Reviews

If society can handle Jerry Springer The Opera, then why not Queen at the Ballet? South Africa's Cape Town City Ballet, which has matched the elegance of classical dance with the grandiose pose of stadium rock, are clearly comfortable with the clash between high art and pop culture.

But perhaps even they were surprised to hear The Point's safety announcement, in which moshing and crowd-surfing is expressly forbidden.

The odd thing is that, on more than one occasion, patrons may find that moshing and crowd-surfing seems the appropriate etiquette for a rock ballet.

The idea of director and choreographer Sean Bovim is, of course, entirely absurd, wholly preposterous and therefore perfectly in keeping with the legacy of Freddie Mercury. A musician whose career was a non-stop dance of invention and exaltation, Mercury knew that all cultural forms, no matter how high or low, could be joined together by a ¾ bridge and a florid guitar solo. Once you surrender to the concept's ridiculousness you should get along just fine.

For all the surface simplicity of Queen's songs about bicycles, radios and bohemians, here arranged for orchestra with style and adventure by Michael Hankinson, Mercury's music plays fiendishly tricky games with musical forms and competing time signatures. It's a rhythmic challenge that Bovim's dancers more than rise to, but curiously, Bovim's choreography is conversely traditional - at times even a touch conservative.

With two Mercurys represented onstage (Robin van Wyk and Russell Cummings), dividing the vocals of Killer Queen, Under Pressure, Bicycle Race, Radio Ga Ga, Bohemian Rhapsody and many, many more, there is a vague, non-narrative sense that Mercury's life story is charging through the ballet's progression.

But while there's a rather innocent pas de deux between two boys who, during Good-Old Fashioned Lover Boy, literally come out of the closet, the ballet seems largely coy about sexuality, its most beautiful and moving sequences afforded to the excellent ballerinas who portray "The Women in His Life".

Among the principal dancers there are six such roles while just two men who play "His Lover".

Against any interpretation of Mercury's life this seems disproportionate, and, like Grant Swift's engagingly danced but aesthetically superfluous Master Time, seems to better serve the demands of company members than those of its subject.

But, with its exquisite choreography and slightly daft mime, its gymnastic interludes and flamboyant set pieces, its ballerinas on pointe and stadium rock postures, Queen at the Ballet doesn't aim to make sense; it aims to disarm, delight and dazzle. Freddie would have approved. - Peter Crawley

Runs until July 15th

McCoy Tyner Septet - National Concert Hall

If Dr Johnson found music to be the least disagreeable of all noises, what would he have made of the sounds at the NCH on Wednesday evening? Waltons World Masters series featured McCoy Tyner, the once hugely influential pianist with John Coltrane's classic 1960s quartet, leading a heavyweight septet completed by Wallace Roney (trumpet), Steve Turre (trombone), Donald Harrison (alto), Eric Alexander (tenor), Charnett Moffett (bass) and Eric Kamau Gravatt (drums). He also, apparently, brought his own sound man.

The results were disastrous. Ridiculously over-miked, piano and drums almost drowned each other - and everything else - out. Moreover, Tyner is an extremely percussive player, which didn't help, while Gravatt is one of the loudest drummers heard here for years; watching him flail away with almost demonic energy at the kit, one could reflect that at least it kept the violence off the streets.

Sadly, what one could hear of the music failed to impress, either. Opening with his trio, Tyner played an interesting modal piece dedicated to John Coltrane and followed it with an In A Mellotone that sounded and felt like a frequently played routine, before bringing the full septet on stage.

Things didn't improve much. The body language of Roney and Harrison, in particular, suggested they couldn't care less, and their solo work, while brilliantly executed, was empty, virtuosic running of changes, a triumph of technique over substance. Only Turre and, especially, Alexander, gave any impression that they were seriously involved in more than phoning in their performances.

Occasionally emerging from the clangour, which at times rendered the front line inaudible, Moffett offered some astonishing, if showy, bass work.

Tyner, the sound of his beautiful Steinway miked to the level of discomfort, also played a solo ballad, For All We Know, floridly treated, with extremes of dynamic contrast, often within the same bar, from pp to ff.

Otherwise, the assault on the drum kit continued, the sound of the cymbals, in particular, rattling round the hall like tons of loose change in an earthquake-stricken counting-house. The show, for show it was, was relatively brief, though to complain of this in the circumstances would be like criticising the food in a restaurant and bemoaning the small servings.

Honesty also compels me to report that Tyner got a standing ovation at the end. - Ray Comiskey