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Perhaps I'm nit-picking, but this is the typographical equivalent of sloppily tied ribbons on a dancer's toe shoes, or unfinished seams on her tutu. It's not fatal, but it's sloppy, and it's wrong. It's obvious someone banged out these texts on a computer, much as I'm typing now. While it's been somewhat acceptable to leave out proper quotation marks in emails or even Web pages, in signage it's just sloppy, especially when meant to evoke an era when such a mistake was unthinkable. It's even painfully easy to fix; a minute's work in any text editor would suffice, or there are many writing programs smart enough to automatically fix quotation marks.

Why am I carrying on so about this? In a previous life I was a desktop publisher, and I still notice typography. As City Ballet just spent more money than I'd care to contemplate getting a new logo that's based entirely on typography, you'd think someone there would notice, too. Lincoln Kirstein would've. But I wouldn't go on so about this admittedly fine point if it weren't emblematic of the close-but-no-cigar Double Feature. Just as the signage undercuts itself through ignorance of typography, the ballet, despite its tremendous investment of artistic and creative capital, undercuts itself through a misunderstanding of what made silents so special.

It's true that both silent movies and ballet are, well, silent. But otherwise, they're utterly different languages. Though Stroman's translation is in places brilliant, the conceit becomes frayed and thin well before the last curtain. The pacing and scale of ballet is diametrically opposed to the silents,' and in too many places Double Feature plods when it needs to sing.

Thanks to the celluloid miracle of editing, silent-film editors were masters of time and space, and developed a language of quick-paced exposition and rapid-fire shifts of viewpoint. Stroman evokes this at the beginning of The Blue Necklace, with its marvelous dancing chorines in Louise Books wigs high-kicking to "Alexander's Ragtime Band." She shifts our viewpoint giddily from the house to backstage in a transition no less magical for its simplicity. Later, she has that ballet's heroine change from a child to a young adult in the blink of an eye (or twitch of a feather duster). But despite these triumphs, Double Feature gets bogged down in exposition, sometimes in nothing more than the time and space needed to move dancers from place to place. It's not so much that it actually takes longer to tell its stories than real double feature, but that it feels longer. Silents also brought their viewers close to their stars in a way impossible, I think, to be recreated onstage. I can't imagine how Stroman might've made an on-stage analog for the powerful intimacy and economy of silent-movie acting. Instead she creates a hybrid, silent, danced vaudeville.

That's not to say Double Feature isn't plenty entertaining. It is. William Ivey Long's designs and costumes are a perfect blend of Twenties-style realism and ballerina fantasies. Glen Kelley's arrangements of familiar tunes by Irving Berlin and Walter Donaldson are perfectly lush and sentimental. Stroman's made some brilliantly charming and inventive choreography and some meaty, melodramatic roles which City Ballet's dancers play for all they're worth, yielding performances that are both unforgettable and not-to-be-missed. In The Blue Necklace, Ashley Bouder, Megan Fairchild and particularly Damian Woetzel bring down the house, as do Tiler Peck and Tom Gold in Makin' Whopee. Oh, and a dog. Stroman creates one coup du theatre after another, and, while some have complained of her limited fluency with ballet, I couldn't care less. Her most wonderful bits practically ignore technique. They don't need it. Indeed, I enjoyed parts of my second viewing of Double Feature tremendously, but that was because, having seen it before, I didn't expect it to be any better than it was, and I could enjoy the fun parts without dwelling too much on the ballet's shortcomings.
 

