When Scottish Ballet premiered the first version of this piece back in 2021 we were just emerging from the Covid lockdown and badly in need of cheering up. Starstruck, based on a wildly original little gem called Pas de Dieux created originally by Gene Kelly as a commission from the Paris Opéra Ballet in 1960 and since all but forgotten, was a real treat. A witty take on the classical myths, where squabbling gods come down from Olympus to wreak havoc in the lives of mortals, it also evoked fashionably bright young things disporting themselves in the sun-drenched South of France and brought a thrilling glimpse into the world of Hollywood dance pics. How could it have been forgotten?
Enter Patricia Ward Kelly, the immortal Gene’s widow and keeper of the flame who, together with Scottish Ballet’s Artistic Director Christopher Hampson, painstakingly pieced together the original from handwritten notes and archive footage. Hampson added a neat framing device, opening the ballet in a modern rehearsal room where a company are working on their new ballet, Pas de Dieux. Drawing on his on-screen experience as well as a wide understanding of classical tradition, Kelly set his work to Gershwin’s jazzy Concerto in F and the result – melding ‘modern’ ballet, jazz dance and Broadway chorus line pzazz – has the stars and stripes stamped all over it. We loved it.
Fast forward five years and Christopher Hampson – ever prone to second thoughts, tweaking and improving – has now created a whole new first act, giving the piece more of a through narrative. The Choreographer, auditioning girls for his new ballet, finds his Star Ballerina. They melt together in pas de deux onstage and off, until his growing obsession with work gets the better of him and, regretfully, she leaves to seek her fortune elsewhere. Which she does: in a dream (ah, yes, the Dream Ballet – staple of many a Hollywood musical, complete with a cloud of dry ice around the ankles) he sees her, now in diamonds and tiara, courted by a star of the silver screen. Disaster! Act 2 then takes up where the 2021 version started.
You have to keep your wits about you as the ballet mirrors ‘real life’. The Choreographer (Yuri Marques) and the Star Ballerina (Marlen Fuerte Castro) are playing Zeus and Aphrodite – a couple whose relationship, like theirs, is a bit frayed. The Rehearsal Pianist (Andrea Azzari), already characterised as something of a live-wire, dons dinky wings to play Eros, mixing up the lovers and generally causing bother.
A sweet couple (Claire Souet and Harvey Littlefield), blissed-out in ‘real life’, have their romance up-ended by the gods. Marlene Fuerte Castro goes from wispy, melting ingenue to spiky demanding star in no time. Her flirtation with a stagehand (Harvey Evans, also the Filmstar) occasions a classic bar-room brawl, complete with thrown punches, overturned chairs and much athletic leaping of the counter. Sexy solos, classical pas de deux and chorus-line routines follow one another at bewildering speed.
Kelly’s own style – manly, appealing, athletic, witty, yet securely rooted in classicism – tips seamlessly over into jazzy modernism, a bit of Charleston and lines of perfectly-timed Broadway hoofing. Eventually the biggest of big finishes brings together the whole company in sparkly diamanté black, letting rip with a real show-stopper routine in front of a backdrop of the Palais Garnier, where the original ballet premiered. And back in the ‘real’ world, the Choreographer and his Star walk off hand in hand. Ahhh…
