A thus-far strong season at American Ballet Theatre continued memorably on the evening of Wednesday, June 5th, of the fluidly staged, dramatically effective Jane Eyre, a 2016 adaptation of the eponymous Charlotte Brontë novel, which received its company premiere the night before, in a co-production with the Joffrey Ballet.

 

Originally presented by Northern Ballet in the U.K., the work is inventively choreographed, although in conformity to classical norms, by Cathy Marston. The score, here conducted by Charles Barker, largely consists of music by Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn, and Frank Schubert, arranged by Philip Feeney, who composed some excellent original music. The production is visually striking, impressively exploiting the possibilities for effects of depth in the staging, with costumes and set design by Patrick Kinmonth, who collaborated on the scenario, and lighting by Brad Fields.

 

The evening I attended featured a fine cast with the talented Isabella Boylston in the title role, ably partnered by a dashing Thomas Forster as Rochester, although one could have imagined a more dramatically weighty pairing with, for example, David Hallberg and Natalia Osipova. The secondary cast included: Skylar Brandt, replacing Breanne Granlund, as the young Jane; Duncan Lyle as St. John Rivers; Blaine Hoven as the Headmaster; Cassandra Trenary as Mrs. Fairfax; Hee Seo as Blanche Ingram; and Stephanie Williams as Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad wife. The admirable corps de ballet was characteristically superb.

 

This production is an interesting addition to the company’s repertoire and it will be worth revisiting in future seasons.

 

 

Susan Sarandon’s first New York stage appearance in a decade (when she was on Broadway in Ionesco’s Exit the King) is the obvious reason to see Happy Talk. In Jesse Eisenberg’s slight comic drama, Sarandon plays Lorraine, a narcissistic actress—is that redundant?—who tries to ignore life’s awfulness from intruding on her well-being in her own home: her (unseen) elderly mother is in a sick bed and her husband Bill, suffering from M.S., often sits in a state of near-catatonia in the living room.

 

A strong season of American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center continued impressively on the evening of Thursday, May 30th, with the Tharp Trio, three compelling dance-works by the innovative choreographer, Twyla Tharp, who has had a long association with the company.

 

Her classical antecedents can be detected in the first piece, the lovely The Brahms-Haydn Variations—originally titled Variations on a Theme by Haydn, after the orchestral work by Johannes Brahms to which it is set—which was given its world premiere by Ballet Theater in the year 2000. The stylistic influence of a choreographer like George Balanchine here provides a contrast with the more contemporary inflections of Tharp’s most celebrated productions. The excellent primary cast included Misty Copeland, Joo Won Ahn, Skylar Brandt, Arron Scott (replacing an injured Herman Cornejo), Stephanie Williams, Blaine Hoven, Zhong-Jing Fang, Calvin Royal III, Sarah Lane, and Gary Pogossian, with strong support from the admirable corps de ballet.

 

There is an explicit link with the historical ballet vocabulary in the second work on the program—the company premiere of Deuce Coupe from 1973, a piece with many beautiful elements set to music, sometimes glorious, by the Beach Boys—in that, throughout, the marvelous ballerina Christine Shevchenko performs steps from the classical ballet dictionary. However, along this one can simultaneously observe the populist choreography that has brought Tharp her greatest fame, with for example three Broadway shows set to music by Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, and Frank Sinatra. The penultimate sequence, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” was an example of one section that was especially powerful. The massive cast is too large to enumerate so I will only cite some of the more noteworthy dancers, including Stella Abrera, Royal, Isabella Boylston, Copeland, Catherine Hurlin and James Whiteside.

 

The most representative work on the program was the last, the mesmerizing In the Upper Room from 1986—set to wonderful music by Philip Glass—a not unworthy successor to the Jerome Robbins master work, Glass Pieces of 1983. Again, the ballet featured a huge cast from which I will only mention some of the most memorable: Devon Teuscher, Brandt, Duncan Lyle, Hoven (again replacing Cornejo), Cassandra Trenary, Scott, Boylston, and Thomas Forster. The conclusion elicited an enthusiastic ovation with which the choreographer thrillingly appeared on the stage.