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PBS salutes Mr. B
BY JEFFREY GANTZ
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American Masters: Balanchine
Written by Holly Brubach. Narrated by Frank Langella. Directed by Merrill Brockway. Airs this Wednesday, January 14, from 9 to 11 p.m. on WGBH/Channel 2.
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American Masters’ two-hour salute to George Balanchine first aired in 1984, the year after his death. In the 20 years since, the George Balanchine Trust has made available a number of the works filmed beginning in 1977 as part of PBS’s Great Performances series as videotapes in its Balanchine Library, as well as New York City Ballet’s three-hour "Balanchine Celebration" and a commercial-film version of his Nutcracker (with Macaulay Culkin) from 1993. No choreographer in the history of dance is as well represented on video. Yet, as this program reminds us, Balanchine created more than 300 (or 400, or 450, we hear varying reports) works, and many of them are no longer in any repertoire, so every bit of footage from America’s greatest choreographer is precious. American Masters: Balanchine hasn’t been seen, according to PBS, since its initial airing, but it’ll be on WGBH this Wednesday at 9 p.m., as part of the Balanchine centennial celebration, and if you didn’t tape it the first time around, there’s no need to make the same mistake twice. Although Mr. B wasn’t there to supervise the making of this biography, he dominates it from the opening moment, in which over tolling bells narrator Frank Langella tells us that on the same day Marius Petipa wrote that he had no successor, January 22, 1904, George Balanchine was born. Mr. B himself takes us through his early years — from life in the Imperial School in St. Petersburg (he saw his family once a year, in the summer) to his post-Revolution flight to Paris, where he joined Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. He talks, in a thin, reedy, homy voice (like the sound of a Russian oboe), the same way he choreographs: cultured, practical, witty, and just plain smart ("We are trying to do things that are unexplainable"). We hear from his first two wives, Tamara Geva and Alexandra Danilova, and from dancer Ninette de Valois. We follow him as, after Diaghilev’s death in 1929 and the demise of the Ballets Russes, he meets Lincoln Kirstein in London and emigrates to New York, forms a new company and is invited to be part of the Metropolitan Opera (where he creates a ballet, The Bat, based on Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus), falls out with the Met and sees his company fold, choreographs for Broadway, creates a ballet for 14 elephants to Stravinsky’s Circus Polka, eventually starts another company with Kirstein and is invited to share the City Center with the New York Opera. He explains that the iconic 1-2-3-2-1-2-3-2-1 formation with which his 1933 Serenade opens came about as the result of having 17 dancers at rehearsal: "If I’d had 16, there would have been two lines." And you get to see why it was said that Balanchine could cook Stravinsky out of a bad mood: George just talking about food puts a big smile on Igor’s face. But the bonanza in the first hour is the black-and-white performance footage: Balanchine in the first English sound film, 1929’s Dark Red Roses; his third wife, Vera Zorina, with Eddie Albert in the Slaughter on Tenth Avenue section of the 1939 film On Your Toes; Diana Adams and Tanaquil LeClerc (his fifth wife) in Concerto Barocco; Nicholas Magallanes, Francisco Moncion, and Violette Verdy in Orpheus; Diana Adams and André Eglevsky on The Ed Sullivan Show; Jacques d’Amboise and Tanaquil LeClerc in Western Symphony; Patricia Wilde in the version of Square Dance with the caller ("Chase that rabbit, chase that squirrel, chase that pretty girl ‘round the world/Chase that possum, chase that coon, Chase Manhattan on the moon"). The capper is a clip from the 1958 Christmas Eve TV broadcast of The Nutcracker, where Balanchine, who’s playing Droßelmeier, unwraps his handkerchief from around Nutcracker, blows his nose and wipes his mouth with it, pokes his finger into Nutcracker’s mouth and gets it stuck there, manages to pull it out after getting chomped, and gives Nutcracker a severe scolding. The second hour is less winning, in part because much of the footage is drawn from the Great Performances telecasts that are now available on video and in part because the chronological approach that took part one up to New York City Ballet’s move to Lincoln Center in 1964 is abandoned. Although we see lots of Suzanne Farrell in performance, there’s no mention of the effect she had on Balanchine’s life, or her departure from the company, or her return. And no one who’s been watching the show for 90 minutes needs to be told that "the studio was his laboratory" or that "New York City Ballet was George Balanchine’s empire." In any case, words, even Mr. B’s, are superfluous when you can compare six different dancers — Peter Martins, Violette Verdy, Jacques d’Amboise, Melissa Hayden, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Patricia McBride — in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux. Or the various presentations of Apollo, Balanchine’s oldest surviving ballet, which opens and closes this tribute and proves that his ability to do things that are unexplainable was there from the beginning.
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