I'm still trying to figure out what the yellow hanging contraptions above the lobby of the New York State Theater were supposed to be last night; the decorations of sticks poking puffy balls of shredded yellow, well, I don't know what, made me think of dandelions, or maybe trick yellow cigars in mid-explosion. Well, at least there were festive, even if they brought to mind airborne clumps of pollen at an unfortunate time of year.

It was fortunate to have City Ballet back, of course, at the beginning of the company's celebration of Jerome Robbins, apropos of his birth ninety years ago, and his death ten years ago. There were, I'm happy to say, no speeches, only Robbins' choreography, and images of his career.

It's become a given at for City Ballet galas in honor of a person to begin with the Robbins/Stravinsky Circus Polka. At the Stravinsky Festival in 1972, Robbins took the cute polka Stravinsky wrote for Balanchine's famous (or infamous) dance for circus elephants, and remade it into a tribute to Stravinsky, as, dressed as a circus ringmaster, Robbins marshaled and herded ranks of schoolgirl ballet students of varying ages and sizes through simple, "dancing animal" paces. I'm sure the sight of Robbins wielding a whip must've resonated intriguingly to generations of his victims, I mean dancers. Back then, the ballet ended with the girls arranging themselves to spell I.S. Last night, Robert LaFosse was the jolly whip-weilder, and the tykes spelled out, not surprisingly, J.R. As a crowd-pleasing curtain-raiser, it's hard to beat.

Next there was a short slide-show of picture of Robbins at varying stages of his ballet career, the gangly young dancing prodigy and the dapper, bearded perfectionist choreographer. Two shots were particularly telling; a portrait of Robbins as Petrouchka, a reminder that he was the last person to whom Fokine taught the role, and, of course, a smiling Robbins leaning against the piano of a smiling Leonard Bernstein.

I must still be seeing ballet with Kirov-accustomed eyes, but, even though I'm fond of the Robbins/Verdi The Four Seasons, it seemed very, very lackluster all of a sudden, not from the choreography, but the execution. Things I'd learned to overlook over the years with City Ballet were suddenly glaring: all those arms all over the place in positions which
are neither fish nor fowl; the never-quite-together corps; and so-so dancing from some leads. It was depressing.

Megan Fairchild was fine in Winter. She's more open, relaxed, confident, funnier every year, and she looked as if nothing could be more fun in the world than to perform high-octane balletic calisthenics to keep from freezing in Verdi's playful winter wonderland. In Spring, Sara Mearns is lovely, lush and fecund, but she still can't manage those tricky little turns with the rapid-fire changes in spotting which come at the end of her solo. She's not a quicksilver, Kyra-Nichols sort of dancer, alas. Perhaps requiring her to become one will make her one, but it hasn't yet. Philip Neal looked to be having great fun, even if he might've lost a bit from his elevation and extensions.

In a debut, Tyler Angle was the best I've seen in Summer for years. Here, the man's usually cast with a big, lunky guy -- Marcovicci, Fayette, Hanna -- or a not-so-big, lunky guy -- Ramasar. At six feet, Angle isn't tiny or a reed, but he doesn't have the massive, stolid affect of his predecessors. While once Angle might've looked too pretty and lightweight for such a sexy, sensual role, in recent years (perhaps building from his wonderful Tybalt), he's tempered his delicacy with a subtle, noble gravitas, which complements beautifully his gift for finding la mote juste musically; I can't remember the last time I saw Robbins' sinuous and deceptively simple male solo make sense as it did last night. Rachel Rutherford approached her own languorous part with her familiar reserved, kittenish beauty. Oddly enough, in not trying to confront her directly as an object of sensuality (ok, lust), as the aforementioned male dancers were wont to do, Angle managed to connect to her in a way I haven't seen, again, for years. Sometimes the way to get the girl is by not trying to get the girl, it seems. From being the least satisfactory Season, Summer was suddenly the best, so far.

In Autumn, Daniel Ulbricht's faun gyred and gimbaled with great mania and greater, crowd-pleasing elevation. Benjamin Millepied still seems a bit off his peak in his tricky leader-of-the-bacchanalia solos, although he dutifully fired of successive double tours, and the hopping "helicopter" turns in second. There were only a couple of awkward moments in his partnering of Ashley Bouder, and wasn't she a sight for my sore, Kirov-calibrated eyes? There seemed nothing she couldn't do, and in delighting at her winning way of taking extreme musical and technical risks (risks for any other dancer), I wondered if perhaps she has a big S embroidered on the chest of her leotard. I'll admit, her fouéttés weren't as pretty as Tereshkina's, but whose are? Bouder travels musical highways no Kirov dancer could follow, except, perhaps for Somova. Well, maybe not Somova, either. But after the endless speculation on dance boards as to who is coaching or not coaching Somova (can the poor girl blow her nose without someone wondering who coached her?), I realized that, in Bouder, I was looking at Somova's perfect coach. Not that it'd ever happen, but Bouder could show her how to handle her prodigious gifts in a way, it seems, that the Kirov artistic powers can't, or haven't yet.

