© Natasha Rogai The Asian premiere of The Merry Widow, performed by Hong Kong Ballet, took place on 18 May 2007. Natasha Rogai 'Merry Widow' review 'Merry Widow' reviews Natasha Rogai reviews

Meehan calls MW his “lucky ballet”. Early on in his career it gave him the chance to perform overseas and to partner Margot Fonteyn. In mid-career he danced it again and assisted Hynd to stage the production for National Ballet of Canada, leading to a long association with that company. After he stopped dancing, Hynd invited him to help stage it again at American Ballet Theatre, where he consequently remained for many years. So it comes as no surprise that this should be one of the first productions Meehan has chosen for his tenure at HKB.

Part of the lead-up to the premiere was a Dialogue with Hynd and Meehan talking about the ballet’s history. The session was chaired by Graham Collins, Head of Ballet at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, who worked with Hynd on numerous ballets as a dancer at London Festival Ballet (now ENB), and Hong Kong choreographer Yuri Ng, who as a young dancer appeared in MW with National Ballet of Canada and encouraged Meehan to stage it in HK, because he felt the local audience would respond to it so well.
 

Hong King Ballet dancers in Ronald Hynd’s The Merry Widow
© Jimmy Chan

The evening was a delightful journey through the memories of all four participants, who obviously relished the chance to get together. Collins and Ng both talked about how wonderful Hynd was to work with as a dancer, and it was easy to see why : now in his seventies, he is warm, funny, down to earth and blissfully unpretentious. When Hynd was asked by Robert Helpmann to create a full length MW for Australian Ballet, he was somewhat puzzled, since the only work of his Helpmann had seen was a ballet about the conception of the Minotaur “very violent, full of rape and pillage” and he had no idea what made Helpmann think he was the right choreographer to adapt Lehar’s operetta. However, he loved the MW music and was happy to accept – and the ballet’s success showed just how shrewd Helpmann’s judgment was.

Hynd was impressed by the quality of the Australian dancers, but caused some controversy by picking Meehan and Marilyn Rowe (the role was later taken by Fonteyn internationally) for the leads instead of the company’s reigning stars, Lucette Aldous and Kelvin Coe. He did, however, make up for it by creating two strong second leads for the star couple, giving them an exquisite but very difficult pas de deux in Act 2 which regularly brought the house down. Meehan recalled once commenting rather sourly to Fonteyn on how much applause Coe and Aldous always received, to which she replied wisely “Oh no, darling, you shouldn’t think like that – you should always surround yourself with the best.”
 

Ronald Hynd and John Meehan at the In Conversation event along with Graham Collins and Yuri Ng
© Natasha Rogai

Hynd was full of praise for HKB’s dancers, and said that out of all the 12 productions of MW he had staged, this was the first time he had not had to face any problems. Because the dancers were already so confident on the technical aspects (he particularly praised the quality of the double work “the lifts are higher, the lines are longer”), he was able to concentrate on interpretation, a Hynd speciality.

Collins commented that it was “never boring” being in Hynd’s ballets because “the characters were so well defined you could really enjoy being who you were on stage”. Ng described how Hynd would often go up to individual dancers and say something about their role which would give them a new insight and change their performance. Apparently Hynd likes to make up biographies for the characters, to give himself and the dancers a better understanding of who they are and how to play them. Even after 11 productions, he is still adding new details to flesh out the characters in MW.

Hynd’s goal is to get his dancers to “speak” with their bodies, in as detailed and convincing a way as actors speak with words. He feels that dancers today find this kind of acting hard, because while technique has progressed enormously over the years, the emphasis on technique, and the amount of work needed to achieve the physical levels dancers now reach, mean that “…something has to give, and it’s the drama. In my day we were not good dancers, so we had to make the most of what we had.” The number of abstract works in the current repertoire is also a factor, since dancers are not often called upon to portray actual characters. Meehan said one of the reasons he wanted to bring MW to Hong Kong was that “it’s such a great example of how to construct a big 3 act narrative ballet with a plot, several sub-plots and lots of characters – people simply don’t know how to do that any more.”
 

Faye Leung as Hanna (Widow) in Ronald Hynd’s The Merry Widow
© Jimmy Chan

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation dealt with music. John Lanchbery, who put together the MW score from Lehar’s operetta and conducted the first performances, used to play with the tempi, drawing out certain notes then speeding up the rest of the phrase, in a way which enhanced the music and the dancers’ phrasing. Subsequent conductors have stuck to a more standardized approach, and usually insist that this kind musical playfulness “cannot be done.” However, when Hynd staged the production in Vienna recently he went to see the original Lehar MW and found to his delight that the conductor was doing exactly what Lanchbery had done (apparently this is part of the traditional Viennese operetta style), which made him feel he could insist on ballet conductors doing likewise.

The discussion was interspersed with extracts from the DVD of National Ballet of Canada’s production of MW, featuring a younger and very dashing John Meehan with the distinguished Canadian ballerina Karen Kain. To give the audience a taste of the new production, the Act 2 pas de deux created for Aldous and Coe was danced beautifully by HKB’s Crystal Costa and Liang Jing, who will be performing the roles on the first night.