Edition: U.S. / Global

Dance in Review

Published: June 22, 1992

American Ballet Theater Metropolitan Opera House

American Ballet Theater's nine-week season ended Saturday night with a floral note and a Danish-American touch. As the dancers joined hands for a communal bow after performing splendidly in the final ballet, Jiri Kylian's "Sinfonietta," flowers rained down from the audience.

It was a gracious gesture to a company that faces some uncertainty now that Jane Hermann, the troupe's artistic director with Oliver Smith, has announced her departure in the fall.

This closing night, however, would not have suggested that anything was amiss, thanks to the ebullience of Victor Borge, the Danish-born pianist and comedian who served as guest narrator for the first work, "Peter and the Wolf."

Reading someone else's script (in this case, Larry Gelbart's for Michael Smuin's choreography) is not really what Mr. Borge does best. But he did a fine job nonetheless and set his own tone.

Coming out in white tie and tails but without a piano to play, he created a comic tension between his formal demeanor and his vicarious involvement in the action: a well-articulated scream when the wolf came too close.

The cast was even better than at the beginning of the season. Jokey images -- Robert Conn's witty wolf pawing the earth after the beast's call to nature and Kathleen Moore's deliciously uninhibited duck doing entrechats in flippers -- are matched by a psychological rightness. Peter, with Gil Boggs outstanding in technique and characterization, childishly mimics his grandfather, Charles Askegard. But after outwitting the wolf, Peter has left boyhood behind in a rite of passage.

Cheryl Yeager's Bird, Christina Fagundes's Cat and six prancing hunters completed a cast that paid attention to hilarious detail.

Jack Everly conducted the program, which included a repeat of Agnes de Mille's "Fall River Legend," set to Morton Gould's music. Miles White's perfect period costumes and Oliver Smith's striking abstraction of a New England frame house create the atmosphere for a meditation upon a century-old crime that continues to fascinate American historians. A real-life jury acquitted Lizzie Borden of killing her father and stepmother. Miss de Mille does not, and she tries to explain why. Alessandra Ferri, as the heroine, offers an original interpretation that is first-rate if not always strongly projected: a neurasthenic, seething and snarling, and obviously not cut out for small-town life.