After the happily rousing curtain, I considered that the Kirov could probably have great fun with Robbins, well, The Four Seasons anyway (I shudder to think of them in West Side Story Suite). So, of course, I had to cast it for them:

Winter:
Tereshkina (this was a no-brainer)
Spring:
Osmolkina/Fadeev and those four guys from Rubies.
Summer:
Kondaurova/Korsuntsev (or maybe Lopatkina)
Fall:
Sarafanov and...
Somova/Shklyarov or
Vishneva/Zelensky

Yeah, it would be fun, especially considering Robbins' Fall is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Soviet bacchanalia like the old Walpurgisnacht. Russians may not be much for jazz, but I think they can do freezing winters and orgiastic autumns just fine.

After a long intermission so donors can see and be seen, we were treated to a short video of Robbins rehearsing his West Side Story Suite in 1995, I think. It was nostalgic to see departed, familiar faces like Jock Soto and Nikolaj Hubbe, and fascinating to hear Robbins chide (gently, for the camera) his dancers to get the effect he wanted, exhorting the men to consider the crappy home environment from which they've grown, or the women rehearsing "America" to remember they're all different, from different homes, with different jobs, lives, etc., and to dance differently. I also liked him pointing out to Hubbe, I think, that in a knife fight one should hold one's knife in front, rather than dangle it loosely to one's side. (I wouldn't have wanted to get into a knife fight with Robbins, even in his seventies.)

After that lead-in, you can bet this generation of City Ballet dancers would do a great job with their excerpts, and, for the most part, they did. The opening Jets/Sharks fight screamed with barely controlled aggression, and Robert Fairchild, was a nicely dreamy Tony, although I wouldn't have minded a bit more passion. Damian Woetzel was a tough hoodlum, but a canny leader as Riff, but, in singing "Cool" his voice sounds to have strayed a few packs over the line, or to have beaten Woetzel into retirement by a month or so. Nevertheless, the dancing in "Cool" sizzled, and I especially liked Jennifer Tinsley-Williams as the leader of the Jets' ladies' auxiliary of very tough cookies indeed. The dance at the gym had its ferocious moments, but somehow Fairchild's encounter with the always lovely Faye Arthurs as Maria looked a bit, well, somnolent.

In the wonderful "America," I don't know what's up with Georgina Pazcoguin's Anita, except that, Mae West to the contrary notwithstanding, too much of a good thing isn't always wonderful. I loved her Anita last year. Despite some iffy pitch to her singing, she was every inch the bombshell latina I knew she could be (Constant Readers may remember she inspired some over-the-top prose). Yet here she was, with way too much makeup (Anita's fiesty; she's not a hooker), selling every phrase, every word with little bits of business, mostly clever, well-done and even funny things like timely rolls of her eyes at her homesick friend's longing for Puerto Rico, but, well, if you underscore every word in a book, you're just wasting ink. And, honestly, how much do you need to sell a line like "I like the island Manhattan/Smoke on your pipe and put that in?" It practically sells itself; that Sondheim guy knew what he was doing. Pazcoguin's singing has improved tremendously; perhaps she was showing off the fruits of voice lessons? As always, her dancing was happily torrid, but, just as Balanchine was famous for exhorting his dancers to do more and dance bigger, Robbins would tell his dancers to do less, or, rather, to do more with less. I can't help but think he'd have had a word or two with Pazcoguin, and her performance would be the better for it.

The "Somewhere" finale was as much an incongruous, beautiful ideal as ever, and I couldn't help but remember the memorial the company gave for Robbins after his death in 1998, which ended with "Somewhere," and the backdrop rising to reveal every dancer in the company singing along. City Ballet's retrospective can only touch on a few facets of the life of this tortured genius, and I regret we'll probably never see a revival of his Age of Anxiety, but even the facets we'll see, among them Nikolaj Hübbe in his controversial Watermill (am I the only critic who doesn't hate it?), are an artistic bounty. To learn more of Robbins fascinating life in the theater, I heartily recommend Deborah Jowitt's Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance.

Angle, Bouder, Fairchild, LaFosse, Mearns, Millepied, Neal, Rutherford, Ulbricht, Woetzel

Casting through May 11.

http://www.nycballet.com/casting/wk2.html?TierSlicer1_TSMenuTargetID=9250&TierSlicer1_TSMenuTargetType=1&TierSlicer1_TSMenuID=30