George Sidney | Kiss Me, Kate / 1953 [dance only]

tommy rall, bob fosse, ann miller, carol haney, jeanne coyne, and bobby van

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dorothy Kingsley (screenplay, based on the book by Sam and Bella Spewack), Cole Porter (music and lyrics), George Sidney (director) Kiss Me, Kate / 1953

 

I have always felt that the film version of Kiss Me, Kate was a sort of mixed bag. The introduction of Cole Porter into the film as he tries out a couple numbers in Fred Grahm’s living room, and the abandonment of the great show opener, “Another Op’nin’ of Another Show,” framed the work like too many other film musicals, and missed the opportunity to display the open theatricality of the original. But then, there is something contradictory in the original as well, where the on-stage personalities of the leads (in this case Katherine Grayson and Howard Keel) seem in their operatic style of singing and action in opposition to the other figures. Porter’s songs for them, as well, songs like “Wunderbar” and “So in Love” appear to be worlds away from the sprightlier numbers such as “Why Can’t You Behave” and “From This Moment On.”

     Accordingly, the musical and film both seem almost divided in two, with a Shakespeare-coated operetta at one end, and a jazzy series of dances choreographed by Hermes Pan and Bob Fosse at the other. Although most of the songs are wonderful, the story and its structure, seems almost to break the piece in two.

     But the dances are all so good that I might have chosen four great dance moments from this  film instead of the two I’ve selected, the other two being Miller’s tap performance of “Too Darn Hot” and Miller’s and the chorus’ rendition of “Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

     However, it is hard to match the dancing wonder of Ann Miller’s and Tommy Rall’s “Why Can’t You Behave?” in which she lovingly chastises him for his reckless behavior, while all the while he jokingly mocks her. The rooftop location of this scene, which literally flirts with “a loss of gravity,” is perfect, for the character clearly has no sense of gravitas. Indeed, when Miller reaches the roof she cannot, at first, locate her lover until he slides in from above down a pole which he has evidently previously shimmied up. It is the first of his gravity defying feats, as, the moment she finishes singing, he skips away, her tapping along, as he, spins like an ice skater, before somersaulting and cartwheeling off. A short rhumba between the two in which she plays out her frustrations in mock punches, butt kicks, and feet stomping, only sets him into a more irresponsible state as Rall dizzily dances at the very edge of the roof, imitating a near deathly fall before he leaps back to safety, catapulting himself up again and again (presumably with the help of a hidden trampoline) spreading his legs, and returning to the floor on his knees. Given Rall’s amazing acrobatic leaps one might almost be able to believe that he is propelling himself with his own leg power, instead of a piece of stretched fabric to help him spring back, except that had he truly fallen back to earth from the heights he reaches, he would surely have broken his knees. As it is, he makes a final leap onto another small construction before closing the piece in a balletic spin that seems for a few seconds it may never cease.

     If the first dance belongs to Rall, the second, “From this Moment On” belongs to Fosse, who choreographed part of it. The dance is a celebratory one after the news of Kate’s marriage, which means her younger sister Bianca can now pick between one of her three suitors. Together with two other women (danced by Carol Haney and Jeanne Coyle) the male dancers don’t seem to care as much about the pairings of women, as they do in the joy of the occasion. Using the roman arches repeated throughout the set, the couples dance out separately or together several times, moving in lateral parallel patterns before shifting from front to back. After several of these arrivals and exits, however, Carol Haney dances out as the song changes rhythm from a zippy, upbeat song of new beginnings to a jazz-infused rhythm that works perfectly for Fosse’s moves.

   After a few seconds of Haney moving across the stage, Fosse suddenly leaps out through the arch seemingly from the sky instead of the floor. As he catches up with the surprised Haney, he leaps to the small ledge of a post, allowing his face and arms to go limp in what would become a signature Fosse pose. Haney crawls toward him in a prone position before they join up again alternating between leaps and sweeps upon their knees as they move forward to close the piece.

   Pan is a great choreographer, but by allowing Fosse to direct his first dance in film, he truly makes the piece fresh, and we absolutely do believe something has changed in all the characters’ lives.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2011).

