TAYLOR'S BITTERSWEET SEASON
Photo: Lois Greenfield
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Just back from touring in India, the
Paul Taylor Dance Company enjoys a home season this month (City Center Theatre,
New York, February 25-March 9; 212-581-1212). Who better to warm us at the end
of winter? Taylor's gang is at one of its gorgeous peaks now, the dancers sunny
and seasoned, and capable in both Taylorian modes: the dark and the light. For
some forty years Taylor has presented us with fascinating portraits of a
mind divided--with dances of innocence and experience. Somehow over time even
Taylor's lightest romps have acquired, for the susceptible, an undertone of
wistfulness. The dances have stayed evergreen, and the dancers seem every year
to grow younger, but we--Taylor and his faithful--have grown older. Never
underestimate chagrin d'amour, nostalgia, and the other milder sorrows,
for their perfume is potent. Taylor's latest work is redolent of all these and
more. Set to Ralph Vaughan Williams, Eventide is a melancholic ode
to loss, replete with beautiful partnerings and partings. If this dance makes
you reach for your hankie, it is because Taylor evokes so clearly what is being
lost (the separation engendered not by whim but by death). There is tribute
being paid here, and there is recognition; for those who have loved (and lost),
it is a valedictory and, in its sunset way, a celebration. Here, as in his
other recent work (such as Company B), Taylor's opposites are finally
converging: the dark and the light meet, at dusk. Happily, the choreographer
has turned for his other new dance toward the future, taking up the work of
David Israel, an accomplished young composer-scholar (and balletomane).
Prime Numbers takes its shape from Israel's Dance Suite for Solo
Cello, a piece inspired by the city of New York. "There are parallels between
architecture and music," Israel says. Small wonder the choreographer has turned
to mathematics! (After City Center the company tours throughout the spring,
with stops in Buffalo, Kansas City, Richmond, New London, Washington, D.C., and
Philadelphia, among other cities.) --N.D.
| February 1997 Cover Page
| Pop and Jazz
| Classical
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ENTER THE QUEEN
Redgrave on the throne
Photo: Albert Watson
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Ten years ago New York's Public Theater embarked on a Shakespeare Marathon, ticking off the thirty-six plays of the canon, with mostly lackluster results punctuated by the occasional revelation. Campbell Scott's Pericles, in 1991,
was one. As we approach the finish line, there is the prospect of another:
Vanessa Redgrave as Egypt's queen in Antony and Cleopatra (February
18-March 30; 212-239-6200). Roughly a generation ago, in an unfortunate London
production, Redgrave portrayed a cringing, clinging creature, miserably
dependent on her man. Directing herself this time, she will surely know better
than to suppress her mercurial intelligence, her sovereign irony, her full
powers of incantation. Though no one can do everything the part demands, seldom
has an actress brought more to the role. --A.B.
| February 1997 Cover Page
| Pop and Jazz
| Classical
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A MAMMOTH TALE RETURNS TO NEW HAVEN
Thorton's wilder side
Illustration: Edmund Guy
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Once a season the renowned Yale Rep turns the main stage over to the third-year
students at the scarcely less renowned Yale School of Drama. In view of an
alumni roster that lists Meryl Streep and Angela Bassett, these theatricals
en famille always generate quite a buzz. This year's play is The Skin
of Our Teeth, which had its world premiere at a commercial New Haven
theater in 1942 with Elia Kazan in charge of a fancy cast featuring Tallulah
Bankhead, Frederic March, and Montgomery Clift. Part Our Town, part
Finnegans Wake, Wilder's second big play depicts the cycles of human
history as enacted by the household of Mr. and Mrs. George Antrobus, a family
fit for the brush of Norman Rockwell. At the final curtain, having come through
the Ice Age, the Flood, and global war, they are back where they started,
headed for another round. Unveiled against a backdrop of world conflict, the
comic panache of The Skin of Our Teeth must have seemed a brave
affirmation of human resilience. Three years later came the Big Bang at
Hiroshima, since which Wilder's optimism has sounded more like whistling in the
dark. Yet the play endures, confronting us now with the question "What
forces--in nature, in man--keep driving us to the brink of extinction?"
(February 20-March 15; 203-432-1234.) --A.B.
| February 1997 Cover Page
| Pop and Jazz
| Classical
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Austin Baer is a writer based in New York.
Nancy Dalva is working on a series of essays on Merce Cunningham
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