The Moiseyev Dance Company. (Courtesy E. Masalkov)

THE RULES FOR FALL FOR DANCE changed slightly this year—several more performances, spread out over three weeks, and a modest price hike—but the principle remains the same: a smorgasbord of wildly various disciplines and aesthetics, and equally various levels of interest and talent. You never know exactly what to expect, but you know there will be the good, the bad, and the well-intentioned boring.

Inevitably, there were four dance modes on view: classical ballet, “downtown,” ethnic/folk and novelties. It makes sense—the programs give audiences a chance to decide what they like, and give critics a chance to get a sense of companies and performers they might never be able to see otherwise—and to send up warning flares: If this bunch makes it back to town, STAY AWAY!

Ballet has been a problem for Fall for Dance since the beginning. There have been occasional happy surprises—the Aspen Ballet a few years ago, for instance (they’ll be at the Joyce next week)—but on the whole the choices have been tame and thin. Our two big companies are miserably represented: Usually they wander down from Lincoln Center with a duet. This year ABT put on Tharp’s Sinatra Suite, which we’ve seen all too often, though anything that brings us Herman Cornejo is a plus. City Ballet, absent this time around, usually gives Wendy Whelan taxi fare downtown, a partner and a Christopher Wheeldon pas de deux; this time we got Whelan and Wheeldon as usual, but under the auspices of Fang-Yi Sheu & Artists. It might as well have been a City Ballet moment, however, since three of the four dancers were from the company.

The ballet—Five Movements, Three Repeats—was new, and there was Sheu herself (well, it’s her company), barefoot in contrast to Whelan’s point shoes, though if this contrast was what the ballet was telling us about, it wasn’t telling us very much. Sheu is a strong, assertive dancer but not very interesting; the music, by Max Richter, is also strong, assertive and not very interesting. Wheeldon is obviously clear in his mind what the connections are among the movements and repeats, but he hasn’t made them clear to us. Nor can I figure out why in the middle of his careful duets and solos and trios he’s inserted Whelan dancing to the Dinah Washington recording of “This Bitter Earth”—we last encountered it (and her) a little while ago at the City Ballet gala. It looked better this time out, with Whelan rid of the ghastly Valentino concoction she was sporting then and dressed in a becoming costume by Reid Bartelme. Wheeldon is always efficient, but this is mid-level Wheeldon, not a keeper.

Another Wheeldon number, the duet from Carousel (A Dance), was the contribution of Pacific Northwest Ballet. It’s sweetly pretty in the Jerome Robbins young-ecstasy mode, with sweeping overhead lifts and rhapsodic expressions. And it brought us the wonderful Carla Körbes at her most lyrical. But this isn’t what we want to see from one of the country’s leading ballet companies. If Fall for Dance can afford to transport large groups from Hawaii and Indonesia and Hong Kong, it should be able to afford plane fare for a dozen dancers from Seattle to present a work of substance.

What was imported from Hong Kong was The Hong Kong Ballet (who knew?) with eight ardent and naive dancers giving their all in Luminous, a relatively new work by Peter Quanz—shmaltz by the bushel from this busy choreographer all of whose works seem to be acts of will rather than artistic impulses.

Worst of breed, worst in show, worst in memory was Ballet West, from Salt Lake City, in the “Grand Pas” from Paquita, a mainstay of the classical repertory that demands the highest level of Petipa technique and style. From the first seconds it was obvious that this company lacks everything Petipa requires; it all looked like an under-powered graduation performance at a second-level ballet school. The ballerina was clearly chosen because she can do, sort of, the barrage of fouettés the climax calls for—I won’t embarrass her and her colleagues by naming them. Regional? Provincial? Definitely not ready for the Big Apple. Poor gifted Elena Kunikova who staged it—we know how thoroughly she understands Paquita from the version she made of it for the Trocks. Where were those fabulous boys when she needed them?