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly | Singing in the Rain / 1952 [dance only]

 

donald o'connor and gene kelly

by Douglas Messerli

 

Betty Comden and Adolph Green (writers), Nacio Herb Brown (music), Arthur Freed (lyrics), Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly (directors) Singing in the Rain / 1952

I have to admit that, perhaps because of the fact I saw so many “Francis and the Mule” movies in the early 1950s, I had never given Donald O'Connor, the actor in these silly caprices, a thought until as a college student I saw a tape of Singing in the Rain. His burlesque-like humor still, from time to time, makes me cringe, but what a remarkable dancer he was, particularly in comic numbers such as "Make Em Laugh!"  Based on Cole Porter's "Be a Clown!" Nacio Herb Brown's and Arthur Freed's joyful anthem to humor is perfect for the rubber-faced O'Connor, who uses everything in the room as a prop. With his bright blue eyes, hat on head, O'Connor dances across couches, chairs, walls and, after fighting a battle with a headless dummy that might remind some viewers of the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer's dolls, O'Connor spins in a circle upon the floor like a Samuel Beckett figure, unable to stand. His final series of backward leaps off walls painted to look like vast perspectives and his last dive into a thin veneer of wood truly does bring smiles to all faces, both out of wonder for his rhythmic energy and his ability just to survive.

     Little need be said of one the greatest of all film dances, "Singing in the Rain," by the matchless Gene Kelly. With a broad smile upon his face, Kelly doddles down the street in a rain storm before embracing a light post from which he hangs in midair, spinning his umbrella like a top, and, in a blue, rain-soaked suit and red shoes, splashing his way through the puddles as a joyful child might. The lively tap number quite literally plays out its lyrics in his body movements, revealing physically that despite the natural elements and all they symbolize, everything can be conquered through the inner joy of love.

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2011).

 

Eileen Tracey | A Particular Friend / 2023

the denial of the natural

 by Douglas Messerli

 

Eileen Tracey (screenwriter and director) A Particular Friend / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

Yet another revelation of the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, A Particular Friend takes place at a Northern Ireland conversion-therapy center, presumably where homosexual-sinning young priests are sent to get cured.

    The figures involved are Father Brady (Liam Burke), Father Brendan (Stuart Dunne), Father Gibson (Desmond Eastwood), Father Matthew (Brian Milligan), and Father Cillian (Chris Robinson) have evidently all had a “particular friend” in their lives, suggesting a homosexual relationship which, according to the tenants of this small and very isolated strict retreat, have taken their minds away from Christ and their duties as priests.

     Yet, the images and sexual alliances of the past, no matter how much the priests prostrate themselves in the grass for forgiveness, continue to haunt their heads. And some go evidently even further in their continued transgressions, especially when Father Matthew discovers two of the priests together in a bedroom sitting in discussion on a priest’s bed. Instead of overlooking the transgression, he reports it, sending the younger man into a spin of guilt and further isolation.

      And finally, it ends with the complete abandonment of the faith by a priest nightly visited in his mind or in reality by his “particular friend.”

      The closeted world of the priesthood is again revealed, as it was in the film I recently reviewed, The Devil’s Playground (1975), as a society which creates repression, self-hate, and torment.

      Belief should not require the absence of the body. And righteousness, in my view, is not achieved by abandoning the body’s natural needs. Where in these men’s lives is the love celebrated as the most important aspect of human life by Christ? One might have thought through the ages of endless literary works, operas, and musical compositions, that we have learned love is not merely a spiritual thing. Yet the Vatican cannot seem to come to terms with this reality.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2024).

Otto Preminger | Advise & Consent

expendable heroes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wendell Mayes (screenplay, based on the novel by Allen Drury), Otto Preminger (director) Advise & Consent / 1962

 

I can’t recall when I first saw the Otto Preminger-directed political drama Advise & Consent, but it must have been after I had come out as a gay man because I remember being shocked by its depiction of the character Brig Anderson (a handsome Don Murray), a young senator from Utah who is asked to chair the committee for the support of Robert A. Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) whom the President (Franchot Tone) has nominated for the position of Secretary of State.

     In fact, I believe I was shocked for a second time, the first time being when, having been accused of being a member of a Communist cell in his youth, Leffingwell denies it, perjuring himself. When Fonda lies on screen, to who else can you turn to believe? True to form, the Fonda character admits to the President that he has lied and asks him to withdraw his nomination. But knowing an honest and capable man when he sees him, the dying President refuses to do so, creating the rather flimsy device of this movie’s plot.

