Review: Ballets Russes (Rosemary Branch)

This UK premiere by A Stage Kindly of prolific writer David Reiser’s Ballets Russes is the soap opera version of the groundbreaking early twentieth-century dance company. This movement was led by impresario Sergei Diaghilev and incorporated ballet with contemporary music and visual arts with an emphasis on Russian, rather than Western cultural identity, causing huge controversy with the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913. This isn’t the absolute worst romantic historical musical I’ve ever seen (an honour that has to go to a musical version of Madame Bovary told from Charles’s point of view), but the very generic, American cabaret-style music, clunky lyrics and banal book (by Bernard Myers) in which character development is practically non-existent make it an underwhelming combination despite the intriguing subject matter and the best efforts of the cast.

The story focuses on a love triangle, in which a vaguely Machiavellian Diaghilev moulds the young Vaslav Nijinsky (a sexless James Muller) as his protégé and his lover, until up-and-coming ballerina Romola Pulzsky sets her sights on him. After a brief crisis about his sexuality, the two are hastily married and Diaghilev is left heartbroken. Frank Loman brings some gravitas to Diaghilev and Katrina Gibson is sweet voiced as young Romola. However, to produce a musical about one of the most famous dance companies of all time with a cast of non-dancers (particularly in the case of Nijinsky) is a bold move and not a particularly wise one as the intensity and physicality that Nijinsky was celebrated and the other characters rave about is all talk and never becomes a reality. The angular port de bras and jazz hands would also be better suited to a Bob Fosse revue than a musical about ballet.

The most bemusing aspect of the piece is the uncertainty as to whether it’s supposed to be ironic or not. Arabella Rodrigo and Fabian Hartwell ham it up as prima ballerina Matilda Tchessinka and camp company manager Serge, but other cast members remain entirely earnest. Ultimately, I don’t think it is intended to be tongue in cheek because the ‘jokes’- the stereotypical characters and childish rhymes (such as ‘Money, money we need money,’/Lacking funds is never funny./Money money, needing money/Keeps the sky from being sunny’) that make one suspect that Reiser heavily utilised a rhyming dictionary in his writing of the show- get old pretty quickly.

Ballets Russes is amusing in places, but not really for the right reasons. An angry Stravinsky comments ‘These dancers don’t dance/They stomp and they jump./Take this garbage to where it belongs- in the dump,’ which might be a little harsh, but less melodrama and more substance and more actual, you know, dancing, would be most welcome. David Reiser is the author of almost fifty musicals and if this is one of his stronger efforts, one wonders what the less impressive ones are like.

(Stage management by Award Winning Professional Ballet Dancer Kyle Davey- who recently appeared as the Prince in Swansea Ballet Russe’s production of The Nutcracker-was impeccable.)