TWO HIGHLY ADMIRED CHOREOGRAPHERS from downtown were displaying their wares at the City Center. Pam Tanowitz’s Fortune, performed by Juilliard Dance to a (live) quartet by Charles Wuorinen, is in her severe, high-minded mode, with lots of silence punctuating lots of jumping, and the clever disposition of Juilliard’s score or so of dancers. (Tanowitz is one of the few modern choreographers who deploys groups effectively.) As usual with her, there are little hints of ballet—you keep feeling that the dancers are raring to rise on point. I wish she’d let them.

Tanowitz is coolly worthy. Jodi Melnick is hotly self-absorbed. Her onstage musicians are much too loud, and like so many narcissistic performers, she goes on much too long: She’s interested in herself, why wouldn’t we be? She and her three colleagues wag their bottoms and swing their arms casually and toss their heads—Melnick’s reddish mop of hair is practically a fifth performer. She’s not without talent both as a dance-maker and a dancer, but Solo, (Re)Deluxe Version is more irritating than appealing.

As for novelties, there was the gone-in-a-flash Shutters Shut from the Nederlands Dans Theater, two goony performers in Cubist-inflected costumes having fun to a recitation of a Gertrude Stein poem about Picasso that begins “If I told him would he like it.” And a group called TU Dance (two ex-Ailey dancers) had a hit with High Heel Blues, more because of its use of Tuck and Patti’s lament about a woman who can’t resist buying shoes she knows in her heart will never fit her than because of any original dance invention. I don’t understand why it didn’t show the lamenter in high heels—at least she could have been trying them on and kicking them off.

The Martha Grahams turned up with the apparently obligatory excerpts from Chronicle (1936)—not again, please, Martha—and there was an extended sequence from Jared Grimes purporting to show a Transformation in Tap which “entertainingly reveals the journey of a young dancer who seeks to create innovative perspectives in tap dance live on stage.” Grimes is a pretty good tapper, and so are his four colleagues, but I just don’t want a message with my tap, and he goes on too long, like just about everyone else. Including the much-admired Balletboyz, 10 guys imported from England who put on a highly charged exhibition of guy stuff called Void. They’re non-stop explosive as they fling themselves at and on each other and crash to the ground, all to pounding music and grim lighting and visuals, and they’re fun to watch—for a while. Then the inevitable law of diminishing returns sets in, and the whole thing, at last, just stops—not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a fizzle.

BY FAR THE MOST INTERESTING OFFERINGS this year were the folk/ethnic ones, although most of them suffered from the raging epidemic of endlessness. The three Asian works all displayed intensity, sincerity and onstage percussion musicians, including singers. (Alas, neither the Hawaiians nor the Sumatrans offered translations of what they were singing—maybe the words don’t matter?) Before the curtain went up, a voiceover explained that Shantala Shivalingappa’s piece was about Shiva, the Lord of Dance, and Ganga, Goddess of the sacred river Ganges, both of whom were impersonated by the much admired Shantala. She’s a slim, attractive figure who moves gracefully—but I found that her Eternal Feminine aspect as Ganga wasn’t very different from her Eternal Masculine aspect as Shiva. It all had to do with Shiva using his head to deflect or absorb a deluge from the river. To each his own.

The group of artists called Nan Jombang from Padang, Sumatra, produced an extremely sophisticated drama decked out in Sumatra-wear which featured chanting and wailing, intoning and yelping, hair-tossing, hand-clapping, swaying, swinging, shouting, screaming, drumming and yet more drumming in a work called Tarian Malam (Night Dances) that announces itself as a “contemporary narrative about the earthquake that struck the region in 2009.” The group is supported by an impressive number of important international cultural organizations, and is as far from unmediated ethnic dance as you can get—this piece is orchestrated and polished to within an inch of its life. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Even so, at two-thirds its length it would have been twice as impressive.

From Hawaii came Ka Leo O Laka I Ka Hikina O Ka Lā with the world premiere of Hula Kane: The Ancient Art of Hawaiian Male Dance. Eleven near-naked smashing-looking guys—green garlands on their brows, green necklaces at their throats, green really skimpy thongs at their not-very-private privates—leaped and bounded and brandished sticks and percussion instruments for a very long time. In one section they looked like a group of nine male strippers shaking gourds. But it was all good-natured fun, if this kind of thing is your idea of fun.