      Anderson, we are shown, is a good family man, happily married, so it appears, to Ellen (Inga Swenson) and so honest that when he gets wind of Leffingwell’s perjury, he demands that the President pick another candidate.

      Behind the scenes of this political melodrama are two men of power, the affable Senate Majority Leader Robert Munson of Michigan (Walter Pidgeon)—who, with his deep baritone voice has played so very many reassuring and stalwart survivors on screen—and the sly, somewhat comical villain of the piece, Senator Seabright Cooley (Charles Laughton), who opposes Leffingwell’s nomination and will do anything he can to prevent it.

      Seeing this played out again, as I did the other day, I couldn’t but be reminded of the partisan politics of today’s Senatorial body. But, at least, the five decades earlier fictional event suggested that most Senators (the cast also includes Will Greer, Paul Ford, Peter Lawford, George Grizzard, and Betty White) were men and women of good-will, while even the villains back in those days had more fun. In fact, if anything, Preminger’s vision of US politics takes itself a bit too seriously, as did the original Allen Drury novel, published in 1959. My high school friend, David Ray, however, tells me he was very moved by the original book when he read it that year.

      Yet, for me, both times I saw the film version, my stomach turned when Anderson and his wife began getting threatening phone calls that hinted at “Brig’s” behavior as a young military man when he was stationed in Hawaii.

       Instead of sitting down with his loving wife to discuss what that behavior might have entailed—a homosexual affair, as a lonely young soldier, with a man named Ray Shaff (John Granger)—the macho-like adult argues to himself and his wife that he can handle this matter, rushing off to a gay bar (strange that he still knows which one and where) to encounter Ray, who admits he has sold the information about their relationship to Cooley and others.

      That on-film depiction of a gay bar may have been one of the first in US movies.

     Growing up in the 1950s, one could not help but know how McCarthy and “the Red Scare” destroyed the lives of so many who had even flirted with the tenants of American Communism. I knew what even having read Marx might destroy men and women’s careers. I hated that always, terrified that political figures might be able to control what you read and believed.

       I also knew being publicly outed as a gay man would, in 1962, might destroy a man’s career. My father, after my asking a rather question about gay behavior described in Life magazine that very same year—"why wouldn’t men or women who liked one another want to kiss?”—roared back at me with a hatred I’d never before believed him capable of.

       But when the handsome hero, perfect husband and father, visits that gay bar (Frank Sinatra singing over the sound system) and then returns to Washington, D.C. to kill himself in his Senate office, I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I was horrified. I was scared and confused. For I suddenly realized that both the original author and Preminger were not really interested in the gay character they had represented except to show a kind of example of what happens to those of us who are interested in relationships with their own sex.

       I have always suspected, with absolutely no evidence, that my young handsome Air Force-flying father might have been approached by another man when stationed in Naples during World War II; or perhaps he just observed others on his team having homosexual relationships, that might explain his suddenly irrational response. And now, in this film, it all came home to me. Those who might have explored different political views and notions of sexuality, were expendable, not even redeemable.

      Even if Drury’s and Preminger’s hearts were in the right place, wanting to show us the evils of such narrow views as Cooley’s (Laughton, a man who it is rumored he liked young boys was suffering from cancer at the time he made this film, and died soon after), I couldn’t get over the fact that the loving, caring Utah Mormon was being punished, after all these years, for his love and new-found faith in a traditional family. Perhaps I was also just a little angry also of his having so completely abandoned his early sexuality.

     I have also to admit, I’ve never quite liked Preminger’s films, most filled with big liberal ideas—racial, sexual, political (most of whose values I share). Yet, he generally botches them, sentimentalizes them, and gets lost in his subplots, even in Laura’s murder.

     In Advise & Consent three good men—Leffingwell, Anderson, and the President—go down in sacrifice to the society in which they live. Maybe that’s reality; perhaps that’s what happens every day in the real world. But I don’t want that world; I want an alternative fiction.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2020).

Arthur Dreifuss | The Quare Fellow / 1962

straightening up the quare

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Dreifuss and Jacqueline Sundstrom (screenplay, based on the play by Brendan Behan), Arthur Dreifuss (director) The Quare Fellow / 1962

 

I have been wanting to see the film version of Brendan Behan’s first play, The Quare Fellow, for many years now, and finally ordered it through my subscription through Netflix.  In part, I wanted to catch a glimpse, at least, of a play by a writer of the 1950s at a time of my extensive theater readings of Ionesco, Pinter, and Albee, since Behan was not among those I read. I suppose to my young 14-16-year-old mind, a drunken Irishman, no matter how good a writer, was simply not of interest to me. How little did I know!

