Hoffmann Grounded

By William Bender

Lust, murder, homosexuality, mental illness, even a mod satire set to the sounds of the Beatles. With innovative ballet subjects like these, Britain's Peter Darrell has become known over the past decade as a choreographer who was going to be up with the times at all costs. His latest ballet is a full-length Tales of Hoffmann based on the Offenbach opera. Introduced last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center by the American Ballet Theater, it is a shocker of another sort: an oldfashioned, behind-the-times entertainment that will offend no one, please some of the public, and bore serious balletomanes to distraction.

Darrell created Hoffmann after moving his London-based Western Theater Ballet to Glasgow in 1970, where it became the government-subsidized (98%) Scottish Theater Ballet. "Scotland doesn't see a great deal of ballet," says Darrell, 43. "It's a matter of educating the public. I wanted to do a ballet that was going to be popular." Fair enough--for Scotland. But whether Hoffmann will catch on with the sophisticates among American Ballet Theater's audience is another matter.

Hoffmann works as an opera because its music is inventive and full of deft characterizing touches. There is no reason the storied fancies of E.T.A. Hoffmann cannot work as ballet too--as long since proved by Coppelia and The Nutcracker. This Hoffmann has a recomposed score by John Lanchbery that draws also on other colorful Offenbach works. But its choreographic steps and gestures are trite, even humdrum at points, and devoid of the kind of grand line that grand ballet at its best demands. (Ah, those outstretched arms signaling the courtesan's entrance--as in a silent film starring Theda Bara.)

The arduous assignment of dancing all four heroines (La Stella, Olympia, Antonia, Giulietta) went to Cynthia Gregory, 27. Although Gregory emerged only last year as a star of the company, she has already been hailed by Dancer-Choreographer Erik Bruhn as "the greatest American ballerina since Maria Tallchief ." Dancer Gregory brought to Hoffmann an enchanting grace and elan worthy of a Giselle, testifying to her thoroughgoing professionalism. Swedish Dancer Jonas Kage, 22, struggled noticeably as the hero, merely indicating that he was not the only one incapable of getting Hoffmann off the ground.

qed William Bender

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