DANCE AND MUSIC REVIEWS : AILEY’S ‘BIRD--WITH LOVE’ AT WILTERN

Alvin Ailey’s Expressionist dance portraits of doomed, driven pop stars now include “Flowers” (on Janis Joplin), “Precipice” (on Jim Morrison and/or Jimi Hendrix) and “For Bird--With Love” (on Charlie Parker), the last given its local premiere by Ailey’s company Friday at the Wiltern Theatre.

Lurid and clumsy as dance dramas, these works share an obsession with the snares of fame. “Bird” personifies this theme in a menacing character called “The Progenitor” (a suave Dudley Williams) and also expresses it in a ridiculous fight among jealous band groupies.

Parker himself (a skillful Gary DeLoatch) is so out of control, his saxophone seems to be playing him . The role has no genuine stature, depth or conflict--merely a lot of frenzied emoting and flashy solos.

But if “Bird” reduces the life of a jazz great to simplistic charades, it does answer the eternal question, “What’s black and white and red all over?” Randy Barcelo’s Photorealist scenic panels and gleaming costumes in these colors evoke the atmosphere of Parker’s era--and in the finale you nearly overdose on scarlet when the cast appears in matching gowns and jump suits for a sensational dance fantasia.

Indeed, Ailey’s surging group dances are so brilliant throughout, you wish he’d junk the plot and choreograph a suite to Parker records. That would be something!

Uneven performances of Ailey’s “Memoria” and Talley Beatty’s “The Stack-Up” (each familiar from previous seasons) completed the program.