       Accordingly, I was delighted to finally have the opportunity to make amends. Unfortunately, the film version, directed by the grade-B Hollywood German-born director, Arthur Dreifuss, never quite gave me the opportunity to experience Behan’s dark, gallows-humor work.

      The first act, which in the play was mostly outside of the prison, was quickly moved within so that prisoners could release their tensions through song and complaint as the new “screw” (prison overseer) arrives. Patrick McGoohan as the well-meaning rustic new prison guard Crimmin is quite excellent in his innocent eagerness to learn and in expressing his in-born sensitivity, despite his seeming ignorance of the brutal world in which he has just entered.

      Fortunately, he has Regan (Walker Macken) as a seasoned guide to help him find his way. Although Crimmin believes firmly in the criminal system, Regan, who has served in the prison for many years, has a much more skeptical view of the entire system, particularly since there are now two “quare fellows” (queer men, men outside of the normal prison population) who are about to be executed, and Regan has seen far too many executions in his service.

      In the play, Behan uses this first act, removed basically from the inner workings of prison life to help break down Crimmin’s naivete through the dark humor that characterizes much of his writing. By quickly jumping into the prison itself (realistic as it is: it was filmed in the real County Wicklow prison), we lose the objectivity that Crimmin must later come to, and the real horror of a system (much like that in US prisons today) which still consider it permissible to kill certain prisoners, including one of the “quare fellows,” named as the silver-caned murderer, who, it appears, is actually a “gay” Wildean kind of man (not made evident in this film production), whose actual crime we never discover; one must recall, however, being gay was still a punishable offence in these days. It hardly seems to matter, since his punishment is stayed; yet, despite that fact he soon after he hangs himself, the fact of which perhaps says more than even his terrible punishment.

       The other “quare fellow,” whose crime in the original play was also very vaguely presented, in this production we discover, has murdered his brother. And this is where the well-intentioned film really begins to unravel, moving to a kind of social documentation against capital punishment.

     In its determined attempt to decry that terrible reality, Dreifuss’ and Jacqueline Sundstrom’s script, widely swinging away from Behan’s far subtler dramatization, introduces the other “quare fellow’s” wife (Sylvia Syms), who resides in the same boarding house as Crimmin, and gradually convinces him that her affair with her husband’s brother is behind the fraternal murder committed by her husband, who refused to mention the affair during proceedings in an attempt to protect her from being described as a “whore.” In short, what was a story of male intrigue and governmental suspicion is turned in this director’s vision to a kind of melodrama about heterosexual jealousy and revenge, giving the comic and far darker elements of Behan’s play an almost melodramatic flair, in which she and Crimmin attempt to save the day—without success. The drama of this film is entirely centered upon the events concerning the possibilities of saving her murderous husband, which we already know, given the dismissals and snobbery of the authorities will never happen.

      There are some excellent moments in this film: particularly when two seasoned criminals drink down the rubbing alcohol that Crimmins is trying to administer to their knees. And the interchanges between Syms (as Kathleen) and Crimmins almost incriminates him in having a secret boarding-house affair, which, of course, transforms the innocent rube from the West coast into a kind of willing participant in witness tampering.

      Generally, the acting, particularly by McGoohan and Macken is credible, and some of the moodily expressionistic cinematic images are quite arresting. But this is clearly not the Irish masterpiece of dark prison humor and suffering that the playwright intended it to be.

       Although the movie received, in its day, general acclaim, Dreifuss went back to grade B Hollywood films such as Life Begins at 17 (1958) and Juke Box Rhythm (1959). Too bad that the great Joan Littlewood, the original director (who died in 2002) wasn’t allowed to transfer this film onto screen.

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2018).

