Name recognition may be one of the most dismal gods of the ballet box office, but it is also the most powerful. That is why Swan Lake, Sylvie Guillem and Tchaikovsky will always sell more tickets than an abstract setting of Hindemith. This is the only charitable explanation for Pacific Northwest Ballet's full-length Silver Lining, which has name recognition in spades. A score consisting entirely of Jerome Kern songs, and a setting that presses every nostalgia button from the 1920s and 1930s, are a guaranteed crowd-pleasing combination. It is just too bad that the choreography by PNB's artistic director Kent Stowell turns out to be such feeble pastiche.
The work takes a chronological saunter through Kern's music, visiting the vaudeville acts of the 1920s, the jazz scene of the Cotton Club and the golden era of 1930s musicals. Flappers, turkey trotters, Apache dancers, lindy hoppers and glamorous lovers in tuxedos and ballgowns parade across a stage evoking the theatres, billboards, fashion icons and movie stars of the period. Some of the songs are performed in purely musical arrangements; others are sung on stage by soprano Valerie Piacenti and baritone Erich Parce, with backing choruses provided by the enthusiastic dancers themselves.
The show has a problem even before it hits the stage: how to justify the transplantation of a perfectly formed popular culture on to the modern ballet stage. If we want to see great lindy, we can simply look to period movies or to contemporary specialists such as the Jiving Lindy Hoppers. If we want to see tap-dancing at its most blithe and dandy, we can gorge ourselves on the Fred Astaire catalogue. And in Fred's partnership with Ginger we see the very definition of dance chemistry.
Stowell's choreography cannot present even a half-satisfying substitute for its original material. Watching his bland and lazy responses to Kern's music, I could only think in terms of what the dancing lacked. Surprise was the most wanting: Stowell's capacity to match a predictable move to every musical phrase was depressing in its consistency. But add to that the absence of wit, romance, even a little vulgarity, and you have a dance work that induces torpor in its audience, dancers and orchestra alike. Stowell's choice of the song Look for the Silver Lining as his opening and closing number was truly unfortunate. However willingly one searched for that hopeful glimmer, the silver in this show was mired in a slough of despondency.
· Further performance on Saturday. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
