It is hard to imagine an American ballet company putting together a themed programme of English works and calling it Heart of Merrie England or Cool Brittania. American ballet's links to Hollywood and Broadway make it a much more universal export, exerting a more obvious glamour over audiences and allowing dancers to move with a familiar yet still exotic accent.
Birmingham Royal Ballet's choice of title, Way Out West, has been sparked by the company's acquisition of two classic items of Americana: Jerome Robbins's Fancy Free (1944) and Balanchine's Western Symphony (1954). Robbins's New York comedy of sailors on shore leave, figuring out that two girls don't divide between three, is best known from the movie version, On the Town. It's a real guy piece, slick with wisecracking humour and garrulous moves, and Birmingham's dancers clearly have a romp.
Michael Revie's monkey-faced deftness and gymnastic speed come closest to genuine New York energy. Robert Parker's sweet-tempered goofiness looks a little too close to his performances in Hobson's Choice, and James Grundy is a tad slow on his feet. They might all have profited from a closer study of Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly on screen.
Western Symphony is dominated by men, too. This is due partly to the outrageous cowboy virtuosity of its male solos and partly to the fact that the company's women do not do bar-girls with much sex or sass. Revie again whizzes around the stage like a firecracker, but is here out-classed by Parker, snake-hipped and whooping, who guarantees Western Symphony a long life in BRB's popular repertoire.
The odd ballet out is David Bintley's new Concert Fantasy, inspired by St Petersburg rather than the US. Women in tutus and tiaras and men in silver-grey jerkins move in graceful symmetries to Tchaikovsky's titular score, their steps a direct take on 19th-century classicism.
Bintley's motives for this retrospective exercise are, I guess, to create a vehicle for his two most classical dancers, Nao Sakuma and Chi Cao. Their solos and duets are certainly the heart of the work, with Bintley allowing classroom steps to pause here and there, sparkle into odd rhythms and deviate from line.
The leading couple glitter; they extend themselves to their full range. But, watchable as they are, neither radiates much of a personality beyond the contours of the steps. Not enough, certainly, to stamp a poetic image on to the work, which is elsewhere predictable and bland. The final impression is dispiritingly less of fantasy than of competent pastiche.
· Until tomorrow. Box office: 0870 730 1234. Then at the Sunderland Empire (0191-514 2517) from October 18-19.
