Ballet in American Theatre

Ballet in American Theatre. Ballet has been a feature of regular American theatre, as distinguished from a totally separate ballet theatre with great ballet companies, virtually from the start. Indeed, because we could not support whole ballet ensembles, ballet first appeared as an ornament in the ballad operas of the late 18th and early 19th centuries or as divertissements on the extended bills that were common before the Civil War. Occasionally, great ballerinas, such as Fanny Elssler, were able to present entire evenings of dance, but even such celebrated artists as Celine Celeste were required to perform in spoken drama to supplement their dancing. Spectacle ballets, largely decorative and with little narrative connected to any play, became the rage about the time of the Civil War, most notably in The Black Crook (1866), and remained popular well into the 20th century. Examples of this style remained a staple in the work of Marilyn Miller in the 1920s, and on a more intimate, artful scale in revues such as the Greenwich Village Follies. At about the same time, however, some more avant‐garde revues began offering examples of more progressive, modern dance, although it was not until the 1930s with the work of George Balanchine in such shows as On Your Toes and I Married an Angel, and the 1940s with Agnes de Mille's ballets for Oklahoma! and Carousel that contemporary ballet began to be woven carefully into the fabric of the modern musical, often telling part of the musical's story in choreographic terms. As a rule these ballets, however excellent, have been too short to offer in regular ballet evenings, albeit several have achieved fame. The most notable is probably “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” from On Your Toes, which undoubtedly owes its celebrity as much to Richard Rodgers's fine and well‐known music for it as it does to Balanchine's choreography. Another memorable example was Jerome Robbins's comic gem, the “Mack Sennett Ballet” from High Button Shoes. Many critics and playgoers would also cite Robbins's “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” from The King and I, and his dances in West Side Story that not only advanced the story but were an integral part of the very construction and tempo of the shows. By the 1960s such choreographers as Robbins, Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, and Michael Bennett came to the fore not merely to create dances, but to conceive and direct whole musicals. A good example would be A Chorus Line, which began as a workshop project with Bennett and became a dance show about dance. To some extent the same could be said about the popular dance musicals Dancin' (1978), Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk (1996), Fosse (1999), and Contact (2000).