Claude Chabrol | L'Œil du malin (The Third Lover) aka The Eye of the Crafty Devil, The Eye of Evil / 1962

a nice boy like me

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claude Chabrol and Martial Matthieu (screenplay), Claude Chabrol (director) L'Œil du malin (The Third Lover) aka The Eye of the Crafty Devil, The Eye of Evil / 1962

 

It might be easiest to describe Claude Chabrol’s 1962 film The Third Lover (L'Œil du malin) as a work that centers upon a kind of sexless ménage-à-trois in which a young Frenchman, Albin Mercier (Jacques Charrier), entering into the lives of the famed German novelist Andréas Hartmann (Walter Reyer) and his French born wife, Hélène (Stéphane Audran), falls in love with Hélène, becomes jealous of Andréas, and—discovering that his friend’s wife is having an affair with another man—reveals her betrayal to Andréas and his knowledge of her love affair to her, resulting in Andréas’ Othello-like murder of Hélène. In some respects, reading the film in this manner, you might even argue the Chabrol’s 1962 film has a great deal in common with Truffaut’s Jules and Jim of the same year, particularly since that ménage-à-trois, also involving a French-German alignment among the three, similarly ends in death.

     Indeed, a number of commentators have simply left it there, although admitting that if the threesome in Chabrol’s work is “sexual” it does not truly involve one of its figures in actual sex with either the male or female other. And in that sense, it is often spoken of as a more psychologically abstract work, as they align it also with Patricia Highsmith’s writing and its influences of René Clément’s Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. In his intelligent review of the new Kino Lorber issue of The Third Lover Gary Tooze describes it as a work lying between the poles of Purple Noon and Hitchcock’s Vertigo. After all, Albin’s (real name Andre) voyeurism does, like Mr. Ripley lead him to not so much as “desire” Hélène, but envy every aspect of Andréas’s life, as he amorally plots throughout the work on just how to grab hold of it, mostly through the agent of his fellow French-speaking interpreter. Like Ripley, finally, Albin is a master of mendacity, an art he began practicing quite early on, he admits, simply to please his loving mother.

     And speaking of boys and their mothers, James Travers in an equally provocative essay, puts Chabrol’s child-like hero in the same room with Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, writing:

 

 “’Things are never quite what they seem,’ is the phrase that most aptly sums up Claude Chabrol’s cinema. The seemingly placid bourgeois setting, inhabited by what appears to be the model married couple, is no more than a trompe l’oeil which masks the unsavory truth lying just beneath the surface. The perfect world that [Albin] Mercier sees and grows to envy is just an illusion, a mirage that is largely his own creation. When he succeeds in entering this world, what the journalist

finds is sordid imperfection that he cannot endure, so, like an artist confronted with his own failure, he must tear up the canvas, destroy his false value of paradise. Mercier is like a pathetic child who

smashes a mirror because he cannot stand the sight of his own reflection. Like Norman Bates, he is trapped in a bubble of self-loathing, forever alienated from the world around him by his vigorously repressed sexuality and contempt for other’s happiness.”

     I am not certain that any LGBTQ person might want to “claim” Albin Mercier—or Norman Bates for that matter, although I have chosen to write on him in these pages—and as I will mention yet again, I have no degree in psychology, but it does seem to me that the repressed sexuality that Travers mentions, and the reason why Chabrol’s ménage-à-trois, compared with Truffaut’s is just no fun, is that Albin is a deeply closeted homosexual. If he thinks he’s fallen in love with Hélène—  as he attempts to explain to her when Andréas leaves for a few days to lecture—is not because of any sudden heterosexual arousal, but that he has fallen in love with Andréas and everything associated with him, his wife, clothes, furniture, house, car, and even the seemingly so satisfied German to whom he might imagine being his “double.”

     Albin’s real first name is André and he too is a writer who beyond his journalistic chores has published short fiction. You might argue that in his immature mind the renowned German writer is the other more gifted and successful self which Albin believes is his birthright. When, as Travers perceives, Albin smashes the mirror it is his friend’s cracked face which greets him as he picks it up to see what is left of reality. Even as a revenge murderer, Andréas remains in control of the image everyone sees. While Albin makes several attempts to take on the guilt for Hélène’s death, no one to whom he expresses the truth will now believe him, wondering why a “Nice boy like me would want to become involved with such unspeakable acts.”

       Even the fact that at film’s end he still remains a “boy” instead of a man also points to his queer feelings. As Hélène marvels about him, his face seems unable to reveal his true age; is he 20 or 40? Still an older boy or (in those days) a middle-aged man? Like Dorian Gray his face shows none of the lines of his endless series of lies, evil machinations, and daily frustrations. Albin cannot forgive Andréas’ scolding him for not telling them the truth about his inability to swim. In part, it simply represents another simple failure of a sightly effeminate man, a stupid and boyish lie he has kept to himself out of his embarrassment for not having yet attained that universally macho skill. But for Andréas, who has deeply suffered World War II, not admitting that he doesn’t have a certain skill is akin to entire nations pretending that they have the vision and knowledge to rule others. Such little lies are the source of wars.