The high point of the entire season was the return to New York after many years of the glorious Moiseyev Dance Company, which knocked our socks off when they first turned up here in 1958. My socks were knocked off all over again at the City Center last week as their galvanizing dancers filled the stage with dazzling energy, dazzling footwork, dazzling teamwork, dazzling costumes and dazzlingly beautiful women. They did four of the company’s classics, created between 1938 and 1959, featuring Kalmyk dances, Tartar dances, Bessarabian Gypsy dances and Moldavian dances. It was all tumultuous, sexy (relentlessly heterosexy) and alive with the joy of performing and the radiance of good will. Please, somebody, get them back here in full force for a season of their own!

A promise: If anything major takes place at the fifth and last of this year’s programs, you’ll hear about it here.

editorial@observer.com

Colin Donnell and Elizabeth Stanley in "Merrily." (Photo by Joan Marcus)

“Yesterday is done.”

Those are, appropriately enough, the first words you hear in the current version of Merrily We Roll Along, the long-troubled and oft-reworked musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth.

Merrily, based on a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart about the slow demise of a close and fruitful friendship among three successful creative types—Franklin Shepard, a charming and ambitious composer-turned-producer; Charley Kringas, an idealistic playwright and Shepard’s collaborator; and Mary Flynn, a novelist—is most notable for being the 1981 bomb that demolished the close and fruitful collaboration between Mr. Sondheim and Harold Prince, the producer and director. It’s also notable for being told, like the play it’s based on, in reverse-chronological order, so that the three friends begin the show old and jaded and end it young and hopeful. Merrily is about looking fondly, but not too fondly, back at the past, hence the opening lyric. But the act of presenting Merrily, whenever it is newly staged, is also an argument that the production we’re seeing is an improvement on whatever less successful versions came before. Yesterday, each successive Merrily insists of its predecessors, is done.

And yet it never seems to quite escape the past.

The new production that opened at City Center Encores last week (and runs though this weekend in an atypically long Encores engagement) is directed by James Lapine, who directed and wrote the book for several of Mr. Sondheim’s classics, including Sunday in the Park With George, which won the pair a Pulitzer Prize. In 1985, he urged Messrs. Sondheim and Furth to rework Merrily for a La Jolla Playhouse production that was more successful than the original.

There’ve been innumerable other revisions since, for a run in Washington, D.C., in 1990, for Off-Broadway’s York Theatre Company in 1994 and for various iterations in Britain. All of that is combined into what’s onstage now, along with a further dash of new work from Mr. Lapine.

And indeed this is a very coherent production, crisp and polished. As has not been the case in all previous Merrilys, the story progresses—that is, regresses—smoothly, with clear and comprehensible transitions further back in time. The cast—led by Colin Donnell, charming but oddly vacant as Frank; Celia Keenan-Bolger, in a series of terrible wigs, as Mary; and an appealing low-key Lin-Manuel Miranda as Charley­—is strong. Together with the mighty Encores orchestra, directed as usual by Rob Berman, they make Mr. Sondheim’s songs—some of them truly lovely, haunting reflections on the loss of friendship—sound fantastic. There’s a bustling chorus and smooth choreography (by Dan Knechtges) that at one point even includes an involved, acrobatic number. (The once-minimal staging of Encores’ shows keeps getting more and more maximal.)

And there are some wonderful moments. Mr. Miranda, for example, performs a version of “Franklin Shepard Inc.”—Mr. Sondheim’s brilliant, one-song dissection of how a successful artist sells out—that keeps the song’s pathos, so often subdued below its comedy, bubbling right at the surface. Betsy Wolfe, as Shepard’s jilted first wife, delivers an amazing, wrenching take on her ballad of jilted love, “Not a Day Goes By.” The comic patter song “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” is a silly gem, presented with glee. There are thoughtful passages on the dilemmas of a successful artist (presaging Mr. Sondheim’s 1983 Sunday in the Park), and there are beautiful meditations on regrets and unrequited love and roads not taken (echoing his 1971 Follies).

