Pleasing ‘Miss Cline’ evokes sweet dreams
Amy Seiwert builds clever dances set to classic country hits for Smuin’s opener
Michael Smuin was a ballet showman whose highest aim was to give his audience a good time. On Friday, Feb. 4, he would surely have smiled upon the Smuin Contemporary Ballet’s season-opening program, featuring the revival of Amy Seiwert’s “Dear Miss Cline” at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.
Seiwert, who was mentored by Smuin before his death in 2017, actually leans more toward complex abstraction in her own work, but years of dancing in and choreographing for the Smuin troupe’s popular “Christmas Ballet” clearly taught her how to build crowdpleasing pop numbers. “Dear Miss Cline” boasts obvious sources of appeal: 10 songs in classic recordings by the country pop singer Patsy Cline, and charming costumes by Jo Ellen Arntz and Seiwert that dress the women in fluffy red and white ’50s skirts. But much of the charm of this romp, which continues for more than a week before also playing in Walnut Creek and Mountain View, should be credited to Seiwert’s skill.
Every section of “Dear Miss Cline” has a distinct and clever compositional idea at its center, carried out to near perfection. In “Tra Le La Le La Triangle,” Maggie Carey is passed — with little foot flutters of excitement — between two men as Cline sings of being “half in love with him and half in love with you.” In “There He Goes,” Terez Dean Orr tries to throw herself at Max van der Sterre as three men hold her back. And in “Stop the World and Let Me Off,” Cassidy Isaacson is trapped in a pinwheel of ensemble members.
Isaacson is so naturally passionate that her performance in “She’s Got You” feels like the dance’s climax — you’re really heartbroken for her when even the third man to give her a whirl leaves her abandoned. But plucky Maggie Carey makes you want to watch on for the clever ways Seiwert illustrates “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down,” and Orr is moving in “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home.”
Seiwert, who briefly served as artistic director of Sacramento Ballet, is a hot commodity this spring. Next month ODC/Dance, one of the city’s most high-profile modern dance companies, plans to unveil a world premiere by her, and in late April, the Smuin troupe’s second season program will feature her “Renaissance,” inspired by gender equality protests in India.
For now, she is also represented on this program by 2008’s “Been Through Diamonds.” Like “Dear Miss Cline,” “Diamonds” has a clever scheme: Three couples each want the other’s partners; then nobody wants poor Mengjun Chen; then everyone wants the elegant Orr. But the music here is Mozart’s String Quintet in C minor, and the costumes by Mario Alonzo are sophisticated silky tunics for the women and suit coats with bare chests beneath for the men. “Diamonds” isn’t quite serious, isn’t quite comic, but at least it is well danced.
In the middle of the program comes Gina Patterson’s “You Are Here.” From curtain up, when Tessa Barbour and Lauren Pschirrer launched a complicated and obscure psychological allegory to piano and strings pseudo-minimalism by Ludovico Einaudi, the ballet plays just too melodramatic for my taste.
Patterson is no slouch. Her works are in the repertories of a plethora of regional companies and “You Are Here” was made for Cincinnati Ballet in 2011, so clearly she has her audience. But under Artistic Director Celia Fushille, the Smuin troupe has added ballets by so many other fine contemporary choreographers over the past 15 years — Stanton Welch, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Helen Pickett — that I pined to be watching one of them instead Friday night.
Still, the small but passionate audience seemed perfectly pleased. Seiwert and Patsy Cline gave us all a good time.
Cassidy Isaacson is so naturally passionate that her performance in “She’s Got You” feels like the dance’s climax — you’re really heartbroken for her when even the third man to give her a whirl leaves her abandoned.