San Francisco Ballet's all-Robbins program is a triumph. This mixed bill is one of the most satisfying evenings in the theater that SFB has produced in Helgi Tomasson's quarter century at the helm of the company. It was Jerome Robbins who discovered young Tomasson and got him started and fed him great roles throughout his career, and Tomasson has paid him back with this tribute. The show runs through this weekend, alternating with another mixed-rep bill, and it's a must-see.
Somewhere in the middle of West Side Story Suite – during "The Rumble at the Gym" – I felt like the Opera House was going to explode. By the end, when the dancers onstage were actually singing "There's a place for us," it's safe to say that half the audience was in tears.
In his lifetime, Robbins was scorned by some critics as an unprincipled crowd-pleaser, whose only imperative was to "make it work." He had indeed broken under pressure during the McCarthy era, and divulged the names of fellow Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Fifty years later, it's clear that his ballets have the integrity to live well into the twenty-first century, and that his character and situation as a closeted gay artist make him, along with Tennessee Williams, the most challenging and fruitful ground for Gay-Studies scholarship to be found.
It seems likely that the all-American sailors he created in 1944 in Fancy Free are a response to his traumatic Army physical (he was declared unfit for service as a homosexual), and that West-Side Story is his response to the intolerance he faced from all sides (when he was threatened with exposure as a queer if he did not cooperate in the McCarthy hearings).
What's even more important is that Robbins could use his unique vantage as an outsider – born Jeremiah Rabinowitz, he was also passing as a gentile – to see people afresh and make fictions that are universally resonant. You don't have to be queer to feel for Tony and Maria, or for the American sailors on shore leave – or for the mythic Polish aristocracy dancing in his Chopin ballet, In the Night, who embody the exalted bruised eroticism of that Romantic music. Last Saturday night, all three couples were radiant: YuanYuan Tan and Ruben Martin danced into the music with greater expressive reach than I have ever seen in the first pas de deux before, and Lorena Feijoo marked her return to the stage after a serious injury with a stunningly fiery account of the prima donna role.
Fresh-faced, adorable Garret Anderson bore the evening away, as both Tony in West Side Story and as the sweetest of the sailors in Fancy Free – who were played with exceptional grace and ease as friends (Davit Karapetyan and Pascal Molat were the other two boys). Their camaraderie overrode even the dazzling pyrotechnics of their show-off solos – big jumps, double spins landing in the splits, big macho stunts – and the tension of their situation, which is that three buddies have found only two girls to hang out with and who's going to be the odd one out? Robbins wrings all the comedy possible out of the situation, with an undertone of poignancy. These are young people in war-time, who could be separated at any moment by 'orders from headquarters' and the boys sent off to die. Vanessa Zahorian was lovely and touching as the girl with the red purse.
As for West Side Story, all I can say is go see it. Rory Hohenstein, James Sofranko, Julianne Kepley, Elizabeth Miner, Dores Andre, Benjamin Stewart, Matthew Stewart, Jaime Garcia Castillo, Pierre Francois Villanoba were all striking, and Shannon Roberts tore up the stage singing and dancing as Anita.
Program Five is another mixed bill, full of good dances very well danced. The new ballerina Maria Kochetkova left a brilliant after-image of herself folded in her lover�s arms, in Tomasson's new ballet set to Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Two vivid shorts by Christopher Wheeldon opened the show, which closed with a dark, androidal spectacle of whipping snaky bodies in Wayne MacGregor's brilliant fantasy-ballet, Eden/Eden. Yuan Yuan Tan was stunning at the center of this vision.
Words on Dance presents a symposium on Robbins's ballets this coming Monday starring Robbins' biographer, Amanda Vaill, talking to Robert La Fosse, Stephanie Saland, Helgi Tomasson, and Edward Villella. at 7:30 p.m. at the War Memorial Veteran�s Building, Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Avenue. www.wordsondance.org