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A CurtainUp Review
Chéri
By Elyse Sommer
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"There they are! Chéri and Lea. . . my son and my best friend… inseparable. . . still in each other's arms after all these years. (Pause) Was he my gift to her? Or did she take him from me? Who knows?".— Charlotte in the first of four brief monologues to fill in what couldn't be conveyed through the dancers' movements.
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Amy Irving & Herman Cornejo (Photo: Joan Marcus)
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The dancers are certainly spectacularly agile. Herman Cornejo is especially outstanding in bringing an impressive range of interpretive emotion to the title character of the French writer Colette's famous May-September romance. David Zinn has created an elegant Paris apartment for the story to unfold, which it does almost entirely through dance. Zinn's costumes both for Irving's brief appearances and the dancers evoke the turn of the last century period of Colette's novella. Christopher Akerlind's lighting does as much, if not more, to establish the context as Tina Howe's four brief monologues for Ms. Irving. And, oh, yes, there's live music by expert pianist Sarah Rothenberg.
So, what's wrong with this picture? The imagination and sensuousness of Ms. Clarke's hybrid of silent film, theater and dance previously demonstrated in Garden of Earthly Delights , Vers la Flamme , Vienna Lusthaus are all on display here. It would seem that this spare new production once again demonstrates the old saw about less being more. However, in this case, the spareness of text and cast, and the single piano presentation of similar sounding and feeling musical selections (mostly Ravel) are a case of less really being less.
Vers La Flamme had even less dialogue than Chéri (all you heard was a bark from Clarke's own dog). It too used just one pianist. However, the source material, five of Anton Chekhov's best known short stories, paired beautifully with the Alexander Scriabin's dream like music whereas in Chéri the addition of pieces by Frederic Mombou and Debussy to the dominating Ravels somehow have a repetitive ring. This may well be intended since the young Chéri and his much older lover come together, apart and together again, only to be finally parted by the awareness of age and the desolation of war (the end is actually taken from the sequel to the first novelette). Unfortunately this repetitive motif falls into the trap of being rather monotonous.
Garden of Earthly Delights, based on the famed 16th Century triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch, was in a class by itself. While totally wordless it was buoyed by dancers literally flying as in a Cirque du Soleil production.
Vienna: Lusthaus enlisted playwright Charles L. Mee to merge text and movements. The thirteen-member ensemble featured actors as well as modern dancers to make it the most theatrically dynamic of Clarke's works — the kind of piece better suited to an organization like the Signature than the current offering.
None of this is to say that Colette's stories don't lend themselves to dramatization. Her Gigi was a major film hit and is currently being readied as a new stage musical in DC, with probable ambition to continue on to Broadway. But I found myself not quite buying into the brief background note after the Playbill's cast list (probably by Ms. Clarke, given that her picture is the one on the Playbill cover) urging the audience to follow Colette's advice to writers to prefer "brush strokes and splashes of color" to narration and to "liberate" themselves from definitive plots and conclusions."
Amy Irving delivers Tina Howe's situation establishing monologues as a character in the Colette novella. She is Charlotte, the mother of Chéri (Herman Cornejo), who at eighteen began a long-term love affair with Lea (Alessandra Ferri), her best friend and contemporary. That set-up established, we see the lovers passionately connect. We then see the affair end when the young man enters "good" marriage arranged by his mother. But passion is not to be denied, and after they've come together, and then apart, they connect once more only to have the morning light (Bravo, Mr. Akerlind!) show that age is indeed a separating factor. The final scene — or I should say the final choreographed "brushstroke"— is taken from the sequel in which Chéri returns psychologically too scarred for love to matter.
Those monologues, Clarke's choreography and the large mirror to underscore the ultimately impossible to ignore age difference do make it reasonably easy to sense what's going on. Cornejo's vivid facial expressions help. Ferri, who retired from the American Ballet Company five years ago, fits the May-December set-up even though it's not evident in her graceful moves. That said, the moods expressed tend to come off as rather one-note.
While Irving's appearances work in getting us attuned to each new aspect of the lovers' relationship that we're supposed to see, she IS a star. You want more of her than the less than ten minutes (probably no more than six) of stage time she gets here. What's more, the choreography itself is problematic in that it doesn't seem to have enough variety, a fact not helped by the same shortcoming in the music. There's a lot of lifting and choreographic coupling, but the really spectacular leaps that ballet enthusiasts know Cornejo can execute are only hinted at in his final solo.
Even though not as satisfying as I'd hoped, the Signature's willingness to tackle something new is admirable. Since Chéri is the first of three programs Martha Clarke will be doing as part of her Residency 5, I look forward to seeing her make the marriage of dance and theater work for New York's most exciting and fun to visit theater complex.
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Chéri Conceived, directed & choreographed by Martha Clarke Text by Tina Howe. Cast: Amy Irving, American Ballet Theater principal dancer Herman Cornejo and ballerina Alessandra Ferri. Pianist Sarah Rothenberg Running Time: 65 minutes, no intermission Pershing Square Signature Center Irene Diamond Stage 480 West 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenue signaturetheatre.org eFrom 11/19/13; opening 12/08/13; closing 12/22/13--extended to 12/29/13 before official opening (extended dates at regular prices). Scenic & Costume Design: David Zinn Sound Design Arthur Solari and Samuel Crawford Music Supervision: Sarah Rothenberg Stage Manager; Terri K. Kohler Reviewed by Elyse Sommer at December 4th press preview |
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