But there are also problems that are not surmounted here, and are perhaps insurmountable.

At the most basic level, friendships fall apart; it’s what happens in life. (“Most friends fade / Or they don’t make the grade / New ones are quickly made,” the song “Old Friends” acknowledges.) So it’s a bit difficult to view as tragic the loss of a friendship between a Hollywood macher, a Pulitzer-winning playwright and a best-selling author. That’s especially true because it is never clear why these people were such great friends in the first place, beyond repeated assertions of great friendship and an occasionally invoked three-way pinky handshake.

We wait for the final scene to discover what so deeply bonded this trio together—and discover that they all merely happened to go up on their apartment roof at the same moment one night in 1957 to watch Sputnik cross the sky. (Which is a nice, if obvious, metaphor for the start of their lives, the moment when everything is changing—until Mr. Furth’s book pounds its shoe on the table: “Nothing’s ever going to be the way it was, not ever again,” he has Frank say, even more obviously. “Do you guys realize that now we are going to be able to do anything? What a time to be starting out.” Excessive exposition, it seems, is what bonded these friends together.)

After seeing Merrily last week, I reread Frank Rich’s 1981 Times review, the one that famously began with the lament that “to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” It’s actually not as mean as it sounds—Mr. Rich was being playful in that lead, noting the accidental heartbreak caused by Mr. Sondheim’s failures but also the intentional heartbreak induced by his incisive songwriting. But I was surprised to discover that so many of his three-decade-old criticisms were the same as mine on Friday: The lack of insight into the characters and their friendship, Mr. Furth’s weak book, an unflattering-by-comparison similarity to Follies.

For all the work that’s been done, yesterday is still very much here.

Tuesday’s Times led with the news that Apple, for the first time, is instituting an outside audit of working conditions at its Chinese factories. Nowhere in the article, nor in the two investigative pieces the Times published last month detailing the appalling abuses in those factories, does the name Mike Daisey appear. That’s surprising, because Mr. Daisey, a writer and performer, has for the past several years been delivering a monologue about his investigation into the appalling abuses in those factories.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which first came to the Public Theater in the fall, is Mr. Daisey’s thrilling, funny, occasionally horrifying story of Apple, his own obsession with the company, and his visit to Shenzhen, China, were Apple’s products are made at the giant Foxconn factory. It is, essentially, the Times’s exposés, but it came first, and it’s entertaining. It’s back for a limited return at the Public, and you should see it.

editorial@observer.com

Michael Chernus and Pierce.

After suffering through the massacre of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, I thought I had seen the dregs of the New York theater season. I was wrong. Things reach the absolute nadir of abysmal incompetence with the new Manhattan Theatre Club production at the City Center of a dopey, pretentious travesty called Close Up Space.

The almost always watchable David Hyde Pierce stars as Paul Barrow, the harassed editor in chief of a small but distinctive publishing house called Tandem Books. The setting is the place where he works. You know the place. One of those elegant, brick-walled offices tastefully decorated with Oriental carpets, walnut shutters, Moroccan bound books, and a bubbling fish tank that is more placid and easygoing than the human life reflected in the glass. In fact, the life it mirrors is worse than the violent ward at Bellevue.

When Mr. Pierce gets the right role as the contemporary embodiment of the near-sighted, addlepated Magoos that used to be played by Marion Lorne, there is nobody funnier. (There’s also some Wally Cox in there, and a smidge of Ed Wynn trying to get out.) From Frasier to the Kander and Ebb musical Curtains, he has proved he can do lots of other things, too, but I like him best when he’s falling apart. Alas, alas, there is nothing playable in the miserable detritus of Close Up Space, a nonplay by a Brooklyn writer named Molly Smith Metzler, woefully lost without a compass by the direction of Leigh Silverman. It is both incomprehensible and awful, often at the same time.

