didn’t make sense. Puck tried to figure out which flower would make Titania fall hopelessly in love by trying to dose his own eyes. It doesn’t take much thinking to see that’s not a good idea. At the very end, Bottom returned back transformed again into a donkey and did the extended curtain call to the Wedding March as a donkey as well. Why and how did he turn back?
Making a new version of “Midsummer” takes bravado. Any attempt is up against stiff competition; both Balanchine and Ashton made masterpieces. Stiefel made an awful lot of conceptual choices, a few of which panned out. Like Sarah Bernhardt taking on Hamlet, Murphy got to dance a part women don’t usually get to do. But more often, Stiefel raised more questions than answers. What was the point of Murphy doing Oberon if there was so little she wouldn’t have done as Titania? It felt like a trouser role without the trousers.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – American Repertory Ballet
New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick, NJ
April 2, 2022
Cover: American Repertory Ballet in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Photo © Rosalie O’Connor.
Got something to say about this? Sound off here.
[Don’t miss a thing! We’ll send you a notification of every article we post if you sign up with your email. (The signup is right below, scroll down). We promise you won’t be deluged and we won’t spam you either.]
