BALLET CHICAGO
Three years ago he re-created the early-20th-century New Orleans underworld–its ten-cents-a-dance dives, its vaudeville stars and wannabes–in By Django, with music by Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. This exceptionally good-natured, hectically humorous work was performed again during Ballet Chicago’s first week at the Steppenwolf Theatre, and it’s filled with “dames,” with fellows you have to watch your hat and coat around, with sexual triangles–one section’s called “Two Ladies . . . A Lucky Fellow?” In another, “Unexpected Cameo . . . The Worm Turns,” a haughty vamp in a slinky white gown and gigantic feather boa teases three men, reducing them to quivering masses of desire. A lot of care and energy have gone into this section, which comes just before the brief finale–into its careful “Egyptian” look, so popular in the teens, and into the self-conscious teasing and fainting and display. Audiences love it.
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And audiences loved Schmidt’s premiere during the second week: In a Nutshell, a suite of nine short dances, looks and feels a lot like By Django, though the era, the music, and to some extent the dancing are different. Performed to Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite and “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” it sets the familiar story of The Nutcracker in an indeterminate modern time–though the piece has the look of the 40s because the dancers keep falling into a jiving jitterbug style. Here Clara (Petra Adelfang) is an overworked secretary kept late at the office on Christmas Eve. A janitor (Manard Stewart) with magical powers rescues her; called Dross in the program, he’s been given only Drosselmeyer’s beneficent qualities while a character called Boss (Robert Remington) takes on all the suggestions of inappropriate lechery. In the opening scene, an office party of dubious high spirits, he’s the office masher, the guy who thinks that because he’s the boss he can pinch and squeeze and dance with whomever he wants whenever he wants.
Consider Drosselmeyer’s characterization as a sexually abusive boss, a reinterpretation that highlights the problems of the task Schmidt set himself. We can’t see Boss as funny, not after the Clarence Thomas hearings–though people in the 1940s (and later) might have. And we can’t regard him with the benign tolerance we show the mildly pedophiliac Drosselmeyer in the original Nutcracker, who’s safely removed by time and custom. We can’t laugh at Boss and we can’t overlook his character, so at the end of In a Nutshell Schmidt punishes him–but that doesn’t seem right either, doesn’t fit the holiday mood. Watching In a Nutshell we’re amused, we’re charmed; but only if we consciously adopt a retro mood, ignoring the fact that we live in the 1990s. Watching this pastiche of styles and eras we have to ask where our own time comes in. Or is this the perspective of the 90s, this arch juggling of long-past looks and attitudes?
