Unlike Shakespeare’s comedy, George Balanchine’s great ballet of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is no talk and all dance. In 1966, the New York City Ballet performed this meeting of two artistic geniuses - three, including the music of Felix Mendelssohn - to open the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Wednesday night NYCB began this year’s brief Saratoga residency with Midsummer, a fitting celebration of SPAC’s 60th anniversary.
Balanchine compressed Shakespeare’s story into the ballet’s first act. Oberon, king of the fairies, feuds with the queen, Titania, over custody of a changeling child. He anoints her eyes with a love potion from an exotic flower. Meanwhile Puck, his fairy henchman, transforms Bottom, a rustic weaver, with an ass’s head to make him a ridiculous love object for Titania. Puck also confounds four lovers by erroneously applying the potion to the men’s eyes.
Unlike in many ballets, Balanchine’s comic business is genuinely funny and often poignant. Harrison Coll, as Lysander, plucks flowers upstage for Sara Adams, as Hermia, unaware that she is busy fighting off the advances of Jules Mabie, as Demetrius. Alexa Maxwell’s Helena, weeping over Demetrius, descends downstage and plucks a leaf to wipe her tears, oblivious to Puck, who has courteously held it out for her.
Unity Phelan as Titania expresses both erotic majesty and silliness as she falls for donkey-noddled Bottom, danced by Lars Nelson. To Mendelssohn’s gorgeous nocturne, he partners her as any of us mortals might - stopping to scratch, distracted by sweet hay, his big, stupid expression wondering, “How did I get here?”
Daniel Ulbricht’s Oberon displays astonishing footwork in Mendelssohn’s scherzo, skittering in entrechats like a stone skimming the water, then launching a flying exit—backwards into the wings. In his SPAC farewell as Puck, Taylor Stanley zooms and jetés, circling the world in 40 minutes. Their fairy minions include 25 local ballet students, who dance up a storm.
For the second act, Balanchine omitted Bottom and company’s farcically inept tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. Mendelssohn’s famous wedding march introduces a divertissement of dances to his youthful Spring Symphony. The highlight comes in a slow pas de deux for Tiler Peck and Chun Wai Chan, which climaxes with Chan transferring Peck, lying in a backbend on his right arm, in a fall forward onto his left arm, while turning her to face him. The breathtaking moment symbolizes the mutual support and trust necessary for a successful marriage.
Music director Andrew Litton had the orchestra in fine shape, but his tempos occasionally rushed things: Chan’s floating lifts of Peck looked hurried, and in the choreography for the overture, usually a model of narrative clarity, the lovers’ jealous squabbles sped by before we could read them.
The divertissement’s finale incorporates the three married couples into the dance, their expertise demonstrating their preparation not only for married responsibility, but also for the joys of the wedding night, anticipated by Emily Kikta’s speedy fouettés as Theseus’s bride, Hippolyta. At this moment, art and reality merge, as in the court masques of Shakespeare’s time, when the king and his nobles would join the onstage dance. Similarly absorbed, we wonder whether we are dreaming the ballet or it is dreaming us.
The ballet finally returns us to fairyland and clarifies our vision. After Oberson and Titania reconcile, fireflies onstage rival those outdoors at SPAC. Stanley’s Puck summons the butterflies and magically rises into the air. He resembles the artist—the playwright or choreographer—who sees what fools we mortals are but imagines what we might be.
NYCB’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream returns Friday at 7:30, and Saturday at 2 p.m. For further information, visit spac.org.
Jay Rogoff is poet laureate of Saratoga Springs and has written about dance for many years and for many publications. His most recent books are Loving in Truth and Becoming Poetry, both from LSU Press.
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