      When Albin reveals what he knows of Hélène’s secret love affairs, she dismisses his threatened revelations, again suggesting that he is a boy not to be taken seriously; his response verifies his own sexual insecurities: “I could rape you right here if I wanted to.” But obviously he doesn’t want.

    Strangely, it is the truth, sought out for terribly warped reasons, however, that results in the Hartmann’s domestic war, and ends both their lives, even if the one will breathe his last days in prison. And equally odd, if Albin/André can be described as a gay man, he remains living at the end of this film, even if perhaps he was never truly alive in the first place.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

Christopher Wheeldon and Jody Talbot | Oscar / 2024 [Live streaming production with The Australian Ballet]

breaking boundaries

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Wheeldon (director and choreographer), Jody Talbot (composer) Oscar / 2024 [Live streaming production with The Australian Ballet]

 

In 2024 artistic director of The Australian Ballet, David Hallberg commissioned for the first time for the company a new ballet, created from scratch, directed and imagined by the noted choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, with music by Joby Talbot, and stage and costume design by Jean-Marc Puissant. The ballet premiered at the Regent Theatre in Melbourne and then moved to the Sydney Opera House where it was broadcast in a HD-live production and made available to subscribers for several weeks after. I was lucky to be one of those subscribers.

       The ballet was exceptional, first all for its subject, an audacious one that perhaps had not been matched since Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, with an all-male cast of swans in 1995, another production about which I’ve written. But this is an even more notably queer work since it concerns life of Oscar Wilde beginning with his trial for pedophilic behavior and “gross indecency,” which he lost, after which he was jailed in Reading Goal for two years.

       Wheeldon’s narrative ballet, however, isn’t just a report of the trial (presented in a verbal narrative prologue), but actually explores his movement away from his wife, Constance Lloyd (Sharni Spencer), and two sons, as Wilde (danced by Callum Linnane, later by Brodie James) at first falls in love with Robbie Ross (John Cayley) and then the enchanting Lord Alfred Douglas, his beloved Bosie (Benjamin Garrett), the two of whom, as Jane Howard in her review describes it, falling physically in love, “over and into each other” in balletic movements.

       Wheeldon interweaves his story of Wilde’s shift to homosexuality and imprisonment with two of the author’s tales, “The Nightingale and the Rose” and the better-known The Picture of Dorian Gray.

       “The Nightingale” (danced by Ako Kondo) is in the original a quite cynical tale of romantic heterosexual love, in which a young student is asked to provide his female love a red rose before she will dance with him; but as a student he has no red roses at hand. The nightingale who sings nearby each night observes his despair and seeks out the rose, only to find a white rose bush, a yellow, and a nearby red rose bush near death from the harsh winter. The bush tells her there is only way to permit him to create a rose again is for her to sing all night putting the thorn into her heart bleeding to death as the blood drips down to bring his own flower back to life.

      The Nightingale, believing that love must be a remarkable thing given the student’s sorrow, gives up her life, delivering up the rose through her death. But when the student takes the rose to his haughty lover, she has already embraced a wealthier young man and has no time for the student, a man without even silver buckles on his shoes. The rose falls into the gutter, and the student abandons love forever.

    My husband Howard, who like many an individual these days does not quite comprehend narrative ballet, suggests that you need to know this story and the others ballets present before they provide meaning. But as any ballet-lover knows, dance can represent the actions quite well, even without the literary details. And Wheeldon’s production does precisely that, if nothing else making clear that such a tale represents the perfect break with Wilde and his wife as he turns to the wilder life of gay bars and homosexual lovers.

     The bar scene in act once would have once been scandalous—and probably still is to many ballet lovers—as two drag queens perform a kind of can-can Harri (Yichuan Wang) and Zella (Jake Mangakahia)—and men flirt and engage with a seemingly endless number of lifts, falls, and graceful rolls over one another’s bodies, ending in Wilde and Bosie’s on-stage kiss.

