Oscar Wilde is mainly remembered in two ways. First, as a brilliant writer of plays and stories, an arch aesthete who shocked and charmed with epigrams of paradoxical wit. Second, as a late Victorian queer man, tried and convicted of the crime of “gross indecency.”
In Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet “Oscar,” the second Wilde is present while the first goes missing. At times throughout this dully dutiful production, which the Australian Ballet gave its New York premiere at New York City Center on Thursday, the dancer playing Wilde pretends to speak or write with a quill and the people around him pretend to laugh in response, but nothing witty ever happens.
One of the world’s leading ballet choreographers and a two-time Tony Award winner for his work on Broadway musicals, Wheeldon has constructed “Oscar” with skill. Over a frame story of Wilde’s trial and imprisonment, he weaves the tale of Wilde’s romances with two men — Robbie Ross and Lord Alfred Douglas — together with two of Wilde’s fictions: “The Nightingale and the Rose” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
“Nightingale” is a fairy tale in which a beautiful young woman promises a dance to a young man if he will bring her a red rose. The young man acquires the rose only through the mortal sacrifice of a nightingale. “Dorian Gray” is a horror story in which the handsome title character shows no signs of aging while a portrait of him registers his physical and moral decay.
Starting each of the two acts with a speaking narrator (Sean O’Shea) is a smart choice, and the two-hour production mostly speeds along. The fairy tale, which here Wilde tells his two sons, is a light lift for a ballet. The nightingale is a ballerina figure like the Firebird or a sylph. The search for the right color flower occasions pretty divertissements (including one that alludes to the swirling fabric of Wilde’s contemporary, the innovative choreographer Loie Fuller). The denouement, when the young woman rejects the suitor and his rose for a suitor with jewels, is as clear as day.
“Dorian Gray,” a more complicated narrative, isn’t difficult to follow, either, though it suffers from a lack of style and panache. A meant-to-be-comic barroom bit with two men in drag makes you long for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Wheeldon’s weaving of the life and the stories is, like the whole production, an artful execution of unimaginative ideas. The transitions, through circle and rose patterns, are smoothly readable as narrative and interpretation. From this production’s point of view, Wilde is the Nightingale and Wilde is also Dorian Gray.
But this Wilde isn’t at all Wildean. Ballet would seem to be a promising medium in which to represent a show-off, but Wheeldon doesn’t give his Wilde (Callum Linnane) any virtuosic sparkle, and the physical contractions meant to express his anguish are weak and unintentionally comic. Wheeldon did something similar to Alice in his 2011 “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” reducing that sassy girl to a conventional ballet heroine, incomplete without the love of a man.
“Oscar” has garnered much attention for daring to be a full-length narrative ballet about love between men. The aim is admirable and overdue, but it’s sad how timid the work is. Wilde and Douglas smooch and some shirtless men writhe on a bed, yet the love scenes are devoid of erotic tension and romance. It’s as if Wheeldon were still wary of the Victorian authorities or the maid coming into the room and catching him in the act.
Apart from the exquisite line of Elijah Trevitt’s Douglas, the work is also short on beauty, which can be a Wheeldon strength. Like “Alice” and many other Wheeldon narrative ballets, “Oscar” is hampered by the derivative mediocrity of a Joby Talbot score (played live by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s). And where many Wheeldon productions have been saved by the set design of the great Bob Crowley, the designs here (by Jean-Marc Puissant) don’t help.
Wheeldon, a British ballet choreographer, is actually less of a good match for Wilde than he was for Michael Jackson (in “MJ: The Musical” on Broadway). He doesn’t know the importance of not being earnest. He ends “Oscar” not with the words of the protagonist but with a sentimental elegiac sonnet by Douglas. It’s the kind of thing that Wilde meant to puncture with his quip about sentimentality in Charles Dickens: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
That, alas, is the only sort of laughter provoked by “Oscar.” In Douglas’s poem, he mourns the loss of what might have been. My sentiments exactly.
Oscar
Through Sunday at New York City Center; nycitycenter.org
The post Review: A Dancing Oscar Wilde, in Love but Drained of Wit appeared first on New York Times.