Maria Kowroski and Ashley Bouder in The Blue Necklace
© Paul Kolnik

The Blue Necklace is the first feature. It's a silly, hyperbolic tale of Maud (Ashley Bouder), the child given up at birth by the movie star Dorothy Brooks (Maria Kowroski), and raised by a social climber, Mrs. Griffith (Savannah Lowery) who tries foist off her own daughter, Florence (Megan Fairchild) as Brooks' daughter instead of Maud, by virtue of the eponymous necklace left with Maud by Brooks. Also moving the plot along is the matinee idol Billy Randolph (Damian Woetzel). As previously mentioned, The Blue Necklace starts with that wonderful chorus line. Stroman also stages a street scene replete with dancing newsboys, flash-wielding reports and sundry cityfolk with a fluency that puts Christopher Wheeldon's similar endeavors in An American in Paris to shame. There's also Bouder's first appearance, in which Skyla Shreter, an SAB student playing the young Maud vanishes with her feather-duster behind a couch and Bouder, the older Maud, pops up like a jack-in-the-box, in a frenzy of happy, allegro housecleaning. Later, at a charity ball thrown by Brooks, Woetzel makes the grandest of grand entrances, and wows the partygoers with a marvelous solo that's about Rudolph's grace and star-power. Much of the time, Woetzel is dashing about the stage with consummate wit and attitude, and the solo's not so much about tricky steps as it is about Woetzel's ability to beautifully inhabit a cutaway tuxedo and incarnate the word dashing.

Before she's found out as an imposter, Florence dances a painful duet with Griffith which is all about the fact that Florence can't dance a step. It's amusing casting against type for the virtuoso Fairchild, and she plays the role to the hilt, standing with her feet rooted to the floor in a duet with the flummoxed Griffith, as Woetzel tries gallantly to overlook Fairchild's feet of lead. Later, when Bouder's Maud is revealed to really be Brooks' daughter, they have a grandly romantic duet together, ending with Woetzel kneeling to kiss Bouder's hand in a quote from Balanchine's Diamonds. Debuting as the wicked Mrs. Griffith, Lowery was appropriately tough and avaricious, and more evil than Kyra Nichol's original performance. The Blue Necklace ends with Kowroski and Bouder in one of ballet's rare mother-daughter duets. If this happy-ever-after ending took its time in arriving, for both the characters and audience, it was still better late than never.

Makin' Whoopee, the second "feature," starts with great promise, as Jimmy Shannon (Tom Gold) woos Anne Windsor (Tiler Peck, another debut), around a cycle of seasons, each time losing his nerve before he can pop the question. Peck is a tremendous actress, and brings this particular cardboard-cutout role a surprising depth. Gold, for his part, is all comic oblivion and slack-jawed pratfalls, a far cry from the "Great Stone Face" of Buster Keaton, who made this same story into a famous silent comedy. Overkill is Makin' Whoopee's theme, as it leaves few lilies ungilded as when Gold must compete with an overly affectionate trained dog, along with Peck. The scenes with Shannon and his business associates (Amar Ramasar and Robert Fairchild) become quickly tiresome as they fret about their potential financial ruin, then greet with glee their potential salvation in the form of Shannon's inheritance, which stipulates he must marry by seven pm that day. Of course Shannon and Windsor become the happy couple, but not before he offends her and finds himself looking for a bride off the streets, with predictably grim results. Noteworthy among his many failures are Irene (Rachel Piskin), a perky nymphette who's happy to be married until she's carted off by her mother, and the sultry, seductive Flossy (Teresa Reichlen), whose flirtation with Gold ends in a punch from her boyfriend.

When Shannon's story hits the newspapers, he's deluged in a flood of would-be brides, and, as they say, hijinks occur. It seems like half City Ballet's corps, both male and female, chases Gold from wing to wing and back again, with some obligatory references to Swan Lake along the way. It's alternately exciting and exhausting, and by the time Peck and Gold are united, a bit numbing. What should be a delicate romantic bon-bon becomes a quarter-pounder with fries. Despite their need for tighter pacing, each half of Double Feature stands well enough on its own, and I left wondering if it would be technically feasible to present The Blue Necklace on its own, as a sort of Single Feature. Then I wondered what ballets one could possibly pair with it (or Makin' Woopee), and gave up. For better or worse, this is a package deal.