      This scene alone is one of the most memorable balletic experiences I have witnessed, and brought tears to my eyes for how the brilliantly talented dancers, choreographer, and composer (Talbot’s music is truly quite astonishing) brought everything together in a manner that modern ballet has seldom seen.

     The second act is far more literal as Wilde, now suffering in prison from tinnitus and malnutrition calls up images of his love with Bosie, alternating with his tale of Dorian Gray, in which he himself becomes the increasingly perverted image of Dorian’s youthful beauty. This act is a dirge, a death song for the cultural accusations and ostracization which the real Wilde suffered.

Jane Howard observes:

 

 “In the second act, we are more fully in Oscar’s mind as he deteriorates in Reading gaol. He recounts his relationship with Bosie; the collapse of his marriage; the retribution of Bosie’s father, Lord Queensberry, who made sure Wilde was tried. The intertwined story is The Picture of Dorian Grey – all hedonism and self-destruction, as Oscar persecutes the case against himself. It is in these moments of darkness where the ballet truly comes into itself.”

 

       Yet, Wheeldon fortunately doesn’t allow his ballet to represent a true guilt trip for the love Wilde felt, as we once more perceive just how much in love he and Bosie were, and how their love—although unaccepted—was a beautiful thing that simply could not be spoken. In this act it is perhaps only his memories of that love that keeps Wilde, the invalid, eating from a bowl tossed to him in his narrow cell, alive.

        Critic Christopher Rogers-Wilson, writing in The Guardian, nicely summarizes the ways in which Wheeldon’s choreography and Talbot’s music work together to create a seamless storytelling that keeps even Wilde’s Reading Goal imprisonment from turning maudlin:

 

“In Oscar, there is a slipperiness of the category of ballet. The movement vocabulary in the ballet draws from multiple forms of dance. Music theatre, for instance, has a strong presence in one courtroom scene in which chairs and benches are being manoeuvred in formations.

      There is classical ballet, such as with the pas de deux between Oscar and his wife. There are contemporary lyrical pieces, including Ross’s solo which opens the second act. There is a touch of Russian constructivism with geometric arm shapes, mechanised jerky movement and fixed mask-like facial expressions.

      There is even a little vaudeville, with cancan and cross-dressing – as well as some sassy Balanchine-esque moments of contemporary ballet with slides and swings, strong geometries and slightly cocked hips.

       This melange applies equally to Joby Talbot’s score. It moves from classical, to jazzed up, to recorded sounds, to techno.”

       Almost all the critics I’ve read agreed that this production was an amazing achievement, and quite frankly I was mesmerized. I didn’t want it to end, and was actually disappointed by the brief epilogue, wherein his friend Ross collects Wilde from prison and takes him to France, where soon after, at the age of 46, the great writer died.

       As even The Australian Ballet’s director admits, we are surely tired of ballet’s dancing princes, princesses, and metaphoric heterosexual lovers. It is time for just such ballet works to reveal that contemporary stories can be told without embarrassment. But as Rogers-Wilson observes, this is far more than just a “gay ballet”:

 

“But what makes Oscar a gay ballet? Is it the heroic narrative about an historic gay figure? Is it two men kissing for perhaps the first time on an Australian ballet stage? Is it because it is made by gay men who themselves have called it a gay ballet? Yes, it’s all of these. But it’s also more than that. As Hannah McCann and Whitney Monaghan suggest in their book Queer Theory Now, the term “queer” is used to describe not just the slipperiness of categories and boundaries of gender and sexuality, but also of more general categories and boundaries.”

   The wonderful thing about Wheeldon’s and Talbot’s work is that it breaks taboos, challenges boundaries. The very fact that ballet is now streaming live on network broadcasts in the manner of the Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live productions is a wonderful breakthrough that should help people around the world to realize just how truly amazing ballet is.

      This work was perhaps, along with Bourne’s ground-breaking Swan Lake production, an early ballet I saw with Howard at the Filene Center at Wolf Trap near Washington, D.C. of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet in the 1970s, and the Joffrey Ballet’s Rodeo in 1969 one of the most memorable “traditional” ballet experiences I’ve encountered.

      I should mention, perhaps, that for a long half year, I trained with the Joffrey Ballet company, then in New York City, every night at the barré, even praised at one amazing moment (praise does not come easy for ballet martinets) for a balletic spin and leap which in my youth I was able to accomplish.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2024

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance and My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).