Celebrating Mr. B

When Broadway director and choreographer Susan Stroman got a call some months ago from Peter Martins, head of the New York City Ballet, she wasn’t particularly surprised. A few years earlier, she’d created a 12-minute ballet for the company as part of a salute to Duke Ellington.

But this time, the salute Martins was calling about was to George Balanchine, the fabled choreographer who co-founded City Ballet in 1948 and is now the subject of a yearlong centennial celebration by the troupe. And Martins wanted not just 12 minutes but an entire evening of original choreography.

Recalling she was simultaneously honored and overwhelmed, Stroman says all she had to do was come up with an idea. She’d already poured dancers into automobiles in the Broadway show “Crazy for You,” set them cavorting on pool tables and swings in “Contact” and had them emerging from file cabinets in “The Producers.” What now?

So began “Double Feature,” Stroman’s homage to silent film as much as to the spirit of Balanchine, which will premiere Jan. 23 at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater. The full-length ballet starts with the sound of a movie projector and is replete with heroes, villains, abandoned babies, scores of brides and one elaborate chase scene.

First up is “The Blue Necklace,” a Cinderella-like original melodrama by Stroman and Glen Kelly, set to the music of Irving Berlin. Paired with it is the comedy “Makin’ Whoopee!,” inspired by the 1916 play and 1925 Buster Keaton film “Seven Chances” and featuring the music of Walter Donaldson.

For the pairing, Robin Wagner’s sets, William Ivey Long’s costumes and even a Boston terrier named Pi are in black and white, and dozens of huge title cards will be projected across the back of the stage. There are nearly 60 dancers in the cast, including students from the Balanchine-founded School of American Ballet.

A choreographer’s first

The first of four world premieres commissioned by City Ballet for the Balanchine year, “Double Feature” is also Stroman’s first full-length ballet. The five-time Tony Award winner will also direct a film of the “The Producers,” which she directed for the stage.

“I’m a big admirer of Susan’s, and I’d been wanting Irving Berlin to be choreographed to in this theater for so long I contemplated it myself,” observes Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief.

“Her ballet also pays tribute to Mr. B’s work as a pioneer on Broadway and in film.”

Although Balanchine is best known for his ballet choreography, he also choreographed more than 15 Broadway shows between 1936 and 1951, including “On Your Toes,” “Babes in Arms” and “The Boys From Syracuse.” He also choreographed such movies as 1938’s “The Goldwyn Follies” and, in 1940, “I Was an Adventuress.”

“We hear people saying, ‘What is this, Broadway coming to ballet?’ and I say, ‘You people don’t know your history,’ ” says costumer Long. “Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Agnes De Mille helped create Broadway choreography. It’s just cross-pollinating.”

Who better to cross-pollinate than Stroman? Delaware-born and bred, the animated blond turned to dancing in Broadway choruses after years of ballet training. Her ensuing Broadway success led to work in the classical arena and, in turn, it was her commissions from both the New York City Ballet and Martha Graham Dance Company in the late ‘90s that sparked her to merge theater and dance in the Tony-winning dance play “Contact” in 1999.

It always starts with a story for Stroman. To help her come up with a ballet that was narrative rather than abstract, Stroman called her friend and frequent musical collaborator Glen Kelly, who had, among other things, arranged the music for “The Producers.”

Stroman was struck by reading Balanchine’s remark, “We are a silent minority, we only dance,” and, she says, “The word ‘silent’ made me think that the closest thing to ballet was silent film.” So the collaborators began to watch silent films: Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid” and “City Lights,” Keaton’s “Seven Chances.”

“Both men had great control of their bodies when they acted,” says Stroman. “They had as much control as any ballet dancer, and I think Nureyev even refers to Chaplin as one of the great dancers of all time. The more I immersed myself, the more it seemed clear this was the way to go.”

Auditions skipped

“Double Feature” begins at Valentine’s Variety Theatre, where onstage is a line of 16 brunettes in black tutus and black toe shoes. It isn’t long before lead dancer Dorothy Brooks faints, revealing her pregnancy, losing her job and launching “The Blue Necklace -- a thrilling melodrama about a great actress and the daughter she left behind.”

That daughter, Mabel, is left on the church steps with a blue necklace around her neck. Taken home by a kindly gentleman who dies all too soon, Mabel cooks and cleans for her stepsister and stepmother. But when Brooks becomes a famous dancer again and the sisters attend a party at her mansion, all is eventually righted.

Stroman says she cast the ballet through observation, not auditions.

“Unlike theater, you can’t audition when you work with the company,” she says. “I had to watch the dancers in class and performance, and it was really their behavior in class that gave me insight as to who could perform these principal roles.”

Damien Woetzel, for instance, “came right up to me, which no one else did, and engaged me in conversation. He had great confidence, so I realized he had to play the movie star.”

Similarly, she chose Janie Taylor to play Mabel because “she has a 1920s quality about her. Plus, she has an unmatched technique of leaping and jumping. When Mabel finally escapes from her trapped environment, she needs to dance with great abandon, and I needed to find a dancer who could fly through the air. Nobody does that better than Janie Taylor.”

Tapping known talent

Stroman also brings back dancers she worked with on her earlier New York City ballet, “Blossom Got Kissed.” Among them is soloist Tom Gold, who “is one of those performers who stick in your mind, and you hope someday you can create a piece for. The fact it actually happened is a miracle in this crazy world.”

Gold assumes the Keaton role in “Makin’ Whoopee! -- a comic dash for riches.” In the play, film and ballet, the hero must marry on deadline to get an inheritance, leading to his pursuit by many willing brides. And, says Stroman, “the visual image of 40 ballerinas in white bridal tutus on pointe chasing a man across the stage made me realize that I didn’t want to limit myself to the melodrama.”

She similarly decided to tap into another composer.

“Berlin’s sweeping melodies -- like ‘Always’ and ‘What’ll I Do?’ -- were appropriate for the melodrama, but I wanted a more lighthearted composer for the comedy. Walter Donaldson’s melodies -- ‘Makin’ Whoopee!,’ ‘Yes, Sir! That’s My Baby,’ ‘My Blue Heaven’ -- lend themselves to comedic tones and are quite good for chase sequences.”

In November, Gold spent a day with Stroman working on the ballet’s show-stopping chase before all the bride wannabes were in the rehearsal hall.

“She’d say, ‘Here come the brides -- what are you going to do?’ ” recalls Gold. “I’d start improvising and do different kinds of leaps, turns and jumps. I gave her tons of options she could choose from.”

“Double Feature” has a short run -- initially just seven performances this month and next. But it should also find a place in the repertory and possibly even come to Southern California when the company visits the Los Angeles Music Center and the Orange County Performing Arts Center next fall.

However long the run, Stroman calls choreographing “Double Feature” on the City Ballet dancers “more than fulfilling” artistically.

“For the first time,” she says, “I choreographed something that is magnified 100 times by their particular talents. They stay up in the air much longer than I ever imagined anyone could remain in the air. You get hypnotized by their techniques and their talents. I’m hooked.”