The popular, slightly daffy Boris Eifman is back with his Eifman Ballet, forgoing his usual forays into the Russian psyche for a comic valentine inspired by an immigrant’s view of America.
Eifman never left his native Russia to live here. But, after years when he wasn’t allowed to visit, the target of Soviet restriction and anti-Semitism, he started coming for visits in the ’80s, and he conquered. His troupe is one of the most reliably popular and successful on the dance touring schedule.
“Who’s Who,” his thank you to the U.S., takes its scenario from onetime immigrant Billy Wilder’s “Some Like it Hot” and its music from American jazz. Choreographically, Eifman comes up with his own characteristically weird mix of ballet, swing, the Charleston and the chorus line. While prior tragedies, probing Tchaikovsky and “Giselle,” quoted Petipa and Massine, this work, unveiled last week in Boston, evokes Busby Berkeley and the Rockettes.
Two ballet dancers fleeing the Russian revolution arrive at Ellis Island, witness a gang murder and go in drag to join a female dance troupe. Max falls for the troupe’s star, Lynn, while Alex becomes the unwitting love object of a movie director. At key points, the frolic is interrupted by painful elegies evoking the sadness of strangers in a strange land. The conclusion is as mixed as the dance styles: Max stays, wins Lynn and starts a jazzy ballet troupe. Alex goes home.
With a large, metallic sculptural set piece and hundreds of period costumes, Eifman tells this tale with a remarkable onrush of dance. His own brand of ballet is long in powerful, whipping legwork and short in delicacy. He brings that same hard, athletic style to his American riffs, his jazz flourishes sometimes as cheesy as their burlesque originals.
But he steadfastly uses dance as a language, interrupting the pop pastiche with duets detailing the characters’ depression and homesickness. The theme of our two cultures coming together through dance reaches a fetching conclusion when Max, revealing his love for Lynn, teaches her ballet. Mirroring an infant learning to walk and a klutzy ugly duckling, Lynn gradually transforms into an effective romantic partner. Dance, for Eifman, is both global olive branch and means of private reconciliation.
Though always well drilled and disciplined, the company flubbed timing here and there, possibly due to the work’s newness. The piece could use some fine-tuning, notably in its abrupt, anticlimactic swing finale to Act One.
Alexey Turko and Igor Siadzko, as Alex and Max, are strong and swift, especially poignant in duets of male friendship, while statuesque Vera Arbuzova, as Lynn, masters the caustic ballet moves and oddball contortions. Physically, she’s a bit of an anti-heroine, but that suits Eifman’s out-there exuberance just fine.
The music includes selections by Duke Ellington, Louis Prima and Billy Strayhorn and orchestral works by Rachmaninoff (written while he lived in the U.S.) and Samuel Barber.
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“Who’s Who” will be performed through Sunday at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress Pkwy. Phone: 312-902-1500.