No wonder Mr. Pierce seems to have difficulties keeping his eyelids open. He has been given nothing to do and nothing important enough to say that enlightened people want to hear. Tightened up in button-down collars and horn-rimmed spectacles, Paul is an aging preppie, pedantic to the point of obsession, talking about compound verbs, expletives and illiterate syntax while he edits everything from hard-copy manuscripts to personal mail. Among the many contrived distractions that plague him are a best-selling writer (a wasted and largely unintelligible Rosie Perez) who is in a rage because he’s red-penciled her new book to the point where it looks like “a used maxi-pad”; a demented office manager named Steve (Michael Chernus) who lives in a tent and cooks bacon in a frying pan in the middle of the floor wearing only a bathrobe; and a daughter named Bailey (Jessica DiGiovanni) who, after being expelled from college, arrives in an astrakhan hat waving a Russian flag and throwing snowballs. The writer grows and eats nothing but fiddlehead ferns. The daughter is moving to Russia because she has never recovered from the death of her mother, who sprayed the house red wearing combat boots and committed suicide. When Paul is out, she empties the office of its contents (she must subscribe to Wonder Woman), babbling away in Russian and going from unconventional tyrant to total mental patient overnight. In the end, Paul climbs into Steve’s tent for a while, but in the end he is shivering in the middle of the Soviet steppes as the snow falls, like the last scene in Anna Karenina. This is what comes of “exclusive” publishers who print too many books on Egyptian hieroglyphics and 100 ways to cook asparagus that nobody wants to read, and Close Up Space is what comes of producing too many horrible plays at the Manhattan Theatre Club that nobody wants to see. Very little of it is engrossing and a great deal of it is just plain savagely stupid. I mean how can one play be overwritten and pointlessly empty at the same time?

The fact that this gibberish made it beyond one public performance is a testament to the sustaining power of membership subscriptions. The only good thing about Close Up Space is the fact that it is 90 minutes long without intermission. The praise ends there.

rreed@observer.com

"Fall for Dance" flings a wide, if not always discriminating, net over the dance world. There's not a lot of money for them to spend--tickets remain at the fantastic bargain-basement price of $10 each--so big ballet companies can't or won't bring in big works: ABT throws in a duet, San Francisco the same, City Ballet a quartet. Modern companies are more generous: Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Larry Keigwin, Ronald K. Brown came with more richly populated offerings.

The opening piece on opening night was XOVER, a very late Cunningham work being featured in his company's worldwide farewell tour. It is to my abiding regret and shame that for 50 years Cunningham has eluded me. I recognize the clarity, the elegance, the intelligence, but watching him, I feel the way you do when you're watching a sport whose rules you don't know and can't figure out. XOVER seemed to me as opaque as almost all the other Cunningham pieces I've struggled to enjoy. The sound--I can't call it music--was more egregious than usual: a singer named Joan La Barbara shrieking, gurgling, howling, moaning in scraps of several languages. And then it was over.

Along the way, the season served up the exotic (India's smuggish, plumpish Madhavi Mudgal); the pretentious (Carolyn Carlson's Man in a Room, which, "inspired by the life of painter Mark Rothko ... explores man's creative anxiety"); the overexposed (the Thaïs Pas de Deux; Red Angels); the happy reminders (Brown's Grace); the old favorites (Company B, The Golden Section); the irritating (William Forsythe's The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude); the vacuous (Yuri Possokhov's Diving Into the Lilacs--what makes San Francisco insist that he's a choreographer?); and--as it's done before--a sensational surprise.

One year, it was a group of enchanting Carpathian folk dancers; another, a pair of white-bread brothers showing off their fabulous Minnesota brand of tapping and drumming. This year, out of nowhere--well, Rio--came the Companhia Urbana de Dança with nine terrific guys mixing hip-hop and modern-dance moves in a totally satisfying work by the company's director, Sonia Destri. For once, hip-hop was used to an artistic end and not merely as exhibitionism, however exciting. The mood was dark. The dancers blended their individual specialties into a rigorous though never rigid progress from meditative to explosive. There was an idea in charge, but not an agenda.

