Music: Satire and Slapstick

A genuinely funny ballet is as rare as, well, a genuinely funny Broadway comedy these days. Choreographing humor, in fact, requires someone with the quirky genius of Jerome Robbins, whose seldom seen 1956 comic gem, The Concert, has just been auspiciously revived by the New York City Ballet. Completely restaged and updated by Robbins, it is still a hilarious, crowd-pleasing delight, especially for anyone who has ever suffered through a Swan Lake mangled by an underrehearsed road company.

As the title suggests, The Concert starts at a recital. A mop-haired pianist stalks imperiously across the stage to his waiting instrument, elaborately dusts off the keyboard and then sails into some Chopin pieces. As he plunks away, an audience arrives: a pair of whispering ladies with jangly handbags, a bored cigar chomper and his prissy wife, an ecstatic temptress so caught up in the music that she seems to be seducing the piano. The sequence ends in a parody of musical chairs when an usher discovers that everyone has the wrong ticket stub.

And so it goes, in a series of dancing blackouts that range from satire to slapstick. Thanks to the precise timing of the City Ballet soloists, the intricate sight gags work to perfection. In an otherwise delicate sextet, one or another of six girls is either out of place, out of step or out of line. A lyrically complicated double duet turns into a Lao-coon-11ke tangle.

When the pianist strikes up the "Butterfly" Etude, the performers appear with wings and antennae. A girl twirls daintily forward through two converging rows of dancers; when the lines part, there she lies—splat—on the stage floor. The pianist, his repertoire and his patience exhausted, suddenly grabs a huge butterfly net and chases the creatures offstage.

Robbins' more recent masterpieces, The Goldberg Variations and Dances at a Gathering, the latter also set, incidentally, to Chopin piano pieces, conclusively proved that he is the best of all American-born choreographers. The revival of The Concert shows that he is ballet's daftest, deftest clown as well.