Will hip-hop prove to be the liberating force that can invigorate today's dance, rescuing it from pretension and exhaustion? A less substantial, more conventional, yet still stimulating use of it motored Jason Samuel Smith's Rhythmdome, presented as a challenge--a street clash--between four tappers and four hip-hoppers. Alas, as in so many desperate new works, there was a portentous spoken commentary, but the tappers' saxophonist, Stacy Dillard, and his hip-hop counterpart, DJ DP One at his turntables, made up for it. This piece was hardly original, but again it demonstrated how recent social dance forms can liven things up. What's harder is reinvigorating old forms, as Rafaela Carrasco failed to do with flamenco. She's robust, she's slick and she's trying too hard. Her musicians, though, were spectacular.

There was more, much more, with one other offering worth singling out: a solo called AfterLight Part 1 by Russell Maliphant, featuring an intense, moving performance by Daniel Proietto in the semi-dark. A kind of meditation on Nijinsky, it invoked his state of mind rather than his tragic story, and against the odds, it worked. (He had Satie's Gnossiennes 1-4 to help him out.) I refuse to discuss Shu-Yi & Dancers: I've gone on strike to protest all works set to Ravel's Bolero.

Overall, then, by no means the most exciting "Fall for Dance" season--but with its moments. One heartfelt plea: Next year, please tame the constant over-miking. The final course on the menu--Brown's Grace--was almost unbearably loud. It's a much more subtle work than the City Center's sound system would have you believe. 

THE CITY BALLET fall gala was weakly programmed but mercifully short. (The swanky folk in the audience have to get to their dinner.) The centerpiece of the evening was yet another new ballet by Benjamin Millepied, his first for the company in at least five months, and just as empty as all the others. Title: Plainspoken. (Why?) Music: a less than magnificent commissioned score by David Lang, whom we had just encountered at the Guggenheim. (Is he going to prove as ubiquitous as Millepied?) Cast: four couples plucked from the company's finest. Costumes: Karen Young's hideous acid yellow-green tops for the men and purple bunchy things for the women that made beautiful Teresa Reichlen look not just tall but big. The most--the only--affecting moment was a long mysterious duet for Janie Taylor, floating in the air with the help of Jared Angle's capable partnering. As always, Millepied is efficient ... and utterly unmemorable. The big question is why he secures so many commissions.

Accompanying this nullity was a tepid performance of Jerome Robbins' I'm Old-Fashioned, which shoots itself in both feet by starting out and ending up with huge-screen Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth in their wonderful Jerome Kern duet from You Were Never Lovelier. Not only do the dancers onstage look like confused ants compared to the radiant images onscreen, but the disparity between Astaire's exquisite choreography and Robbins' dutiful attempt to embroider on it is an embarrassment. As for Balanchine's Tarentella, Daniel Ulbricht and Ashley Bouder, for all their virtuosity, have it all wrong. This charmer was originally danced by a randy Edward Villella and a wickedly, subtly flirtatious Patricia McBride. The current two treat it as an occasion for tricks, and they're mugging more and more with every performance. If only Ulbricht would forget about his tambourine and keep his eyes on the girl!

IT WAS AN emotional return to BAM for Pina Bausch's company so soon after her shockingly sudden death last year. Vollmond (Full Moon), created in 2006 but unseen until now in New York, is a full-evening work that isn't Pina-heavy and isn't really Pina-lite; it's more Pina fooling around with water effects and a big boulder. The men fling themselves around--at times splashing and slithering like crocodiles through the onstage pool of water and in the occasional downpour, while clambering up and over and even under that boulder. The women, often in Bausch's trademark gorgeous gowns, are frequently soaked, too, as they make their trademark enigmatic and often funny remarks, and fiddle with glasses, cigarettes, buckets and waiters. There are angry moments, sad moments, comical moments and many wet moments--it's all familiar, and a lot of it effective. But the whole thing does suggest that Pina Bausch was running out of steam: There's nothing here that wasn't more interesting earlier on. It's always a little sad when a turbulent New Wave subsides into still waters.

rgottlieb@observer.com